My dreams are darkening again. The past week has seen them become so vivid and me so lucid it's as if I'm awake. But to live through this...
Last night I dreamt I was standing in front of a pool, cool breeze caressing my cheek. And then it struck me, this fire scorching strongly in my forearm. I could feel the muscle tightening, the searing shooting through my veins. I clutch at the pain, trying to smother it before it consumes me. And then an invisible dagger plunges deeply into my chest. I can't breathe. I swear my heart is going to rupture. I'm shaky on my feet, struggling to stay conscious...and then my chest implodes and I collapse into darkness.
I find myself in an office, a man sitting across from me telling me I'm alright. Yet I hear a whisper in my ear telling me he is lying. "I had a heart attack," the voice reveals to me. I'm dying. At most I have is three months and then...
All I can do is mourn. I haunt my bedroom, the shades pulled, brooding on a short end to a tale that never truly began. The phone rings. It is my ex-wife. She tells me she wants me back. All I can do is choke back the sorrow, swallow that vile taste as I tell her no. She doesn't know I'm dying. I don't want her to know. I push her away. I keep her from me. I refuse proper closure. She doesn't need this pain. Better she hate me than pity me. Better she forget me than obsess over my memory. I want to die alone, what few ripples that event cause upset as few as possible.
And then I wake to reality, my eyes bleeding tears; my throat thick and tongue swollen. My mind tortures me so. No, I am not dying physically; just spiritually every day. I am in one of my downward spirals if you couldn't guess. Sometimes it takes sheer will to pull myself up. What can these dreams be but a torturous subconscious.
Sometimes I love my dreams. I fly ever so high, beyond the clouds, that veil that hides such beautiful realms. I've seen empires and spoken to legends. But then the demons come, clutching at me, dragging me into the darkness with them that I may see what lurks in the world of shadow.
This is all metaphorical mind you. I have had supernatural events occur but those were frightening and I brought those on myself because I dared to seek out answers I never should have. I have seen the dark man cloaked in shade staring down at me, the void his face, the silence of the grave his voice.
I am a strange man, a fluid man, a being without purpose or fate. I am a cruel irony in this clever equation dubbed Existence. I am a superfluous piece, an unnecessary cog whose absence would cause no trouble for the machine to continue running. So I have no reason to be. I have no purpose. Does that mean I never should have been?
I live for my dreams and yet I fear what they bring. Either way, the terrors and the glimpses of Paradise are far more preferable to the waking world of bitter reality. I do not belong in the world of men. If only I could tear free, find that horizon, claim a star for myself, and weave such wondrous tales with a faith so true that they became real, my soul breathing life into fiction.
But I am in a downward spiral, and the bottom does not exist. There is only void and the light grows ever so distant. Perhaps I should stop looking up at that fading sun and look only toward the approaching abyss. Why reach for that I shall never touch.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
To Those Who Believe in God
What's that I hear? Could it be your spiritual crutch clacking as it supports your hobbled soul through life?
Purpose is what drives humanity. Societies rise and fall based on it. Once we no longer believe there is a reason to be we lose all hope and crumble back into the dust from whence we came.
Religion is man's way of creating the ultimate purpose as to the why and to give us drive to carry on despite what reality throws at us. But it is nothing more than one purpose among many.
Me, I believe Life may have been an accident, but a glorious accident indeed. It is our unique status, our shimmering spiritual being in this vast, black void, that makes us so special. Rather than to make ourselves slaves and puppets to some vague, illusory being why do we not embrace one another as the brothers and sisters that we are and, through a united front, spread life through the dark void; give brilliance to the abyss.
I will never believe in God. For a being to create evil, pain, and death and to claim they are for the best is nothing more than sadism, elitism, and the ultimate hypocrisy when it comes to love and being a creator.
We are a spark from which a glorious fire may rise, a torch of civilization and realization we may carry through the cosmos. Realize that and truly understand the meaning of being.
Purpose is what drives humanity. Societies rise and fall based on it. Once we no longer believe there is a reason to be we lose all hope and crumble back into the dust from whence we came.
Religion is man's way of creating the ultimate purpose as to the why and to give us drive to carry on despite what reality throws at us. But it is nothing more than one purpose among many.
Me, I believe Life may have been an accident, but a glorious accident indeed. It is our unique status, our shimmering spiritual being in this vast, black void, that makes us so special. Rather than to make ourselves slaves and puppets to some vague, illusory being why do we not embrace one another as the brothers and sisters that we are and, through a united front, spread life through the dark void; give brilliance to the abyss.
I will never believe in God. For a being to create evil, pain, and death and to claim they are for the best is nothing more than sadism, elitism, and the ultimate hypocrisy when it comes to love and being a creator.
We are a spark from which a glorious fire may rise, a torch of civilization and realization we may carry through the cosmos. Realize that and truly understand the meaning of being.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?
Today, boys and girls, we are going into tales of my childhood abuse, aka The Trauma Years. Yes, this was quite a formative time for me. Now if you lack a sense of humor or cringe easily then I suggest you stop reading now because I am simply going to be blunt about some of the abuse I suffered through as a kid. With that said, and my conscience clean, I am ready to begin.
My father was a complete and utter asshole. There is no way around it. I respect the man. He dropped out of high school and yet managed to support and raise six kids. He suffered a minor heart attack when he was thirty due to the amount of stress he was under. The man simply didn't know how to deal with his stress save in one way and that was myself and my siblings.
I can claim to be a partial hero. There were times I took the blame for things because I knew my sisters couldn't handle the beating. Ah, but what do I mean by beatings. Well, I'll get a little descriptive:
Once, when I was five, my twin and I were taking a bath and my father walked in. He discovered a small puddle of water on the bathroom floor and, like Ward Cleaver, acted in the most moral way: he grabbed my by my hair, dragged me out of the tub, and proceeded to ram me face first into the tiled floor repeatedly until he broke my nose.
Another time, when I was I believe eight, my sister was telling a joke. I decided to be a smart ass, in one of my euphoric states (see the post about my bi-polar problem to understand), and spoil the punchline. Sadly my father didn't see the humor in it and proceeded to drag me out of the room into the back hall where he used his belt to strip the skin right off the back of my legs. The man literally whipped me until blood was seeping out my black and purple thighs.
I did get to see my father abuse my mother on a consistent basis. Him throwing dishes at her, breaking furniture, screaming at her at the top of his lungs. Oh, memories. If there was one thing she taught me it was the power of passive aggression. That woman literally did give as good as she got by undermining many of his plans whether it be slowing down family trips when my father was making good time(she always had to go to the bathroom), controlling the finances (she never could really remember where she hid the checkbook except after dad left the house), or consistently taking us off on trips to see our grandparents when things became a little too heavy (he'd eventually want us to come back).
I don't want to deceive you. Not all the abuse was physical. There was mental abuse as well. I had to deal with the mandatory adjectives of "worthless", "pathetic", and other delighted terms. I remember my eigth birthday. The twin and I, as well as the rest of the family, had gone out for pizza. We were celebrating, yada yada. Well, being young and impulsive, the twin and I began in on the pizza before my father had returned from wherever the hell he had vanished to. Well, when he came back to discover the twin and I eating our birthday slices before he had returned he let loose in a torrent of us being "ungrateful bastards" and more (forgive me if my subconscious has repressed a great deal of some of the things I should remember). The twin and I could only look down at the floor after he stomped out, chewing miserably on greasy cheese. Happy birthday.
There were multiple whippings, hair pullings, and worse but they didn't compare to the threats to my personal belongings. There were the classic moments when my father threatened to sell my toys (of which I barely had any and thus were very precious to me), his willingness to abandon my things when we'd move (I lost so many comic books, baseball cards, books, etc. as we never had enough room in the car), or the holidays when he'd play cruel jokes like giving me something other than what I asked for. That last may be why I don't ask for anything on my birthday or for Christmas. God knows I never expect to ever get what I really want.
The man loved to let us watch horror movies. Geeze, nothing like being five and catching a showing of The Exorcist.
There were the challenges to fist fights that my father raised, daring the twin and I to "take him on". Of course being twelve and him forty seven, it didn't seem a fair fight. Factor in his amateur boxing background and judo training while in the military and you can understand the trepidation of the twin and I. Well, we did learn strategic thinking throughout those abusive years. Choose your battles. Know when to retreat. We did want to reach manhood. How else were we going to escape save in a pine box!
All of this really hurt me in ways I've never completely dealt with. I suffered through night terrors horribly and still do from time to time.
Now the twin and I were gradually becoming psychotic under the endless pressure we found ourselves under. By the age of thirteen he and I vowed we were going to kill the man. Oh, tis true I tell you. Lucky for him he began to notice we weren't taking anymore from him and he began to back off both us and the rest of our siblings. Sadly we didn't murder him. I was never really good at achieving goals.
Now there were funny times. My father pulling a gun out to shoot a car that had cut him off was classic. Then there was him being so drunk he fell down the stairs with such a loud series of booms that the entire family ran out to the stairwell to see what the hell had happened. Then there was the time he made us all watch as he whipped my sister (who always gave away when she was at fault by asking the stupid question of 'what is going to happen to the person who did it?') only for the belt to break after two lashes. Seeing the confusion on that crimson face as he didn't know what to do now that his weapon was no more had us all laughing rather morbidly. The man crumbled beneath the giggling and hurried out of our sight.
I'd say the worst part of it all was the constant moving. He refused to live anywhere long and thus I never had real friends. I only had the family and trust me we were twisted enough. You can imagine my shock after basing my model of the world off of the only thing I knew, my family, to discover people weren't as fucked up as we were.
I'm a very introverted person. I think because of the fact that I lack some of the belief that I can ever truly do. I'm extremely passive aggressive and manipulative. These are not positive traits but then what are? I've been beaten, verbally lashed, sexually exploited (though not by pops but that in and of itself is a whole different story which I will not share with anyone), and spiritually scarred. I don't trust easily if at all.
The above is a little insight into my formative years. They instilled a type of brutality in me that I largely directed at myself because of the fact that I did not want to harm others. I learned to split myself into multiple personas to deal with some of the pain. No, I'm not a split personality though I can veer sharply from one point to another. I am what I need to be; fluid. Maybe that is why I don't believe there is any real substance to me.
I'm sorry if I'm being vague and if some of this seems to be a rant rather than true introspection. My mind isn't completely here right now. I'm in a partial depression and doing my best to keep the body going.
Now don't feel bad for me. I've developed quite the dark humor and found ways to laugh at a large amount of the shit in my life. It's all been an adventure. People are drawn to me despite the person I believe myself to be. I love to talk, yearn to help you guys through your problems. As for me, I hold onto my trauma like a sack of bricks. They're all I really have despite the heavy weight.
My father was a complete and utter asshole. There is no way around it. I respect the man. He dropped out of high school and yet managed to support and raise six kids. He suffered a minor heart attack when he was thirty due to the amount of stress he was under. The man simply didn't know how to deal with his stress save in one way and that was myself and my siblings.
I can claim to be a partial hero. There were times I took the blame for things because I knew my sisters couldn't handle the beating. Ah, but what do I mean by beatings. Well, I'll get a little descriptive:
Once, when I was five, my twin and I were taking a bath and my father walked in. He discovered a small puddle of water on the bathroom floor and, like Ward Cleaver, acted in the most moral way: he grabbed my by my hair, dragged me out of the tub, and proceeded to ram me face first into the tiled floor repeatedly until he broke my nose.
Another time, when I was I believe eight, my sister was telling a joke. I decided to be a smart ass, in one of my euphoric states (see the post about my bi-polar problem to understand), and spoil the punchline. Sadly my father didn't see the humor in it and proceeded to drag me out of the room into the back hall where he used his belt to strip the skin right off the back of my legs. The man literally whipped me until blood was seeping out my black and purple thighs.
I did get to see my father abuse my mother on a consistent basis. Him throwing dishes at her, breaking furniture, screaming at her at the top of his lungs. Oh, memories. If there was one thing she taught me it was the power of passive aggression. That woman literally did give as good as she got by undermining many of his plans whether it be slowing down family trips when my father was making good time(she always had to go to the bathroom), controlling the finances (she never could really remember where she hid the checkbook except after dad left the house), or consistently taking us off on trips to see our grandparents when things became a little too heavy (he'd eventually want us to come back).
I don't want to deceive you. Not all the abuse was physical. There was mental abuse as well. I had to deal with the mandatory adjectives of "worthless", "pathetic", and other delighted terms. I remember my eigth birthday. The twin and I, as well as the rest of the family, had gone out for pizza. We were celebrating, yada yada. Well, being young and impulsive, the twin and I began in on the pizza before my father had returned from wherever the hell he had vanished to. Well, when he came back to discover the twin and I eating our birthday slices before he had returned he let loose in a torrent of us being "ungrateful bastards" and more (forgive me if my subconscious has repressed a great deal of some of the things I should remember). The twin and I could only look down at the floor after he stomped out, chewing miserably on greasy cheese. Happy birthday.
There were multiple whippings, hair pullings, and worse but they didn't compare to the threats to my personal belongings. There were the classic moments when my father threatened to sell my toys (of which I barely had any and thus were very precious to me), his willingness to abandon my things when we'd move (I lost so many comic books, baseball cards, books, etc. as we never had enough room in the car), or the holidays when he'd play cruel jokes like giving me something other than what I asked for. That last may be why I don't ask for anything on my birthday or for Christmas. God knows I never expect to ever get what I really want.
The man loved to let us watch horror movies. Geeze, nothing like being five and catching a showing of The Exorcist.
There were the challenges to fist fights that my father raised, daring the twin and I to "take him on". Of course being twelve and him forty seven, it didn't seem a fair fight. Factor in his amateur boxing background and judo training while in the military and you can understand the trepidation of the twin and I. Well, we did learn strategic thinking throughout those abusive years. Choose your battles. Know when to retreat. We did want to reach manhood. How else were we going to escape save in a pine box!
All of this really hurt me in ways I've never completely dealt with. I suffered through night terrors horribly and still do from time to time.
Now the twin and I were gradually becoming psychotic under the endless pressure we found ourselves under. By the age of thirteen he and I vowed we were going to kill the man. Oh, tis true I tell you. Lucky for him he began to notice we weren't taking anymore from him and he began to back off both us and the rest of our siblings. Sadly we didn't murder him. I was never really good at achieving goals.
Now there were funny times. My father pulling a gun out to shoot a car that had cut him off was classic. Then there was him being so drunk he fell down the stairs with such a loud series of booms that the entire family ran out to the stairwell to see what the hell had happened. Then there was the time he made us all watch as he whipped my sister (who always gave away when she was at fault by asking the stupid question of 'what is going to happen to the person who did it?') only for the belt to break after two lashes. Seeing the confusion on that crimson face as he didn't know what to do now that his weapon was no more had us all laughing rather morbidly. The man crumbled beneath the giggling and hurried out of our sight.
I'd say the worst part of it all was the constant moving. He refused to live anywhere long and thus I never had real friends. I only had the family and trust me we were twisted enough. You can imagine my shock after basing my model of the world off of the only thing I knew, my family, to discover people weren't as fucked up as we were.
I'm a very introverted person. I think because of the fact that I lack some of the belief that I can ever truly do. I'm extremely passive aggressive and manipulative. These are not positive traits but then what are? I've been beaten, verbally lashed, sexually exploited (though not by pops but that in and of itself is a whole different story which I will not share with anyone), and spiritually scarred. I don't trust easily if at all.
The above is a little insight into my formative years. They instilled a type of brutality in me that I largely directed at myself because of the fact that I did not want to harm others. I learned to split myself into multiple personas to deal with some of the pain. No, I'm not a split personality though I can veer sharply from one point to another. I am what I need to be; fluid. Maybe that is why I don't believe there is any real substance to me.
I'm sorry if I'm being vague and if some of this seems to be a rant rather than true introspection. My mind isn't completely here right now. I'm in a partial depression and doing my best to keep the body going.
Now don't feel bad for me. I've developed quite the dark humor and found ways to laugh at a large amount of the shit in my life. It's all been an adventure. People are drawn to me despite the person I believe myself to be. I love to talk, yearn to help you guys through your problems. As for me, I hold onto my trauma like a sack of bricks. They're all I really have despite the heavy weight.
Bi-Polar: Hurray! I mean, boo!
I have bi-polar disorder. It was a frightening thing to discover when I entered college. Until my sophomore year, when I began taking psychology classes, I never really noticed there was something wrong with me. Of course, that was mostly because I have a severe anti-social personality and thus had few individuals to compare myself to. I always thought of myself as normal. Discovering there was something wrong with me...that was harrowing. Growing up I discovered the mental instability that runs through both sides of my family. My mother's side had a few relatives committed as recently as the 1950s. My father's side had one antecedent who was lobotomized. You can understand why I began to feel really uncomfortable knowing there was something wrong with me "up there".
