TWIB Notes: Kirk, Kimmel and the Kommissars of Speech

This Week in Bullshit - TWIB NOTES

TWIB Notes this week is chock full of hot topics, but the main theme is freedom of speech. So…let’s get to it.

CHARLIE KIRK

Charlie Kirk, the Republican firebrand made famous for his on-site debates with college liberals, was assassinated on September 10, 2025 on the campus of Utah Valley University.

At the time of his killing Kirk was doing his thing…debating in public with less-than-intellectually-stellar liberals enraged by his political philosophy and their inability to navigate his debating style.

As someone who tries to spend as little time on social media as possible Charlie Kirk was not exactly someone I spent much time thinking about prior to his death.

I had seen a bunch of videos of him and he struck me as a talented political matador who would get coddled liberal fools into a frenzy by waving a red cape in front of them and then effortlessly dance around them as they furiously charged at him.

Watching Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck on video was a deeply unsettling thing. Watching many seemingly normal, regular liberal people react to Kirk’s death with unabashed glee was even more unsettling.

Look, I get that people were offended by the things Charlie Kirk said and believed…despite the fact that what he said and believed did not offend me…but what I don’t get is why people would cheer some dude who is not even in power, is not a politician, and controls next to nothing, getting killed in public.

The reaction to Kirk’s death, from lots of regular people and from the media, was disgusting. People cheering his slaughter are not just vile – but deeply sick. Why can’t we just disagree with someone politically and let that be enough? Do we really need to hurt them? To kill them? To spill blood? Good Lord.

The media response was even more ridiculous. I never watch cable news…the last time I did was when Trump was shot in the ear during the campaign, but watching CNN after Kirk’s assassination was a jaw-dropping experience.

The entirety of the coverage I watched on CNN was concern not over political violence and the killing of Kirk, but of the danger of how right-wingers responded. You would’ve thought that right-wingers being pissed that one of their own got gunned down were a major threat to civilization. When you contrast this with the “mostly peaceful protests” coverage of the George Floyd riots then you see how absurd and inane and totally tone-deaf it all is.

As for the actual assassination of Kirk I have a few thoughts…first off…I don’t know what happened…who shot what and from where and for what reason…but I do know this…the official story is, without question, absolute horseshit.

They’ve already come up with a new “magic bullet” theory and have exalted Charlie Kirk into a super-Saint with bones of steel that cannot let bullets pass through them and allowed him to save others while being killed himself…just absurd. The big question is - how does a guy get shot with a high-powered rifle and not have an exit wound? What the fuck is that all about?

Then there’s the indictment, which if you read it is riddled with inaccuracies and fallacies. And then there’s the unbelievable bullshit that is the text exchange from the alleged shooter to his alleged trans lover/roommate that feels like a fabrication from start to finish. And then there’s the “video coverage” where we see the alleged gunman but never with a gun and never in the place he was said to have done the shooting.

The bottom line regarding this assassination is that conspiracy theories will flourish around it (they already have) but they will only obfuscate the truth – which is most likely a very nasty conspiracy all its own.

Whatever comes out of this fucking pathetic and ridiculous FBI in the coming weeks and months, do yourself a favor and don’t believe a word of it.

JIMMY KIMMEL

Back in July I wrote a TWIB Notes column that touched upon the cancellation of the Stephen Colbert Late Night show at CBS and finished my discussion of that topic with the prediction “Colbert is not the last to get the boot…in fact, he’s only the first. Fallon, Meyers and Kimmel are dead men walking…and I have to say that unlike their comedy, that is something that makes me laugh.”

Well, well, well.

Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC after saying that right-wingers were doing everything they can to make it seem like Charlie Kirk’s killer wasn’t one of them….or something to that effect.

Kimmel has always been a mystery to me. I never once saw The Man Show, and have never once during its entire 22-year run watched a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The few times I’ve seen Kimmel, liked when he hosts an awards show, I have found him to be aggressively unfunny. He is not only devoid of comic ability but he’s also blessed with the charisma of a fly on week old shit.

The left has been more horrified by the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel than they were by the killing of Charlie Kirk…which to be honest is the funniest Jimmy Kimmel related thing to ever happen.

Right-wingers, ever true to their values (wink-wink), are ecstatic over Kimmel’s suspension and hope it is a permanent firing.

The reality is that Kimmel is not, and never has been, a free speech warrior. He, like many liberals, is only interested in his speech being free, and those that disagree with him being silenced.

Right-wingers who were so outraged by woke cancel culture during the Biden years, have spent their first year back in power going full on right-wing woke and cancelling anyone and anything that is even remotely anti-Zionist. By the way…Democrats have not done a single thing to stop the Republican jihad against anti-Zionists, they have in fact, encouraged it.

Kimmel, of course, would never say a bad word about his paymasters so Israel is not a topic he would ever discuss…so there’s a good chance he gets his gig back after a hiatus (his suspension was lifted a few hours after this article was originally published).

But the truth is this…regardless of politics or anything like that, late night talk shows are going away. None of them make money and none of them are worth the cost. All of their ratings are in the toilet and none of them hold any cultural cache anymore.

The other day I happened to watch an old clip of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal having a half hour long cat fight on The Dick Cavett show some fifty-odd years ago.

The level of intellect, eloquence and the depth of that discussion was staggering compared to the toxically empty calories currently being fed to the public on cable news and late-night talk shows. Seeing American intellectuals like Vidal and Mailer go at each other was invigorating and depressing…invigorating because they were such sharp minds, and depressing because not only do we not have those types of debates anymore – we don’t even have intellectuals anymore.

Ultimately, whether Kimmel stays or goes is utterly irrelevant….which brings us to…

THE KOMMISSARS OF SPEECH

What makes the Kimmel case so interesting is that the allegation is that the government, at the behest of Trump himself, pressured ABC to suspend/cancel Kimmel. That action is, obviously, in direct violation of the First Amendment which guarantees the right to freedom of speech – and is remarkably similar to what the Biden administration did with social media companies in trying to silence dissent and debate over Covid policies and vaccines. Hmmmm.

But here’s the rub in the free speech debate…the debate over free speech is long over and free speech has most certainly lost.

For years we have been reduced to free speech debates in this country amounting to little more than “free speech for me but not for thee!”. So we get liberals wanting to cancel people who say things they don’t like, or in the case of Covid – people who don’t get vaccinated, and then we get right-wingers (notice I don’t call them conservatives because they conserve nothing but their own hypocrisy) doing the exact same thing – trying to ban flag burning, anti-Zionism, protests etc.

The truth is that freedom of speech was killed long ago. This past year we had a big furor because Trump was pissed at 60 Minutes and Paramount caved to the pressure in order to get a merger approved. But since we are so historically illiterate in this country no one seemed to remember this drama played out before with very similar results…back in the 1990’s when 60 Minutes refused to air a story that was highly critical of Big Tobacco for fear of lawsuits and loss of ad revenue. They made an excellent movie about that incident called The Insider…you should go watch it if you’ve never seen it – Michael Mann directed it and it stars Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.

60 Minutes has, for the last quarter century at least, but nothing but an intel community and military industrial complex mouthpiece that spews the most vacant and vapid of propaganda imaginable…it has been co-opted and is now a nefarious and insidious media machine that routinely deceives and divides.

Remember when the liberal New York Times were used as a propaganda weapon by the Bush administration in deceiving the populace regarding the threat from Iraq? I do.

I also remember when the liberal New York Times held a story about the Bush administration’s illegal surveillance of Americans for over a year until after Bush’s re-election. I also remember when the liberal New York Times refused to use the word torture and instead used the word “enhanced interrogation” at the behest of the Bush administration. I remember those things…but I am apparently in the minority.

Back in my day liberals dedicated to the value of free speech were rightly horrified when Big Tobacco silenced 60 Minutes, and when the Bush administration set-up “free speech zones” for protestors…the name of which more than implies that there are places in America where free speech is not allowed, and used Judith Miller as a pro-war propagandist.

But many of these same liberals were as silent as the grave while Saint Obama used the Espionage Act more times than every other president combined to prosecute whistleblowers and reporters.

These same liberals stayed silent when, under Obama, Edward Snowden was forced from his country after revealing the illegal surveillance state we all lived under. And were just as silent when, under Obama and Biden, Julian Assange was imprisoned for the crime of revealing the war crimes of the American government.

Freedom of speech was long a lynchpin of the liberal movement, but because many liberals who love freedom of speech stayed silent when Obama gutted our right to it, they then were conditioned to more easily sell out their values and ideals regarding speech in favor of genuflecting to the woke mob when it rose to prominence. Quickly over the span of less than a decade - freedom of speech was gone and in its place was the banner of being against “hate speech” – literally and figuratively. Liberal disdain for freedom of speech disintegrated so quickly and thoroughly that even the ACLU has disavowed it in purpose and practice.  

“Hate speech” (which is ironic considering it can be interpreted as meaning to hate – speech) became the favorite talking point of liberals everywhere…and I warned that labelling things hate speech, and wanting to ban hate speech, would lead to the destruction of free speech – but liberals didn’t care that they, as I told them, would eventually be hoisted on their own petard…or as I called it – foisted on their own retard!

Right-wingers have long made no bones about their desire to curb freedom of speech, but then freaked out when woke liberals wanted to curb right-wing speech.

And so, the cycle will continue on and on forever until some douchebag centrist (maybe Pete Buttigieg!!) comes along and Obama-style makes a compromise that in order to clamp down on hate speech and political violence we will do away with freedom of speech altogether. It’ll be just like the healthcare debate where a public option is never discussed and the big business republican option is the only option – thanks Obama!

To tie this up in a very messy bow, woke liberals have made the argument that hate speech is violence, and when speech is violence then it is logical to use actual physical violence to silence it…and thus we get Charlie Kirk not just being murdered, but his killing being celebrated.

I have long written on this subject (and will link some of those articles below), most notably about the argument from liberals in the wake of Trump’s first election about the efficacy of “punching Nazis”. Of course, the problems with punching Nazis are numerous…like who gets to decide who is a Nazi? And what if someone decides you’re a Nazi? And are Nazi’s allowed to defend themselves…and more so…can Nazi’s – like liberals punching – proactively defend themselves? And finally…punching people you label Nazis will only escalate into ultimately shooting people you label Nazis – people like Charlie Kirk.

Speech is not and never will be violence…violence is violence…and the only people who claim speech is violence are the ones who haven’t been punched in the face.

The bottom line is this, current free speech debate is a farce because both the left and the right have long ago sold out their ideals regarding speech and instead have used their power to silence their enemies.

The war for freedom of speech, and frankly the war for any of our “freedoms” is long over…and we all lost. The aristocratic oligarchy and intelligence and military industrial complex and globalist corporatocracy have won and now keep us as slaves in what is essentially an open-air surveillance state prison.

So fuck Jimmy Kimmel, and fuck 60 Minutes, and fuck the mainstream media and fuck social media and fuck our politicians and fuck the myopic fools who bought into the two-party system and all of its homicidal lies.

And fuck all of us while we’re at it…because we are just as much to blame for this disaster as anybody.

Charlie Kirk is dead and Jimmy Kimmel is out of a job…and the cold hard reality is that there are going to be many more who face a similar fate….and don’t kid yourself…there’s nothing we can do about it.

Links-

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

Caesar Americanus

The Tragedy of Charlottesville

Punching Nazis

©2025

CHAOS: The Manson Murders - A Documentary Review: Errol Morris' and Netflix's Anti-Conspiracy Agenda

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

MY Recommendation: SKIP IT. Errol Morris makes a mess of his look into the Manson murders by never daring to search for truth. An intellectually incurious and vapid film that commits journalistic malpractice.

CHAOS: The Manson Murders is a new Netflix documentary from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris based on Tom O’Neill’s expansive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.

Tom O’Neill was a magazine reporter given an assignment in 1999 to do write up on how the infamous Manson murders of 1969 changed Hollywood. O’Neill dove into the story so deeply that he was neck-deep in all things Manson for twenty years, and finally published his findings in 2019 in his epic Tome CHOAS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History the Sixties.

What O’Neill uncovered in his investigation is much too extensive and expansive to flesh out here, and most definitely too expansive to be given its proper due in a documentary that runs a measly 90 minutes, which CHAOS: The Manson Murders does.

Errol Morris is one of the more respected documentarians of our time but he is shockingly off his game and way out of his depth on CHAOS: The Manson Murders, which feels like a cheap and tawdry episode of Dateline rather than a serious documentary.

This flimsy and foolish documentary is so vapid and vacuous as to be guilty of documentary malpractice. The documentary ignores the majority of O’Neill’s work, obfuscates much of the truth he revealed, and instead of diving deeper or at least adequately stating O’Neill’s thesis and argument, it spends it’s time rehashing frivolities and pondering inane questions like “why are people so interested in these murders?”

For example, one of the many things O’Neill proves in his book is the corruption and moral and ethical bankruptcy of famed Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi – who also wrote the famous book on the case Helter Skelter. Morris doesn’t even mention Bugliosi until the final twenty minutes of his documentary, and never gets into any of the scandals that O’Neill uncovered and experienced first-hand in his reporting.

The biggest bombshell O’Neill uncovered in his book is the connection between Charles Manson and villainous government psychiatrist, Jolly West. Jolly West, for those who do not know, was a psychiatrist for the CIA who headed up MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control program. West seems to have been connected to many curious and nefarious events throughout his time as a CIA psychiatrist.

For example, when Jack Ruby was sitting in a Dallas prison cell waiting to be interviewed by the Warren Commission, he got a special visit from Jolly West, who spent the day with him and at the end of that day, lo and behold, Jack Ruby had lost his mind and West recommended he be institutionalized. How interesting.

Jolly West was in San Francisco working out of a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury during the “Summer of Love”, which also happened to coincide with the implementation of CIA’s CHAOS program - which was designed to co-opt and destroy the anti-war movement through the introduction of drugs and agent provocateurs. The FBI program COINTELPRO was designed to do the same thing and started at the same time.

Well, you’ll never guess who was in the Haight-Ashbury clinic of Jolly West once a week for a year during the late sixties…you guessed it…Charles Manson. Manson brought his girls in there for medical treatment and he himself met his parole officer in the same building. The same parole officer who, time after time, refused to have Manson’s parole revoked when he got arrested multiple times in San Francisco…and who even wrote letters urging judges not to imprison him. Curious.

