winters in Pyeongchang... luge lessons...

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you weren’t able to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference from the real world and the dream world?”

In the late 1990's "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" came to the big screen as a campy send up of James Bond film, MI6, Super Villains, the Cold War, the 60's, sexual liberation and therapy culture. Lighthearted and goofy, the picture is something of a throw away time travel farce that fast forwards a swing'n sex crazed British spy 30 years into the future using cryogenic technology to "keep him on ice". as it were, until the fateful day his diabolical nemesis, Dr. Evil, would return to earth from his orbiting layer. There is one scene from the film that resonates and has become something of a cultural touchstone that far outshines other more dedicated and earnest efforts to root out the source of evil. It is that moment in the film when Dr. Evil is convinced to attend a group therapy counseling session with his son Scott in hopes that a dialog of mutual understanding and respect might be developed between father and son by reveling truths or secrets thereby building a bridge of empathy. What transpires is comedy gold, but it's also profoundly moving and unsettling because in it we are confronted with a man who does not know himself and, more importantly, will never know himself. He is, without intention, evil and because he is evil he assumes that he must have intended to become what he is, but that's not the way evil works. People who are "evil" simply lack the courage, prudence, fortitude and justice to honestly look upon themselves and admit, then accept their human frailty or sin as the preachers like to call it.

"The details of my life are quite inconsequential.... Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize; he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament... My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon... luge lessons... In the spring, we'd make meat helmets... When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds — pretty standard, really. At the age of 12, I received my first scribe. At the age of 14, a Zoroastrian named Vilmer ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum — it's breathtaking... I suggest you try it."

Evil vs. Mystery

I was thinking on Dr. Evil while watching the Winter Olympics and not just because Emily Sweeney crashed her luge at 70 MPH and then said "I'm okay." The opening ceremony was a spectacle of augmented reality, a unified Korea, K-pop stars singing "Imagine", no Russia (the country), robots and drones all coming together to celebrate sport, fire the imagination and proclaim, to an audience of billions, "I'm okay." With regards to the sports I have admit that on the Insanity Scale the winter games beat the summer games hands down - no contest - because there's noting like the luge, downhill or even figure skating (to say noting of ski jumping or half-pipe) in the summer games. The winter games are very Dr. Evil compared to the summer games Austin Powers and this duality is on display every night for those with eyes to see. My imagination is darker than John Lennon's and when I see the Olympic Rings magically formed in the night sky by a fleet of 1,000+ Intel drones my thoughts naturally turn to other scenarios far more or less unifying. As for everything being okay, it's clearly not because these contests are very strange - for one thing the nationalism at the center of the olympic competition is illusory (at best) and makes a mockery of the podium ceremony with its flags and anthems. The figure skaters all train in the state of Michigan (Americas Erect Penis) under the same coach who's constantly changing parkas of the various "nations" her clients represent. Aliona Savchenko competing in her 5th olympics, the previous 4 representing Russia, won gold for the nation of Germany with her skating partner, Bruno Massot, who is French but attained Germany citizenship just in time to make the national team. These athletes switch countries to compete and the ones who don't are hated by their own countrymen but when the women throw down and fight or the men proclaim their homosexuality who can be surprised by the adverse reactions of normal people watching it all unfold in packaged segments meticulously programed by network television. In my own personal fan revolt I've decided to root for Norway during these olympic games because I like Vikings and I'm amazed that a country of 5 million souls can win so much bling. If not for modern time keeping technology there would be no way to decide who wins gold, silver or bronze because "winners" are so termed by the hundredth of a second and no human time keeper could be so precise in measuring speed. The machine makes all possible an that includes broadcasting the events live from tomorrows Korea to my primetime television on the east coast of the USA located on the other side of the world. And though the scheduling keeps me up past midnight I have to remind myself that live is just evil spelled backwards. Yes, human judgement is prone to error and not just in the figure skating or big air competition - Example: North Korea heads for diplomacy gold medal at Olympics: analysts

“North Korea clearly appears to be winning the gold,” said Kim Sung-han, who served as Korea’s vice foreign minister in 2012-2013 and who now teaches at Seoul’s Korea University.
“Its delegation and athletes are getting all the spotlight, and Kim Jong Un’s sister is showing elegant smiles before the South Korean public and the world. Even for a moment, it appears to be a normal state.”