My teenage years were highly emotional ones. I swung back and forth so readily between euphoria and depression. I was suicidal. I had dreams of grandeur (I was going to conquer the world. Didn't you know?). I'd become depressed because I hadn't conquered the world yet (fifteen is not too young, afterall). I'd run for hours around the house at one in the morning. I'd do a week's homework in one night. I'd become so sluggish I'd wear the same clothes for a week straight. The list could go on and on, quirky as it is.
Then the problems started. I had my first beer when I was sixteen. That would prove a catalyst for later life as I used alcohol as a means to dull down the pain of my depressive periods. It wasn't until two years ago, when I hit my worst period of alcoholism, that I finally began to reign in my drinking. There were also bouts of self-mutiliation. No, I didn't use the knives. I used my fingernails. Sometimes. Other times I'd simply punch the walls, usually until my knuckles were bloody...or broken.
My "problem" became pronounced in 1999. It just seemed one continuous depression. Nothing seemed to improve. Every day was so much work. I just didn't want to get up. There wasn't anything out there in the world for me. I found myself drawn to people even more depressing than I was and that only served to make me worse. Then came the car wreck. To this day I'm not completely sure if I did it on purpose or if it truly was an accident, but I almost killed myself that day.
After that I dropped out of college and just wandered. I found my way, eventually, to South Africa. That is a whole other story. Once there I found my ex-wife. I think I married her because I wanted some form of stability. For the first few years I had it. But then the depression started to deepen again. I never told her about my "problem". I couldn't. It was this stigma I didn't want to share. I hate being judged and letting her know about my bi-polar disorder, ugh, that really wasn't an option. So she began to distance herself. She saw other guys. I needed her but didn't want her to be a part of what I was going through. August 2005 I almost had a nervous breakdown because of my crumbling marriage matched with the bi-polar. Just sitting there, feeling my body tremble as I watched my hands shake: it's like a quake is going through you and you can't help but to believe you are going to shatter into a million pieces.
The only thing that has kept me together is will. Having OCD, a mixed blessing but positive in this case, has helped me to instill a sense of discipline in my life. I have to do things, follow a set pattern, or else I become agitated. So OCD helps me to keep it together, to keep pressing forward, etc. Now having OCD and bi-polar disorder may make me sound like one really fucked up guy. Trust me, it's not as apparent as I make it.
Now why don't I take medication or seek therapy. As to the former, I simply cannot bring myself to take meds. My grandmother was forced to take ten pills a day. Watching the effects they had on her when I was a kid severely curtailed any interest I would ever have in being medicated as well as instilled a strong disdain for the medical community. And therapy, I know I've got problems. I don't need someone patronizing me and helping me take babysteps. I also don't want the attention or the fear of judgment being passed by someone trying to help me. I don't want to be dependent. I can't be a burden.
So I am bringing about change myself. I have to want it and I do. I've curtailed my drinking (I do still drink but very moderately), the periods of self-mutilation haven't occurred for well over eight months, and I have taken steps to actually own up to my problem, i.e. talking to you guys.
I'm sorry if I have been a tad vague on some parts of my condition. It's not easy "owning up". If you guys want, I'd be more than happy to chat about it off the blog. Just on here, I have my trepidations. Don't be scared. I don't snap.
My teenage years were highly emotional ones. I swung back and forth so readily between euphoria and depression. I was suicidal. I had dreams of grandeur (I was going to conquer the world. Didn't you know?). I'd become depressed because I hadn't conquered the world yet (fifteen is not too young, afterall). I'd run for hours around the house at one in the morning. I'd do a week's homework in one night. I'd become so sluggish I'd wear the same clothes for a week straight. The list could go on and on, quirky as it is.
Then the problems started. I had my first beer when I was sixteen. That would prove a catalyst for later life as I used alcohol as a means to dull down the pain of my depressive periods. It wasn't until two years ago, when I hit my worst period of alcoholism, that I finally began to reign in my drinking. There were also bouts of self-mutiliation. No, I didn't use the knives. I used my fingernails. Sometimes. Other times I'd simply punch the walls, usually until my knuckles were bloody...or broken.
My "problem" became pronounced in 1999. It just seemed one continuous depression. Nothing seemed to improve. Every day was so much work. I just didn't want to get up. There wasn't anything out there in the world for me. I found myself drawn to people even more depressing than I was and that only served to make me worse. Then came the car wreck. To this day I'm not completely sure if I did it on purpose or if it truly was an accident, but I almost killed myself that day.
After that I dropped out of college and just wandered. I found my way, eventually, to South Africa. That is a whole other story. Once there I found my ex-wife. I think I married her because I wanted some form of stability. For the first few years I had it. But then the depression started to deepen again. I never told her about my "problem". I couldn't. It was this stigma I didn't want to share. I hate being judged and letting her know about my bi-polar disorder, ugh, that really wasn't an option. So she began to distance herself. She saw other guys. I needed her but didn't want her to be a part of what I was going through. August 2005 I almost had a nervous breakdown because of my crumbling marriage matched with the bi-polar. Just sitting there, feeling my body tremble as I watched my hands shake: it's like a quake is going through you and you can't help but to believe you are going to shatter into a million pieces.
The only thing that has kept me together is will. Having OCD, a mixed blessing but positive in this case, has helped me to instill a sense of discipline in my life. I have to do things, follow a set pattern, or else I become agitated. So OCD helps me to keep it together, to keep pressing forward, etc. Now having OCD and bi-polar disorder may make me sound like one really fucked up guy. Trust me, it's not as apparent as I make it.
Now why don't I take medication or seek therapy. As to the former, I simply cannot bring myself to take meds. My grandmother was forced to take ten pills a day. Watching the effects they had on her when I was a kid severely curtailed any interest I would ever have in being medicated as well as instilled a strong disdain for the medical community. And therapy, I know I've got problems. I don't need someone patronizing me and helping me take babysteps. I also don't want the attention or the fear of judgment being passed by someone trying to help me. I don't want to be dependent. I can't be a burden.
So I am bringing about change myself. I have to want it and I do. I've curtailed my drinking (I do still drink but very moderately), the periods of self-mutilation haven't occurred for well over eight months, and I have taken steps to actually own up to my problem, i.e. talking to you guys.
I'm sorry if I have been a tad vague on some parts of my condition. It's not easy "owning up". If you guys want, I'd be more than happy to chat about it off the blog. Just on here, I have my trepidations. Don't be scared. I don't snap.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
MMA vs. Boxing: It's no contest
Recently I saw a debate that was held between professional boxing authorities and members of the MMA community, UFC in particular. What I saw was a complete lack of respect among boxing peers for their MMA counterparts. At best, professional boxing authorities claim that members of the MMA community could possibly compete in a boxing environment. The subtle undertone of the arrogant stance of professional boxing for MMA became blunt when Floyd Mayweather, one of the best boxers today, stated, "MMA is the minor leagues of fighting. They couldn't last in the ring with us." Nothing could be further from the truth.
For those who do not know what MMA is, it stands for Mixed Martial Arts. It is a style of competitive fighting which allows multiples disciplines to be used in competition. Boxing, wrestling, judo, kickboxing, and other styles are readily used in the sport. It has seen a rapid rise in popularity in the past few years under the steady hand of Dana White, himself a former boxing promoter.
One misconception of the sport which has lingered among the public is that MMA is a bloodsport. This was partly true in the early days of MMA in this country with the creation of UFC in the 90s. During that period there were no weight classes allowing any and all body types to fight one another. It was not impossible to see a 150 pound fighter versus a three hundred pound monster. There were no gloves, blows could be landed anywhere save the groin, and rounds were non-existent with both opponents fighting for a pre-set time limit until the bell rang (usually ten to fifteen minutes). It was an anything goes atmosphere and it pretty much was. Hair pulling, eye gouging, brutal beat downs (including stomping, a move by which a fighter was allowed to literally stomp on their opponent while he was down), and bloody battles were the norm in the infancy of the UFC. This all changed with the introduction of Royce Gracie.
Royce Gracie revolutionized the sport of MMA in this country. A master of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he was a tiny fighter who proved himself capable of beating men twice his own size. It was how he went about doing it that altered the perception of fighting. He didn't charge in exchanging blows like in a Rocky movie. Gracie's talent lay in submissions and grappling, wearing out his opponent through strategy and holds rather than blunt force trauma. It opened another avenue for fighting that broadened the possibilities of matches from mere pugilism to true multi-style fighting.
Crowds had never seen this style of fighting before and very nearly never saw it again as Congress stepped in and pressure was put on venues not to show UFC/MMA fights because of their bloody past.
To the rescue came Dana White who helped to make the sport more palatable to officials by the creation of weight classes roughly equivalent to boxing standards, a creation of restrictions which helped to lessen the more savage aspects of MMA (no more punches to the back of the head, stomping, etc.), and acceptance of states to determine eligibility of fighters to fight through licensing. Once Congress backed off, the show truly began.
To compare MMA to boxing it will take an analogy. Fighting is war on a personal scale. Two forces come up against one another. Only one may walk out the victor after a battle. It is the weapons used and the environment within which these tools are applied which determine the battle's action, length, and overall appearance. To compare MMA to boxing is to compare World War II to World War I respectively.
Boxing is nothing more than a battle of attrition. Each fighter begins limited in the tools allowed, their fists being the sole weapons legally used. These weapons are protected by thick gloves worn to help soften the impact of the blows on a fighter's fists helping to prolong their use throughout the fight. Only the head and body may be targeted creating a zone of interest. Both fighters engage one another in attempts to deliver blows to the chest or face in hopes of weakening and ultimately dropping their opponent. They may go about this via uppercuts, jabs, straights, and hooks; using combinations or power shots. The goal is to systematically break down the other fighter until such time as he is unable to continue.
Victory is not simply one quick battle but a series of conflicts as one fighter attempts to batter his opponent into absolute surrender. The goal is to knock his challenger down until such time as he is unable to rise. The knockdown rule is a type of gentleman's agreement. It is there to define the strength and will of the fallen, to see whether he is man enough to rise and continue. He is not beaten while he is down but given the chance to defend himself. If he is unable to do so then the fight is over.
The sport is very primitive in its focus with victory solely by the exhaustion of the loser. It is plodding and at times predictable. Each opponent knows what is vulnerable (the head and body) and quite easily defend these two simple places. Should the opponent begin to gain an advantage, a fighter may clinch his opponent to stop the action and give himself time to recover. Thus action is rarely constant. It is far more defensive than offensive with strategic thinking being of prime concern. A match is roughly nothing more than two men probing one another for a weakness and attempting to exploit it. There will be periodic flare ups but for the most part a match will simply be two men following one another around trying to create openings in a tightly defended front over the course of twelve rounds.
MMA, in contrast, is lighting fast, unpredictable, and literally a living version of combined arms warfare. One does not simply use their hands, which in this case are protected by streamlined gloves which allow for use of fingers. One may use their legs, one may use their shoulders, and one may also use holds. The fighting isn't merely two men standing toe-to-toe. The battle can go to the mat as one opponent tries to either pound the other into unconsciousness, submit him, or choke him out. One can never be sure which way a fight may proceed. It is because of this that MMA fights do not always go the distance. Most don't even last longer than the first round.
Because every part of the body may be a weapon or a target, protecting the body is impossible. Both fighters have to think largely offensively rather than defensively. If one plants their feet they may leave themself open to a lunge meant to take them down to the mat for a submission. Guarding the body leaves the legs open to kicks which can weaken one's abilities to move and thus hinder the possibility of moving out of harm's way. One must constantly being moving forward or trying to seize the offense as there is no sure way to win defensively in MMA. One cannot defend against everything and if one stays on the defensive, his opponent will eventually find a weakness. There are exceptions such as Tim "The Maniac" Sylvia or Chuck "The Iceman" Liddell, two men who allow their opponents to come in and then wait for a mistake before seizing the offensive. But these two are the exception rather than the rule. Largely defensive fighters fare poorly. In fact, these two men, once dominant, have lost recent fights due to their styles of defensive fighting. This is in contrast to boxing where men who fight largely defensive styles (Mayweather, Bernard Hopkins, and Winky Wright) go long stretches victorious because they exhaust their opponents'.
There are multiple paths to victory rather than a stand-up punching battle. This is the difference between the static monotony of boxing versus the fluid, dynamic style of MMA. It is also why brain damage is far more prevalent in boxing versus MMA. In MMA, should a fighter get knocked out the fight is immediately called. There is no waiting to see if he can get up or giving him the chance to clear his head. MMA fighters go in for the kill and one knockdown is usually all it takes. Boxing on the other hand encourages men to keep going despite the trauma they take leading to short careers and long lasting physical effects.
One can see from the above the differences between MMA and boxing. In fact, it is startling that anyone would claim boxers are superior to MMA fighters. There have been hard charging boxers in MMA. Men like Tank Abbott and Bob Sapp are good examples of successful boxers, or brawlers, in MMA competition. But this style of fighting has only proven successful via quick rushes at the opponent, overwhelming him with blows before he can put up a viable defense. These two men (Sapp and Abbott) found themselves on the losing end of many of their fights once their opponents found ways to blunt their charging and brawling (kicks, throws to the ground, etc.). It is telling that MMA forced boxing to "evolve" in the UFC, Pride, and elsewhere, because of the vulnerabilities of more than the body and the head. With so many possibilities and avenues of attack, UFC and other organizations have forced fighters to think offensively, to attack constantly, and to energize fights leading to continual action. This has been lacking in boxing much to the fans' dismay.
It is the outright arrogance of men like Mayweather which irritates me. His belief that boxing is superior to MMA has been disproven time and again as boxers have fought in MMA and found themselves rapidly beaten by men of other disciplines (Abbott, Sapp). Mayweather himself is a true symbol of what boxing represents. His hands are fragile from years of boxing having broken the bones in his hands constant times, thus he is a highly defensive fighter. He consistently retreats and guards, throwing punches when he must to keep his opponent at bay. He has mastered the shoulder roll to guide punches away and open the avenue for a counterpunch. His style is meant for a battle of attrition, to go long rounds, to wear out the opponent as he fails time and again to break through his defenses. The problem is Mayweather would quickly find himself in trouble were he to fight MMA. Though he may be able to guard against punches, could he also defend his legs against kicks? If his legs start getting chopped and become bruised, sensitive, and non-responsive then his punches would start to wane in power as he would be unable to plant himself, a necessary point in throwing a punch in boxing. His mobility would shrink preventing continual escape from his opponent. Thus he would have to start defending his legs leaving his body or head open to a kick or punch. Would he clinch? Not a good idea in MMA as Mayweather's opponent could deliver knees to his abdomen or even higher should he lock his own hands behind Floyd's neck. Or maybe Floyd's opponent instead decides to lunge at him and take him to the mat. How would Mayweather defend against a chokehold or a submission move if all he knows is how to throw punches? On the mat, his leverage gone, how would boxing alone save him? This and more brings great doubt to Mayweather's belief that MMA is for individuals who couldn't make it in boxing. In fact, it is boxers who can't make it in MMA with pugilist skills alone.
The fact is that fans want action. They want men who are going to compete. They don't want to watch two figures simply wear each other out. They want to see actual competition. It is not simply a question as to why MMA is the dominant form of fighting in the U.S. and world today, it is a question as to why boxing is even still legal.
For those who do not know what MMA is, it stands for Mixed Martial Arts. It is a style of competitive fighting which allows multiples disciplines to be used in competition. Boxing, wrestling, judo, kickboxing, and other styles are readily used in the sport. It has seen a rapid rise in popularity in the past few years under the steady hand of Dana White, himself a former boxing promoter.
One misconception of the sport which has lingered among the public is that MMA is a bloodsport. This was partly true in the early days of MMA in this country with the creation of UFC in the 90s. During that period there were no weight classes allowing any and all body types to fight one another. It was not impossible to see a 150 pound fighter versus a three hundred pound monster. There were no gloves, blows could be landed anywhere save the groin, and rounds were non-existent with both opponents fighting for a pre-set time limit until the bell rang (usually ten to fifteen minutes). It was an anything goes atmosphere and it pretty much was. Hair pulling, eye gouging, brutal beat downs (including stomping, a move by which a fighter was allowed to literally stomp on their opponent while he was down), and bloody battles were the norm in the infancy of the UFC. This all changed with the introduction of Royce Gracie.
Royce Gracie revolutionized the sport of MMA in this country. A master of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he was a tiny fighter who proved himself capable of beating men twice his own size. It was how he went about doing it that altered the perception of fighting. He didn't charge in exchanging blows like in a Rocky movie. Gracie's talent lay in submissions and grappling, wearing out his opponent through strategy and holds rather than blunt force trauma. It opened another avenue for fighting that broadened the possibilities of matches from mere pugilism to true multi-style fighting.
Crowds had never seen this style of fighting before and very nearly never saw it again as Congress stepped in and pressure was put on venues not to show UFC/MMA fights because of their bloody past.
