Unless you’re new to this, then it’s old news that sports suck, so I’ll spare y’all the commentary on that front.  However, here’s something equally disturbing.

A CNN poll at the time of the Big Game found that almost 25% of the people watching the ’Bowl tuned in just for the commercials.

Man, that’s just sick.  As has been pointed out, commercials are evil, too.

Time slot prices for Super Bowl advertising are the highest on television, so sponsors pour millions into making them, hoping to get as much for their money as they can.  Presumably this is why people watch them: they are getting something high-priced, shiny, and entertaining.

But it’s still high-priced, shiny, entertaining evil!  Folks, if you want to see high-priced, shiny, entertaining evil, go to Las Vegas.  At least that will get you outside the house.  

Unfortunately, we've since moved on to the Winter Olympics, which is the only thing worse...

If you were expecting an extended rage against the ’02 Games (aka the Mistake at Salt Lake) then sorry.  That was such a flat-out disaster, making fun of it is just too easy.  

The Games were swamped in scandal as early as two years ago, when it became known that Utah officials were funneling state tax dollars to fund Olympic committee “incentives” (such as booze, hookers, and unabashed bribes) to get the games to the Mormon state.  And, as has been amply documented, it just went downhill from there faster than a slalom skier.  The only thing that could have made it worse would have been another Munich-style hostage crisis.

I will make one comment, though, that I feel needs to be addressed: they’re getting just plain goofy with the event choices, clearly attempting to cater to GenY rejects.  Two examples will do to prove my point.

• Snowboarding.  The only thing sillier than this event were the three Americans who swept the medals.  What a surprise there, eh?  I’m tempted to call them Moe, Larry, and Curly, but based on their dialogue to the press, Man, Like, and Dude would be more appropriate, as that was about all they could say.  Personally, I suspect the real reason they entered the event was due to a misunderstanding: rather than signing up for the Men’s Half Pipe, they thought it was the Men’s Hash Pipe.





• Curling.  Hmmmmm: pushing around a big chunk of stone with brooms....  think I’ll go sort socks during that one.  Granted, this game isn’t really aimed at a GenY audience, instead having a target audience of kilt-wearing, chain-guzzling, haggis-eating gits.  I was about to ask when this oversized version of Scottish shuffleboard got acknowledged as an Olympic-grade event, but then I remembered: the Olympics have been curling my stomach for some time now.
  
  
  

SubPlot Theatre

By

Alien and the Protestant Work Ethic

A couple of quick clarifications here.

“Alien” in this case is the original film from 1979 only, not any of the sequels.  Despite having a similar monster mythology and Sigourney Weaver’s character continuity, the four films are very different, and saint offers compelling evidence that the three follow-ups should be completely ignored.  As this is outside the scope of SubPlot Theatre’s subject, we will move these to his following Peshar.

“Protestant Work Ethic” is a belief that hard, honest work and/or labor results in a strengthening of one’s character and has a moral, even spiritual benefit as well.  The unofficial credo is “idle hands are the Devil’s playground,” a passage not in the Bible per sé but in pop culture nonetheless.  The term “Protestant Work Ethic” originated in England during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s, and thus should perhaps be called the Anglican Work Ethic (again, see saint’s accompanying Peshar.)  At its worst, the Protestant Work Ethic produced social dysfunctions of the type railed against by Dickens and the like.

Anyway, with me so far?  Good.

The movie Alien is actually about the Protestant Work Ethic, merely employing the otherwise irrelevant sci-fi framework to get the P.W.E. point across.  

Consider the characters to see what I mean:

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was the only one on the Nostromo who actually did a decent day’s work; everyone else aboard the ship was a slacker of Souly proportions.  The obvious result was that Ripley was the only one to survive, which of course would be the “moral benefit” for her toil.

Kane (John Hurt) on the other hand does nothing on board, and in fact it is unclear what his purpose on the ship even is.  When the Nostromo crashes, rather than hang around to help repair it, he promptly volunteers to go off on a leisurely stroll around the planet.  Result: first one to die.

Captain Dallas (Tom Skerrit) is equally useless, and doesn’t do any “real” work on board.  Instead, he delegates duties away, and spends his time slacking in the escape shuttle listening to Mozart while the rest of the crew does all the shit work.  What a lazy sack of cheese; he, too, gets what he deserves: death.

Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) is just plain pointless on board, contributing nothing to productivity but bringing morale down with her constant complaining and whining (she even admits “I like griping!”)  Lambert is actually counterproductive, getting in the way of Parker when he had a clear shot at the creature with his flamethrower.  Her moral reward: hideous disembowelment (and reincarnation into the infamous ‘cherry’ scene of “Witches of Eastwick.”)

Of course, the two worst workers on board are Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), the maintenance engineers.  These are the two who should be working hardest, but they are only motivated by money bonuses, not the moral justification of doing an honest day’s work.  Their slack, slipshod work ethic is amply documented throughout the movie.  The one time they actually do an honest, hard day’s duty during the repairs, Parker makes this comment: “the sooner we get this ship patched up, the sooner we can get out of here.  This place gives me the creeps.”  Of course, it is not fear of the alien that frightens him, it is the fear of God!  Still, this is not enough to atone, and both men meet gruesome ends.

The curious exception to the crew, almost a counterpoint, is Ash (Ian Holm.)  Ash is the only one on board other than Ripley who does any real work, though it is necessary to put this in perspective.  Ash is the “sleeper agent” secretly working for the mysterious, unnamed “Company” sponsoring the ship, and his loyalties and agenda are unquestionably to said Company, not his fellow compatriots.  To understand Ash, we must also consider his Company.  While the alien is portrayed as the film’s ostensible antagonist, it is, after all, only one of God’s creatures and is behaving in its natural way, merely eking out a survival the only way it knows how.  The Company, on the other hand, is outright evil.  We must therefore see Ash’s demise via flamethrower as his being consumed by the fires of Hell for his dirty deeds!

It should be amazingly obvious at this point that the real focus of the film is about the rewards for doing a hard day’s work.  Alien is a shining example of the Protestant Work Ethic in action.

Unfortunately, the whole thing about the creature rampaging on board absolutely distracts from all that.  Better if they’d left it out entirely, I say.

If the movie had spent more time on the Protestant Work Ethic angle and had less emphasis on the monster, it would be a true masterpiece.

saint’s SubPlot peshar(s)

Alien

As shade points out, there are four films in the Alien Cycle.  Each one is noticeably different in its cinematic approach:

• “Alien” is a horror film

• “Aliens” is an action-adventure

• “Alien³” is an art film

• “Alien Resurrection” is an extended exercise in masochistic bilge

Oddly, the second one seems to be the most popular, which I think is too bad.  Critics of the first deride it for its bare-bones plot.  Most of these people forget to put the original movie in context: although the Alien sequence is now part of public lore, when the movie originally came out, first-time viewers (like myself) had absolutely no idea what was going to happen.  Every time you see the creature it looks different, so there is a very real sense of not knowing what is coming next.  However, I will spare y’all the cinematic critique to get to the point here.

shade has pointed out privately that in the second movie, there is, if not an actual subplot, at least a theme or motif concerning motherhood.  In scenes deleted from the cinematic release (but available in the DVD) we learn that Ripley had a daughter (a pic of Sigourney Weaver’s actual mother is used) who died during her extended absence.  In the film, Ripley becomes Newt’s mother in spirit.  This is counterplayed against the Alien Queen, who has “children” (the eggs and aliens) of her own.

Unfortunately, I am forced to cry foul on this, based on the original intention of the movie.  I do this largely in part as an effort to disown the two final films; however, here me out.

In the original movie, a crucial scene was shot but ultimately edited out.  It is available on the DVD, though.  In this, Ripley—on her way back to “Mother” to shut off the auto-destruct—by accident happens upon the remains of Brett and Dallas.  Up until then, their fates were never explicitly stated, instead left to the imagination of the viewers, who understandably presumed they had been killed. 

Not so!

The alien had cocooned them, and both were turning into eggs.  Brett, being abducted first, is much farther along in the transformation, but Dallas is still “human” enough to have a brief conversation with Ripley, where he pleads for a mercy killing.  This she does, and because of the time spent, is too late getting back to deactivate the auto-destruct.

The scene was ultimately edited out of the cinematic release, as it was felt that it disrupted the pace.

I disagree.

More to the point, I feel it completes the alien creature and its reproductive cycle, and makes the thing that much more terrifying.  Being turned into an egg seems a much more morbid demise than merely being eaten and/or slaughtered for gore’s sake.

