HELLHOUSE

click on picture for teaser trailer

Most people don’t openly profess an interest in serial killers or the subject of murder, as these topics are considered morbid and untoward. But the 24 hour news cycle has it’s own sardonic obsession with brutality, and you can see evidence of this every night on the local news and CNN. For months at a time, people crowd around their television sets, listening with bated breath for the salient details of a buried baby or a raped teenager. But we are not obsessed with violence and terror. I repeat, we are NOT obsessed with violence and terror!

But for those of us who do secretly wonder about the final thoughts of a tortured soul, or the sounds a serial killer makes when no one else is around, have I got a film for you! My film, HELLHOUSE, which I am co-writing/directing with my friend and fellow horror movie fanatic, Jared Salas. We have launched a KICKSTARTER campaign for our movie and are expecting to begin shooting principal photography in spring.

HELLHOUSE is about a financially desperate couple, Collin and Aria, who decide to start robbing houses in order to pay their bills….they pick the wrong house. What they find inside will keep law enforcement officers and scientists baffled for years to come, and hopefully moviegoers too!

Right now we need help funding this movie. We’re not asking for much and the money we do get will be used for camera equipment, lenses, and for the creation of a haunting prosthetic mask for the film’s antagonist. Anyone out there who wants to support an independent avante garde horror film in the vein of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, The House of the Devil, and Quarantine is encouraged to visit our KICKSTARTER page, watch the teaser trailer and get on board the HELLHOUSE production!

Sale of the Century: Marketing the Singularity With Insane Clown Posse

Guerilla Marketing And The Singularity

Could we find there’s no limit to the reach of guerilla marketing? As we hurl ourselves toward a future of sentient nanobots and global AI networks, what will become of advertising and its sneaky, drug-addled step-brother, marketing? I found myself thinking about this at the 2011 Singularity Summit, when filmmaker Jason Silva (a self-described “techno-optimist transhumanist wunderkind”) presented a film in the vein of his “The Immortalist”, a work of ‘art’ that feels more like Ashton Kutcher describing quantum mechanics at a poetry slam. This film, and in fact Silva’s entire presentation, felt curiously out of place. Smacking of hackneyed Hollywood orchestration, the film wielded roughly the intellectual curiosity of Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” video.

Roland Emmerich Likes The Singularity

What makes this guerilla marketing? Well, Jason Silva’s presence there, and his presentation itself, was being filmed by a documentary film crew embedded by director Roland Emmerich, who is in development on a 2013 feature film called Singularity, which has reportedly tapped Ray Kurzweil as its top consultant. My theory is that Jason Silva will play a naïve proponent who cheerleads the positive possibilities behind the singularity before being killed off by either rampant self-replicating nanotechnology or malevolent artificial intelligence. I submit that his short films and his appearance at the Summit will be featured in the film, as a fictional cautionary tale. Speaking of fictional cautionary tales, the fact that Silva is dating Heather Graham, who was present at the Summit and appeared in some of the shots, bodes well for my theory. If it turns out Graham is in Singularity you can be sure Silva’s appearance at the Summit was a cunningly leveraged marketing ploy by Emmerich that will pay off big time in 2013.

Advertising In An Accelerating Future

I found myself shocked that even a community as savvy and future-shocked as the Singularity Institute could let themselves be infiltrated by a Hollywood guerilla marketing team. While some analysts have speculated that the actual Singularity will make human endeavors such as advertising and marketing obsolete—as this staggering schism in history will surely render new industries and modalities that will fundamentally change the nature of capitalism—I have to respectfully disagree. The global economy relies on advertising and consumerism as its bone marrow. In the coming decades I see us likely to descend even further into a technocratic nightmare fueled by a savvy corporatocracy that harvests consumers like an abbatoir to lifestock, using new technologies to vacuum away the noxious fumes.

“Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”

-Jake Anderson

Area 51, Flying Saucers, and Soviet Human Experimentation: Annie Jacobsen’s New Book

Image via Wikipedia

Area 51 goes by many names – Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Watertown, Groom Lake – and has been a part of our collective consciousness for decades. It is a melting pot of conspiracy theories, science fiction fodder, and intense government secrecy. According to some investigators, this nebulous military base nestled in the Mojave Desert is home to the truth about UFOs and alien visitations, the belief that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth. Central to that belief is that aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and their ship and bodies were taken to Area 51 to be studied and reverse engineered.