To the rescue came Dana White who helped to make the sport more palatable to officials by the creation of weight classes roughly equivalent to boxing standards, a creation of restrictions which helped to lessen the more savage aspects of MMA (no more punches to the back of the head, stomping, etc.), and acceptance of states to determine eligibility of fighters to fight through licensing. Once Congress backed off, the show truly began.
To compare MMA to boxing it will take an analogy. Fighting is war on a personal scale. Two forces come up against one another. Only one may walk out the victor after a battle. It is the weapons used and the environment within which these tools are applied which determine the battle's action, length, and overall appearance. To compare MMA to boxing is to compare World War II to World War I respectively.
Boxing is nothing more than a battle of attrition. Each fighter begins limited in the tools allowed, their fists being the sole weapons legally used. These weapons are protected by thick gloves worn to help soften the impact of the blows on a fighter's fists helping to prolong their use throughout the fight. Only the head and body may be targeted creating a zone of interest. Both fighters engage one another in attempts to deliver blows to the chest or face in hopes of weakening and ultimately dropping their opponent. They may go about this via uppercuts, jabs, straights, and hooks; using combinations or power shots. The goal is to systematically break down the other fighter until such time as he is unable to continue.
Victory is not simply one quick battle but a series of conflicts as one fighter attempts to batter his opponent into absolute surrender. The goal is to knock his challenger down until such time as he is unable to rise. The knockdown rule is a type of gentleman's agreement. It is there to define the strength and will of the fallen, to see whether he is man enough to rise and continue. He is not beaten while he is down but given the chance to defend himself. If he is unable to do so then the fight is over.
The sport is very primitive in its focus with victory solely by the exhaustion of the loser. It is plodding and at times predictable. Each opponent knows what is vulnerable (the head and body) and quite easily defend these two simple places. Should the opponent begin to gain an advantage, a fighter may clinch his opponent to stop the action and give himself time to recover. Thus action is rarely constant. It is far more defensive than offensive with strategic thinking being of prime concern. A match is roughly nothing more than two men probing one another for a weakness and attempting to exploit it. There will be periodic flare ups but for the most part a match will simply be two men following one another around trying to create openings in a tightly defended front over the course of twelve rounds.
MMA, in contrast, is lighting fast, unpredictable, and literally a living version of combined arms warfare. One does not simply use their hands, which in this case are protected by streamlined gloves which allow for use of fingers. One may use their legs, one may use their shoulders, and one may also use holds. The fighting isn't merely two men standing toe-to-toe. The battle can go to the mat as one opponent tries to either pound the other into unconsciousness, submit him, or choke him out. One can never be sure which way a fight may proceed. It is because of this that MMA fights do not always go the distance. Most don't even last longer than the first round.
Because every part of the body may be a weapon or a target, protecting the body is impossible. Both fighters have to think largely offensively rather than defensively. If one plants their feet they may leave themself open to a lunge meant to take them down to the mat for a submission. Guarding the body leaves the legs open to kicks which can weaken one's abilities to move and thus hinder the possibility of moving out of harm's way. One must constantly being moving forward or trying to seize the offense as there is no sure way to win defensively in MMA. One cannot defend against everything and if one stays on the defensive, his opponent will eventually find a weakness. There are exceptions such as Tim "The Maniac" Sylvia or Chuck "The Iceman" Liddell, two men who allow their opponents to come in and then wait for a mistake before seizing the offensive. But these two are the exception rather than the rule. Largely defensive fighters fare poorly. In fact, these two men, once dominant, have lost recent fights due to their styles of defensive fighting. This is in contrast to boxing where men who fight largely defensive styles (Mayweather, Bernard Hopkins, and Winky Wright) go long stretches victorious because they exhaust their opponents'.
There are multiple paths to victory rather than a stand-up punching battle. This is the difference between the static monotony of boxing versus the fluid, dynamic style of MMA. It is also why brain damage is far more prevalent in boxing versus MMA. In MMA, should a fighter get knocked out the fight is immediately called. There is no waiting to see if he can get up or giving him the chance to clear his head. MMA fighters go in for the kill and one knockdown is usually all it takes. Boxing on the other hand encourages men to keep going despite the trauma they take leading to short careers and long lasting physical effects.
One can see from the above the differences between MMA and boxing. In fact, it is startling that anyone would claim boxers are superior to MMA fighters. There have been hard charging boxers in MMA. Men like Tank Abbott and Bob Sapp are good examples of successful boxers, or brawlers, in MMA competition. But this style of fighting has only proven successful via quick rushes at the opponent, overwhelming him with blows before he can put up a viable defense. These two men (Sapp and Abbott) found themselves on the losing end of many of their fights once their opponents found ways to blunt their charging and brawling (kicks, throws to the ground, etc.). It is telling that MMA forced boxing to "evolve" in the UFC, Pride, and elsewhere, because of the vulnerabilities of more than the body and the head. With so many possibilities and avenues of attack, UFC and other organizations have forced fighters to think offensively, to attack constantly, and to energize fights leading to continual action. This has been lacking in boxing much to the fans' dismay.
It is the outright arrogance of men like Mayweather which irritates me. His belief that boxing is superior to MMA has been disproven time and again as boxers have fought in MMA and found themselves rapidly beaten by men of other disciplines (Abbott, Sapp). Mayweather himself is a true symbol of what boxing represents. His hands are fragile from years of boxing having broken the bones in his hands constant times, thus he is a highly defensive fighter. He consistently retreats and guards, throwing punches when he must to keep his opponent at bay. He has mastered the shoulder roll to guide punches away and open the avenue for a counterpunch. His style is meant for a battle of attrition, to go long rounds, to wear out the opponent as he fails time and again to break through his defenses. The problem is Mayweather would quickly find himself in trouble were he to fight MMA. Though he may be able to guard against punches, could he also defend his legs against kicks? If his legs start getting chopped and become bruised, sensitive, and non-responsive then his punches would start to wane in power as he would be unable to plant himself, a necessary point in throwing a punch in boxing. His mobility would shrink preventing continual escape from his opponent. Thus he would have to start defending his legs leaving his body or head open to a kick or punch. Would he clinch? Not a good idea in MMA as Mayweather's opponent could deliver knees to his abdomen or even higher should he lock his own hands behind Floyd's neck. Or maybe Floyd's opponent instead decides to lunge at him and take him to the mat. How would Mayweather defend against a chokehold or a submission move if all he knows is how to throw punches? On the mat, his leverage gone, how would boxing alone save him? This and more brings great doubt to Mayweather's belief that MMA is for individuals who couldn't make it in boxing. In fact, it is boxers who can't make it in MMA with pugilist skills alone.
The fact is that fans want action. They want men who are going to compete. They don't want to watch two figures simply wear each other out. They want to see actual competition. It is not simply a question as to why MMA is the dominant form of fighting in the U.S. and world today, it is a question as to why boxing is even still legal.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
I'm still alive!
So today I finally got my divorce papers. Can't say I'm relieved. Rather than feeling free, I feel abandoned all over again. At least I have a vacation coming up in the next few days.I need to get out of here, clear my head, see the countryside, just know there is a world outside of this bubble I'm stuck in forever afraid it's going to burst and send me down into the abyss.
On a positive note, I've decided in a new marketing approach for the book. I'm going to start putting together a few toons to see if I can't draw some traffic to the site (the official one, www.anti-christ.biz, not this one), interest people in my twisted sense of humor, convince them that if I'm funny enough to make shorts then I must be funny enough to buy my book. Let's hope. Fingers crossed.
I've just been so busy these past few days, unable to transfer my blog from anti-christ over here. Finally got around to it. But, uh, the hassles to come!
So if you'll excuse me, I have much work to get to. I'm not sure how soon I'll be back on the blog. Don't worry though; "they" haven't grabbed me.
On a positive note, I've decided in a new marketing approach for the book. I'm going to start putting together a few toons to see if I can't draw some traffic to the site (the official one, www.anti-christ.biz, not this one), interest people in my twisted sense of humor, convince them that if I'm funny enough to make shorts then I must be funny enough to buy my book. Let's hope. Fingers crossed.
I've just been so busy these past few days, unable to transfer my blog from anti-christ over here. Finally got around to it. But, uh, the hassles to come!
So if you'll excuse me, I have much work to get to. I'm not sure how soon I'll be back on the blog. Don't worry though; "they" haven't grabbed me.
Jimmy Carter, the Great American Hypocrite
How I love the irony: Jimmy Carter called George W. Bush the worst president in modern times. Now I will criticize ol' Dubya on many issues, but he is not the worst president in the past thirty years. That honor, my friends, goes to the all mighty Jimmy Carter.
Let me reminisce over the grand four years of the Georgia Peach:
He was a Democrat as was the majority in Congress much like Bush was a Republican with a Republican led Congress. Yet during Carter's administration there was a definite polarization of the legislature as Carter antagonized those who were supposed to be fellow party members leading to a general paralysis of federal authority/action. This was caused by Carter's repeated veto of Congressional provisions which led to them refusing to support his agenda. Both sides simply kept attacking each other rather than getting down to what they were there for: running the country. And this was the same party in both branches!
There was a severe economic downturn coupled with rising fuel prices. Yeah, that wasn't going to lock us into a downward spiral: jobs vanish causing people to spend less while fuel costs add to prices people already can't pay thus leading to larger losses causing more lay offs, etc. In fact, rising fuel prices led to rising energy prices leading to periods of brownouts. Nothing like the faltering light of democracy.
Of course, the above problem was greatly influenced by OPEC who proved exactly how vulnerable America was to foreign oil. What was Carter's response? Generally that the economic problem was caused by the American people's lack of confidence in their government. So the economic problem was the American people's problem, not an administration unwilling to either negotiate or find solutions to the OPEC problem? Yeah, good way to alienate your base.
While we're on the economy, it was during Carter's administration that interest rates hit their record high in America: 21.5% by December of 1980 (just before his stepping down in the wake of the Reagan tide). This of course led to a devaluing of investments and hurt the growing government deficit.
Carter proved himself incapable of following through on tax reform.
The American image was tarnished as we lost authority in Iran, still a leading opponent of ours. Even worse, Carter was unable to rescue embassy workers who were taken hostage shortly after the revolution led by the Ayatollah.
There was Carter's allowance of a massive exodus of Cubans into Florida, the Mariel Boat Lift. Now the illegal alien problem from Mexico is bad enough but that is due to lax border security which is gradually being tightened. Carter knowingly allowed thousands of Cubans into America without even worrying about their backgrounds. What was later discovered was that Castro had simply packed all his mentally unstable citizens along with a multitude of criminals onto the boats and shipped them over to us relieving himself of a major problem. Great on the background checks there, Jimmy. Don't even worry about who you're letting in.
Of course there was also Carter's willingness to sign a treaty surrendering the Panama Canal to Panama. Yeah, America financed and fought for Panamanian independence in order to gain the ground to build a canal (with our money) and the Panamanians simply get it all because they are complaining that it should be theirs. If Carter were smart he would have made them sign into the treaty that they would lease it from us until such time as they could afford to buy it outright. At least make them pay us back for one of "our" projects. Oh, and there was also the power vaccuum left by Carter's allowance of the Panamanians to push out American forces which was eventually filled by a drug cartler leader. Yeah, Carter was the master of creating unstable regimes.
On unstable regimes, let's follow two more. Carter decided human rights were more important than political reality thus he stopped his support of Somoza in Nicaragua. Of course this ended up leading to a civil war in that country. Hmm, guess trying to convince the guy to reform rather than backing his opposition just made too little sense. And then of course there was Zimbabwe. Carter complained that the election held there during his term had to be reheld because Mugabe was kept out of the list of candidates. Eventually Mugabe won due to Carter's support. Yeah, we saw how such progressive views led to a vibrant Zimbabwe.
There was also Carter's view that the Soviet Union's invasion into Afghanistan (a nation that is virtually useless both strategically and economically) and hurt America rather than the Soviet's by voiding the Russian Wheat Deal, an idea that had been used to establish trade with the U.S.S.R. and lessen Cold War tensions. Instead, it hurt farmers in America while the Soviets continued assaulting Afghanistan. It didn't matter that the Afghan government had asked for Soviet aid to put down revolutionaries. And of course, Carter's belief that America should help defend Afghan "independence" has only led to a brilliantly victory for fundamentalism over Communism. God over secularism. Awesome! That $40 billion investment in the Taliban paid off handsomely.
So, though I disagree somewhat with corporate practices, gas prices, involvement in Iraq, torture of suspects, tax cuts for the rich (largely the rescinding of estate taxes), and the increasing centralization of power at the executive which has proven so incompetent that states are doing things the federal government should take the lead in (clean/domestic fuel, immigration reform, environmental issues), at least this nation is in better shape than it was during Carter's four years. I think Carter should learn to watch his mouth and prove he learned something as a preacher: judge not lest ye be judged.
Pulse, American Style
I was super-psyched to see this movie, because I had loved the Japanese original, which was so obtuse and subtle I knew that it was particularly ripe for getting massively screwed up when trying to adapt it to something American teenagers might understand and be scared by. In the Japanese version no corpses jump out of laundry machines, we do not see people turning into stains, and there are many things the audience is never offered a direct explanation for, you’re just left to—imagine this—use your own brain power to piece together. I’ll be comparing the two versions a lot throughout this review.
I should also mention that I saw this movie on opening night in a theater full of a lot of teenagers of all races who were in large groups of friends, and who were in the mood to SCREAM. Had I wanted to enjoy the movie as something of quality this would have been annoying, but since I really just wanted to deride it for how badly it dumbed-down what the original film was, this proved to be the perfect audience, and the whole experience was very fun and lively.
The opening credits try to express how prevalent electronics are in our lives. Okay, as IF anyone needs any additional proof of that. We then join our heroine’s boyfriend Josh, who is walking through a library and all freaked out. There is a ghost attack within the first 30 seconds of the movie, wherein Josh is, uh, sucked by a ghost.
Then we meet Mattie, college student played by Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame. Mattie and company attend college in the dirtiest, grungiest city Ohio has to offer [we’re setting a movie in OHIO?], and for the first half you’re sitting there like “WHERE is his city? What, is everything a total slum?” The entire city looks like some community college that started with shitty facilities 20 years ago and has been burned, graffittied, broken, and not cleaned every year in between. It’s a bit ridiculous. Mattie is friends with Christina Milian, trying to extend her tepid singing career into a tepid acting career, and two other guys, one black, one Hispanic. Together they truly express the United Colors of Benneton.
Mattie, who needs to take the eye liner down a notch, is concerned by not having heard from her former boyfriend Josh, the one we saw getting sucked in the library. She goes over to his apartment, where she finds the computer on in an equivalent shot to the view of the computer from the original, only a bit more souped up with constantly-moving graphics and such. Mattie finds that Josh has not exactly been hip on cleanliness lately, and has roaches in the sink and—completely weird and unexplained—a crippled, greasy CAT locked in his closet. I don’t know WHERE that came from [or where it went]. Anyway, Josh is there, and he has a nasty black stain on him, and he tells Mattie to hold on while he goes in the other room and hangs himself.
Soon after this all the friends start getting IMs from Josh saying “Help me.” But wait a minute—Josh is dead! So they think that Josh’s computer must be somehow still on and sending them messages that say, “Help me.” So they send a member of their cru over to turn his computer off. He wanders around the apartment, then he sees a woman who comes at him and presumably sucks him as well.
Up until now this movie has stayed fairly close to the original. In the original all the friends worked at a facility studying plants, and the Josh character was delivering a piece of software for them. The apartment is neglected, but not filthy, i.e. no roaches and certainly no wounded cats. The second character who goes to Josh’s apartment actually sees him, turns away, and when he turns back, there is just a vaguely humanoid black stain on the wall. In Japan, this would have a lot of cultural resonance, based on the human shadows left on walls post-Hiroshima. This is one of those things that is very evocative, but not really explained. The character who later goes to the apartment leaves and goes to another basement room in the complex, and that’s where he sees the woman, which makes more sense, as… why is this woman in Josh’s apt? Anyway, the parts in which this movie apes the original end up being the most successful, such as the simple shot of the ghost woman just walking toward the camera. Oh, by the way, in the original, they didn’t get IMs from the dead guy, but phone calls where he said “Help me,” akin to the creepy phone calls in The Grudge.
So anyway, no one has heard from the guy who went over to Josh’s, but they start to connect to this weird thing on their computers that shows pale people looking at them. Mattie goes to Josh’s, where she meets an obese black landlady straight out of Gone with the Wind, who tells her she sold the computer to some refugee from a boy band. Mattie finds him, and discovers that Josh’s computer is in the trunk of his car, and thus couldn’t be sending them messages. Oh my God!
Meanwhile Josh sent them all a roll of red duct tape, with the message “It keeps them out. Don’t know why.” The reason Josh doesn’t know why is that the screenwriter of this movie doesn’t know why, because it’s never explained in the original. You just see it lining the doors and windows of several apartment buildings. You start to notice it and wonder what it’s about, and eventually piece it together, but here, of course, we can’t leave anything unexplained and we certainly can’t count on the audience to piece anything together. In the original the people would just LINE their doors and windows with the tape. Here they cover them completely. I guess that makes it more X-Treme.
