American Gladiators: How The Running Man is Our Reality

jay008 / http://jaysanalysis.com/2015/05/10/american-gladiators-how-the-running-man-is-our-reality/

Film Poster. Image: Wikipedia.com

By: Jay Dyer
Cheesy 80s dystopian films constitute some of the best cinematic predictive programming, and 1987’s The Running Man is a fine specimen.  Full of Schawrzenegger’s grunts and “aagghhhs” (as opposed to a script), even Bloodsport has a contender for wooden acting and silly fight choreography with Running Man.  Nevertheless, Stephen King’s novel of the same name was transformed into an accurate description of where the U.S. is headed in full Hunger Games fashion: Although many dystopian novels and the films depict the great gladiatorial games scenario, but The Running Man has some unique insights that are worth highlighting.

“By 2017, the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil are in short supply.  A police state, divided into paramilitary zones, rules with an iron hand. Television is controlled by the state and a sadistic game show called “The Running Man” has become the most popular show in history.  All art, music and communications are censored.  No dissent is tolerated and yet a small resistance movement has managed to survive underground.”

From the outset, The Running Man projects a very likely near future.  While the world economy may not globally collapse by 2017, as long as the stated plans to move towards an SDR-backed IMF plan continue, the older dollar system will fold.  Economists have projected this transition for some years, but when this will occur is anyone’s guess.  When it does, the partitioning of the various continents into trading unions (which is already long in process) will lead to the global federation of unions, headed by IMF, World Bank, and BIS.  In the U.S., the FEMA Zones will likely constitute the new regions, precisely as our film projects, with a heavy-handed federal force quelling dissent – all of which is predicted with precision accuracy.
A complete panoptic society has been installed, where all of life is monitored, from cradle to grave.  In order to keep the masses satiated, the old “bread and circuses” trick of bloody, gladiatorial spectacle has been reintroduced, mirroring the devaluation of human life.  One need only turn on the television in our day to see the gladiatorial spectacle of trash that has evolved since the 80s, where transvestites are accounted heroes, morons compete in the most extreme forms of lunacy, and the latest “idol” is trotted out to record some pop song that will be forgotten in a few months.  Make no mistake about it, we are only a few years away from the return of actual gladiatorial games and bloodletting, as Hunger Games style competitions will eventually exist.

Everyone’s favorite, forgotten American Gladiator, Dynamo” the fat, opera singing electrocutioner.

And speaking of Hunger Games, boy does its plot resemble The Running Man, yet instead of Jennifer Lawrence in spandex tights, we’ll have to settle for Arnold and Yaphet Kotto.  I might also add that the 80s were completely convinced that the fullest extent of the future’s technological advances, profound as they may be, never extend beyond Atari level screen displays.  Setting aside spandex and Space Invaders, another surprising element worth noting is the film’s depiction of crowd control weaponry.  Still retaining its class structure, the future megacity of The Running Man confines its classes to various zones, where enforced labor is conducted.  Step outside that zone, and your RFID necklace explodes your noggin – something the deluded bureaucrats of our day have actually suggested, as well as micro-chipping. In fact, just as in the film, NBC reported a projection for 2017:

NBC News: All Citizens Will Soon Have RFID Chip Implants

Another fascinating foresight is reality TV.  Far before MTV’s The Real World, The Running Man displays a society that has become obsessed with cheaply-made “reality” television that is explained in the film as “brainwashing.”  While reality TV may have come about for its low-cost efficiency, the possibility of its deeper psy op and social engineering possibilities cannot be overlooked.  As with social media, reality television prepared the way for the mass consciousness to accept the idea that their own thoughts and lives were fantastically important, especially if you do nothing.  Living out their dreams through the proxy of the virtual world, the “stars” of reality TV seemed to be regular Joes and soccer moms that won some special “lottery” to become the next big thing.

80s Arnold uses the Innerwebs.