Errol Morris shows little to no interest in the Jolly West intrigue, instead just shrugging his shoulders at the notion that the CIA was really up to no good with its MKULTRA program. Morris even says that ‘yes, the CIA wanted to do bad things, but it never succeeded’. Hmmm.

O’Neill then chimes in and corrects Morris by stating that there is documented proof (found in a document the CIA covered up for half as century) from Jolly West himself, who admitted in a CIA memo that he had mastered the ability to create a “Manchurian candidate” type of situation by implanting false memories in patients through hypnosis and various drugs. Morris replies to this information in shockingly flaccid fashion when he retorts, “well, Jolly West could be lying”.

This exchange perfectly encapsulates why Errol Morris is so out of his depth with this story. He is repulsed by “conspiracy theories” of any kind and prefers to embrace mundane explanations, even when the mundane explanation isn’t adequate and the “conspiracy theory” is well documented. This approach shows that Morris isn’t interested in truth but instead in his own respectability amongst the corporate media and “people who matter”.

Morris’ cowardice and journalistic impotence reminded me of a podcast I listened to a few years back about the RFK assassination titled The RFK Tapes. This podcast got a lot of traction at the time as the host of it did a deep dive into the conspiracy surrounding the RFK assassination. And just as the evidence had piled up to a tipping point in favor of conspiracy, the podcast host had a very abrupt change of heart and instead not only denounced the idea of a conspiracy surrounding the RFK assassination, he stopped investigating it at all. His reason for this change of heart (notice I say heart and not mind), was because, in essence, he felt bad people like Alex Jones believed in conspiracy theories and propagated them so he didn’t want to be a conspiracy theorist. So, in order to protect delicate sensibilities of the Sandy Hook families – which has no connection or correlation to the RFK assassination, this podcaster simply turns off his mind and turns his back on his research and his research partner.

This podcaster didn’t discover something that proved the conspiracy theory wrong, quite the opposite…but he did realize that he didn’t love the Truth more than he loves his reputation amongst the corporate media. This podcaster played it off as some sort of moral and ethical act of courage to do so…but it was an act of intellectual cowardice.

Errol Morris just did the same thing with the CIA’s connection with the Manson murders and Tom O’Neill’s expansive research. Morris has such an intense case of cognitive dissonance regarding O’Neill’s thesis he chooses to ignore the lion’s share of his research and expertise and instead elevates and gives the last word to Bobby Beausoliel, a member of Manson’s ‘family’ who was arrested for murder before the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred.

Beausoliel met Manson in Los Angeles about a year before the murders, and he was never in San Francisco with Manson and the family, and he has no first-hand experience about what happened regarding the Tate-LaBianca murders, as he had been on the run for ten days prior to the murders and arrested the day before they occurred. In other words, Beausoliel, who has been in prison since his arrest in 1969, is incapable of having a big picture view of Manson and who may or may not have “created” him and potentially “directed” him. But Morris still lets Beausoliel get the last word of the film by saying essentially, ‘people make too much about this stuff, the truth is simple…Occam’s Razor rules the day – Manson was just a bad dude out for revenge.’

Ultimately, Errol Morris is one of those intellectuals who can’t get out of his own way and is so crippled by his slavish devotion to institutionalism, establishment and his paymasters in the corporate media (like Netflix), that he is incapable of seeing what is right in front of his nose.

I know many people of a similar ilk, who are incredibly smart and successful but are incapable of thinking critically or of seeing what is obvious to those that have eyes to see and the courage to actually look.

Netflix has adamantly embraced the establishment’s anti-conspiracy position in its documentaries. Besides this Manson documentary there was The Octopus Murders documentary series which investigated the Danny Casolaro story and despite all of the evidence to the contrary, came to the conclusion that well there is no conspiracy because conspiracies are bad. Sigh.

I really, really wish CHAOS: The Manson Murders was good, or at least did an adequate job of presenting Tom O’Neill’s work, but it is really bad and it doesn’t do the least bit of justice to O’Neill’s work. This documentary is, quite frankly, an absolute travesty.

My recommendation for anyone, Manson aficionados or newbies alike, is to pick up O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and read it.

The book isn’t perfect, in fact it can be downright frustrating because O’Neill refuses to speculate or project, but instead sticks to what he can prove. The book tells a fascinating tale and takes you down many tantalizing roads of inquiry but repeatedly comes up just short because the case is so old and cold and so many people associated with it are no longer alive.

But it is O’Neill’s journalistic restraint that gives the book credibility. This is not some wild-eyed exercise in wish fulfillment, this is a serious examination of one of the most curious cases in American juris prudence and cultural history, where the CIA, FBI, LAPD, LA County Sheriff’s Department, Bureau of Prisons, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, all behaved in the most bizarre of ways in order to enable Manson before his arrest, and pervert a free and fair trial after it.

If you’re interested in the reality of the world that you inherited and currently inhabit…go read Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and skip entirely Errol Morris’ mendacious, deceptive, and deceitful documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders, for it is a total waste of time.

©2025

UFO Week - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown (MGM+) - A Documentary Review

BEYOND: UFOS AND THE UNKNOWN

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. One of the very best UFO documentaries I’ve seen. Highly informative and insightful. Well worth watching whether you’re a seasoned ufologist or a newbie to the topic.

It is day three of UFO Week here at the home office and things got off to a decidedly bumpy start with two less than stellar documentaries in day one and two.

Thankfully, day three is a gem.

The documentary today is Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown, a four-part documentary miniseries from JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot that released it’s first episode on October 27th and its last episode on November 8th.

Bad Robot released their first UFO documentary back in 2021, simply titled UFO, and I found it to be professionally made but underwhelming in a style over substance kind of way.

Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is not underwhelming in the slightest. Simply said, it is exquisitely made, abundantly researched, and one of the very best documentaries on the subject I have ever seen.

The documentary series, which runs roughly four hours long in total, hits upon a myriad of angles related to the UFO topic. It examines it scientifically, historically, politically and spiritually.

If you’re looking for a murderer’s row of UFO experts Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is the documentary miniseries for you.

The stellar first episode opens up with a bang with Dr. Gary Nolan, an esteemed medical professor at the prestigious Stanford University, speaking about his scientific and medical work with various intelligence agencies on deathly serious UFO-related topics.

It then dives into the bevy of sightings and experiences of Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded their interaction with various entities in the last twenty years…resulting in the Gimble and Go-Fast videos made famous in the New York Times article of 2017 that brought the UFO topic into the mainstream.

This episode features prominent Naval personnel like former pilot Ryan Graves, Rear Admiral Tim Galudet, as well as Leslie Kean, the journalist who wrote the NY Times piece in 2017, and Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense – and now prominent UFO disclosure advocate.

Also examined are the maze of various UFO programs in the Pentagon over the years and the mind-numbing acronyms that go along with them. As well as the very complex political situation around the subject, which is explained by Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who describes the military’s handling of the UFO situation, “duplicitous and inappropriate.” Wow.

Episode two delves into the history of ufology and features a who’s who of UFO heavy-hitters, like the godfather of ufology, Jacque Vallee, and the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried, PhD Hal Puthoff.

Also explored are the early days of ufology, including Donald Keyhoe’s important work and the curious case of J. Allen Hynek.

One of the most important things discussed in this episode is how it is the Navy pilots who are reporting UFO encounters, with nary a peep from the Air Force. The reasons why this might be are fascinating, not the least of which is that the intelligence agencies take a large chunk of the Air Force budget for black projects, so they are deeply intertwined with the Air Force…and not the Navy.

The other big topic in episode two is Whitley Strieber and alien abduction. Strieber, who was a novelist who was allegedly abducted in the 1980s in upstate New York and wrote a best-selling book about it titled “Communion”, was a catalyst for hundreds of thousands of regular people across the country to come forward with their abduction stories in letters to him after he published his book.

Strieber’s story is an intriguing and compelling one, and he is a terrific spokesperson - articulate, humble and serious.

This leads into episode three and four which feature Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religion at Rice University, who has begun to gather UFO source material from Strieber and Vallee among others in one place so that scientists and academics can do serious study of the subject without ridicule. He has also has begun conferences on esoteric subjects that brings together experts and experiencers to discuss once taboo subjects academically and scientifically.

Episodes three and four delve deeply into the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of UFOs and what they may be beyond physical objects, and what they may mean to science, philosophy and humanity going forward.

Episodes three and four are so rich with deeply serious and thoughtful discussions on elevated esoteric matters that they are worth watching over and over again…as is the rest of the series.

For seasoned followers of the UFO topic, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a gloriously rich documentary that not only informs but seriously challenges.

For newcomers to the subject, this documentary is a great starting place if for no other reason than to give a brief glimpse at the scope and scale of the subject matter, and to do so with a seriousness that it deserves.

The biggest problem with Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is that it is very difficult to find. The documentary is currently only available on the streaming service MGM+. Not only do I know no one who is a subscriber to MGM+, I myself had never heard of it until I went looking for Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. That’s not a good thing because unless if you’re a UFO nerd like me, you wouldn’t know this documentary series exists, and therefore won’t ever stumble upon it unless you explicitly are looking for it.

Hopefully it will eventually become available to rent through Amazon or Apple in the future, but for now the best thing to do to see it is to sign up for MGM+…which will give you a free week before it’s month to month subscription at $6.99 kicks in. Watch Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown during your free week…in fact I’d recommend you watch it twice, like I did…and then cancel your subscription before you actually have to pay.

The bottom line is this…whether you’re a ufologist or a newbie, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a must-watch documentary miniseries if you want to have a deeper understanding of the UFO phenomenon and topic. I highly recommend you put in the effort to find and to watch it because considering what is going on in our world at the moment, arming yourself with as much knowledge as you can is a very good idea.

©2024

UFO Week - Manhattan Alien Abduction (Netflix): A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK: MANHATTAN ALIEN ABDUCTION

Earlier this year I was alerted to the fact that starting on October 30th and running up to December 16th, there were going to be five UFO-related documentaries being released on various streaming platforms.

As someone who has been interested in the topic and followed it for the majority of my adult life, I was glad that there would be a bevy of new UFO documentaries to digest. I was so happy, in fact, that I decided that once the final documentary, James Fox’s The Program, was released on December 16th, I would have a celebratory “week” on the website and review all the UFO documentaries over the course of five days – one review a day.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to UFO week…namely UFOs!! In the past two weeks there has been a cavalcade of coverage of the UFO topic because apparently New Jersey is being swarmed by drones of “unknown origin” that nobody seems to be able to do anything about. (As an aside…its odd that they are called “drones” when in fact they are the etxtbook definition of UAP’s - unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UFOs - unidentified flying objects…makes you think)

The New Jersey reports have been followed by reports, and video, from other areas of the country and the globe. Truth be told, a week before the New Jersey sightings, my son and I witnessed a very bizarre anomalous object flying at night over our farm in rural Pennsylvania. It looked somewhat like a plane, but it wasn’t a plane, and it made no noise and had odd lights on it that are not like the lights on a regular plane. We spotted something similar, but not identical, just last week as well, again at night.

We get lots of military craft flying over our farm so I just chalked it up to some military craft I couldn’t identify….and maybe it is…and maybe that’s what everyone is seeing over New Jersey. Who knows? There have been other reports in the local media of UAP/drones in the area over the weekend.

The theories about the sightings in New Jersey are all over the map. There are people claiming they are “Special Ops” drones used to sniff out a nuclear threat posed by a “loose nuke” or a “dirty bomb”. The theory goes from there and speculates the nuke is from Iran or China or Russia.

Others speculate that it is actually a false flag and that nefarious elements of the U.S. government are planning to detonate a nuke and blame it on…Iran, China and/or Russia in order to get the neo-con world war of their dreams.

Then there are those who think the “drones” are from Iran/China/Russia and are part of some recon mission that is a prelude to a Pearl Harbor type event.

Then there are others who think that the events of the last two weeks are the beginnings of “disclosure”, where the government admits there are aliens and they’re here, or the aliens step out of the shadows and tell everyone themselves that they’re here.

There are others who think that this is just a false flag using Project Bluebeam to make it appear there are alien craft in our skies in order to scare people and drum up a draconian response that demands we give up more rights to the powers that be in order to stay “safe”.

And finally, there are those who claim that this is all a hoax or a mass hallucination, and that some teenagers are flying normal drones over New Jersey as a gag and the media and the populace are going full War of the Worlds on it because they’re in the throes of hysteria.

As for who to believe…one thing is for certain, whatever government spokespeople say - don’t believe it as it is either going to be a manufactured lie or completely and utterly incorrect. That you can take to the bank.

What do I think is happening? Honestly, I don’t know. My sense is that the false flag discussion, be it about nukes or Project Bluebeam, are probably on the correct track…but who the hell knows?

On that note…let me officially welcome you to UFO Week!! Let’s start things off with a review of the Netflix documentary mini-series Manhattan Alien Abduction.

MANHATTAN ALIEN ABDUCTION

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This could have, and should have, been a thorough debunking of an abduction claim, but it is a rather empty and shallow miniseries that diminishes everyone involved.

Manhattan Alien Abduction, which premiered on Netflix on October 30th, tells the story of Linda Napolitano – who claims to have been abducted from her New York City apartment on November 30th, 1989, and her nemesis, Carol Rainey, who thinks the story is an elaborate hoax.

Napolitano’s story is, not unexpectedly, an odd one. She claims that on November 30th, 1989, in the middle of the night, that aliens abducted her out of her 12th floor Manhattan apartment “on a blue beam of light, lifting her onto a reddish-orange spacecraft that quickly sped off toward the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Linda’s story could easily be dismissed as the ravings of a mad woman except for the fact that there were 23 people who claimed to witness it, among them a “world leader”, namely United Nations Secretary General Perez de Cuellar.

What really propelled Linda’s story into the spotlight was that she brought her tale to ufologist Budd Hopkins, who was one of the leaders in the study of alien abduction in UFO culture, and was a conduit for Linda to the wider UFO community.

Hopkins, who died in 2011, was very well known in the UFO world for having been among the first, along with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, to use hypnosis to help people recall their abduction experiences. Hopkins hypnotized writer Whitley Strieber and assisted him in recalling his famous abduction experience which is recounted in the blockbuster book Communion (1987).

Hopkins brought Linda into his world of self-help alien abduction survivor meetings in his New York City apartment, and dove deep into her story, including with hypnosis.

Carol Rainey was Budd Hopkins’ wife at the time of Linda’s alleged abduction, and had a front row seat to Linda’s relationship with Budd and with her time in the spotlight recounting her tale to anyone who’d listen in the media.

