Anywhere But Hollywood

In 1966, hundreds of students, teachers, and local residents witnessed a flying saucer hover overhead, land, and take off again at incredible speed. What was it? Extraterrestrial visitation? Top secret experimental aircraft? Weather balloon?

WESTALL ’66 is an intriguing documentary that tells the story of the largest and most impressive mass UFO sighting in Australian history. This is the Australian Roswell, and it amazes us that we (here in the States) haven’t heard more about it. While there is little physical evidence for the reality of this encounter – much less for the extraterrestrial hypothesis – there is palpable truth in the personal stories of the witnesses.

Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING is: a) a confession of his participation in the hoaxed Apollo moon mission; b) a treatise on the genocide of the Native Americans; c) a meditation on the holocaust; d) all of the above; e) a frickin’ horror movie.

New favorite word: apophenia.

For more than 25 years, someone has been placing mysterious tiles on the busiest streets in New York, Philadelphia, and other east coast cities – as far south as Brazil.

They all bear some variation of this message:

“Toynbee Idea/In Kubrick’s 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter”

Who’s been doing this? How? Why?

And what does all of this have to do with playwright David Mamet?

Is the federal income tax unconstitutional? Is it a fraud perpetrated by a cabal of sneaky elites pushing their self-serving agenda through nefarious means? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? I mean, who loves paying taxes?

Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism was a passion project for him. He put this thing together in the last years of his life as he struggled under a $2 million tax debt. He was certain he had found evidence of the unconstitutionality of the United States Federal Income Tax, and was determined to spread the word far and wide, calling for nothing short of revolution.

More accurately, he was certain he had not found evidence of the constitutionality of the tax code. But does lack of such evidence equate with the illegitimacy of the income tax?

What would you say if I told you that everything you see, everything you taste, touch, and do, it’s all an illusion? Would you say I’d seen The Matrix a few too many times? Well, this seems to be an affliction affecting some prominent physicists and philosophers these days.

Turns out there’s actual scientific evidence for the idea that we are all living in a carefully crafted simulation. Are we in fact merely sprites in a video game played by some disaffected teenager sitting on a cosmic bed in some “greater” reality?

The Simulation Hypothesis is a documentary offering a brief overview of the theories and science behind this notion. It’s not all as implausible as it sounds.