Month: October 2024

The anarchist cookbook was honestly a fun read, he had a few one-liners and some of his drawings were kinda silly. He did approach everything with an air of caution, which made sense due to the material covered.

For example, in the section on drugs, he gave some of the most detailed explanations in the entire book on the more harmless drugs like pot and lsd. While conversely, brushed off some of the more dangerous stuff, he didn’t bother at all with heroin, and strongly advised against its usage, saying that anything injected was bad suggested to never go there. With hydrangea leaves, he flat out said no, this will kill you, I put this in there because I’ve heard about the stuff and don’t want people to be uninformed- ignorance is dangerous and inexcusable (he goes over this many many times.)

Throughout the book he gave locations and/or postal addresses on various resources, which made me wonder what came of it. Did they see an increase of sales? Or were they investigated by law enforcement? Side not, this man is both repetitive and inconstant. he goes over caution and safety a thousand times (which in some cases can be appreciated), and he hammers into your head that ignorance is not bliss, it is deadly, and that there is no excuse for ignorance.

At the same time, he messes up basic counting- ‘there are five points marked on the bridge,’ my dude there are six. ‘here you can have three to four explosives and should have six explosives in these places.’ Four plus six is ten. On the diagram there are eleven. My guy. I get that you’re nineteen but you should know how to count by now.

But in all he was pretty informative, he even listed some common household substitutes for some of the things that are harder to find. You can use black pencil lead as a substitute for lead, salt for sodium chloride, and dutch fluid for ethylene dichloride.

We were planning to just read the important parts and particularly eye catching sections, but ended up reading the whole thing.

So, my dude starts with a disclaimer. Something to the lines of, “This movie is about tricks, fraud, and lies. Every movie is in part a lie. Except for all of this, this is true real facts.” Now, the guy who tells us this is a magician. So even without the title or description, I think that sets the tone pretty well.

So, I’mma be real honest here. I can’t write a good reflection on this, because this movie was confusing and my thoughts are tv static. It’s a movie about fakers, who, a good portion of what we think we know about them could very well be a lie, but we believe it to be the truth.

First of all, Ibiza. Ibiza seems like a fun place to vacation for like, a week, and say that it was nice and you enjoyed your time there, but you’re purposely blocking out the experiences you had with the people there.

Elmyr de Hory is an interesting man, if not a bit eccentric. He couldn’t achieve fame with his own paintings, so he turned to forgery, and became quite famous for it. The things the movie focused on the most were Modiglianis and Picassos.

One kinda quote kinda paraphrase from the movie I jotted down has very little to do with the actual contents of the film is thus: “France was now suffering from August. The time when an invader could take the country by telephone, if they could get anyone to answer it.”

The narrator then tells of how a lovely woman named Oja Kodar vacationed in the same village in France that Picasso lived in. He was so entranced by her that he created 22 different paintings of her; All of which she took back home with her. He later found them in a museum, then found out they were forgeries. Oja then took him to see her grandfather, who forged them. At the end of a long conversation, Picasso demands his paintings back, but her Granddad says that that’s not possible, as he burned them.

He then says that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour, and that hour has passed. “For the last 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off.” The entire thing with Oja and Picasso was fake- gotcha! I guess.

This girl. Had issues.

To preface, she wrote a play called Up Your Ass, and she went to Andy Warhol to try and get it produced, but, as he was already in a bit of trouble for some of the stuff he produced, and that the play was incredibly vulgar, he thought it was a police trap and said no. But, he offered her a bit of money to act a minor part in something he did end up producing, and they seemed to get along fine. But, she still wanted her play to be produced.

So, when trying to talk to get her play produced, and the person she was talking to kept saying no, she supposedly pulled out her gun and said, “Yes, you will produce the play because I’ll shoot Andy Warhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you’ll produce it.”

And then she did it. She actually went and did it.

