Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to leave suckers in possession of their money, that is the Law. Are we not Men? #2 is more of a guideline than a rigid directive

So there was this flurry of speculation a few years ago, as to who might be behind the ArcSurvival scam. Which was aimed at a small audience of guileless suckers who combined (a) terrified belief in the vague menaces of New-Age / Pop-culture apocalyptic bafflegab, (b) relieved belief in strangers who offered to save them with promises of technological omnipotence, and (c) possession of several million Euros in disposable wealth. Not a large Venn Diagram intersection there, so the speculation included whether ArcSurvival was a real (but incompetent) con or a parody of one, a travesty of a burlesque if not vice versa.

Left: As advertised in New Scientist

Right: as advertised in Private Eye

Now at Riddled Research Laboratory we pride ourselves on our expertise in the construction of Arks, for escaping the End of Civilisation As We Know It; and it would be nice if your humble staff could boast that we participated in the debate. The truth, alas, is that at in January 2011 we were primarily engaged in ranting about zorbs, Morris dancing and Mooses. We only learned of Arksurvival belatedly, via a comment on an old thread from helpful brownie 'Anonymous'.

The entry page of ArcSurvival.com must be read in a Dr Evil voice for proper effect:

If you do not have expendable liquid funds available to you, to cover as a minimum of one point five million euros for each member of your family, please do not continue.

I failed the test but continued anyway, and learned much about the nature of the coming catastrophe, which appears to incorporate plot elements from Gordon Dickson.

This is the long time planned and thought out new world of the few (many names including, Knights of Malta, Knights of the Templar, Bilderburg group, Illuminati, and so on Reptilian hybrids, shape shifters, etc, etc) It is quite well known that a large segment of these entities have been living underground for thousands of years, feeding off the surface in terms of energy, food, etc etc.

The refuge itself is a "survival village in the safest place on earth. The village will be completely unknown to the outside world, and is a long distance from any habitation. It can not be detected by land or air and will always remain that way." There will be hydroponics, and homeopathic healing to guarantee the health of the passengers, and eugenic selection of an elite population of Nordic purity, and Free Energy technology, and evacuation via "high speed, long distance helicopter’s", and an impenetrable electric fence to keep out the Aberrations, I saw that series.

The whole thing is as mad as a barrel of green squirrels dancing a jig on a giant blue flower. It goes past the stage of mere barking madness into "entire wolfpack howling at the moon" territory, and you must read it now, preferably with Amon Düül II playing in the background. It all speaks of a fantasy life comparable only in its richness with Baron Merlona of Melbourne, but written with the blithe unconcern for practicalities of an 8-year-old child.

Although the authors missed a few tricks through their unfamiliarity with the word 'arcology'.* Nor were they aware of two crucial narrative traditions in the preservation of a tiny vestige of civilisation. First, the best way to isolate the Ark from a world of conflagration is in space;

and second, that lifeboats always have one passenger who is the agent of an evil ideology devoted to the destruction of all we hold dear. No-one knows why. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.


Many of the tropes are sourced from the recurring theme of the Libertarian Utopia. These have been variously advertised in Idaho (the Citadel scam), or in a desert in Chile (oops, water rights and land occupancy sold separately), or on a sand-bar in the Pacific belonging to someone else, or aboard a ferro-cement barge. How does a ship made of concrete and rebar catch fire? It is a mystery.

After each con the suckers are sadder and poorer, but no wiser. They console themselves with the thought that libertarianism is such a rational, geometrically-logical philosophy / economic system that the next gaggle of grifters soliciting subscriptions to a Utopia of Selfishness will be motivated by their own self-interest to make it work, rather than just to take the money for a moonlight flit.

The Arksurvival Utopia was a product of its time, piggybacking on an ephemeral pop-culture deadline for EOCAWKI. 2012 was a golden age (as it were) of prepare-for-disaster gold-pimping. Since then the website has fallen into desuetude, leaving only those records we could salvage with the Riddled Time- Wayback Machine. Which deprives us of the opportunity to participate in the poll that opens later recensions of the Doomsday Countdown:

How you think apocalypse will happen?

	Meteor / Comet
	2012
	Global ocean flood
	Global ozone problem
	World war 3
	Nuclear bomb radiation
	Petrol crisis
	Alien attack

Now on the one hand, some potential customers might have placed slightly more confidence in the people from whom they were buying protection from catastrophe if those people projected a greater sense of knowledgeable authority in the nature of that catastrophe. On the other hand, everyone appreciates an interest in one's opinions, and voting in an on-line poll can foster a sense of investment and ownership. On the prehensile tail, the options on offer do not include my personal EndCiv scenario, "Jaguars falling from the sky".

