Operation Blackjack Part 2 is Up
January 24th, 2009The ultimate challenge is to shape the common concern of most countries and all major ones regarding the economic crisis, together with a common fear of jihadist terrorism, into a strategy reinforced by the realisation that the new issues like proliferation, energy and climate change permit no national or regional solution.
—Henry Kissinger: The World Must Forge a New Order or Retreat to Chaos
Blackjack – Part 2. A slideshow story
The production values of this slide show are so horrid that it brings to mind the work of an intern or someone who just downloaded a warezed copy of photoshop. I can’t imagine that the paper would run this crap on their site.
Slide 24 has a “Union of North America” logo at bottom right. The motto below is “Novus Ordo Something”, where “Something” is truly frightening.
There’s an equally shitty site that goes along with this called:
jackblack12.info
That domain name was embedded in the crappy quality photo with the delivery truck and the snake/serpent from part 1. Squint at the compression artifacts and noise under the sign that says “REPORT” at the left.
The domain was registered through DomainsByProxy, so whois doesn’t tell us anything.
You might think twice about visiting that jackblack12.info site with your real IP, though. Whoever or whatever is behind this has created something that can’t be of interest to more than a couple of thousand people on the planet. These will be confirmed thought criminals. Oh well… You’re reading Cryptogon so maybe it doesn’t matter.
As already noted, the piece has zero aesthetic value. It’s hideous to look at. So… Well, I don’t know. If it’s viral marketing, I can’t begin to imagine for what.
I don’t see any obvious hooks, like the Mini Cooper / Robot thing from years ago:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/744/
Looking at the code on the jackblack thing, I noticed that it was created by someone using Apple’s iWeb. That application is only used by people who have no idea what they’re doing with web development. This leads me to believe that this might (repeat, might) be some sort of stupid interactive performance art project; some pothead art student screwing some editor at the Telegraph, etc. Who knows…
I suppose it could be a meme mapping experiment, like injecting isotopes into a person before a PET scan.
Oh, how cute. Somebody ripped off a bunch of concepts from the “Jericho” television series.
The extremely poor production values (even for the UK) are a tip-off that this might have originated from an intelligence agency. This is the work of someone who isn’t familiar with the tools he’s using; that might describe an intern, or equally an intelligence veteran who needed to do this himself, for whatever reason. The story seems designed by committee, as does the concept itself.