There are also assertions that inside Area 51 the US government experiments with teleportation, time travel, weather control, and exotic energy weapons.

Now there’s a new assertion, made by journalist Annie Jacobsen in her book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, that Area 51 was actually home court for the space race with the Soviets. Jacobsen claims that according to her sources, some of whom worked at Area 51, the ‘alien’ bodies recovered from Roswell were actually 13 year-old Soviet pilots who had been the victims of eugenics experiments overseen by none other than Stalin himself. The ships they were flying, actually reconnaissance vessels, were deliberately designed to look like flying saucers, so that in the case of a crash a War of the Worlds-like hysteria would be unleashed in the United States, overloading our air defense systems.

Elsewhere in the book, Jacobsen discusses Operation Plumbbob, which is the name given to a series of 29 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in 1957. During these tests, the US military also experimented with the crash of a plutonium-loaded airplane–you know, just to see what would happen. Apparently, it’s not good.

Other experiments include:

-The conceptual development of a nuclear-powered space-based missile launch system just above the Earth’s atmosphere

-The Oxcart, a stealthy dirigible designed by the CIA to fly three times the speed of sound at 90,000 feet and used to run surveillance missions over the Soviet Union, Cuba and, later, North Vietnam and North Korea

Jacobsen’s research culminates in some pretty intense speculation about the reason Area 51 is actually classified. According to her sources, a flying saucer did indeed crash in New Mexico in 1947 and the bodies recovered from it were child-sized aviators who had been made to look like aliens as the result of human experimentation. At this time, Stalin did not yet have nuclear weapons, so the thought is that he wanted to fight President Truman with black propaganda. It is speculated that Stalin was working with sinister scientist/war criminal Joseph Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’, fresh off his departure from Nazi Germany.

Annie Jacobsen interviewed 74 people for her book. Thirty two of them actually lived and worked at Area 51.

While it certainly ignites the imagination, as well as invoke deep sympathy for the Soviet children who were possibly the victims of human experimentation, what I’m left wondering from these assertions is what the US government learned from all this. Perhaps they gleaned a clever little trick from their Cold War nemesis, that UFO’s, and the conspiracy theory hysteria that surround them, are a great cover for nefarious military projects, both foreign and domestic.

Check out the NPR interview with Annie Jacobsen, as well as the Democracy Now interview….

-Jake Anderson

Dark Side of the Moon – b-sides

martian artifact

There’s a fella I wanna tell you about, fella by the name of Richard C. Hoagland, “hyper-dimensional” physicist and co-author of the book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. He believes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is concealing the existence of extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

artifacts on the moon?

Hoagland’s journey of “truth” began after completing an extensive examination of the Cydonia region of Mars, which contains the legendary Face and Giza-like pyramids (if you’ve never heard of the Face on Mars, google it with the online web Internet). Though the image of the Face was dismissed as a trick of shadow and light over two decades ago, its legacy persists in conspiracy theory circles. For Hoagland, there’s more going on than optical illusions: there’s a full-scale NASA coverup. He cites the still-unsolved disappearance of the Mars Observer as evidence. More importantly, he claims to have decoded a “tetrahedral geometry” to Cydonia, which suggests that its surface features are actually the ruins of an extraterrestrial civilization. In addition to pyramids, he asserts the existence of a Sphinx- completing a full cycle of Egyptian verisimilitude.

is this a freaking Sphinx on Mars?

Proof of aliens on Mars…check!

On to the moon….

After color-correcting and enhancing photographic images originally collected from the Apollo missions in the 60′s and 70′s, Hoagland claims to have discovered evidence of ancient lunar engineering: the existence of vast, semi-transparent geometric superstructures, including a mile-high crystal castle. He cites as evidence a 1955 Disney movie called Man in Space, a dramatization of a journey to the moon in which a geometric structure on the lunar surface is revealed. BOTH the director, Wernher Von Braun, a rocket engineer, Nazi SS officer, and close friend to Heinreich Himmler, AND producer Walt Disney were Scottish Rite Freemasons, as were, incidentally, four of the twelve men who walked on the moon.

lunar artifact

But wait, so why have the Apollo astronauts never mentioned seeing these glass castles soaring above the lunar horizon? Well, because they were hypnotized by the occult secret society of Masonic bloodlines controlling NASA. Duh!

