Superman III [1983)

We all battle ourselves.

Self-hate.

Vs. self-love.

Pride vs. self-respect.

A subtle distinction there.

Alcoholism vs. sobriety.

Destructive evil vs. creative good.

But evil itself is created.

Man vs. machine.

Man vs. computer.

Sentient computers.

This is a pretty good movie.

Which gets lazy at the end.

But it is well worth watching.

Because it is iconic.

Richard Pryor really makes this one tick.

Sure, some of the comedy is goofy.

But I also gotta hand it to Christopher Reeve.

He really tapped into an impressive DARKNESS here.

Reeve essentially plays three characters in the film:

-nerdy, clumsy Clark Kent (this is impressive because his portrayal of Clark is so consistent)

-noble, honorable Superman (a suave character who always does the right thing)

-pathetic, angry, bitter, spiteful Evil Superman (Superman’s own opposite–spawned by a sort of “splitting” of Superman’s being)

The new aspect in this film is, of course, this dark side to Reeve’s acting.

And he does it well.

In this film, Clark returns to his hometown of Smallville.

Which brings us to Allison Mack.

And the New York sex cult NXIVM.

Amazingly, Lois Lane doesn’t get abducted in the Bermuda Triangle.

Which brings us to East Palestine.

And a fictional substance called beltric acid.

Which brings us to the Chinese “Belt & Road Initiative”.

The pants in poor countries are always falling down.

Because too skinny.

Hence need belt.

Hey, you can talk shit about the People’s Republic of China, but I got one word for you: TikTok.

TikTok.

YouTube Music (owned by Google [aka Alphabet Inc.]) BANNED all of my music.

Me.

Pauly Deathwish.

They REMOVED about 700 of my original songs.

And have refused delivery of about 300 more.

It all started with my anti-vaccine song “Crimes Against Humanity”.

From there, YouTube banned every song I have ever put out under my stage name Pauly Deathwish.

That includes simple love songs (what could possibly be questionable about those?).

Where is YouTube/Google/Alphabet headquartered?

YouTube is an American company HQed in San Bruno, California.

Google is an American company HQed in Mountain View, California.

Alphabet is an American company HQed in Mountain View, California.

Google (now a subsidiary) and Alphabet (the parent company of Google) are located in the same building (known as Googleplex).

An American company (probably at the urging of the FBI, CDC, or some other federal agency) COMPLETELY stifled my speech.

I am betting that YouTube/Google was merely a proxy for the American government when it came to my music.

Which is a violation of my Constitutional rights.

Anyone wanna take up my case?
It would have to be pro bono as a MOTHERFUCKER.

Cause I don’t make a cent.

Anyway.

Google (the Americans) banned me.

TikTok (the communist, supposedly-authoritarian Chinese) merely removed ONE of my videos.

I was mad about that video being removed.

So mad that I left TikTok.

But I am back on TikTok (pdeathwish).

Why?

Well, let me tell you about the other companies which have banned me.

And before I do, take a wild guess as to where they are headquartered.

Next is Truth Social.

That’s right, Donald Trump’s social media company (to the best of my knowledge) BANNED me (and my 81-year-old U.S. Army-vet father) from their platform.

AFTER THREE DAYS!

Why?

My presumption is because I publicly questioned Trump about his vaccine stance.

Magically, after three days, my account stopped working.

My dad tried to make an account some time later.

I also presume that he was banned because we share an internet connection.

See how that works?

It appears Trump banned MY WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY because I dared to present some facts from the VAERS system on his precious platform.

Now, I should point out.

i SUPPORT Trump in his current legal battles.

I find the political persecution of Trump to be disgusting.

As a disclaimer, I would add that I want to vote for RFK Jr. in 2024.

Indeed, my intention at this point is to vote for Bobby Kennedy.

N.B. I voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

Where is Truth Social HQed?

Sarasota, Florida.

Truth Social is a subsidiary of Trump Media & Technology Group.

Where is TMTG headquartered?

Palm Beach, Florida.

If we count YouTube/Google/Alphabet as one company and TruthSocial/TMTG as another company, that makes TWO American companies that have banned me.

Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China and their flagship app TikTok has not banned me.

Far from it!

N.B. No other major music streaming platform in the world (besides YouTube Music) has removed ANY of my material (to my knowledge).

Moving on.