SPOILERS > > >
In here we also see several news reports about an unexplained rash of suicides in the area. Then there’s some material about how the people on the campus are dwindling. Again, in the original this was not called attention to. We stayed very closely within the perspective of our main character, and we only see suicides obliquely, until the end, where the movie opens up the perspective and there is a tremendously powerful effect of “Holy shit! This is happening all over and everyone is gone! The world is actually ending!” But here we can’t have anything sudden or anything hidden from the audience, so we have to foreshadow long ahead, in my opinion, losing a lot of the power of this effect in the original. Also in the original the main character is walking down the street, then sees this woman atop a tower. The woman throws herself off, falls, and BAM! Hits the pavement! This is one of those few moments that can make a jaded filmgoer like myself jump out of my seat and say “Oh my God!” It isn’t here. I saw a glimpse of an equivalent scene in the trailer, but I’m thinking they decided it was too much for our fragile American minds. Isn’t it funny how everything has to be X-Treme, and yet we can’t show anything that’s actually extreme?
So here someone goes to another friend’s house and sees the black stuff on his skin. He touches it, causing someone in the audience to exasperatedly say “And he’s gonna touch it!” We actually SEE the guy turn into the stain on the wall, which is considerably more vulgar than the original would ever do. It is also accomplished with CGI, which the original used very sparingly. By this time, the audience I was with was just making cracks. When Mattie’s printer starts printing out a giant puzzle for her [as seen in the trailer], someone shouted “Now let’s see what you have won!” And later, after a creepy monster has jumped out of the washing machine [also seen in the trailer], the guy next to me cackled “That’s it for you, Christina Milian!” Also, I don’t know, is it a common fear that something creepy might jump out of a washing machine? It must be, for as much as it appears in movies from Dark Water to The Video Dead. Later, just before Milian turns to dust, we see her in vivid close-up with a long river of snot running out of her nose and into her mouth, causing the audience to collectively go “Eeeewwww!”
Anyway, since we have to have a chance for hope and a way to defeat the virus, Mattie and Boy Band guy try to find Zeigler, who Josh was in contact with at the beginning. They think he has all the answers. So now we see how the city is deserted, which isn’t surprising since it had been foreshadowed for so long. As I said, in the original, we stayed very much with our main characters, and when we finally saw the city was deserted, it was really shocking, and quite a revelation; we’re not just talking about a few people, we’re talking about the very breakup of society and the end of the world. It was one of my favorite things about the original. Here it’s not that much of a shock. They find Zeigler, and he unleashes a BUTTLOAD of exposition: they were doing some computer shit and found a bunch of “frequencies we didn’t even know existed,” and one of them is apparently DEAD-FM. The dead are seeping into our world, and sapping our “will to live.” The red tape is the only thing with the properties to keep them out. Josh was working on a virus to reverse the whole thing, but they have to get down to the computer lab to put it in the system, and this is ghost central.
So Mattie and mister Boy Band go to the basement, where they are chased by ghosts, and Mattie almost gets her will to live sucked out. If you watch carefully, you can see Boy Band actually PUSH her will to live back into her with his hand. Could someone please push my will to live back into me? And while you’re at it, please push a sense of hope and optimism as well? Thanks. Anyway, so BB uploads the virus, and it works! For like three seconds. So they flee.
We have previously heard that “you’re safe in the dead zones. Places with no computer, cell service or wi-fi.” So they take off to the rolling hills of rural Ohio [SO not accurate… as someone who grew up in Michigan, I can assure you that Ohio is as flat as Paris. Hilton, that is]. They hear on the radio that you have to get rid of your cell phone, so of course the first thing Mattie does is open up her cell phone. They also chose to sleep under giant electrical towers, by the way. They are attacked by ghosts, and finally make it to the human encampments that are in a “dead zone.” We then have some ending voice-over about how “what was meant to connect us to each other connected us to worlds we were never meant to find.” The end.
< < < SPOILERS END
The main difference here [aside from how obvious and in-your-face everything is] is a fundamental change in the focus and point of the movie. In the Japanese version, it was the loneliness and social isolation that all the electronic gadgets were a symptom of that turned people into ghosts. It was a potent metaphor; people’s loneliness actually turned them into ghosts, and the ghosts spread through the devices that contributed to the social isolation in the first place. Therefore, it was the gadgets and the technologies themselves that were the problem. Here the gadgets are no problem, it’s just that we’ve tapped into a bad frequency, and THAT is the issue. For all the loving product placement for technology this film takes advantage of, I guess we can hardly expect it to come out and say that technology itself is bad. And really, Americans cannot be shown ANYTHING that might be seen as discouraging sales. Remember how right after 9/11 we were told that if people stop shopping the whole fabric of American society would crumble? You know how the ONLY solutions to global warming that President Bush is willing to consider are those that can be accomplished by new technology? Technology that will boost the economy? So clearly, a message that consumer products which are a cornerstone of our economy might not be entirely good CANNOT be uttered in the land of the free! The entire idea that teenagers are going to part with their cell phones and Internet because of some shitty low-grade horror movie just underscores how apparently important it is that any anti-technology message be suppressed. The sheer number of people in my audience checking their cell phones for any urgent messages that may have come in while they were at the movies seems to weigh toward the idea that we need not worry.
As I said, in the original, the breakdown of society was handled as quite an effective surprise. In a way, it was like a zombie movie, where you find things are going badly in your backyard, then find out it’s happening through all of society. When the plane crashes at the end of the original, it’s a “Holy Shit!” moment, where you realize that the world is truly fucked. Here it just kind of happens and has no impact. This movie also ends with a note of hope for humanity, whereas the original left us with much darker prospects. I do have to give the remake credit for going as far as it did in [SPOILER!] leaving us with a society that is reduced to living in ragtag shanty towns in rural areas. It could have had the virus work and everything go back to normal [END SPOILER!]. So I guess we should be happy for this small gesture toward the events in this movie having actual consequences.
Poor Kristen Bell picked the wrong movie to make her post-Veronica Mars debut in. It’s too bad, because she projects such canny intelligence on Veronica Mars, but here she is hampered by trying to make the lame lines of the script plausible, and it comes out the worse for her. It’s a little disturbing to see an actress of her promise and intelligence [she was quite an electrifying presence during her short scenes in Mamet’s Spartan, too] having to show her tits on the cover of Maxim and the like. Well, next time, Kristen. We’ll keep on pulling for you. Christina Milian is no worse than anyone else in most movies. The rest of the cast is quite generic and are unable to rise above the script and direction.
As a movie you might want to see, this movie is not as bad as the fact that it was delayed several times and that there were no screenings for critics would lead you to believe. It’s also not that great. Despite that obvious studio shill Earl Dittman says in his blurb: “Like no horror movie you’ve ever seen before or ever will see!” this movie is completely generic and all of the genuine creepiness of the original has been removed, leaving it just a tepid thrill machine in the vein of most low-rent horror movies lately. If you’re totally bored there are worse things you could see, but unless you’ve seen the original and are interested in how they fucked it up, there really is no reason to sit through this.
Hollywood doesn't get comic books
Now I will be honest; the majority of movies based on comic books are sub-par, do not follow the source material really well, and are too dumbed down for audiences due to a need to be overly generalized. Movie studios are too scared to invest time, effort, and heart into projects which could truly play out as our own modern mythology. People look at comic books and sneer as if this a juvenile form of entertainment without any literary value or merit. These tales are far more than simple entertainment. They are tales of action, adventure, and when written with respect for both the character and the content, capable of deep, emotionally rich stories. They can be progressive, such as X-Men, which symbolized racism and its harmful effects on society, and Daredevil, a comic which presented the ability of the blind to function in and contribute to society. They can be introspective, such as the brooding Batman or the alcoholic Tony Stark of Iron Man. They can be about the nobility of the human spirit, such as Superman and 300. And they can be about the darker side of man (Sin City, V for Vengeance).
Comic books are morality plays, insight into modern culture, views into human nature, and larger than life epics that help to make it all palatable because it attempts to prove to us the nobility of man. Like the tales of Greek gods and heroes, Celtic myth such as Beowulf, and the olden tales of Arthur and his knights, comics are our modern day legends.
The problem with the current studio system is that it does not recognize these tales for the rich characters and tales they have to tell. These are merely stories with explosions, excessive violence, over the top villains, and quirky jokes. The studios have glossed over the material and understood only the outlying plot but not the theme to what makes comic books such an endurable part of American, as well as world, entertainment.
One fine example is what became of the Spider-Man franchise. Whereas the first two movies did well in capturing the heart of the Spider-Man series, Peter Parker struggling to do what was right in a world that didn't always appreciate his efforts as he attempts to discover his place in it, the third movie simply crapped on story for more violence and mindless plot that served on to cram as many characters as possible into an already overburdened cast. Juvenile humor was used to deal with serious plot threads, such as how power can ultimately corrupt an individual (Parker with the symbiote which would eventually become Venom). Rather than show the inner turmoil of a character whose actions never seem capable of ever totally solving all of his problems (the more he helps the city the more he drives MJ away, whereas the more attention he spends on MJ and his own life the more the city suffers), they make it seem as if Peter's life is simple as can be. Having a full-time job in a precarious position as a photographer, attending college, trying to carry on a relationship, and being the sole champion of a city shouldn't come easily to anyone. Spider-Man 2 did well in showing how difficult it is to carry on so many responsibilities and the sacrifices that generally accompany having to make such choices of public service: when do the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. Spider-Man 3 completely crapped all over that dilemma by removing it and making being a superhero seem so easy. To put oneself consistently in harm's way, to sacrifice oneself for so many: to make it seem so easy is to completely undermine the heroic nature of being a superhero. Spider-Man 3 could have been about how the stress of doing so much finally led Peter into a gray zone where he began to take shortcuts (becoming violent, taking advantage of his powers to improve his own life versus those of others, etc.). Instead it became another mindless popcorn flick as Sony freaked over its declining profits and wanted to ensure its economic security.
Comic books are about the possibilities that lie within all of us. There is a reason the early heroes costumes were under there clothes, why these heroes were separate identities from who they really were. A hero can be anyone, anywhere, at any time. That possibility lies within all of us. It is not who we are but we we do, our actions, that define us as heroes. The real us is not important. It is the ideal, the hero that we seek to become, that is the truly super part about being a superhero. Likewise, the infamy that all of us are capable of, how readily we may slip into the abyss beneath that thin line we walk everyday are ready fodder for comic book tales.
Comic books are rich material. They are more than a child's early steps into novels. They are visual tales that captivate and illuminate the world around us. They are living, breathing art. They are us magnified. If only studios could realize this and put that heart into their translations to the big screen one could just imagine the amazing tale they could tell.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Soon you too can be a superhero!
Being the tech nerd that I am, I was fascinated by these advances I discovered via Sci-Fi Tech. Being a superhero might be closer to the realm of possibility than we ever thought:
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird. It's a plane. It's… you?
Admit it — you've fantasized about soaring through the sky like Superman or swinging from building to building like Spidey. Unfortunately, superheroes exist in only comic books, cartoons and movies. And then it usually takes being doused with radioactive waste or belted by gamma rays to hear a gun cock from a mile away or crush cars like soda cans.
But with scientists apparently drawing inspiration from the comics they read when they were kids, the line between science fiction and science fact has become blurred. Superheroics suddenly seem like a viable career option. Follow the link to see to see how you, too, with today's technologies, can spin webs and get superhuman strength.
Spider-Man
With his third major motion picture debuting today, Peter Parker's alter ego needs no introduction. He faces baddies like the Green Goblin, Doc Ock and Venom on a daily basis, so it's a good thing that bug bite gave Petey a talent for sticking to walls and the ability to shoot webs from his wrists, among other things.
Synthetic Gecko: Be A True Wall-Crawler
You won't need Spider-Man to get you out of a sticky situation. Thanks to the Synthetic Gecko technology developed by BAE Systems, the Spidey-suit has become more than a child's Halloween costume. Researchers discovered that billions of tiny hair-like structures along the reptiles' feet allow geckos to get their grip. Mimicking the real-life counterpart, Synthetic Gecko acts as a reusable super-strong adhesive that leaves no messy residue or stickiness behind. Just think: It's only a matter of time before you, too, can be a wall crawler.
BioSteel: Spin Your Own Web
Our beloved arachnid can do more than scale walls so you'll need the ability to sling webs, too, if you want to be a legit Spider-Person. Nexia Biotechnologies is eager to assist your pursuit of power. After injecting spider genes into a goat, researchers were able to extract a silk-like material, dubbed BioSteel, from the goat's milk. Because of its compatibility with the human body, BioSteel appears to have some remarkable real-life applications (artificial limbs, tendons and ligaments). Stronger than steel, and with a breaking strength of 300,000 pounds per square inch, wannabe webheads will undoubtedly dream about using the technology for a swing through New York City.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fantastic Four's Invisible Woman and Human Torch
Like the rest of the Fantastic Four, Susan and Johnny Storm gained their special powers after their experimental rocket was bombarded by cosmic rays. Thanks to the spacecraft's sucky shielding, Sue gained the ability to turn invisible and project force fields. Her blazing bro Johnny picked up the power to surround himself in flames, fly and fling fireballs.
Invisibility Cloak: Now You See Me, Now You Don't
If you want to be like see-through Susie, then clearly (pardon the pun) you, too, have to be able to make yourself invisible. Duke University scientists have created a cloak using artificial composite materials called metamaterials, which could enable you to do just that. "The cloak would act like you've opened up a hole in space," said Duke's David R. Smith. "All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space." If you can understand the scientific mumbo jumbo, more (super) power to you. Researchers are still uncertain what degree of invisibility can be achieved, but I sure do wish they could make the Ghost Rider movie disappear.
Heat-Ray Gun: Drop It Like It's Hot
Some like it hot, including the U.S. military, which has revealed a heat-ray gun for diffusing unruly crowds and forcing enemy surrender without the use of lethal tactics. This seemingly harmless weapon releases an invisible beam of high energy that can penetrate clothing and heat the skin (to a depth of less than 0.5 mm) to a harmless, but extremely uncomfortable degree (enemies can expect to run for cover).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Superman
Rocketed to Earth as an infant from the doomed planet Krypton (stop me if you've heard this one before), Kal-El's extraterrestrial physiology lets him absorb immense energy from his adopted homeworld's yellow sun, bestowing him with a host of mad superhuman skills. Two favorites: x-ray vision and the power to fly.
Xaver 800: I See London, I See France, I See Lois' Underpants
You, too, will be able to see right through those skyscrapers with Camero's Xaver 800 device. Because its ultra-wideband signal can travel through plaster, brick and reinforced concrete, acts of heroism are in your future. Your super-vision will allow you to locate people through walls up to 26 feet thick in just seconds, with hopes that in the future, a thickness of 300 feet won't be difficult. Unlike its conceptual counterparts, Xaver 800 is already on the market to police, fire and rescue teams and costs merely $100,000 — pocket change for getting Supes' super power.
Rocket Belt: Ready For Takeoff
You'll be soaring the blue skies with the Rocket Belt, from Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana. Donning this device won't put you on any best-dressed lists, but so what if it's not as stylish as Clark's red cape. TAM offers hands-on training (with housing and food, probably tastier than you'd get on any airline), 24/7 expert support and 10 flights in your own custom-made Rocket Belt. As long as you don't tip the scales at 300 pounds, you're ready for takeoff — and to become the marvel of your own Metropolis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Black Canary
Founding Justice League member (and Green Arrow's main squeeze) Dinah Lance was born with her superhuman ability: the "canary cry." With this ultrasonic scream, the stunning siren can shatter objects and incapacitate her opponents. Your girl may have the gift of gab, but be glad you're not getting an earful from Ms. Lance.
LRAD: Sonic Assault
We're wondering if Black Canary inspired this next tool of the superhero trade: the long-range acoustic device, LRAD, created by American Technology Corporation. LRAD, touted as a nonlethal weapon, has the capacity to cause permanent hearing damage within a range of 300 feet by producing a high-energy acoustic beam (technically known as a loud noise), enabling you to neutralize any neighborhood nuisance. U.S. forces in Iraq and the States have used LRAD for crowd control and protecting ports. And thwarting pesky pirates is now simple for cruise ships. Worried about your own drums? Though targets will feel like they are standing next to a jet engine, those producing the sonic scream are shielded from harm.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Captain America
Scrawnier than Sanjaya and thusly rejected by the military, patriotic Steve Rogers agreed to become the recipient of the Super-Soldier Serum. With his body, agility, strength, speed, endurance, and reaction time elevated to peak human levels, Rogers became San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds, er, um, Captain America, the living symbol of freedom.
