Above Majestic (with an excursus on turban jokes)

Last Halloween, I posted "Francis Bacon, papal keys, triple tiara, Denver Airport," which included a meme referencing that airport's sinister reputation. Yesterday, in "Hashtags, Keywords, Stones, and X," William Wright posted a still from an Elmo video, noting the striking similarity to the meme:

The character next to Elmo is supposed to be Rapunzel with her hair up, which makes it look an awful lot like the alien's golden tiara. Rapunzel and the alien both have green skin and mostly white eyes with what looks like heavy black mascara. The alien is flanked by two annoyingly cute little guys -- Minions with SpongeBob faces, I think. If you look closely, you'll see that Rapunzel is similarly flanked by two Elmos (the gold standard for "annoyingly cute") -- a picture of Elmo on one side and the muppet himself on the other. The main difference is that the alien is enjoining silence, while Rapunzel has her mouth wide open.

This made me curious about where the meme image had originally come from. It turns out to be from the poster for Above Majestic, a 2018 documentary about the "secret space program":

Take a look at that coin or medallion the alien is holding. I think that's meant to be one of the daughters of Akhenaten. She might appear to be wearing a beehive-shaped headdress like the alien's, but actually that's just how her head is shaped -- just as Rapunzel's "tiara" is actually part of her body.

Have you ever seen a cartoon where a guy is wearing this enormous turban, and he takes it off to reveal that his head is actually shaped like that? I know I've seen a comic strip like that, either in English or in Spanish, but I can't seem to find it now. Apparently, Google is deliberately making it hard to find such "disturbing or hurtful" content. Check out the very first image result with the English search prompt, though:

Seriously, six of the first ten results are from this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" site. That's how self-parodying Google has become. And even these have a surgeon general's warning slapped on them. I can literally type bomb making instructions into the search bar and not get a warning, but here, red alert, "Memes about groups of people might be disturbing or hurtful!" Ya think? It's a strange thing to say about one of the biggest tech companies in the world, but it's hard to fight the impression that no one at Google quite understands how the Internet works.

Also, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it is strictly impossible to use turban jokes to fight stereotypes. You can fight stereotypes by including a few totally normal people who just happen to wear turbans in a movie or something, but there's no way to make a turban joke unless there are stereotypes about turbans that you can count on your audience to share, or at least effortlessly understand. Take the first search result for instance. It assumes, and depends on, a widespread understanding that seeing someone with a turban on a plane is scary. Without that, the joke can't even get off the ground, as you can see if you replace the turbans with polo shirts or something without making any other changes. I guess the cartoonist thinks he's "fighting" this stereotype by subverting it -- in this case people avoid the turban-wearer because he smells bad, not because he might be a terrorist! -- but humor always subverts expectations and in doing so reinforces them as the norm. That's why so much humor is inherently racist and sexist and whatever-phobic. Whoever came up with this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" project is either retarded or else a god-tier troll. Hopefully the latter, but probably not. I'll bet it says somewhere in his bio that he has a Sikh sense of humor.

Anyway, coming back to our topic here, look at what the stinky-not-scary gentleman in the blue pagri is saying: "So, I was flying to Denver . . . ." The search prompt was just turban joke cartoon, but here we are back at the Denver Airport, of all places.

I assume the movie name Above Majestic is referring to Majestic 12, the secret UFO task force allegedly created by Harry Truman. Whitley Strieber wrote a novel called Majestic, also referring to this organization. As documented in "Light shining through yellow flowers," I finished reading Majestic on October 29, 2023 -- just two days before I posted that Denver Airport meme, not knowing until today that it was from a movie called Above Majestic.

Above Majestic is available in its entirety on YouTube. It's over two hours long, but I'll probably try to watch it when I have the time:

Note added: A few hours after posting the above, I ran across this at AC. I think the implication is that she is stuck in the Denver Airport:

Burying the lede: Australia makes it a federal crime to ACCESS "violent extremist material" on the Internet

It's all over the news that Australia has decided to outlaw the public display of the symbols of some German political party from a hundred years ago. As bonkers as that would be just by itself, the real story here isn't getting nearly as much press. Included in the new law is a provision that makes it a crime to access "violent extremist material" using a "carriage service" (meaning the Internet). You don't need to produce this material or even possess it; just clicking a link and seeing it is enough. If the US will put you in prison for sharing a meme, Australia will now put you in prison for looking at a meme. Forget the "public display" of anything; so much as lurk on /pol/ in the privacy of your own home, regardless of your own political views, and you're flirting with five years behind bars.

