Hey John A, maybe you could clarify some of this for us. I know Nico was somehow part of Pseudo. This documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
Looks like another Jonestown situation to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XSTwfdFwIY&fea...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3426316/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4gmTFIf8A&fea...
Nico appears at 23:40 expounding No Planes.
funny you bring this up. Nicholas Levis and I have been exhanging emails about this recently. there is much much more to this story.
i'll post more tonight.
Looking forward to hearing more. Is this part of what set Nico off the deep end?
LOL I doubt it. i think its half schtick - half useful idiocracy
Idiocracy: a world that has degenerated into a dystopia where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society devoid of individual responsibility or consequences.
Haupt is the future. Get used to it.
If i could buy stock in Haupt - i would.
ok -
alittle history here. Nico Haupt came to america and was sponsored by the owner of an internet dot-com startup called “Pseudo.†Haupt in fact moved into the premises where he supposedly produced video.
If anyone has any evidence of any actual video work produced by Haupt for Pseudo – I’m sure we would all like to see it.
The owner of Pseudo was Josh Harris. In the interests of full disclosure - my wife was one of Josh Harris’s personal assistants. I was on their payroll as well as a freelance audio designer.
The relationship between Harris and Haupt was documented by Wired here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/luvvy_pr.h...
what is interesting to note is that in all the time we worked at Pseudo (pretty much the whole time) - Haupt never appeared to do ANYTHING. he never produced any videos - or did ANYTHING anyone could pinpoint. He was just THERE - on the books. just between you and me (chuckle) - Pseudo was a front.
In this article Harris openly admits that “Pseudo was a fake companyâ€
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/26/josh-harris-p...
I would think Pseudo’s investors would find this to be ‘interesting’ – considering the millions that were poured into Harris’ “fake†business model.
According to The Independent:
Before its demise, Pseudo burnt through $34m (£23.5m) put up by investors. Stories about absence of all discipline at the firm, financial and otherwise, became legendary. The air at headquarters apparently reeked of marijuana most afternoons.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysi...
Hmmm… isn’t it illegal to take millions of investment dollars for a “fake company?â€
Anyway…
Harris did indeed appear to tip-toe thru the raindrops in those heady daze of the 1990s dot-com boom. Pseudo appeared on a regular basis in the local tabloids – hosting parties which openly boasted drug use.
And all this while Mayor Rudy G. was arresting people for smoking grass and cleaning windshields in NYC.
Pseudo was operating IN PLAIN SIGHT!
Anyway….
Pseudo went bust. What a surprise.
But here’s where it gets interesting. In this article Harris claims he was investigated by the FBI for 9/11:
http://gawker.com/5348487/josh-harris-sunday-style...
Quote: "Is also delusional. Salkin experienced Harris' insanity first hand when Harris explained that he thinks the F.B.I. went after him for being connected to 9/11."
He flaunts this 9/11 connection in multiple interviews. He even announced a project several years back called "Operation 11"
In this article in the New York Times we see that Harris is mentioned. According to Nicholas Levis:
So I got all angry about the latest bullshit story to come around - trying to pin the WTC destruction on a group of artists who stayed there for a few months, known as "Gelatin," with this constructed alleged link to the Mossad.
I had known about them for years and years and figured it showed only that one could get around WTC security - if one was accredited in the first place!
So in doing a debunking, I read the NY Times article about them published just before 9/11.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/nyregion/balcony...
And I saw a name in that article that gave me pause. A name you've mentioned recently.
Make what you will of this.
Harris then moved on to his 'QUIET' project:
From 'ArtLoversNewYork':
http://www.artloversnewyork.com/zine/the-bomb/2006...
QUIET was eventually shut down by a c0mbined force of FEMA, the NYPD & the NYFD, (the NYC Police dept, the NYC Fire dept) for various reasons, not the least being FEMA’s belief that it was a ’suicide’ cult ! .. not to mention the firing range, run by ALFREDO MARTINEZ, in the basement of the main building, … AND the toxic room, run by AIDAS BAREIKIS and AARON BREWER, right next to the pod hotel, designed and built by JEFF GOMPERTZ, that housed 100 artists !
JOSH HARRIS, who surfaced recently in Manhatttan before departing for SPAIN, is quick to point out now, that the next big call for FEMA and the NYPD and NYFD - was the World Trade Center disaster, …. think on that.
Interesting.
And again – Haupt was involved.
And again Harris walks away – unscathed – lol – leaving behind massive real estate damage and the remnants of a suicide cult and arsenal.
And again – connections to 9/11 cited in the article. not sure what to make of it all…
but i will say THIS - Harris' "quiet" experiment, building a bunker with swastikas on the wall and interrogation rooms and guns and destruction of property and FEMA raids surely resembles the crypto-fascistic transgressive art predicted in Fight Club’s Project Mayhem.
Was Harris' project was called "Quiet" because the first rule of fight club is....
I know I’m off in a tangent here – but I always found the opening lines of the movie Fight Club to be … funny?
