from russia with...nada

Wow. I've noted for some time that Russia was second to the US in hits to my blog. Now they've ceased altogether, incredible. This happened with China back around 2007. Things must be getting bad for free speech there! In Russia, you don't surf the Internets, only secret police do, all day, all night!

 Postscript  03.19.2013: Russia is back, but with far lower traffic than normal.

One Final Shot Across an Asshole's Bow Before Pulling the Trigger...

"I look forward to fourth coming litigation, marathon deposition sessions of every blogger that had made a post regarding Jack Burkman and the loves of his life! Win,Lose it doesn't matter! Its going to be very expensive for all parties involved! Or, you can shut this site down as soon as possible!

Dennis G. Brewer Sr. And Associates, P.C.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:27:00 AM EDT"

And I look forward to kicking your tiny dick in the dirt--what of it? Your mother sucks cocks in hell, eat a leper, do your best/worst. Blow me, asshole...

DC Madam book update

Things are wrapping up: Work is about to commence on a cover design as well as a stand alone website or the book, separate from this blog. At this point, the book is clocking in at 504 pages+ an  index and a table of contents. The length is based primarily on the fact that it's packed with primary information related to and from the case from correspondence, the public record, court documents, and more, much more. This is a view into the case that--other than in Montgomery Blair Sibley's Why Just Her--no one has ever seen. I was in a privileged position to experience, view and analyze information that few outside of the defense have ever seen let alone heard of.

The primary data isn't so much as explosive as my own own take, my analysis of it. While these are my opinions, they're the opinions of someone intimately involved in the case, therefore, this is a historical accounting as well as opinion and analysis. There will never be a book quite like it, rest assured, and it might just stand as a clear-eyed testament to this troubled era in ways that many of the observers of the case at the time never quite grasped, hindsight being everything of course. You would never want to experience what I and others did. While he's been quite reviled in relation to the case, I can only imagine the hell that counselor Sibley experienced. I was fortunate not to get too close and still got my wings singed.

 
The prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was a nightmare case if there ever was one. It was without any legal precedent in American jurisprudence. No one can recall anything like it ever happening, and I doubt there will ever be one quite like it ever again, power nailed that lid shut as thoroughly as possible. Incredible forces were marshaled to shut her down, to prevent more exposure of influence peddling related to defense/intelligence contracting by members of Congress, the executive branch, and yes, even the judiciary who enabled them. As this book should make clear, we're in a lot of trouble as a nation with no hope of actual reform. I believe we're headed in the same direction as the Soviet Union. Perhaps after that there can be a real chance at rebuilding American democracy. That's at least my hope. As it stands, under the current order, there can be no reform and we will continue to push towards the brink of what could be major catastrophe.

Ironically, only government can fix these things. This wasn't just a story about a sex scandal, it was about institutionalized corruption by officeholders who are in fact criminals. The media lied, and lied, and lied, and fulfilled their usual role of protecting power from public scrutiny. Small wonder no one wants to pay to be lied to anymore. More than a few institutions will be put under scrutiny in this account. The picture's not a pretty one and the myth of democracy is revealed as just that. It's one thing to assume, it's another to have your worst fears and cynicism confirmed. Expect a spring release.

Postscript: All of the important DC Madam entries from this blog have been extracted and archived. There have been some alarming clusters of activity around the blog and I'd neglected to create copies of some of them. This is no longer the case, and I suspect that some of them faced potential removal in the current political climate. Future editions of the upcoming text could possibly include a DVD-r containing them as well as other primary materials not included in the text from the case.

Jaenell Antas and Censorship

Naziland--This very stupid young woman had her photos (posted at one time by her on Stormfront, also her MySpace page) removed from this blog not long ago, perhaps the last six months. That's pretty ridiculous considering she's been putting them out there--you don't keep title when you do that without some statement of intellectual ownership. Whether it was her or Google, I don't know, but it's even money the Nazi, Holocaust denying bitch whined to them about it.

