UFO Roundup (March 2023)

1) From Zamone Perez's 3-31-23 MILITARY TIMES article entitled "Congress Calls for More Funding of Pentagon UFO Office":

Lawmakers have called to increase funding for the Pentagon’s unidentified aerial phenomena research office following the release of the Biden administration’s budget request.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) questioned senior Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, about the budget request for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Questions from Gillibrand, who chairs the Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, focused on why the office was underfunded for the second year in a row.

“The incidents last month involving the Chinese high-altitude balloon and the three unknown objects highlighted the need for us to continue to improve our understanding of UAP’s over U.S. airspace,” Gillibrand said.

In response, Austin pledged to fully fund the office in the future, and said the Pentagon requested $11 million for its research in the fiscal year 2024 budget.

Military Times has reached out to Gillibrand’s office for clarification on the figure, which was disputed during the hearing. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment about Austin’s remarks as of publication. On March 14, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told Military Times the fiscal year 2024 AARO budget figures were classified.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

2) From Michael Lee's 3-28-23 FOX NEWS report entitled "Video of Fighter Jets Shooting Down UFOs Over Alaska Is Classified, Won't Be Released: Pentagon":

The Pentagon said that footage of U.S. military aircraft shooting down two unidentified flying objects over Alaska is currently considered classified and will not be publicly released.

"The footage of the high altitude objects and the takedown of those objects exists," a Defense Department spokesman told Fox News Digital Wednesday, adding that "none of that footage has been cleared for release" and that "the footage remained classified."

The comments come after the Defense Department said last month that multiple "high-altitude objects" were shot down over Alaska at the direction of President Biden [...].

"No official video footage of the objects or their take-down have been cleared for release, and I would not have any information about a timeline for any future potential release," the DOD spokesperson said.

The lack of transparency from the Pentagon has fueled speculation about exactly what the military shot down, with one balloon hobbyist club speculating that at least one of the objects may have been one of their weather monitoring balloons.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

3) From Douglas Charles' 3-27-23 MSN.com article entitled "Tic Tac UFO ‘With No Visible Means Of Propulsion’ Caught On Camera Over California":

For the second time in less than two weeks, we have something mysterious happening with UFOs in the skies over California.

This latest UFO sighting was recorded on video by a passenger on a commercial Southwest Airlines flight on March 11th.

“On Saturday March 11, 2023, I was flying south over central California on Southwest Airlines 2463 from Sacramento Airport (SMF) to San Diego (SAN). I was seated in the window seating, on the left side in the middle of the plane, right behind the left wing,” the witness told UFO Sightings Daily.

“About halfway through our flight, I was looking out the window and saw a tic tac UFO in the distance traveling perpendicular to us. It was a white cylinder craft, with no wings, windows, markings, or discernible features. It was a smooth white cylinder with no visible means of propulsion or exhaust, plumes."

To read the entire article, click HERE.

4) From Bill Kaufmann's 3-26-23 CALGARY HERALD article entitled  "Nearly Six Decades After Seminal Montana UFO Incidents, Air Force Vets Brief Pentagon":

On the night of March 24, 1967, Robert Salas was a 26-year-old U.S. Air Force lieutenant cocooned 20 metres below the Montana prairie overseeing weaponry that could obliterate millions.

Instead, without any warning, Salas said his menacing cluster of 10 Minutemen 1 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) burrowed beneath the Malmstrom Air Force base a five-hour drive southeast of Calgary seemed to be prey.

“I felt we were under attack,” said Salas in a phone interview from his home near Ventura, Calif.

But the assailants, he said, weren’t any Cold War foes.

Soviet technology couldn’t have abruptly disabled the missiles’ guidance and control systems, which is what happened that night.

“You would have to have sent individual signals to each missile and within seconds, we had (no power),” said Salas, 82.

“This had never happened before and we have nothing that could do that now.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

5) From Bruce DeSilva's 3-21-23 APNews.com article entitled "Review: A Writer Investigates a UFO Cult in East Texas":

“The Donut Legion,” by Joe R. Lansdale (Mulholland)

Charlie Garner, a former private detective turned novelist, was staring through his telescope at the rural East Texas sky late one night when he received an unexpected visit from his ex-wife, Meg.