She went to the building, loitered around, got told to go home, did not go home, rode up and down the same freaking elevator until Andy and his pal walked in, then went and shot them. Then turned herself in. “For the fame,” I guess.

And then, she was deemed to be too mentally unstable to stand trail. How! Shocking!

I mean, she was an open lesbian in the 1950’s, which was pretty brave of her. But she also seems the type to not listen nor to hear what other people say, which in some situations, is a good thing, in other situations, is maybe a bit, uuhhh, not great.

Solanas had some… interesting points.

Some of what she said was silly, some of it was so extreme it was scoffable, but, some of it actually kinda made sense.

The whole prevention of conversation bit? It was pretty much a mix of men talking more than women, talking over women, and mansplaining. Some of the ways she explained it was a bit.. odd…. But the basic idea is there.

Similar to this are her ideas on ‘Great Art’. She mentions that almost all of what is called “great art” was made by a man and that we consider it to be great because the men said so. Which, I mean kinda, most art critics are also men, so…, I guess??

The thing about all of this that got me the most is that she’s serious about this- like, this isn’t satire. She genuinely believes that all men should die. No, let’s do a series of protests or riots to get our demands for equality, no no no, none of that. Death. Men should die. End of. Like, girl, please try to cool down a bit.

In terms of how it’s written…. it reads as a rant with slight refining. The same points are gone over, over and over again, but all the different points do reinforce the central idea. But, the lack of sense, occasionally meandering sentences, giving too many examples for any one point, the spelling and grammatical errors, all point to a hastily written rant.

No Man’s Land is a movie that takes place in the Bosnian War.

Because of circumstances, three men all end up in a ditch in no man’s land. One Bosnian Serb, and two Bosniaks, one of whom is lying on a land mine, in which if he moves, it will explode, and everybody would die. This is, of course, thanks to the Bosnian Serbs.

There’s a whole debacle of getting help. The two sides agree to a cease-fire, while the UN sweeps in to save them. The UN is at first ordered to leave, however, one of the people in charge decides to go back to help them. A bomb unit is called in for the land mine, and the two men not lying on a land mine are taken out of the ditch, but tensions between them are high.

The bomb man, when shown what type of bomb the other guy is laying on says that there is nothing he can do, there is no way to defuse it. While this is going on, the Bosniak and the Bosnian Serb have a shoot out, the Bosniak lands a killing shot, and a UN member shoots the Bosniak for the sake of peace. This all takes place in a few seconds.

As if all of this was not enough, a worldwide news crew is broadcasting the whole thing live. So, to keep face, the two out of the ditch are told to be in not good shape and on their way to hospital. A body is carried past on a stretcher, fully covered by a blanket. It’s told to the news that this is the man that was laying on the bomb, and he is in very not good condition, and will be going to hospital immediately.

Cut to the man still laying in the ditch.

And they just leave him there. In the middle of nowhere, with no food, no water, no shelter, and nobody coming to help him.

It’s ambiguous if he laid there until he died of natural causes, well, as natural a cause can be in his situation, or if at some point, he got up, and let the mine kill him.

He knows his friend is dead, he knows there’s no way to help him, he knows nobody is coming to help him, and he knows he’ll never see his loved ones again. He knows death is the only thing life has left for him. It’s just a matter of when.

For me, the worst thing about all of this is that, given the right circumstances, this could happen. It’s more likely that the ground troops of the UN would either not come to the rescue at all due to the risk or would follow through with the order to retreat.

For many people, no man’s life is valuable enough to lose more.

I found the Holocaust Museum to be very sobering. I’m well aware of the atrocities committed against Jews and the other victims of the Holocaust. In the hall of pictures, I saw a portrait that strongly resembled my great-grandma Pearl, who was a Polish Jew. I saw portraits that reminded me of my grandmother and grand-uncle.

I had to take a break somewhere in the middle.