What some people will do to make ends meet…

Secret Societies and The New World Order: a comedy

image by A78

To return to conspiracy theories, our discussion wouldn’t be complete without talking about secret societies and their sinister plot to forge a one-world government.

One of the first historically significant secret societies was the Knights Templar, a Western Christian military order who amassed an enormous fortune and used it to wield political influence in Europe in the later Middle Ages. Around 1307 King Philip IV of France, who owed the Templars money, declared the group enemies of the state and eventually burned them at the stake. Conspiracists claim this wasn’t the end, that the Templars, or what remained of them, absconded to England where they created the first Grand Masonic Lodge, new home to what would become one of history’s most notorious secret societies, the Freemasons.

The Freemasons prided themselves on embodying the ideals of the Enlightenment, claiming to be benevolent do-gooders. Yet history has found them hated and feared time and time again. Autocratic kings and fascistic regimes alike condemn their secrecy and subversive ways; Britons gripe about the corrupt political and judicial influence the group has wielded in collusion with the Royal family; religious groups, especially Catholics and evangelical Christians, routinely indict the Masons as being part of a Satanic conspiracy; secular conspiracists say the Freemasons seek to bring about the New World Order.

Inside the Grand Masonic Lodge, circa unknown

They’re even accused of orchestrating the French Revolution. Of course the latter claim is made by catty Frenchmen who still feel awkward about having decapitated whole families in broad daylight.

The Freemasons are often linked together with the Templars, the Jews, and the Illuminati in a worldwide conspiracy. Oh yeah, the Illuminati. Don’t ever forget about them: they watch you while you poop. The secret society of the Illuminated Ones was founded by a mercurial Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt in 1776, an otherwise uneventful year. Not only did this secret society boast the coolest name ever, they sought to abolish the Christian church and overthrow all European monarchies, believing such a purifying sweep to be capable of bringing about happiness for the entire human race. Unfortunately, in 1784 a butt-hurt King Karl Theodor of Bavaria excommunicated both the Freemasons and the Illuminati, cracking down on all secret societies.

If you believe the conspiracies, this wasn’t the end to either group. In fact, they still operate behind the scenes of today’s society, controlling our wars, finances, and toilet paper manufacturing.

In addition to charges of Satanism and promulgation of the New World Order, the aforementioned groups have also been accused of practicing the occult, or black magic. Especially the Jews, so mystifyingly clever with money!

Historical revisionism breaks the seams with these secret societies. For example, if you believe what the conspiracists yell in your ear, there was no other purpose to World War 2 except to enrich the banking cartels, who hedged their bets by funding both sides of the conflict. In fact, throw out everything you know about the dangers of nationalism and ideological extremism: the wars of human history were waged merely to benefit bankers.

Scene—World War 2 reconstruction—whiny, war-torn countries coalesce into a beleaguered League of Nations, which, in 1945, forms the United Nations. Together with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, international regulatory bodies become the backbone of a new generation of conspiracy theories—the consolidation of financial institutions into a one-world government. Add to that the Federal Reserve! Those….b-bastards!

Which then leads us to the Mother Superior of secret societies: the Bilderberg Group. This clandestine cabal of royal leaders, political power brokers, industrial titans, and media magnates meets every 4 years to calibrate the world itinerary—conspiring to orchestrate everything from the war on Iraq to hikes on oil prices to the Trans Texas Corridor. That is, if you believe the conspiracists. But, I mean, members from both the Rockefellar and Rothchild families are perennial attendees. Doesn’t that fact alone prove something insidious is going on? Can I get a witness??

The basic plot behind the New World Order is that a group of elite masterminds is slowly but irrevocably centralizing power by carving the regions of the world into unions: the European Union, another post-WW2 League of Nations creation; the North American Union, consisting of the US, Canada, and Mexico, which is noodling ever closer to finalization; and eventually the Asian and African Unions. The purpose behind these mergers is to break down national borders and make the world’s populations subject to international law. The masterminds behind it all—the Bilderbergs, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rockefellars and Rothchilds, the CEO’s of Taco Bell and Subway—ultimately seek to reduce the Earth’s population to somewhere around 500 million. This will allow them to more effectively control the infrastructure of the planet.

In the meantime, they must keep the masses preoccupied, ignorant and innocuous. So they brainwash and poison us into subservience by spraying our skies with chemtrails, fluoridizing our water and toothpaste, and wilting our minds with pills and advertising.