Or did he?

A storm had left the ground soft, perfect for leaving footprints and tire tracks, but in the morning there was no sign that she had ever been there. Had it been a dream? A hallucination? An apparition?

Charlie was still in love with Meg, who’d left him to marry another man, and what she’d come to tell him — if he hadn’t imagined it — was disturbing. She thought her husband had been murdered, and she wanted him to look into it.

As the plot of Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Donut Legion” gets rolling, Charlie is shaken but uncertain that there is anything to it at first. But soon, he learns that both Meg and her husband have disappeared, leaving all of their possessions behind.

Charlie’s suspicions turn to The Saucer People, a cult that had persuaded hundreds of gullible Texans to surrender their worldly goods and wait for flying saucers to carry them to paradise. The group was also known as The Donut Legion because it was laundering money through a string of local donut shops.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

6) From Sarah Sicard's 3-16-23 MILITARY TIMES article entitled "Tucker Carlson Shares Bizarre Tale of Troops Dying from UFO Encounters":

During an appearance on the “Full Send” podcast, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recalled a recent discussion with a Stanford professor, who, 11 years ago, was allegedly tasked by the Defense Department to investigate numerous cases of troops dying due to UFO-inflicted brain injuries.

The polarizing host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” shared that his source, who claimed to have expertise in traumatic brain injury, studied the brains of more than 100 troops who died following such encounters. The professor also told Carlson that there are dozens of open court cases that support his claims.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

7) From Douglas Charles' 3-14-23 MSN.com article entitled "Multiple Mysterious UFOs Captured On Video Over California Puzzle Witnesses":

A strange grouping of UFOs was recently captured on video in the sky over Menifee, California.

The glowing object or objects “moved slow and appeared and disappeared,” according to the witness.

“Watch this awesome catch in California,” prolific UFO expert Scott Waring wrote on his website. “The witness saw these objects appear and unite and then shoot into the clouds and vanish several times. This seems to have no other explanation except possible alien craft flying together.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

8) From Zamone Perez's 3-9-23 MILITARY TIMES article entitled "Pentagon UFO Chief Says Alien Mothership in Our Solar System Possible":

There is a possibility that extraterrestrial motherships and smaller probes may be visiting planets in our solar system, the head of the Pentagon’s unidentified aerial phenomena research office noted in a report draft shared Tuesday.

“[A]n artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions,” Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, wrote in a research report co-authored by Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department.

Kirkpatrick, who was appointed as director of the AARO when it was founded in July 2022, previously served as the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center. The AARO was established to investigate unidentified “objects of interest” around military installations, according to a Pentagon press release.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

9) From Paul Edward Parker's 3-1-23 PROVIDENCE JOURNAL article entitled "Two of the Most Iconic Flying Saucer Photos Ever Are from RI? Our History of UFO Sightings":

Was there an out-of-this-world cause of a 1967 power failure that knocked out electricity in Woonsocket, Cumberland and North Smithfield?

Harold A. Trudel of Woonsocket thought so.

A day later he told The Providence Journal and its sister paper, The Evening Bulletin, that he saw a UFO hovering over power lines in the city just before the blackout.

And Trudel went one step further: He produced several photos of the whirling, saucer-like craft, some of the most famous UFO photos ever published....

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Censorship Roundup (January 2023 to April 2023)

1) From Derek Seidman's 4-1-23 TRUTHOUT.org article entitled "Florida Teachers’ Unions Are Front Line of Resistance Against DeSantis’s Fascism," which features an interview with Paul Ortiz, author of AN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINX HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:

We’re facing a regional fascist movement that is also backed by a national reactionary movement. Everyone realizes by now that Ron DeSantis and the people around him in Florida are moving along a fascist tendency. If you follow the careers of people like Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini, DeSantis is borrowing from their playbook, which is to destroy civil society, especially the trade unions [...].

DeSantis is trying to abolish unions, critical race theory and gender studies because these are institutions and theories that help people challenge state power. There was a local news story that came out yesterday where a teacher had been assigning Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to his high school students. Now he’s learning he can no longer assign it.

This is a book that really gives you a sense of possibility and also a critique of society. I read that book as a senior in high school, as the son of combat military veterans. It really changed my life. And yet the state of Florida is trying to stop people from reading things like Slaughterhouse-Five, Toni Morrison, critical race theory, books about LGBT issues.