The next company (guess where this one is from) to deplatfrom me was Elon Musk’s Twitter/X.

That’s right.

Even the dipshit assholes Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde never permanently suspended me.

They did, however, suspend me “accidentally” (I have the email from them where they admit that as the reason) FOR FOUR MONTHS.

What happened during the time that Twitter suspended me for four months?

A. the 2020 U.S. Presidential election

B. the Biden inauguration

After Jack and Vijaya admitted they had mistakenly banned my account, I was back in business.

And I had high hopes when Elon took over.

But he banned me.

For “platform manipulation and/or spam”.

It was a very vague, Kafkaesque accusation.

The platform manipulation part is particularly funny to me.

If I was manipulating the platform, then I obviously wasn’t doing a very good job at it.

Why do I say that?

Because my PUBLIC (not set to private) profile [which I had had for five years] had TWO [sic] followers (even though I think I had made 100,000+ tweets).

My followers were:

A. Dr. Steve Pieczenik MD, PhD

B. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

As for spam, don’t you think one of those two personages would have unfollowed me were I a spammer?

Where is X headquartered?

San Francisco, California.

And it appears to be a subsidiary of X. Corp. (which is also HQed in San Francisco, California).

Taken as one entity, that makes THREE A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N companies which have deplatformed me.

Meanwhile, the Chinese communists accept me.

Enough to let me post.

And my posts are seen.

Well, they get views (anyway).

The PRC has censored me.

But very little in comparison with these three American companies (which totally squashed me).

Why am I whining about this?

Because as an almost-unknown musician, I have very little way to tell the world about my music when major media companies (like YouTube and Twitter) ban me.

The further irony is this:

A. Trump’s company is called Truth Social. I came to him with sourced facts from VAERS, CDC, and BMJ. And my account magically thereafter stopped working. Permanently.

B. Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist”. If you can’t see the irony of him then banning me for nebulous reasons, I can’t paint a more-clear picture for you

There is one last company I would like to mention.

Rumble.

The ostensible “conservative” competitor to YouTube.

Rumble did not ban me.

But they refused my advertising dollars.

For a very small campaign with which I was trying to promote my music.

Why did they refuse my money?

Because my website (the one you are reading) is not “age appropriate”.

Let me translate that for you–I think they meant “you are not conservative enough”.

Where is Rumble headquartered?

Toronto, Canada.

Ok, so we finally found another country where my music is hated (by a small company).

But is my music hated in communist China?

Not if my access to TikTok is any indication.

I should also point out that Facebook has mercilessly censored me for at least the past five years.

So much so that I gave up on that platform.

One of their subsidiaries, Instagram, has also recently given me trouble.

Not allowing me to do this. Not allowing me to do that.

But I haven’t had the same issue with TikTok.

Where, by the way, are Facebook and Instagram (subsidiaries of Meta Platforms) headquartered?

Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.

Instagram is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.

Meta Platforms is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.

Like YouTube/Google/Alphabet, it is essentially one big company.

So there’s another American company suppressing (probably at the urging of various government agencies) my free speech which should be protected from the hand-in-glove fascism of cozy government/corporate-proxy activity.

Who’s gonna take my case?

I’m not holding my breath.

Which brings us back to Evil Superman.

Who dies by strangulation.

Hell, Superman himself almost even suffocates in this movie.

He gets caught in the Wayne Coyne bubble and it gets a bit uncomfortable for a bit.

Bloke can’t breathe.

But fortunately he can shoot laser beams out of his eyes like Jimmy Page.

We get weather modification.

Weather weapons.

Man vs. weather.

Man vs. machine-controlled weather.

Science fiction?

If you don’t wanna be an evil son of a bitch, you gotta watch out for that low-tar kryptonite.

Pryor is great as a three-star general.

Superman hates himself.

Because he has become poisoned.

Something has come over him.

He changes.

For the worse.

Just a slump (says Ricky).

Coming up on an election year, this was roughly the middle of Reagan’s Presidency.

And it was the decade when computing really fell into the hands of plebes like me.

[though I was not a digital native and didn’t really start becoming computer literate until about 1995]

May 1980: Pac-Mac released in Japan

October 1980: development of MS-DOS begins in U.S.

January 1982: the 8-bit Commodore 64 debuts at an electronics show in Las Vegas

August 1982: Commodore 64, the best-selling computer model of all time, is released

October 1982: MIDI standard is published

June 1983: Superman III is released

October 1983: Microsoft Word is released

This movie really falls apart when Vera becomes a cyborg.

