Music: Torture tunes.

The Wall Street Journal has a short article on some of the songs and musicians that the U.S. military has used to "enhance" their interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number one tune on the WSJ's short list is disheartening.

1. Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA"
It should stand as no surprise that a large majority of the songs used in Guantanamo Bay consisted of seemingly patriotic ditties like Springsteen's most famous American anthem. One Spanish citizen accused of being linked to the terrorist network Al-Qaida claimed his interrogators played this song the majority of the time during his entire two year stay in the Cuban prison. However, Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the UK human rights charity Reprieve, noted that it may not have been the most patriotic choice since "the message of the song is harshly critical of American policy, condemning the war in Vietnam and describing a veteran's effort to find work."

Is there any modern pop song with a weirder political life than the Boss's anti-heroic, bitterly pointed tune? When Springsteen originally conceived the tune, it was low-fi, minimalist number that could have easily found it way on Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town. Eventually, Springsteen decided to go for a cognitively dissonant epic feel that would, at once, be both an ironic take on bombastic American triumphalism and a sonic statement that elevated the size of the story to the point it could not be ignored.

At least, he thought it couldn't. The protest tune quickly became a hit and then, with greater irony than Springsteen could conceive, it became the campaign theme song for Ronald Reagan. Springsteen demanded the Reagan campaign stop using his tune, but the damage was done. It's virtually impossible not to hear this clear non-celebratory song and not catch a disagreeable whiff of (thoroughly undeserved) Reagan Era jingoism.

Though even that doesn't beat the irony of the fact that a song about a forgotten veteran of the archetypal American military quagmire has been refashioned for use as a weapon in our latest foreign adventures.

I wonder if the soldiers blasting this music at prisoners ever listen to the lyrics and ponder how they'll be treated when they come back home. Like the vet in the song, they'll be returning from a massively unpopular conflict into an economy that most likely can't reabsorb them. It must be odd, doing this nation's dirtiest work, all to a soundtrack that serves to remind them of how disposable they are.

The article doesn't discuss the efficacy of blasting loud noise at prisoners, but a discussion of prolonged and repetitious exposure to loud noise appears in John Conroy's Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts: The Dynamics of Torture. In 1971, twelve Irish prisoners were rounded up by the British government as part of an anti-terrorism push called Operation Demetrius. The prisoners formed the test case for the application of the Five Techniques: a torture regimen devised by the British and Irish governments that included wall-standing (rigid standing positions that prisoners kept until their muscles gave out), hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, deprivation of food and drink. The combined affect of these techniques is horrific and potentially deadly. Notably, one of the prisoners interviewed stated that, of all the things that were done to him, he could only remember one of techniques clearly: Years, later he still vividly recalled the noises he was exposed to.

True Crime: Fakenstein?

THe NY Times is reporting on a multiple court cases involving the forgery of horror memorabilia. From the article:

Over the last several months, collectors of movie memorabilia have been rocked by claims that a Georgia-based collector, Kerry T. Haggard, has corrupted what had been seen as a relatively safe market for classic horror film posters by selling or trading forgeries of the promotional art for pictures like “Frankenstein," "Dracula,” and "The Mummy."

In July a Los Angeles collector, Ronald Magid, filed suit against Mr. Haggard in Federal District Court in California. Mr. Magid claimed he had been persuaded to swap Mr. Haggard 20 genuine posters and other memorabilia valued at about $150,000 for nine items Mr. Magid said were fakes.

In August another collector, James Gresham, filed a similar suit in Federal District Court in Michigan. That suit claims that Mr. Haggard had joined a restoration artist to create forgeries, 28 of which Mr. Gresham bought or traded for in deals he valued at $852,400.

In an answer filed on Monday to the California complaint, Mr. Haggard denied committing any fraud, contending in turn that Mr. Magid had not only damaged his reputation with smears on various Internet sites, but also sold him items that Mr. Haggard, upon reselling them, were told were fake. As of Friday, federal court records available online did not show a response by Mr. Haggard in the Michigan case.

Because I don't trade in high-priced horror collectables, I can find humor in Haggard's profoundly skewed sense of self importance. Again, from the article:

In response to an e-mailed query, Mr. Haggard said he was the victim of a “colossal frame-up.”

He added: “The monsters of fiction that I have loved & adored so all my life have destroyed my life in a conspiracy not seen since Lee Harvey Oswald."

