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.

The Red Tent depicts Gen. Nubile’s North Pole expedition by adirigible which resulted in crash landing.

The Red Tent is a true story depicting the North Pole expedition by a dirigible led by Italian Gen. Nubile in 1928, which resulted in crash landing at somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole. One more thing making this event famous is, the world famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was also lost in an attempt to rescue the survivors of this unfortunate accident. Peter Finch plays Gen. Nubile, and Sean Connery plays Amundsen. I consider their performances are quite excellent, especially watching Sean Connery play a role other than James Bond at that time is quite refreshing. And Peter Finch seems to be always reliable and acting persuasively. That’s true even when he played a demented TV announcer in the movie “Network”(1976), after the completion of which he died and got the Oscar posthumously. I also remember that he played an important part in the similar kind of movie titled “The Flight of the Phoenix” in 1965, though it was about desperate persons stranded right in the middle of the Sahara desert instead of freezing arctic ocean and was a fiction completely (incidentally, German born actor Hardy Kruger also appears in both movies). Although I think that it would be very interesting to compare these two movies, because, as one is European made and the other is American, there seems to be several significant differences between them in spite of both handling similar situations, I don’t have any intention to explicate it in this review, because there are other intersting points I want to mention about The Red Tent.

Unfortunately, this film lacks serious drama aspect, and also the excessive use of flash-forward technique is marring the movie itself.

Several critiques seem to have been brought against this film on the ground that there are so many awkward flash-back scenes (or rather should be called flash-forward scenes) in it to the extent that they almost destroy the integrity of the movie itself. I’m afraid I must agree to this remark. Had it not been for these unnecessary scenes and, instead, had it been spiced up by more appropriate drama aspects such as struggles for survival, which “The Flight of the Phoenix” seems to succeeded in conveying, the film could have been one of the best movies of this kind, and surely I would have given the film a five stars without any hesitation. Nevertheless, I consider the film is entitled to be referred as an excellent movie.

The Red Tent is by far the most beautiful movie ever made.

One reason for it is, “The Red Tent” is by far the most beautiful movie ever made. The scenary of arctic ocean is quite marvelous, though I don’t know exactly where the film was shot. Furthermore, the simple score composed by famous Italian screen music composer Ennio Morricone (He is also famous in the field of classical area. In that area, he composes such kind of music like music-concrete or something like that, which is definetely not for ordinary audiences. Sometimes I wonder he might be composing very beautiful screen music in order to compensate it.) is surely augmenting the beautiful atmosphere. The scene of icebergs crushing into arctic ocean is literally breathtaking and awe-inspiring, and I assure you will be able to easily feel the resistance of nature refusing the trespass of human race by watching these scenes. Even it shouldn’t be referred by the word “resistance”, for resistance is the activity a fragile creature like human being trys to conduct. Nature is always beyond human being’s imagination, and, you, for example, would never be able to fully understand the meaning of glaring eyes of a tiger that was about to eat you at his lunch time. Anyway, by this point alone, I can recommend you to watch this movie at least once.

Internationality is the key word of this movie, and it is essential for our future world.

Another reason is concerning this film’s characteristic of international nature. By saying so, I am not only referring to the famous international players participating in this movie, but also referring to the nationality actually involved in this accident in 1928. The expedition itself is composed of Italian personnel. The person firstly picking up the SOS signals from the abandoned survivors is a Russian, though I don’t know whether it is historically accurate or not. The first contact with the survivors is made by a Swedish pilot (played by Hardy Kruger), and, of course, aforementioned Amundsen is a Norwegian. Although I guess that there must have been serious struggles among these countries as to which country would be the first one to reach the Sauth Pole and the North Pole, they seem to work cooperatively and heroically beyond their nationalities once something bad has happened. Considering the fact the age was between two world wars, national interest must have been prioritized over everything else. Nontheless, they conduct rescue tasks together, if it wouldn’t be called remarkably cohesive. Probably facing something far bigger than human interest, i.e. nature itself as I mentioned before, they might have been compelled to do so. Or rather they might have acted heroically because of their intention to show the bravery of their own country. But, whatever is the reason, this kind of cooperative works organized beyond nationality was, and, is, and, will be the most important element to achieve world level objectives. And it is especially true in the age when all the world is connected by the nexus like the Internet, even if it only means the connection in an information area alone for now. So whenever I watch this film, I cannot help feeling the freshness, the freshness that would not be attainable by the elements only limited to one country’s local interest and propaganda, and I never feel any dreariness from this film usually accompanying this kind of stories. Finally thanks to the gorgeous internatinal casting of this film, which has certainly succeeded in augmenting international feel of this film. There are British players (Peter Finch, Sean Connery), Italian (Claudia Caldinale among others), German (my favorite Hardy Kruger), and also Russians (judging by the name, director must be a Russian).