“The Spark” Art Film Debuts Online — Stephen Shellen’s Tour-de-Force on Post 9/11 Surveillance

Thomas Fontanez McFarlan
Medium

“What if your worst fears become your world, and no one believes a word you say…”, reads the poster headline for this beautifully crafted abstract art film — by Canadian Actor, Filmmaker and Painter Stephen Shellen. With exquisite acting, cinematography and score, arranged in a non-linear narrative, Stephen Shellen weaves a visually stunning, evocative and haunting, depiction of life, for those thrust into the front lines of the battle against the utterly surreal surveillance-state, imposed on America and the world, in the wake of September 11th. If you thought you knew everything the Edward Snowden revelations revealed — you better think again…

A prime target of the intelligence agency complex for well over a decade, Stephen Shellen informs his cinematic tour-de-force, with a wealth of first-hand knowledge of surveillance-state crimes. “The Spark” illuminates these insidious and covert surveillance crimes of unimaginable horror, with a leading actor who is held in absolute possession by his character, and simultaneously, poured every last drop of blood, sweat and tears at his command, into financing and directing this seminal 21st century film. Stephen Shellen is historically best known as a mainstream Hollywood actor — with roles in dozens of major Hollywood productions between 1982–1995. He’s most especially known for his performances in the feature films: “A River Runs Through It”, “The Stepfather”, “American Gothic”, “The Bodyguard” and “Damned River”, as well as, the TV series “Counterstrike” and “La Femme Nikita”. In the year 1995, his life as a successful Hollywood actor, came to a sudden and shocking end, when he and his young children, became the subject of unimaginable surveillance and human trafficking crimes… It was this surreal and horrific juncture, some 23 years ago, that sent Stephen on the trajectory that would lead him to create “The Spark”.

Read more

IN SHADOW

IN-SHADOW: A Modern Odyssey from Lubomir Arsov on Vimeo.

Embark on a visionary journey through the fragmented unconscious of the West, and with courage face the Shadow. Through Shadow into Light.

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
-C.G. Jung

This film was created with earnest effort, diligence, and sacrifice. It is an urgent call to growth. If you are moved by the content, please SHARE.

Written, Directed & Produced by Lubomir Arsov

Original Soundtrack “Age of Wake” by Starward Projections

Composited by Sheldon Lisoy

Additional Compositing by Hiram Gifford

Art Directed & Edited by Lubomir Arsov

___

'IN-SHADOW' is an entirely independently funded, not-for-profit film. If you'd like to support the artist, DONATE here: (click the 'donate' tab) https://www.inshadow.net/

Gallery quality ART PRINTS available here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/inshadow/

Film Website: https://www.inshadow.net/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inshadowmovie/

Music Composers: https://www.starwardprojections.com/

Contact: light@inshadow.net

© Lubomir Arsov 2017

Intimate portraits of Gaza's lost

Charlotte Silver 

The Electronic Intifada

Obliterated Families is a newly released multimedia project produced by Anne Paq, a member of the photography collective ActiveStills, and journalist Ala Qandil.

Two years in the making, it profiles ten families from Gaza partially or entirely annihilated during the Israeli bombardment in the summer of 2014.

The first chapter, released early to the press, tells the story of Ibrahim al-Kilani and his family, most of whom held German passports.

Every single member of the family was wiped out as they sought safety from the onslaught, hidden in a friend’s office in the middle of Gaza City.

Ibrahim spent the first 20 years of his young adult life in Germany, where he became an architect, married a German woman and had a daughter and a son, before moving back to Gaza when his marriage fell apart.

After returning, he remarried and had five more children. All five children were killed. They ranged in age between between 3 and 11 years old.

Absent from the telling of Ibrahim’s life story, both prior to and during his final hours, are the customary statistics and figures, political facts and flashpoint dates that usually accompany the story of Gaza’s destruction.

Such figures may strive to show the magnitude of the tragedy, but they also obscure the staggering consequence of each extinguished life.

The deeply reported profiles in Obliterated Families never depart from the perspective of the witness – the surviving family members left in grief, the neighbors who last saw the families alive, the friend who tried to find them safe shelter and sometimes Paq herself.

