Good lord, if this is true, it’s absolutely fucking hysterical, but I have my doubts: Reuters, CNBC, Forbes, the Washington Post and the Guardian have all reported inconclusive speculation in the last few hours that the “candid” (some might say “sociopath”) Wall Street trader, Alessio Rastani, who told BBC News:  “I dream of another recession,” might be member of the genius satirical activists, The Yes Men!

Rastani’s statement, “The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world,” has caused his shocking BBC News appearance to become a viral video sensation in the past 24 hours. An BBC internal investigation has concluded that Rastani is who he says he is, a real trader, but not everyone is buying it:

FORBES: Have you heard of the Yes Men?

AR: Heard of it before? Not quite sure why they’re calling me that. I have no idea where that came from.

FORBES: Because there’s a video of you posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman [She’s totally off-base here, obviously].

AR: What? A Dow Chemical spokesman? Have you seen this video? That can’t be right. I’ve never spoken to Dow Chemical before in my life. Maybe it’s a fake. Are you sure about this? Honestly, listen, I’ve no idea where that came from. That interview yesterday was one of the first ones I did live.

I don’t know why they think it’s a hoax. No, I am a trader absolutely. I have trader friends who could back that up. One of my mentors is a bestselling author and trader. Everyone knows me.

Here’s the problem: The speculation seems to be that Alessio Rastani is, in fact, the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum. I know Andy personally—Disinformation published the Yes Men book—so unless Andy has had extensive plastic surgery or gotten into a time machine since I’ve last seen him, I can assure that he’s not Alessio Rastani. Rastani also has a blog, several YouTube videos about trading, he’s on Twitter and has been for two years, etc. IF this is a hoax, it’s either one concocted with a very, very long fuse, or else the Yes Men hired a real stock broker to say the same nihilistic, “fuck the little guy” things that brokers say amongst themselves all the time,

I’ll repeat that: I’m not saying that the Yes Men didn’t hire this guy to say what he said on BBC News—I have no knowledge of this—but the speculation that he’s Andy Bichlbaum is absolutely NOT true.

Still, the fact that this is being speculated about as a Yes Men media prank is simply delicious! I’m sure they’ll keep quiet about this as long as possible. Why not milk it, especially if it’s a freebie, you know? Not sure if I want it to be a hoax or not. Probably not, which means I’m rooting for Rastani to actually be the sociopathic stock broker he represented himself as on the BBC News channel…
 

Revolutions are great places to meet members of the opposite sex… just sayin’

There have been a lot of people wondering why they major media seems to be ignoring the Wall Street demonstrations. Some are calling for the protests to be brought to the media and it seems like a decent tactic would be to take the demonstrations directly to the headquarters of the various networks and news organizations so they simply can’t ignore it. In the meantime, until the networks deign to cover them, you can watch a live feed of the Wall Street protests on the Global Revolution Livestream channel.
 

 
Was it a case of more money than sense that led Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, formerly of the KLF, to burn 1 million pounds sterling on the Isle of Jura in 1994? It’s a question neither man has fully answered.

After the event, both said they wouldn’t talk about it for twenty-three years. Since then, Drummond has spoken about it twice: once in 2000, when he said he was unrepentent; then in 2004, when he admitted to the BBC he regretted burning the cash.

The money allegedly came from royalties Drummond and Cauty made through the success of their band the KLF - the world’s most successful band in 1991. After retiring from music, Drummond and Cauty reunited the K Foundation, and established an award for the “worst artist of the year”, which they gave as a £40,000 prize to that year’s Turner Prize winner, Rachel Whiteread.

The following year, the pair carried out their biggest stunt - burning a million quid of their own money.

Was it real? Did they actually burn a million? Or, was the money bogus?

One theory suggests it was all a hoax and the notes burnt had been intended for incineration, being purchased from the Bank of England by the K Foundation for £40,000.

Seems possible, but Drummond and Cauty were accompanied by journalist Jim Reid who wrote the whole event up in the Observer newspaper:

“The money is not beautiful, and it is only intimidating for a while. It is impossible, looking at it, to imagine what you might buy with it. Four bundles for a nice flat in Chelsea, the whole lot for a lifetime not working. It doesn’t look that impressive. The next thing you feel is the need to do something, not to let it just stand there. Because, of course, I, like anybody else with healthy appetites, want it.

“Lying on the floor in its proud plastic packages, the money represents power. But it is a power that is painfully vulnerable. Cauty separates two fifties from a bundle, hands one to Drummond, and taking his lighter, lights them both. Despite the rain and wind outside, the money is going to burn. In fact, nothing could burn better.

