Cold War

The Department of Defense maintains a database summarising its collaboration with Hollywood productions. The master list for this database was released to me two years ago as the DOD Film List and since then I have obtained a handful of entries. Getting a little more creative I asked for entries on over a dozen films and today got a response with details on Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Contact, Tears of the Sun, Indiana Jones, Deja Vu and others.

Recently released documents on former White House consultant and MPAA capo Jack Valenti strongly suggest that his appointment as president of the MPAA in some way involved the CIA. The new documents on Valenti come from the CIA and the State Department. Though they are tiny fragments in themselves the details they do contain are eye-opening. Valenti was a State Department consultant with a Top Secret clearance in the early months of taking over at the MPAA.

Pearse and I recently appeared on The Opperman Report to chat about The Writer with No Hands, Matthew Alford's book into the disappearance and probable murder of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore. We get into Devore's connections with the government, the CIA and DOD presence in Hollywood and how that might explain what happened to him.

Branko Malić
21st Century Wire
While he’s suffering under the mass media information barrage, a question tends to pop up in one’s mind: exactly how many words are there in the media vocabulary?

Jay Dyer returns to Our Interesting Times to discuss his third lecture on Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope. We talk about the banker-financed Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, the rise of the Third Reich, power blocs, why Russia and Germany were problems for the Atlanticists, and why both continental powers needed to by destroyed.

Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, said Paul Begala (probably). Washington is the entertainment capital of the world, said Jack Valenti. Washington's influence on Hollywood, the state's influence on popular culture, is the primary topic of this site. But what about Hollywood's influence on politics, the influence of popular culture on the state?

Jay Dyer joins us for this episode where we analyse the 2009 comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats, loosely based on Jon Ronson's book of the same name. It tells the story of a journalist who is inducted into the world of psychic soldiers during the Iraq war. The movie goes on to explain some of the history behind the First Earth Battalion, an experimental Pentagon unit devoted to developing a new generation of super soldier informed by the hippy and New Age movements.

One of the most prominent influences of pop culture on government and on the deep state is in the use of code names. From the capture of Saddam Hussein to a counter-smuggling helicopter unit in Hawaii, from a mass surveillance program named after Blazing Saddles to Secret Service and MI5 code names taken from cartoon characters, this is a widespread and frequent phenomenon.

21st Century Wire says…
High powered figures in foreign countries are finally coming out against NATO.
German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has branded NATO as a ‘warmongering‘ force within Eastern Europe.
He has specifically attacked recent NATO exercises near Russia, speaking these very wise words:

Aaron Franz joins us to discuss the 2002 biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which tells the story of game show producer and host Chuck Barris. Barris claims that while becoming a TV star he was recruited by and worked for the CIA as an assassin, killing a total of 33 people. In this episode we analyse this claim, which has been dismissed by the Agency as a ludicrous fantasy.