It’s very much a siege on the entire society, and one that’s being directed by — again — a segment of the American ruling class which is controlling the Florida State legislature.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

2) From Toyin Owoseje's 3-27-23 CNN article entitled "Agatha Christie's Classic Detective Novels Edited to Remove Potentially Offensive Language":

Novels by "Queen of Crime" Agatha Christie are the latest classic works to be revised to remove racist references and other language considered offensive to modern audiences.

According to the UK's The Telegraph newspaper, publisher HarperCollins has edited some passages and entirely removed others from its new digital editions of some of Christie's detective mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

The amendments to the books, published between 1920 and 1976, the year of Christie's death, include changes to the narrator's inner monologue. For example, Poirot's description of another character as "a Jew, of course" in Christie's debut novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," has been stripped out of the new version.

Throughout the revised version of the short story collection "Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories," the word "native" has been replaced with "local," The Telegraph reports.

A passage describing a servant as "black" and "grinning" has been revised and the character is now simply referred to as "nodding," with no reference to his race.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

3) From Elliot Tritto's 3-16-23 WUFT.org article entitled "Fahrenheit 352? What Alachua County Educators Are Saying About Book Removals":

Patrick Gallagher teaches 11th-grade AP English at Buchholz High School. Teaching English for 26 years, Gallagher has a master’s degree in educational leadership from the University of Florida and an educational leadership certificate.

“I love my job. It is the only thing I have ever wanted to do in my entire life,” Gallagher said. 

Gallagher’s curriculum has recently been altered by re-evaluating every piece of media. 

“Whether it be a book, movie, article or a YouTube video, we have to submit to be approved,” he said. 

According to Gallagher, the process involves a media specialist with a certificate to review the submitted information. With all his educational background, he feels his degree means nothing anymore. 

“This is completely superfluous,” Gallagher said. “This is creating a ridiculous amount of work for the two librarians to have this weight on their shoulders as well because we already had a process.”

According to Public School Review, Buchholz has over 2,000 students and 84 teachers.

And according to Gallagher, over 30,000 books will be re-evaluated from the school’s library. 

Gallagher said there were other alternative ways to suspend a book before the law was enacted. He said if enough parents complained, the principal would review if the book was worth teaching. They can also present it to the Alachua County School Board. 

He said there are three points of criteria the media specialist has to undergo to define what’s disapproved: Pornography, child’s comprehension, and ideology.

Gallagher said the first and third criteria are subjective and have no guidance.

Pornography has no definable term.

One of the books Gallagher can no longer teach is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. According to Britannica, “the absurdist, nonlinear work blends science fiction with historical facts, notably Vonnegut’s own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, during the Allied firebombing of that city in early 1945.”

Gallagher said the book came under scrutiny from the American Library Association at times with profanity and made it inappropriate. 

He said a picture depicts half circles, which present the idea of breasts. 

“At the end of the day, we have to define what is pornographic or not,” Gallagher said. “Like the nudity in a renaissance painting, is it porn or art?”

Regarding ideology, Gallagher said books like The Hate You Give can interpret negative views on police and law enforcement. 

“Maybe DeSantis felt this book had a negative view of police and has 'woke' ideology,” Gallagher. “As he said in his re-inauguration speech this year, Florida is where woke goes to die.”

Gallagher feels DeSantis is using the word woke as ‘newspeak’, the propaganda language used in George Orwell’s classic book, 1984. 

He feels this was done on purpose by the state’s administration to define things on their terms.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

4) From Jacalyn Wetzel's 3-24-23 UPWORTHY article entitled "Florida Principal Forced to Resign After Showing Michelangelo's 'David' to Students":

If you ask most teachers why they went into education, they'll share that it had nothing to do with the money and everything to do with their passion for teaching. Even with rapid changes in curriculum and policies, teachers who remain in the classroom are lovers of education and are doing their best to help kids learn.

Hope Carrasquilla, the former principal of Florida's Tallahassee Classical School, was one of those teachers who simply enjoyed teaching. As the principal, Carrasquilla was required to teach two classes. During her sixth grade lesson about Renaissance art, which is also a requirement of the school, Carrasquilla showed a picture of Michelangelo's "David" statue.