Manhattan Alien Abduction is essentially a cat fight between Linda and Carol stretched over three episodes.

Carol is there to debunk Linda’s story, and Linda is there to convince you of it.

In my less than humble opinion, neither woman succeeds, despite the mini-series obviously being made for Carol’s benefit and from her perspective rather than from Linda’s or from a genuine journalistic instinct.

Linda’s story is, frankly…preposterous, and it only gets more and more outlandish with every passing fact and incident that comes to light.

For example, Linda claims that two bodyguards for UN Secretary general Cuellar, named Richard and Dan, come to her apartment in the days after her abduction and, in a somewhat menacing fashion, question her about the incident, and in doing so admit they, along with Cuellar, saw the whole thing while driving by that night.

That element of the story is fine and is very helpful in making Linda seem somewhat believable…but the Richard and Dan story just goes off the rails from there.

Linda claims Richard and Dan later abducted her…while she was walking down the street audio recording herself for her own safety, and abscond her to some location to threaten and question her again.

This second Richard and Dan story is, frankly, embarrassing. It sounds so fake and so stupid is boggles the mind that anyone would tell it, never mind believe it. But Linda told it, and Budd Hopkins believed it.

Linda seemed to have Hopkins wrapped around her finger by playing the ‘fragile bird who needs protecting’ game, and Hopkins fell for it. This seemed to infuriate Carol back in the 1980’s and 90’s…and still today.  

Back at the time, Carol, a self-proclaimed documentarian and journalist, then goes about getting Linda on camera as much as she can and investigating her story in order to debunk it. Carol, and the makers of this docu-series, think she has succeeded…I don’t.

To be clear, I don’t believe Linda’s preposterous and ever more outlandish story. It is so outrageous and ridiculous as to be absurd. But that also makes it very easy to debunk…and Carol and the makers of this documentary, fail to do even the most rudimentary journalistic work to expose Linda as a fraud…but they work very hard to make it seem like they’ve done the work.

For example, Linda and Budd have 23 witnesses who claim to have seen her being abducted into the New York night sky. That’s a lot of witnesses. A scene plays out in the documentary where Carol, while videotaping in the early 90’s, has Budd call one of the witnesses in order to question them, but Budd isn’t able to get in touch with them and leaves a message. This is his second attempt to do so. No other attempts are made…and Carol, and the producers, claims this proves all the witnesses are fake or frauds. Huh?

The claim is also made by Carol that she called one witness and that it “sounded like Linda”. Again, this is the extent of the journalism on display in this series. Out of 23 witnesses, one didn’t call back and the other sounds kind of like Linda, and so that makes all 23 fake or fraudulent? That is just as ridiculous a claim as Linda’s original claims.

Then there’s the story of Richard and Dan, the UN security guards for the Secretary General. Back in 1990 Carol films Linda as they go through file footage of various UN events and Linda actually identifies one of the guys in the video as being Dan. She literally ID’s the guy.

Now, does that mean it is the guy? Does that mean that the guy she ID’s came to her house and did all the things she claims? No. What it does mean is that it should be easy to investigate who that person is…and maybe…just maybe…find him and talk to him. If you work as a security guy at the UN, there’s a paper trail, pay stubs, taxes, insurance, and all the rest. There’s a paper trail and probably a picture ID on file. Do Carol and the producers of this series investigate and find that material? No, they don’t. Why not? I have no idea. Maybe they’re lazy.

Carol and the producers do have handwriting analysis done on a type-written letter signed by Secretary Cuellar in which he claims to have seen all that happened to Linda that night in 1989. The hand writing analysis is on Cuellar’s signature and the expert declares that no one writes their name exactly the same way twice and this signature is too perfect to be real.

Now, the signature and the type-written letter may very well be fake, but public officials use signature stamps to sign their name all the time…is it out of the possibility that this happened here? No. Did Carol or the producers acknowledge this? Also no.

If Linda is as big a bullshitter as she appears to be in this documentary, you’ve got to find more substantial evidence and prove she is a bullshitter…it can’t be that hard.

What about the other 22 witnesses? Did they try and track them down? Who are they and where are they?

Where’s the investigation into Richard and Dan and the UN and all that? This is simple stuff. It may not be easy to do and may take effort, but if Linda is so full of shit then it should be easy to prove and yet they never prove it.

With the slightest bit of awareness on the game being played on you by understanding what is missing from this series, Manhattan Alien Abduction looks in hindsight to be a cheap and tawdry venture.

As bizarre and unbelievable as Linda’s claims are the investigation into them is shallow and amateurish. Do the work. Track down the witnesses. Find a connection. Don’t just speculate and assume and conjecture and imply…investigate and prove…or in this case, disprove.

Here’s another oddity about this mini-series, namely that Carol Rainey has her own major biases from a tormented childhood in a religious cult, and from her personal relationship with Budd Hopkins, that skew her own objectivity and judgement.

Hopkins and Rainey divorced in 2006, and when he died in 2011 he was in a relationship with Leslie Kean. You know who Leslie Kean is? She’s the journalist who went on to break the big UFO story published in the New York Times in 2017 that brought ufology into the mainstream.

The question I have after learning of Hopkins relationship with Kean, and Carol Rainey’s background and her obvious jealousy of Linda Napolitano, is this…is this docuseries just Carol Rainey in a jealous fit trying to destroy the legacy of Budd Hopkins, Linda Napolitano’s reputation and undermine Leslie Kean’s life’s work?

As much as I think Linda Napolitano is a fabulist, I think Carol Rainey is one too…and a much more nefarious one. Rainey is the woman scorned, and while she may be right about everything, her personal vindictiveness and venom are not journalistically acquired evidence…they are just grievances in the form of accusations.

Ultimately, Manhattan Alien Abduction disappoints despite a very compelling thesis, and is scuttled by a thoroughly amateurish and weak journalistic effort that fails to adequately disprove something that should be so easily debunked.

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: There and Back Again

ELECTION 2024 - POST-MORTEM #1

I’m picking up Bad Vibrations

In case you haven’t heard, former president, nepo-baby real estate mogul, and reality tv star, Donald J. Trump, has won the 2024 presidential election in resounding fashion.

I believed, due to my extensive expert analysis of “vibes”, that Trump would not win…or more accurately…would not be allowed to become president again. I was definitely wrong about the election results – as I thought the establishment would steal it fair and square, but I might still be right about whether Trump actually gets inaugurated.

A lot can happen between now and January 20th, and most of it can be very, very bad.

I had a conversation the other day with a good friend of mine, Red Dragon, who is a therapist. He and I avoid talking about politics for the most part but he called me to ask my Jungian thesis on Trump. I told it to him, which is essentially that Trump is the archetype of Loki, the Norse trickster god, personified.

Red Dragon, who is devoutly anti-Trump, then explained to me that he has a “feeling” and a “sense” that Trump’s astonishing story has one more gigantic twist in it and that twist involves some calamity befalling him. He wasn’t sure what it was…maybe a heart attack or stroke or worse.

What intrigued me about Red Dragon’s “feeling” and “sense” is that I have had the same feeling for some time now, and have even written about it. And to be clear, Red Dragon does not read my writing at all, so it’s not like he’s seen my pieces on the subject.

So my sense of the “vibes” around the election were wrong, but my “sense” of a calamity awaiting Trump persists – and is shared by other distant, yet kindred, spirits.

I fear, and I genuinely mean that I am fearful because I do not want anything bad to happen to the guy or to the country, that he will not make it to the presidency, and if he does, he won’t be there very long (remember the very murky and mysterious assassination attempt on Reagan in March of 1981 was a little over two months after he was inaugurated).

Trump may have a “heart attack” or “stroke” that aren’t really a heart attack or a stroke. Or he may get shot. Or blown up. Or poisoned. Or have an anvil fall on his head. Or may have a lawfare bomb blow up in his lap. Whatever it is, the powers that be, most notably the intelligence community, are out to get him, and when they want to get someone, they usually, but not always, do.

After Trump’s win he put out a series of videos describing his plan for his presidency. In one of the videos, he talks at length about his plan for the intelligence community and how he is going to bring them to heel. It is shocking to watch, and is the equivalent of when JFK said he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces”. We all know how well that went for JFK…he got his brains blown out all over his Ivy League suit on a sunny November day in Dallas, Texas.

Trump further antagonized the intel community when he tweeted that he would NOT be inviting former CIA director, and unrepentant neo-con, Mike Pompeo, to join his administration. Pompeo was the one who convinced Trump to not release the JFK assassination files during his first term…something he has sworn to do this time around. Trump’s “no Pompeo“- announcement made me both cheer…and shudder, because Pompeo is a monster but his ouster will only further antagonize the villains in the intelligence community.

The point of all this is that Trump has a big old bullseye on his back, and the people putting it there are notorious for assassinations and coups. So the Trump drama may hold another turn to it that will be Shakespearean in its tragedy.

Again…I hope not…but it’s a distinct possibility.

It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I Feel Fine

I spoke to a high-ranking election official here in Pennsylvania on the morning after the election and they told me that Harris was poised to win Pennsylvania and therefore the White House until a single vote was cast in my small, rural, overwhelmingly conservative township for Jill Stein. According to this official, this single vote somehow miraculously, single-handedly, halted Harris’s momentum and began her precipitous electoral decline.

In case you’re wondering…it was me…I was the one who voted for Jill Stein and thereby destroyed Harris’s electoral bid and, according to establishment liberals and hysteric woke fools, the democratic experiment that is the United States of America.

Sorry about that. Just kidding…I’m not sorry at all.

While every liberal I know is freaking out, or inconsolably depressed and deep within the throes of despair, I feel fine.

The reason for that is simple, yet complicated. The simple part is this…Donald Trump is a gigantic middle finger to the establishment and the DEI, woke, pussy-hat brigade, identity politics obsessed portion of the democratic party, and I have, for many years, been loudly saying “fuck you” to this intellectually insipid and politically insidious faction.  

In this sense, Trump’s victory fills me with a shameful amount of schadenfreude – the German word for pleasure in response to another’s misfortune. Of course, my feeling of schadenfreude is only heightened by the woke cult’s extraordinarily expansive amount of self-righteousness and hubris over the last ten years.

So, in one sense I am giddy at the truly malodorous, mid-wit, machine politician mediocrity that is Kamala Harris and her supremely silly sycophants losing this election.

I fully acknowledge that this response is childish, vindictive and vulgar. I am not proud of it, but I do admit to it.

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness…like resignation to the End…always the End

There is another part of me though that is deeply concerned about Trump’s victory, and it has nothing to do with his policies or the American polity, and everything to do with my own humanity. Namely, that there are many people that I love dearly who have personalized their politics to the point where they are in a great deal of emotional pain at the moment.

While I am a notoriously vicious son of a bitch, I am only that way to my enemies, and am deeply protective of those that I love.

In the broadest sense, my enemies are those in politics, like the entire democratic party and their shills in the legacy media, who have embraced a self-righteous racial, gender and ethnic identity politics over class politics. I despise these vapid and vainglorious villains because they are the most duplicitous, diabolical and deceptive scoundrels in American life, as they have irreparably destroyed the middle-class and decimated the working-class, and thus given us President Donald Trump…not once, but twice.

But then there are people in my life – most notably women, and everyone knows how much I obviously respect and adore women, like my wife, and my girlfriend, and my other girlfriend, and the prostitute I frequent, and the other prostitute I frequent, and this other women who may or may not be a prostitute who I’m trying to make my girlfriend but she’s kinda being a bitch about it so who knows where that will go…anyway…these women are deeply upset that Trump won, and I don’t like them being in anguish.

In all seriousness, I know a bevy of women who are either furious, or despondent, or inconsolable, or all of the above, regarding Trump’s victory. I totally get it. I do.

Therefore, I will not try and convince them to feel otherwise because how they feel is how they feel and I am not going to mansplain to them how their feelings are wrong no matter how wrong they are.

What I will do is encourage them to, in due time, put aside their feelings and try and analyze not so much their political beliefs but their political strategy and tactics and try and find how we, and they, got us where we are.

I would also try to encourage them to, going forward, not catastrophize and internalize their politics, because, as I have learned through experience – the Bush years were hell on earth for me, that is a terrible waste of time and an egregious waste of a glorious life.

I’m NOT looking at the Man in the Mirror, oh yeah, I’m NOT asking him to change his ways

In my final dispatch from before the election, I wrote that if liberals lose, they should, “look in the mirror and ask yourself some meaningful questions like…what have I done and what policies have I supported, that brought this vile man to power? If the answer you receive makes you question your entire ideology and approach to politics…then you’re on the right track.”

Thankfully, liberals are taking my sage advice and looking deeply inward in an attempt to learn from failure.

Just kidding…liberals have learned nothing and are once again doubling down on identity politics in order to explain their catastrophic defeat in this year’s election. The top three reasons I’ve heard for why Kamala lost are…you guessed it…racism, sexism and white supremacy. Yawn. I guess liberals think they didn’t screech “racist, fascist and sexist!!” quite loud enough over the decade. Maybe if they yell it louder, they’ll win next time. Addiction to wokeness is a hell of a thing.

A glance at MSNBC, CNN or ABC in the hours and days following Trump’s win and you were treated to intellectual titans like Joy Reid, Eddie Glaude, and Sunny Hostin, declaring that the only reason Trump won is because of racism and sexism….some of that racism and sexism even coming from “people of color” and women.

Glaude, a Princeton professor and one of the griftiest of race grifters, responded to an argument that people voted for Trump due to economic reasons, by saying, “I do not believe that…I CANNOT believe that…”. Exactly. Glaude, like the rest of the identity politics hucksters, CANNOT believe that because his entire career is premised on race being front and center at every moment in America….so if racism goes away...so does his income stream and prestige.

Glaude is, like his fellow race hustlers, Ibram X. Kendi, Joy Reid, Sunny Hostin, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and their ilk, an intellectual midget and political and cultural snake oil salesman and charlatan.

These mendacious morons are the same ones denying the fact that Kamala Harris was one of the most grotesquely inadequate politicians of the modern era and, in fact, have over and over, along with fellow talking heads and pundits in newspapers, declared that Kamala ran a “flawless” campaign. It’s impossible to take anyone who says that seriously. Kamala’s campaign was a lot of things, but “flawless” was not one of them. Kamala’s campaign was just like her in that it was fearful and entirely forgettable.

