Money, Matrix, Moss, and Music

Sometimes the conspiracies were started by the conspiracy theorists. 

•The bizarre trillion-dollar coin debt solution idea was first popularized twenty-one years ago by Bo Gritz, a white supremacist and 1992 Populist Party presidential candidate who personally intervened to help resolve the Ruby Ridge standoff at around the same time as his coin idea and his presidential run.

Oddly, one of his goals was to abolish the Federal Reserve, presumably on the grounds of its arbitrary manipulation of the money supply, but it seems as though he’d fit right in at the Federal Reserve if he likes big money-printing schemes (indeed, he’s sort of following in the money-supply-increasing, anti-gold footsteps of populist William Jennings Bryan).

But it gets weirder still: In his brief prior political campaign, in 1988, he was technically in the v.p. slot (on the Populist Party ticket, for which he’d be the presidential candidate in 1992) with David Duke at the top of the ticket – but he later claimed he’d been misled about who his running mate would be and had expected it to be extremely colorful congressman James Traficant.  (After meeting Duke, Gritz abandoned the campaign.)

And to think Gritz probably believes Jewish people are a threat to sound money.

•But Cornel West says that political and ethnic divisions aside, it’s time to let the healing begin (actually, there are few things in the world scarier or more disingenuous-sounding than Cornel West saying things like “I love Brother [so-and-so],” as he does a bit in the clip of him I linked in yesterday’s entry). 

And so let us turn our attention away from political conflict toward pop culture items such as the Matrix movies in which West did cameos (though that may still remind us of the clash between anarchism and socially-constructed illusions). 

On a hunch, I checked to see if someone has in fact made a montage of clips of Matrix star Carrie-Anne Moss set to the old song “Carrie Anne” by the Hollies.  Naturally, someone has. 

•By the way, I now realize that the Wachowskis actually accomplished the impressive feat of making her look less sexy than in any of her other appearances – even though Trinity was still very hot, I think we can all agree.  Here is her appearance as a crazy chick on Baywatch synopsized in 2.5 minutes.

•If anyone makes a movie about the early days of the Hollies, I think Rupert Grint (Ron from the Harry Potter movies) should play Tony Hicks (who sings second here).

•But then, who’s to judge where similar faces end and the Matrix begins, given how disturbingly bad the brain is at sorting multiple faces at the same time (h/t Dan McCarthy)?