Just a quick update of sorts to my original post on “The Bitcoin-Russian Information Warfare Nexus“, as I watch the bitcoin crash and note that Roger Stone paid a visit to the Ecuadorean embassy to drop off a love letter card to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
I forgot to put something important in my first post.
The so-called first mention of bitcoin in “main stream media” was in a PC World article in relation to WikiLeaks’ acceptance of the cryptocurrency as a donation in December 2010. At least that is the way bitcoin mastermind Satoshi Nakamoto seems to have seen it too.
“It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.” – Satoshi Nakamoto
Today’s Google Doodle is about the 120th Birthday of Sergei Eisenstein.
Sergei Eisenstein was an early-Soviet propagandist who is perhaps best noted for his trilogy of films: “The Strike“, “The Battleship Potemkin“, and “October” (“Ten Days that Shook the World“) about the 1917 Russian October Revolution. Eisenstein is a notable character for the n01r blog since he was set to direct an anti-fascist version of “The War of the Worlds” in the early 1930’s before he left the US to complete the pro-Communist propaganda film “Que Viva Mexico“. He was a strong career influence on both Francis Ford Coppola and Orson Welles.
I read Lucien Wolf’s enlightening 1921 book: THE MYTH OF THE JEWISH MENACE IN WORLD AFFAIRS or THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FORGED PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION as part of my research into the correlation of eschatology with conspiracy theory and anti-Semitism. This is by far the most authoritative debunking of The Protocols which I have read. You should read it too (it’s free at Google Books and may take you only 30 minutes).
In the controversy which is surrounding the widely condemned recent Russia Insider article (cached version) : “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo”, I feel that calling attention to the very nature of modern anti-Semitism as having been in large part engineered by Russia is important. In this same vein, it is also important to highlight how the article is just another rehashing of the idea that being conscious of anti-Semitism as a real thing is some kind of racism.
To me, given the Soviet infiltration of the peace movement, and his proximity to multiple “cells” of Russian spies (including peace movement figures), this is all pretty compelling evidence of Orson Welles being a Russian influence asset over time (less so for Cheetham to be honest). But maybe you have a different idea?
Noting a story about counterfeit Modigliani paintings in the news today, I recalled a bit of research I had done on the film F for Fake, which deals with forgery of Modigliani paintings as a superficial subject. It is time to blog it. In my ‘expert’ opinion, this film is a clever piece of Cold War-era, Russian-inspired, anti-fascist propaganda. Ultimately the film serves as a vehicle to launch ‘legal’ (and carefully worded) smears at the characters of Howard Hughes and the ‘art expert’ community at large. Perhaps I feel guilty to say it is a fantastic and entertaining art film. (See the below if you only watch a moment of it.)
One of the reasons I don’t invest time in money-generating side quests in video games is that the money isn’t real. Who cares if you have a million Gil, GP, ‘gold’, etc. but you drive a Hyundai Accent in real life? (No offense intended — I am so cheap I used to drive one by choice.) In one way, this is how the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies look to me.
Their hyper valuations seem to be based on nothing more than the collective imagination of a bunch of game players hunched in front of their computer screens, having traded World of Warcraft quests for hashing programs. In addition, cryptocurrencies are mined using graphics cards, and this is quite literally where they become “video game money”.