Thankfully I haven’t yet heard my favorite term “misogynoir” (hatred of black women), but that may be only because I’ve not watched enough cable news…as it is sure to be thrown around quite a bit in the coming days by the race hustler du jour trying to sound smart.

The reality is that Kamala Harris is not just a not-ready-for-prime-time player, she’s a never-will-be-ready-for-prime-time player. She is a generic, disingenuous, California machine politician who never had to actually convince people of anything in her entire career, just got to show up with the “D” next to her name to get elected. She never got a single vote in the democratic primary and was chosen to be vice-president, and democratic nominee, not despite being a black woman, but simply because she’s a black woman.

The KHive, a collection of rabid Kamala fans in both the media and public at large, loved Kamala but couldn’t name a single policy she believed in…because her identity as a black woman was all they needed, as supporting her was a self-righteous way to signal their virtue. This is why Kamala is the ultimate candidate for DEI-obsessed democrats.

This is also what made her such a disastrous presidential nominee, not to mention a heinous vice-president and senator. This is why she didn’t do the Joe Rogan interview…because she can’t sit for three hours and talk to anyone about anything. The reason for this is because there is no there - there. She is as vacant and vacuous as Trump is venal and vile…which is saying a lot.

But to Trump’s credit…he may be a bullshitter but at least he is dexterous enough to go on Joe Rogan and bullshit for three hours and not crumble and cackle his way into a warm puddle of his own piss.

Thankfully, Kamala Harris will, barring something extraordinary, disappear from public life forever because she will be a stark reminder of the failures of the DEI, woke, identity politics driven hysteria that put her a heart-beat away from the presidency…and put Trump in the Oval Office for a second time.

Alright…that’s enough ranting and rambling for today. Until next time America!!

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: The Assassination Chronicles

DISPATCHES FROM THE SHITSHOW – VOLUME TWO: ASSASSINATION CHRONICLES

So…that was weird.

A week ago, I wrote an article where I described what I thought was going to happen in this year’s election. The big point was that Trump wasn’t going to be allowed to be President…and that the intelligence community would try and assassinate him.

And then…two days later…they tried to assassinate him.

As everyone knows, “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” Unfortunately for me I am a prophet without honor everywhere! I’m the Rodney Dangerfield of prophets….I don’t get no honor…NOWHERE! Also unfortunately I am a prophet without profit….but that’s a story for another day.

As insane as the Trump assassination attempt was, and it was insane, I think things only get crazier from here on out.

I don’t know what exactly happened on Saturday, but what I am absolutely certain of is that whatever the “official story” is, is not to be believed even in the slightest.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the conspiracy scolds seem to have lost whatever grip they had left on our society with this batshit event. Right-wingers, even the ones who are reflexively establishment sycophants, are convinced that a deeper plot was involved than just a disgruntled, lone nut and left-wingers are convinced Trump staged the whole thing for a photo-op and sympathy. For example, I had multiple people text me within minutes of the assassination attempt to tell me they thought it was staged.

My spot on the political spectrum is impossible to discern – people on the right hate me and people on the left hate me (shrug), but I’ll say this, I don’t think this was an event staged by Trump. I think there are forces trying to destroy Trump…and they will keep trying to do it – although to be honest I’m not exactly sure why they want to destroy him. I have hunches, but I am not sure….maybe they just want to give the appearance that they’re trying to destroy him….who knows?

That said, I am most definitely open to the possibility that the powers that be are trying to destroy Trump but if they fail to do so they will still use him for all sorts of ungodly schemes and such…but that is only if they can’t pin the tail on his donkey and put him in the morgue instead of the White House.

As for the rest of the election, it is hysterical to me that Trump got shot and yet Biden is the one who looks like he’s being measured for a body bag.

Biden is a dead man walking, and I’m not just talking about in the polls.

With Schumer and Pelosi having now leaked stories about how they each spoke with the President and urged him to step aside, it would seem that Biden should not be asking for whom the bell tolls…although in his demented state he will probably keep asking even after being told it most definitely tolls for him. (And the Washington Post is now reporting that Obama told allies and associates that Biden needs to seriously consider his “viability” as his path to reelection has “greatly diminished”.)

Schumer and Pelosi leaking those stories is a Brutus level of political brutality and is a more politically bloody event than Trump getting shot in the ear. That Biden came down with Covid mere hours later may give him the impetus and cover to close up shop and hand the keys off to the rest of the party. But who knows if crotchety narcissist Joe and the rest of the Biden clan will walk away.

If Biden does step aside, then the carnage really begins.

As I said in my last article, I don’t know who will be president but I’m confident that Trump won’t be allowed to be president again.

It could be any one of the lollipop-guild of intellectual midgets which include Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or someone else…hell…even the decaying, decrepit, demented dipshit Joe Biden might be Weekend at Bernie’s-ed into the big chair again if he doesn’t back out or drop dead.

Kamala Harris is, in the eyes of many democrats, the next in line but she is an extraordinarily unimpressive politician and person. Kamala Harris has been California’s Attorney General, a U.S. Senator and a Vice President, not despite being a black/Asian woman but because she’s a black/Asian woman. If Democrats simply declare her the nominee it will be an open declaration that identity politics is the be all and end all of their ideology and that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion their unquestioned dogma.

In recent months DEI has somewhat taken a back seat amongst the corporate set as it has become a decadent luxury they have decided they simply can’t afford, and the same may be true among the democratic party – which is, as always, hostage to its corporate donors.

I don’t know how it will play out, I just know that the “deep state” is going to do everything and anything to keep Trump out of the White House…up to and including more assassination attempts during and after the campaign and election.

There is also a very distinct possibility of terror attacks here in the U.S.(or at the Olympics), and false flag attacks overseas that will force America into a war with Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, North Korea or somebody else….whatever it takes to keep Trump out of office and the American war machine running on all cylinders.

We live in very dangerous times and that danger is only going to increase with every passing day. My advice is to believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear, and to keep your head on a swivel, because there is much more shit about to be thrown at our fan….so hold your nose and be ready to stop, drop and roll at a moment’s notice.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

The Trump Legal Charade and Other Uncomfortable Truths

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

I loathe Donald Trump with the fury of a thousand suns but it seems obvious to me as someone aligned with neither political party, that the legal cases against him are third world, banana republic level political warfare manufactured to thwart his political ambitions.

This is the sort of legal maneuvering that the CIA routinely works overseas to knee cap political opposition to the corporate stooge they placed in power.

Make no mistake, Trump is a scumbag and a charlatan but the same could be said for every single president in my lifetime.

Bush and Cheney lied us into an illegal war that killed millions and ran a torture program and illegally spied on Americans. No charges. Obama willfully murdered Americans without trial. No charges. Wall Street honchos and their lackeys in government willfully defrauded the American public for billions if not trillions with the housing bubble and subsequent collapse, and not a single one of them was held “accountable” for their crimes. And yet, people celebrate when Trump gets convicted of this manufactured, pissant bullshit? Can people really be that gullible, that controllable and that stupid? I guess so.

Trump’s conviction isn’t about “holding a president accountable!”, it’s about inoculating the corrupt establishment from legal consequences by punishing a loudmouthed incompetent for deviating from the script (but not the narrative) and daring to disrespect the deep state. Charging and convicting Trump and not Bush, Obama and the bevy of bad boy Wall Streeters is the point and is meant as a way to rub any thinking person’s nose in shit.

Understand that Trump is meant to be a scapegoat (in the Girardian/classical sense - although certainly not an innocent) upon which the establishment can throw its sins and cathartically cleanse themselves in the eyes of the public through his legal crucifixion.

For example, the fact that Trump is facing prison for paying hush money to a whore while war criminals Dubya and Cheney bask in the glow of liberal love, is frankly, horrifying and extraordinarily revealing about the state of our country and the vacuous, vapid and venal nature of 21st century liberals. The fact that Trump is an icon of the right to begin with says the very same thing about modern-day Republicans.

Another note on Trump is that the big selling point for Democrats and Biden is that Trump is a threat to democracy…which is hysterical. What “democracy” exactly?

I think Trump is less a threat to our alleged “democracy” than the people in both parties who keep third parties off of ballots and allow corporations and Israel to meddle unabated in our elections and government.  

A line I often hear from Democrats is that this could be our last election because Trump won’t leave office if he wins. This is moronic. Trump is an actor…and just because he improvises his lines doesn’t mean he’ll change the storyline.

Do people not remember that Trump was president already…and many claimed he wouldn’t leave office then too…and yet…he isn’t president anymore. He left office. The retort to that fact is often “he didn’t concede”. What does that even mean, really? He left office…so who cares if he “concedes”? Do Super Bowl losers have to concede the game before the trophy is handed out? No. The game was played and the score is the score even if the loser doesn’t like it.

And speaking of the fact that Trump was already president…any dope that still thinks he is some outsider who will drain the swamp needs to be institutionalized if not lobotomized. Trump ran the first time, and is doing it again, as the ultimate outsider…and in a way he is...but not really. What he really is, is the ultimate outsider among insiders…like an uncouth dinner guest who shits on the duck l’orange.

The most repulsive thing about Trump, and there’s a lot to choose from, is that he ran as a man who’d drain the swamp but when elected stuffed his administration chock full of the most vile and corrupt, swampiest swamp creatures who have ever existed.

As for Biden…those delusional dingbats who think he’s doing a great job and that the economy is robust and that he is some kindly, dignified statesman, are even dumber than the MAGA morons.

Biden is a dementia-addled shitbag who is one of the most corrupt politicians of the last 60 years…which is quite an accomplishment considering the array of assholes who’ve held office.

The bottom line is it actually doesn’t matter in the least who wins the election because the brutish, barbaric beast will continue slouching towards Bethlehem and the decadent and morally diseased American Empire will continue its decay and decline leading to its inevitable collapse. And regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, know this, that every member of the ruling class, including the president, aren’t indifferent to your plight…no…they actually actively hate you and desperately wish you and your family great harm.

Understand that when you are voting in November you aren’t choosing a leader, you’re simply casting the lead for the clown-show that is American politics and whom you want to see on your tv every night. You can either have the corrupt, senile scumbag or the corrupt, blowhard carnival barker.

Regardless of how Trump’s legal issues play out or who gets the most votes in November, the bottom line is that no matter who wins, we all will lose.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Encounters (Netflix): A Documentary Mini-series Review - The Truth is Out There...But Not So Much in Here

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

 My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Newbies to the UFO story might find this a decent if uneven place to dip their toe into the topic. Viewers more informed on the UFO phenomenon won’t find much useful in this tepid and tame mini-series.

Encounters is the new four-episode docu-series on Netflix that explores four different UFO mass sightings at four different locations across the globe. The series, which premiered on the streaming service September 27th, is garnering some attention because it is produced by Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin.

As someone who has had a longtime interest in the subject of UFOs, and who has read and watched a great deal about the phenomenon, I was excited to see Encounters. With UFOs, or as they’ve now been deemed UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomenon), finally being publicly taken seriously by governments and the media after years of being scoffed at, the opportunity for quality documentaries to inform audiences and initiate further investigation is at an all-time high.

Prior to Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment producing Encounters, other high profile Hollywood producers/directors have stepped into the UFO breach in recent years in similar fashion. JJ Abrams’ 2021 docu-series titled UFO, is one example.

Encounters is very similar in some ways to Abrams’ UFO as both are four-part docu-series, both cover a lot of familiar ground that UFO afficionados will know well, and both are decent enough starting places for the uninitiated to dip their toe into the UFO subject. Unfortunately, both are also, despite their best intentions, middle-of-the-road, rather forgettable projects.

Unlike Abrams’ UFO series, Encounters for the most part stays away from the UFO hot topics that have made headlines in the last five years or so and instead focuses on four mass sightings in recent and not-so-recent history.

The first episode is about the 2008 sighting by hundreds of people in Stephensville, Texas.

This first episode is, like all the others, very well shot and professionally produced. The witnesses presented aren’t just credible but are interesting, and their stories are compelling. Even more compelling is the radar evidence discovered after a FOIA request that backs up the claims of those who saw UFOs and saw F-16s quickly chase after them.

One minor issue I had with the first episode is that it never mentions that Stephensville, Texas is very close to the home of George W. Bush, who was President of the United States at the time of the UFO incident. This seemed a curious omission in recounting the tale.

Episode two covers the 1994 encounter at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe. This incident is fascinating, but the episode is a bit bumpy. For instance, 60 students claim to have seen a UFO and an alien in broad daylight, but one student, who is now a grown man, claims he made the whole thing up and everyone else just went with it and now believe the delusion. I understand wanting to show both sides of an argument, but this lone student seems, frankly, unhinged, and his testimony about it being a hoax feels, ironically enough, absurd in the face of the counter evidence.

This episode is noteworthy solely because it introduces the remarkable Dr. John Mack, the late Harvard psychiatrist who in the 1990s began to take the alien abduction phenomenon seriously.

John Mack’s story is worthy of an extensive documentary all its own, but Encounters is only able to give a brief background on his astounding career and the impact he had on the subject. One can only hope that a more extensive documentary on Mack is produced, but for the time being this quick review in episode two will hopefully pique newbie’s interest in the man and his work.

Episode three examines the 1977 Broad Haven Triangle incident, in which a bevy of Welsh school boys and townspeople witnessed UFOs and aliens. This episode was the weakest of the bunch as it never streamlines its storytelling or clarifies the bizarre incidents in question.

The incident itself is fascinating, as all of the children who witnessed it were quickly separated by skeptical teachers and asked to draw what they saw, and drew the same thing. The counter point is that at that time the culture was awash in UFOs and so all people, not just children, had a foundational understanding of what UFOs would look like and thus rendered them in unison upon request.

Much of the other witnesses in the Broad Haven case tell interesting stories but they feel less compelling, and frankly less believable, than the three other incidents examined in this series.

The final episode looks at the plethora of UFO sightings in Fukushima, Japan after the horrific earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

This episode features the very best video evidence in the series, but also wanders down some pretty bizarre, and frankly, unhelpful paths when interviewing residents of the area.

For example, one woman, a drama teacher and pseudo-spiritualist, claims she is an alien and is inhabiting a body on earth to witness the great transformation that is happening. This woman, who is like every other new age kook I’ve ever met, and trust me when I tell you I’ve met a hefty number of them, suffers from the shadow disease of new age-ism, namely egregious narcissism. Why the producers would include such an obviously low-credibility nutjob like this woman is beyond me as it demeans the topic and diminishes the mini-series.