It is utterly-ridiculous.

I’m just an ole chunk of coal.

But I’m gonna be a diamond someday.

Annette O’Toole is the secret weapon of this movie.

-PD

WarGames [1983)

Greetings, Professor Falken.

Today is my birthday.

41.

The age at which you “died”.

But you didn’t really die.

Is this real world or exercise?

Dawn Deskins wanted to know.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Joshua.

And the tree of life.

Klimt.

Seattle.

Starbucks.

Greetings, my friends.

It has been a long time.

Perhaps you thought I was dead.

Perhaps I thought I was dead.

And so this is a perfect movie with which to attempt a comeback.

“You can always come back/but you can’t come back all the way”

Bob Dylan said that.

To get her together.

I said that.

NORAD.

It was a rough day.

9/11/01

NEADS thought it was part of an exercise called Vigilant Guardian.

Michael Ruppert (may God rest his soul) documented the litany of war-games which were active on 9/11/01.

And Michael Ruppert wrote about this in a tome which should serve in some ways as a sort of bible for those wishing to know the truth about 9/11: Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.

Ruppert was wrong about some things.

“Peak oil”, for instance.

Perhaps my understanding is hopelessly daft, but it seems that hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) changed the geopolitical world immensely.

Just a few years ago, rather intelligent folks like Leonardo Maugeri (to name a typical example) were bemoaning the hydrocarbon “cliff” off of which we were about to leap.

Alas…

That has not been the case.

Maugeri’s book The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource is wildly, spectacularly wrong.

Which also means that Dick Cheney and all those arch conspirators* were also wildly, spectacularly wrong about the importance of the Caspian Basin.

Let me put it to you this way: if you really believe 19 blokes with box cutters brought the U.S. military machine to its knees, then I can’t help you.

As for me and my house (so to speak), we do not believe the box cutter theory.

And so we come to the DoD and fictional characters such as Stephen Falken.

And Albert Wohlstetter (not forgetting his ever-so-important-to-the-neocons wife Roberta).

And Steve Pieczenik.

So much has happened.

And so much is at a precipice.

“The Far East Strategy”.

Pshaw.

Tic-tac-toe.

It is my firm belief that 9/11 was some sort of engineered* conspiracy which involved boxcutters and Muslims in only the most tangential of ways.

But you will have to learn that parallel history.

If in fact you are interested.

And I shall show my enlightened, nonpartisan wisdom by recommending Trump-hater Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA above all other books on the subject.

Indeed, I look forward to hopefully adding another Trump-hater (Wayne Madsen) book to my collection soon…one which discusses to what extent and in exactly what ways Saudi Arabia and Israel were involved in the 9/11 false-flag/stand-down.

Which brings us back to Pieczenik.

And the Wohlstetters.

But let us at least attempt to make passing reference to the film under consideration.

If you’ve never seen this movie from the beginning (a cold start), I highly recommend adding such footage to your filmic knowledge.

The silos.

Minot?

Somewhere.

The Great Plains.

Nuclear missiles.

Humans in the loop.

Physical keys.

Launch orders.

Wisdom.

As humans are removed, MAD (what, me worry?) becomes even more unequivocally assured.

You might remember WHOPPER’s (WOPR) cousin [Siemens System 4004] from Willy Wonka…

It is somehow fitting that WarGames should make a Burger King allusion in 1983.

Indeed, this was the period of the very real (and ridiculous) “burger wars“.

But let’s get on with it…

Matthew Broderick plays basically the Bill Gates of this famous picture:

I must say…this film deeply affected me as a kid.

Perhaps it was due to the wonderfully effervescent (what is she, a sparkling wine?!?) Ally Sheedy.

Sure… There are a couple of moments of unbearable melodrama to make this movie slightly imperfect, but a kid doesn’t notice such things.

And so as a youth, I ate this film up.

Broderick and Sheedy as “partners in crime” (somewhat literally…).

It would be like some high school kid hacking into the USAF’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) to play a “game”.

Is this real world or exercise?

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Which brings us back to the ubiquitous Baudrillard.

And, if you can bear it, Debord.

Simulation.

Spectacle.

Fake.

Radar inserts.

Etc.

GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.

Big Gulp.

[g’uh?]

