atlas-astir

[atlas-astir]

Barack Obama has a new Netflix series

Which is already a weird thing to write. A few years ago he-- and his wife, signed an 8 film deal with Netflix. And I saw that at the time, it was weird at the time.

But their first film was “American Factory” which chronicled the lives of Rust Belt factory workers as they tried to integrate with new Chinese ownership. It was topical, won a whole bunch of awards, was very much in the obama The Obama’s wheelhouse.

This time around he’s inexplicably hosting and presenting to camera, a BBC style nature documentary. 

I watched the trailer and he’s standing on a beach somewhere in a button down shirt talking about how “Our National Parks contain natural wonders”. 

And he’s got a great voice, don’t get me wrong. It’s just weird for the guy giving a to-camera about Sloth fur to have a history of war crimes. I don’t think that’s happened before?

Alleged War Crimes. 

But it’s like scientology, right? If I’m talking to someone and it comes up that they know Tom Cruise, that’s not inherently suspicious. My first thought isn’t that they’re a scientologist. But if later, we’re talking about Pulp Fiction (they must have brought it up) and it turns out that “just the other day they were hanging out with John Travolta”, my brain starts turning. You know?

It’s like, do you just hang out around the military community? Maybe you just authorize a lot of military action? Or is it specifically the ones where CIA backed death squads abduct children out of schools?

And later, if they offer to introduce me to Nancy Cartright (she’s the lady that voices Bart Simpson) they’re now in proximity to enough scientologists that I assume they must have authorized at least some of the massive escalation in military action that lead to thousands of dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians. 

You know?

It’s just. This person knows too many Scientologists to not be one. And Obama was complicit in the deaths of too many children to launder his reputation through a Netflix nature documentary. 

[atlas-astir]

[atlas-astir]

I think that we should go "HA!" whenever one millionaire slaps another at the special dinner party where no one expected to get slapped.

does everything have to be an ethics debate cant we just watch a man slap another man on television and go “huh” and gossip and move on

[atlas-astir]

I thought you might like these moss-filled pawprints in concrete which I saw earlier. :-)

[atlas-astir]

did i ever tell you guys about that time i gave my sister 2000 nickels for her birthday

[atlas-astir]

In the 90's we discovered magic. I know because I've

seen the Power Point presentation, full of bezels and slide transitions. It's liminal-- like an empty school gym. The impossible within the language and tastelessness of 2005 corporate americana.

The first slide is totally blank. It comes to life with a theatricality that hadn't yet been beaten out of our Microsoft Office experience. A click and the first words fade in.

"The Next Electricity".

They got fourty-million dollars of the ballooning post 9/11 military budget. Unaccountable "defense spending" on "alternative energy research". That's how it's always framed, very carefully. They worked at Moffet Field, outside Silicon Valley. The base is home to the Air Force and NASA's Ames Research Center. At it's outside edge is a massive wooden hanger, one of only ten ever constructed to house blimps during World War Two. On paper it was sold by the Air Force to a private contractor. This stuff's all public, part of a massive whistleblower dump a few years ago. The media focused on the UFO's obviously, but I knew what I was looking for.

The Center for Alternative Energy at Moffet Field. Officially the cowboy physicists working there had figured out a new way to manipulate passive electrons, creating energy fields. Officially, it was nothing practical, but might turn into something given enough funding and time. Certainly nothing magical.

The first thing that anyone who's seen it, not the suits or the uniforms but the cowboys in t-shirts, will tell you is that it's magic. Not science. The second thing they'll tell you is that they can't go on the record.

They know what'll happen. Best case, they'll be labeled a fraud. Some nutcase who took too much LSD while working on god-knows-what for the CIA in the 90's. Worst case? Well that's Henry Ngyuen. He jumped through the reinforced window of a ten story hotel the day before he talked to Laura.

Of course, it was Laura. Some scientist at NASA begs her to meet and then jumps out his window? She couldn't resist that. She was an old-school journalist. New York Times, chain smoking, sharp suits. The kind of tenacious reporter that Tom Hanks movies are about. When she died, she left me everything she'd ever worked on in fourteen cardboard boxes. Most of them were red-herrings. They'd moved to digital in the 90's at The Times, so a lot of it was just random research on Hard Drives and SD cards. Three of the boxes were filled to the brim with honest-to-god paperwork. An instant indication something was up.

I'd found Doctor Ngyuen's death with quotation marks drawn in red ink around the word "Suicide". Interviews she'd done with NASA researchers at Moffet Field. A janitor who'd seen six men in white suits dancing on the tarmac at midnight. A handwritten note.

In case I missed anything.

L. Hillenger

Reporters don't write like that anymore. At least not ones that work for the New York Times. Efficient, brutal, catastrophically witty.

She'd known I couldn't resist.