As occurs often in dystopian fiction, the “lottery” concept cannot be overlooked since this trick of the golden ticket, just like the scam of the various cash lotteries in most states, is a state-supported myth that dupes the mass.  Reality TV, like the lottery, holds out the carrot stick of wealth and fame for being and doing nothing – the ultimate scam that ensnares the lethargic denizens of refuse programming.  Just as Richards (Schwarzenegger) discovers, the golden ticket of fame and stardom are not real, but in fact are controlled by a completely ruthless and maniacal corporate slave culture.
The Running Man thus exposes the Hollywood machine in its truest sense.  As demonstrated in The Truman Show, the appeal to the narcissism of the ego’s desire to be an icon of reflected, mimetic glory is the trap of what I call the Serpentine Mirror.  The result of this trap is the commodification of everything, including ones own being, as the trade off for imagined status will eventually lead to the complete transference of our identities to a digital Internet avatar (for example, watch Ari Folman’s The Congress).  The title itself is indicative of the sense we are to feel as men on the verge of this great era of transition of the end of man – we should run.  As Richards discovers, working in the system results in becoming a patsy for trying to do the right thing.  Framed as a mass killer, Ben Richards is “chosen” to be the next victim of the Amerikan Gladiators.
Patterned after Soviet and Nazi governments, the police state of our film mandates that children and citizens report others for untoward thoughts or violations, even to the extent of wearing “unauthorized” clothing or possessing or distributing illegal art, along the lines of the East German historically-based film, The Lives of Others.  All art and culture is tightly mandated by the state-controlled network, ICS, home of the one show everyone watches, The Running Man.  Sound far-fetched?  What if I told you the culture industry already exists, and that the state and the Hollywood corporate machine already work together as a symbiotic organism of culture destruction?  The reality is, as readers of JaysAnalysis have seen now in hundreds of articles, the CIA and Hollywood are flip sides of the same coin.  Movies and media are the new peep stones our shaman priests indoctrinate us with. (I must admit, the shows ICS advertises sound like a blast: “The Hate Boat,” “Climbing for Dollars,” and “Pain: American Style”).

The dystopian megacity.

The merger of the state and television news into “infotainment” is also presaged, as Ben Richards’ is set up as a lone gun mass shooter and plastered all over the network, and subsequently transformed into a “star” runner for ICS.  As an added bonus, the film even has the “Infonet,” where Ben purchases a plane ticket online under the identity of his Hispanic love interest, Amber Mendez.  Uniting with the ubiquitous hacker resistance, Ben and his hacker revolutionaries plan to use their placement in the show to hijack the satellite uplink to expose the show.  The most revealing scene is the completely staged death of Ben that Damon concocts for ratings, since Ben has proven harder to kill than assumed.  Wag the Dog revealed this same technique where a completely staged war is filmed on a sound stage.  Here, Killian stages a bloody battle leading to the death of a CGI Richards.  With this in mind, it becomes much more plausible how events like Sandy Hook or the Boston Bombing can incorporate such deception:

The Running Man - Future & TV Fakery

Although presented as minor 80s science fiction dystopia, The Running Man is far more accurate in its prediction that most would assume.  From panopticism to false flags and staged killings, The Running Man is an accurate revelation of man’s obsession with the un-real.  In reality, the “winners” of the Running Man are actually killed – just as many of the “winners” in our synthetic system end up broken, abused, exploited, drug-addicted and murdered.  The brutalization and desensitization of the populace is a deep, psych warfare strategy, deployed for the destruction of western culture in particular, and ultimately of man himself.  From the Fabians to the Frankfurt School “experts” who worked with the CIA and OSS, the disintegration and decay is not only happening at a rapid pace, it is revealed openly in films like The Running Man.
Damon Killian, the dastardly network head, explains that all he is doing is giving the people what they want – American’s love TV. They wean their kids on it.

Apple Has Plans for Your DNA       ~  Oops :0

The iPhone could become a new tool in genetic studies.

• By Antonio Regalado on May 5, 2015        http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537081/apple-has-plans-for-your-dna/

Why It Matters

Gene research is held back by medical privacy rules and limited data sharing.