According to the Tallahassee Democrat, three parents complained about their children being shown the picture. Two of those parents were mostly upset that there wasn't sufficient notice given before the photo of the sculpture was shown. The third parent reportedly complained that the statue of the Biblical figure was pornographic.

Michelangelo's sculpture wasn't the only source of the complaint. It was essentially the entire lesson, which also included "The Creation of Adam," another Michelangelo piece, and Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." These are classic works of art that are easily recognizable by just about any layman, even if they can't name the artist.

Carrasquilla admitted that there was a bit of a kerfuffle with notifying parents of the lesson, which is a new policy implemented just two months ago. The policy requires that parents receive written notification two weeks prior to teaching potentially controversial content, according to The Independent.

Shortly after her lesson, Carrasquilla was called into an emergency school board meeting where she was forced to choose between resignation or being fired. She chose to resign, leaving the school less than a year after starting her tenure there.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

5) From Bill Galluccio's 3-8-23 KFIAM640.IHEART.com report entitled "'Goosebumps' Author R.L. Stine Says Books Censored Without His Permission":

The author of one of the most popular children's book series claims that the publisher made numerous edits to his works without his permission. A report last week from The Sunday Times found that Scholastic had made more than 100 edits to several books in the Goosebumps series to remove what it considered offensive and outdated words and phrases.

According to the Times, the changes include describing a character as "cheerful" instead of "plump," while descriptions comparing overweight characters to "a bowling ball" and having "squirrel cheeks" have been removed.

In the book Don't Go to Sleep!, one of the characters called Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina "girl's stuff." That phrase was removed, and now, the character just says the book is "not interesting."

While the Times' initial report said that Stine was on board with the changes, the author tweeted that he had nothing to do with the edits. He replied to a tweet from a fan who expressed her dismay that the books were altered.

"Lindsey, the stories aren't true. I've never changed a word in Goosebumps. Any changes were never shown to me," Stine tweeted.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

6) From Andrew Lycett's 2-27-23 INDEPENDENT article entitled "I’m Ian Fleming’s Biographer – There’s No Way James Bond Can Be Made ‘PC’":

Ian Fleming’s books have now followed Roald Dahl’s and been pruned of potentially offensive references on the advice of a new tribe of sensitivity readers.

But it’s never a good look to change what an author originally wrote. It smacks of censorship, and there’s seldom much mileage in that [...].

I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of that writer’s – and society’s – attitudes at a particular moment in time, whether it’s by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Ian Fleming.

The only changes to the text should come from the author [...]. [T]here's no way Bond's character in the Fleming books can be modified to make him politically correct. Fleming created a sexist, often sadistic, killer, with anachronistic attitudes to homosexuals, and to a range of people of different nationalities. These stand as evidence of how Britons (or at least some of them) thought at a particular moment in time.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

Regarding the above matter, novelist Nick Mamatas (author of THE SECOND SHOOTER and many other books) made the following observation on Facebook on 2-26-23:

Another scene in the book, set during a strip tease at a Harlem nightclub, was originally “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.” This has been revised to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.” 

Of course, the main locus of racism in the UK—the very existence of the Queen as the figurehead of imperialism—will remain intact across all volumes.

7) From Elizabeth Blair's 1-11-23 NPR report entitled "A Play About Censorship Is Censored — and Free Speech Groups Are Fighting Back":

PEN America and two other free speech groups are drawing national attention to Florida county school officials' decision to cancel a play that is itself about censorship.

Last week, Duval County Public School officials canceled a production of Paula Vogel's Indecent at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts. Officials said the play about a play about a love affair between two women is "inappropriate," as reported by WJCT.

PEN America, along with The National Coalition Against Censorship and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund released a statement condemning the decision and "urged school officials to rescind their decision and work with students to stage the play as planned."

Indecent is about the controversy surrounding a 1923 Broadway production of God of Vengeance, a Yiddish play by Sholem Asch. In the story, the daughter of a Jewish brothel owner falls in love with one of her father's prostitutes. Asch's script includes a love scene between the two women. The play was a hit in Europe and New York's downtown theater scene. But once it was translated into English and performed on Broadway, the entire cast was arrested and charged with obscenity.