“Drummond is standing to the left of the fireplace throwing fresh bundles in, Cauty is to the right, screwing up three or four fifties at a time. After five minutes their actions become mechanical, almost like it is peat or coal that they are fuelling their fire with. But this is going to take some time. ‘Well that’s OK,’ says Cauty, rolling a cigarette. ‘It’d take a long time to spend it. Can I spend an hour out of my life to burn a million quid? (Drummond laughs)... All the time you say about things: ‘I haven’t got the time to do that.’ Well, I’ve definitely got time to do this.’

“The fireplace is a rough affair. Occasional fifties get wedged in crevices above the fire before they eventually fall down to be destroyed. Cauty is poking at the fire with a stick, moving the bigger bundles into the heat. Whole blocks of 50 grand remain resolutely unburnt: singed, charred, but perfectly legal. We have a bottle of whisky with us and it is passed round as if nothing could be more natural than burning £1 million on a remote Scottish island in the middle of the night. This is the truly shocking thing about the evening. It almost seems inevitable.

“It took about two hours for that cash to go up in flames. I looked at it closely, it was real. It came from a bona fide security firm and was not swapped at any time on our journey. More importantly, perhaps, after working with the K Foundation I know they are capable of this.”

A few days later, a total of £1500 in charred notes were washed up on the shores of Jura, much to the islanders’ disgust.

Did they actually burn £1m? And what did it mean? Julian Cope called the stunt “intellectual dry wank”, while the Observer in 2000 returned to it stating:

“It wasn’t a stunt. They really did it. If you want to rile Bill Drummond, you call him a hoaxer. ‘I knew it was real,’ a long-time friend and associate of his group The KLF tells me, ‘because afterwards, Jimmy and Bill looked so harrowed and haunted. And to be honest, they’ve never really been the same since.”

Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid questions our strange and fetishistic relationship with money - who has not considered how they would spend a million? - as it reaffirms a moral responsibility wealth (in any form) brings, by exploring a one-off event that now runs counter to the current global obsession with failing banks, bankrupt economies and corrupt financial markets.
 

 
TV’s dumb, sometimes unintentionally dumb, as can be seen from Mike Sacks’ Photos of TV. Sacks is the author of the “laugh-out-loud/piss-yourself-funny” Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason and has a fun collection of photographs from TV, over at his home page.

Check here for more of Mike‘s photos.
 

 

 
Previously on Dangerous ~Minds

 
With thanks to the brilliant Steve Duffy!
 

 
I’m not going to go into the whole song and dance about how Playboy provided a forum for some of the most progressive thinkers and artists on the planet including Lenny Bruce, Robert Anton Wilson, Paul Krassner, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jane Fonda, Muhammad Ali and many more. I’m not gonna tell you how I bought the magazine to read the interviews and fine fiction from writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Gabriel García Márquez, Joseph Heller, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. No, I’m not gonna tell you all about that because it won’t make any difference in anyone’s opinion of Playboy magazine. You’ve got your opinion, I’ve got mine.

Playboy and its creator Hugh Hefner have been polarizing people for the past half century. I happen to like Hefner and his magazine, though the nude spreads have rarely featured much that floated my boat. My taste in women rarely coincided with the picture perfect All-American, mostly white, women of Playboy. I was also never into the “Playboy philosophy” when it came to stuff like cars, fashion and cocktail culture. I never wore an ascot or cufflinks and I wouldn’t know the difference between a Cuban cigar and a dog turd or good champagne from Everclear and 7-Up.

What I dug about about Playboy is that it introduced my young Catholic-corrupted brain to the idea that sex could be fun and intelligence could be sexy. In retrospect, the nudity objectified women, but at the time, for me, it opened up a world in which women’s bodies were wondrous and beautiful. I may be one of the only teenage boys of the Sixties that didn’t use Playboy as jerk-off fodder. I gazed upon the full-bodied Playmates during breaks in reading the genuinely mind-opening interviews with some of my counter-culture heroes. There literally was nowhere else to get some of the insights that Playboy published (I wasn’t reading Evergreen or Paris Review yet). Between bouts of being battered mentally and physically at school by malevolent Nuns, it was liberating to come home, lock my bedroom door, and read about psychedelics, beatnik culture and the pleasures of the flesh in a girlie magazine. And the nudes did steer my thinking away from perceiving the human body as a vessel of sin and shame toward an appreciation of it as something delightful and fulfilling.