News: Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang walla walla, bing bang.

I don't even know how to introduce this, so let's just cut straight to the article from the BBC about what appears to be a giant, possibly government-backed witch hunt in Gambia.

Up to 1,000 Gambian villagers have been abducted by "witch doctors" to secret detention centres and forced to drink potions, a human rights group says.

Amnesty International said some forced to drink the concoctions developed kidney problems, and two had died.

Officials in the police, army and the president's personal protection guard had accompanied the "witch doctors" in the bizarre roundup, said witnesses.

Gambia's government was unavailable to comment on the claims.

The human rights group asserted that many of those abducted were elderly.

The London-based rights group said the witch hunters, said to be from neighbouring Guinea, were invited into Gambia after the death of the president's aunt earlier this year was blamed on witchcraft.

To put this in scientific context, in 2007 the president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, announced that he had developed a cure for AIDS. MSNBC describes Jammeh's treatment:

From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia’s president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient — a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.

He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.

“Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof,” President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound. “Mine is not an argument, mine is a proof. It’s a declaration. I can cure AIDS and I will.”

To properly work, the cure must be taken on a Thursday and, more troubling, the patient must stop taking any anti-retroviral medicine.

Though it is not clear exactly what he thinks he is doing, critics have suggested that Jammeh's faith in his herbal "cure" stems from his mistaken notion that AIDS is caused by some sort of intestinal parasite. He also claims to be able to cure asthma and high blood pressure.

To put this in a human rights context, Jammeh – who is, curiously enough, the Vice President of the International Parliament for Safety and Peace – has been linked to the deaths of 12 student protestors, at least 2 journalists critical of his administration, 44 Ghanaian immigrants, and 10 foreign nationals denounced variously as criminals and spies. In 2008, he announced that his government would begin a policy of beheading homosexuals. Several years ago, folks started an online petition to get the International Criminal Court to indict him for crimes against humanity.

Jammeh is actually serving his third term as president, winning the 2006 election with nearly 70% of the popular vote.

Stuff: Zombies and your money.

As if pop horror's seemingly endless wallowing in zombie crudolla wasn't spirit-killing enough, the phenomenon has reached a new misery inducing levels by being linked to the other great soul-numbing fact of modern American life: the economy.

Welcome to the era of the American zombie bank.

For a group not noted for their poetic sensibilities, financial types have some truly descriptive and colorful slang. Way back in 1997, in a Wall Street Journal article about the "lost decade" in Japan (a ten-year slump in Japan's economy experienced zero growth), economist Edward Kane coined the term zombie bank. Zombie banks are created when a combination of government support and shady accounting practices not only prevent banks from failing, but turns them in sucking black holes of crappy value. In the colorful phrasing of WSJ reporter Martin Mayer:

Such walking dead devour their own good assets every night, and thanks to the magic of compound interest they become exponentially more insolvent . . . But governments and central banks vouched for the zombie banks, which were able to keep borrowing dollars from banks in other countries.

In theory, a propped up bank could be saved by the correct balance of wise stewardship and carefully managed injections of cash. In practice, a often badly handled combo results in a bank that just keeps negating the cash injections with its ever growing debt. This doesn't just obliterate any wealth the government may throw at the bank, but starts to drag on the health of other banks. As mentioned above, the zombies continue to borrow money just like a healthy bank would. Unfortunately, this wealth doesn't circulate back out into the system in the form of profit-generating loans. Instead, like the government support, it vanishes down the ever-growing debt-hole of the zombie bank.

This grim term invented to explain the collapse of the Pacific Rim economic boom has, zombie-like, risen again. Only, this time, experts are using it to describe American banks receiving bailout money from the gov.

Stuff: Ain't exactly "Twilight," is it Princess?

According to the Associate Press, one-time presidential hopeful and full-time Satanic vampire overlord of Toms River, Minnesota, Jonathan Alfred Sharkey (pictured above), was thrown into jail last week for failing to appear before court to answer charges he threatened a 16-year-old girl her referred to as "his wife and princess."

