Month: September 2023

…But who’s counting?

So “vaccine” was trending on Twitter and, even though I knew it was a stupid idea, I had a look…

…and it was stupider than I thought it would be, a ton of far right cranks, but this was particularly notable. This idea that the Global Elites (TM) want to wipe out most of humanity is one I’ve seen before (cf. the Georgia Guidestones), but this time there’s a date we can use on the article brother Taunton is highlighting… from what I can see, Robert Frank doesn’t actually subscribe to the idea himself, he’s just describing another article about it, but that’s not the point. This was published in 2009. We can, and I did, check to see what the world’s population was in 2009. (Approx. 6.8 billion people.) We can then, and I did, look up the current world population. (A bit over 8 billion.) A quick bit of mathematics that even I could do indicates the world’s population has grown by 1.2 billion people in the 14 years since Robert Frank’s piece was published… which suggests that if billionaires are trying to shrink the population, they’re doing a PROFOUNDLY FUCKING TERRIBLE JOB OF IT, doesn’t it? I thought about pointing this out to Larry Taunton but eh, I don’t get paid for dealing with these cunts up close…

Thanks but no thanks

ELON WANTS YOUR BRAIN!

In theory, Neuralink actually sounds great, and to be honest, if I’d come away from my stroke without having regained movement, I’d maybe consider it… but not with what we know now about Oolong.

That was his response on Twitter to someone talking about animals dying during his tests on them. It’s… not great, is it? A whiff of “they were dying anyway, who gives a fuck” hangs over it, but apart from that, it appears to be bullshit:

Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths. […]
Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research. The documents include veterinary records, first made public last year, that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering reportedly endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects, all of whom needed to be euthanized. These records could serve as the basis for any potential SEC probe into Musk’s comments about Neuralink, which has faced multiple federal investigations as the company moves toward its goal of releasing the first commercially available brain-computer interface for humans. […]
Shown a copy of Musk’s remarks on X about Neuralink’s animal subjects being “close to death already,” a former Neuralink employee alleges to WIRED that the claim is “ridiculous,” if not a “straight fabrication.” “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” they say. The ex-employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.
A doctoral candidate currently conducting research at the CNPRC, granted anonymity due to a fear of professional retaliation, likewise questions Musk’s claim regarding the baseline health of Neutralink’s monkeys. “These are pretty young monkeys,” they tell WIRED. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”

Shocking that Musk might’ve been dishonest about this thing (if those reports are true, of course)… This may make me sound bad but I have no strong opinions about animal testing, in that I think it’d be better if we didn’t have to do it but I kind of understand why we do… but even so, there should be ways of doing it that don’t result in harming the animals in the way that seems to have happened with Musk’s monkeys. I don’t know about you but it makes me wonder how he’s going to approach experimenting on humans if this is what he’s like with animals. I think I’ll pass on the offer. Remember, too, he hasn’t got FDA approval for the Neuralink thing yet, so it’s maybe a bit previous of him to be saying he’s ready to test on humans, but I feel that the mere fact he can’t legally do something won’t stop him somehow…

Were they ever anything else?

No one is surprised by this, of course, except insofar as it took until late-ish 2023 to happen. NFTs could perhaps have been something but once those fucking bored apes moved in they were dead in the water. Just like the Dutch tulip mania, except the tulips had the common decency to be real physical objects… Mind you, if only 95% of NFTs are worthless, that logically indicates that 5% are worth something. How much and what ones are they? That’s more interesting than the rest of the market imploding…

Getting both down and with it

Tonight’s listening. Great fun. The only serious problem with this? They made it before Slayed? which gave us tunes like “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” and “Gudbuy T’Jane”, and before “Cum On Feel the Noize”, all of which would’ve lifted this live album immensely. On the other hand, Slade Alive climaxes in a berserk runthrough of “Born to Be Wild” that’s one of the most… just “holy shit” things ever. I wish there was video of them playing that song, cos I want to see how they actually made some of those noises.

Where’s Mike Buckner now?

A few weeks ago we were introduced to the unedifying spectacle of Michael Buckner and his… mildly inaccurate prediction about the world ending thanks to the planet Nibiru. You may recall that he decided he’d actually been right about that but had failed to factor in the flat Earth. And it appears he’s still on that trip, literally:

Mike has not posted since the 9th of this month, and I see no evidence of the promised livestream of his adventure to the great ice wall to see what lies beyond…

…but just how bullshit is all of this? When I look at some of the people replying to him, I get a certain feeling of, you know, them taking him less than seriously. Similarly, Mike handily has his Twitter likes public…

…and that’s one of his likes. I also see him liking a post by Creaky Blinder, a flat Earth debunker on Youtube. So I’m actually kind of confused now; having thought Mike was just a straightforward dickhead, I now longer know if I’m looking at that or some sort of weird satire or surrealist performance art, or bizarre commitment to a “bit”, or truly remarkable mental illness or Dunning-Kruger in action. I must confess to finding this idiocy more fascinating than I probably should…

You can’t blame him on an Italian man either

Here’s another film poster that’s kind of perplexing. There was a phenomenon after Bruce Lee’s death called “Bruceploitation“, of which this is technically an example… but it didn’t start that way. It’s actually a South Korean film called Visitor of America that had nothing to do with Bruce Lee even as a character; evidently an American distributor hired a Bruce imitator and shot a new sequence of “Bruce” emerging from the grave to tack on to the start before re-dubbing the film for American release (and apparently re-racialising it, too, the film’s Wiki entry notes that all the Korean characters are called “Chinese” in the English dub). Oh, and also re-crediting the film on the poster to one “Bert Lenzi”.

This was the perplexing bit, cos when I first saw this and lighted upon the director credit. Umberto Lenzi did Bruceploitation?

Umberto Lenzi was a hack of all trades in Italian genre cinema from the 60s to the 90s. He’s probably most notable for having basically invented the hideous Italian cannibal trend with Man From Deep River in 1972, but he was generally one of those genre journeymen who did whatever was popular in Italy at any given moment, sword and sandal, historical adventure, spy thrillers, spaghetti westerns, gialli, poliziotteschi, and horror of whatever sort. I knew this much about him, but the idea that an Italian filmmaker would get mixed up in a specifically south-east Asian trend just seemed too weird to be true.

And that’s because it was. Lenzi actually had piss all to do with this film, which was actually directed by one Lee Doo-yong. So what was Lenzi’s name doing on the poster, then? I did briefly entertain the possibility that there might have been a director in Hong Kong called Bert Len Zi until I realised that was, frankly, too stupid to be the case. Why him? Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the 70s exploitation scene to know what sort of name recognition Eurotrash directors like Lenzi actually had among American audiences for this sort of thing. I mean, I’m sure the films were known to American viewers, they got released there, but to what extent did people know or care who made them? The American distributor seems to have thought Lenzi was enough of a “name” that they could palm this thing off as his work. But why him? Why anyone at all? And did it work?

And who was the distributor, anyway? According to the poster it was something called Head Gorilla Releasing, but the film’s IMDB page suggests Aquarius (who, amusingly enough, had actual Umberto Lenzi films on their books) handled the original 1978 US release and the other company (whose only IMDB credit is this thing) only got their hands on it in 1982. So I thought maybe this Head Gorilla mob had done the deed… but apparently not, cos as it turns out you can actually find the film on Internet Archive, where the print used has the “Bruce emerges from the grave” opening (which is somehow even stupider to watch than it sounds) and an Aquarius logo. So was it all their work and Head Gorilla got it from them in this form? I don’t know, and no doubt there’s no way we ever will know now. It all mystifies me, and likely as not only I care anyway…