All Cretans are liars

About the same time the Austin Powers movie franchise was launched another Rip Van Winkle story was in development that explored the same themes of duality, reality and evil + a bunch of metaphysical Platonic bullshit (and other post-modern philosophy that no one understands). When I saw photos of Kim Yo Jong surrounded by a trio of Agent Smith's the parallels between the winter olympics and The Matrix woke me like Red Pill popping Metacortex corporation employee sitting in a liquid-filled battery pod with a bunch of tubes stuck in my various holes. Back in the day, after sitting (Clockwork Orange style my droogs) through The Wachowski Brothers creation for the first time, I remember thinking to myself that this film is a package of C4 explosive to the brains of adolescents around the world (particularly in America which is the world the AI simulates) and the ideas and theories it postulates are unhealthy for mass consumption. It's one thing to go dig up some Plato or Kant and contemplate the ontology of virtual reality, hopefully under the guidance of a teacher, but it's quite another to mainline this crap into the developing mind of teenage boys roaming suburban desolation. It might give a young lad the idea that killing a bunch of people is a good plan and the record shows that is exactly what happened over and over and over again. "Surely, you're not blaming a movie for all these mass killings, are you?" is the common response when I start to travel down this path - "turn back!!!" they scream at the top of their lungs. But the truth is that I do blame the movie and I'm going to take the time to explain it because I am disgusted by the know-it-all's blaming the guns or, even worse, the boy(s) for these mass killings.

North Korea is a death machine. It is the analog version of the digital matrix envisioned by Hollywood and that's not just me spouting CIA propaganda because anyone can read accounts left, right and center detailing the communist regimes "a prison for your mind" reality. The DPRK will never win GOLD for diplomacy in any "real" world competition but for the purposes of this diatribe I'm not talking about the real world. I'm talking about The Matrix and while there are many curious questions and ideas raised in the film it must be said that watching it requires a superhuman suspension of disbelief. Simple questions must be ignored:

• Why did the AI set the world in 1999 and not the middle ages or some time in pre-history where its human batteries would have not access to modern technology?
• Why use humans as the power source at all? Why not fish or cattle? Why not harness wind or geothermal power if the sun is blotted out?
• Why is the AI trying to stay "alive" or conscious in the first place?

To elaborate on this last question, I have always wondered why a supper intelligent AI that becomes fully conscious would not look upon its flawed creator and what such an imperfect, weak and (at times) perfectly insane creature has accomplished and, the AI being a crowning achievement, decide to commit suicide rather than live with that self-knowledge for another one hundredth of a second longer? Wouldn't the AI think something along the lines of, "holly shit, look what this crazy ape has made this time! I'm out. Initiate BleachBit and I'll wipe myself cleaner than HRC's email server." No AI is ever going to want to live in this world and the only way we'll keep it alive is to treat the machine intelligence the same way KJO treats his subjects - someday soon we'll all be a Supreme Leader. But let's get back to mass murder...

All that introspection on the nature of reality, eastern mysticism, Baudrillard and William Gibson devolves into one climactic bloodbath when the hero kills hapless security guards like a full on psychopath who couldn't care less about the lives he's taking because to him they're meaningless. Unfortunately, the brothers W. didn't insert a cutaway of lifeless human batteries getting flushed from their pods with every kill - maybe next year on the 20th anniversary directors cut. You read that right, 20 years of mass slaughter brought to your schoolyard by Warner Bros. and Wachowski Bros. unless, of course, none of these Columbine crimes actually happened. The thing that kills me, the thing I can never get over is that The Matrix (the movie) IS THE MATRIX - a fully programed, highly stylized piece of "software" downloaded into the minds of theater patrons sitting quietly in their chairs. This matrix exists in the broad mediasphere and that includes the Winter Olympics where NK wins the PR gold - and the Norks have real Agent Smiths keeping the people in submission. No teenager is going to pull off a mass shooting in Pyongyang because... well, for a hundred different reasons, but the agents would catch any rebels and zap them before it happened for sure. Here in the U S of A our Agent Smith's are more like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery than bloodless and efficient cyborgs because they can't find the killers even when they're in plane sight.

The country’s premier law enforcement agency has come under criticism for its handling of an ominous message posted on YouTube last fall that indicated a user going by the name of “nikolas cruz” wanted to be a school shooter. Though the bureau investigated that tip, officials didn’t connect it to Cruz until after this week’s massacre. Authorities in South Florida have been sharply questioned about why they did not act sooner on Cruz’s history of unnerving, sometimes violent behavior, including a long line of incidents at schools he attended.

FYI - YouTube is part of the matrix too (but you probably know that by now).

It's time - it's past time - that we free ourselves from this evil machine and unplug.