The free speech organizations wrote that Indecent explores "LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, censorship, and antisemitism in the early 20th Century — themes which have striking relevance to the issues facing society today." They pointed out that Douglas Anderson's recent productions include RENT and Chicago, shows with, "as much, if not more, 'sexual dialogue' as is conveyed in Indecent."

"If vaguely-defined 'adult sexual dialogue' is reason enough to ban plays from school productions," the statement continued, "these, and many other canonical productions would be banned from student theaters — Romeo and Juliet for depicting sexually active teens, Oedipus Rex for its incestual themes, and other works that have serious literary and artistic value for students and community members."

Paula Vogel herself has also taken up the cause of her play's cancelation. The Pulitzer Prize winner released a statement and, according to an interview with PEN America, offered to meet with the school board. She also recorded a podcast with the student actors.

"What does surprise me is the courage of this high school student for speaking out and the courage of the students in that cast," she told PEN America. "The faculty and the administration have principally been silenced. I am fearing for their jobs. ... censorship of the arts is always the first step towards totalitarianism, and ultimately, towards genocide."

To read the entire report, click HERE.

TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD Has Been Nominated For a Rondo Award!

The nominations for the 21st Annual Rondo Awards have been announced! TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD (edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Tom Weaver) is included among the nominees for "Book of the Year (Non-fiction)." This book includes my long essay, "'We Didn't Lie to You, Folks!': The Thin Line Between Deception and Foma in the Worlds of Tod Browning." Please consider voting for TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD!

YOU CAN VOTE FOR TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD IN 3 EASY STEPS....

1. Copy-and-paste the ballot below into an e-mail.
 
2. Choose TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD in the BOOK OF THE YEAR (NON-FICTION) category.
 
3. Then email to David Colton (taraco@aol.com) by midnight on April 23rd, 2023.

Don’t forget to include your name in the e-mail!

--START COPYING--

BOOK OF THE YEAR (NON-FICTION):
— TOD BROWNING’S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD (Tom Weaver’s Scripts from the Crypt #12), compiled and co-written by Gary Don Rhodes (BearManor Media, softcover, 266 pages, $34). Unfilmed 1932 script sparks new appraisal of Browning.

--END COPYING--

TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD shines some much-needed light on many essential lost and/or forgotten Browning projects. If you would like to hear Gary D. Rhodes and I discussing the book on J.G. Michael's PARALLAX VIEWS podcast, click HERE.

Here's the publisher's description of TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD....

“THE GRAVE WILL GIVE UP ITS OWN, UNTIL THE WORLD WILL BE FILLED WITH THE WALKING DEAD.”

London throbs with terror when the dead rise from their graves and walk its streets. The city will soon be overrun. The horror of it all is driving residents to madness and suicide. One victim suffers possession, stigmata and crucifixion. With occult forces at work, civilization may be doomed!

Decades before Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and other industrial-strength shockers, Tod Browning’s 1932 screen treatment and script The Revolt of the Dead anticipated their horrors – and at the same time echoed Browning’s Dracula (1931) by featuring duplicates of several of that film’s major characters. Enter an unexplored corner of Browning’s universe as the Scripts from the Crypt series world-premieres this ultra-rare work, along with background information unearthed by the redoubtable Prof. Gary D. Rhodes.

To delve deeper into Browning’s storytelling process, Professors Rhodes, Nathaniel Bell, Will Dodson and Robert Guffey examine multiple script drafts of Browning’s Freaks (1932), Mark of the Vampire (1935) and The Devil-Doll (1936) and document the step-by-step evolution of those macabre tales.

The cinematic universe of Classic Horror’s “darkest” director is about to get weirder, wilder and more shocking!