It also (thankfully!) nullifies all the sequels.  Since we now know where the eggs really come from, the whole concept of a Queen is contradicted, and we can thankfully  ignore the 3^rd and 4^th movies.  Although James Cameron did a half decent job with the 2^nd segment, we never learn where the Queen comes from, and I feel she was added, partly as the aforementioned maternity motif, but mostly as a theatrical device to upstage the first and add extra impact to the ending.

Unfortunately, this allows the cinematic mashuguna of the (hopefully!) last two movies.  

So do what I do: follow the original intention, and ignore the Queen completely.

In light of how bad the last two are, it’s the only reasonable thing to do.

Another good way to nullify the sequels is to consider director Ridley Scott’s suggestion for an ending of the first film.  In the final showdown on the shuttle, the alien actually bites off Ripley’s head, sits down in her chair, and then (in her voice!) radios Earth.  Alas, studio execs thought this was much too morbid, and vetoed the idea.

But back to saint...:

Protestant Work Ethic

As shade stated, the Protestant Work Ethic would be more appropriately deemed the Anglican Work Ethic.

Here’s why.

The “Protestant” faith was founded by Martin Luther, a German Catholic who actually had no intention of starting a new religion but merely wanted to reform an unquestionably corrupt old one.

Although it has been correctly pointed out that Luther wrote the majority of his “Ninety-Five Theses” on the medieval equivalent of a toilet, it cannot be denied that without his thinking for himself, we would most likely still be under the yoke of Catholicism, paying indulgences for sin forgiveness and swearing obedience to Overlords in Rome.

Still, let’s take Luther’s own dogma into perception, in light of the above-mentioned “work ethic.”

The best Biblical basis for a(n) [insert name of Faith] Work Ethic would easily be James 2:20

 However, a quick context check is in order.

Back in the Biblical day, when the New Testament was still being written, there was a heated debate between the apostles James and Paul.  James was Jesus’s younger brother, and head of the remnant (post-Resurrection) Church; Paul was an outsider who, until the ‘road to Damascus’ incident, persecuted Christians.  The two were completely at odds (as Acts amply demonstrates,) and there is even compelling evidence that at one point before his Damascus epiphany, Paul threw James down the Jerusalem Temple steps (breaking his leg) for preaching The Word.

Ever at odds with James, Paul preached a doctrine which has best become known as ‘Justification through Faith’ and is best explained throughout the Epistle to the Romans.  Deeds were meaningless; Faith was what mattered.

James, as we have seen (in 2:20) emphasized works, pointing out that Faith alone was not enough.

Luther wholeheartedly embraced (to put it mildly) Paul’s point of view, and firmly entrenched himself in the Pauline camp of Faith over Works.

Luther was very verbose in his hatred of James (the Apostle and the Epistle), calling the work “a right strawy epistle” and saying it deserved absolutely no place in The Bible.

I would therefore think that Martin Luther would be horrified to know that a concept based of the Jamesian extollation of Work would become know as “The Protestant Work Ethic.”

Then again, the irony greatly amuses me, too.

Last issue’s equal-airtime exposure to The Ranch Manifesto produced an outcry unparalleled since Jethro Tull got the Grammy for ‘Best Hard Rock Performance.’  

One of the most biting of these comes from our newest recruit, The Ignition Missionary, whose riposte rebuttal offers...

The Last Word on Ranch 

 

by

First we will show them their weakness...

Weaklings (Ranch Peninsulars):

With the possible exception of the infamous Majestic 12 memos, no other document has so captivated the world of conspiracy research than The Gemstone File.

Fortunately, unlike the MJ-12 cache, the Gemstone File doesn’t read like a rejected X-Files/Dark Skies plot.

Unfortunately, it does read like a bad James Bond novel.  Indeed, a number of researchers have suggested that ‘Diamonds are Forever’ is loosely based on it, especially since Bond author Ian Fleming used to work for British Intelligence and thus would have had access to much of the information contained therein.  After reading it, the true identity of SPECTRE should be obvious...

Whatever the case, The Gemstone File’s popularity is especially surprising since it is a document that almost none of its proponents have actually read.

Then again, the Bible is the all-time best seller, despite the fact that few of its followers have actually cracked it cover to cover, so perhaps it is worth looking into the Gemstone File to see what it reveals.  

