$100,000 Amateur Video Challenge

Did you or someone you know shoot amateur video of an airplane crash on 9/11? If so, it could net you a hundred grand.

As readers of my work already know, I don't believe any airplanes crashed anywhere on 9/11. All of the airplane crash videos are video composites, says me. Prove me wrong, and make a quick $100,000 U.S.

The problem is none of the 9/11 airplane videos are available in their original quality. I highly suspect that this is due to the fact that reducing quality on a composite image is the best way to hide the messy fingerprints of the compositing process.

To sort it out, I offer this next in what has become a series of $100,000 challenges. To meet the challenge:

1. The video must show "UA175" hitting the south tower.
2. You must allow me to inspect the original tape on which the event was recorded. It must be originally recorded video on "mini DV", or other DV format. 
3. The airplane video must match in quality the other videos present on the tape. Any attempt to copy onto the DV tape video that has been further compressed, or reduced in dimensions, or subjected to any unnecessary quality loss is grounds for disqualification. 
4. You must allow me to create a high-quality, uncompressed digitization of the video, directly from the original tape.
5. You will grant to me a non-exclusive license to publish the  footage.

Jennifer Spell? Evan Fairbanks? Luc Courchesne? Michael Hezarkhani? Any takers?

I warrant that I have a line of credit in excess of $100,000.

Applicants may contact me via the email link, top right. 

-Ace Baker

The Death of Reality

The other day my daughter asked me how I thought future historians would characterize the current era. I thought for a moment and answered, "The death of reality".



In case you didn't know, a software tool called "autotune" can give any singer perfect pitch. It's so easy and so overused, a Brooklyn musician has created "Autotune the News". Katie Couric, Newt Gingrich et al. singing passable R&B ditties. Of course it sounds artificial, but have you listened to many of today's hit artists? Autotune is everywhere.

Animators have been inserting realistic images like dinosaurs into movies and TV shows for well over a decade now. We all know this. For some reason, most people have not connected the dots and realized that the govern-media has the same technology, and will use it as needed. Perhaps many are laboring under the antique fantasy of an independent news media.

The media is a de-facto government agency, the U.S. Department of Mind Control. On 9/11 they inserted realistic airplane animations into live video of an exploding tower and called it "news". Just as they avail themselves of the most advanced aircraft and satellites, missiles and bombs, so too with video animation and compositing.

Animations of inanimate objects like airplanes or cars are today indistinguishable from those recorded on film or video. Animations of human beings are not quite there yet. There still can be subtle clues with the movement and in the complex visual details which betray the fakery.

But the day is not far off when computing horsepower and software ingenuity solves these problems, and allows for the creation of realistic virtual people, right down to every little hair and freckle. And then it will be just a matter of time before this is available in real-time. Entertainment companies like, say Disney, will wrestle with the ethical dilemma of creating virtual movie stars. Virtual stars don't eat, and they don't demand a huge contract.

News rooms will have the same kinds of temptations. Why not serve the master by digitizing a new Hitler?

What then? How can we ever again trust that the images we see on the news are real? Hopefully, we won't. Hopefully we will at long last see the news media for what it is: The untrustworthy propaganda arm of the government. Hopefully the death of reality will be the birth of the new liberty. That is the complete distrust and disobedience of all things governmental, especially the "news" media.

This is my dream.