"We justifiably gnash our teeth over what might-have-been had George Romero's sadly unfilmed 1980s Day of the Dead screenplay been made as Romero intended—anticipating as it did so much of what followed, including The Walking Dead TV series—but far, far more mind-blowing is this rediscovery of this lost screenplay to Tod Browning's unfilmed horror epic Revolt of the Dead. Expanding upon Abel Gance's hallucinatory march-of-the-WWI-dead climax to the 1919 J'Accuse, transforming William Seabrook's localized Haitian zombie scourge of his 1929 bestseller The Magic Island into an apocalyptic pandemic, what Browning intended to bring to the screen in 1932 would have scandalized & devastated audiences, rocketing the horror genre decades beyond what was considered even remotely possible at the time. Revelatory, relentless, essential reading!"
- STEPHEN R. BISSETTE (Swamp Thing, Taboo, Studio of Screams, Midnight Movie Monograph: David Cronenberg's The Brood)

 “A trove of fascinating materials that sheds light on Browning projects made and unmade.”
— MURRAY LEEDER, Horror Film: A Critical Introduction

You can order TOD BROWNING'S THE REVOLT OF THE DEAD through Amazon.

Fun in Florida!

From Lisa Tolin's 2-13-23 Pen.org article entitled "Florida Book Bans: Why Are There Empty Shelves in Florida Schools?"

You may have seen pictures of empty bookshelves in Florida classrooms, or heard about book bans across the state.

While efforts to remove books have been intensifying for the past year, what’s happening now is that new laws passed last year in Florida are having a clear chilling effect on classroom teachers and librarians. School districts are interpreting the laws differently, but some teachers have been told they must suspend access to their classroom libraries, so each book can be vetted by a media specialist for approval first. If they don’t comply, they could risk losing their teaching license or even being charged with a felony, if they are found in violation of one of these new laws.

For the most part, nobody knows what is being lost from the shelves, because so many books have been removed at once.

“It’s a bleak situation in parts of Florida. We’ve got teachers teaching on eggshells, in classrooms with no books,” said Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s director of Free Expression and Education programs [...].

One high school student in Manatee told the New Yorker, “I’m scared they’re going to take my one history book away.” In Duval, a media specialist described to The Independent, a “sad sight” of students walking by an empty, closed library unable to access books, until she reviews 37,000 of them. The process, she explained, is challenging and subjective: “The phrase ‘harmful to children’ is so vague… It used to just encompass pornography. They have now added excessive violence. They’ve added negative language. Just they have snuck so many little things underneath harmful to children, it just seems like they’re trying to catch us making a mistake.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

From Arno Rosenfeld's 3-7-23 FORWARD article entitled "What Do You Do When Neo-Nazis Start Projecting Swastikas Across Your City?":

When thousands of college football fans flocked to Jacksonville for an annual rivalry game between Florida and Georgia on Halloween weekend, they saw an unprecedented series of antisemitic displays. That Friday, a group of men stood on a freeway overpass with painted banners. “Honk if you know it’s the Jews,” one read.

That same night, an identical message appeared scrolling across a Wells Fargo skyscraper and the Lynch Building, a historic apartment tower, both downtown.

White supremacists had unfurled banners like that before, but what came next was new. As the sold out crowd at TIAA Bank Field started to stream out of the stadium on Saturday, they were greeted by a message more than 10 feet high and roughly the length of a billboard, projected with lasers onto the back of the structure. “Kanye is right about the Jews,” read the flickering, handwritten script.

Jacksonville quickly became the epicenter of antisemitic projections on buildings. “Tom Brady got Jew’d” appeared on a parking garage the following month. In December, projections showed up on a downtown bridge and on a former navy ship docked in the St. Johns River. A towering symbol that combined a swastika and cross was projected in January onto the headquarters of the railroad company CSX, one of Jacksonville’s largest employers.

While the most dramatic incidents made national headlines, the Anti-Defamation League tracked more that escaped coverage. It found at least seven such events in and around Jacksonville — and three more elsewhere in Florida — starting on Oct. 29 and running through January, when the city council outlawed them, according to data shared with the Forward. But the laser projections have since spread throughout Florida.

To read the article, click HERE.

From Vic Micolucci's 3-14-23 News4Jax.com article entitled "Jacksonville Jewish, LGBTQ+, FBI Leaders React to Spike in Hate Crime Reports":

Hate crimes reported in America are showing an alarming rise again, according to a revised report from the FBI documenting 2021 cases.

The report shows a 12% increase in hate crime reports across the nation. Those hate crime reports include 18 murders.

Agents point out that the data isn’t complete, as not all police departments and sheriff’s offices contributed. In Florida, the latest data report shows 116 reports of hate crimes.

