I’m working on a new post on “MMA culture and propaganda”. Of course, in the context of this investigation, we will come back to John Milius, screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, NRA board member, and popularizer in film of the Nietzsche-inspired character Conan the Cimmerian. The octagonal ring of mixed martial arts (MMA) is said to have derived from the film Conan the Barbarian (written by Milius but with a first draft by Oliver Stone), and Milius was in fact an architect of the UFC and an early Hollywood practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Words on Words: Vaclav Havel
Editorial: One of the names I considered for this blog was ‘wordswords(com)’ – which could be read as both ‘word swords’ and ‘words words’ (it wasn’t available and I am ultimately glad). As the below 1989 speech by Vaclav Havel shows, words can be dangerous, and they can also be redeeming. We need to be careful about the words we believe, and the words we use. We need to be careful how they can be used or changed in ways they are not intended to. I have always felt I have been very careful about how I choose words – despite my sometimes dyslexic tendencies towards syntax and grammar. That said, I am somewhat like a bull in a Chinese propaganda shop so we’ll see how that turns out.
The following speech is one of the best ‘sermons’ I have ever read and is filled with many relevant quotes for our age (some of the best I’ll highlight to ease visual scanning). I generally like to use my exclusively own opinion to avoid bias, but to be honest I have come to so many of the same conclusions independently of Havel from a moralistic standpoint (if not a historical one — since I am not fully educated on all of the matters of history which he references) that I have few if any reservations about putting his opinion forth as representative of my own. (This appeared originally in the NY Review of Books.)
“Nostradamus Ratios”: Why is Russia an Outlier?
I just presented on the attached paper (and a poster of my political model of Russian conspiracism) at the 13th International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ICCWS) which was held at National Defense University in Washington DC. The paper is based on a 2017 analysis of Google ‘hit count estimates’ (HCEs) for 38 news sites and 38 top level domains (TLDs) (two separate investigations) in order to test my theory that Russia employs the concept of Nostradamus and similar ‘prophets’ in a way that is different from the ‘West’. HCEs are a ‘webometric‘ which can potentially be used for conducting quantitative social science research on the internet.
(We are allowed and encouraged by the publisher to post these to personal web pages following the conference. )
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Marxist Dracula meets Vlad the Impaler and the Propaganda Men
I wrote this paper about the connections between Russia and Dracula a year ago and thought I would get it published. It was kind of just an interesting ‘spin off’ of my research on Nostradamus. Now I lost interest in revising and publishing it, so it is for the blog.
Since I have written this, I have made some advances in my theory and personal understanding of anti-Semitism and antifascism. You may find it somewhat ‘primitive’ compared to my more recent analyses. But the nuts and bolts hold true in my opinion.
Marxist Dracula meets Vlad the Impaler and the Propaganda Men:
Dracula as Strategic Communications about Russia
Abstract
Vlad Tepes, also known as ‘Vlad the Impaler’ and ‘Dracula’ was a 15th century Wallachian warlord whose brutality was immortalized in the stories of contemporary European publicists. These stories were brought to Russia and became the basis for Russia’s first belletristic text: “The Tale of Dracula”. The 16th century Russian Tsar Ivan IV (a.k.a. ‘Ivan the Terrible’) was a critical figure in implementing a cohesive Russian mythology, and he was equated with many stories formerly related to Dracula. The first English-language book which combined the concept of vampires and the historical figure of Vlad Tepes was Karl Marx’ “Das Kapital”. There is evidence that Marx influenced Bram Stoker’s conception of Dracula as a character. In the 20th century, film-makers have developed the concept of Dracula in ways which may undermine Stoker’s arguably Russophobic and anti-Semitic context while also introducing 16th century Russian mythology and modern geopolitics to the vampire story.
Keywords: Dracula, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Third Rome, Propaganda, Russian History
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Fascism and Antifascism: Just Russia playing both sides?
There seems to be pretty good evidence that Russia exploits the extremes of our modern US political system in order to damage the establishment center (“playing both sides“) in ways which reciprocally advance Russian political and military interests. In a nutshell, this dialectic model of conspiracism forms the basis for my working theory of so called “active measures”.
I present to you that we should look to parallels in history to see this has quite likely happened before — specifically in the case of German fascism and Western antifascism.
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It is pretty obvious that Charlton Heston was a Kremlin “Culture Warrior”
The late Charlton Heston has frequently been associated with “culture war”. Heston died in April 2008, but in the final years of his life, he was known principally as a staunch right wing gun rights activist, and former long term president of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
In 2013, appearing on Alex Jones’ Infowars in a segment devoted to ‘rebut[ting] the desecration of Charlton Heston’s memory‘, frequent guest Ted Nugent said:
“Charlton Heston knew the culture war was coming before any of us did, Alex”. (@6:40)
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Spy Talk : Newsweek’s Jeff Stein
Jeff Stein is the Newsweek Spy Talk columnist. He is an interesting figure to consider from the standpoint of history and narrative. I hadn’t realized that Stein had an anti-CIA history of his own .
Here’s how you connect David Jang the Second Coming Christ to Russia
In the spirit of noting the “plagues” visited upon Newsweek, I might have found the Holy Grail of the Newsweek-Russia connection (of course, by way of David Jang). Well maybe it is more like The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
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First ‘MSM’ mention of bitcoin in 2010 connected it to WikiLeaks
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
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Comrade Trotsky: The Original Recipe
Maybe it is a little funny that Colonel Sanders looks more than a little like Leon Trotsky.
“My mother went well supplied with money, jars of butter, bags of sweet biscuits, fried chicken and so forth.” – Leon Trotsky