Here’s an interview with Hefner from the mid-1970s that was conducted for City University of New York TV show Day At Night hosted by James Day. I like Hefner’s belief in the liberating power of a healthy sex life. And I bet the Bunnies did too. I can’t recall any of Playboy’s models ever complaining about their jobs and several books have been written about and by them.

As we once again enter an era of prudishness, over-zealous political correctness and sexual repression, some of what Hefner has to say sounds as relevant as it did 40 years ago. While the bunny costumes may seem silly and dated, the truth is always hip.
 

 
My 1970s Tumblr supplies “inspiration drops from 1970s aesthetics and lifestyle.” A fine reminder to that decade’s rich diversity of music, film, politics, fashion, and some rather dodgy advertising.

See more here.
 
 
 

 

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
More pix from the fab seventies, after the jump…
 

 
TorrentFreak reports that millions of online file-sharers will soon be getting their activities monitored by a third-party “detective” agency/entity who will be provided with raw information by the major ISPs. Alleged copyright violators will be notified that “they” (Hollywood, the music industry) are on to them and given a series of six warnings before more serious measures are taken. Why has the mainstream media been so mum on this story?

In June the MPAA and RIAA announced a ‘ground-breaking’ deal with all the major Internet providers in the United States. In an attempt to deter online piracy, a third-party company will monitor BitTorrent and other public file-sharing networks and collect the IP-addresses of alleged infringers.

The ISPs will then notify these offenders and tell them that their behavior is unacceptable. After six warnings the ISP may then take a variety of repressive measures, which include slowing down the offender’s connection.

This new system is a formalized version of the existing takedown system that’s already in use by copyright holders. It was announced under the name ‘Copyright Alerts‘ and will be managed by the Center for Copyright Information, but little is known about how the data on alleged infringers is collected and stored.

Previously we tried to get more background info, but to no avail. However, via a detour we got in touch with a spokesman for the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) who kindly provided us with some additional information.

We wanted to know what will happen with the IP-addresses that are collected, for how long will they be stored, and will there be a central organization that’s responsible for this process like there is in France. The CCI spokesperson informed us that the data will be exclusively kept by the ISPs.

“ISPs will hold this information, as they do today. Please also note that no personal information about subscribers will be shared with rights holders without the required legal process being completed,” he told us.

There’s no agreement on how long the data will be stored, but a minimum of 12 months is required.

“ISPs will determine this individually based on their own policy. However, please note that the Memorandum of Understanding allows for a 12 month reset period. That means that, if an ISP does not receive any ISP notices from rights holders concerning a subscriber’s account for a 12 month period, all prior ISP notices and copyright alerts from the subscriber’s account may be expunged.”

Previously TorrentFreak reported that DtecNet had been chosen to administer file-sharer activities, although CCI has denied this.

Read more at TorrentFreak

 
“Chaque jour une vie nouvelle” or “A New Life Everyday” claimed David Bowie’s advert for Vittel Water back in 2003. The ad was tied-in to the release of Bowie’s Reality album, and had the rock god sharing a house with his stage alter egos - including Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, the Scary Monsters Clown and the Diamond Dog.
 

 
“Tea Party Zombies Must Die” is a new first-person shooter game from StarvingEyes Advergaming, a company set up to make viral Internet games. Looks like they’ve got a winner in that department with this in-house produced game:

DON’T GET TEA-BAGGED! The Tea Party zombies are walking the streets of America. Grab your weapons and bash their rotten brains to bits! Destroy zombie Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, the Koch Brothers, and many more!

Apparently the way this works is that the shooter, er, player, blasts their way into the Fox News studio encountering “Factory-made Blonde Fox News Barbie Who Has Never Had a Problem in Her Life Zombie” and then moves through the levels encountering the “Koch industries Koch Whore lobbyist pig zombie,” “Generic Pissed Off Old White Guy Zombie,” the “Pissed Off Stupid White Trash Redneck Birther Zombie” and the “Climate Change Denying Zombie.”

Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Brit Hume, Mike Huckabee and the ever hapless Rick Santorum also provide “undead” fodder for the game.

Cue Fox News making a huge controversy over this, and blaming Obama for it somehow…
 

 

 
Via The National Review

 
Australian TV gameshow The Gruen Transfer brings together competing advertising agencies and pits them against each other in an almost American Idol-type scenario. A segment called “The Pitch” gives them a subject like “Child labor should come back” or a similarly controversial topic and asks them to come up with a 30-second spot meant to promote it. A panel of advertising industry experts judges the ads.

In the four years of the program, the only subject they had agencies actually decline to compete on was “Banning religion is a good idea.”

However, two agencies took the challenge and the results were pretty amazing (especially the first one, IMHO). Can you imagine something like this on American TV???