“Tell the truth and run.” Yugoslavian proverb. Actor John Cusack’s favorite motto given to Vanity Fair.

 

“It costs us millions to keep Gandhi in poverty.” Sarjini Naidu, a friend of Gandhi

 

 

My Mention in “Your Movie Sucks” by Roger Ebert. Roget Ebert mentions me on page 77! What an honor! Of all the movies Ebert reviews, he only mentions 2 other fellow critics, me and some other guy!

Amazon.com: Your Movie Sucks: Roger Ebert: Books

 

Masquerade Hope Gala. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) was founded in 1970 by the parents of children with type 1 diabetes. On Saturday, May 17th, JDRF will hold its 2008 Masquerade Hope Gala at The Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino. The gala was an over-the-top evening with a rush of sensory elements from epicurean delights to music. The evening also included an exceptional silent and live auction.

I'll be dressed in a gown and customized mask. If you are going, come by and say hello. 

Since inception, JDRF has provided more than $1.16 billion to diabetes research worldwide. For more information visit www.jdrf.org.

 

Indiana Jones. I will see a pre-screening of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” yesterday at 11am at the Brenden Theaters at the Palms. The much anticipated film opens May 22.

John Hurt, who plays Indy's colleague in the film, disdains the flick and executive producer George Lucas. "It's cops-and-robbers stuff," Hurt told the Times of London. "And it's all to make Mr. Lucas an extra billion, as if he needs it."

 

My report will be in next week's VCO.

 

Most Evil. Dr. Michael Stone has standardized evil! Dr. Stone, a Columbia University psychiatrist, has a very popular series on Investigation Discovery Channel called Most Evil. This series runs constantly. Dr. Stone has published a 22-level Hierarchy of Evil scale, derived from detailed biographies of more than 500 violent criminals.

For Most Evil, Dr. Stone interviews serial killers in prison and there are re-enactments of their childhood.

It’s not DNA. It’s mom’s fault.

Dr. Stone has the typical grandfather approach to interviewing these monsters and shows absolutely no emotion as he questions killers asking them to describe their killings in detail.

It is my opinion that we are not told the truth by investigators. The serial killers will tell the truth if someone asked them the right questions. But no one in charge wants us to know why they do what they did.  

I’d like Dr. Stone to research not Adolph Hitler, who never actually tortured or killed anyone himself (to my knowledge), but someone like Alexander the Great. He enjoyed killing, not commanding, his soldiers to kill. What about the tens of thousands of men he slaughtered in the name of empire building? What about the men he personally killed in fits of drunkenness and rage?

Was Vlad the Impaler dropped on his head as an infant? Was he suffering from a mental illness? Was he abused as a child? Apparently, these 3 things make a serial killer.

I don’t know about you, but you don’t have to be a forsenic face reader to know that Vlad doesn’t look like someone who cries at weddings.

In an effort to standardize what makes a crime particularly heinous, Dr. Michael Welner, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, has been developing what he calls A Depravity Scale, which rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details. Take the Depravity survey and rank yourself! https://depravityscale.org/depscale/survey.php

From May 1942 to July 1942, approximately 100,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor. I was horrified to read that just a few SS guards ran the camp while Jews were routinely stripped and forced to run through a gauntlet  to ‘The Road to Heaven” gas chambers that awaited them. From leaving the trains to a “shower” death took a brisk 20 minutes.

Amazon.com: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps: Yitzhak Arad: Books

The Belzec extermination camp had a staff of 20-30 SS men plus a guard company of 90-120 Ukrainians. In all, 2,000 Ukrainians were trained to assist the small group of SS men who ran the concentration camps. Kurt Gherstein recalled that in Belzec, where the guards were mainly Ukrainian, “two hundred Ukrainians assigned to this work [emptying trains] flung open the doors and drove the Jews out of the cars with leather whips.”

Also, another Belzec survivor maintained: “The Ukrainians employed at the camp treated the people even more sadistically than the Germans.” Amazon.com: Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947: Tadeusz Piotrowski: Books

Can we really attribute the behavior of normal, peaceful citizens as being swept along in the kind of collective sadism that the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the Banality of Evil?

According to many books I have read, the SS men working at the concentration camps were often traumatized by the stress of their roles in the camp and had to be replaced. What about the Ukrainians?

 

Buddha’s Bodhi Tree To Be Cloned.

Worried over the health of the Bodhi tree, Bodh Gaya temple authorities have quietly prepared a plan to preserve the sacred tree, which grew from the banyan tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago.

The cloning will be done in a laboratory to preserve its origin. The Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee, which looks after the temple, fears that the tree may collapse because of diseases or natural causes. Forest Research Institute scientists will do a ‘virtual modeling’ using cells of the existing tree through a DNA finger printing exercise. The scientists have also been asked to conduct a health check-up of the tree every six months. (Photo from my trip to India memorializing the place of Buddha’s first sermon. I brought back leaves from the Bodhi tree.)

Buddha’s tooth is in Sri Lanka; another tooth relic of the tooth is currently in Ling Guang Temple in Mainland China.

British UFO Files Released.

 

Right in time for the new movie, “The X Files: I Want To Believe”!  The British UFO files,  opened up to the public for the first time and documented by the Ministry of Defense, have been revealed after a Freedom of Information request by UFO researchers.

 

I met Lt. Col. Charles Halt and discussed with him the famous December 27, 1981 Rendlesham Forest case. Security patrolmen spotted odd lights above the forest and saw the lights plunge down and went to investigate.

Investigators studying the site where the craft landed found three depressions in a triangular shape.

A radar reading spiked at each depression.

My favorite reports in the British UFO files are these two: A 78-year-old man alleged that he met an alien in Hampshire in 1983. He said he went on board the craft, giving a detailed explanation of it, before being quizzed by the aliens about his age. He was then told: "You can go. You are too old and too infirm for our purpose."

 

So there you have it! It’s an age-obsessed Universe. If you are abducted and not carrying your driver’s license, tell them you are 10-20 years younger than you really are.

 

Another man explained in great detail his "physical and psychic contact" with green aliens since he was a child. The writer said that one of them, called Algar, was killed in 1981 by another race of beings as he was about to make contact with the UK government. The letter's author said he visited their bases in the Wirral and Cheshire.

 

No photos or lifted spacecraft gadgets were included in the reports.

 

To all future abductees – please take along an earth trinket to trade while onboard. The spacecraft personnel also need proof they met a human.

 

Another 150 files are due to be released over the next four years.