The video above, produced as part of the project, tells some of these stories.

Read more

On Bullshit

Carl Herman

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this… But we tend to take the situation for granted… (the bullshitter) does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up… (Bullshitters) continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.”  ~ Princeton professor emeritus, Harry Frankfurt, 2005 Bestseller, On Bullshit

“[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” ~ Think Nice’s brilliant 5-minute artistic frame for Professor Frankfurt (although there’s likely more to climate change than he mentions [and here, here]):

 

Read more

The Killings of Tony Blair: watch the trailer for George Galloway's film about the former PM – video

The Guardian: The Killings of Tony Blair

The Truth Perspective: A Very Heavy Agenda: The rise, fall and resurrection of the neocons, with Robbie Martin

Sott.net

 

"Post-9/11, the War on Terror had outlived its usefulness. The minds behind the think tanks that drive America's interventionist foreign policy decided that the U.S. needed a new enemy, so they chose an old one -- Russia."

Thought they were gone and increasingly irrelevant after the disastrous Iraq war? Think again. The neocons are back, and they're directing American foreign policy with as much psychopathic zeal as ever. PNAC may be gone, but it has simply been rebranded as the 'bipartisan' Foreign Policy Initiative, and its agenda is one and the same: to ensure U.S. hegemony and global domination, no matter how many people they have to kill.

All this and more is covered extensively in filmmaker Robbie Martin's new documentary, A Very Heavy Agenda.

Read more and listen to the podcast.

Philip Zimbardo Thinks We All Can Be Evil

New York Times

In 1971, you conducted a psychological experiment at Stanford. You split your 21 student-subjects into guards and inmates, with you as the superintendent, and had them run a prison out of a basement. You had to abandon the experiment after six days, because it spiraled violently out of control. Now, 44 years later, there is a movie about it. 

Do you like it? 

I’m delighted with it. It conveys for the first time to a general public what this kind of experiment is like. There is another movie called ‘‘Experimenter,’’ about Stanley Milgram’s research, which also premiered at Sundance, and the second half is confusing. At one point, Milgram walks out of his lab, and behind him is a huge elephant. I saw the director at Sundance, and I said, ‘‘Why did you have an elephant?’’ He said, ‘‘People like elephants.’’

I had always believed that the Stanford experiment started very professionally, and that in your role as superintendent, you got caught up in it the same way the guards did. But in the movie, it’s as if you were this dark, eerie, almost sadistic figure right from the very beginning. Were you?  

No. I had a reputation at Stanford. I was one of the most lovable professors there.

The movie makes it seem as though the study was irresponsible — that you were abusive from the very start. Do you worry that this will change what people think of the study?  

Yeah. If there is a weakness, it’s that there is not a sufficient transformation with my character. You see it in the guards. They start off playing a game, and then there is a point at which they each, one by one, flip and become more and more extreme.

Have any of the prisoners or guards seen the movie yet?  

No, nobody has.

David Eshleman, one of the most abusive guards, told me that he doesn’t think an evil environment turned him evil. He claims that his motivation was actually to try to please you.

He said he was trying to do something good.  

Everything he created was really off the charts. I mean, he forced the prisoners to simulate sodomy: ‘‘Bend over. You’re a camel. Hump him.’’

Sometimes the evil acts captured in the original footage of the experiment seem as if everybody’s hamming it up.  

Oh no, not at all.

Do you think Eshleman’s only now saying he wanted to do good because he feels embarrassed by the way he behaved?  

Yes. I think it’s a rationalization after the fact. He began as an actor, and he ended up as a mean, cruel guard, no different from the guards at Abu Ghraib.

Read more

 

9/11 - The Anatomy of a Great Deception ~ Full Documentary

Documentary: The Power Principle

SKYGATE 9/11

Visit http://pilotsfor911truth.org/store#sk... to grab your copy in HD.
You are the Jury as new and existing evidence is gathered with regard to the aviation related events of September 11, 2001. Analysis includes in depth study of the Departure Gate at Dulles, In-Flight navigation and alignment combined with further scrutiny of the data provided by government agencies which far exceed the capabilities of the alleged aircraft reported. Encompassing a fresh comprehensive examination into the extreme speeds reported based on new evidence as it compares to precedent set by other aircraft accidents on the record with respect to manufacturer limitations... and more. Exhibits are presented making a strong case for a new independent investigation into the day which changed our world.

