Bon Hiver 2015

The new year is off to a great start with this gift from Nickie. Not that he made it for me personally or anything, but he might as well have. Penis, piss, lightning, totenkopf and the most adorable little winged rainbow pony you'll ever see. I heart sync!

Winter Sleep

Happy New Year, everyone!

The Digital Pearl Harbor

I have a long standing fascination with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, at first because of little syncs like one of Var’s best friends was born on Dec. 7, 1941, and that my dad’s football jersey was no. 41 - stuff like that. When you look beneath the covers of the mainstream historical account, you discover that FDR knew full well about the impending attack - and actually goaded Japan into it. He was counting on the attack to send the country into the war in Europe. The ploy worked perfectly, and history was forever changed by that singular event.

Pearl Harbor is the “Paris” of planned disasters in the way that Paris is the “Pearl Harbor” of cities. The ultimate example, so to speak. Which is why the writers of The Project for the New American Century wished so fervently for a “new Pearl Harbor” in order to boost the USA into their Neocon dream. Their dream came true on Sept. 11, 2001.

A few weeks ago I spied a book in the bookstore free box downtown, Black List, by Brad Thor. It’s a James Bond type thriller that I normally would never pick up except inside it was a birthday card being used as a bookmark, addressed to Sid. “From your buttbuddies” it said inside, and because I could sync that card as occult gay slang, with myself as a buttbuddy, I picked it up.

Written in 2012, Black List is all about a shadowy defense contractor who is responsible for implementing the “digital security state” (now famous thanks to Edward Snowden), and their ultimate goal of creating a “digital Pearl Harbor” which would cause such a massive disruption of the internet that banks would close, grocery stores would empty, gas stations would pump dry, and many thousands would die. This disaster would usher in the “new and improved” Internet II, aka the Big Brother that Orwell warned us about.

As sync happens, it turns out that SONY, the quintessential Japanese technology and entertainment brand, was targeted for a cyber-attack by hackers calling themselves “The Guardians of Peace” on November 24. This nicely brought together my interest in sneak attacks, Japan, and the Black List.

So what exactly DID happen on Dec. 7?

North Korea denies involvement in the hack while praising it as a “righteous deed.”

The story is going around that Sony was about to release “The Interview”, a comedy starring James Franco and Seth Rogen about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Pyongyang government denounced the film as "undisguised sponsoring of terrorism, as well as an act of war" in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in June.

Were the Americans goading the North Koreans?

In Black List, the wicked defense contractor goes to a great deal of effort to create a scapegoat for an attack that they themselves engineer.

Today (Dec. 16) we got an email to reporters from the "cyber-terrorists" written in a parody of Engrish:

 “We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places The Interview be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to. Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.”

Perhaps this is all just a publicity stunt for the motion picture. Coming to a theater near you.

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UPDATE 12/19/14

Well, I guess the “cyber-terrorists” "win" and The Interview by SONY will not be released on Christmas day, after all. However, let not the free world despair:

"Americans cannot change their patterns of behavior due to the possibility of a terrorist attack," he said. "That's not who we are, that's not what America is about."

"We will respond," Mr Obama told reporters on Friday, declining to offer specifics. "We will respond proportionately and in a space, time and manner that we choose."

He added: "We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship in the United States." -BBC

Ah yes, the “proportional response”. That means Pyongyang is about to become the new Gaza, not that the US will be blocking the next big North Korean comedy from release.

But back to Black List:

Brad Thor introduces me to the Panopticon (all seeing eye):

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building [prison] designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

And this Christmas, we get the Panopticon Elf on a Shelf! (Thanks to Alan Green for this one)

When the WDC are finally revealed to the President, it is decided to “Black List” their board of directors, which meant that all 15 of them would find themselves on a corporate jet that suddenly dove into the sea and disappeared.

A US technology company which had 20 senior staff on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had just launched a new electronic warfare gadget for military radar systems in the days before the Boeing 777 went missing. Freescale Semiconductor has been developing microprocessors, sensors and other technology for the past 50 years. The technology it creates is commonly referred to as embedded processors, which according to the firm are “stand-alone semiconductors that perform dedicated computing functions in electronic systems”. -Macedonian International News 

This, BTW, is exactly the kind of company that the WDC was in Black List.

It’s almost as if I was reading this stupid book and all the major plot points surfaced into my reality as I read it. The icing on the cake was that James Franco’s character in The Interview is David Skylark. “Skylark” is my secret sync code word. OK, not so secret, but still… WTF? David = King in biblical myth, so this essentially means "King Skylark".

If I personally caused the beginning of the Digital Pearl Harbor by reading this book, I am sincerely very sorry. I will swear off this conspiracy crap and read nothing but gay porn from now on - at least that always has a happy ending! So if you start to hear about hot, horse hung studs walking around naked and shit, don’t be too alarmed. It’s just what I'm reading!

Orion Orange Juice

Some Orion syncs both personal, national, and interplanetary today. Trying a new thing, where I link images of the syncs that occur during my day, strung out like movie film. Thumbs up or thumbs down?

8:00 am: I had orange juice this morning (which I almost never do), as I watch Orion lift off in a dawn ceremony.

Mission control called the first test of the capsule a "picture perfect" mission that had surmounted "significant milestones" for the program that could eventually pave the way for putting astronauts on the surface of the Red Planet.

NASA: "There's your new spacecraft, America!"

Orion, which could one day take astronauts to Mars, made a "bull's-eye splashdown" at 11:29 a.m. ET, mission control said, after the spacecraft endured a searing 4,000-degree Fahrenheit re-entry and was carried to the ocean surface under four giant red-and-white parachutes.

12:00 pm A friend mentions a boat named OJ.

Officials noted that in two days, it will be exactly 42 years since Apollo 17 launched.

3:00 pm: Varen tells me to go look outside to see the rainbow. He’s going to the store.

4:30 pm: Varen brought home a big bag of oranges from Safeway. He said they are “full of liquid sunshine”. I couldn’t help but quote Miss Oklahoma, Florida orange spokesmodel and notorious anti-homite Anita Bryant:

“A breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!”

“Before the news conference ended, a rainbow appeared in the sky.” -cbs8

I made a fire this evening in the INTREPID II using kindling from the MOCK orange we cut down last year. Ahhh... Here we go again. Perfect timing with Interstellar, Nolan playing the Kubrick of our time.

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NOTES:

Capricorn One is a 1978 thriller movie about a Mars landing hoax. It was written and directed by Peter Hyams and produced by Lew Grade's (British) ITC Entertainment. It stars Elliott Gould with James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O. J. Simpson as the astronauts.

I do admit the rainbow was well done. Nice one, Maestro.

“Happy is he who’s quiver is full” -Orion