The False Gold of the Meidas Touch
After a quick review of the MT site, I told him it was the most egregious pile of vile libel made up completely out of whike cloth I had ever seen. (A permanent sidebar there declared that there are over 20,000 pending lawsuits against Trump for a variety of sex crimes.) I told him he was a disgusting cancer on the corpse of journalism that was stinking up the Internet. This was before I learned that one of MT’s financial pimp was Reid Hoffman, the same guy who had bankrolled the farcical E. Jean Harris sexual assault lawsuit against Trump despite the lack of any evidence of any kind, long after the expiration of any statute of limitations for criminal action. Which is what made it a perfect case for a civil court loaded with cherry-picked Trump-hating jurors and a crooked judge.
All the above is by way of explaining why I made it a point to read a National Pulse story involving Meidas Touch, which was somehow still in business even after Reid Hoffman was now being ensnared by revelations in the Epstein Files. Otherwise I probably would have paid no mind to an item about the bailout job secured by of a laid-off CBS glunk I’d never heard of. But when I perused the post, I got a Spidey tingle that for the second time in a week, the lofty national Pulse had missed the real story, which amazingly wasn’t really about the Meidas Touch connection.
What was my Spidey sense feeling? Something the Japanese isolated as perceptual phenomenon and called the “Uncanny Valley.” It’s a function of technology, first experienced with advanced computer animated artwork and has blossomed into an epidemic syndrome associated with Artificial Intelligence attempts to copy human motion and expression convincingly. The uncanniness is born of the paradox that the imitation is so close to reality yet unnerving in that it seems somehow “off,” as in just not quite right.
I tend to feel it every time I see Samuel Jackson in a new TV ad showing him 20 years younger than he could have been in any recent filming. And that’s exactly how I felt when I saw the CBS correspondent named and shown in the National Pulse post. Scott MacFarlane. I knew I had never seen before, but there was something familiar about him, including apparent stiffness he exhibits even in a still photo.
Then I got it. I remembered where I had seen that face before. YouTube had a video clip that confirmed my suspicion. Oddly they wouldn’t let me copy the web address, so I had to video it from the iPad screen.
Hymie. I’d seen him on TV as a kid. He was an agent of KAOS, the evil
force Max and 99 were fighting in their missions for C.O.N.T.R.O.L.
Only it couldn’t be. The episode I’d found was from late in the first season of Get Smart, which meant 1966 at the earliest. Which meant the actor playing Hymie was 10 years older than I am at a minimum. Was Scott MacFarlane some actor’s son? I looked him up on Wiki, Which is when uncanny became positively creepy. One thing you can always count on at Wiki, whatever other liberties they take, is that they always include birth dates. Not this time.
The text is short on dates too, although it gives him a degree from Syracuse University in 1998. Which seems a bit convenient, since Syracuse is one of the universities everyone’s heard of but never knows anyone who actually went there. His hometown of Highland, New York, is also mysterious.
I went to school for a couple years in upstate New York, and my sister spent four years going to college in Poughkeepsie, and I’ve never heard tell of a quaint hamlet called Highland, let alone been there. The phrase “Highland is a hamlet” gave me that uncanny feeling again. Hamlet is also an actor, isn’t he, a many who play parts in plays of various kinds… I zoomed out of map by bit and discovered a name I did know quite well. Armonk. Home of the Works Headquarters of IBM beginning in, uh, 1964. That was year when more in the world was changing than the network TV lineup.
Even two decades later, when I was working in the computer industry, IBM was famous for its skunkworks, spoken of in the same fantastic terms as USAF’s Area 51, home of technology so advanced ‘Big Blue’ was reputed to keep impossible breakthroughs under wraps for fear they’d obsolete their own product lineup and put themselves out of business. If anyone could have been working on something as earthshaking robot technology, it would have been the nerve center of the computer industry just 58.4 miles away from the upstate Brigadoon called Highland.
An AI question if there ever was one, so I asked Google’s little AI gnome about it.
The magic word here is ‘Apollo,’ which means government work at a very high, top secret level. If IBM was involved in clandestine robotics development, then there was always the possibility that the company would have been involved with the CIA and probably its Director of Operations. I looked up Thomas Watson Jr. in connection with the CIA and got this vague but provocative report.
Bingo. Sort of. They had a lot in common. Watson was technology CEO engaged with NASA projects. McCone had been CEO of ITT becoming Director of the CIA. Both were engineers. The blurb above suggests they were perhaps uniquely similar in terms of experience and aggressive pursuit of their goals.Had they played gold together, I wondered? Was I looking at some kind of precocious high-tech cabal consisting of two obsessives and a project they couldn’t bring themselves to let go of?
The ‘H’ could be the Langley layout. Who’s to say that a ‘Y’ isn’t a natural
expression of ‘crooked letter ‘I’, or that the ‘M’ in the cover name ‘Hymie’
isn’t a subliminal confession of the Me Factor in a McCone/Watson plot?
Viewed together, these three faces do look similar. To me, anyway. Not just that they’re white men, because there are lots of white faces that don’t have even features, strong straight noses, downturned eyes under prominent brows, and bold jawlines.
My last stop was to a place I try not to go very often. The DarkNet is a dangerous place. But I went this time with a limited question, asking for a clue and hint about any connection between these three faces.
They won’t let you in. I’m just showing you it’s there.
Here’s what I got back. A photo of a printout accompanied by the words “Two men hired a sketch artist to ink a face combining them both into a template for an automaton. This is all that remains…”
It’s best not to ask followup question at DarkNet.
I think someone (or ones) have inherited or hijacked the HI/C project and are running a pilot for an incredibly dangerous and subversive replacement program of tremendous scope. As the mass media dinosaurs die out, one by one, they will be replaced by robots whose physical awkwardness (still persistent) can be minimized by the fact that they will be operated on studio sets, behind desks, and utterly without any personal contacts that can result in sexual scandals, actionable ad-libbed (i.e., unscripted) lies, or anything approaching red carpet celebrity. They will look and act like professional functionaries delivering the straightest of straight news, no matter what kind of maniacs are writing the words they say, the TV-watching will never know the difference. It will seem as if everything has returned to normalcy while the Deep State soldiers smoothly on, completing the long-term mission of reducing the citizenry to mind-number serfs in a vast machine that, for once, really is a machine.
That’s probably a Midas Touch for the conspirators behind this enormous scheme. All I can do is ask everyone to keep your eyes keenly open at everything this Scott MacFarlane, the man with no birth date who hasn’t aged a day in 50 years, does and says to the cameras. See if you can find a way through the Uncanny Valley that awaits us all.
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