The spiritual element of UFOs is a big topic in this episode as the cultural differences between East and West are explored, with the East being more open to UFOs as some sort of spiritual phenomenon rather than a physical one.

The Fukushima UFO case is one of the more evidence-based ones, so it makes the producers decision to focus on more esoteric subjects rather than on the actual evidence very counter-productive and dismaying.

On the whole, Encounters is disappointing for someone like me as I know a lot about these incidents already, and the series doesn’t really bring anything new to the fore.

To someone with any background in UFOs, Encounters is decidedly tame and feels rather out of date. If the series came out a decade ago it would’ve felt much more relevant and interesting.

That said, if you spend the majority of your time in the mainstream and are a newbie to the UFO subject, then Amblin’s Encounters could be a decent enough place to dip your toe into the topic, as would be JJ Abrams’ tepid UFO series.

But if you want to take a serious look at the subject of UFOs, I would recommend starting with the work of documentarian James Fox, whose films Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and Phenomenon (2020), are as good and as informative as it gets in the genre.

With those three films as your foundation, you’ll have a solid understanding of the history of the subject and how we got where we are today, and what might come tomorrow.

As for Encounters, despite covering some truly vital incidents, it never rises to be anything more than a brief overview of a topic worthy of so much more.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Banshees of Inisherin: A Review – Journey to the Irish Heart of Darkness

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but well-written and well-acted dark comedic fable that speaks to our current hyper-polarized time.

The Irish are often caricatured by outsiders as a bunch of rosy-cheeked, pseudo-leprechauns blessed with a persistent good-nature and the relentless gift of the gab.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Irish are not jolly jig dancing leprechauns, they’re a complicated people inflicted with a deep-seated darkness and melancholy that confounds psychiatry and could swallow universes whole.

Yes, the Irish are blessed with the gift of the gab but they’re also cursed with the impulse to jab. Wherever two or more Irishmen are gathered, a fight is more likely than not.

Which brings us to The Banshees of Inisherin, the new dark comedic fable written and directed by acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh which stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with supporting turns from Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan.

The film, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, tells the story of Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), two men living on a small island just off the coast of civil war torn Ireland in 1923, as they navigate the end of their friendship.

The troubles (pun intended) start when Colm decides one day that life is too short to spend another moment in the presence of the dull and dim-witted Padraig. Fiddle-player Colm wants to leave his mark on the world by writing a great Irish song, and believes Padraig’s company is holding him back by taking up too much of his time. Colm would rather cut off his nose to spite his face than to spend another minute of his life chatting inanely with Padraig.

Padraig, who really is dull and dim-witted, is blindsided by this turn of events and simply can’t wrap his head around Colm’s behavior. Padraig is nice and only aspires to be nice, so Colm’s rather rude demand that they not be friends anymore is a shock.

The story of Colm and Padraig’s progressively uncivil civil war unfurls from there but I’ll refrain from sharing any more details to avoid spoilers except to say that things escalate to literally absurd extremes.

The Banshees of Inisherin has a lot going for it. For one, it is simply but beautifully shot, the setting is glorious and the costumes are sublime.

In addition, Colin Farrell gives a phenomenal performance as the doe-eyed dumb-ass Padraig. Farrell has discovered himself as an actor in recent years under the direction of both McDonagh and Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). Hell, he was even terrific in the Ron Howard nothing burger that was Thirteen Lives from this past Summer.

Padraig’s character arc gives Farrell a great deal to sink his teeth into and he makes the absolute most of it. I would assume that an Oscar nomination is in his future and he’s definitely deserving of a win.

Brendan Gleeson too is superb as the determined yet despondent, gruff but good-natured Colm. Gleeson is a fantastic actor and the more we get to see of him the better. Make no mistake, The Banshees of Inisherin is Colin Farrell’s movie, but none of it is possible without the subtle and sublime work of Brendan Gleeson.

Kerry Condon plays Siobhan, Padraig’s sister and she is captivating as she perfectly captures the tortured and tormented existence of the Irish woman stuck on an isolated island with the hell that is Irish men.

Barry Keoghan gives an uneven but at times spectacular performance as Dominic, the lonely and desperate son of the local brutish policeman. Keoghan sometimes gets lost in histrionics, but when he slows down and stills himself, he is capable of immense dramatic power and that is evident in his work as Dominic.

I’ve enjoyed Martin McDonagh’s plays but I’ve not been a huge fan of films. I thought In Bruges (2008) was good but not that good, and found his most recent effort, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri to be a steaming pile of donkey shite.

The Banshees of Inisherin is by far his best film as it tells a bleakly funny, layered and complex allegory about the nature of men, Irish men in particular, and the perilously polarizing nature of our fractious time.

Men like Padraig and Colm, are designed to communicate shoulder-to-shoulder, whether it be in a foxhole, the fields, an assembly line or at a bar. Shoulder-to-shoulder. The problems start when Colm forces a face-to-face discussion, which is unnatural to men. When men are face-to-face, they’re squaring up to fight…and that’s what occurs with Colm and Padraig…and with all men who attempt to deny their masculine nature no matter how suffocatingly self-destructive it may be.

As for the more current notions addressed in The Banshees of Inisherin, the recent trend of celebrating the banishing of friends or family over the differing of opinions, is front and center.

Nowadays as a cold civil war rages in America, disagreement over politics, of all stupid, fucking useless things, is punishable by exile, which is lustily cheered on by the cacophony of clowns manning the echo chamber of social media.

Like Padraig I’m a dim-witted dullard, and like Padraig I’ve been cast out of the garden by friends. Unlike Padraig, I don’t give a flying fuck. Like Colm I prefer to be alone, and do not want to waste my time or disturb my peace with inane chit-chat with dopes, dipshits and douchebags.

This is part of the brilliance of The Banshees of Inisherin as Padraig and Colm are two parts of the masculine Irish psyche that are forever in and out of accord with one another. Colm’s newfound, fear-of-being-forgotten inspired ambition and Padraig’s yearning for comfort coupled with his fruitless hope to be remembered as nice, are the two clashing desires in the heart of all Irishmen, and maybe in all men.

Ultimately, what Martin McDonagh understands is that the thing to remember about the Irish is that they are the best friends and the worst enemies. They’re happy to talk your ear off or rip your head off, either one, you decide. They have short-tempers and long memories and they don’t hold grudges, they ARE grudges.

The Banshees of Inisherin understands all of that and all of the darkness in the Irishman’s heart, and that’s why it’s both amusing and gloriously insightful that this movie feels like a prequel to some epic grudge inspired feud that will burn the fictional island of Inisherin to the ground in the years and decades to come…which is a wonderfully Irish thing to do.

The Banshees of Inisherin is possibly the best movie of the year, but to be clear, it isn’t a great movie. It’s good, and interesting, and insightful, but it isn’t great. But in the current cinematic drought in which we suffer, I guess I’ll have to drink from the well of the pretty good while I dream of greatness past.

If you’re Irish or of Irish descent, you’ll probably recognize yourself in The Banshees of Inisherin. But regardless of your connection to the Emerald Isle, be forewarned, The Banshees of Inisherin is a subtle but dark…very dark…comedy. If that’s not your thing, then this is won’t be your thing.

©2022

The Rehearsal (HBO Max): TV Review

 ****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Batshit, bizarre and brilliant.

“ONE TIME A THING OCCURRED TO ME, WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S FOR SALE?” – Vasoline by Stone Temple Pilots

It is very difficult to describe The Rehearsal, a new six-episode series written, directed and starring Nathan Fielder, now streaming on HBO Max.

At first glance, the series is a ‘reality tv’ show about Fielder helping regular people navigate their anxiety by directing elaborate rehearsals of difficult situations they will encounter in the future.

For example, in episode one Fielder assists a man who has been lying to a friend about his level of education and wants to come clean but is worried about how the friend will react. This is pretty standard reality tv stuff…nothing to see here. Except Fielder goes to extraordinary lengths to recreate the setting and the individuals involved in the encounter. He builds an exact replica of the bar where the conversation will take place, and hires actors to play everyone involved except for the man who wants to confess, and then rehearses the hell out of it trying to build a roadmap to follow for any contingency that may arise.

Episode one is amusing for how ridiculous Fielder is in his quest for “authenticity” regarding setting and cast…but it’s child’s play compared to what comes in episodes 2-6. That’s where the show turns the lunacy up to eleven and the absurdity up to infinity.

The first episode actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series. I won’t spoil anything vital from episodes 2-6 only because it simply has to be seen to be believed…and even seeing isn’t believing as I assume all of it is as phony as a smile on a two-dollar whore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating and insightful.

I’ve never seen any of Nathan Fielder’s earlier work, but from what I understand he’s a comedian/actor and comedic provocateur, so The Rehearsal is, I guess, best described as a docu-comedy…or maybe a mocku-comedy, or maybe an off-the-rails, reality tv social experiment.

I’m a notoriously difficult audience for comedy and am incapable of giving pity laughs. The Rehearsal made me guffaw numerous times, and not with traditional build-ups and payoffs but with subtle, understated, insanely weird moments of glorious absurdity.

Nathan Fielder is the ethically and morally corrupt ringmaster and clown of this straight-faced, three-ring circus, and he’s a passive-aggressive, raging narcissist suffering from supreme self-absorption and cluelessness…and it’s hysterical to behold, even when, or maybe especially when, he acts so superior to the rubes he’s supposedly silently judging, despite being just as ignorant, oblivious and self-delusional as they are.

I have no idea if this Fielder persona is genuine or an act, and I don’t much care. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Fielder’s persona is able to tell a complex story without ever needing to utter a word.

Fielder’s ‘act’ is, in some ways, sort of a more subdued version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat work, where he bonds with the audience because he’s in on the joke and uses ‘normal’ people as the punchline. But unlike Borat, Fielder’s insecurities and arrogance keeps slipping out from behind the mask.

The Rehearsal reminded me of a documentary/mockumentary from 1999 titled American Movie, which chronicled some passionate but unfortunate Midwestern filmmakers trying to make a movie that is destined to be terrible. American Movie was all the rage amongst a certain sect of hipster cinephiles back in the day. I even worked on a similar project as a cinematographer/actor in the same time frame. Similar to The Rehearsal, debates raged about whether American Movie was a real documentary or a mockumentary, and the answer is still elusive. I’m less in doubt about the dubious voracity of The Rehearsal.

The Rehearsal is also somewhat reminiscent of the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, NY, which blurs reality and manufactured reality in a post-modern cauldron of existentialism.

And the last thing that The Rehearsal reminded me of was Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, Inside. Although The Rehearsal is nothing like Bo Burnham’s Inside in content and character, it’s similar in the sense that it is undoubtedly a singular work of genius.

Many moons ago while studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my class did a sort of Meisner-esque exercise where an actor sits on a chair and looks straight ahead. The actor is supposed to be still and just listen to the words other classmates say to them from across the room and see if they generate a genuine, spontaneous emotional or physical reaction.

It's an interesting exercise in that it is meant to remove the impulse of the actor to “show” or indicate and instead just open themselves up, to be and to react organically and naturally.

I had already gone to film school prior to the Royal Academy so I realized during this exercise that it was very similar to the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage. In layman’s terms Eisenstein’s theory claims that the context surrounding an image is what assists the audience in projecting onto it meaning and emotion. For example, the shot of a stoic face is given meaning if it is preceded or followed by different images. The audience projects upon the stoic face a pleasant demeanor if it is preceded by a baby laughing, and the audience projects a darker meaning if the stoic face is preceded by a shot of war or carnage.

All of this came to mind watching Nathan Fielder, as his usually expressionless face and monotonous voice is a blank canvass upon which the audience can project their own meaning, including their own bias and prejudice.

For example, for much of episodes 2-6, Christianity is often positioned to be the butt of the joke by Fielder, who is Jewish. So much so, that at one point that prejudiced sub-text bubbles to the surface as someone openly declares without any opposition, that being a Christian is itself an irredeemable act of anti-Semitism. But afterwards another discussion takes place regarding Judaism, and the previously espoused anti-Christian sentiment is then given more context and its meaning changes radically. This is an instance of Fielder finding insight because of his lack of self-awareness, not in spite of it.

In that class at the Royal Academy there was a student, I’ll call him “Tushy”, who was a recent Ivy league grad, came from a very wealthy family, and seemingly had everything going for him, and yet he still felt the need to tell everyone fantastical stories about the famous women he had dated. Everyone knew these stories were obviously untrue for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that Tushy was very gay, but he and his stories were harmless so nobody really cared.

In the Meisner-esque exercise though, Tushy’s inability to just “be”, which is a form of being honest with yourself and thus your audience, proved a liability. Tushy was incapable of just “being” and had to push and indicate all of the feelings he thought he was supposed to have during the exercise. As an audience member and participant this was uncomfortable to watch because it was so painful, obvious and painfully obvious. The teacher, who was one of the best in the world, gently tried to remind him of the purpose of the exercise and re-direct him to stillness but Tushy would have none of it. He kept pushing and urging himself to have a profound reaction (in this case crying) because he wanted everyone to think he was a profound person having a profound reaction.

There’s a pivotal sequence in The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder turns into Tushy, and is betrayed by his desperate yearning for profundity and therefore creates a manufactured profundity. Except in this case, Fielder’s forced profundity is actually profound in its own right as it exposes the deeper ‘reality’ about him, his series, and his audience, which is that our culture, marinated in malignant narcissism and saturated with social media, has devolved humanity to the point where we are no longer capable of ever feeling genuine empathy.

On its surface The Rehearsal is a simple bit of reality tv comedy, but beneath that façade is an astoundingly complex piece of work that speaks volumes about the diminished and depraved state of humanity.

The bottom line is that Nathan Fielder is a modern-American holy fool, and his series The Rehearsal is batshit, bizarre and absolutely brilliant.

©2022

Severance (AppleTV+): TV Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

SEVERANCE

SEASON ONE - NINE EPISODES - APPLE TV +

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dramatic and insighftul meditation on the cult-like nature and profound evils of corporate America.

Severance, Apple TV’s sci-fi psychological thriller which just concluded its first season, is one of those TV shows that is a joy to watch despite it being such a viscerally uncomfortable viewing experience.

The series follows the trials and tribulations of Mark (Adam Scott), a rather soul-sucked, dead-eyed worker at an ominous bio-tech firm named Lumen, who undergoes a procedure called “severance”, which implants a chip in his brain in order to separate his work memories from his non-work memories.