There are actually two Gemstone Files: the “true” text, which runs well over 1,000 hand-written pages, and a short synopsis of it, called “The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File.”  Most fans of the ’File are familiar with the latter, as the former exists (aside from the original) in only a few photocopied versions that are jealously guarded by their possessors.  Various small presses have published selected excerpts of the original ’File, though oddly each of these picks and chooses what it prints and/or omits, with no real uniformity between the versions.  In 1978, Hustler Magazine attempted to print the full ’File (in serial form) but coincidentally—or not—Larry Flynt was shot the very next month, which pretty much monkey-wrenched the idea.  

The Skeleton Key is much easier to get ahold of, with transcripts available online at any number of sites (such as this one.) 

A quick history of the Gemstone File(s), to put this in perspective.

The original Gemstone File was written by Bruce Porter Roberts, an American living in San Francisco, and about whom little is conclusively known.  He did die of a brain tumor on July 16^th, 1976, and spent the last years of his life insisting that said tumor was given to him by the CIA to shut him up.  According to Roberts, he was studying Crystallography at the University of Wisconsin in the early 30’s, where he (allegedly) developed a cheap, synthetic ruby that was ideal for lasers.  Roberts attempted to sell this to Hughes Industries, who found it easier to simply steal it.  This prompted Roberts’ crusade against Howard Hughes, and through some dirt digging, discovered the devilish details of what would ultimately constitute the Gemstone File (ostensibly named for his fascination with precious stones.)  Starting in 1969, he began distributing copies of his hand-written manifesto to people in the Bay area who he believed would be appreciative.  

One person who got a copy was Mae Brussell, the legendary “Queen of Conspiracies.”  In 1974, Brussell helped Playgirl “columnist” Stephanie Caruana write an alternative-perspective article about the Patty Hearst kidnappings, which was successful (and lucrative) enough that Caruana contacted Mrs. Brussell again for a follow-up article on Howard Hughes.  Brussell showed Caruana select portions of a manila envelope labeled “Gemstone” and insisted that only the parts about Howard Hughes be used for her work (about 400 pages - roughly one third of the file.)  Caruana was flabbergasted by what she read, and afterward was able to track down Roberts.  After meeting and talking to him several times, she published a synopsis of what she read and heard, the infamous “Skeleton Key.”

The “Gemstone Thesis,” as it has become known, is a sweeping Unified Field Theory that conveniently yet cohesively ties together almost all major events of the 20^th Century (Dealey Plaza, Watergate, etc.) into one vast conspiracy of Machiavellian proportions.  Surprisingly, the chief villain is not Howard Hughes, but Aristotle Onassis.  Per Bruce, Onassis became the Mafia KingPin and Dark Force behind Organized Crime, though it is occasionally unclear if “Mafia” refers to the crime syndicate stereotyped by Mario Puzo and Martin Scorsese, or if it is a metaphor for something larger.

Grossly oversimplified, the Gemstone Thesis runs something like this:

In the 1930’s, Onassis forged a huge drug cartel/crime fortune with the help of Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Kennedy.  Through FDR, Onasis attempted to run the Oval Office, but eventually found himself at odds with Howard Hughes, who himself was buying up politicians wholesale (like Richard Nixon.)  Things came to a head in 1957, when Onasis had Hughes kidnapped and replaced with a reclusive “double” puppet.  {During the kidnapping scuffle, Hughes received severe brain damage, and would spend the rest of his life a vegetable heroin addict prisoner on Onassis’s island fortress of Skorpios.}  Meanwhile, Papa Joe Kennedy called in his marker with AriO to have one of his sons elected President, but when daddy died, JF and RF Kennedy rebelled against the pact with Onassis, becoming ‘loose cannons’ that needed dealing with.  (After their assassinations, youngest son Teddy K read the writing on the wall and quietly complied with Onassis overlordship; Mary Jo Kopechne found out about it, thus requiring her to be silenced at Chappaquiddick.)  Through the Hughes doppelganger, Onasis also controlled Nixon, who obediently obeyed orders from above.  However, Nixon became convinced that the Democrats had proof of all this (apparently a copy of Roberts’s Gemstone File) in their national headquarters, and arranged the Watergate break-in to find out how much they knew.

Supposedly during the infamous 18-minute gap in the Watergate Tapes, Nixon makes an extended rant against “that asshole Bruce.”

Oh yeah: and The Pope was in on all of it, too...

Bruce Roberts died at that point in the story, though an anonymous New Zealander has continued the work (the so-called “Kiwi File” or “Opal File”) into the late ’80s, tying in things like the October Surprise and ContraGate.

