Video Shop Conspiracies

Movie & culture review show from deathfab art and entertainment

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

What would the person you want to become do with the time you’re spending right now?

Do that.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Spielberg was only 24 when he directed the COLUMBO pilot but the visual confidence was already there. The opening shot moves seamlessly from the murderer approaching to the victim in a single elegant take, a glimpse of the director he would soon become.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

Erdogan: "85 years ago, silence in the face of Hitler led to 80 million deaths. Today, the same mistake is being repeated.

Gaza Butcher Netanyahu and his cabinet are committing genocide - and the world is watching with the same silence"

[･ Ice ･  Ⅹ ･ @IceXTruths]

Há momentos na história em que uma frase revela mais do que mil páginas de propaganda.

Em Davos 2026, Yuval Noah Harari praticamente admitiu aquilo que muitos ainda se recusam a enxergar: a Inteligência Artificial não está sendo apresentada apenas como uma ferramenta. Está sendo apresentada como uma nova entidade capaz de substituir funções humanas, ocupar espaços sociais, influenciar culturas, moldar religiões, controlar mercados e, eventualmente, receber reconhecimento jurídico.

Perceba a mudança de linguagem.

Não se fala mais em programas.

Não se fala mais em softwares.

Não se fala mais em máquinas.

Fala-se em "agentes".

Fala-se em "imigrantes digitais".

Fala-se em inteligências que poderão administrar empresas, movimentar contas bancárias, criar religiões, participar da política e exercer influência sobre bilhões de pessoas.

A pergunta feita em Davos não foi tecnológica.

Foi civilizacional.

O que acontece quando os seres humanos deixam de ser os principais produtores de conhecimento, informação e narrativa?

Quem controla as palavras controla a percepção.

Quem controla a percepção controla a realidade.

E quem controla a realidade controla sociedades inteiras.

Durante séculos, governos disputaram territórios.

Depois passaram a disputar petróleo, comércio e recursos naturais.

Agora a disputa é pelo controle da inteligência.

Pela capacidade de influenciar pensamentos antes mesmo que eles surjam.

O mais curioso é que tudo isso está sendo apresentado como inevitável.

Como se a humanidade estivesse diante de um fenômeno natural.

Como se ninguém estivesse tomando decisões.

Como se não existissem corporações bilionárias, centros de dados gigantescos, governos, investidores e organizações globais financiando essa transformação.

A pergunta que ninguém faz é simples:

Se a IA passar a produzir a maior parte das informações que consumimos, quem programará os valores que estarão dentro dessas informações?

Quem definirá o que é verdade?

Quem definirá o que é discurso aceitável?

Quem definirá o que pode ou não ser dito?

Porque, no final das contas, não estamos falando apenas de tecnologia.

Estamos falando de poder.

Poder sobre informação.

Poder sobre cultura.

Poder sobre educação.

Poder sobre religião.

Poder sobre economia.

Poder sobre a própria definição do que significa ser humano.

A Revolução Industrial substituiu músculos.

A Revolução Digital substituiu tarefas.

A Revolução da IA ameaça substituir a própria capacidade humana de interpretar o mundo.

E quando uma civilização entrega sua capacidade de pensar para sistemas que ela não controla, ela não está avançando.

Ela está terceirizando a própria liberdade.

A verdadeira pergunta não é se a IA será poderosa.

A verdadeira pergunta é:

Quem será poderoso através dela?

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

The BBC make me physically feel sick.

BBC News is running a strapline: "Israel and Lebanon agree ceasefire if Hezbollah stops attacks".