Every morning Mark steps into the elevator at Lumen and as it descends into corporate hell, his outside life is erased. Then as the elevator doors open at his assigned floor, he awakens to a repeating, Orwellian, work-day nightmare complete with torture chamber break rooms and mazes of endless white hallways leading to nowhere.

At the end of the work day Mark enters the same elevator and the process is reversed, and he returns to his regular, rather sad life, none the wiser as to what has been afflicted upon him, and what he’s been up to all day at Lumen.

Speaking of which, the job Mark and his three co-workers actually do all day at their computers is a mystery even to them as they do it, as they’re never told what exactly it is they’re doing, but considering the brutal cruelty beneath the fake-smiling façade of management, it is most likely profoundly nefarious.

I will avoid going any further into the plot and machinations of Severance because it is best experienced, ironically enough, with a “severanced” mind that is clear from bias and distractions.

And Severance most definitely should be experienced, because it’s a brilliant mediation and examination of the cult-like nature of corporate America, and the banality of evil that is big business bureaucracy.

Severance resonates because it is deeply in tune with the insanity that is America’s mindless and soulless corporate culture as it becomes, with every passing day, ever more deeply intertwined with the modern-day religion that are the socio-political movements du jour.

Severance expertly but subtly comments on the current cancer that is American corporate culture. Lumen is a stand-in for, among other things, big tech, with its yearning for a thought-reducing social credit system and its compliance-inducing addiction to cancel culture. It’s also commenting on the cavalcade of companies forcing Human Resources-inspired indoctrination seminars disguised as “sensitivity trainings” on their workers, as well as the relentless and vacuous public moral preening and pandering of corporations which they use to distract from their pernicious behavior in private.

Lumen, the morally self-righteous, ethically-challenged company at the center of Severance, is Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Pfizer, Walmart, Goldman Sachs or any other too big to fail behemoth that is above the law and runs our corrupt corptocracy as they exploit and brutalize their workers.

The show is so good at replicating what passes for life in the spirit-stomping, soul-crushing, mind-shrinking fluorescent hell of corporate America that it was at times physically uncomfortable to watch. Having in my younger years been a prisoner in corporate America’s suffocating gulag, Severance triggered my PTSD so severely it made my legs ache and my colon twinge.

The first season of Severance consists of nine episodes, six of which are directed by Ben Stiller. I’ve never been a fan of Stiller’s directing. His previous foray into tv was the Showtime mini-series Escape at Donnemara, which came in as a lion and went out like a lamb. That mini-series was a disappointment as it opened bursting with dramatic potential but ultimately ran out of steam mid-way through and then fell flat on its face at the finish line.

Severance is the exact opposite. The series starts slowly…so slow that I almost bailed on it. But after sticking with it through the first few episodes, I was rewarded for my patience. The series builds more and more dramatic momentum as it hurtles toward the final two episodes of the season which are gloriously nerve-wracking.

A large part of why Severance works so well is its stellar cast.

Adam Scott plays protagonist Mark with a morose aplomb. The great John Turturro is absolutely phenomenal as Irving, the straight-laced company man. Britt Lower is undeniably captivating as Helly, the enigmatic new employee. And Zach Cherry is terrific as Dylan, the master of the mysterious task the office is assigned.

Equally outstanding are Patricia Arquette, as Ms. Cobell, the steely-eyed boss, and Tramell Tillman as her ruthless henchman, Seth.

And last but not least, Christopher Walken gives a sterling performance as Bert, a worker at a different division of Lumen who befriends Irving.

The combination of a culturally relevant story, a well-crafted sci-fi script, deft direction and an impeccable cast, make Severance an alarmingly compelling series and one you should definitely check out. It starts slow, but stick with it, it’s well worth it.  

©2022

'They Are Us' and the Tragedy Trap

The shutting down of ‘They Are Us’, the film about the Christchurch massacre of 2019, is the right thing to do for the wrong reason

Artists and audiences need time and emotional distance from a tragedy and trauma before they can make and appreciate any worthwhile cinema about it.

Last week pre-production for the film They Are Us, which intended to dramatize Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the killing of 51 Muslim worshipers by a white supremacist in Christchurch in 2019, was shut down due to outrage from New Zealand’s Muslim community which deemed the project “insensitive” and “obscene”.

The film, which had Rose Byrne set to star as Ardern, is now “on hold” and may have a difficult time exiting its self-induced purgatory. And maybe that’s for the best, at least for the time being.

I’m conflicted when it comes to this controversy, as I don’t believe that any group of people being offended, even righteously offended, by a film should ever stifle a project, but I also think that making a movie out of a recent tragedy is a bad idea because it rarely produces worthwhile cinema.

Generally, when a movie rushes to recount a recent tragedy it’s either cynically exploiting trauma to make a quick dollar, or it’s a piece of propaganda meant to manipulate the public.

In the case of They Are Us, it may very well be a combination of the two.

It’s highly curious to make a film focusing on a politician’s reaction to a recent real-life tragedy when that politician is still active in the political arena. It seems likely that They Are Us would be cashing in on a horrific tragedy by making a two-hour campaign commercial for Jacinda Ardern, which doesn’t exactly sound very artistically compelling.

The They Are Us controversy brought to my mind Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), which told the story of Chris Kyle, a famed Navy SEAL murdered in 2013.

Kyle’s father told Eastwood “disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell”, so the director dutifully made a hagiography that played up Kyle’s legend and ignored his fabulist tales of punching Jesse Ventura, shooting carjackers and sniping looters in New Orleans.

American Sniper was a propaganda popcorn movie and made tons of money by watering down not only Kyle’s complexity but the Iraq War’s as well. While commercially successful, artistically it was ultimately forgettable as it shamelessly promoted myth in favor of exploring truth.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion They Are Us would follow the same empty path regarding Ahearn and the massacre. Truth is that time and emotional distance are needed for artists to make noteworthy cinema about tragic events and audiences to be able to make sense of them.

For example, the bloodiest year for the U.S. in Vietnam was 1968 and it took a decade before Hollywood could adequately make a movie about that war. Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were the first to successfully ponder the Vietnam fiasco, with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born of the Fourth of July (1989), and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) continuing the exploration nearly a decade later.

Time and emotional distance greatly aided these films, their filmmakers and the viewers who digested them, as artists and audiences simply weren’t capable of diving into the horror of Vietnam in its immediate aftermath.

Oliver Stone has often gone back to examine the unhealed wounds of the American psyche. Twenty-eight years after JFK’s assassination he made his masterpiece JFK (1991), and twenty years after Richard Nixon’s downfall he made the brilliantly astute Nixon (1995).

The previously mentioned Vietnam war films and the Oliver Stone historical dramas succeeded artistically because they were constructed on a foundation of reason, and upon that foundation emotion and drama were built, whereas films made closer to traumatic events are usually built on a flimsy foundation of heightened emotion and therefore lack all meaning and purpose besides emoting and manipulating.

Speaking of manipulation, a perfect example of a movie exploiting an event for propaganda purposes is Zero Dark Thirty, which purported to tell the tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty premiered in December of 2012, a quick year and nine months after Bin Laden’s killing, and was propaganda meant to lionize the Obama administration and the intelligence community as it played up the effectiveness of torture and played down its barbarity.

Similarly, United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, premiered four and half years after 9-11 and exploited the raw emotion of that trauma to indelibly imprint upon the public’s consciousness through drama the government’s version of that heinous event.

Greengrass also made 22 July, about the 2011 massacre in Norway. 22 July came out in 2018, and like United 93, even some time had passed from the traumatic event it recounted, the emotional trauma was still too fresh. Both films are well made but the wounds they probed were too fresh for any valuable insights to be uncovered.

In contrast, Greengrass’s greatest film, Bloody Sunday, about the Bloody Sunday massacre in the north of Ireland by British troops in 1972, came out in 2002, thirty years after the events depicted. And while that movie is viscerally jarring and emotionally unnerving, it’s also powerfully poignant and insightful in ways that United 93 and 22 July simply aren’t because it had the benefit of time, distance and perspective.  

As for They Are Us, maybe a decade from now a worthwhile movie about the Christchurch massacre could be made as both artists and audiences will have had time to process that tragic event and be open to insights and interpretations of it that they’re immune to in the current, more emotionally fraught moment. Any movie made sooner than that will most assuredly only be exploiting trauma, rather exploring it for deeper meaning.

 A version fo this article was published at RT.

©2021

Birds are Racist!!!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes and 27 seconds

A bunch of loons have declared that bird names and bird-watching are racist.

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, the dodo’s in the establishment media are once again pushing an absurd racism narrative.

Everything is racist…including birds. I learned that fact by reading an article in the Washington Post titled “The racist legacy many birds carry” by Daryl Fears.

The headline makes it seem as though racism is like avian flu and is spread either by racist birds or birds carrying the racism bug. As dumb as that sounds, it isn’t nearly as idiotic as what the actual article contains.

The aptly named author Mr. Fears lays an egg in his insidiously insipid investigation into racism in bird watching and how many birds, “bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.”

It’s difficult to read that quote without rolling your eyes so hard you give yourself a seizure and it’s even harder to read the whole article without wanting a murder of crows to peck your eyes out.

The article claims that birds being named after people who did awful things in history shows that “as with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in orinthology’s DNA”.

Most normal people don’t know and don’t care that the Townsend’s warbler and Townsend’s solitaire are named after John Kirk Townsend who dug up Indigenous skulls to study them and “prove the inferiority of Indigenous people”. Or that Wallace’s owlet is named after Alfred Russell Wallace who in the 1800’s used the “n-word”. Or that James Sligo Jameson (of the Jameson whiskey family) purchased a girl in Africa in 1888 and watched as she was killed by “cannibals”. Or that John James Audubon, the patron not-so-saint of conservation and bird-watching, was a slave owner in the 1800’s.

Normal people don’t care about how birds got their name as it’s completely irrelevant to enjoying bird-watching. They don’t interpret names as celebrations of awful (or good) people but simply as a way to identify different birds.

Of course, in our current racial hysteria every narrative besides race is ruthlessly pushed out of the nest and left to die of under exposure.

For instance, in the article black ornithologist Corina Newsome says that after she was hired by Georgia Audubon and wore the organization’s work shirt she felt “like I was wearing the name of an oppressor, the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

Regarding Newsome the article also states that “On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Another “ornithologist of color” Alex Troutman says he “goes out of his way to smile and wave at every white passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible”.

Look, racial prejudice exists across all racial and ethnic lines, but Newsome and Troutman’s tales are more akin to the subjective ramblings of delusional paranoiacs conjuring boogey men of racial violence and oppression where none exist rather than a serious recounting of racist incidents by thoughtful people.

The article goes on to attempt to explain the root of the racist/colonialist problem in ornithology with this fantastically flaccid paragraph.

“Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.”

How exactly naming a bird by its identifying marks…like a red-tail, is a sign of European possessiveness or racism remains a mystery, though curiously the changing of the name of the ‘McCown’s longspur’ to the ‘thick-billed longspur’ due to John Porter McCown’s confederate past is deemed a victory against racist bird names.

The most interesting pieces of information in this asinine article come after its conclusion. In his bio it states that Fears has a Pulitzer prize, which is a shock considering he writes so poorly I wouldn’t trust him to correctly and coherently write a grocery list.

Also revealed is a hysterical correction which reads “An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans.”

Confusing Africa with the Malay Archipelago and humans with orangutans seems super-racist to me. Unfortunately, Mr. Fears doesn’t have any birds named after him that we can re-name, but he has a Pulitzer and a job at the Washington Post, so maybe those can be rescinded?

Ultimately, those manufacturing tenuous claims of racism in bird names and bird-watching are as ridiculous as movie-goers who would watch Hitchcock’s The Birds and conclude it’s a civil rights movie about black crows rightfully pecking to death a bunch of privileged white people over the injustice of Jim Crow laws.

The reality regarding the buffoonery of these manufactured bird-based racism claims is that if you want to undermine the fight against legitimate racism by coming across as an absurd, insane and inane loon, then a preposterous, pretentious and beyond parodic cause like “racism in orinthology” is a truly terrific way to do it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Anne Boleyn and Color-Conscious Casting

Anne Boleyn is so dull that the lead’s race is the only worth discussing…as intended

The Channel 5 mini-series has attracted a lot of attention for its unconventional casting, but it is an underwhelming piece of television.

The first episode of the highly anticipated three-part drama, Anne Boleyn, which has generated a great deal of conversation because it cast Jodie Turner Smith, a black actress, in the titular role, premiered Tuesday night on BBC Channel 5.

The casting of a black actress to play a white historical figure has garnered much attention, which seems to be the point. I certainly wouldn’t have watched Anne Boleyn if it weren’t for the casting controversy…so mission accomplished.

This color-blind (casting without considering an actor’s race) or color-conscious (intentionally casting a minority because of their identity) casting approach has been a hot topic in recent years.

“Whitewashing”, where a white actor or actress plays a role that’s a minority in the source material, such as Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell or Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange, or where white actors/actresses play “people of color” like Emma Stone in Aloha, Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart or Jonathon Pryce in Miss Saigon, has been labelled culturally insensitive and all but banned.

In a case of “race-washing for me but not for thee”, during this same time-period “artists of color” playing characters that are white in the source material, even when that source material is actual history, has been met with cheers for being a sign of victory for “diversity” and “inclusion”.

A Wrinkle in Time, Hamilton and Mary, Queen of Scots(2018) are just a few of the examples of the race-washing of white characters, including white historical figures, with actors of color in recent years.

As a traditionalist who believes in respecting source material, particularly when the source is history itself, I always find it ironic that the woke are so enthralled with color-blind or color-conscious casting when it comes to white historical figures or originally white characters yet are so addicted to classifying people by their racial identity in real life.

Of course, the argument from the pro-color-blind/color-conscious side is rather disingenuous and unserious. Author Miranda Kaufman’s recent article on the subject in the Telegraph is a perfect representation of the vacuousness and vapidity of that position.

Kaufman opens her piece by declaring she is “always exasperated by the uproar when a new historical drama comes out with a cast that isn’t solely white” and then goes on to reveal her ignorance and stunningly obtuse perspective on the issue.

According to Kaufman, since there were blacks in England during the Tudor era that means it’s no big deal if a black actress plays Anne Boleyn.

There were white people in the civil rights movement, so should Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day Lewis and Meryl Streep play Malcolm X, MLK and Rosa Parks? There were white abolitionists so should Sean Penn and Jennifer Lawrence play Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman? This is obviously absurd.