So much for Google's supposed stance on censorship over the impending intellectual property protection bills (SOPA is one) is hypocritical in this light, the use of the photos was academic, they were up for years before being pulled, and Antas lost title to them the moment she posted them without any declaration of ownership--doesn't matter.

Hit the related labels below for a rundown of the story. Yes, some of the links in those posts are dead. Some of us have a habit of rewriting history. Others, like me, have a habit of documenting it for posterity so that the lies don't hold. What a flake...

Here's a link to her MySpace page where they're still posted: http://www.myspace.com/jaenellesings

The first article, coming from a tip out of Portland, Oregon: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2009/07/jaenelle-antas-stormfront-phots-nifty.html

PS: Wikileaks was releasing hacked emails from UK Holocaust revisionist David Irving at the time. Interesting serendipity.

On the Wikileaks State Dept. cable controversy

WWW--Make no mistake: The leaking of the State Department cables is--far-and-away--bigger than the release of the Pentagon Papers. Even that scandal's whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg, is giving this one a thumb's-up, and so am I and millions. Could we be wrong? I don't think so at all.

I wholeheartedly support their release because crimes are routinely committed in the name of the American public. This is about institutionalized corruption being hidden from the public and the world; the victims of American foreign policy are the first to know, the American public, the last, and for good reason. That's a systematic abuse of power and calls for things like this release to happen just as systematically if we wish to live in a free and open society. Such releases are the best defense we can possibly have since these clowns are risking our lives every single day in the service of anarchic and unregulated power.

These people in the State Department and the national security state are going to get us all killed if we're not careful; they're the great terrorists of our common era.

This last week has brought numerous attacks on Wikileaks, and coming from all kinds of nefarious corners, across the globe. It's coming from an international, criminal power structure that's bent on total domination of the rest of us, the salt of the earth, the average man and woman, everyone outside of the corridors of power. This is, in the words and observations of many of us on the true left in America, the first major information war, a war with incredible stakes: The survival of human civilization and possibly the species itself, not merely the freedom of the average man and woman.

Make no mistake that the mask is off and that this is a global phenomena. It's not just America's mask being ripped-off. Predictably, the shills and lackeys are coming out of the woodwork and exposing themselves to patch things and instate damage control. Amazon.com, Ebay/Paypal, Time Magazine, CBS, CNN, and much of the rest of the American mainstream media as well as corporations are running into the fray. The walls of their Castle system are quaking right now and it's time to take notes on who's part of the problem. It's now obvious who they are.

A national security issue? It is, just not the way it's being presented. We, the people of the world, have a right to know these things--we must know them for our own safety and the preservation of human rights and democracy itself, now under incredible and sustained attack. The stakes couldn't be any higher. Many Internet providers like Amazon are cutting the lines that feed Wikileaks into the United States.

This is mainly to keep the American public where it's usually at: In the dark, the last to know what is being done in their name, and what is being done is systematic crime, make no mistake about it. This is crucial for unaccountable power to succeed, which could mean the end of us all.

Links to Wikileaks mirrors and foreign-subsidiaries: http://czardonic.wordpress.com/

CNN, Fox News, and the rest of the American mainstream media not reporting Italian General Strike

Berlusconi's Italy--If you watch tv for your news, you would never know this. Just one more reason that the internet is a better source of news and information, even with all the noise, mis-and-disinformation, and outright lies.

Internet searches only bring a few American notices, none of them any of the major wire services, excepting UPI, though they narrow it to being just a "transport strike." As far as mainstream American media is concerned, it never happened. Neither did the renewal of the Italian Communist Party as a force in national politics out of the strike, or the 300,000 protesters in Rome's Piazza San Giovanni.

What's it over? So-called "reforms" by the Berlusconi government in public jobs and education. The President wishes to cut pensions, have fewer teachers in classrooms, and wants to institute an authoritarian structure in Italian education. Few support these moves in Italy.

