The Japanese have responded to the latest “ISIS™” Crisis in style with what’s being called the “ISIS Crap Photoshop Grand Prix”

In response to the ridiculously crafted fake beheading videos, Japanese bloggers and Twitter users have decided to make fun of the “ISIS™” psyop rather than dropping to their knees and cringing in fear as is the custom here in the land of the round-eye.

With their production value being openly ridiculed in public, the b-rated studio that has been crafting these sophomoric “hearts and minds” psyops for the Global War OF Terrorism industry seems angered that their gravy train is coming off the rails.

Though I am glad to see the Japanese stepping up and calling a fraud a fraud, I just have to remind you, they weren’t the first. Not by a long shot.

The latest threat from the production house propaganda outlet revolves around two Japanese citizens who are supposedly going to be beheaded today if Japan doesn’t cough up 200 million bucks.

One of those guys is a “journalist” and the other… well, the other “dreamed of becoming a military contractor” (you can’t make this shit up).

The video features the same British MI6 agent pretending to be an “ISIS” terrorist waving around his prop knife and threatening to kill Kenji Goto (propaganda journalist formerly embedded with the FSA) and Haruna Yukawa (mentally ill contractor wannabe). It’s obviously shot in front of a green-screen with several lighting sources (in studio, not outside) and a fan blowing consistently on the shirts of the phony “victims” in an attempt to create a “breeze” effect.

The victims look bored and the “terrorist” can’t open his eyes for some reason. I guess because they are blue. Either that or the diva has become such a megastar he’s showing up for work high on crack like Charlie Sheen.

It’s about as bad as those that came before it.

• Fake Alan Henning Video
• Fake David Haines Video
• Fake James Foley Video
• Fake Steven Sotloff Video
• Fake Peter Kassig Video
• The ISIS Crisis

Clearly the U.S. is in need of yet another member of the Coalition of the Willing and Japan’s government needed some help justifying it to their population… so… here we go again.

Of course it hasn’t worked out the way they planned.

This campaign of ridicule and the popular approval it’s receiving has apparently angered the psyop’s planners. The Japanese are making fun of the cartoonish presentation of these ridiculously fake videos and it seems it might foretell the end of this particular product run. I guess no more paydays for the ISIS studios is something they are having to consider. You see, it’s bleeding into American popular culture as well.

Many Japanese blogs, including popular site My Game News Flash, are reporting how the glib Photoshops have allegedly angered ISIS members. Washington Times

Poking fun at the poorly crafted propaganda has becoming so popular, even Di$info Jone$ has decided to jump on the bandwagon after spending months propping up the “radical Islam” mythology.

I have too say I’m very glad to see this particular meme taking off.

I only wonder if perhaps a couple of my earlier efforts might be considered in the ISIS Crap Photoshop Grand Prix.

A quarter of all Russian men die before they reach their mid-fifties and their passion for alcohol – particularly vodka – is largely to blame, according to research published on Friday.

A study of more than 150,000 people found extraordinarily high premature death rates among male Russians, some of whom reported drinking three or more bottles a week of the potent clear spirit.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, deaths among heavy drinkers were mainly due to alcohol poisoning, accidents, violence and suicide, as well as diseases such as throat and liver cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, pancreatitis and liver disease.

“Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the past 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations..was vodka,” said Richard Peto of Britain’s Oxford University, who worked on the study.

The researchers, including David Zaridze from the Russian Cancer Research Centre in Moscow, noted that whereas British death rates between age 15 and 54 have been falling steadily since 1980, mainly because so many people there have stopped smoking, Russian death rates in this age range have fluctuated sharply – often approximately in line with alcohol consumption.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 alcohol restrictions, alcohol consumption fell by around 25 percent – and so did the death rates, they said. And when communism in Russia collapsed, alcohol consumption went up steeply, as did death rates.

More recently, since Russian alcohol policy reforms were introduced in 2006, consumption of spirits has fallen by about a third and so has the risk of death before age 55, the researchers said – although that risk is “still substantial”.

For this study, published in the Lancet medical journal, researchers asked 151,000 people how much vodka they drank, and whether they smoked, then monitored them for up to a decade.

Around 8,000 of them died during that time, and the results showed much higher risks of death in men who smoked and who also drank three or more half-litre bottles of vodka a week than in men who smoked and drank less than one bottle a week.

Zaridze described the relationship between vodka and deaths as a “health crisis” for Russia, but stressed it could also be turned around if people were to drink more moderately.

“The significant decline in Russian mortality rates following the introduction of moderate alcohol controls in 2006 demonstrates the reversibility,” he said.

“People who drink spirits in hazardous ways greatly reduce their risk of premature death as soon as they stop.”

I finished Contact by Carl Sagan earlier this week. It was surprisingly beautiful and exciting.

We have a tiny little library in Bay City. They have a limited selection, but the atmosphere is cozy and welcoming. I try to take the kids there once a week – whether they want to go or not. While my TBR pile is a few hundred books high, I’m always drawn to hang out in a building dedicated to books.

Hanging out on the floor, looking through the sci-fi and fantasy section, I came across Contact by Carl Sagan. I watched the Jodi Foster movie back in the ’90s. And as a lover of space, I knew the name Carl Sagan but didn’t realize he had written the book the movie was based on.

It was a hefty hardbound book. I opened it up to read the first page. This is how I determine if I want to read a book. If the first page doesn’t hook me, I’m out. This one grabbed me, and it left with me, safe and snug in my library bag.

At 480 pages long, it took me two weeks to read. I read it before bed, during lunch, and while riding my stationary bike. Sagan had a knack for dumbing down physics enough for the layperson to understand. This book has a whole lot of science in it, but it’s easy to comprehend.

I have not watched the movie since it came out on video. I couldn’t remember much of what happened in the movie – what I read was fresh and thrilling.

The book took a long time to wind up. There was a whole lot of backstory on the main character. That being said, the pacing was good until the middle of the book. I almost skipped a few pages but managed to resist.

While reading this, it was as if I was reading Sagan’s personal beliefs versus reading a fictional story. I imagined his faith. His trust in something more. A lifelong search for answers to his questions on what space held, and why we were here. With every page, his deep respect for the cosmos is apparent.

At times the fact that a scientist wrote a work of fiction was obvious. The main character Ellie was often emotionless. Contact seems to break all of the rules of a story while following others to the T. Overall, I enjoyed the book and would read it again.

I like the message I took from it – that was, we may not be alone, and we don’t have all the answers. What we need to be is open minded and humble in our lives. We need to more open to change and different opinions. People rarely get good things from pushing their opinions or beliefs on others.

Have you read the book or watched the movie? What did you think?

We step into the review ring with the puzzles, muscles, and tussles of Guacamelee to find that Metroidvania meets Mexico is a charming recipe for success.