Danny Glover Calls for Cultural Boycott of Israel

The Bow Spring

Actor Danny Glover and others featured in a documentary about a 98-year-old Asian-American activist are protesting the film’s screening at a Tel Aviv film festival.

In a statement released Monday, participants in “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” including Boggs, said:

“We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and support their call for cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

As people featured in the film American Revolutionary: the Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, we were shocked to find the film slated to be screened at the DocAviv festival in Israel on May 13th and 15th. This was scheduled without our knowledge.

We immediately took action to have the film withdrawn from the festival. The festival organizers and film producers informed us that this was not possible and they would move forward with the screening, over our objections.”

Boggs, a philosopher and writer who has been involved in left-wing American social movements, “has explicitly stated her support of the boycott and believes this screening is in direct contradiction to her legacy and ongoing work as a revolutionary,” the statement continued.

The producers posted the statement on the film’s website, but prefaced it by saying they had been “unaware that playing in the festival would be an issue for the participants of the film. We respect their position and regret the discomfort this has caused for them.

Read more

Lights, Camera, Arrested: Americans Are Being Thrown in Jail for Filming Police

John Whitehead RINF Alternative News

“I thought I had freedom of speech here,” the man said to the police officer.

“You don’t. You just lost it,” the officer replied.

Once again, the U.S. government is attempting to police the world when it should be policing its own law enforcement agencies. We’ve got a warship cruising the Black Sea, fighter jets patrolling the Baltic skies, and a guided-missile destroyer searching the South China Sea for the downed Malaysia Airlines flight. All the while, back home in the U.S., our constitutional rights are going to hell in a hand basket, with homeowners being threatened with eviction for attempting to live off the grid, old women jailed for feeding crows, and citizens armed with little more than a cell phone arrested for daring to record police activities.

Robin Speronis now finds herself threatened with eviction from her own Florida home for daring to live off the grid, independent of city utilities such as water and electricity. City officials insist the Cape Coral resident’s chosen way of life violates international property maintenance code and city ordinances. Mary Musselman, also a Florida resident, is being held in jail without bond for “feeding wild animals.” The 81-year-old Musselman, on probation after being charged with feeding bears near her home, was arrested after officers discovered her leaving bread out for crows. Meanwhile, Brandy Berning of Florida was forced to spend a night in jail after recording her conversation with an officer who pulled her over for a routine traffic stop.

Welcome to the farce that passes for law and order in America today, where, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, crime is low, militarized police activity is on the rise, and Americans are being penalized for living off the grid, feeding wild animals, holding Bible studies in their back yard, growing vegetables in their front yard, collecting rainwater, and filming the police.

This latter point should really stick in your craw. Consider the irony: the government insists it can carry out all manner of surveillance on us–listen in on our phone calls, read our emails and text messages, track our movements, photograph our license plates, even enter our biometric information into DNA databases–but if we dare to return the favor, even a little, we get roughed up by the police, arrested, charged with violating various and sundry crimes (often trumped up), and forced to make restitution.

Read more

 

Lights, Camera… Covert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood

Orwell was Right
 
A great overview of Hollywood propaganda from Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham writing over at Global Research. I read Alford's excellent book Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy a couple of years ago – indeed, I wrote a review which you can read here – it's a fascinating insight into both the dynamic between the Pentagon and movie studios and the way in which the propaganda itself manifests on the silver screen.  

Here we build a prima facae case supporting the idea that Hollywood continues to be a target for infiltration and subversion by a variety of state agencies, in particular the CIA. Academic debates on cinematic propaganda are almost entirely retrospective, and whilst a number of commentators have drawn attention to Hollywood’s longstanding and open relationship with the Pentagon, little of substance has been written about the more clandestine influences working through Hollywood in the post-9/11 world. As such, our work delves into the field of what Peter Dale Scott calls “deep politics”; namely, activities which cannot currently be fully understood due to the covert influence of shadowy power players.