Now, let’s face it, mind control on the scale of 6 billion is hard work, so to let off steam once a year the elite masterminds convene at the Bohemian Grove to get drunk, worship Satan, and piss on redwoods. They get to squeeze in some R&R while they take over the world.

Conspiracists who champion the the New World Order theory in its many permutations range from Zeitgeist left to right wing conservative televangelists and libertarians, such as Pat Robertson and Alex Jones. Even futurist Ray Kurzweil buys into the idea of a one-world government, albeit in the form of an advanced technocracy.

Notably, many of the New World Order theories are suspicious of and outright hostile to Jews. The anti-Semitic bent, while certainly owing to mankind’s historical legacy of Jewish oppression, may also have something to do with the heavy religious undertones, as the New World Order seems to represent the inception of the Christian apocalypse. Now, many evangelicals are supportive of Jews, as manifested by their obsessive nurturing of Israel, the latter being ground zero for the second coming of Christ, which, incidentally, might well be the oldest and wackiest conspiracy theory of them all.

-Jake Anderson

Shapeshifters on YouTube and the Anunnaki

The idea that a race of aliens—referred to by conspiracy theorists as the Anunnaki—is embedded among the human population is a belief held by author David Icke. He believes mankind is the result of prehistorical interbreeding between these reptilian aliens (also known as the Serpent-Gods) and humans, a babylonian orgy which created powerful and insidious hybrid bloodlines. Out of these bloodlines came the elite royal families of the world, the Illuminati, who have controlled all governments, banking systems and transnational corporations since.

Hillary Clinton sheds her skin

Chosen ones from these bloodlines are culled by the Reptilians and groomed to be in positions of power—they are the Suits (politicians, executives, etc.), puppets essentially. Once they are established, their alien masters deploy them to carry out the master agenda of forging a one world government and enslaving the human race.

Effectively throwing a pie in the face of Ocham’s Razor, Icke points to historical documents such as ancient Summerian texts, which depict serpent worship as the oldest religion. And, ALSO, there is serpent symbolism on the coat of arms for the Knights Templar. This proves mankind’s intimate relationship with extraterrestrials.

The theory gets even more bizarre when Icke starts in on shape-shifters, or human descendants of the hybrid alien bloodline who momentarily shift in form and become visible to the observer as reptilians. There are numerous conspiracists who purport to have video clips of such shape-shifting. Remember, Icke cautions, it’s not a shape-shift from a physical body to another body, it’s a shifting of holograms—the perceptions of the observer have fundamentally changed and they are able to decode the energy field. You see, the hybrids have a vibrational affinity with their reptilian overlords and can be possessed by them.

Well why didn’t you say that in the first place? Here I was thinking that the hybrids didn’t have a vibrational affinity with the Reptilian overlords…This. Changes. Everything.

Like any intrepid explorer in search of the truth, I ended up watching YouTube videos. For several days in a row I burned the midnight oil watching footage alleging to have caught reptilian shape-shifters in the act of transformation. Cue videos, edited by albino gingers in Affliction t-shirts, set to music from System of a Down or Linkin Park, and featuring various CNN reporters, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Harrison Ford, Jesse Jackson, an aide to John Edwards, Drew Carey, Brad Pitt, Elvis, and of course Henry Kissinger.

What conspiracy theory would be complete without Henry Kissinger and his flapping turkey jowls?

Each of the videos contain some, if not all, of the following characteristics:

-Pupils momentarily appearing to transform into oblong slits.
-Faces suddenly impressed with scaly patterns.
-Over-active, fork-shaped tongues and jagged teeth; odd, sinister smiles.

I reached a few conclusions. One) YouTube should not be embraced as a step in the scientific method. Two) some people have really creepy eyes. Three) poor video compression results in scale-like pixelation.

Four) some people are weird-looking, to the point of looking lizard-like.

And five) Brad Pitt is infinitely more desirable to women than I am.

