Social groups can be compared to a hurricane – mildly interested folk at the edges, more dedicated followers towards the center, a tight group of fanatics near the middle…and dead center, someone who doesn’t really care that much.

Here’s an interesting article about Loose Change creator Dylan Avery. It’s sort of the equivalent of Rosie O’Donnell coming out of the closet – everyone knew it, but it’s nice to have it in the open.

Loose Change was originally conceived as a fictional film: a way for Avery to polish his filmmaking skills and get his name out there. I don’t think it ever stopped being a fictional film. This thing was huge in 2007, and Dylan became the unofficial spokesperson of the 9/11 Truth movement, but I always wondered if he really believed what his film says. Now he basically says that no, he didn’t.

“Loose Change happened because I wanted to make a film,” he said. “It was born out of the passion of wanting to be a filmmaker. And then Loose Change took over my life, and it’s almost like filmmaking is completely out of the question.” […] “Am I going to be 60 years old, still getting hate mail about a movie I made when I was 20? That’s not what I wanted for myself.”

That’s a strange thing to say if you believe you’ve uncovered proof of a conspiracy to kill 4,000 US citizens in a false flag attack. The biggest domestic scandal of the eternity and he’s bitching about his lost career and how he receives hate mail? It’s like if the Watergate guys had said to the press “hey, while we’ve got your attention, can you also run a piece about the Watergate hotel? Their room service was three-star at best, and my soap had a hair in it.”

Somehow, this unconcerned doofus became the 9/11 Truth leader…or the closest thing to one, because they never exactly had a leader. Its boosters say it doesn’t need leadership: it’s a grassroots organisation, the will of the people coalescing like iron flakes around a magnet. Some even think having any sort of leader is a drawback, that you’ve got to flow as water, etc.

I kind of think that leadership is impossible for such a movement – that the movement fundamentally doesn’t agree on anything beyond one or two talking points, and they can’t actually move in any one direction. Those who live by sharp thingies die by sharp thingies and those who prize ad-hoc networks die by ad-hoc networks.

The “9/11 should have been investigated better” crowd has a goal, but pushing for a better investigation is lost on the section that believes all levels of the US government is complicit in a conspiracy.

Personally, what killed me on the film was how it was obviously porn. Not literal porn, but conspiracy porn. You could see storywriting oozing from every pore: Loose Change was designed to be exciting, not truthful. You could postulate any number of conspiracies that are both a) more boring and b) more practical (like the US knew the attacks were coming and didn’t tell anyone, or they trained the terrorists, or whatever.) Instead you’ve got this convoluted Die Hard plotline with planes getting switched out and simulated with holograms or whatever. I’m surprised there isn’t a part where Hani Hanjour hijacks a plane by holding a gun sideways.

So that’s the sad truth of the 9/11 Conspiracy. It was actually a meta-level 9/11 Conspiracy Conspiracy, with Avery faking it like a Jewish wife in the bedroom in return for fame and riches (which he didn’t get). Although you never know. Maybe he really does believe in a conspiracy, and is now trying to rehabilitate his filmmaking career.

Out of the classic Manowar albums (1982 thru 1990), you could make a case for this one being the best, or at least the most consistent. Kings of Metal‘s best moments are better, but it’s worse moments are far worse. I can never get comfortable with that album, despite the greatness of “Hail and Kill” and “Blood of the Kings”. Listening to it side to side is like sleeping on a luxurious hammock that has several large holes in it. There are no Manowar albums with all killer and no filler, so don’t look for them, but there’s a difference between normal crappy and “Pleasure Slave” crappy. On Sign of the Hammer I merely skip a few tracks. On Kings of Metal I actually deleted several mp3s so I can pretend they don’t exist.

Anyway…

1. Shitty songs: “All Men Play on 10” and “Thunderpick”. The first is an annoying Spinal Tappish self-parody – Manowar is at their best when they’re playing with absolute conviction, not winking at the audience. The second is four minutes of unlistenable bass guitar masturbation. Can someone keep Joey DeMaio away from those higher frets? It’s like giving Bashar Al-Assad access to white phosphorous. It’s nothing personal, he just does not use them for the betterment of humanity.