If you do a search on the subject on most any major search engine, you're not going to find much on this. The General Strike began on October 17th by educational, public transport, healthcare services, and by members of various other public occupations. Only lasting a few days, it's been a resounding success with the participation of students. Understand now why you aren't supposed to know this? Maybe there are other wire stories on this, but they aren't coming-up in any deep searches.

The great thing about the Italians is that they don't take things lying-down like Americans. Capital still has its battles with ordinary people there, often losing to worker demands. For all intents, the strike has ended with a defeat for the rightist Berlusconi, who like Canada's Stephen Harper can expect to be politically isolated in the event of a Democratic landslide on November 4th.

Note: The ANSA article has served as the general template for what few American news-outlets covering the story at all. That means that virtually no American journalist has reported on this story from Italy. Were they told to "stand down"?

"Strike shuts down Italian public transport," UPI, 10.17.2008: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/10/17/Strike_shuts_down_Italian_public_transport/UPI-50231224267266/

"Strike brings Italy to a halt, "ANSA, 10.17.2008: http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2008-10-17_117266546.html

Criterion's Salò DVD and "deleted-scenes"

The new edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò or 120 Nights of Sodom" (1976) is a revelation and will bring with it a reassessment of what can only be described as one of the purest works of art barely released as a commercial film product. This was as Pasolini would have had it, though his work has become a highly sought after cultural artifact, a commodity of another kind altogether (but still a commodity).

Pasolini wanted to direct a film that was "indigestible" as a commodity and more a work that would stand a statement on "the anarchy of power," consumerism, the hopeless inevitability of hierarchy, and so much more. Perhaps our culture is ready for his message of power run amok, it couldn't be more timely.

Yet, there are always those who are going to claim that there's no definitive cut. This is partially-correct as Pasolini was murdered while working on the French cut of the film, not even finishing its dubbing. Pasolini strangely and enigmatically stated that the French version would be "definitive" before his untimely assassination.

What does this mean? We don't know, and probably never will, though some of it has a relationship with the artist's obsession with language, and DeSade was a French aristocrat who wrote in his native-tongue.

Conversely, the film was being made for an Italian audience first, having been backed mostly by Alberto Grimaldi, producer of Sergio Leone's (a close friend of Pasolini's) "the man with no name" trilogy with Clint Eastwood, as well as films with the rest of the Italian canon of directors during the 1960s-70s. He recently co-produced Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" with the Weinsteins. Italians barely got to see Pasolini's film due to a succession of bannings that extended into 1978, though there were an unknown number of renegade screenings that caused a proliferation of grainy-prints--and some strange variations in the cuts.

The censored prints that eventually got shown to the Italian public only exacerbated this problem. Somehow, someone in the UK got a print with a scene that doesn't exist in any other...

Whenever I have a question about a master on one of my projects, my first stop is with our technical director, Lee Kline. He confirmed that our new HD transfer was made from an interpositive (IP) off of the original camera negative, which exists at Technicolor in Rome. An IP is usually the preferred source, especially when made from an original negative, since it’s wet-gated and contact-printed, and typically safer then using a cut original negative. Lee also confirmed that the missing scene is not in the IP. I had been in touch with a number of Pasolini collaborators, friends, and scholars as part of my general research on the project, and so I began asking them about how this scene might have made its way into the print used by the BFI for their 2001 release. ("Because You Can Never Have Enough," Kim Hendrickson, The Criterion Collection Blog, 08.28.2008)

Would Pasolini have wanted the scene in the final cut? There's no evidence of that, especially considering that this 24 second scene included in the 2001 BFI DVD and now Blu-Ray disk isn't found in any of the original materials, only a sole British print in their possession. Had Pasolini really wanted this tiny poetry reading scene in (there are others in the film), we would find it in these archival materials.

