File under Arts 'n Crafts, Conspiracy Theory, Drugsploitation, Fetish, Massive Consumption of Drugs, New York City History, Secret History, SeMeN SPeRmS Approved, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG
Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on May 8, 2012
Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground (1988) Geraldo Rivera 80′s TV Satanic Scare
” Twenty-one years ago tonight, television standards plunged further when NBC aired “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground,”a two-hour “documentary” from “journalist” Geraldo Rivera.
The network touted the special as an investigation into crimes and a correlation between heavy metal music and Satanism, but the Washington Post’s Tom Shales had a different description, calling it “dirty-minded teleporn,” filled with “talk about butchered babies, dismembered corpses, cannibal cults and sex orgies.”
He noted the networks had cut their departments of standards and practices, attributing the whittling to “hyped competitiveness fostered by the Reagan administration’s sweeping deregulation” of broadcasting.
NBC began “Devil Worship” at 8 p.m. – the slot it reserved for “ALF,” “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties” on other nights – requiring frequent interruptions for disclaimers and parental advisories.
As Shales reported, Rivera himself addressed parents during the broadcast: “I am begging you. This subject is just too upsetting for your young children. Please, get them out of the room or change the station!”
NBC’s entertainment division produced “Devil Worship,” triggering much strife within the network.
The news division refused to allow Rivera on “Today” to promote “Devil Worship,” and “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw told the Los Angeles Times “quasi-news programs cheapens the genuine news product.”
In the days before broadcast, with negative publicity mounting, NBC was forced to sell some commercials at half price.
The Los Angeles Times reported KNBC’s “Devil Worship” broadcast carried just 14 commercials, including two for the National Enquirer and three for new horror movies.
An NBC spokeswoman told the Times the network’s switchboards received 331 complaints in New York and Burbank. (A secretary at the NBC affiliate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said it received just one call – from a viewer whose home lost power as the broadcast began and wanted a rerun.)
“Devil Worship” finished fifth in the weekly ratings, with viewers in almost 20 million homes. Only NBC’s “Cosby,” “Cheers” and “A Different World” and CBS’s “60 Minutes” ranked higher.
In his 1992 memoir “The Last Great Ride,” NBC entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff recalled hiring Rivera after he scored big ratings opening Al Capone’s vault in a live syndicated special in 1986.
Another concession: “Devil Worship” was conceived as a “blunting weapon” to counter the second episode of ABC’s “Roseanne,” which ended up ranking eighth.
Although Tartikoff was apologetic in the days after the “Devil Worship” broadcast, he struck a somewhat defensive tone in his book, noting affiliates received calls and letters from viewers thanking NBC for “exposing this very real problem … infecting their communities.”
Still, Tartikoff wrote, “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t.”
File under Blast From The Past, Comedy, Conspiracy Theory, Cults, Culture, Fashion, Fetish, Horror, Kooky Characters, Music, SeMeN SPeRmS Approved, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS ViDeO CLuB, Sex, Trash TV
Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on April 26, 2012
Dimethyltryptamine Elf
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A woman has filed a complaint with federal authorities over how her elderly mother was treated at Northwest Florida Regional Airport last weekend.
Jean Weber of Destin filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security after her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.
Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.
“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber said Friday. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”
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Here, Alex Jones absolutely leaves David Icke in the dust as he spins a conspiracy theory of the how “the elite” smoke DMT to put them in touch with Terence McKenna’s “self-transforming machine elves” who want them to kill everyone Dalek-style. Apparently.
According to Jones, the alien beings have instructed that the Large Hadron Collider be built so that the inter-dimensional vortex could be opened, allowing them to gain access to our space-time continuum. (Well he doesn’t say that exactly, I’m interpolating just a little bit).
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Nicole Jackson, whose child is in first grade, said her son told her, ‘Mommy there was naughty medicine in the school. One of the kids had naughty medicine.” She called the incident “very scary.”
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In 2010, the U.S. military had a problem. It had bought over 59,000 microchips destined for installation in everything from missile defense systems to gadgets that tell friend from foe. The chips turned out to be counterfeits from China, but it could have been even worse. Instead of crappy Chinese fakes being put into Navy weapons systems, the chips could have been hacked, able to shut off a missile in the event of war or lie around just waiting to malfunction.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the spy community’s way-out research arm, is looking to avoid a repeat. The Trusted Integrated Circuit program is Iarpa’s attempt to keep foreign adversaries from messing with our chips — and check the circuits for backdoors once they’ve been made.
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Radiation is expected to continue spewing for months from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that suffered a meltdown following an earthquake and tsunami in March, but despite grim reports from Japan, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly stopped running extra tests for radioactive material in America’s milk, rain and drinking water.
The EPA initially ramped up nationwide testing in the weeks following the disaster in Japan, and radioactive materials like cesium and iodine-131 were detected on US soil. Citing declining levels of radiation, the EPA has abandoned the extra tests, even as reports from Japan indicate that the Fukushima plant continues to emit radiation and the disaster is one of the worst in world history.
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And now I have a document that should clear up quite a bit with respect to Kubrick’s desires and intentions: a letter to projectionists signed by Kubrick. It came to me through the courtesy and kindness of screenwriter and critic Jay Cocks, who writes: “I knew Stanley pretty well for a while, but at the time of the Time Barry Lyndon cover I was in LA beginning preliminary work on Gangs of New York. So I had no hand in the Time cover, but still managed to let Stanley know how great I thought the movie was. He replied with his usual gracious, funny note and enclosed this letter, because he thought I’d be interested. Bet you will be too.”
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Seagull stoled my video camera in Cannes France
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Directed by Matt Lenski but created with the help of many amazing people
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The couple caught on video and in film kissing on the street while the June 15 Vancouver riot swirled around them has quickly become an iconic image, hailed as a moment of beauty in the midst of violent uproar. New video, however, shows that it’s not quite the moment of tenderness previously thought.
The couple, now identified as Alexandra Thomas and Scott Jones, were knocked to the ground and hit by police batons, the new footage shows. Thomas is on the ground and appears to be in pain and crying, while Jones holds his hand up to protect her. Once the police move on, he tried to comfort her, leading to the now-viral kiss photo.
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File under Conspiracy Theory, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death
Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on June 26, 2011