2. Good songs: “Animals” and “The Oath” – really fun high-energy rockers, the first reminding me of KISS, the second a NWOBHM inspired speed metal song. Not much songwriting going on here, just a shot of Manowar’s larger than life energy, like an Epipen in your arm.

3. Great songs: “Thor, the Powerhead” and “Sign of the Hammer.” Holy crap these rule. Elaborate early power metal, rivaling anything done by Manilla Road and Fates Warning. Great vocals, great instrumentation, and great songwriting equals two bona fide classics. If Manowar sounded like this consistently I’d quit making fun of Joey DeMaio’s ego forever, because he’d have earned it.

4. “Mountains”: the standout track and one of the most incredible moments of Manowar’s career. A long-winded ballad that finishes on a massive emotional crest. This is the sort of song you point to when trying to convert someone on a band. Eric Adams has never sounded better than this.

5. The outlier: “Guyana – Cult of the Damned”. An odd doom metal song that I don’t hate, but it doesn’t really do anything to sell me. Some more bass shredding, some heavy doomy riffs, and a bizarre chorus that sounds like the band flailing around in free-time. An odd lyrical choice for Manowar, too. Just a strange, strange song all around.

I’m torn on whether to recommend this as a first Manowar album. One other thing is that Sign of the Hammer opens with terrible cheese while Kings of Metal opens with the great “Wheels of Fire.”

As is always the case with Manowar, you can get a much better album by just deleting all the garbage and dogshit. The trouble is: sometimes this results in a 20 minute long album. Sign of the Hammer fares better, you still get 33:00 or so of good stuff.

Some jokes require you to think about them for a bit before you laugh. For example, that classic knee-slapper we all heard in the locker room: “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”.

Some jokes are the opposite: laughter requires that you do not think about the joke, at all, and that as soon as you hear it you must jam a screwdriver through your eminence ridge, giving yourself a frontal lobotomy.

Playboy’s recent announcement that it will stop featuring pictures of nude women provoked in me a “hahaha” reaction followed by “…makes sense, I guess. Not like they signed a contract saying they’d print porn forever. They’re in a declining market. Or rather, a market that has declined so much that it has ‘declined’ into a hill on the other side of the world. Might as well jump ship and start doing something that makes money.”

Welcome to 2015: there isn’t a market for print porn. Photographs of naked women are worthless now. This isn’t the 70s, or an Amish community. We have a military-funded porn delivery system in our houses now. Porn is so common and ubiquitous that they might as well have decided not to print photographs of wallpaper.

Playboy’s selling point was that it had a thin veneer of class, you could read it without feeling like a total sleazeball. So why not focus on the class? Playboy’s value is not that they provide porn. Any idiot can find porn. Their value is in their brand. They’re an iconic household name. There’s all sorts of ways they can spin it to make money. They don’t have to do porn. And that’s good, because they’d file chapter 11 if they did.

The magazine actually has really good content. Porn is worth literally nothing against exclusive new writing by Stephen King and Haruki Murakami, or interviews with Metallica. It’s safe to say that the average person in 2015 actually is reading Playboy for the articles.

Times change. Playboy’s Playmates have their time in the spotlight, then they gracefully age into real estate agents and radical feminists. Hugh Hefner’s changing too – once he was the icon of crazy wild partying, now he’s the icon of crazy wild oxygen therapy (does he even have sex anymore? At that age all I’d want from my girlfriends is a nice long foot massage.). Why shouldn’t the magazine itself be ready for change? Remember, there’s no stasis anywhere in nature. If you’re not evolving, you’re regressing.

(Also in the funny if you don’t think about it category: this. That’s like a 50 meter walk. Would you want to carry heavy bags of groceries and furniture that far? Let the man have his car. Jeez.)