Equally absurd is Kaufman’s reasoning that because there were 200 free blacks out of a total of between 2 and 4 million people living in Tudor England, then a black Anne Boleyn is perfectly reasonable even though, as Kaufman admits, “of course” Boleyn wasn’t black.

Kaufman’s article is titled, “Yes, there were black Tudors – and they lived fascinating lives”, so why not make a tv show about one of them and cast black artists in the roles instead of turning history into fantasy by casting Jodie Tuner Smith as Boleyn?

My opposition to color-blind and color-conscious casting is purely a function of wanting to see the very best film and television possible. Film and tv is all about ‘make believe’, as the actors are playing ‘make believe’ in order to make the audience believe what they are witnessing is genuine.

This is why movie and tv studios pay millions of dollars for top-notch CGI to make it look like superheroes are really flying and dragons actually exist, and why taller actors play Abe Lincoln and pretty actresses play Marylin Monroe.

By casting a black woman as Anne Boleyn, or any other white figure, the critically important suspension of disbelief needed to lose oneself in entertainment has one more obstacle to overcome in our jaded age, and the ‘make believe’ is made markedly less believable.

Which brings us to Anne Boleyn.

I wanted Anne Boleyn to be good because I want every-thing I see to be good, but unfortunately it isn’t just Anne’s head that will roll in relation to this show, but viewer’s eyes as well.

This drama is a rather flimsy and flaccid retelling of the Boleyn tale that brings nothing new to the table except for the race of its leading lady.

The show is not underwhelming because of Jodie Turner Smith, it would probably be anemic regardless of who played the titular role, but it isn’t helped by her presence either.

Smith is an undeniable beauty but she’s not particularly charismatic, and she certainly lacks the magnetism and skill to elevate this rather shallow and stilted drama.

The rest of the cast, be they white, black or other, don’t fare any better, as the production feels decidedly cheap and devoid of drama.  

Episode two and three of Anne Boleyn air over the next two nights and maybe it will find its dramatic rhythm and improve significantly, but I doubt it as the first episode was so dull it left me wanting to chop my own head off.

The bottom-line reality regarding Anne Boleyn is that the virtue signaling of color-blind or color-conscious casting may make pandering studio executives and the woke feel good, but it often doesn’t make for good art and entertainment.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Final Account: Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 58 seconds 

New Nazi documentary ‘Final Account’ is a powerful and prescient warning for our identity politics obsessed age

Luke Holland’s film, which chronicles the complicity of ordinary German’s in the crimes of the Third Reich, is a reminder that it’s easy to label our enemies as Nazis…but the true search for evil should begin with a look in the mirror.

The new documentary Final Account is a collection of interviews with elderly, ordinary Germans recounting their experiences of life under the collective madness of the Nazi regime and their connection to, or complicity with, the Holocaust.

The film opens with a quote from Primo Levi, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Director Luke Holland, whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust and who himself died of cancer in 2020 after the film’s completion but before its premiere, goes on to prove Levi’s thesis.

Holland began production in 2008 and ultimately interviewed 300 people for this fascinating project, and his bare-bones, oral history approach, works exquisitely well in revealing the banality of evil.

Holland’s subjects were indoctrinated into the Nazi system early in life. The women went through the League of German Girls, the men the Hitler Youth. The males then graduated to the Waffen SS, some becoming concentration camp guards and one becoming a member of Hitler’s elite body guards, the Leibstandarte.

Their recollections regarding the holocaust run the gamut. Some claim to have known nothing, while others say they heard whispers and gossip but were too afraid to speak up or act. Others give grudging admissions of complicity, while some admitted the egregiousness of the crime but doubt its scale. And one, a former member of the Leibstandarde, is unbowed by the weight of history.

This former bodyguard of Hitler says the Fuhrer was a great leader with a good plan, except that the Jews should’ve been deported and not exterminated. He’s so unabashedly defiant he refuses to accept the Nuremberg ruling that the Waffen SS, of which he was a member, was a criminal organization because “then I would dirty myself”. His reasoning is wrapped in patriotism as he explains that the Nuremberg court wasn’t a German court, and therefore lacks authority in his eyes.

Other stories reveal how Jew hatred and the Holocaust were normalized. Stories of children being taught anti-Semitic songs in school, reading books with derogatory Jewish depictions and being indoctrinated by teachers into Nazi ideology are common.

Tales of visiting camps in order to get a cavity filled from a dentist who was a prisoner, or of routinely seeing prisoners escorted to and from camps, some being worked or starved to death slowly before their eyes, are mundanely recounted.

None of these revelations are met with tears or even overt remorse, just a stern, steely-eyed matter of fact-ness.

The most compelling subject in the film is Hans Werk, a former member of the Waffen SS. Werk is at times elusive and at times defensive, but he evolves over a series of interviews.

The most electrifying moment in the entire film is when Werk goes to the sight of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leadership made official the Final Solution policy, to speak to a group of college students about his guilt.

After saying he is ashamed of what he did as a member of the SS, these students push back. At first it seems they’re resistant because they think he’s lying about his contrition, then it becomes clear they’re actually angry with him for his shame. They call him a traitor for being ashamed of being German and having fought for Germany.

This scene is electrifying because it’s the only time the veneer of control recedes and the beast comes to the surface baring its teeth. Werk is shaken by the young men confronting him, and his horror at the realization that the disease of Nazism has passed to a new generation is readily apparent on his face as he pleads with them to “don’t let yourself be blinded”.

Werk’s warning fell on deaf ears in that room, and across the globe as well. The Nazi disease, or as my Jungian therapist friend describes it – the “not-see” disease, is back in our collective psyche with a vengeance. “Not seeing” the humanity of the other has reached epidemic proportions.

The dehumanizing sentiment of Nazism is readily apparent in recent videos of Jews rampaging on the streets of Israel attacking Arabs, Palestinians roaming the streets of New York attacking Jews, blacks viciously attacking Asians and whites, militarized police brutalizing minorities and rioters wreaking racially motivated havoc, as well as in stories of Uighers being held in Chinese concentration camps.

This ugly sentiment is also found in the establishment approved Critical Race Theory, a shamelessly anti-white and anti-Asian ideology that demands people be judged by racial and ethnic categories instead of by the content of their character, which is now being used to indoctrinate students in schools and becoming the default setting in corporate American.

This industrialized effort at dehumanization is horrifyingly reminiscent of the process which created the legions of “functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions” which populate the Nazi nightmare of Final Account.

Final Account is not a great film, it is somewhat derivative in style as evidenced by its repeated use of a melancholy cello played over shots of hollowed out concentration camps, but it is most certainly a powerful and prescient one.

It is cold comfort that the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi evil in Final Account will soon be dead of old age, for the spirit of Nazism is obviously alive and well in our world, living in all of our hearts, whether we have the courage to admit it or not.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

The Me You Can't See: Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

The navel gazing narcissism of Prince Harry’s mental health series The Me You Can’t See is not something you need to see

The series focuses too much on royal gossip and self-serving celebrities and not enough on how to help regular people struggling.

The Me You Can’t See is a five-part documentary about mental health issues produced by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry that premiered on May 21st on the streaming service Apple TV.  

The uneven series features interviews with Oprah and Harry, Lady Gaga, Glenn Close, and a plethora of regular people. Thankfully, unlike their thirsty celebrity counter parts, the segments featuring non-famous participants and unconventional approaches to mental health hold some value.

The most compelling of these regular-folk are the parents at the Selah Care Farm, who have lost children to suicide. Their brutal honesty and unfathomable, gut-wrenching grief are deeply moving and profound.

Equally compelling is the story of a young boy named Fawzi, a Syrian refugee living in Greece. The trauma Fawzi suffered in Syria is horrifying, but the doctor helping him heal is a beacon of hope for humanity.

Other captivating and insightful stories include Rashad, a black man suffering depression, Forget, a granny in Zimbabwe who provides mental health care in her remote area, Ambar, a young woman diagnosed with Schizophrenia, and Ian, a man with an egregiously traumatic childhood who takes part in a study on the hallucinogen psilocybin as a way for people to address their trauma, anxiety and depression.

Unfortunately, The Me You Can’t See doesn’t focus entirely on everyday people but instead wraps itself in the shallow Oprah aesthetic and the toxicity of celebrity and victimhood culture.

Oprah has long been painfully obtuse in regards to mental health and even admits as much on the show, but despite this admission she is still completely incapable of being anything other than a carnival barker and new age snake oil saleswoman, as The Me You Can’t See proves.

The big draw of the series is Prince Harry who’s featured throughout speaking about his journey to therapy, his struggle with the death of his mother, the “neglect” and “bullying” he suffered at the hands of the Royal family and his ultimate escape from it all.

Harry claims he began therapy four years ago at Meghan Markle’s insistence. What is so peculiar though is how completely devoid of self-awareness he seems to be.

For example, near the end of the series Harry says he “has never had any anger through this”, but he is obviously seething whenever he talks about the “firm”, the media and the paparazzi.

Harry seems to be in denial of his shadow, and it would serve him better to acknowledge this anger with the paparazzi in particular, because then he might come to better understand that the paparazzi is not the disease that killed his mother, it is merely a symptom.

The disease that killed Princess Diana was fame, and by moving to Hollywood, becoming enmeshed in the entertainment world, and putting himself front and center in this series, Harry is not shunning the beast that devoured her but embracing it.

The series is a frustrating viewing experience because while it tackles a worthwhile subject, it uses celebrity culture as the gateway into that discussion, which is the equivalent of serving booze at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

The reality is that celebrity and victimhood culture is a trauma upon our society just as much as fame is a trauma upon those who attain it because it confuses sadness with depression, nervousness with anxiety, and obstacles with trauma while breeding a populace of fantasists fueled by delusion and narcissism.

Oprah, Harry, Lady Gaga and the rest may genuinely suffer but their celebrity status makes their public struggle feel performative and self-serving. And in many cases if the famous wanted to decrease their anxiety and trauma they could do so by simply withdrawing from public life.

For instance, Harry claims that he and Meghan simply could not withstand negative media attention anymore. So, his solution was for them to start a production company, sign a deal with Netflix, do a huge interview with Oprah and publicly navel gaze on an Apple TV series. This is obviously self-defeating.

Also self-defeating is the rich and privileged Harry being filmed doing an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) therapy session where he recalls a trauma from his life and then hugs himself, rapidly moves his closed eyes and rhythmically taps his body. That treatment may be effective but it comes across as so ridiculous as to be a hyper-parody, and will set back working-class views of psychiatry two hundred years.

Ironically Fight Club’s Tyler Durden accurately diagnosed our current mental and emotional dis-ease and malaise much better than The Me You Can’t See when he said,

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war... Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

And we’re very depressed and anxious too…and The Me You Can’t See would’ve been better served preaching as the antidote to those maladies the power of resilience, becoming comfortable with discomfort, and overcoming petty traumas and not identifying with them. Instead, the series is an often-vapid, victimhood touting, celebrity culture band-aid on a complex and cavernous existential spiritual and philosophical bullet wound.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Father and the Media's Dementia Simulation Machine

The Oscar-nominated The Father is a masterful film about living with dementia…and a reminder that the mainstream media is a dementia simulation machine.

The film immerses viewers in the confusion of dementia – the same sort of bewilderment caused by US media misinformation to disorient the public and make them easier to control and manipulate. 

The Father is a terrific movie that tells the story of an aging man struggling with dementia, and it has left me rattled as it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the delusional and disorienting nature of American life.  

The film is rightfully nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards as it showcases a superb performance by Anthony Hopkins who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his stellar work.

What makes The Father such a poignant and insightful film is that director Florian Zeller doesn’t just show the effects of dementia on the screen, he immerses the audience in the excruciating experience of dementia.

Watching the film and experiencing that disease-imposed confusion, I couldn’t help but think about how, here in the U.S. at least, it feels as if our entire culture is suffering from a collective dementia. The disorientation and detachment from reality that come with that dreaded disease are entirely commonplace in America, where we seem incapable of remembering the past, or of clearly seeing the present.

This rapacious American dementia is fueled first and foremost by the mainstream media’s manipulation and misinformation.

The establishment media have long distorted reality in order to manufacture consent around a desired narrative. This is why Americans always see themselves as the “good guys” on the world stage and not as the imperialist aggressors and colonialist exploiters that we are.

For proof just look at the flag-waving coverage surrounding the Iraq war and the WMD nonsense, or the egregious media assaults on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden compared to the genuflecting coverage of infamous bs artists like Chris Kyle, George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.

This duplicitous media approach can often be so blatant as to be ridiculously absurd, such as when CNN described the rioting, looting and arson last Summer as “mostly peaceful” protests.

The same is true regarding the current wave of anti-Asian violence. The media blame the attacks on the ever-expanding yet conveniently amorphous label of “white supremacy”, but the videos and statistics regarding these repugnant attacks against Asians show black people are the majority of perpetrators, a fact the media steadfastly fail to mention.

Another dementia-like distortion caused by the media is the perception that police are killing black people en-masse.

As a 2021 Skeptic Research Poll found, most Americans greatly over-estimate the number of unarmed black people killed by police.

When asked “How many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?”, 53.3 % of those self-described as “very liberal” estimated that over 1,000 unarmed black men had been killed by police, even though the actual number is believed to be between 60 – 100.

According to the same study, 24.9% of people killed by police are black, yet those self-describing as “liberal” or “very liberal” estimated the number to be 56% and 60% respectively.

This detachment from reality is no shock as according to a Gallup poll over half the country already over-estimates the size of the black population in general, believing it to be over 30% when in reality it is roughly 14%.

The over-estimation of police killings of unarmed black men is to be expected as every killing of a black person by the police or by a white person results in massive media coverage and a declaration that the only motivation for the incident is racism. In contrast the deaths of white people at the hands of police or by black perpetrators are not considered noteworthy.

The anti-Russia hysteria is another establishment media manufactured narrative that is directly at odds with reality, but that is deeply rooted in the American psyche.

Russiagate, hacking of electrical grids, using super-secret microwave weapons to attack U.S. diplomats, and putting bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, are just a few of the dominant pieces of anti-Russian disinformation devoid of fact that the media tout as gospel truth.

The immigration crisis is another bewildering story disorienting Americans. The media vehemently chanted the mantra “kids in cages” when Trump detained children at the border, but were silent when Obama did the exact same thing during his presidency. And now that Biden is doing it too, the media are back to downplaying its significance or ignoring it entirely.