Powered Exoskeleton: Unleash Your Inner Avenger
It's possible to be like Cap without taking performance enhancers (legal or otherwise). The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is planning to build an army of super soldiers, with powered exoskeletons designed to improve the freedom fighters' speed, strength and endurance. This exoskeleton would enable troops to carry hundreds of pounds as easy as a backpack and leap extraordinary heights and distances (watch out, Man of Steel). It may not be a serum, but it looks like the army just might someday get the juice they need to become super.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Iron Man
In between boozing and womanizing, wealthy weapons contractor Anthony Stark set aside enough time to design a suit of armor that would keep his bum ticker ticking. Later, he pimped out the suit to give himself superhuman strength, virtual invulnerability, flight capabilities and an array of weapons.
Future Warrior Concept: Dressed to Kill
Unless you're like Tony — a genius inventor with Benjamins to burn — don't hold your breath for the Future Warrior Concept. You won't be able to get your hands on the Natick Soldier Research Center's tricked-out uniform until 2025, which aims to outfit soldiers in a fully integrated, lightweight and lethal combat system.
The Iron Man-esque outfit is equipped with sensors that monitor the wearer's body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure as well as hydration and stress levels, which can be transmitted to medics and field commanders who might be miles away. An emissive display inside the headgear will let soldiers view GPS-generated maps and real-time video provided by forward-positioned troops, aircraft or satellites. The helmet also houses wide- and local-area network connections for sharing mission data (or photos of Jessica Alba) among squad mates. Additional bells and whistles include a built-in heating and cooling system and sensors for 360° situational awareness.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolverine
X-Man Wolverine was born with a mutant gene that lets him heal at an accelerated rate. Gunshot wound or burn injury? No biggie. The ol' Canucklehead needs mere minutes to recover. The atrocity that was X3? That might require an extended stay in the ICU.
ARP Trainer: Get Well Soon
Trips to the ER could be far less frequent for you, too, with a little help from an Accelerated Recovery Performance (ARP) trainer. This device helps prevent injury by relaxing healthy muscles. For injured muscles, electrical currents penetrate deep into tissue (no worries, bub, it won't hurt a bit) to strengthen and elongate them, speeding up recovery time. As a superhero, you can't afford to be on the DL for long. You could join the pack of 50 MLB, 100 NBA and 300 NFL players who already use ARP to prepare for game day.
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird. It's a plane. It's… you?
Admit it — you've fantasized about soaring through the sky like Superman or swinging from building to building like Spidey. Unfortunately, superheroes exist in only comic books, cartoons and movies. And then it usually takes being doused with radioactive waste or belted by gamma rays to hear a gun cock from a mile away or crush cars like soda cans.
But with scientists apparently drawing inspiration from the comics they read when they were kids, the line between science fiction and science fact has become blurred. Superheroics suddenly seem like a viable career option. Follow the link to see to see how you, too, with today's technologies, can spin webs and get superhuman strength.
Spider-Man
With his third major motion picture debuting today, Peter Parker's alter ego needs no introduction. He faces baddies like the Green Goblin, Doc Ock and Venom on a daily basis, so it's a good thing that bug bite gave Petey a talent for sticking to walls and the ability to shoot webs from his wrists, among other things.
Synthetic Gecko: Be A True Wall-Crawler
You won't need Spider-Man to get you out of a sticky situation. Thanks to the Synthetic Gecko technology developed by BAE Systems, the Spidey-suit has become more than a child's Halloween costume. Researchers discovered that billions of tiny hair-like structures along the reptiles' feet allow geckos to get their grip. Mimicking the real-life counterpart, Synthetic Gecko acts as a reusable super-strong adhesive that leaves no messy residue or stickiness behind. Just think: It's only a matter of time before you, too, can be a wall crawler.
BioSteel: Spin Your Own Web
Our beloved arachnid can do more than scale walls so you'll need the ability to sling webs, too, if you want to be a legit Spider-Person. Nexia Biotechnologies is eager to assist your pursuit of power. After injecting spider genes into a goat, researchers were able to extract a silk-like material, dubbed BioSteel, from the goat's milk. Because of its compatibility with the human body, BioSteel appears to have some remarkable real-life applications (artificial limbs, tendons and ligaments). Stronger than steel, and with a breaking strength of 300,000 pounds per square inch, wannabe webheads will undoubtedly dream about using the technology for a swing through New York City.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fantastic Four's Invisible Woman and Human Torch
Like the rest of the Fantastic Four, Susan and Johnny Storm gained their special powers after their experimental rocket was bombarded by cosmic rays. Thanks to the spacecraft's sucky shielding, Sue gained the ability to turn invisible and project force fields. Her blazing bro Johnny picked up the power to surround himself in flames, fly and fling fireballs.
Invisibility Cloak: Now You See Me, Now You Don't
If you want to be like see-through Susie, then clearly (pardon the pun) you, too, have to be able to make yourself invisible. Duke University scientists have created a cloak using artificial composite materials called metamaterials, which could enable you to do just that. "The cloak would act like you've opened up a hole in space," said Duke's David R. Smith. "All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space." If you can understand the scientific mumbo jumbo, more (super) power to you. Researchers are still uncertain what degree of invisibility can be achieved, but I sure do wish they could make the Ghost Rider movie disappear.
Heat-Ray Gun: Drop It Like It's Hot
Some like it hot, including the U.S. military, which has revealed a heat-ray gun for diffusing unruly crowds and forcing enemy surrender without the use of lethal tactics. This seemingly harmless weapon releases an invisible beam of high energy that can penetrate clothing and heat the skin (to a depth of less than 0.5 mm) to a harmless, but extremely uncomfortable degree (enemies can expect to run for cover).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Superman
Rocketed to Earth as an infant from the doomed planet Krypton (stop me if you've heard this one before), Kal-El's extraterrestrial physiology lets him absorb immense energy from his adopted homeworld's yellow sun, bestowing him with a host of mad superhuman skills. Two favorites: x-ray vision and the power to fly.
Xaver 800: I See London, I See France, I See Lois' Underpants
You, too, will be able to see right through those skyscrapers with Camero's Xaver 800 device. Because its ultra-wideband signal can travel through plaster, brick and reinforced concrete, acts of heroism are in your future. Your super-vision will allow you to locate people through walls up to 26 feet thick in just seconds, with hopes that in the future, a thickness of 300 feet won't be difficult. Unlike its conceptual counterparts, Xaver 800 is already on the market to police, fire and rescue teams and costs merely $100,000 — pocket change for getting Supes' super power.
Rocket Belt: Ready For Takeoff
You'll be soaring the blue skies with the Rocket Belt, from Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana. Donning this device won't put you on any best-dressed lists, but so what if it's not as stylish as Clark's red cape. TAM offers hands-on training (with housing and food, probably tastier than you'd get on any airline), 24/7 expert support and 10 flights in your own custom-made Rocket Belt. As long as you don't tip the scales at 300 pounds, you're ready for takeoff — and to become the marvel of your own Metropolis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Black Canary
Founding Justice League member (and Green Arrow's main squeeze) Dinah Lance was born with her superhuman ability: the "canary cry." With this ultrasonic scream, the stunning siren can shatter objects and incapacitate her opponents. Your girl may have the gift of gab, but be glad you're not getting an earful from Ms. Lance.
LRAD: Sonic Assault
We're wondering if Black Canary inspired this next tool of the superhero trade: the long-range acoustic device, LRAD, created by American Technology Corporation. LRAD, touted as a nonlethal weapon, has the capacity to cause permanent hearing damage within a range of 300 feet by producing a high-energy acoustic beam (technically known as a loud noise), enabling you to neutralize any neighborhood nuisance. U.S. forces in Iraq and the States have used LRAD for crowd control and protecting ports. And thwarting pesky pirates is now simple for cruise ships. Worried about your own drums? Though targets will feel like they are standing next to a jet engine, those producing the sonic scream are shielded from harm.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Captain America
Scrawnier than Sanjaya and thusly rejected by the military, patriotic Steve Rogers agreed to become the recipient of the Super-Soldier Serum. With his body, agility, strength, speed, endurance, and reaction time elevated to peak human levels, Rogers became San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds, er, um, Captain America, the living symbol of freedom.
Powered Exoskeleton: Unleash Your Inner Avenger
It's possible to be like Cap without taking performance enhancers (legal or otherwise). The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is planning to build an army of super soldiers, with powered exoskeletons designed to improve the freedom fighters' speed, strength and endurance. This exoskeleton would enable troops to carry hundreds of pounds as easy as a backpack and leap extraordinary heights and distances (watch out, Man of Steel). It may not be a serum, but it looks like the army just might someday get the juice they need to become super.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Iron Man
In between boozing and womanizing, wealthy weapons contractor Anthony Stark set aside enough time to design a suit of armor that would keep his bum ticker ticking. Later, he pimped out the suit to give himself superhuman strength, virtual invulnerability, flight capabilities and an array of weapons.
Future Warrior Concept: Dressed to Kill
Unless you're like Tony — a genius inventor with Benjamins to burn — don't hold your breath for the Future Warrior Concept. You won't be able to get your hands on the Natick Soldier Research Center's tricked-out uniform until 2025, which aims to outfit soldiers in a fully integrated, lightweight and lethal combat system.
The Iron Man-esque outfit is equipped with sensors that monitor the wearer's body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure as well as hydration and stress levels, which can be transmitted to medics and field commanders who might be miles away. An emissive display inside the headgear will let soldiers view GPS-generated maps and real-time video provided by forward-positioned troops, aircraft or satellites. The helmet also houses wide- and local-area network connections for sharing mission data (or photos of Jessica Alba) among squad mates. Additional bells and whistles include a built-in heating and cooling system and sensors for 360° situational awareness.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolverine
X-Man Wolverine was born with a mutant gene that lets him heal at an accelerated rate. Gunshot wound or burn injury? No biggie. The ol' Canucklehead needs mere minutes to recover. The atrocity that was X3? That might require an extended stay in the ICU.
ARP Trainer: Get Well Soon
Trips to the ER could be far less frequent for you, too, with a little help from an Accelerated Recovery Performance (ARP) trainer. This device helps prevent injury by relaxing healthy muscles. For injured muscles, electrical currents penetrate deep into tissue (no worries, bub, it won't hurt a bit) to strengthen and elongate them, speeding up recovery time. As a superhero, you can't afford to be on the DL for long. You could join the pack of 50 MLB, 100 NBA and 300 NFL players who already use ARP to prepare for game day.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
I am now in the top 80,000!!!
Oh happy days, happy days. I managed to finally break into the top 80,000 books sold on Amazon. I believe I was at 79,985. Hey, that is something! To those of you out there buying my book I give a heartfelt thanks. It's for you guys that I write the strange things that I do. I won't say I don't find humor in the oddities that bubble up when I sit down to create. In fact, I am as amazed as most at what appears on the screen following a session of transcribing my subconscious.
As to me and the revelations I've discovered in my life: I've discovered an odd thing concerning the twin and I. Now many believe in some of the old superstitions that twins dress alike, act alike, think alike, and even feel what the other is feeling. The strange fact I've discovered over this past year of living with my twin is that he truly does share many of my dreams. The interesting part is how he views these dreams versus me. A good example is that we both wanted to be writers, something I never knew about him. Now his choice of genre is quite separate from mine. He is more the horror/action oriented type. Me, I'm into whatever. My stories shouldn't be shoe horned. It's hard enough describing them let alone classifying them. There is also our drive to stay fit, various plot ideas (I don't share any of my future projects with anyone and yet he seems to know quite a few of them though with a twist), and more. It's just strange hearing him speak about things I generally think about. Maybe we are connected and if so does that speak on a spiritual or genetic level?
Oh, I'm going into weird metaphysical territory here. Imagine if it is true, that genetically we carry traits that determine thought and view. Is this due to the genes of our parents? Maybe a freak mutation? Maybe it evolves and changes as we grow, starting at one point but generally altering as we mature. Strange, strange theories those.
What does that say about a human being? If we are quanitifable on the genetic level does that rid us of our uniqueness? And if we are not unique, then is life really all that special? Is there really nothing more to us than a chemical reaction? I'm not sure how deeply I want to peer beyond the mists of mystery. Sometimes knowing the why only serves to lessen the value of the question.
That is the price of learning I suppose; every fact draws us further and further away from innocence. Oh, that purity of beginning and how each day and every thought serves only to stain once immaculate form with scars and graffiti. Evolution in any form, whether physical or mental, seems to only draw us further and further away from our origins. The light of enlightenment only blinds us to the beauty of the world, scorching fields of fantasy.
I am a learned man. Could that be why sometimes I no longer have faith in possibility?
As to me and the revelations I've discovered in my life: I've discovered an odd thing concerning the twin and I. Now many believe in some of the old superstitions that twins dress alike, act alike, think alike, and even feel what the other is feeling. The strange fact I've discovered over this past year of living with my twin is that he truly does share many of my dreams. The interesting part is how he views these dreams versus me. A good example is that we both wanted to be writers, something I never knew about him. Now his choice of genre is quite separate from mine. He is more the horror/action oriented type. Me, I'm into whatever. My stories shouldn't be shoe horned. It's hard enough describing them let alone classifying them. There is also our drive to stay fit, various plot ideas (I don't share any of my future projects with anyone and yet he seems to know quite a few of them though with a twist), and more. It's just strange hearing him speak about things I generally think about. Maybe we are connected and if so does that speak on a spiritual or genetic level?
Oh, I'm going into weird metaphysical territory here. Imagine if it is true, that genetically we carry traits that determine thought and view. Is this due to the genes of our parents? Maybe a freak mutation? Maybe it evolves and changes as we grow, starting at one point but generally altering as we mature. Strange, strange theories those.
What does that say about a human being? If we are quanitifable on the genetic level does that rid us of our uniqueness? And if we are not unique, then is life really all that special? Is there really nothing more to us than a chemical reaction? I'm not sure how deeply I want to peer beyond the mists of mystery. Sometimes knowing the why only serves to lessen the value of the question.
That is the price of learning I suppose; every fact draws us further and further away from innocence. Oh, that purity of beginning and how each day and every thought serves only to stain once immaculate form with scars and graffiti. Evolution in any form, whether physical or mental, seems to only draw us further and further away from our origins. The light of enlightenment only blinds us to the beauty of the world, scorching fields of fantasy.
I am a learned man. Could that be why sometimes I no longer have faith in possibility?
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Was there more to Hitler's dramatic change?
This, as well as my preceding posts on Hitler, are first and foremost a scholarly diversion. To those accusing me of diabolical or distasteful goals, please read the material and try not to draw unfounded, inflammatory views upon what is nothing more than a hobby. Largely, what I have written is fiction, though plausible and entertaining. I do not support fascism, racism, Nazism, or any other -ism for that matter. -Isms, in my opinion, are not a good thing.
The occultist magician Aleister Crowley liked to describe himself as the Antichrist of the Apocalypse (Therion - Beast 666) and once boasted: "Before Hitler was, I am." He often claimed that Adolf Hitler was his guinea pig or magic child, a term used by hypnotists to describe an "inner shadow" or product of the unguarded psyche.
While in America during the First World War, Crowley unflinchingly proposed "collecting a large number of photographs, full face and profile for each subject, and classifying them according to the horoscope." To other occultists, such a photo experiment would have been for "the educated astrologer to adopt scientific methods of study." But it would have also been a very good way for a schemer of in-the-flesh identity fraud to look for his double or look-alike:
"The labour required for this research would be enormous, but the bulk of it would be done by ordinary clerks. And as for the preliminary difficulty of collecting material, any great newspaper could carry out the scheme easily enough. It would of course be necessary to publish an explanation of the proposal with a questionnaire covering the principle points, and asking for good photographs to be sent with the filled up form." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Police and military intelligence files are even better sources for collecting mug shots than a newspaper survey. According to Crowley, Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard Universitywas the war-time secret director of German propaganda in America. Crowley went to great lengths to act as a friend to Munsterberg and even volunteered to collect and report information for Germany and the Central Powers of World War I.
Hundreds or perhaps thousands of photographs of German soldiers could have been classified and studied to find Crowley's look-alike. But why Aleister Crowley? According to some accounts, Crowley was not only an occultist, but also a double-agent during the First World War; a skilled practitioner of counter-espionage. He wrote disturbing anti-British stories for a pro-German weekly paper called The Fatherland, published in America by George Sylvester Viereck. And the New York Times even printed a three-column article about how he supposedly destroyed his British passport, while standing in a small motorboat with a woman playing a violin, under the Statue of Liberty. Crowley had told Viereck in 1915 that he wanted to help Germany in order "to exploit the stupidity of the British public." But he later claimed to others that he was actually doing mischief to Germany by working upon "the baser passions of the mob" and wrecking the German propaganda machine.