[first lines] [Tyler points a gun into the Narrator's mouth] Narrator: [voiceover] People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden: Three minutes. This is it - ground zero. Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion? Narrator: ...i... ann... iinn... ff... nnyin... Narrator: [voiceover] With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels. [Tyler removes the gun from the Narrator's mouth] Narrator: I can't think of anything. Narrator: [voiceover] For a second I totally forgot about Tyler's whole controlled demolition thing and I wonder how clean that gun is.
And of course Tyler does indeed collapse the financial center of some generic city… somewhere…
Last three lines of Fight Club:
Narrator: I want you to listen to me very carefully, Tyler. Tyler Durden: Okay… Narrator: My eyes are open.
Hi all.
Nowadays I follow our common interests often enough to remain informed, and also post (too much for my own good) at RI, but remain honestly uncertain about what next. So my contributions have been and will remain limited until I think otherwise.
John, this stuff is really fascinating in a car-crash kind of way, and I eat it up. But in the end it's a construct, with part of the appeal lying in applying the Nico Haupt method of associative logic to Nico Haupt (where the findings turn out much richer than what he usually produces). What I mean is, Gelatin didn't blow up the Twin Towers. They were among the artists who were hosted at the 91st floor gallery (meaning that they had no need to "infiltrate," at all, as one of the linked articles falsely states, because they were already inside). And they abused this position to pull one of the typically lame pranks that passes as state-funded (in this case Austrian) conceptual art, temporarily replacing a skyscraper window with a balcony and having a helicopter (rented by Josh Harris, who was presumably riding shotgun) shoot photos of this totally. astonishing. event. We can speculate all year about whether their publicity stunt had a ritual connection to a simultaneous operation that was preparing the building to explode. (I know at least one guy who would get very excited by the Millennium Hotel party angle, since he's convinced it represents Kubrick's monolith, an Illuminati symbol blah blah blah but of course I also consider him to be both nuts and a dilettante.)
As you may know, with regard to theories of how high terrorists plan mass murders, I belong more to the school of thinking that stresses "plausible denial" (or "leave no clues at all motherfucker") rather than "revelation of the method" (which at least has the credible appeal of putting the masturbation back in mastermind).
Where I think we're on more solid ground is in the idea that Harris is a spooked or mobbed-up motherfucker who not only defrauded investors out of tens of millions, but (unlike Madoff) got to publicly proclaim capital-f Fraud as his business plan, without consequences. And apparently even dealing drugs out of the office. One is compelled to the conclusion that he's got connections and protections, especially given his comeback, and further drawn to speculation about what role his promotions of ideas like the panopticon, torture and transhumanist fantasy play in someone's larger propaganda scheme. And clearly Haupt's hanging around in there in a suspicious manner, but as you say: he wasn't visibly doing anything. So what is he doing? Was he just an expense item? (Harris obviously got a kick out of publicly burning the money, even if we presume he funneled a share back to himself.) Is Haupt a dedicated part of Harris's disinformation scheme, which we're presuming he's doing for some larger agency or cause? And does this really have any kind of inside 9/11 connection, or was that event simply serendipitous for PR whores who live from the glom?
In short, do you think this will get us anywhere? And how would one go about it, methodologically speaking?
well - lets be clear here - i am just laying out the facts. and although the facts themselves may appear to be leading the jury in a certain direction - i myself have NO emotional attachment to any of the "Gelatin" 9/11 theories.
i also DO believe in something called 'coincidence.' happens all the time. shit happens. you can really see this quaint axiom in action if you accompany me to atlantic city some time. i bet red - the ball drops in black. i bet black - the ball drops in red. you can almost believe that unseen forces - like magnets - are at play. i am UNCANNY at losing my own money that way.
i offer no theories in my above post. it just is what it is.
but if i WERE to theorize - the last thing i WOULD believe is that Gelatin wired the buildings for demolition. LOL
an advance team? surveilance? i don't know. but - they would not be the first foreign 'art students' in america to not be what they seem.
but i do take exception with one thing you said:
As you may know, with regard to theories of how high terrorists plan mass murders, I belong more to the school of thinking that stresses "plausible denial" (or "leave no clues at all motherfucker") rather than "revelation of the method" (which at least has the credible appeal of putting the masturbation back in mastermind).
I belong to a different school of thought that believes that much of the power that comes with being a mafia boss is committing your crimes in plain sight. Any two-bit criminal could wack the competition. but it takes a special kind of criminal to mail back his clothes - wrapped around fish.