-Jake Anderson

Ancient Astronauts, Future Friends

The following is a feverish, hamburger-inspired meditation on aliens, artificial intelligence, and the New World Order :

My gut instinct is that there are many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations flourishing beyond our solar system. In a universe containing billions of galaxies, each one containing billions of stars, to believe otherwise is an exercise in ignorant hubris.

photo by chamakoso

But it could take a while for us to meet ET. Centuries perhaps. Much sooner than that we’ll not only meet, but create, a new and dramatically different kind of advanced species: Artificial Intelligence. AI will be good to us….at least at first. AI might even introduce us to ET, like a friend of a friend at a party – (“Dude, you gotta meet this dude, he’s a great photographer!”). As AI integrates itself into our society, humans will use nanotechnology to upgrade ourselves to near-machine status. We’ll become post-humans, in that most of our day to day functions and pleasures will be heavily grounded in advanced technology. The foundation for this has already been laid. It’s all around us. Soon it will be within us.

Along these lines I agree with elements of Alex Jones’ New World Order theories. Note, elements. On other issues he’s just a wackadoodle. Somehow reptilian aliens controlling mankind is more plausible to him than than CO2 emissions destroying the atmosphere. Flanked by an armada of rabid libertarians, Alex Jones thinks the specter of global warming is nothing more than an elaborate ruse perpetrated by scientists and government officials in order to pave the way for a global carbon tax. Their main evidence disproving human-caused climate change is 1) Al Gore has a private jet, 2) Earth isn’t the only planet getting warmer, Mars is hot too, 3) cities during the medieval times were also hot, 3) Al Gore has a private limousine, and 4) Vikings grew crops in Greenland. Oh man, Vikings grew crops in Greenland?? Well fuck me running, let’s poison and vaporize the rest of our ozone, my bad, I didn’t know Vikings grew crops in Greenland!

You would be hard-pressed to find an assertion that makes me angrier than human-caused climate change denial. It’s the final sick-home for free market sociopaths, a rent-controlled insane asylum they sub-lease with creationists and teabaggers. I see nothing but dangerous insanity in the act of looking at a unanimously agreed-upon body of science and declaring it false, to the catastrophic detriment of global ecosystems and future generations of humans, simply because property taxes are a bummer. BUT–and here’s my hamartia–while I have trouble believing a small circle of elite masterminds controls the world, I do think it’s very possible that at some point in the future a class of post-humans, wielding advanced technology in dissonant collusion with AI societies—who (perhaps justly) believe humanity and its old world paradigms are a danger to Earth—could descend into absolute tyranny. Or, ascend, might be the better word. In “Adams in the Void” (a short story I haven’t written yet), I position this post-human/AI master race as taking over the surface of the planet, while old school humans are forced underground.

photo by rahll for Bonded By Blood

Alex Jones thinks the participants of this new class have already been chosen, and that in exchange for their complicity in forging the New World Order they have been promised vast powers of life augmentation and life extension. Frankly, my problem with the NWO is that I find it difficult to imagine a completely centralized global dictatorship when the trends behind technologies like the Internet lean overwhelmingly toward de-centralization—of knowledge, distribution, and even ownership. Jones’ theory also crumbles in one very important capacity: I don’t view AI as necessarily a danger to humanity. If the New World Order exists, AI will be the power that brings it down.

And if, like I believe, the phrase New World Order does not finger a singular group of tyrannical elites but rather exists as a metaphor for the widespread and historical lineage of human corruption itself, AI will be the revolutionary force that topples our dying regimes and restores parity to human consciousness. This will either be viewed as Armageddon or renaissance, depending on whose Twitter feed you follow.

I admit I harbor some fairly busy visions of the future. But I’m not married to them, and when push comes to shove I don’t believe in most conspiracy theories. I don’t believe that reptilian aliens inter-bred with humans. I don’t believe in crystal castles on the moon, or that Kennedy was killed by an emo hobgoblin who lives under a bridge. I don’t believe in ancient astronauts.

photo by yrindale

I feel the same disdain for conspiracy theories that I feel for celebrity gossip: intense guilt, for willfully distracting myself from the bigger problems of the world. And while I don’t personally dislike conspiracy theorists, they worry me…because I think they unwittingly make activists and whistle-blowers seem crazy, and by doing so distract the rest of us from the back-handed power plays of very real and very corrupt establishments. Corporations, seizing the infrastructure of the Earth, of the human body, of the particles that constitute matter. Corporations, who now own patents on our genes, on carbon nanotubes; who control the flow and substance of information; who influence what pills we take and what facts we believe; who hunt our young, on the streets and through social networking sites; who sell us culture before we’ve had a chance to decide if it’s just.

The theory of a New World Order is a displaced fear of plutocracy, privatization, and human existence turned to consumer fodder. It’s a healthy fear.

-Jake Anderson