"It was necessary to persuade the Germans that arrogance and violence were sound policy, that bad faith was the cleverest diplomacy, that insult was the true meaning of winning friendship, and direct injury the proper conjuration to call up gratitude." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
The brutalizing or demoralization of Germany was his apparent goal. During the First World War, Crowley sent secret correspondence to an acquaintance in the British Intelligence Department, saying that he was "in a position to get into the full confidence of the Germans." Crowley maintained that he "had the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the German secret service," and that he "could go to Germany" under an assumed identity and "report on the conditions of the country" as a spy for Britain. When his secret proposal was rejected by British Intelligence, Crowley wrote that he "was compelled to go on playing a lone hand." If Crowley was indeed preparing to penetrate the German intelligence community, having his own German look-alike would have provided him with a safety escape measure. Perhaps this is where our doppelganger plot of identity fraud begins.
While it is still not clear whether Aleister Crowley was primarily spying for Britain, Germany, or a rogue regime, we do know from his writings that he was looking for a distinct type of doppelganger or "Magic Child." Of course, Crowley's double had to be someone who closely resembled him in photos and in the flesh. But Crowley also needed a look-alike with a clean police and service record, perhaps even a soldier noted for courage on the battlefield. He also needed someone single, an unknown loner living far enough away from any family members or friends who might otherwise notice the "switch-over." But most important, he needed someone who was still morally innocent; a virgin. The Magic Child would be the ritual sacrificial victim or foundational guinea pig for Crowley's new anti-Christian religion. The motives which determined the policy of Crowley's political actions would be kept secret. The Magic Child would be forced to forfeit his identity and, if the devil had his way, even his soul.
"For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence. It is the sacrifice of oneself spiritually. And the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result. And male he must be, because what he sacrifices is not the material blood, but his creative power." - Aleister Crowley
Switch-Over: The Great Change
In his 1983 book The Leader and the Damned, Colin Forbes was perhaps first to make popular the idea that Adolf Hitler's double may have been responsible for the final horrors of the Second World War. Forbes points to a 1943 bomb attack on the Fuhrer's private plane as the time for the "switch-over" between the real Hitler and his impostor. But recent studies indicate that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's personality (and physical appearance) took place long before he became well-known. It happened in 1918, while Hitler was still a soldier at the end of World War I.
About two months after winning the Iron Cross, Hitler was blinded by mustard gas during a battle. He was taken to the Pasewalk military hospitalin northernGermany where he was diagnosed as suffering from "psychopathic hysteria." Hitler was consequently placed under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Edmund Forster. What exactly was done to Hitler while under Dr. Forster's care is uncertain because years later, in 1933, the Gestapo rounded up all psychiatric records related to Hitler's treatment and destroyed them. Dr. Forster "committed suicide" in that same year.
In a work published in the History of Childhood Quarterly, psycho-historian Dr. Rudolph Binion suggested that Hitler's psychopathic visions may have been deliberately induced by the military hospital psychiatrist, Edmund Forster. Dr. Binion cited a book completed in 1939 entitled, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), written by a Jewish doctor named Ernst Weiss who knew Dr. Forster and had fled Germany in 1933. It is a thinly fictionalized account of Hitler's "miracle cure." As a follow-up in a published review, David Bonnell recently summarized the Pasewalk puzzle:
There is considerable controversy regarding precisely when Hitler became driven to destroy the Jews and dominate the world. There is strong evidence, however, that the 'hate and pain' which characterized Hitler's speeches in 1919 and afterward, as well as his fanatical purpose, were not in evidence prior to his psychiatric treatment.
Other psychologists have also published conclusions similar to those of Dr. Binion. In November 20, 1998, for example, the following feature article was dispatched by Reuters to international newspapers:
Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Reuters)-- Adolf Hitler's belief he was meant to rule the world may have stemmed in part from a hypnotic suggestion given during treatment for hysterical blindness in 1918, a Louisiana psychiatrist said in the November Journal of Forensic Science. Dr. David Post, a forensic psychiatrist at the state's forensics hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, based his theory on a book he believes used material from a German military hospital where Hitler was treated after he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack in the First World War in October 1918. Hitler was a corporal at the time, but the hospital records from that period were later destroyed by the Gestapo, although Hitler wrote of his sudden blindness and his resolve to enter politics if he regained his sight. After Germany's surrender on Nov. 11, 1918, Hitler wrote that he had "a supernatural vision ... A miracle came to pass" and he could see again.
In a book called "Eyewitness" by Ernst Weiss, an exiled German doctor and novelist, a German psychiatrist in a military hospital uses hypnotic suggestion in a still-accepted medical protocol for post-traumatic stress syndrome. He tells the patient A.H.: "I am a simple doctor. But perhaps you yourself have the rare power, which occurs only occasionally in a thousand years, to work a miracle. Jesus did it. Mohammed. The saints.... An ordinary person with such a condition would be blind for life. But for a person of particular strength and will and spiritual energy, there are no limits."
"You have to have a blind faith in yourself, then you will stop being blind ... You know that Germany needs people who have energy and blind self-confidence. Austria is at an end, but not Germany," the book passage stated. Hitler was born in Austria.Post believes that passage was based on the German Pasewalk Military Hospital notes and records of Weiss' friend, Dr. Edmund Forster, chief of the Berlin University Nerve Clinic, who treated Hitler at Pasewalk in 1918.
"It was chilling and disturbing to me to read what I believe may have been an account of his hypnotic session," Post told Reuters. Weiss wrote the book for a literary competition in Paris in 1933.
He committed suicide as the German army marched into the city and the book was not published until the 1960s. Weiss also was on the board of a German exiles newspaper Forster contacted in Paris in 1933, taking copies of his records from Pasewalk. Forster warned the editorial board not to be surprised if he were killed.
Shortly after returning to Germany, Post said, Forster was picked up by the Gestapo on charges of "harboring a subversive attitude toward the new (Hitler's) regime." After 13 days of interrogation, Forster was reported to have killed himself.The records of Hitler's 29-day stay at Pasewalk later were destroyed by the Gestapo, Post said. Although Hitler suffered what are now considered classic symptoms of mustard gas poisoning, including depression, he was diagnosed as a "psychopath with hysterical tendencies" by Forster even before the hysterical blindness, Post said.
Post is a faculty member at the Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans and a former fellow in forensic psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, where he began his research on Hitler. Post documented connections between Weiss and Forster through interviews with historians, a Hitler biographer, a copy of a 1943 U.S. Naval Intelligence report declassified in 1973, and records of the German exiles' newspaper.
"Because of the deaths and the records' destruction, we'll never be able to prove definitively if Weiss' book is a direct account from Forster's reports or just an incorporation of key passages," Post said. "But I'm convinced the account is true."
Psycho-historians agree that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's life occurred in Pasewalk Military Hospital while recovering from a mustard gas attack at the end of World War I. His hatred for Jews may have been implanted there by hypnosis, drugs and modern brain washing techniques. But if Aleister Crowley saw a double or look-alike in Hitler, his sudden switch-over to Aryan racism would not have been a coincidence. To bigoted Crowley, all women were unintelligent, and black men were primitive. Jews were vile in his opinion and "possess bad qualities" not because they want to, but because they have been forced to behave as such by the development of hostility over a long period of time:
"But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
An explanation for what may have happened in Pasewalk to cause Hitler's desire to rule the world is that Dr. Forster developed a scientific method of producing a "programmed assassin" or cruel, pre-coded tyrant using mind control drugs. But the drastic alteration of Hitler's personality may have been a more thorough switch-over than just a change of mind. Pasewalk would have presented a perfect opportunity for identity theft, the world's fastest growing crime today. If so, perhaps the real Adolf Hitler never left the military psychiatrist's watch, but remained an experimental hostage or guinea pig until his apparent suicide. An in-the-flesh impostor such as Crowley, using Hitler's name and personal data to spy within Germany in ways that involved fraud and deception, may have been the man who was actually released from Pasewalk Hospital a month later:
A young German soldier lies in a hospital bed, suffering from hysteria and mustard gas blisters. His face is bandaged with gauze. Is he really Adolf Hitler? When the bandages are finally removed, he will only slightly resemble his earlier person. A New Hitler is about to be hatched, a changed man, with almost no recollection of his past. His nose, forehead, and chin will seem permanently altered from inflammations caused by exposure to mustard gas. From now on, his voice will sound rough and croaking due to respiratory damage and coughing. He will wear dark glasses during the first period of recovery from his chemical blindness. He will have extreme difficulty recognizing his close friends and remembering old acquaintances. But he will be a New Hitler indeed, always mindful of the miraculous change which guided him on his occult mission to lead Germany. Literally overnight, he will quickly discover his eloquent powers of ceremonial speech. And he will debate with dogmatic opinions about history, geopolitics, philosophy, and other things that never crossed his mind before. The uneducated country bumpkin who never had a girlfriend will suddenly emerge from a few weeks in hospital as aseasoned diplomatic leader and spy. He will even shamelessly seduce his own niece.
Yet ironically, in 1918 the New Hitler will abruptly lose his artistic talent. Out of awkwardness, he must abandon the art of applying paint to canvas, even as a pastime. The illustrator who once made a living by selling landscape paintings in Vienna will now be all thumbs: he can't draw a straight line. His artist's signature will not be the same.
Hitler supposedly painted between one and three watercolors a day during his Vienna years. If one assumes he painted only one painting a day, and only three days a week, then the minimum number he would have painted would be six hundred, which is close to Hitler’s own recollection of "over a thousand." While the early years were doubtless lean at times, he was not nearly as destitute as he indicates in Mein Kampf. After Hitler's stay in PasewalkHospital he stopped painting and concerned himself with politics. Yet it would be wrong to say that he no longer had time for art.
One of his most ambitious projects was codename Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Assignment Linz). It involved establishing Linz, Austria as the art capitol of Europe and stripping Vienna of that distinction. It is interesting to note that one of Hitler’s favorite official functions was the dedication of art galleries depicting a variety of artworks, past and present. Yet he himself would no longer paint. Only when critics became skeptical of his artistic talent did Hitler finally produce a few more paintings and architectural sketches in the 1920s and late 30s. (Of course, there were also forgeries and copies of his work which the Nazis ordered destroyed.)If we assume that the real Adolf Hitler was still being held as a secret hostage since his stay in Pasewalk Hospital, it would not have been difficult for his military guards to persuade him (by threat or torture) to produce a few more paintings to satisfy the public's curiosity. Characteristically, Hitler's last artworks were interiors, as one might expect from a prisoner under secret arrest. It is highly possible that in those final paintings, the Pasewalk hostage left abstract visual clues about himself and his captors.
Keeping a doppelganger hostage could serve two main purposes in this type of in-the-flesh identity theft. First, to be able to interrogate the hostage at will, and extract any relevant information about that person's life, including other people's names, past activities, and special experiences worth quoting or remembering. Second, if the secret plan to commit genocide or violate sovereignty went wrong, the look-alike hostage would be blamed and killed in a way resembling suicide. The real criminal would then be able to escape unnoticed.
Rumors of a Hitler-Hostage: Official World War Two intelligence reports from some nations disclosed formal references to "a war prisoner named Hitler." According to Reich leaders, the mysterious hostage was Adolf Hitler's favorite nephew, Heinz, who they said was captured by Soviet troops. Resembling an off-camera scene from Fleming's "The Man From UNCLE," an exchange of prisoners was supposedly set in motion with Stalin to free the obscure Hitler-Hostage. But his fate remains unknown. He is presumed to have died in a death camp in 1942.
Time to Meet the New Man
Where was Aleister Crowley during Hitler's miserable stay in Pasewalk Hospital? For the most part, we know that Crowley had dropped out of sight. Anyone wishing to meet with him was kindly informed by friends or solicitors that Mr. Crowley had gone on a Masonic "Magical Retreat" to a secret place he called Oesopus Island. He supposedly went off to camp and canoe for over a month somewhere, writing a commentary on the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu. Since Crowley had studied for the foreign service, he learned various languages including Russian and modern Persian Farsi.
"Persian fascinated me more than any other language had ever done and I revelled in the ideas of the Sufis." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Crowley studied to be a diplomat at Cambridge, before devoting himself entirely to the occult, and was competent in his knowledge of English, French and German. He considered himself to be a neglected poet. But where was his mysterious Oesopus island, not listed in any Atlas or travel guide? Gary Alexander, a freelance writer who lives in New York, recently wrote:
Aleister Crowley came not to some Olympian myth of an upstate island named "Oesopus" for magical retreat but to our own Esopus Island right here in the Hudson Valley.Today, Esopus Island, a small rocky streak of land in the Hudson, is still uninhabited and officially off-limits. Coast Guard markers are sunk into the rock at the southern end. Visitors have left carvings in stone and painted graffiti, but one searches in vain for traces of Crowley or his campsite.
There are no wartime reports of Aleister Crowley ever being in Esopus Island, not even in the official Hudson Valley records. He simply vanished from America during the summer of 1918 and did not turn up in England again until the next year. When magical scoundrels may have escaped the process of legend-building, a New Hitler had entered Germany. The missing weeks that marked the end of the First World War would have been as good a time as any for Hitler and Crowley to meet. Biographer John Symmonds quotes Crowley:
I never met... someone so demonic as Herr Hitler. Why do you think I spend so much time with him? And come when he bids me? I tell you only the universe can prevail against Hitler. But the universe for the present doesn’t seem to be interested; though Hitler is the enemy of the universe, that is to say of God; for the universe is only God’s instrument. It is as if God said, "Let mankind learn a lesson; they need to open their eyes a little wider. Hitler will do that for them. Just wait. They will see things that men have never seen or heard before - such horrors that there will be no word in the German or any other language to describe them."
Hitler:"And are you an angel of darkness?"
Crowley: "You’ll find out in good time all about me. For the present, I’ll say this: if I were an angel of light, you wouldn’t want to know me."
Was Hitler really Crowley's guinea pig? "Before Hitler was, I am," replied the new man. By 1919, the New Hitler immediately began identifying all colleagues and fellow soldiers who smelled a rat (or impostor). He earned himself a promotion by having them rounded up to be shot as Communists. Then, he was assigned to the highly secret Political Department of the Army District Command. Hitler's new unit was an intelligence operation (Crowley's German-spy ambitions realized) that engaged in acts of domestic terrorism. The unit refused to accept the defeat of the German-Turkish Central Powers in World War I and assassinated some of the leaders who had negotiated surrender. The New Hitler had now entered a different, wealthier inner social circle. He avoided, and in many cases even refused to see his old acquaintances and relatives. In a secret wartime report, later published as The Mind Of Adolf Hitler, Walter C. Langer drew attention to the curious fact that the New Hitler supposedly always carried a photograph of his deceased mother in his vest pocket. Yet when questioned about her, he could not remember the date of her death.
Another peculiar detail noticed by Langer was Hitler's German "accent" or particular mode of pronunciation. It is taken for granted that Hitler sometimes uttered Germanic syllables with a local Austrian dialect. But his voice defect was important enough to be brought to the attention of William Donovan, the director of OSS (forerunner of CIA).
The New Hitler ran into serious dysfunction when he plotted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them at gunpoint to accept him as their leader. With the aid of famous World War One General Erich Ludendorff, he hoped to win over the German army, proclaim a nationwide revolt and bring down the German democratic government in Berlin. The Nazis put this plan into action when they learned there would be a large gathering of businessmen in a Munich beer hall and the guests of honor were to be the Bavarian leaders they wanted to kidnap. It did not occur to them to first take over newspaper offices and radio broadcasting stations. A beer hall was selected instead as the best site for their revolution. In an incidental way, Aleister Crowley had a self-centered tendency of using beer halls to stage his magical events. His family fortune came from the brewing of Crowley's Ale.
Crowley celebrated a Gnostic Mass the basis of which is in the believed sexual secrets of the Eucharist. Some of Wicca’s analysts guess the Gnostic Mass to be the origin of the “Cakes and Ale” ceremony that is part of Wiccan rituals.
"On November 8 and 9, 1923, SA troops under the direction of Hermann Goring surrounded the place. Hitler and his storm troopers burst into the beer hall causing instant panic. Hitler fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. 'Silence!' he yelled at the stunned crowd."
Hitler and Ludendorff then marched through the streets of Munich at the head of a group of roughly 3000 men, only to be met by police gunfire which resulted in sixteen dead and Hitler's arrest. This brought the would-be putsch to an end.
On February 26, 1924 the New Hitler was tried for his crime. He successfully turned the tables on his accusers with a "white brotherhood" propagandist speech. Hitler was sentenced to five years imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. It was during this time that his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), was dictated to Rudolph Hess. Hitler was released November 1924, after serving only nine months of his five year sentence.
Where was Aleister Crowley from the time of the failed Nazi beer hall putsch until Hitler's release from Landsberg Prison? In 1923 Crowley was suddenly expelled from Sicily by Mussolini (Mussolini later asked the Pope to excommunicate Adolf Hitler). Once more, Aleister Crowley dropped out of public view on a new "Magical Retreat," supposedly going to Tunisia this time, for several months of isolation to complete his autobiography, "The Confessions." He did not resurface in Europe again until 1924, having undergone the "supreme ordeal" for his initiation of the Masonic Ipsissimus Grade in Paris.