There’s an example train car in the museum for the guests to walk through, getting a glimpse of the feelings the would-be prisoners felt while they were in transport. As I was already slightly overwhelmed, I chose not to walk through, I could vividly imagine it, and that was enough for me.

And while this is not directly related to the museum itself, more so the other people in the museum at my time of visiting, it still contributed to my overall experience.

Guests at the museum make a big difference aswell. During my visit, there was a pair of people, a lady and a gentleman, dressed in business casual. From what I could tell, the lady was someone who had studied the Holocaust, most likely in a professional sense. She was pointing out the different things and elaborating on them to the man with her, getting close to the exhibits and remarking on how interesting things were.

And I get being enthusiastic about something you’re interested in, I get it, I think it’s nice to have something that you’re passionate about. But it made me, as a Jew, feel like the museum was a zoo, and that we, the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides, were the animals on display; being pointed at and treated like an object instead of a living human being.

Which is the opposite of what the museum was trying to convey.

Hitler was… an interesting man. And not in a good way. In a really bad way, actually.

He didn’t have the easiest childhood, but neither did he have the hardest. He didn’t have any big horrible experience that made him into who he was, just a couple of bad influences; and, by the way, he’s the one who took it as far as he did. That cannot be blamed on anyone else.

Mein Kampf, like many other texts, was authored while the writer, in this case, Adolf Hitler, was in prison for the ideologies and/or crimes they discussed in their writings. I’m pretty sure this is because they have a lot of time on their hands to stew on their thoughts and why they think they are being quote-unquote “wrongly” imprisoned.

Mein Kampf is also rife with a helluva ton of foreshadowing.

He talks about how out of the “woes of the Punic Wars,” Rome grew to greatness, and how the German state should do the same. He also mentions how if the German and Russian militaries joined forces against western Europe, it would result in global relations crumbling.

However, I think that the quote that foreshadows the coming war the most is thus, “Hence no sacrifice to insure political independence and freedom can be too great.”

I know the neo-nazi movement is alive and thriving. A neo-nazi brought a gun to my local highschool during Hanukkah and flaunted it around. Never in my life have I been more thankful to be homeschooled. And never in my life had I been so scared for the Jews who weren’t.

Reading Hitlers own account of how he came to be an anti-semite made me sick. And knowing what he would do to my people made it worse.

I think I’ve just viewed Hitler as a pillar of anti-semitism, and never gave any thought into how he became that way. I guess I assumed that he never liked Jews. And yet here I was reading how he went from feeling neutral, to hating us with his entire being.

Just the thought of him not hating Jews made me feel unwell. But reading of how he, a relatively normal man up until a certain point, came to think of us as less than human? That just made me sad.

He details how he genuinely struggled with the very concept of anti-semitism, how it was hard for him to come face-to-face with the “reality” of it all. It really made me think that anybody, if presented with the right kind of evidence, could change their beliefs. Even to the point of wishing an entire culture, one that you’ve only had the briefest of experiences with, was completely. eradicated.

I don’t like that one bit.

But he doesn’t like me one bit. So I guess it evens out somehow.

All of this aside, I’d love to see his reaction to seeing a Jewish kid reading his work with their friend, both of which are laughing at him. But from a distance, I’d rather not get killed by him. I have a point to prove.

The first mention of the Protocols appeared in Russian newspapers in 1902 and was first published in 1903.

At the time it was published, there were bigger antisemitic riots, and it’s creation only fueled the fire. Although it was proven to be fabricated both in 1921 and in 1923, at the beginning of 1933 it was brought into some German school systems and taught as fact. This further fueled antisemitic feelings there.

The Protocols themselves are supposed to be minutes from meetings held by a group of Jews who intended to take over the world and rule it in tyranny. However, the Protocols are plagiarized, stereotypical, and nonsensical.

Multiple sections plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”, even word for word occasionally. And honestly, I’m so incredibly tired of the stereotype that all Jews are bankers. It’s the stereotype that bothers me the most, but why, I could not tell you.