ANYWAY... the email address for negotiating one's berth on the Ark of Survival was saved; it was "newworld@hush.ai". Against all odds, that address is still extant, and is that of Amanda Law or Amanda Mary Heath or Amanda Mary Jewell -- GcMAF Entrepreneur and Friend of Riddled. She uses it to accept donations on behalf of the people she is curing from cancer, so that they might continue their expensive treatment.


Back in 2012, Amanda Mary and Douglas Jewell were based in Bulgaria, within the colony there of UK ex-pats, and fond memories linger on. Suffice to say that there was drama. And it transpires that ArcSurvival.com was registered to "jewellless1@hotmail.co.uk", at an address in Cornwall, but hosted on a server in Bulgaria. Allowing one to hazard a guess that the last redoubt of civilisation in the midst of the New Dark Age will be Bulgarian in nature. Possibly the Health Restoration Centre in Smolyan, or the Stoikite Orphanage.

It would certainly have been useful for powering the Redoubt that Douglas William Jewell was CEO of Pearl Engineering at the time, and an expert in renewable energy.

We are the only company with the depth of experience to provide a fully turnkey renewable energy investment package, with investments ranging from 1,000,000. Euros to 2,000,000,000. Billion.

It does not seem that Doug found the investors with the ‎€16,400,000 for his 12-Megawatt windfarm development. Perhaps the turbines required upgrading to strengthen them against the impact of falling jaguars. Surprisingly, he does not mention his Vacuum-Energy technology.


Amanda now appears to reside in Mexico, as Healing Oracle and GcMAF Oracle, offering the intravenous GcMAF cancer cure as "Holistic health adviser and Cancer researcher" at La Flor de la Salud. That being a quackery clinic that started out by diagnosing slipped discs as the cause of all physical ailments and offering surgical treatment for slipped discs, later adding ozone, chelation, acupuncture, neuro-focal odontology and many other modalities of money-removal (although no-one has informed the quacks of Amanda Mary's presence on their staff).

And there was drama -- with a seminar advertised in Florida, "on taking control of your health", only to be cancelled at the last minute "due to the very recent and mysterious deaths of two holistic doctors in Florida during the last two weeks".**

It is not clear how she continues to treat her UK clients from Mexico, but many months have passed since the last appeals for funds on behalf of Anne Pharo and Freddie Mansfield, so it may be that this is no longer an issue.

Thx Fiona, Malarkey

----------------------------------------------------------------

* "An Arcology is a very large building with a self-contained ecology and a high population density, built in the shape of a rainbow."

** Not a rip-off; "Anyone who has already paid a deposit for the seminar will be automatically entered into the video course OR you may request a refund."

Derpsichorean muse

Sam Beckett had his characters discuss the best way of extracting entertainment from Lucky:

VLADIMIR: I’d like well to hear him think.
ESTRAGON: Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn’t too much to ask him.
VLADIMIR [to Pozzo]: Would that be possible?
POZZO: By all means, nothing simpler. It’s the natural order. [He laughs briefly.]

But Beckett's bitter irony was too much for the philistines and ignorant numpties, who lost no time in mistranslating and reassembling his lines into a triumphant acceptance of the primacy of physical performance above intellect.

Case in point, here is Shelagh Magadza -- Artistic Director of the 2016 NZ International Arts Festival -- bandying Beckett about as an empty signifier of High Modernist Cultural approval for her smug aesthetic preferences, and puke-funnelling a fabricated quotation:

Dance your arts off!

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.” So said Samuel Beckett. Smart man. Sheer power, adrenaline highs, poignant lows, pain and joy – experience dance that will take you out of your head and allow you to FEEL.

If only the Artistic Director were sufficiently familiar with the arts to have encountered Beckett's actual work and sensibility. Then she would not sound so much like Everyone's Email-forwarding Halfwit Uncle. Then she might not have booked the Jumping Jews of Jerusalem as the Festival's keynote act.

Then there's the Jumping Jews of Jerusalem!

And what do they do?

They jump, my lord. A lot.

I for one would pay many shiny milk-bottle tops to watch a modern interpretive dance version of "How It Is", with terpsichorean performers writhing through a vast arena of mud, dragging sacks of tinned food and poking one another in the buttocks with their can-openers.

Obligatory Oglaf episode

Way TMI

I knew it was a mistake to turn to the "Celebrity Farts" section of the Com-Post.

Brawndo's got what Astroturf craves

Establishment Republican astroturfers launched an advertising campaign calling attention to Donald Trump's contempt for women (presumably hoping to reduce his support).

That made such a big difference last time.

Every day is Irony Day

1. Hawkes Bay dairy farmers complain that someone upstream is polluting their river.

"You can't go fishing in that, can't go swimming in that, it's a disgrace really. Stock can't drink it and pumps can't pump it," Jarden said.*

HA HA HA. The Minister for Dairy Farming Primary Produce needs to explain to them that whenever someone else's profits require the river turning brown, then clean water is a luxury that we simply can't afford.