Which is astoundingly dishonest framing.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Watching Liam Neeson in THE NAKED GUN (2025) is half the fun because he commits to the absurdity so completely. After decades of playing intense men, seeing him lean into silliness feels like he’s finally cashing in on a joke he’s been setting up for years

[Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle]

🇷🇺 “The US deliberately dragged Russia and Europe into this conflict. In that sense, they achieved their goal - they drove a wedge between us and Europe. Now they’re shifting the financial burden onto the Europeans. And the spineless, weak-willed generation of today’s European politicians can’t stand up to them, given their overwhelming dependence on the U.S. in media, economics, and politics. You know, if you look closely at any major media outlet, the ultimate beneficiary often turns out to be some American fund. U.S. intelligence agencies across the ocean recruit their supporters from a young age, right from the student benches, grooming them and propelling them to the political heights of European countries.”

-- President Putin

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

We are in capitalism’s final stage, where global capital can’t expand or sustain past profits. It now consumes public institutions and key systems, sacrificing democracy, welfare, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and ecosystems for short-term gain.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

At any moment in RollerCoaster Tycoon, up to 4,000 cartoon people were walking around your park, each one living a tiny life the game tracked moment by moment. The game knew each guest's name, how much money was in their pocket, whether they were hungry, thirsty, tired, sick, or needed the bathroom. It also knew which rides each person liked and how strong their stomach was. The sequel handled 9,621 of them.

Then there was the money. The game gave you a $10,000 starter loan from a fake bank, often at 10% interest. You also paid for staff, ride maintenance, snack stall restocking, and loan interest charges that came out four times a month. Take the maximum $5 million loan to build a giant coaster, and the interest alone would bankrupt you before your park opened. Kids were getting their first taste of running out of money to pay the bills.

Every ride had to pass a physics check. The engine looked at three things: how exciting the ride was, how intense, and how likely it was to make people throw up. A turn too sharp pushed the sideways force past 2.81 G's. Guests refused to ride. Push a bobsleigh past its safety limits and the cars would fly off the track and kill the riders. Your rating tanked, guests stopped showing up, the in-game news ran the story, and your scenario quietly failed.

Every level handed you a hard target. Get 250 guests in by October of Year 1, with people happy enough to stick around. Pay off your loan and build your park up to $500,000 in value. Hit a monthly profit number from food and merchandise sales. You could buy advertising near the deadline to bring in more guests, but only if you still had cash to spend.

One person built all of this. Chris Sawyer wrote 99% of the game in assembly language, working alone from a house in the Scottish countryside. That's the hardest kind of code to write, talking straight to the computer's chip with no friendly tools. Two years coding solo. The game sold 700,000 copies in its first year, brought in $19.6 million, and crossed 9 million copies franchise-wide. Sawyer walked away with around $30 million.

In 2014, a guy named Nicolas Gunkel wrote about it after finishing business school. He said playing RCT as a kid had already taught him most of what his MBA later did: customer value, pricing, return on investment, how to keep a place running at full capacity. The school just used fancier words.

The meme is funny because half of it is true. Kids playing this were running real businesses. The cartoon coasters were just the wrapper around a business simulator.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“Perfection is insane. The entire tyranny of the perfect body, the perfect family, the perfect life is literally a commercial narrative. It has nothing to do with being human.”

— Guillermo del Toro

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder. Ejected in 2007 by his own MPs as a massive liability, he bequeathed Britain a wild casino economy primed for the 2008 crash. And when the British economy crashed and burned, Mr Blair kept quiet while honing his skills at securing power by other means.

His first job, after his ejection from 10 Downing Street, was as the West’s Middle East envoy, with a supposed emphasis on Gaza. It took six painful years for Mr Blair’s tenure to prove a failure so profound it amounted to active complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian erasure, and in paving the ground for the ongoing genocide.

Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.

Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle's Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.

Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers' rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.

https://t.co/1Onlpx9Nkh

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

HE KNEW THE DOSSIER WAS FAKE. WEEKS LATER HE WAS DEAD IN A FIELD

Dr David Kelly was Britain's foremost weapons inspector. He spent years inspecting Iraqi facilities, earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and knew more about Saddam's arsenal than almost anyone in government.