But let’s change tacks for a second.

TALENT SPOTTING.

Back in the Cold War days.

David Lightman would have been a prime target for recruitment by a foreign intelligence service (or so this film claims).

However, I would point out a plane which the passing analysis seems to miss: industrious brilliance.

Disruptive innovation.

Recording the analog [?) signal of the infirmary door with a psychiatrist’s micro-tape recorder.

Removing the tap from a pay phone and using a pull tab to hotwire a call back home (in lieu of a quarter).

These are the assets of operators.

Whether CIA or early FBI, appreciation for unconventional skill sets has been a hallmark of organizations engaged in successful growth.

Put differently, David Lightman would have made a pretty great spook.

Indeed, his skill set might have been best utilized by the NSA (no such agency).

Back in the day.

Before the world changed.

On 9/11.

The average citizen had no idea about the National Security Agency back in the Bobby Ray Inman days (1977-1981).

par exemple…

Research.

Know your enemy.

Half the battle.

Mirror’s other half.

It’s not impossible.

To make a matrix.

Collation.

Big data.

Must be organized.

Delphic databases.

Few films capture this.

This anxiety of being ushered into an FBI van.

Picked up on the street.

Fresh out of the 7-11.

A unique take on “talent spotting”.

Almost an accidental spy.

Like the DIA buffoons seen here:

These films are real.

And offer us hope.

About unconventional paths.

Former DIA head Gen. Flynn has an appreciation for this.

“…you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

[or some of it]

Enter the jaded Richard Dawkins character.

Really a rather laborious (and dead-on) archetype.

The “science worshipper”.

Obsessed with mass extinction.

Really, Dr. Falken is very much a J. Robert Oppenheimer character.

Which is appropriate, seeing as how the subject under consideration is Global Thermonuclear War.

WarGames is a genuinely moving, inspired film.

But it stumbles in a few places.

Not least, at the end.

Both of them 🙂

Yes, like the slew of “disaster movies” (such as Deep Impact) which glutted picture houses at the end of the last century, WarGames hones in on a maudlin tessitura which is made ineffective by repeated use.

In plain English, this film has two endings.

And they are identical.

Thus, anticlimax.

And the aforementioned melodrama.

Yet for all its imperfections, WarGames is a masterpiece of sorts.

And so I salute director John Badham.

Truly an indispensable film.

-PD

3 Comments

Citizenfour [2014)

Four days till the US election.

OK, three.

But we must take a look at things as they seem.

And analyze what they might be.

I have always written about Edward Snowden glowingly.

But this film is an enigma.

If you know the history of film, you realize that certain filmmakers (particularly Robert Flaherty) presented staged events as if they were documentaries.

This is known as docufiction.

And if you have followed my take on the two US Presidential candidates (Johnson and Stein can suck it…though Stein has true credibility), you’ll know that my assessment of Trump and Clinton has been mainly through the lens of film.

What we (I) look for is credibility.

Having watched all three Presidential debates (in addition to extensive supplemental research), it has been a no-brainer to conclude that Hillary Clinton has ZERO credibility while Donald Trump has immense credibility.

The differentiation could not be more mark-ed.

[Docu-fiction]

But what about Edward Snowden?

Let me start off by saying that Mr. Snowden does not come off as a wholly believable whistleblower in this film.

Perhaps Laura Poitras’ inexperience as a filmmaker is to blame.

Perhaps it is indeed because Edward Snowden is no actor.

But Mr. Snowden is completely inscrutable and opaque in this documentary.

HOWEVER…

there is something about his ostensible North Carolina drawl which rings true.

And so there are two major possibilities…

Edward Snowden is an extremely brave individual who succeeded in “defecting to the side of the public” (to paraphrase)
Edward Snowden is a superspy

I had read of Snowden. In studying what he had leaked, his credibility seemed beyond a shadow of a doubt. Such a damaging agent could not possibly have been a Trojan horse operation (so I thought).

Indeed, the most believable part of this film is the last 10 minutes or so.

Sadly, my “copy” of the movie switched to a German overdub for this final segment.

Which is to say, I was more focused on images in the finale.

Every once in a while I was able to make out the beginning of a phrase from William Binney or Glenn Greenwald.

At all other times during this last portion, the German superimposed upon the English made the latter an almost palimpsest.

My German is that bad.

Entschuldigung.

But here are my reservations concerning hypothesis #1 (from above).