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2. In a recent report, Miller and Wager cherry-picked three examples of dodgy non-peer-reviewed GMO alarmism -- including our old friend Gilles-Éric Séralini -- to demonstrate that all opposition to GMO technology is driven by conflicts of interest and intellectual dishonesty.

Another trend, related and equally worrisome, is the increasing frequency of publication of the results of flawed “advocacy research” that is designed to give a false result that supports a certain cause or position and can be cited by activists long after the findings have been discredited. The articles are often found in the predatory open-access journals.

Miller and Wager are concerned that shabby but superficially-scientific junk-journals are being used by hacks and charlatans to provide their conclusion-driven propaganda with a sheen of academic plausibility, stovepipe it into political debate, and create mocktroversies out of consensus. This is all very well, but their chosen vehicle for their concerns was National Review.

No-one could have predicted that the NR comment thread would quickly devolve into a competition among the readers to see who could shout “Global Climate Change is a Fraud!!” most loudly.

H/t Jeffrey Beall, Retraction Watch

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3. There is no #3.

* Should note in the interests of scrupulous fairness that James Jarden is not necessarily a cow-cockie himself; if memory serves, he and Jamie are sheep farmers.

From the annals of None-more-Blackness: Bitumen edition

There is a movie waiting to be made about shenanigans in the English arts scene of the late 18th century. For the milieu encouraged wild experimentation with new pigments and techniques, but also intrigue and skulduggery, with forgers and con-men offering to sell the stylistic secrets -- rediscovered or unearthed -- of the Renaissance Old Masters. In fact Thomas Pynchon has already written the book, although the only surviving copy of his original manuscript is preserved in the Reality Exclusion Vault in the Riddled library... all other copies having been rewritten by some kind of entropic degeneration from a resonance in the Morphogenic Field (which turned them all into a noir novel about PIs, drug-smuggling and degenerate dentists in 1970 California).

Poster design: Variations on a theme

"Inherent vice" in art conservation is the term for the self-destructive, time-bomb nature of certain media and pigments. Case in point being bitumen. Which was popular with Georgian artists, who had no compunctions about painting with roading material (the units are not well-standardised but one compunction is roughly comparable to a qualm, and less than a scruple).

The attraction of bitumen was the velvety raven's-wing blackness it provided on the canvas, the blackness of putrefaction and alchemical nigredo, the first stage in the process of individuation. Regrettably, bitumen is never quite stable; it retains a paradoxical life from all the long-chain hydrocarbons: over the decades it bubbles and cracks, creeps across the canvas in the manner of a slime mould.

Joshua Reynolds was fond of bitumen backgrounds, with the result that half his paintings from the 1770s and 1780s have transformed into Picture-of-Dorian-Gray monstrosities (while their models are still alive today, showing no evidence of the passage of time and the corruption of their souls).

The other attraction of bitumen, along with toxic pigments like Realgar and Orpiment (which coincidentally are the names of the Riddled goldfish), is that it discouraged people from eating canvases. Which was a widespread problem in late-1700s art galleries. Also megilp [alternative spelling of megilph], "a mixture of mastic varnish and [...] linseed oil [...] cooked with litharge or white lead."

"I was given to understand," Another Kiwi vouchsafed, "that a Megilph is deputy leader of any secret society devoted to preserving the esoteric wisdom of Old Master alchemical painting. Second only to the Petrarch."

"How much did they charge you for membership?" asked tigris in sympathy.

This all reached a climax in the 'Venetian Secret' imbroglio, or fiasco, or farrago [it is a mystery why so many words for "disreputable goings-on" came to us from Italian]. An egregious con-man convinced various members of the art establishment that he had inherited a manual of trade secrets from the Italian masters, for the construction of adjustable slatted window shades, which happened to be in the handwriting of his daughter because the original version had been destroyed. It will be a great movie and I do not want to spoil things by reading the book. See Highly Allegorical portrayal of the whole unfortunate episode:


But here at Riddled there is no end to the generous sharing of our knowledge, and with nary a thought for personal advancement, without demanding a 10-guinea subscription or expecting you to buy your own copy of "Colour and Meaning", we pass on here the actual recipe for Titian's Shade:

The Guardian arts columnist has a slightly different recipe but his methods are unsound:

In the 18th century, leading artists including Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds paid through the nose for the right to use “Titian’s shade”, a mixture of ivory black and Prussian blue that was supposed to be the Venetian master’s secret colour. It was in reality a con trick concocted by a painter called Ann Provis, who had a good laugh at the men of the Royal Academy.

The 'Venetian Secret' debacle ran from 1795 to 1797, and Joshua Reynolds died in 1792, so he can be forgiven for his gullibility what with the absence of brain activity.

Hello, is that the Grauniad? I'm calling from the Zapotec culture in pre-Colombian Mexico to let you know that some ignorant slut is making crap up and putting it on-line on your website.