In 2002, Tony Blair's government published a dossier claiming Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. Britain went to war on the back of it. No weapons were ever found.

Kelly knew the dossier was rubbish. He said so, quietly, to a @BBC journalist. That conversation ended his career, his privacy, and ultimately his life.

The MOD carefully allowed his name to leak to the press as the BBC's source. He was then hauled before parliamentary committees, stripped apart by his own employer, and thrown to a media frenzy he never asked for.

Two days after giving evidence to MPs, the 59-year-old was found dead in woodland near his Oxfordshire home.

Instead of a proper inquest, Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to run a private inquiry. Hutton concluded suicide. The inquest was opened, then suspended, and never resumed.

Eight senior legal and medical figures, including a coroner, later wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was unsafe. They argued the wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not have caused sufficient blood loss to kill a healthy person.

There were no fingerprints on the knife found beside his body, even though he was not wearing gloves.

In 2011, Attorney General Dominic Grieve rejected all calls for a new inquest. He said the Hutton Inquiry was "tantamount to an inquest" and that further investigation would be dismissed by judges with irritation.

A man challenged the government's justification for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly destroyed, died in mysterious circumstances, never got a proper inquest, and the people who sent him into that media storm faced no consequences whatsoever.

Tony Blair became a Middle East Peace Envoy the following year. You genuinely could not make it up.

Sources: @BBCNews, openDemocracy, Hansard, @thetimes | Hutton Report

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

The reason everything seems so fake is because the working class has been squeezed out of the music business, journalism, TV, and movie production.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Robin Williams once said:

“You’re only given a little spark of madness. If you lose that, you’re nothing.”

A quote that perfectly captured how much he valued creativity, weirdness, and staying completely yourself.

[Uzi @UziCryptoo]

This man robbed a bank for $1, sat down and waited for the police, just to get free healthcare in prison

In 2011 a man named Richard James Verone walked into a RBC Bank in Gastonia, North Carolina

Handed the teller a note demanding $1

One dollar

Then sat down in the lobby and waited calmly for police to arrive

He was 59. No job. No insurance. A growth on his chest. Two ruptured discs.

Calculated that a federal conviction would guarantee him full medical coverage inside prison

The judge sentenced him to 3 years

He got the surgery

He got the treatment

He told reporters on the way out he had no regrets

A 59 year old American man robbed a bank for $1 because it was cheaper than seeing a doctor

[DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine]

Orson Welles on why "Citizen Kane" (1941) was banned in Russia & what he considers to be an obligation of every artist:

"Interviewer: In 'Citizen Kane' (1941) and 'Lady from Shanghai' (1947), were you intending to criticize American civilization?

Welles: I certainly was. I think every artist has an obligation to criticize his own civilization, his contemporaries. It’s clearly and obviously the task of an artist of any ambition. Every French person ought to criticize the present French civilization. It’s a responsibility.

Interviewer: But was it your intention to criticize a capitalistic viewpoint?

Welles: The capitalistic viewpoint as opposed to the materialistic view point? If I admitted that I was criticizing capitalism, it would look as if I were adopting a Marxist attitude, and that’s not so. It’s no accident that 'Citizen Kane' (1941) is banned in Russia. They don’t like it at all, any more than the capitalists like it.

I am an anti-materialist. I don’t like money or power, or the harm they do to people. It’s a very simple old idea. And I am specially opposed to plutocracy; it’s American plutocracy that I am attacking, from different angles in several films: 'The Magnificent Ambersons' (1942), 'Lady from Shanghai' (1947), and 'Citizen Kane' (1941).

Interviewer: And in 'Touch of Evil' (1958)?

Welles: There too, but from now on I’m more interested in the abuse of power by the police and the State, because today the State is more powerful than money. So I’m looking for a way of saying that."

(Orson Welles' interview with Bazin, Bitsch, Domarchi, 1958)

P.S: On this day, 85 years ago, "Citizen Kane" (1941) premiered in New York City, USA.