My own take here? It's only about marketing. The BFI edition simply has something that Criterion's doesn't, and vice versa--and that's about it. It strikes me as doubtful that there was any regard given over the director's original intentions in adding it to the cut, but more to feed a mania of "more is better" for a specific audience out there. Stupid, but there it is.

http://www.criterion.com/blog/index.html

Canadian Film Tax Credit Legislation Stalled, Evangelist Charles McVety Laments

"It's not about Charles McVety. Who am I? I'm nobody. I am irrelevant in this process. But I have been someone--this evangelical that people can take a shot at...because of my faith and because of the religion that I belong to." --Rev. Charles McVety doing a very bad job playing the role of a religious minority and a victim this week. (The Globe and Mail, 04.17.2008)

Ottawa, Canada--It's unsurprising that evangelist activist Charles McVety--president of the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC)--is unhappy about the current version of legislation that would revamp Canada's Telefilm tax credit fund and how it's going to be distributed in the future. The vast majority of Canadian media are against the current version of the bill that would grant unprecedented powers to the federal Heritage Minister (an appointed position), allowing them wide-berth in defining what films violate "public policy," and deny tax credits to those productions. This could occur even after Telefilm approval of tax credits for a movie or television project, and banks could get cold feet over future domestic productions thanks to these provisions of the legislation.

McVety wants another version of the bill that would go drastically further in curtailing which films get made, and which ones won't. Yet he won't define what is and isn't a violation of public policy in Canadian media. Fortunately, his recent outbursts might be a sign he and his allies have been told that they won't be making any of those decisions as political appointments in the future. According to McVety, he's "not a lobbyist," yet he certainly acts a lot like one. McVety had likely spoken too soon on the legislation back in February, having taken credit (not a tax one) for the very existence of the current bill being debated in the Canadian Senate's banking committee. Now, he's flatly denying it.

Naturally, the Tories are still bullish on the idea of this bill passing, but with the recent RCMP raids on their national offices, it could get the backseat. The entire banking and commerce committee don't appear to like Mr. McVety or his dubious agenda of blanket censorship:

Dr. McVety did not appear to have supporters of any stripe around the committee table.
The Conservatives were cordial, but seemed preoccupied with refuting allegations that government lobbying on the part of Dr. McVety had prompted the legislation.

The Globe and Mail reported in February that Dr. McVety had claimed credit for the proposal after discussions with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.

Dr. McVety backed away from that yesterday.

"We had no discussions about this legislation [Ed.-Called "C-10."] period. We didn't even know it existed. We didn't know it until The Globe and Mail called us the day after they had put this provision on the front page of their newspaper. We had zero knowledge of it. We had no specific meetings on this," Dr. McVety said. ("Film tax credit proposal falls short, evangelists says," The Globe and Mail, 04.17.2008)

The politicians on the liberal and conservative sides don't appear to want to have any impression that there is an association between themselves and "Dr." McVety, and the subject himself is trying to backpedal on his claims of virtual authorship of the current tax credit bill. Why is that? Because it's bad political theater.

Should we take Charles McVety at his word this week? Of course not. That's asking to believe much of anything he has to say outside of his circle of believers--believers in yet another false social prophet-cum-influence peddler. McVety sounds more like a Father Coughlin than a Jesus Christ. This week, almost all he could talk about was a controversial film that has yet-to-be-released in Canada: "Young People Fucking," and like many, it was funded partly through Telefilm and the Canadian tax credit. The reverend appears to be a little too obsessed with young people fucking, frankly. Like it or not, this is what Canada's media is great at.

If you know anything about Canadian cinema's success, it's that it's edgier than boorish American fare--it has its own niche, and it takes more creative-risks. As far as North America's concerned, it's the freest form of cinema left in an ocean of Hollywood conglomeration and meaninglessness-of-content. Interestingly, C-10 doesn't punish foreign movie and other media productions from receiving the same funds, irregardless of whether they violate "public policy."

Only Canadian productions fall under this provision of C-10, and it isn't hard to understand why this is so: monied American productions don't want to be affected, and the biggest ones don't want any Canadian competition. Enter creatures like Charles McVety, a Trojan horse if ever there was one. The Liberal Party's senators weren't buying what McVety was selling, and were practically belittling his testimony before them on Wednesday. This is how things are supposed to work, and it's obvious Canadian government is a little healthier than her American counterpart. But not much.