Sharkey first came to the wire services attention in '07, when the New Jersey native tossed his cloak of darkness into the presidential ring and announced his bid for this nation's highest office. From the A.P.:

"I have real ideas to make this country better, but I'm still a Satanist, I'm still a vampire, I still follow the Goddess Hecate and practice the art of black magic," Sharkey says, pushing back his long black hair to reveal a crimson pentagram embroidered on his golf shirt. "So if you cross my line, I have no problem vanquishing you."

Honest words from an honest candidate.

To be fair, Sharkey brought some political assets to the table. He had a military record no worse than some other presidents: A former Army recruiter, Sharkey's main source of income was from disability benefits the Army owed him after he was injured in a parachuting accident. He was also a Republican district leader in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the 1980s.

For a brief time he was also a stock car driver and a pro-wrestler (Rocky Flash).

Still, it was clear from the start that a successful campaign was going to have to get over some substantial obstacles. Again from the A.P.:

As for how he plans on convincing voters to hand over the reins to an ordained Satanic dark priest who "feeds" daily on the neck of his 19-year-old bride, Sharkey said he hopes voters will be open-minded.

"It's like JFK said, 'Are you going to vote against me because I'm Roman Catholic?'" Sharkey asked. "The campaign shouldn't be about religion."

Sadly Sharkey's presidential campaign, like his efforts to win a governor's race in Minnesota and senatorial races in both Jersey and Florida, fizzled. He was outspent (by nearly $999,994,000) and hamstrung by a series of outstanding warrants.

Now, Sharkey faces yet another legal crisis:

The criminal complaint says he was running for president in 2007 when the 16-year-old girl wrote a message of support on his MySpace page. She told police they began dating online, and the threats began when she tried to break off the relationship.

She told police that "in a desperate attempt" to get him to leave her alone, she had e-mailed him that she was a member of an elite vampire hunter society and that continuing their relationship would put him in danger. Her father told police he talked to Sharkey, but Sharkey continued to call the girl and write letters to her parents.

Which is odd, really, because the "I'm a member of an elite vampire hunter society" thing has always worked on me.

News: The big topic.

I wasn't going to mention "you know what." I tend to avoid politics and I'm not particularly eloquent anyway. So I'm just going to steal some words (twice stolen, in fact, from music critic Alex Ross) and leave it at that.

It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

— Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

News: Pentagon prepares to launch Operation Die Human Weaklings!

Whenever I'm watching a science-runs-amok style horror flick, I'm always baffled that the scientists involved seem completely unaware of, say, the almost two centuries of culture and art that have passed betwixt the publication of Shelley's Frankenstein and now that state, fairly unambiguously, that mad science is almost always a shitty idea. You never see a researcher pause, turn to his lab partners, and say, "Hey, does anybody ever wonder if making these sharks bigger, stronger, smarter, and psychopathic is really a good idea? I mean, sure, everybody needs bigger sharks. That a given. But psychopathic? Does anybody even remember why we decided that? Just seems, you know, ill-advised."

Lab partner: "Wait, are you accusing us of playing God in a dangerously irresponsible way? Are you saying we're like Frankenstein?"

Scientist: "I'm sorry. I'm completely unfamiliar with one of the most common metaphors for the dilemma of scientific ethics in Western culture. Forget I said anything. Let's get back to work. We're burning daylight and these sharks aren't going to make themselves into unstoppable killing machines!"

But, apparently, it isn't a lapse on the part of filmmakers. Mad scientists seem to actually work that way.

Last Wednesday, Short Sharp Science, the blog of New Scientist magazine, reported that the Pentagon has put out a bid request for something they're calling a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System." The short description: they want researchers to develop robots that will hunt down things using the same pack logic that wolves and dogs use.

Currently, remote weapons systems are spiffy and all, but a one-person-per-machine ratio means that you take a soldier off the field for every machine you deploy. What, say the brilliant minds at the Pentagon, if you could tip the ratio? One soldier could control an alpha robot and several other robotic weapons systems would follow its lead the same way pack hunters organize their efforts around an alpha hunter. From Short Sharp Science's post:

What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.

As if this wasn't Rise-of-the-Machines enough, the phrasing of the request is equally unsettling. The stated function of these robo-packs is to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human." While the language actually means "a test subject who is actively attempting to avoid detection," it is a turn of phrase that makes it sound as if some quisling AI researchers have already decided to welcome our new Skynet-driven overlords.

Lest ANTSS be accused of not going after the low hanging fruit, here's the robo-revolution's version of L'Internationale:

News: How the West was won?

