ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher

Edinburgh University Press has recently launched a fascinating new series of books entitled ReFocus.  The purpose of this series, according to editors Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer, is "to produce new critical volumes from an interdisciplinary perspective which bring influential, yet neglected, American directors to the attention of a new audience of scholars and students in both Film Studies and American Studies."  

The next volume will shine a spotlight on Budd Boetticher, a trailblazing director best known for a series of innovative and subversive westerns produced at breakneck speed during the late 1950s and early 1960s.  The anthology will include my essay, "The Box in the Desert:  Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the 21^st Century Western" (6,000 words), which covers such films as Seven Men from Now (1956), Decision at Sundown (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960).  

ReFocus:  The Films of Budd Boetticher is scheduled to be released in the Autumn of 2016.

"Destroy All Monsters" in The Mailer Review

I just learned that my short story "Destroy All Monsters" (5,900 words) will be appearing in the Fall issue of The Mailer Review.  This will be the second time one of my stories has appeared in that august journal.  The first was "The Walk" in the Fall 2013 issue.  No doubt, Norman Mailer is turning over in his grave.  But I'm sure he'll get over it... at least I keep telling myself that.  The last thing I need to deal with right now is a pissed off Norman Mailer haunting me in my sleep. 

CONSPIRINORMAL

This past Sunday, on the 5th of June, talk show host Adam Sayne interviewed me for almost two hours on his podcast, CONSPIRINORMAL.  If you wish to listen to the entire interview, click HERE.  I enter the show at approximately 32:00.  

Noam Chomsky Confirms Gangstalking

In the following excerpt from his 1977 book Language and Responsibility, linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky confirms the existence of gangstalking as far back as the 1950s (Chameleo readers will no doubt notice the important role San Diego plays in Chomsky's testimony here):


"...in San Diego the FBI apparently financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing group of former Minute Men, transforming it into something called the Secret Army Organization specializing in terrorist acts of various kinds. I heard of this first from one of my former students, who was the target of an assassination attempt by the organization. In fact, he is the student who had organized the debate on economics that I told you about a little while ago, when he was still a student at MIT. Now he was teaching at San Diego State College and was engaged in political activities — which incidentally were completely nonviolent, not that this is relevant.

"The head of the Secret Army Organization — a provocateur in the pay of the FBI — drove past his house, and his companion fired shots into it, seriously wounding a young woman. The young man who was their target was not at home at the time. The weapon had been stolen by this FBI provocateur. According to the local branch of the ACLU, the gun was handed over the next day to the San Diego FBI Bureau, who hid it; and for six months the FBI lied to the San Diego police about the incident. This affair did not become publicly known until later.

"This terrorist group, directed and financed by the FBI, was finally broken up by the San Diego police, after they had tried to fire-bomb a theater in the presence of police. The FBI agent in question, who had hidden the weapon, was transferred outside the state of California so that he could not be prosecuted. The FBI provocateur also escaped prosecution, though several members of the secret terrorist organization were prosecuted. The FBI was engaged in efforts to incite gang warfare among black groups in San Diego, as in Chicago, at about the same time. In secret documents, the FBI took credit for inciting shootings, beatings, and unrest in the ghetto, a fact that has elicited very little comment in the press or journals of opinion.

"This same young man, incidentally, was harassed in other ways. It appears that the FBI continued to subject him to various kinds of intimidation and threats, by means of provocateurs. Furthermore, according to his ACLU attorneys, the FBI supplied information to the college where he was teaching that was the basis for misconduct charges filed against him. He faced three successive inquiries at the college, and each time was absolved of the charges brought against him. At that point the chancellor of the California state college system, Glenn Dumke, stated that he would not accept the findings of the independent hearing committees and simply dismissed him from his position. Notice that such incidents, of which there have been a fair number, are not regarded as 'totalitarianism' in the university.

"The basic facts were submitted to the Church Committee by the ACLU in June 1975 and also offered to the press. As far as I know, the committee did not conduct any investigation into the matter. The national press said virtually nothing about these incidents at the time, and very little since. There have been similar reports concerning other government programs of repression. For example, Army Intelligence has been reported to have engaged in illegal actions in Chicago. In Seattle, fairly extensive efforts were undertaken to disrupt and discredit local left-wing groups. The FBI ordered one of its agents to induce a group of young radicals to blow up a bridge; this was to be done in such a manner that the person who was to plant the bomb would also be blown up with it. The agent refused to carry out these instructions. Instead, he talked to the press and finally testified in court. That is how the matter became known. In Seattle, FBI infiltrators were inciting arson, terrorism, and bombing, and in one case entrapped a young black man in a robbery attempt, which they initiated and in the course of which he was killed. This was reported by Frank Donner in the Nation, one of the few American journals to have attempted some serious coverage of such matters.

"There is a good deal more of this. But all these isolated cases only take on their full meaning if you put them into the context of the policies of the FBI since its origins during the post-World War I Red scare, which I will not try to review here. The Cointelpro operations began in the 1950s, with a program to disrupt and destroy the Communist Party. Although this was not officially proclaimed, everybody knew something of the sort was going on, and there were very few protests; it was considered quite legitimate. People even joked about it."