As one might expect, Crowley's published autobiography briefly described a dismal incident involving street gunfire: "I do not know whether I stepped over fallen bodies or not... The report of the pistol, the screams (for all I know!) of the wounded or frightened men, and the alarm given by the fugitives, had aroused the entire district."
One of Aleister Crowley's German secret societies - based on Ottoman Caliphate role play, assumed identities, and sex magic - was known as O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis). Crowley declared that the Silver Star (S.S.) was his grand occult school, in succession to the mission of Mohammed.
During a museum visit in Egypt with his wife Rose Kelly, Crowley was attracted to an ancient Egyptian artifact with exhibit number 666. Shortly later an entity known as Aiwass dictated "The Book of the Law" to Crowley. The book expounds a spiritual path called Thelema, the Greek word for "the will."
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
A member of the OTO wrote to Adolf Hitler on behalf on Crowley, suggesting that Thelema was the best choice for the national religion of the Third Reich. Hitler summoned an up-and-coming movie director named Leni Riefenstahl and asked her to film the entire week-long 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg. Her film of the Nuremberg rally bore the title personally chosen by Hitler, "Triumph of the Will," and became one of the most powerful propaganda statements ever made. As a pseudo-religious movement, the "triumph of Thelema" became political gold, symbolizing the neo-pagan dynasty Hitler claimed would survive for the next thousand years.
Aleister Crowley's most important occult ritual is said to have been the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. Ironically, Crowley was never able to complete the operation which lasts over a year. It is a series of prayers that allow magicians to converse with guardian angels and secure the salvation of the soul. And it requires a special place to perform it:
Scotland Yard: Foiled Again
Aleister Crowley attracted the attention of Scotland Yard on various occasions. Crowley claimed he had personal information concerning Jack the Ripper's identity. His sinister approval of the German-Ottoman Central Powers during World War I became a well-known embarrassment for England, where the national press called him "the world's wickedest man." But secret investigations into Crowley's espionage acts reached an even higher pitch during the Second World War.
One case involved a special unit that was created to monitor the movements of carrier pigeons using the expertise of Lord Tredegar, a falconer, whose birds of prey were sent in pursuit of suspected spy pigeons (The Falcon Unit). The question of Nazi pigeons was taken seriously enough to launch a pigeon deception plan over the English Channel during the German advance into Belgium and France. The object of this exercise was to confuse the enemy by filling the sky with pigeons. It is mentioned by Nigel West in MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945, (Great Britain, 1981). "Lord Tredegar, an Old Etonian Welshman, had been somewhat indiscreet after lunching with Lady Baden-Powell and actually gave her a guided tour of his office as well as describing how he was engaged in the destruction of Nazi carrier pigeons. When word leaked of Tredegar's lapse he was taken into custody at the Tower of London but released soon afterwards when MI5 intervened. This, however, was not the last of the affair. Tredegar was outraged by his arrest and threatened dire consequences. He retired to his country seat, TredegarPark in South Wales, and invited Aleister Crowley, the renowned occultist and magician, to prepare a spell. Coincidentally or otherwise, Tredegar's arresting officer fell painfully ill shortly afterwards and nearly died."
A more serious incident involving Crowley also concerned Maxwell Knight, the secret head of British Intelligence. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight joined MI5 in 1924 and was to have considerable influence with the intelligence hierarchy and the government. He recruited and ran individual agents. Max Knight thrived on the intrigue and greatly enjoyed the trappings of counter-espionage. Different agents knew him simply as 'M' (later made famous in the James Bond novels). His secretary Joan Miller compiled long lists of British people who were Nazi sympathizers.
Knight penetrated both the Right and Left and had recruited agents in every walk of life. According to Christopher Andrews in Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985), "Knight also had for a time a rather disturbing interest in the occult, going with Denis Wheatley to seances by the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley to research black magic for Wheatley's novels." Maxwell Knight's first wife committed suicide after an occult experience with Aleister Crowley.
A similar account of the above story is described by Anthony Masters in The Man Who Was M (Oxford, 1984).
It was by now becoming painfully clear to some officials that Aleister Crowley had more or less penetrated the heart of British Intelligence. John Baker White, Director of the Economic League between 1926 and 1939, later wrote that he had been recruited to run "Section D" of a private intelligence agency operated by a "Sir George McGill." According to White, McGill's agency "investigated all forms of subversion including communism... the international traffic in drugs and the traffic in women and children... [and] the cult of evil which Aleister Crowley was the centre."
Scotland Yard was no doubt concerned by the fact that several suspicious deaths were indirectly being connected to Aleister Crowley. He always claimed that dark, avenging spirits were protecting him from his magical adversaries, causing illness and accident. Yet Sir George McGill and other inspectors probably saw the known pattern of a serial killer emerging in Crowley's peculiar attitude to the tragic deaths of those around him.
Before Scotland Yard could lawfully seize Aleister Crowley, he supposedly quietly died in December of 1947. When the authorities arrived to investigate, they found that Crowley's Satanic disciples had broken into a countryside chapel and staged a secret "last rite" which involved sex orgies and the desecration of the small chapel. A handful of ashes found in a jar were reported to be Crowleys' last remains. An official coroner holding inquests on deaths was one of Crowley's followers, who call themselves New Age "Thelemites." Crowley's morphine-prescribing physician died within 24 hours.
Did Aleister Crowley suddenly die in 1947, or did he conveniently go into hiding after the collapse of Nazism? Leaving that question unanswered, Gershom Scholem, the leading historian of mysticism at the University of Jerusalem, later wrote that Aleister Crowley died in 1946. A typographical error? Scholem categorized Crowley as an occultist of "supreme charlatanism." Undoubtedly, the world was lied to about Hitler's double.
Surrender Rejected?
On the 10th of May 1941, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of Nazi Germany, flew to Scotland where he landed by parachute and surrendered to Britain. Was he a deranged peacemaker or the bearer of a message so bizarre it was not believed? Had Rudolf Hess discovered that his Fuhrer was an impostor?
Outraged Reich leaders quickly announced that Hess had been suffering from "a worsening mental condition." Most of Germany's Masonic lodges were violently forced to close. In Britain, secret intelligence agent Ian Fleming was carefully arranging a face-to-face meeting between Rudolf Hess and Aleister Crowley. But Fleming's proposal was rejected by his superiors of higher rank in the British Intelligence Department. Hess himself was finally treated summarily as either a madman or a doppelganger. He died in Spandau Prison in 1987. It appears that Hess committed suicide by hanging himself.
Recognizing the serious nature of identity fraud and the long term ramifications to its victims, the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 criminalized fraud in connection with the unlawful theft and misuse of personal identifying information, regardless of whether it appears in or is used in documents. - FBI
In May 2002, US Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal prosecutors nationwide to speed up investigations and trials of people accused of stealing identities.
- DAVID HO, Associated Press
"But the bloody sacrifice, though more dangerous, is more efficacious; and for nearly all purposes human sacrifice is the best. In the Sacrifice during Invocation, however, it may be said without fear of contradiction that the death of the victim should coincide with the supreme invocation." - Aleister Crowley
A blurred portrait is visible in the controversial photos of Adolf Hitler's "doppelganger suicide." The out-of-focus portrait is almost certainly a photograph of Eva Braun. It's size, contours, shadows, and range of luminance all bear marked similarities to a now-famous series of photos probably taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who was Hitler's personal photographer and "corporate" image maker.
The occultist magician Aleister Crowley liked to describe himself as the Antichrist of the Apocalypse (Therion - Beast 666) and once boasted: "Before Hitler was, I am." He often claimed that Adolf Hitler was his guinea pig or magic child, a term used by hypnotists to describe an "inner shadow" or product of the unguarded psyche.
While in America during the First World War, Crowley unflinchingly proposed "collecting a large number of photographs, full face and profile for each subject, and classifying them according to the horoscope." To other occultists, such a photo experiment would have been for "the educated astrologer to adopt scientific methods of study." But it would have also been a very good way for a schemer of in-the-flesh identity fraud to look for his double or look-alike:
"The labour required for this research would be enormous, but the bulk of it would be done by ordinary clerks. And as for the preliminary difficulty of collecting material, any great newspaper could carry out the scheme easily enough. It would of course be necessary to publish an explanation of the proposal with a questionnaire covering the principle points, and asking for good photographs to be sent with the filled up form." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Police and military intelligence files are even better sources for collecting mug shots than a newspaper survey. According to Crowley, Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard Universitywas the war-time secret director of German propaganda in America. Crowley went to great lengths to act as a friend to Munsterberg and even volunteered to collect and report information for Germany and the Central Powers of World War I.
Hundreds or perhaps thousands of photographs of German soldiers could have been classified and studied to find Crowley's look-alike. But why Aleister Crowley? According to some accounts, Crowley was not only an occultist, but also a double-agent during the First World War; a skilled practitioner of counter-espionage. He wrote disturbing anti-British stories for a pro-German weekly paper called The Fatherland, published in America by George Sylvester Viereck. And the New York Times even printed a three-column article about how he supposedly destroyed his British passport, while standing in a small motorboat with a woman playing a violin, under the Statue of Liberty. Crowley had told Viereck in 1915 that he wanted to help Germany in order "to exploit the stupidity of the British public." But he later claimed to others that he was actually doing mischief to Germany by working upon "the baser passions of the mob" and wrecking the German propaganda machine.
"It was necessary to persuade the Germans that arrogance and violence were sound policy, that bad faith was the cleverest diplomacy, that insult was the true meaning of winning friendship, and direct injury the proper conjuration to call up gratitude." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
The brutalizing or demoralization of Germany was his apparent goal. During the First World War, Crowley sent secret correspondence to an acquaintance in the British Intelligence Department, saying that he was "in a position to get into the full confidence of the Germans." Crowley maintained that he "had the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the German secret service," and that he "could go to Germany" under an assumed identity and "report on the conditions of the country" as a spy for Britain. When his secret proposal was rejected by British Intelligence, Crowley wrote that he "was compelled to go on playing a lone hand." If Crowley was indeed preparing to penetrate the German intelligence community, having his own German look-alike would have provided him with a safety escape measure. Perhaps this is where our doppelganger plot of identity fraud begins.
While it is still not clear whether Aleister Crowley was primarily spying for Britain, Germany, or a rogue regime, we do know from his writings that he was looking for a distinct type of doppelganger or "Magic Child." Of course, Crowley's double had to be someone who closely resembled him in photos and in the flesh. But Crowley also needed a look-alike with a clean police and service record, perhaps even a soldier noted for courage on the battlefield. He also needed someone single, an unknown loner living far enough away from any family members or friends who might otherwise notice the "switch-over." But most important, he needed someone who was still morally innocent; a virgin. The Magic Child would be the ritual sacrificial victim or foundational guinea pig for Crowley's new anti-Christian religion. The motives which determined the policy of Crowley's political actions would be kept secret. The Magic Child would be forced to forfeit his identity and, if the devil had his way, even his soul.
"For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence. It is the sacrifice of oneself spiritually. And the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result. And male he must be, because what he sacrifices is not the material blood, but his creative power." - Aleister Crowley
Switch-Over: The Great Change
In his 1983 book The Leader and the Damned, Colin Forbes was perhaps first to make popular the idea that Adolf Hitler's double may have been responsible for the final horrors of the Second World War. Forbes points to a 1943 bomb attack on the Fuhrer's private plane as the time for the "switch-over" between the real Hitler and his impostor. But recent studies indicate that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's personality (and physical appearance) took place long before he became well-known. It happened in 1918, while Hitler was still a soldier at the end of World War I.
About two months after winning the Iron Cross, Hitler was blinded by mustard gas during a battle. He was taken to the Pasewalk military hospitalin northernGermany where he was diagnosed as suffering from "psychopathic hysteria." Hitler was consequently placed under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Edmund Forster. What exactly was done to Hitler while under Dr. Forster's care is uncertain because years later, in 1933, the Gestapo rounded up all psychiatric records related to Hitler's treatment and destroyed them. Dr. Forster "committed suicide" in that same year.
In a work published in the History of Childhood Quarterly, psycho-historian Dr. Rudolph Binion suggested that Hitler's psychopathic visions may have been deliberately induced by the military hospital psychiatrist, Edmund Forster. Dr. Binion cited a book completed in 1939 entitled, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), written by a Jewish doctor named Ernst Weiss who knew Dr. Forster and had fled Germany in 1933. It is a thinly fictionalized account of Hitler's "miracle cure." As a follow-up in a published review, David Bonnell recently summarized the Pasewalk puzzle:
There is considerable controversy regarding precisely when Hitler became driven to destroy the Jews and dominate the world. There is strong evidence, however, that the 'hate and pain' which characterized Hitler's speeches in 1919 and afterward, as well as his fanatical purpose, were not in evidence prior to his psychiatric treatment.
Other psychologists have also published conclusions similar to those of Dr. Binion. In November 20, 1998, for example, the following feature article was dispatched by Reuters to international newspapers:
Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Reuters)-- Adolf Hitler's belief he was meant to rule the world may have stemmed in part from a hypnotic suggestion given during treatment for hysterical blindness in 1918, a Louisiana psychiatrist said in the November Journal of Forensic Science. Dr. David Post, a forensic psychiatrist at the state's forensics hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, based his theory on a book he believes used material from a German military hospital where Hitler was treated after he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack in the First World War in October 1918. Hitler was a corporal at the time, but the hospital records from that period were later destroyed by the Gestapo, although Hitler wrote of his sudden blindness and his resolve to enter politics if he regained his sight. After Germany's surrender on Nov. 11, 1918, Hitler wrote that he had "a supernatural vision ... A miracle came to pass" and he could see again.
In a book called "Eyewitness" by Ernst Weiss, an exiled German doctor and novelist, a German psychiatrist in a military hospital uses hypnotic suggestion in a still-accepted medical protocol for post-traumatic stress syndrome. He tells the patient A.H.: "I am a simple doctor. But perhaps you yourself have the rare power, which occurs only occasionally in a thousand years, to work a miracle. Jesus did it. Mohammed. The saints.... An ordinary person with such a condition would be blind for life. But for a person of particular strength and will and spiritual energy, there are no limits."
"You have to have a blind faith in yourself, then you will stop being blind ... You know that Germany needs people who have energy and blind self-confidence. Austria is at an end, but not Germany," the book passage stated. Hitler was born in Austria.Post believes that passage was based on the German Pasewalk Military Hospital notes and records of Weiss' friend, Dr. Edmund Forster, chief of the Berlin University Nerve Clinic, who treated Hitler at Pasewalk in 1918.
"It was chilling and disturbing to me to read what I believe may have been an account of his hypnotic session," Post told Reuters. Weiss wrote the book for a literary competition in Paris in 1933.
He committed suicide as the German army marched into the city and the book was not published until the 1960s. Weiss also was on the board of a German exiles newspaper Forster contacted in Paris in 1933, taking copies of his records from Pasewalk. Forster warned the editorial board not to be surprised if he were killed.
Shortly after returning to Germany, Post said, Forster was picked up by the Gestapo on charges of "harboring a subversive attitude toward the new (Hitler's) regime." After 13 days of interrogation, Forster was reported to have killed himself.The records of Hitler's 29-day stay at Pasewalk later were destroyed by the Gestapo, Post said. Although Hitler suffered what are now considered classic symptoms of mustard gas poisoning, including depression, he was diagnosed as a "psychopath with hysterical tendencies" by Forster even before the hysterical blindness, Post said.
Post is a faculty member at the Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans and a former fellow in forensic psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, where he began his research on Hitler. Post documented connections between Weiss and Forster through interviews with historians, a Hitler biographer, a copy of a 1943 U.S. Naval Intelligence report declassified in 1973, and records of the German exiles' newspaper.
"Because of the deaths and the records' destruction, we'll never be able to prove definitively if Weiss' book is a direct account from Forster's reports or just an incorporation of key passages," Post said. "But I'm convinced the account is true."