Charles McVety isn't just obsessed by "young people fucking," however, but by homosexuals: another film called "Breakfast with Scot" was another object of attention by the evangelist during his testimony before the suffering Senate banking and commerce committee. This shouldn't be a surprising tactic on-the-part of the evangelist and the shadowy interests he presumably represents, and was used to dramatic effect in the 2004 elections here in the United States. It's the politics of division and minority-baiting. McVety on "Breakfast with Scot":

Breakfast with Scot, released last fall, is about a gay ex-hockey player and his partner caring for a young orphan who displays less-than-masculine tendencies.

"(It) is about an 11-year-old boy who is being raised by a homosexual Toronto Maple Leaf to be a homosexual," said McVety. "... This is not something that the government should be (funding)."

Toronto-based filmmaker Laurie Lynd said he was "appalled" by McVety's description of his movie.

"The film is a gentle family comedy about self-acceptance and loving your child for whoever he or she is," Lynd said in an interview. He added that losing public financing just before production "could have killed the film completely."

McVety would not say how he would define entertainment that is "against public policy," instead listing titles such as The Masturbators and Young People F------.
("Activist decries tax break for gay comedy," The Toronto Star, 04.17.2008)

Like all would-be censors, Charles McVety wants us to believe that he knows best, and that he knows smut when he sees it within his own mind. Indeed he does, and he's far-and-away more obsessed by so-called "smut" and "pornography" than the rest of us here in North America. But are any of these films genuine "pornography"? No. This isn't the case, and these reactionary elements know this. Statutes already exist under Canadian law that bar public funding of pornographic productions.

McVety's congregational rank-and-file likely don't know this, and it's even money that they've all been told not to ever watch the aforementioned films. A Canadian-blog named "Slap Upside the Head" adds some pertinent insight into the McVety take on "Breakfast with Scot":

McVety—who previously claimed responsibility for Bill C-10, but has since backpeddled—summarized Breakfast With Scot as a film about “an 11-year-old boy who is being raised by a homosexual Toronto Maple Leaf to be a homosexual.”

Ignoring, for a moment, that the notion that someone can be raised to be homosexual is rejected completely by the psychological, medical, and academic community, I’m amazed by this misclassification. Either McVety has never seen the film, or he is lying about what he saw. ("Lobbyist: No Tax Credits for Adorable Gay Comedy," Slap Upside the Head, 04.18.2008)

Well-connected activists like McVety appear to have very robust sexual imaginations, but have they even seen these movies? Why do they have such easy-access to politicians? These kinds of acts of political theater are familiar to Americans looking across-the-border at the Canadian versions. They fall-short, and the strings are showing. It's likely that they extend from the corporate boardrooms, Hollywood, right-wing think tanks, and the evangelists congregations of America. Canadian autonomy is being assaulted on all fronts.

Fat, smug demagogues like the Rev. Charles McVety are the avatars of this push, and they and their unfortunate supporters should be resisted aggressively .

"Activist decries tax break for gay comedy," The Toronto Star, 04.17.2008: http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/415391

"Film tax credit proposal falls short, evangelists says," The Globe and Mail, 04.17.2008: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/freeheadlines/LAC/20080417/FILM17/national/National

"Lobbyist: No Tax Credits for Adorable Gay Comedy," Slap Upside the Head, 04.18.2008: http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/2008/04/no-credits-for-gay-comedy/

Boogie Nights: The Midnight Blue Collection Vols. 1-5 review

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The Wicker Man (1973/SPOILERS) review

'Oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ!'

Christopher Lee is dismissive of a lot of his screen-work, but this is one of his favorites (along with The Whip and the Body). It's hard to call this a horror film, but I guess you could say it is, depending upon who you root for. There really are no villains in this film, and hardcore religionists who would say the pagans who inhabit the island are evil are just flat-wrong.

Western civilization still has its sacrifices in our American death penalty, and in warfare.

Almost every generation is called-up to give of their numbers to Mars and the bottom-line. So-called conservative economists argue that a minimum-of-poverty is needed to maintain the tyranny of consumerism, the New Fascism.