Kinda like Dick Cheney shooting someone in the face. The real cosmic humor lay in the victim's apologies to the entire Cheney family.
and its kinda fun to imagine that certain artistic propaganda pieces intentionally foreshadowed 9/11 - like The Lone Gunman episode - and the movie The Siege - and Fight Club. (all 20th Century FOX productions - LOL)
and i think it was you who educated me on the fact that The Siege was written by Lawrence Wright - who also wrote this:
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006) was published to immediate and widespread acclaim, spending eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and being translated into twenty-five languages. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Lionel Gelber Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
and - lest we forget - Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. LOL
again - i do not know what to make of this. could my red ball simply be falling into the little black slot again?
or should i believe like "V" from another Fox movie "V for Vendetta:
V: It means that I, like God, do not play with dice and I don't believe in coincidences.
and
V: There are no coincidences, Delia... only the illusion of coincidence.
really. who DOES watch the Watchmen anyway?
Rorschach? naaaa... he gets killed at the end of the movie/book for refusing to surrender his morality to the accepted realities of war. He knows the truth behind the attacks on NYC - and must die for refusing to remain silent.
The Nite Owl II (Daniel Dreiberg)? naaaa... his liberal sensibilities and senstitivites are perhaps admirable - but - ultimately he is impotent and unable to get it up with The Silk Spectre II. In the REAL WORLD REAL MEN are needed.
The Comedian (Edward Morgan Blake)? naaaa... he's just a fascist stooge who cries over how fucking hysterical everything is. Conflicted over the planned attacks - he too must die.
Doctor Manhattan (Dr. Jon Osterman) ?? well - he represents the higher power of reality itself. He is amoral. To him 9/11.. errr... the plot to attack multiple cities....ultimately makes perfect sense. Kill thousands to save millions. a simple equation that - in the scheme of things - on a cosmic level - makes perfect sense. doesn't it?
So who watches the Watchmen then? Chris Matthews? don't count on it.
ultimately - we are left with Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt) - the ultimate symbol of power and empire - sitting on his Egyptian thrown in his infinite wisdom. only HE has the courage to do what must be done. - ya know - to save us.
fun trivia:
While Adrian (Ozymandias) is talking to the press, the twin towers can be seen outside his office window. While he is discussing the problems caused by dependence on oil, a blimp is also in the background. It seems to be closer to the windows than the towers, but the effect still makes it look like that blimp is flying towards the towers very slowly.
and i made the mistake of betting red again.
Although I'm cautious, the questions at the end of my last post were not rhetorical or dismissive. I mean seriously that I'd like to hear a methodology for exploring this area and establishing conclusions (including for falsifying given suspicions) best as possible.
To review:
Me: As you may know, with regard to theories of how high terrorists plan mass murders, I belong more to the school of thinking that stresses "plausible denial" (or "leave no clues at all motherfucker") rather than "revelation of the method" (which at least has the credible appeal of putting the masturbation back in mastermind).
You: I belong to a different school of thought that believes that much of the power that comes with being a mafia boss is committing your crimes in plain sight. Any two-bit criminal could wack the competition. but it takes a special kind of criminal to mail back his clothes - wrapped around fish.
Let's go for synthesis. I overstated. First, you'll agree these approaches constitute poles along an axis of options for different situations. The same boss who sends fish to announce the Luca Brassi killing might prefer to make some other murder look like an accident.
An obvious example of the "in plain sight" strategy would be to plan an invasion of Iraq, take power in an electoral coup, prepare the invasion, announce it, make up laughable lies about the reasons, declare those who object traitors and tell them to fuck off, invade Iraq, name the operation O.I.L. for a day before pretending that was a mistake, and present the carpet bombing of Baghdad under a brand name, like "Shock and Awe." That's all about showing power and impunity.
But a similarly extreme version of this approach would not be compatible with a false flag terror attack designed to mobilize general outrage and support for this (and all other) wars and repressive strategies. The point, after all, is to lay the blame on the designated enemy, and make it stick; and not just for domestic consumption, but for foreign allies in the resulting crusade, and the international community. The resort to a false flag furthermore inherently does not imply a position of total strength or confidence; why else deceive, why pump up or invent an enemy?
Anyway, I'd just like to see potentially testable hypotheses here.
Here's an example: Harris's op set up as a sort of flexible factory for human experimentation and whacked out disinformation praxis that can be pulled from the shelf and applied to different situations. Also to attract assorted useful idiots. 9/11 happens, and Haupt gets a mission. Is this compatible with what you saw of Pseudo? Write some memoirs on it.
On the Hollywood stuff: Very interesting is the treatment Mamadou Chinyelu gave to The Siege and Lawrence Wright in what I found to be the most interesting chapter of his book, Means Motive and Opportunity. Though it's often very compelling to attribute significance to film foreshadowings on the sheer strength and detail of the parallel (Tyler Durden's controlled demolition of the financial center at Ground Zero! Lone Gunmen's flying a passenger plane into the North Tower!), it's usually hard to see the planning mechanics beforehand, or the utility afterward of this arrangment. Does no one in these scenarios ever fear or seek to minimize exposure?
Thanks for your insights, guys. The Gelatin stuff is news to me.
It is pretty weird that Nico would be involved in something like this before 9/11 even happened. Then again, I do believe in some kind of synchronicity, and there are only so many people out there who are on these wavelengths...or who are intelligence assets assigned to these areas.
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