Obviously, anyone who discounts all this as political paranoia to the left of Oliver Stone is missing most of the fun.  More to the point, though, they’re overlooking some of the timeline context: many of the things in the Gemstone File are today public knowledge, but back in the ’70s, they were completely unknown.

For instance, there is now ample evidence of Mafia infiltration into the highest levels of the American government.  The earliest documentation of this is from 1942, when during World War Two the United States government struck a deal with mobster Lucky Luciano: they would get him an early release from prison if he used his mob connections abroad to help facilitate an Allied invasion of Italy.  The group brokering this illegal deal, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), was of course the direct precursor to what became the CIA after the war.  

Another documentable pairing of the Mob and the Company/U.S. Government was in the early ’60s, when the two found they had a common enemy in Fidel Castro.  Even before Soviet ICBMs were stationed in Cuba, the CIA absolutely did not want a Marxist regime 90 miles off the coast of Florida.  Meanwhile, the Mafia was still smarting from the loss of their private playground: under Batista, the Mob ran a number of casinos in Havana, and it was a vast cash cow that dwarfed Las Vegas.  Jointly deciding that Castro had to go, the CIA “hired” mob hitmen to take out Fidel; by most accounts, the mob agreed to do it for free as their patriotic duty!  This was the infamous “Operation Mongoose,” where assassination attempts were planned—by future Bay of Pigs mastermind and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, no less!  The assassination plans ran the gambit from straight-out marksmanship with a high powered rifle, to some rather unorthodox methods such as an exploding cigar, tuberculosis spores in Fidel’s scuba gear (Castro was an avid diver), a , and even an overdose of LSD timed to coincide with his weekly radio broadcasts.  (I’m not making this up!  It’s public record, and your tax dollars at work.)  The Gemstone File even adds a new one to the infamous list: “The team tries five times to kill Castro with everything from long-range rifles to apple pie with sodium morphate in it.”

My point: all this information was highly classified “National Security” until about ten years ago, and unless Roberts happened to get lucky with wild guesses, there is no way to have known this without inside information.

A second example should suffice to serve testimony to how much the Gemstone File makes mention of things not known at the time of their inception: Mafia connections to the Vatican.  

In 1978, the newly-elected Pope John Paul (The First, not his Polish post-op) inadvertently inherited a fledgling banking scandal, where it was being revealed that the Mafia was laundering billions of dollars through various Vatican-run banks, with the Church (and especially several key higher-ups) pocketing a hefty “service charge.”  A major player behind all this was a shadowy group known as Propaganda Due (aka ‘P2’) that had extensive ties to the Grand Lodge Alpina (Switzerland’s major Freemasonry organization) and the Mafia.  John Paul vowed to clean house, cleansing the Church of the Mob and the Masons, but after announcing this abruptly died a mere 33 days into his Papacy.  

The Vatican ruled the death as natural causes, specifically a heart attack.  This is odd, because: 

1) At the beginning of his term, John Paul I was given a clean bill of health by his doctor,

2)  No autopsy was performed (how do you know if someone had a heart attack without an autopsy?!?)

3)  His body was immediately embalmed, thus preventing any type of autopsy

If this smells like bilge to you, then you’re among others of a like mind.  

Perhaps predicting a potential pattern, his successor (John Paul II) conveniently dropped any investigations into mafia/masonic money laundering, and the issue quietly died.  Especially since most of the other major players involved began turning up dead, executed in either traditional Mafia or Masonic style.

Still, it did make front page headlines for a while, and is a matter of the public record.

More to the point, it is public record as of 1978—at least two years after Roberts wrote about it in The Gemstone File.

That said, one would think that Roberts knew what he was talking about when he began composing The Gemstone File.

But wait!

Despite parts that seem privy to precognizant inside information, some of the ’File also reeks of unequivocal bullshit that flies in the face of common sense.

Let's start with the claim that Aristotle Onassis was the true kingpin behind the Mafia.  Onassis was Greek, yet pretty much everyone else agrees that the Mafia is (and always has been) a xenophobic institution which is so Sicilian that it bleeds marinara sauce.

Even more incredulous, though, is Roberts’ claim about the JFK assassination, which has the fatal shot being personally fired by Mob boss Johnny Roselli.  Robert Anton Wilson best sums up my disdain for this bilge:

 

THIS JUST IN!

click here for a Gemstone File update!