And of course, the most perplexing media coverage surrounds the coronavirus. Originally the press excoriated anyone who raised the notion that the disease may have come from a lab in China, but now the truth that they aren’t sure where it initially came from is acknowledged.

The medical establishment is just as perfidious and deceitful as the media.

For example, Dr. Fauci knowingly lied early in the pandemic about the need for masks.

And last Summer a collection of medical professionals said that no large groups should gather, except for Black Lives Matter protests, making the obscene and absurd claim that the media manufactured “epidemic” of racism was just as bad as the coronavirus pandemic.  

In addition, concerns over vaccinations are broken down by race, with white concerns stigmatized and black concerns gently understood.

Just like dementia, this insidious media and medical duplicity creates stress, irritability and aggression among the populace.

In conclusion, The Father is a masterful film insightfully exploring the tragedy of dementia, and the hypocritical, pernicious, frivolous and mendacious establishment media are a relentless dementia simulation machine. The former is worth indulging, the latter is terminal and should be avoided at all costs.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

Coded Bias: Documentary Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. The film tackles a fascinating topic but is too narrow and shallow to be of much use.

Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya, explores how artificial intelligence algorithms propagate racial and gender bias.

Big tech totalitarianism is one of the most important issues of our time, and I’m on board with any film highlighting the inherent perils of over reliance on insidious technologies. But Coded Bias, while being somewhat informative, ultimately falls flat because its focus on race and gender is much too narrow.

The film sets out to show how artificial intelligence dehumanizes people and encodes racial bias into the job, college, mortgage and loan application process as well as the criminal justice system, but this misses the techno-tyranny forest for the trees and is akin to complaining about a lack of art by people of color on the walls of the Titanic.

MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini opens the movie by recounting how she discovered racial bias in facial recognition software and then documents her attempts to combat it with her collection of activists named the Algorithm Justice League (AJL).

Buolamwini makes for a compelling protagonist on this journey into the Orwellian hellscape of artificial intelligence due to her superior knowledge of the subject matter and magnetic personality.

Equally compelling is the disturbing information about the totalitarian use of algorithms by the Chinese government to control their populace through a social credit system and the U.K.’s baby steps down the same authoritarian path as it implements its own flawed facial recognition program.

Americans are under the same invasive surveillance and are imprisoned by a similar social credit system, the only difference being that they are unaware of it and it’s being done by big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

But these issues are painfully complex and Coded Bias is often at cross-purposes with itself when confronting them. For instance, the film highlights the Chinese and U.K. government’s draconian use of technology, but then spotlights activists demanding the American government assert itself more aggressively regarding oversight.  

The same is true when Buolamwini takes her racial bias study to IBM to show them that their facial recognition tech fails to adequately work on black faces. In response, the company fixes the problem, which results in…more black people being able to be put in facial recognition databases. This pyrrhic victory makes the AJL seem like controlled opposition.

In this way the AJL is reminiscent of Black Lives Matter, in that they’re really a grievance delivery system designed to divide people and distract them from the much bigger issue. The race and gender obsessed AJL, just like BLM, makes enemies of potential allies by refusing to see all victims as equal.

For example, the conservatives and “conspiracy theorists” that have been de-platformed by algorithms from Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube are not considered worthy victims of tech totalitarianism by the AJL (and are never mentioned in the movie), but these ‘deplorables’ could be powerful allies in the fight to rein in the Sauron of Silicon Valley.

In one scene Republican Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is aghast at the power and pervasiveness of the FBI’s extra-judicial facial recognition program. The AJL no doubt loath Jordan (an easy thing to do), but he could be an effective asset in attempting the Herculean task of restraining the tech behemoth.

In contrast to Jordan, in the same congressional hearing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignores deeper concerns and instead theatrically focuses her ire at the majority “demographic group” that writes the code for artificial intelligence…white males.

The arch-villains of big tech expanding their surveillance capabilities without the slightest thought to ethics or human rights makes the possibility and probability of a dystopian corporate and draconian governmental future (and present) extremely high, but the film and the AJL are simply incapable of moving beyond their slavish devotion to identity politics and their own biases against white men to focus on that truly horrifying bigger picture.

The reality is that artificial intelligence doesn’t just dehumanize black people, it dehumanizes all people, and any movement that fails to put that fact front and center is deserving of distrust if not disdain.

If the AJL were serious about stopping techno-tyranny they’d be fighting vociferously to restore every person’s right to privacy and freedom of speech, especially if that speech is ugly and hateful, and for the right of people to own their personal information and data, and to stop tech companies from collecting and selling that data, and to either shatter the tech monopolies into a million pieces or transform them into public utilities. But they aren’t serious and they don’t aggressively address any of those issues.

Coded Bias ends by recounting the true story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet soldier in 1983 who defied technology during a missile scare and refused to launch a nuclear counter attack against the U.S. The film states that if the artificial intelligence of a Strangelovian “doomsday machine” were in charge, and not Petrov’s humanity, then the world would have been obliterated. This nod to individualism is a nice sentiment but rings hollow after 90 minutes of relentless identity politics. It’s also somewhat amusing since the heroic Petrov is a member of the dreaded white male demographic.

In keeping with the Dr. Strangelove metaphor, Coded Bias and the activists it spotlights unfortunately aren’t truly interested in fighting against big tech’s artificial intelligence “doomsday machine”, they just want to make sure the war room is diverse and inclusive enough.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In a culture obsessed with serial killers and murder stories, it is the state-sanctioned violence we ignore that is most corrosive

The tragic death of Sarah Everard has me questioning my choices in entertainment, but it’s the brutal actions of my government over the years that have done more to create a society desensitized to the value of life.

In the wake of the grisly murder of 33 year-old Sarah Everard in London earlier this month, there has been much debate about how to make women feel safer.

For example, the rather radical idea of a 6 p.m. curfew for men has been discussed. Considering that men stuck at home will just marinate in our morally twisted media which features a plethora of programming that highlights men killing women…that might not make women feel any safer.

Having just finished watching the Yorkshire Ripper documentary on Netflix, I couldn’t help but wonder if the prevalence of such gruesome subject matter in our culture cheapens the sanctity of life and thereby inspires killers.

Our culture’s fascination with violent death can often intentionally or unintentionally transform into a celebration of people who kill. In our fame-obsessed, reality-tv world, being famous and infamous are now virtually synonymous, and it doesn’t matter how you get the spotlight, just that you do. By lavishing our attention on murdering monsters we often turn them into celebrities.

I’m not immune to the lurid appeal of a serial killer story, but it feels like a chicken and egg debate pondering if I watched the documentaries on the Night Stalker and the Yorkshire Ripper because Netflix made them or did Netflix make them because they knew I’d watch them?

The most interesting serial killer narratives are the ones that explore not so much the serial killers but our obsession with them.

For example, Zodiac is one of David Fincher’s best movies as it tells the true story of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who turns into an obsessive Zodiac Killer researcher. Fincher mining our fear of becoming obsessed with the Zodiac Killer rather than our fear of the Zodiac Killer is what makes the film so captivating.

Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter dives even deeper into that theme as it follows two FBI agents as they interview serial killers such as Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz and Charles Manson in order to try and understand how they think. Ultimately, the brilliance of the show is that it mirrors its audience by being obsessed with the minds of serial killers.

But does immersing oneself in the crimes and mindset of a killer do damage to our individual or collective psyche?

It is much too simplistic to argue tv shows and movies about serial killers transform men into murderers.

It’s more accurate to say that the moral guardrails of our culture, most notably religion, have so decayed and been so diminished, that there seems no counter-balance to the darker things that naturally intrigue us. In other words in our fallen world there is no flicker of illumination to give us respite from the relentless darkness.

These serial killer narratives once felt cathartic and even psychologically healthy when contained within a culture with clear moral and ethical boundaries that acknowledged the precious nature of life. Now that these moral and ethical boundaries have blurred, and the religious foundation for them has been removed or revealed to be fraudulent, these serial killer stories now feel much less cathartic and much more toxic.

The result of this is, as killer John Doe tells us in Fincher’s iconic Seven, “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it is common, trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night.”

This is true of our culture as news and entertainment are inundated with murder, mayhem and depravity morning, noon and night.

Whether it’s scenes of attacks on Asians, or cops brutalizing civilians, or “mostly peaceful” violent protests, or documentaries on The Night Stalker or Nazis, we are perpetually force-fed a toxic media stew leaving our bellies bloated with bile and barbarity.

It is unimaginable that the culture’s consistent mantra of “if it bleeds it leads” is healthy, as it destabilizes the weak-minded, desensitizes us to the value of life and dehumanizes all of us.

Nearly a decade before the flag-waving pornography of the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” bombing campaign, Oliver Stone’s under appreciated Natural Born Killers (1994) skillfully explored this idea of a violent culture creating murderers and a malignant media transforming them into celebrities.

It is not surprising that a culture that made media sensations of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, celebrated more “respectable” serial killers like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they unleashed their carnage.

It seems to me that the media’s glorification of the industrial scale, state sanctioned, military industrial complex murder machine does more to damage our collective psyche and diminish our sense of the preciousness of life than stories about lone murderers.  

I’m less worried about the psychological effects of a serial killer documentary than I am about America’s ambivalence regarding their war crimes committed in Yemen.

I’m less worried about Seven inspiring a lunatic than I am about the U.S. and U.K. killing people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

I’m less worried about Ted Bundy’s body count than I am about the body count of Bush, Blair, Obama, Trump and Biden.

The murder of Sarah Everard is a tragic symptom of the disease of indifference to the sanctity of life that ravages our culture. But the majority of blood on our collective hands is not just a result of watching too many serial killer movies but from turning a blind eye to the violence done in our name to innocent people across the globe.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Only in a Nation Detached From Reality Would Tulsi Gabbard Be Denigrated and Kamala Harris Celebrated

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

In an age of where lies are worshiped and cowardice celebrated, Tulsi Gabbard is despised for her bravery and loyalty to truth.

Tulsi Gabbard, a four-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, is currently being attacked by liberals for introducing The Protect Women’s Sports Act, which seeks to protect women’s athletics by recognizing that different sexes are born with different physical abilities.

Reasonable and rational people realize that men and women are biologically different. Reasonable and rational people also realize that on average, men are bigger, stronger and faster than women, and that just because someone born a male now subjectively “identifies” as a female, that doesn’t alter the objective fact that copious amounts of testosterone were pumping through their body as it developed, thus making their competing against biological girls and women in sport not only unfair, but dangerous.

These should not be controversial statements as they are obviously factually and scientifically true. But objective truth is anathema in our age of subjective insanity. Which is why Tulsi Gabbard’s introducing of the Protect Women’s Sports Act is a brazen act of bravery.

This is why it is so perversely ironic that on the same day Tulsi Gabbard was being made a pariah for courageously speaking plain truth and supporting common sense, Time Magazine was announcing that the empty pantsuit and monument to tokenism, Kamala Harris, and her chauffeur in the corporate Democrat clown car, Joe Biden, were being honored as the Person of the Year.

If America were a sane place, Tulsi Gabbard, not Kamala Harris, would be the darling of the supposedly liberal Democratic Party.

Gabbard is an intelligent, principled and charismatic woman of color, something the devotees of diversity claim to desire.  Her progressive bona fides are unquestionable as she vociferously supports Medicare-for-All, a Universal Basic Income and wants to end the war on drugs and private prisons. She is also a courageous anti-interventionist in addition to being a respected Army Reservist and Iraq War veteran.

In contrast, Kamala Harris is a corrupt former “top cop” in California who brutalized the poor by being a proponent of the war on drugs yet let white-collar corporate criminals skate. She is also a neo-liberal militarist who opposes Medicare-for-All and a Universal Basic Income.

And yet, despite, or more likely because, of all of these things, Tulsi Gabbard is persona non grata among the dupes, dopes and dullards in the Democratic party and media, while the sellout and raging sub-mediocrity Kamala Harris is celebrated.

This is not surprising as Gabbard and her fetish for truth have long been a thorn in the establishment’s side, especially with her contrarian foreign policy beliefs, most notably regarding Syria and Bashar al-Assad.

In 2017 Gabbard committed the cardinal sin of going against establishment orthodoxy when she expressed skepticism regarding dubious claims of chemical weapons attacks by Syria in Khan Shaykhun, and, despite being right, was quickly labeled an “Assad apologist”.

She also made the egregious mistake of speaking truth when she said that the U.S. had been “waging a regime change war in Syria since 2011”. Nothing will get you a scarlet letter from the establishment faster than telling the truth regarding America’s thuggish empire.

As for compliant Kamala, speaking truth to power is not a sin with which she is intimately familiar. Kamala is more of a kiss up and kick down kind of girl. She “kissed” up to former Speaker of the California Assembly and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and kicked down by trying to jail poor parents of truant kids.

Another glaring difference between Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris is that Gabbard is guided by principle and Harris is guided by blind partisanship and personal ambition.

For instance, besides the Protect Women’s Sports Act, this week Gabbard also dared to cross the aisle by introducing the Break Up Big Tech Act, that supported Trump’s initiative to repeal Section 230, which gives legal immunity to large social media companies. Gabbard did this because it is the right thing to do, even if Trump supports it.

As for Kamala, she is allergic to principles beyond personal ambition. Kamala will not take on big tech, as they are her donor base and she is a junkie for their money and a whore for corporate power. One should not expect a Biden-Harris administration to move in any way shape or form against Silicon Valley.

Another argument in favor of Gabbard’s superiority over Harris is that the one time the two women went head-to-head was in the Democratic primary debates, and Gabbard eviscerated Harris so decisively that it stopped Harris’ campaign dead in its tracks.

This week’s state of affairs proves that America is a madhouse, and the media, Time Magazine and their ridiculous and grammatically incorrect “Person of the Year” selection included, are funhouse mirrors used to further distort our already deranged sur-reality.

In these United States of the Insane, the inmates are running the asylum as American militarism and corporate power are now deemed benign, it is declared gender doesn’t exist, and Kamala Harris is worthy of celebration while Tulsi Gabbard is deserving of denigration.

America always gets the leadership it deserves, and when Joe Biden falls, or more likely gets pushed, down a flight of stairs and Queen Kamala ascends to the throne, we will get what we deserve. And that certainly isn’t a person of quality and worth like Tulsi Gabbard, that’s for damn sure.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020