According to Comic Book Resources Devil's Due Publishing will be independently distributing issues 16 and 17 of their guilty-pleasure horror hit Hack/Slash as Diamond will no longer touch those two issues. The reason:

The decision follows Diamond’s receipt of a Cease and Desist letter regarding the issues from an unknown, recently registered company, Re-Animator, LLC, in connection with Dynamite Entertainment’s Nick Barrucci.

Hack/Slash is featuring Lovecraft's famed mad scientist, Herbert West, in its latest story arc. Apparently Re-Animator LLC felt this infringed on their ownership of the character.

Re-Animator LLC, a company that seems to exist solely as a Delaware PO Box, was the company that sold the rights to Dynamite Entertainment when Dynamite was featuring West in their Army of Darkness comics. However, R-A LLC seems to have been created solely for the purpose of snatching up what may be a public domain figure, the character of West, and then "selling" it to Dynamite.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to horror director Brian Yuzna, who helmed the second and third installments of the Re-Animator film franchise. Yuzna was pretty sure that he owned the character of Herbert West. Here's an annoyed Yuzna from the article:

"It may seem crazy to Re-Animator fans to think that a company that had nothing to do with the classic films could actually claim ownership of the "Re-Animator" brand and threaten to stop anyone else from creating comics, films or merchandise with the word 'reanimator' or 're-animator' in it- even the actual producer of the films that created the brand—but in this wacky world that is exactly what has happened."

According to CRB, Yuzna has owned the Re-Animator film franchise, on which both comics based their respective Wests, for more than twenty years.

All of this might be moot: various factions of Lovecraft's estate have fought for years to close off his works from the public domain. Many argue that, under existing laws, the various feuding parties claiming to speak officially for the Lovecraft estate have long since blown their chances to keep the famed author's work under copyright. However, this nebulous claim hasn't prevent these groups from behaving as if their ownership was a given. They regular cut deals with publishers, threaten web sites posting Lovecraft's works, and so on. If any of these groups were to somehow gain the force of law for their currently BS claims, then DDP, Dynamite, Yuzna, and the flimsy R-A LLC would all be screwed.

Stuff: Real Events That Should Inspire a Horror Movie: #1

Still trying to find a way to squeeze in some reviewing, in the meantime, I post this story to show that things could always be worse. From Reuters:

At least 30 hungry bears have trapped a group of geologists at their remote survey site in Russia's far east after killing two of their co-workers last week, emergency officials said on Tuesday.

News: You think that's scary? Wait until you see the caterer's bill.

Alright Screamers and Screamettes. I'm going to be signing off for just a week and some change. Your host with the vowel-deficient Internet handle is getting married. That's right, married! Can you wrap your noodle around that? Somebody want's CRwM to hang around for like forever! I find it hard to believe myself, but it is the double truth, Ruth.

After my wife-to-be become my wife-who-is and we do a little honeymoon action, I'll be back. Until then, dear readers, be cool to one another and stay classy.

News: President denies rumors that Russia is developing giant robots to defend itself from eldritch horrors.

There are many burning issues that President Vladimir Putin must deal with: tensions over the United States proposed missile defense system; continuing political strife with various breakaway republics; the fallout from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko; and, according to the St. Petersburg Times, the military deployment of giant robots and the awakening of Cthulhu.

In a recent press conference, President Putin agreed to answer questions submitted to him via the Internet. Here's an excerpt from the short article about the conference:

“Yes, we will use the latest technical devices. Already now they are being stationed, for example, in the southern parts of our country,” Putin said when reporters asked him after the conference whether Russia planned to use “gigantic, humanoid war robots” to defend itself.

Asked to elaborate about what he meant, Putin said: “These are unmanned aerial vehicles. And maybe the time will come for gigantic robots. However, so far we have put our main hope on people — namely border guards,” Putin said, Kommersant reported.

Asked about the possible awakening of the giant mythical octopus Cthulhu, the fourth-most popular question among the more than 150,000 sent to Putin, he said that he believed something more serious was behind the question. Cthulhu was invented by novelist H.P. Lovecraft and was said to be sleeping beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Putin said he viewed mysterious forces with suspicion and advised those who took them seriously to read the Bible, Koran or other religious books.

Thanks to Dave over at Digital Download for the heads up on this story.