Psycho-historians agree that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's life occurred in Pasewalk Military Hospital while recovering from a mustard gas attack at the end of World War I. His hatred for Jews may have been implanted there by hypnosis, drugs and modern brain washing techniques. But if Aleister Crowley saw a double or look-alike in Hitler, his sudden switch-over to Aryan racism would not have been a coincidence. To bigoted Crowley, all women were unintelligent, and black men were primitive. Jews were vile in his opinion and "possess bad qualities" not because they want to, but because they have been forced to behave as such by the development of hostility over a long period of time:
"But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
An explanation for what may have happened in Pasewalk to cause Hitler's desire to rule the world is that Dr. Forster developed a scientific method of producing a "programmed assassin" or cruel, pre-coded tyrant using mind control drugs. But the drastic alteration of Hitler's personality may have been a more thorough switch-over than just a change of mind. Pasewalk would have presented a perfect opportunity for identity theft, the world's fastest growing crime today. If so, perhaps the real Adolf Hitler never left the military psychiatrist's watch, but remained an experimental hostage or guinea pig until his apparent suicide. An in-the-flesh impostor such as Crowley, using Hitler's name and personal data to spy within Germany in ways that involved fraud and deception, may have been the man who was actually released from Pasewalk Hospital a month later:
A young German soldier lies in a hospital bed, suffering from hysteria and mustard gas blisters. His face is bandaged with gauze. Is he really Adolf Hitler? When the bandages are finally removed, he will only slightly resemble his earlier person. A New Hitler is about to be hatched, a changed man, with almost no recollection of his past. His nose, forehead, and chin will seem permanently altered from inflammations caused by exposure to mustard gas. From now on, his voice will sound rough and croaking due to respiratory damage and coughing. He will wear dark glasses during the first period of recovery from his chemical blindness. He will have extreme difficulty recognizing his close friends and remembering old acquaintances. But he will be a New Hitler indeed, always mindful of the miraculous change which guided him on his occult mission to lead Germany. Literally overnight, he will quickly discover his eloquent powers of ceremonial speech. And he will debate with dogmatic opinions about history, geopolitics, philosophy, and other things that never crossed his mind before. The uneducated country bumpkin who never had a girlfriend will suddenly emerge from a few weeks in hospital as aseasoned diplomatic leader and spy. He will even shamelessly seduce his own niece.
Yet ironically, in 1918 the New Hitler will abruptly lose his artistic talent. Out of awkwardness, he must abandon the art of applying paint to canvas, even as a pastime. The illustrator who once made a living by selling landscape paintings in Vienna will now be all thumbs: he can't draw a straight line. His artist's signature will not be the same.
Hitler supposedly painted between one and three watercolors a day during his Vienna years. If one assumes he painted only one painting a day, and only three days a week, then the minimum number he would have painted would be six hundred, which is close to Hitler’s own recollection of "over a thousand." While the early years were doubtless lean at times, he was not nearly as destitute as he indicates in Mein Kampf. After Hitler's stay in PasewalkHospital he stopped painting and concerned himself with politics. Yet it would be wrong to say that he no longer had time for art.
One of his most ambitious projects was codename Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Assignment Linz). It involved establishing Linz, Austria as the art capitol of Europe and stripping Vienna of that distinction. It is interesting to note that one of Hitler’s favorite official functions was the dedication of art galleries depicting a variety of artworks, past and present. Yet he himself would no longer paint. Only when critics became skeptical of his artistic talent did Hitler finally produce a few more paintings and architectural sketches in the 1920s and late 30s. (Of course, there were also forgeries and copies of his work which the Nazis ordered destroyed.)If we assume that the real Adolf Hitler was still being held as a secret hostage since his stay in Pasewalk Hospital, it would not have been difficult for his military guards to persuade him (by threat or torture) to produce a few more paintings to satisfy the public's curiosity. Characteristically, Hitler's last artworks were interiors, as one might expect from a prisoner under secret arrest. It is highly possible that in those final paintings, the Pasewalk hostage left abstract visual clues about himself and his captors.
Keeping a doppelganger hostage could serve two main purposes in this type of in-the-flesh identity theft. First, to be able to interrogate the hostage at will, and extract any relevant information about that person's life, including other people's names, past activities, and special experiences worth quoting or remembering. Second, if the secret plan to commit genocide or violate sovereignty went wrong, the look-alike hostage would be blamed and killed in a way resembling suicide. The real criminal would then be able to escape unnoticed.
Rumors of a Hitler-Hostage: Official World War Two intelligence reports from some nations disclosed formal references to "a war prisoner named Hitler." According to Reich leaders, the mysterious hostage was Adolf Hitler's favorite nephew, Heinz, who they said was captured by Soviet troops. Resembling an off-camera scene from Fleming's "The Man From UNCLE," an exchange of prisoners was supposedly set in motion with Stalin to free the obscure Hitler-Hostage. But his fate remains unknown. He is presumed to have died in a death camp in 1942.
Time to Meet the New Man
Where was Aleister Crowley during Hitler's miserable stay in Pasewalk Hospital? For the most part, we know that Crowley had dropped out of sight. Anyone wishing to meet with him was kindly informed by friends or solicitors that Mr. Crowley had gone on a Masonic "Magical Retreat" to a secret place he called Oesopus Island. He supposedly went off to camp and canoe for over a month somewhere, writing a commentary on the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu. Since Crowley had studied for the foreign service, he learned various languages including Russian and modern Persian Farsi.
"Persian fascinated me more than any other language had ever done and I revelled in the ideas of the Sufis." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Crowley studied to be a diplomat at Cambridge, before devoting himself entirely to the occult, and was competent in his knowledge of English, French and German. He considered himself to be a neglected poet. But where was his mysterious Oesopus island, not listed in any Atlas or travel guide? Gary Alexander, a freelance writer who lives in New York, recently wrote:
Aleister Crowley came not to some Olympian myth of an upstate island named "Oesopus" for magical retreat but to our own Esopus Island right here in the Hudson Valley.Today, Esopus Island, a small rocky streak of land in the Hudson, is still uninhabited and officially off-limits. Coast Guard markers are sunk into the rock at the southern end. Visitors have left carvings in stone and painted graffiti, but one searches in vain for traces of Crowley or his campsite.
There are no wartime reports of Aleister Crowley ever being in Esopus Island, not even in the official Hudson Valley records. He simply vanished from America during the summer of 1918 and did not turn up in England again until the next year. When magical scoundrels may have escaped the process of legend-building, a New Hitler had entered Germany. The missing weeks that marked the end of the First World War would have been as good a time as any for Hitler and Crowley to meet. Biographer John Symmonds quotes Crowley:
I never met... someone so demonic as Herr Hitler. Why do you think I spend so much time with him? And come when he bids me? I tell you only the universe can prevail against Hitler. But the universe for the present doesn’t seem to be interested; though Hitler is the enemy of the universe, that is to say of God; for the universe is only God’s instrument. It is as if God said, "Let mankind learn a lesson; they need to open their eyes a little wider. Hitler will do that for them. Just wait. They will see things that men have never seen or heard before - such horrors that there will be no word in the German or any other language to describe them."
Hitler:"And are you an angel of darkness?"
Crowley: "You’ll find out in good time all about me. For the present, I’ll say this: if I were an angel of light, you wouldn’t want to know me."
Was Hitler really Crowley's guinea pig? "Before Hitler was, I am," replied the new man. By 1919, the New Hitler immediately began identifying all colleagues and fellow soldiers who smelled a rat (or impostor). He earned himself a promotion by having them rounded up to be shot as Communists. Then, he was assigned to the highly secret Political Department of the Army District Command. Hitler's new unit was an intelligence operation (Crowley's German-spy ambitions realized) that engaged in acts of domestic terrorism. The unit refused to accept the defeat of the German-Turkish Central Powers in World War I and assassinated some of the leaders who had negotiated surrender. The New Hitler had now entered a different, wealthier inner social circle. He avoided, and in many cases even refused to see his old acquaintances and relatives. In a secret wartime report, later published as The Mind Of Adolf Hitler, Walter C. Langer drew attention to the curious fact that the New Hitler supposedly always carried a photograph of his deceased mother in his vest pocket. Yet when questioned about her, he could not remember the date of her death.
Another peculiar detail noticed by Langer was Hitler's German "accent" or particular mode of pronunciation. It is taken for granted that Hitler sometimes uttered Germanic syllables with a local Austrian dialect. But his voice defect was important enough to be brought to the attention of William Donovan, the director of OSS (forerunner of CIA).
The New Hitler ran into serious dysfunction when he plotted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them at gunpoint to accept him as their leader. With the aid of famous World War One General Erich Ludendorff, he hoped to win over the German army, proclaim a nationwide revolt and bring down the German democratic government in Berlin. The Nazis put this plan into action when they learned there would be a large gathering of businessmen in a Munich beer hall and the guests of honor were to be the Bavarian leaders they wanted to kidnap. It did not occur to them to first take over newspaper offices and radio broadcasting stations. A beer hall was selected instead as the best site for their revolution. In an incidental way, Aleister Crowley had a self-centered tendency of using beer halls to stage his magical events. His family fortune came from the brewing of Crowley's Ale.
Crowley celebrated a Gnostic Mass the basis of which is in the believed sexual secrets of the Eucharist. Some of Wicca’s analysts guess the Gnostic Mass to be the origin of the “Cakes and Ale” ceremony that is part of Wiccan rituals.
"On November 8 and 9, 1923, SA troops under the direction of Hermann Goring surrounded the place. Hitler and his storm troopers burst into the beer hall causing instant panic. Hitler fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. 'Silence!' he yelled at the stunned crowd."
Hitler and Ludendorff then marched through the streets of Munich at the head of a group of roughly 3000 men, only to be met by police gunfire which resulted in sixteen dead and Hitler's arrest. This brought the would-be putsch to an end.
On February 26, 1924 the New Hitler was tried for his crime. He successfully turned the tables on his accusers with a "white brotherhood" propagandist speech. Hitler was sentenced to five years imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. It was during this time that his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), was dictated to Rudolph Hess. Hitler was released November 1924, after serving only nine months of his five year sentence.
Where was Aleister Crowley from the time of the failed Nazi beer hall putsch until Hitler's release from Landsberg Prison? In 1923 Crowley was suddenly expelled from Sicily by Mussolini (Mussolini later asked the Pope to excommunicate Adolf Hitler). Once more, Aleister Crowley dropped out of public view on a new "Magical Retreat," supposedly going to Tunisia this time, for several months of isolation to complete his autobiography, "The Confessions." He did not resurface in Europe again until 1924, having undergone the "supreme ordeal" for his initiation of the Masonic Ipsissimus Grade in Paris.
As one might expect, Crowley's published autobiography briefly described a dismal incident involving street gunfire: "I do not know whether I stepped over fallen bodies or not... The report of the pistol, the screams (for all I know!) of the wounded or frightened men, and the alarm given by the fugitives, had aroused the entire district."
One of Aleister Crowley's German secret societies - based on Ottoman Caliphate role play, assumed identities, and sex magic - was known as O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis). Crowley declared that the Silver Star (S.S.) was his grand occult school, in succession to the mission of Mohammed.
During a museum visit in Egypt with his wife Rose Kelly, Crowley was attracted to an ancient Egyptian artifact with exhibit number 666. Shortly later an entity known as Aiwass dictated "The Book of the Law" to Crowley. The book expounds a spiritual path called Thelema, the Greek word for "the will."
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
A member of the OTO wrote to Adolf Hitler on behalf on Crowley, suggesting that Thelema was the best choice for the national religion of the Third Reich. Hitler summoned an up-and-coming movie director named Leni Riefenstahl and asked her to film the entire week-long 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg. Her film of the Nuremberg rally bore the title personally chosen by Hitler, "Triumph of the Will," and became one of the most powerful propaganda statements ever made. As a pseudo-religious movement, the "triumph of Thelema" became political gold, symbolizing the neo-pagan dynasty Hitler claimed would survive for the next thousand years.
Aleister Crowley's most important occult ritual is said to have been the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. Ironically, Crowley was never able to complete the operation which lasts over a year. It is a series of prayers that allow magicians to converse with guardian angels and secure the salvation of the soul. And it requires a special place to perform it:
Scotland Yard: Foiled Again
Aleister Crowley attracted the attention of Scotland Yard on various occasions. Crowley claimed he had personal information concerning Jack the Ripper's identity. His sinister approval of the German-Ottoman Central Powers during World War I became a well-known embarrassment for England, where the national press called him "the world's wickedest man." But secret investigations into Crowley's espionage acts reached an even higher pitch during the Second World War.
One case involved a special unit that was created to monitor the movements of carrier pigeons using the expertise of Lord Tredegar, a falconer, whose birds of prey were sent in pursuit of suspected spy pigeons (The Falcon Unit). The question of Nazi pigeons was taken seriously enough to launch a pigeon deception plan over the English Channel during the German advance into Belgium and France. The object of this exercise was to confuse the enemy by filling the sky with pigeons. It is mentioned by Nigel West in MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945, (Great Britain, 1981). "Lord Tredegar, an Old Etonian Welshman, had been somewhat indiscreet after lunching with Lady Baden-Powell and actually gave her a guided tour of his office as well as describing how he was engaged in the destruction of Nazi carrier pigeons. When word leaked of Tredegar's lapse he was taken into custody at the Tower of London but released soon afterwards when MI5 intervened. This, however, was not the last of the affair. Tredegar was outraged by his arrest and threatened dire consequences. He retired to his country seat, TredegarPark in South Wales, and invited Aleister Crowley, the renowned occultist and magician, to prepare a spell. Coincidentally or otherwise, Tredegar's arresting officer fell painfully ill shortly afterwards and nearly died."
A more serious incident involving Crowley also concerned Maxwell Knight, the secret head of British Intelligence. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight joined MI5 in 1924 and was to have considerable influence with the intelligence hierarchy and the government. He recruited and ran individual agents. Max Knight thrived on the intrigue and greatly enjoyed the trappings of counter-espionage. Different agents knew him simply as 'M' (later made famous in the James Bond novels). His secretary Joan Miller compiled long lists of British people who were Nazi sympathizers.
Knight penetrated both the Right and Left and had recruited agents in every walk of life. According to Christopher Andrews in Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985), "Knight also had for a time a rather disturbing interest in the occult, going with Denis Wheatley to seances by the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley to research black magic for Wheatley's novels." Maxwell Knight's first wife committed suicide after an occult experience with Aleister Crowley.
A similar account of the above story is described by Anthony Masters in The Man Who Was M (Oxford, 1984).
It was by now becoming painfully clear to some officials that Aleister Crowley had more or less penetrated the heart of British Intelligence. John Baker White, Director of the Economic League between 1926 and 1939, later wrote that he had been recruited to run "Section D" of a private intelligence agency operated by a "Sir George McGill." According to White, McGill's agency "investigated all forms of subversion including communism... the international traffic in drugs and the traffic in women and children... [and] the cult of evil which Aleister Crowley was the centre."
Scotland Yard was no doubt concerned by the fact that several suspicious deaths were indirectly being connected to Aleister Crowley. He always claimed that dark, avenging spirits were protecting him from his magical adversaries, causing illness and accident. Yet Sir George McGill and other inspectors probably saw the known pattern of a serial killer emerging in Crowley's peculiar attitude to the tragic deaths of those around him.
Before Scotland Yard could lawfully seize Aleister Crowley, he supposedly quietly died in December of 1947. When the authorities arrived to investigate, they found that Crowley's Satanic disciples had broken into a countryside chapel and staged a secret "last rite" which involved sex orgies and the desecration of the small chapel. A handful of ashes found in a jar were reported to be Crowleys' last remains. An official coroner holding inquests on deaths was one of Crowley's followers, who call themselves New Age "Thelemites." Crowley's morphine-prescribing physician died within 24 hours.
Did Aleister Crowley suddenly die in 1947, or did he conveniently go into hiding after the collapse of Nazism? Leaving that question unanswered, Gershom Scholem, the leading historian of mysticism at the University of Jerusalem, later wrote that Aleister Crowley died in 1946. A typographical error? Scholem categorized Crowley as an occultist of "supreme charlatanism." Undoubtedly, the world was lied to about Hitler's double.
Surrender Rejected?
On the 10th of May 1941, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of Nazi Germany, flew to Scotland where he landed by parachute and surrendered to Britain. Was he a deranged peacemaker or the bearer of a message so bizarre it was not believed? Had Rudolf Hess discovered that his Fuhrer was an impostor?
Outraged Reich leaders quickly announced that Hess had been suffering from "a worsening mental condition." Most of Germany's Masonic lodges were violently forced to close. In Britain, secret intelligence agent Ian Fleming was carefully arranging a face-to-face meeting between Rudolf Hess and Aleister Crowley. But Fleming's proposal was rejected by his superiors of higher rank in the British Intelligence Department. Hess himself was finally treated summarily as either a madman or a doppelganger. He died in Spandau Prison in 1987. It appears that Hess committed suicide by hanging himself.
Recognizing the serious nature of identity fraud and the long term ramifications to its victims, the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 criminalized fraud in connection with the unlawful theft and misuse of personal identifying information, regardless of whether it appears in or is used in documents. - FBI
In May 2002, US Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal prosecutors nationwide to speed up investigations and trials of people accused of stealing identities.
- DAVID HO, Associated Press
"But the bloody sacrifice, though more dangerous, is more efficacious; and for nearly all purposes human sacrifice is the best. In the Sacrifice during Invocation, however, it may be said without fear of contradiction that the death of the victim should coincide with the supreme invocation." - Aleister Crowley
A blurred portrait is visible in the controversial photos of Adolf Hitler's "doppelganger suicide." The out-of-focus portrait is almost certainly a photograph of Eva Braun. It's size, contours, shadows, and range of luminance all bear marked similarities to a now-famous series of photos probably taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who was Hitler's personal photographer and "corporate" image maker.
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