From projections on downtown Jacksonville buildings and the stadium to signs on interstates and flyers in yards, North Florida has seen signs of hatred.

News4JAX on Tuesday spoke with Jacksonville Jewish Federation CEO Mariam Feist and asked her if she worries that messages like those are going to amplify the risk of crimes against the Jewish community.

“You always worry about that — less concerned about the actual people in these groups, as compared to someone who feels that what their messages that they’re portraying are a call to action,” Feist said.

Feist said she’s disappointed but not surprised to see the latest FBI report shows an increase in hate crimes.

“All reports have shown that they’re getting worse and especially in different areas, so Florida is a hotspot. Northeast Florida is a hotspot. And the rhetoric is just increasing,” Feist said.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

From Ken Tran's 3-21-23 USA TODAY article entitled "Florida Bill Would Ban Girls from Talking About Their Periods in School, GOP Lawmaker Says":

As local bills on gender, sexuality and diversity make their way through Florida’s state legislature, new legislation could ban any discussion of menstrual cycles in school before the sixth grade.

That breaks from the advice of medical providers who recommend talking to children about puberty and changes in their bodies before they occur.

First periods typically start between ages 10 and 15 but can begin as young as 9 years old. That means a student could likely be in third grade up to tenth grade, or later when a period begins.

During a subcommittee hearing in the Florida House on Wednesday, Republican state Rep. Stan McClain said his bill would include restrictions on girls talking about their menstrual cycles. The legislation doesn't specifically mention periods or menstruation but McClain told a subcommittee hearing that it would include restrictions on conversations about girls' menstrual cycles.

To read the rest of the article, click HERE.

Operation Mindfuck In the Wild

Yes, the rumors are true! We've had a confirmed sighting! OPERATION MINDFUCK has been spotted in the wilds of a Barnes & Noble in Long Beach, CA by a brave photographer/explorer with experience in capturing--under a panoply of life-threatening conditions--crisp images of ghosts, UFOS, and rarely seen, endangered, cryptozoological species (not to mention cutting-edge books attempting to unveil sadistic psychological warfare campaigns directed against the unsuspecting masses). But if you don't want to venture out into the dangerous landscape of a corporate bookstore to get your hands on a copy of OPERATION MINDFUCK, perhaps try ordering a copy from the publisher right HERE!!!

 

Bert I. Gordon, R.I.P. (1922-2023)

From Robert D. McFadden's 3-8-23 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Bert I. Gordon, Auteur of Mutant Monster Movies, Dies at 100":

Bert I. Gordon, the professed king of the monster movies whose B pictures featured giant rats, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, giant chickens, a colossal man and 30-foot teenagers laying waste to everything in sight, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 100.

His daughter Patricia Gordon confirmed the death.

As anxieties over nuclear testing and the effects of radiation swept postwar America, Mr. Gordon embarked on a low-budget filmmaking odyssey that turned mutated monsters loose on the hapless world [...].

“Bert has never given much thought to social message,” Beverly Gray wrote on the Beverly in Movieland blog in 2014. “He just wants to tell stories on film.”

Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive [...].

Called “Mr. B.I.G.,” both for his initials and for his techniques of creating movie monsters, Mr. Gordon wrote “The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G.: An Autobiographical Journey,” which was published in 2010.

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Robert Blake, R.I.P. (1933-2023)

From Alli Rosenbloom's 3-9-23 CNN article entitled "Robert Blake, Embattled Actor of ‘In Cold Blood’ and ‘Lost Highway’ Fame, Dead at 89":

Robert Blake, noted actor and Emmy-winner who starred in crime series “Baretta,” has died, according to his daughter, Delinah Blake Hurwitz. He was 89.

Delinah Blake Hurwitz told CNN in an email that her father died “peacefully” on Thursday “surrounded by family.”

Robert Blake died in Los Angeles from heart disease, according to his niece Noreen Austin, who released an obituary notice via a representative.

Over the course of more than 60 years working as a professional actor, Robert Blake amassed a number of memorable credits, including 1967’s “In Cold Blood” and David Lynch’s 1997 film “Lost Highway,” the actor’s final screen credit.

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Lost Highway - Mystery Man