You can read the entire article by clicking HERE.

The Pentagon's Killer Robot Army

The Pentagon Is Building a ‘Self-aware’ Killer Robot Army Fueled by Social Media.

 

This sounds like an Onion headline.  

 

It isn't.

 

It's the headline of Nafeez Ahmed's 5-12-16 Insurgence Intelligence article entitled "The Pentagon Is Building a 'Self-aware' Killer Robot Army Fueled by Social Media."  Here are the first few paragraphs:

 

"An unclassified 2016 Department of Defense (DoD) document, the Human Systems Roadmap Review, reveals that the US military plans to create artificially intelligent (AI) autonomous weapon systems, which will use predictive social media analytics to make decisions on lethal force with minimal human involvement.

"Despite official insistence that humans will retain a 'meaningful' degree of control over autonomous weapon systems, this and other Pentagon documents dated from 2015 to 2016 confirm that US military planners are already developing technologies designed to enable swarms of 'self-aware' interconnected robots to design and execute kill operations against robot-selected targets.

"More alarmingly, the documents show that the DoD believes that within just fifteen years, it will be feasible for mission planning, target selection and the deployment of lethal force to be delegated entirely to autonomous weapon systems in air, land and sea. The Pentagon expects AI threat assessments for these autonomous operations to be derived from massive data sets including blogs, websites, and multimedia posts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

"The raft of Pentagon documentation flatly contradicts Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work’s denial that the DoD is planning to develop killer robots."

 

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Reporters Are Stupid, Claims Pentagon

Journalist Morley Safer passed away on May 19, 2016 at the age of 84.  In a 5-20-16 article entitled "Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government Are 'Stupid,'" Joe Schwarz of The Intercept insists that the most important story Safer ever covered involved a Pentagon official named Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs during the Vietnam War.  In 1966, Safer published a newspaper column in which he repeated a comment Sylvester made to a group of American journalists in Saigon:  “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid.  Did you hear that? — stupid.”

What follow are a few choice excerpts from Schwarz's article:

"...Sylvester absolutely meant what he said. By the time he met with the journalists in Saigon he’d already told some of the key U.S. government lies about the Cuban missile crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin.

"You’d think this would have made an impression on American media outlets. And that going forward, they wouldn’t be so 'stupid' as to believe what they were being told.

"But in the 50 years since, from essentially everything the Nixon administration said about Vietnam, to the Reagan administration’s claims justifying the invasion of Grenada, to the George H.W. Bush administration justifying the Gulf War because Iraqi forces were massed on the border of Saudi Arabia, to the Clinton administration’s wild exaggerations about Serbian violence in Kosovo, to essentially everything the Bush administration said about Iraq, to Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denying the National Security Agency gathers data on millions of Americans, most of the U.S. media has been, as Sylvester put it, 'stupid.'

"Time and again, members of the Washington press corps have credulously accepted officials’ lies and misinformation and passed them on to their readers as the truth. Their real-time skepticism is almost nonexistent. And they keep doing it.

"If you look at the last few weeks of the New York Times, you’ll learn that U.S. officials say that American troops in Yemen 'are working at the headquarters’ level and are not near the front lines' and that a Navy SEAL killed in Iraq 'was two to three miles behind the front lines' when it happened. Do you think they’re telling the truth? Assuming that would be stupid.

"And the important precedent you won’t find mentioned in either New York Times story is that John F. Kennedy initially lied about U.S. advisers being involved in combat in Vietnam, and Ronald Reagan lied about U.S. advisers being involved in combat in El Salvador. (A 1984 Miami Herald story quoted an Army officer who said the military would go so far as to fly dead American soldiers home from Indochina and 'insert a body or two into the wreckage' of helicopter crashes on U.S. army bases.)

"Safer’s death should remind us of what the media consistently forgets."

To read Schwarz's entire article, click HERE.

Gangstalking in the Imperial County

More and more people are becoming aware of the gangstalking phenomenon.  This illegal harassment of innocent civilians is becoming so prevalent that it's difficult to avoid.  References to it are beginning to pop up all over the place.  Immediately below you will see a minor--but nonetheless relevant--example from the 5-17-16 edition of the Imperial Valley Press.  The matter-of-fact tone of the complaint makes it worthy of one's attention:

Is gang stalking allowed in the Imperial County?

Posted: Tuesday, May 17, 2016 12:35 am

By IMPERIAL VALLEY PRESS STAFF | 0 comments

• 
• Posted on May 17, 2016
  by Staff Report

"Is gang stalking allowed in the Imperial County? Can you please inform the community on the legalities of this type of participation? I observed a vehicle being chased down the highway and illegal lights and lasers were being flashed at the driver. That is not safe." — Concerned Driver, Brawley
No it’s not safe and yes it is illegal according to information that California Highway Patrol Public Information Officer Fernando Alvarez provided us.



You can find the original post by clicking right HERE.