 The Latest Picture

A variety of state agencies have liaison offices in Hollywood today, from the FBI, to NASA and the Secret Service. Few of these agencies, though, have much to offer in exchange for favourable storylines, and so their influence in Hollywood is minimal. The major exception here is the Department of Defense, which has an ‘open’ but barely publicized relationship with Tinsel Town, whereby, in exchange for advice, men and invaluable equipment, such as aircraft carriers and helicopters, the Pentagon routinely demands flattering script alterations. Examples of this policy include changing the true identity of a heroic military character in Black Hawk Down (2001) due to his real-life status as a child rapist; the removal of a joke about “losing Vietnam” from the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and cutting images of Marines taking gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers in Windtalkers (2002). Instances such as these are innumerable, and the Pentagon has granted its coveted “full cooperation” to a long list of contemporary pictures includingTop Gun (1986), True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Transformers (2007), Iron Man (2008), as well as TV series such as JAG (1995-2005).

Such government activity, whilst morally dubious and barely advertised, has at least occurred within the public domain. This much cannot be said of the CIA’s dealings with Hollywood, which, until recently, went largely unacknowledged by the Agency. In 1996, the CIA announced with little fanfare the dry remit of its newly established Media Liaison Office, headed by veteran operative Chase Brandon. As part of its new stance, the CIA would now openly collaborate on Hollywood productions, supposedly in a strictly ‘advisory’ capacity.

The Agency’s decision to work publicly with Hollywood was preceded by the 1991 “Task Force Report on Greater CIA Openness,” compiled by CIA Director Robert Gates’ newly appointed ‘Openness Task Force,’ which secretly debated –ironically– whether the Agency should be less secretive. The report acknowledges that the CIA “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and the authors of the report note that this helped them “turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories, and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.” It goes on to reveal that the CIA has in the past “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests…”

These admissions add weight to several reports and Congressional hearings from the 1970s which indicated that the CIA once maintained a deep-rooted and covert presence in national and international media, informally dubbed “Operation Mockingbird.” In its 1991 report, the CIA acknowledged that it had, in fact, “reviewed some film scripts about the Agency, documentary and fictional, at the request of filmmakers seeking guidance on accuracy and authenticity.” But the report is at pains to state that, although the CIA has “facilitated the filming of a few scenes on Agency premises,” it does “not seek to play a role in filmmaking ventures.” But it seems highly implausible that the CIA, whilst maintaining a decades-long presence in media and academia, would have shown no interest in the hugely influential Cinema industry.

Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the CIA has been involved in a number of recent blockbusters and TV series. The 2001 CBS TV series, The Agency, executive produced by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, Air Force One) was actually co-written by ex-CIA agent and Marine Bazzel Baz, with additional ex-CIA agents working as consultants. The CIA gladly opened its doors to the production, and facilitated both external and internal shots of its Langley headquarters as the camera gazed lovingly at the CIA seal. This arrangement was comparable to the Feds’ efforts on the popular TV series The FBI (1965-74) which was shaped by the Bureau in cooperation with ABC and which thanked J. Edgar Hoover in the credits of each episode. Similarly, The Agency glorified the actions of US spooks as they fought predictable villains including the Russian military, Arab and German terrorists, Columbian drug dealers, and Iraqis. One episode even shows the CIA saving the life of Fidel Castro; ironically, since the CIA in real life had made repeated attempts to assassinate the Cuban President. Promos for the show traded on 9/11, which had occurred just prior to its premiere, with tag lines like “Now, more than ever, we need the CIA.”

Read More 

 

9/11: A Conspiracy Theory

 

The Corbett Report

Podcast: Play in new window | Download video

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.(Watch French, German, Spanish or Portuguese translations of this video.)

TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.

These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.

Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidence literally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history.

The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimony extracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.

The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.

The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.

NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.

The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.

This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).

Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilities and the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.

This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM, White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. Because Ignorance is Strength.