The 2nd shooter got a real early start in the business.



Via Reddit

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It's Propaganda, Yes, But Maybe It's From Our Side, To Reassure Us North Korea Can't Defend Itself

As war appears to be about to dawn between North & South Korea, if it didn't actually already begin two or three days ago, this very strange video appears on the UK Telegraph site.

The Telegraph story is about "propaganda broadcasts" by North Korea, which featured a female newsreader issuing warnings that North Korea won't allow it's territory to be entered by US or South Korea, on land or sea, during the joint US-SK live fire war games now underway only a handful of miles from waters claimed by North Korea.

The Telegraph claims the above HDNK (high definition for North Korea) video was also aired.

Are we are supposed to watch it and think, "Ha! North Korea is so pissweak and pathetic. Look how shitty everything looks. Fuck North Korea"?

It's only a theory, but that video looks like it was produced by us, not them. To convince us that all North Korea has in the way of defence is a few missiles and rocket-launching flatbeds.

The explanation why this video feels fake is not elaborate. Kim Jong-Il is a movie freak. He is said to have one of the most extensive DVD collections in the world, his son likewise is drenched in movies. Why would either of them release such a piece of shit video?

It's laughable, even for North Korean producers.

It's filled with the kind of stock footage you'd find in the BBCNews library, instead of recent footage from the ranks of cinematographers who are often seen filming the epic military rallies North Korea is famous for.

If it is indeed real (and it probably is, what the fuck do I know?) it only proves that no matter how many movies you watch, it won't make you a great director. By this appearance of that crapfest, it doesn't help one bit at all.

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Very soon, this could be what you find when you go to your favourite independent news site to load up on truth to help fight the daily barrage of lies.



Piracy prosecutions can and will be used to close down news sites. Not CNN or FoxNews of course. I mean the ones that carry actual, real news.

Enjoy them while they last. And save copies of the stories you know will be historical, and the front pages that carry them, so you can show people years from now what real news sites used to look like, the stories they used to run.

The stuff, the truth, that used to make people so fucking angry.

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The "structure" discovered at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy :

Where icebergs are 'born' :



From the Earth Observatory

David Foster Wallace :

"Human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing…. The narrative patterns to which literate Americans are most regularly exposed are televised. And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient—not necessarily even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end—openly acknowledged—is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding."

"You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart."

IraqBodyCount on the Chilcot Inquiry :

"Throughout the inquiry most of the attention has remained firmly fixed, fixated even, upon the interplay between political and military actors here and in the USA, and the ramifications of the war as felt by them, while the subject that is of greatest concern to the greatest number of people, here as in Iraq, gets only brief mentions."

Make it theatre and the crowd will hoot and holler.

Surely this is no accident. Let the media feast on the personality conflicts between "top ranking" militatoids and bizarrely grinning politicians so the public will be distracted from the undeniable truth that the UK went to war on Iraq against the will of the people and failed to secure the lives of the Iraqi people, leading to the deaths of more than 100,000 (The Lancet still insists the civilian death is six or seven times that estimated by Iraq Body Count) and the near total destruction of Iraq's infrastructure.

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John Gray reviews Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism :

...free market policies rarely make poor countries richer; global companies without national roots belong in the realm of myth; the US does not have the highest living standards in the world; the washing machine changed the world more than the internet; more education does not of itself make countries richer; financial markets need to become less, not more efficient; and – perhaps most shocking to Chang's colleagues – good economic policy does not require good economists.

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Capitalism is not only about creating wealth, it is also about power – and western power is waning. Economic energy is shifting to the emerging countries, while in the west economies stagnate and politicians continue to worship at the altar of the free market...Rather than reforming itself, free-market capitalism looks set simply to decline.

The Full Review Is Here

Ha-Joon Chang on why the internet has not changed the world as much the washing machine did :

By liberating women from household work and helping to abolish professions such as domestic service, the washing machine and other household goods completely revolutionised the structure of society. As women have become active in the labour market they have acquired a different status at home – they can credibly threaten their partners that if they don't treat them well they will leave them and make an independent living. And this had huge economic consequences. Rather than spend their time washing clothes, women could go out and do more productive things. Basically, it has doubled the workforce.

And demolishes the "information revolution" importance placed on the internet having speeded up our ability and capacity to communicate with each other :

"...we overestimate the internet and ignore its downsides. There's now so much information out there that you don't actually have time to digest it."

"Before the invention of the telegraph in the late 19th century, it took two to three weeks to carry a message across the Atlantic. The telegraph reduced it to 20 or 30 minutes – an increase of 2,000-3,000 times. The internet has reduced the time of sending, say, three or four pages of text from the 30 seconds you needed with a fax machine down to maybe two seconds – a reduction by a factor of 15. Unless I'm trading commodity futures, I can't think of anything where it's really so important that we send it in two seconds rather than a few minutes."

The Full Interview With Ha-Joon Chang Is Here

Beautiful Russian animation from Anatoly Petrov in 1978. The subject matter is fascinating, more so considering how close the war industry is to linking the human mind directly to weapons :