There are sacrifices-aplenty in our 'modern' world, and the results are hardly-removed from pagan-sacrifices, just physically-removed and indirect from our daily lives (what could be more modern?). Oddly, the film is critical of both the ancient and the modern.

No, this is more a thriller with a 'horror reveal' at its climax, as it was originally conceived by director Robin Hardy. Sadly, the producers of the failing UK studio balked at his cut, and we have been left with cobbled-together theatrical and 'director's-cut' versions of the film with many of the scenes and insert-shots restored, but from shoddy sources like videotapes. The original-negatives of deleted material were hidden in a hole on an English country road according to Christopher Lee and others close to the production.

Why? Why did RKO destroy an hour of Orson Welles's 'The Magnificent Ambersons'? Revenge for Citizen Kane, of course. This is done as retribution by some producers, so that a director can never reinsert the footage. Why? Partly because producers cannot usually create movies like a director does, and some of them resent this fact. It also gives them a chance to legally-assert authorship, and thus solidify their ownership of a 'property' based under international copyright laws.

Due to the butchering of The Wicker Man, Christopher Lee has attempted for decades to do a remake, but it appears that this isn't going to happen with him now, and he refuses to discuss the Cage version.

The Nicholas Cage remake can only suffer from this fact, since it doesn't improve-upon the original. It actually does a poorer job, yet has a budget almost twenty-times the 1973 version. The remake basically says nothing-new, and actually takes a very wrong-headed attitude towards women.

Literally 'stealing the show', Lee plays the enigmatic and charming Lord Summerisle, and he haunts the entirety of the Wicker Man until the brutal ending. The other protagonist of the film is the character of Sergeant Howie, who has been sent by the mainland-Police to investigate the disappearance of young-girl on the island, namesake of the Lee character.

This island is Lord Summerisle's domain, and he has re-instituted various pagan beliefs alongside the island's agricultural-base or fruit orchards in the cold and hostile environment of the Hebrides. Temperate fruits aren't supposed to grow there, but miraculously, they do. The cop is entering a world he (and we, the audience) never knew existed. Unlike the remake, I'd say the Summerisle seems inviting and sensual. It's a place you might want to call home. As a stodgy-Christian, Howie doesn't really get this, and it seals-his-fate, creating a nice touch of irony.

It appears the 'new-beliefs' (really ancient, British-ones) are working, for the crops are abundant and the people of Summerisle seem happy and prosperous. There are numerous references to fertility symbols, and the musical-numbers are both inviting and haunting (if not a little goofy), and they lull Howie and the viewer into a complacency (as pagan rituals do to their sacrifices). Seargeant Howie (a daft-name, chosen so the audience doesn't fully-identify with him) is being tested by the pagans for his purity, and the gorgeous Britt Ekland is the bait, though her acting is a bit 'wooden' (or is it 'Wicker'?).

Still, she and her body double add a great erotic flavor to the film that makes paganism seem pretty inviting. Well, unless you're the sacrifice, though believers would likely have no-problem. This then, is the horror component of the film, a non-believer sacrificed by believers in an irrational-rejection of modernity. This kind of romanticism fueled the rise of Nazism, and the burning of the scapegoat.

There are many-reviewers who have said this is about a battle-between paganism and Orthodox Christianity. This is accurate, but there are some nuances to this, and comments on the surrender to irrationality by the pagans and Sergeant Howie.

Let's face it: the cop isn't likable, and we aren't really supposed to identify with-him until the end of the tale as simply another human-being caught-up in something he never wagered on. But that's where it ends. The current version of the 1973 Wicker Man is definitely flawed.

Like a pagan initiation, the story begins as a mystery, both tempting-and-warm, even human. The initiate penetrates more-and-more layers of the mystery of the cult until...you'll have to watch the movie, it is an ending for-the-ages. There really isn't any gore here, just a little-blood, so gorehounds won't like it, but who cares what they think? This is inverted-horror.