This is just insanely over-the-top tyrannical. I might compare it to something, but I wouldn't want any of my Aussie readers to go to prison for reading the analogy!

Moonlight Shadow

 

Note added: Given some of the topics I discuss on this blog, and my well-known penchant for thinly veiled hate speech and malinformation, I never dreamed that my very first post to be deleted for violating Community Guidelines would be this completely innocuous 1983 music video hosted on YouTube (same company as Blogger) and posted here (originally) without comment! Well, I guess everybody's got to start somewhere.

Banned by Google! For 36 minutes, but still. I feel like all my hard work is finally starting to pay off.

Update: Google deleted it again at 3:07 and reinstated it again at 7:00. No idea what’s going on.

I'm feeling excluded.

"Inclusion," in a single screenshot:

This is from an organization that was in the news recently for vandalizing the works of Roald Dahl (removing such offensive words as black, white, fat, and attractive), so I went to their website to send them some hate mail -- er, I mean some diverse mail expressing my own differing viewpoint as informed by my lived experience as person of diverseness.*

I guess I'm not the only one. The "contact us" page on the site is now blank, although the Wayback Machine shows that it didn't use to be. Oddly enough, their donation buttons are still operational.

Also scrubbed from the current site, but still viewable on the Wayback, is the list of individuals involved: directors Jessi Parrott, A. M. Dassu, and Heather Lacey; and founders Beth Cox and Alexandra Strick. (Hmm, one "diverse" group is rather surprisingly conspicuous by its absence. Almost every single time.)

As the unexpurgated Dahl himself put it, "I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women."

*I can't be diverse because I'm white, you say? Fool, I'm Ukrainian. Beat that!**

**I hope the inclusionnaires appreciate how I self-censored and went with "fool."

Hate speech is a human right

Duke of Earl 1, Big Tech censors 0

Not only is it absolutely impossible for anyone to stop him as he walks through this world; the Duke of Earl also possesses a supernatural ability to circumvent Big Tech censorship.

You know the website that bills itself, with considerable justification, as "The Most Censored Publication in History"? The one with a name that sounds sort of like "Norman Mailer"? The website so outrageously racist that, in what I guess is an instance of the "only Nixon could go to China" phenomenon, only the tiny Central African nation of Rwanda has the balls to host it?

Type the name of that website into Google, and you will scroll in vain through page after page of links to Wikipedia and the ADL and the SPLC without ever finding a link to the site itself. It's not just "downranked"; it's flat-out blacklisted.

But search instead for duke of earl snopes, and -- voilà!

The second hit. And the third!

Nice try, Google. I know you're one of the most powerful organizations on the planet, but nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.

Note added: A commenter suggests that Google gives me this result only because it knows I've visited the website before. So here's a screenshot of my results from Brave private mode, not signed in. (Notice that it doesn't even know that I speak English or prefer a dark background.)

And even when I am signed in, and Google knows that I check DS from time to time, it still absolutely blacklists it from my search results if I search for the site name instead of the Duke of Earl.

I'm telling you, no one can stop this guy.

Brave and Presearch absolutely DO censor search results.

So DuckDuckGo has just decided to do this:

Even Google doesn't go that far! They at least give you a few RT articles in foreign languages.

Bing is the same as DDG.

Brave has claimed that they don't censor anything, which is a lie.

In fact, Brave seems to be just using Google's algorithm. What are the chances that two different search engines would independently return the Wikipedia article on Tim Burton as the first hit for christopher walken infogalactic?

Notice that my own blog is fifth result -- not the post where I mention Walken but one where I quote one of Paul's epistles without comment!

Presearch, which also claims not to censor search results, is the same as all the others.

They do at least return the Christopher Walken page on Infogalactic -- though for some reason it ranks lower than "1969 texas longhorn football stats."

Okay, what about Yandex, then? I mean, they're actually Russian, right?

Yeah, well that's a mixed blessing.

To be clear, this is what happens when you run this news search on their English site: it automatically switches you to all Russian.

So . . . any other ideas? Is there any search engine at all that returns uncensored English-language results?