A). Glenn Greenwald’s earliest interview after the leak was clearly shot with the skyline of Hong Kong in the background. It is somewhat inconceivable that the NSA in conjunction with the CIA (and possibly the FBI or DIA) did not immediately follow Greenwald’s every move from that point forward (courtesy of operatives under the Hong Kong station chief of the CIA).

B). Glenn Greenwald is a little too smooth to be believable (the same going for Snowden). Greenwald’s sheer fluency in Portuguese (a bizarre choice for a second language) seems particularly suspect. The credulous me wants to believe that Greenwald is simply brilliant. The incredulous me sees Greenwald as just as much a CIA operative as Snowden.

Indeed, hypothesis #2 would be that Edward Snowden is in fact a CIA operative. His complete calm at The Mira hotel in Hong Kong does not harmonize with a computer geek who just lifted the largest cache of the most top-secret files in world history. Instead, his mannerisms almost all point to someone who has been hardened and trained at Camp Peary rather than someone who grew up so conveniently close to NSA headquarters.

Snowden is admittedly a former employee of the CIA.

But what could the purpose of such a Trojan horse exercise possibly be?

One strong possibility comes to mind.

As we learn in Dr. Strangelove, there’s no purpose in having a “doomsday machine” if the enemy doesn’t know about it.

In fact, we don’t even need cinema to illustrate this.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations as much as they were mass-murder war crimes.

Weapons are “tested” often as much for the power of display as for the exercise of weapon efficacy.

But the world has always been a weird place.

And it is indeed possible that Edward Snowden is an idealistic, independent party in this affair.

The esteemed Dr. Steve Pieczenik (of whom I have spoken much recently) has lately called Snowden “no hero”.

I’m not exactly sure what he means by that.

Possibly Pieczenik knows the Snowden affair to positively be an intel operation.

Possibly Dr. Pieczenik (whom I respect deeply) merely sees Snowden as of no great bravery when compared to the men and women (both military and intelligence employees) who risk their lives on battlefields across the world…by direct order through the US chain of command.

But Dr. Pieczenik has also pointed out that some orders must be disobeyed.

That is part of the responsibility of defending the Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic”.

So we have a very interesting case here.

And it directly parallels our current election choices.

What SEEMS to be?

What is patriotism?

At what point must standard operating procedures be put aside?

What constitutes peaceful protest?

Who among us has the duty and privilege to spearhead a countercoup?

I’ve often thought to myself that I would be a horrible NSA employee because I would have a framed picture of Snowden on my desk.

Suffice it to say, I’m sure that is strictly NOT ALLOWED.

But this film makes me doubt the Snowden story.

As a further instructive detail, why does Snowden (in this film) feel so confident in his ability to withstand torture (!) as a means of coercing from him his password(s)?

Again, that does not sound like a standard ability of an “infrastructure analyst”.

Snowden does not admit in this film to ever having been a field operative.

Indeed, it almost feels like Louisiana Story or Tabu: A Story of the South Seas when Snowden drapes a red article of cloth over his head and torso to ostensibly prevent Greenwald and Poitras from visually seeing his keystrokes.

It is overly dramatic.

These are thoughts.

No doubt, someone knows much more than me about the truth in this strange tale.

And so the film is, in turns, shockingly brilliant and daftly mediocre.

In a strange way, it is just as suspect as James Bamford’s books on the NSA (which I have long suspected were really NSA propaganda pieces).

One of the keys to propaganda and social engineering is gaining the trust of your targets.

In a large-scale psychological operation, the entire world (more or less) is the target.

Back to cinema, we need look no further than Eva Marie Saint “shooting” Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

Yes, Body of Secrets (Bamford) was damaging to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US military in general (the revelation of Operation Northwoods) while also exposing Israel as a craven “ally” (the USS Liberty “incident”).

But if we are not careful, we are taken in by these juicy bits of “truth” (in all likelihood, very much true) on our way to accepting the whole book as an accurate exposé.

And this is what makes the world of intelligence so tricky.

Like a chess game in which you are blindsided by a brilliant move.

It takes years (perhaps decades) or an innate brilliance (perhaps both) to discern the organic from the synthetic in the shifting sands of this relativistic world of espionage.

I can only guess and gut.

-PD

paulydeathwish

musician and film critic

Tag Archives: computers

WarGames [1983)