Of all the rumors ever to swirl around the world’s most valuable company, this may be the first that could involve spitting in a plastic cup.
Apple is collaborating with U.S. researchers to help launch apps that would offer some iPhone owners the chance to get their DNA tested, many of them for the first time, according to people familiar with the plans.
The apps are based on ResearchKit, a software platform Apple introduced in March that helps hospitals or scientists run medical studies on iPhones by collecting data from the devices’ sensors or through surveys.
The first five ResearchKit apps, including one called mPower that tracks symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, quickly recruited thousands of participants in a few days, demonstrating the reach of Apple’s platform.
“Apple launched ResearchKit and got a fantastic response. The obvious next thing is to collect DNA,” says Gholson Lyon, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who isn’t involved with the studies.
Nudging iPhone owners to submit DNA samples to researchers would thrust Apple’s devices into the center of a widening battle for genetic information. Universities, large technology companies like Google (see “Google Wants to Store Your Genome”), direct-to-consumer labs, and even the U.S. government (see “U.S. to Develop DNA Study of One Million People”) are all trying to amass mega-databases of gene information to uncover clues about the causes of disease (see “Internet of DNA”).
In two initial studies planned, Apple isn’t going to directly collect or test DNA itself. That will be done by academic partners. The data would be maintained by scientists in a computing cloud, but certain findings could appear directly on consumers’ iPhones as well. Eventually, it’s even possible consumers might swipe to share “my genes” as easily as they do their location.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. But one person with knowledge of the plans said the company’s eventual aim is to “enable the individual to show and share” DNA information with different recipients, including organizers of scientific studies. This person, like others with knowledge of the research, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the company’s insistence on secrecy.
One of these people said the DNA-app studies could still be cancelled, but another said Apple wants the apps ready for the company’s worldwide developers’ conference, to be held in June in San Francisco.
Sophisticated data
Starting last year, Apple began taking steps to make its devices indispensable for “digital health.” Its latest version of the iOS operating system includes an app called Health, which has fields for more than 70 types of health data—everything from your weight to how many milligrams of manganese you eat (as yet, there’s no field for your genome). Apple also entered a partnership with IBM to develop health apps for nurses and hospitals, as well as to mine medical data.
Now Apple is closely involved in shaping initial studies that will collect DNA. One, planned by the University of California, San Francisco, would study causes of premature birth by combining gene tests with other data collected on the phones of expectant mothers. A different study would be led by Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Atul Butte, leader of the UCSF study and head of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences, said he could not comment on Apple’s involvement. “The first five [ResearchKit] studies have been great and are showing how fast Apple can recruit. I and many others are looking at types of trials that are more sophisticated,” Butte says. Noting that the genetic causes of premature birth aren’t well understood, he says, “I look forward to the day when we can get more sophisticated data than activity, like DNA or clinical data.”
To join one of the studies, a person would agree to have a gene test carried out—for instance, by returning a “spit kit” to a laboratory approved by Apple. The first such labs are said to be the advanced gene-sequencing centers operated by UCSF and Mount Sinai.
The planned DNA studies would look at 100 or fewer medically important disease genes (known as a “gene panel”), not a person’s entire genome. These targeted tests, if done at large scale, would not cost more than a few hundred dollars each.
Like the ResearchKit apps released so far, the studies would be approved by Apple and by an institutional review board, a type of oversight body that advises researchers on studies involving volunteers.
The ResearchKit program has been spearheaded by Stephen Friend, a onetime pharmaceutical company executive and now the head of Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit that advocates for open scientific research. Friend’s vision for a data “commons” in which study subjects are active participants in scientific research was enthusiastically embraced by Apple starting in 2013. Friend, whom Apple describes as a medical technology advisor, declined an interview request through an assistant.
Silicon Valley companies are intent on using apps and mobile devices to overrun what Friend has called the “medical-industrial complex.” The problem is that hospitals and research groups are notorious for hoarding data, in many cases because they are legally bound to do so by state and federal privacy regulations. But no law stops individuals from sharing information about themselves. Thus one reason to “empower patients,” as rhetoric has it, is that if people collect their own data, or are given control of it, it could quickly find wide use in consumer apps and technologies, as well as in science.
One study that could get a boost from the iPhone is the Resilience Project, a joint undertaking by Sage and Mount Sinai to discover why some people are healthy even though their genes say they should have serious inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis. That project has already scoured DNA data previously collected from more than 500,000 people, and as of last year it had identified about 20 such unusual cases. But the Resilience Project was having difficulty contacting those people because their DNA had been collected anonymously. By contrast, recruiting people through iPhone apps could make ongoing contact easy.
Hard to handle
By playing this role in gene studies, Apple would join a short list of companies trying to excite people about what they might do with their own genetic information. Among them are the genealogy company Ancestry.com, the Open Humans Project, and 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer testing company that has collected DNA profiles of more than 900,000 people who bought its $99 spit kits.
That is one of the largest DNA data banks anywhere, but it took 23andMe nine years of constant media attention, such as appearance on Oprah, to reach those numbers. By comparison, Apple sold 60 million iPhones in just the first three months of this year, contributing to a total of about 750 million overall. That means DNA studies on the ResearchKit platform could, theoretically, have rapid and immense reach.

But DNA data remains tricky to handle, and in some cases what people can be told about it is regulated by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
One study launched this year by the University of Michigan, Genes for Good, uses a Facebook app to recruit subjects and carry out detailed surveys about their health and habits. In that study, participants will be sent a spit kit and will later gain access to DNA information via a file they can download to their desktops.
So far about 4,200 people have signed up, says Gonçalo Abecasis, the geneticist running the research. Abecasis says that the project will tell people something about their ancestry but won’t try to make health predictions. “There is tension in figuring out what is okay as part of our research study and what would be okay in terms of health care,” he says. “You can imagine that a lot of people have a good idea how to interpret the DNA … but what is appropriate to disclose isn’t clear.”
One issue facing Apple is whether consumers are even interested in their DNA. So far, most people still have no real use for genetic data, and common systems for interpreting it are lacking as well. “In 10 years it could be incredibly significant,” says Lyon, the Cold Spring Harbor geneticist. “But the question is, do they have a killer app to interact with their [DNA] quickly and easily.”
Some people have ideas. Imagine you could swipe your genes at a drugstore while filling a prescription, getting a warning if you’re predicted to have a reaction to the drug. Or perhaps an app could calculate exactly how closely related you are to anyone else. But Lyon believes that right now the story is mostly about helping researchers. “They need people to donate their DNA,” he says. “One incentive is to have it on their phone where they can play with it.”