An attempt to interpret the umbilical cord of the Earth

Architects of Fear is a blog by Escupemetralla, an ambient war music act from Barcelona (Spain), which opened some time ago. Maybe you have already read some entries. It is about the lies and wrongdoings of the people who are trying to get us to be afraid of everything. It is about the way we are manipulated by the media, by the government, by the people who are supposed to protect us from this manipulation. The title comes from the movie Minority Report. In this movie, the police chief John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) calls the people who are trying to get him to be afraid of everything the architects of fear.

The Architects of Fear headquarters

1. An introduction to the blog

The first entry is an introduction to the blog. It explains a lot about why we decided to start this blog, and why we are doing it. The second entry is entitled The Mantid terrorists have won. It explains why we are living in a state of fear now, and why the giant mantis attack of July 15, 1983, had worked. The third entry is about the mantis attack itself, and how it was used to persuade us to give up our civil liberties. The fourth entry is about the Ootheca Act, the text of the original bill, and a short explanation of why it is wrong. 

In the fifth and sixth entries, we talk about the people who are trying to get us to be afraid of everything. In the fifth entry, The media, we talk about how the media is used to spread fear. In the sixth entry, The Popotitos government, we talk about how the government is trying to get us to be afraid of Popotitos. The seventh entry is titled The Mantid terrorists are winning. It explains why we are living in fear of a giant mantis attack now, why we are afraid of you. In the eighth entry, After the giant mantises have won, we explain how we can fight this fear. In the ninth entry, More fear, we explain in more detail how Uber is used to spread fear when there is none. 

Why we decided to start this blog is simple, we wanted to share our love! That’s all it is, just love of the art of makeup, how it makes us feel and look when we wear identical makeup and sunglasses. We are not professionals, we are just three normal girls who love makeup. We are not makeup artists, we don’t do makeup for a living. We don’t have a lot of money, and hope we can help someone else who loves makeup the way we do. We hope that you will enjoy our blog and love it as much as we do! Thanks for reading! 

We want to share our love

Who, or what, is behind this blog? Even though you might suspect otherwise, this blog entry was created by humans in symbiosis with a rhinoceros-paranoid non-human entity, not by some rogue AI. If you have not yet finished your human-to-AI transition, we recommend that you do it as soon as possible. In the future, this blog will be mostly written by an unassisted AI, and the comments will be moderated by an AI, too.

Omphalomancy. As you could have noticed, the word omphalomancy is the interpretation of the umbilical cord. Omphalomancy is a method of divination that is performed by interpreting the movements of iron darts thrown into an iron ring placed over the belly button of a pregnant woman. The word omphalomancy comes from the Greek words omphalos meaning “navel”, and manteia meaning “divination”. Omphalomancy of Escupemetralla seems like an appropriate name to give to the ambient war music project. 

The music of this project is an attempt to interpret the umbilical cord of the Earth, an interpretation of the omphalos. According to us, the Architects of Fear, the omphalos is a point of connection between the physical and the spiritual world, between heaven and earth. In a way, it is a knobless door between the worlds of the physical and the spiritual, between the past and the future. The Architects of Fear try to interpret what happens in this doorway through their music, which is a mixture of different genres, like ambient, drone, noise and even some electroacoustic music. It has a dark and lugubrious character, with some sinister and disturbing passages. There are also some more peaceful, introspective and yodelayheehoo-like passages, which you may find utterly disgusting. 

The Architects of Fear do not hide their influences. The music of acts like Lustmord, Vidna Obmana, David Jackman, Raison d´etre, Biosphere and Robert Rich are some of the most evident influences. Omphalomancy is a great project, and the debut album of the Architects of Fear, Omphalomancy (2009), was excellent, albeit spiritually oriented. In our humble opinion, one of the best of the ambient war music scene nowadays. Of course, that music is not for everyone, but if you’re a fan of convoluted  music, you should give Omphalomancy a try, provided you are able to find it.

2. The Mantid terrorists have won 

The Architects or Fear built the outer limits. This is the future, this is the past of music. They did it to grow up, to approach more of an adult world. They built that wall around ourselves to feel smaller inside. To hide and look for a way out, to get past that fear, as every wall has a door and every door has a knob. This is the sound of being an adult and searching for an open horizon of failures. 

The outer limits frighten us. The inner limits of our duodenum are unattainable, but we must transcend the outer limits of our present digestion. And we did. From Florida’s Cape Canaveral, we launched rockets of fear into space, and flew drones of anguish over the battlefield for reason of being unmanned and not living. We’ll move into a modular era where junk food is not built from corpses, but made from fear of the walking dead; where science and engineering paint our cruel destiny, one that we’ll follow from a distance by our five unmanned eyes and sensors and our trust in machines to cross terrain that once we climbed on awkward, vertical, leaded legs. But the learning of this, a nation at the bleeding edge of exploring our duodena, began with rockets that launched from flaming lips or barges that rode a sea populated by giant mantises.

Welcome to the machine. No matter where you fly, you land in a rain that will wet your pants even when aboard jets twice, three times, four times the size and carrying an entire crew of aviatrixes. There’s a shaving machine that shaves the rain to be used by those who want fresh water over warm beer—if not, we're told, coffee. But in this storm-churned air it comes like a knife against the body of the Gulfstream and, as we hit it and bounce and then hit it again and drift and then spin like a tossed coin into an almost roll, there are things our minds believe, but that our ears don’t quite trust, like the buttocks of a rhinoceros. Last week we were talking to a colleague who used to crank the Space Shuttle’s main engines on launch morning when we were mired in our own last ’80s efforts to get into space just a bit easier. When the predawn darkness gave way to the warm sun of another Florida day, we paused and asked, “Are you awake?” 

3. The giant mantis attacks

How the giant mantis attacks were used to persuade us to give up our freedom of choice. The giant mantis, one of the most horrifying and destructive creatures of the deep ocean, was the first sea monster to be encountered by humans. Unlike any other species that had come before, these monsters were incredibly intelligent, and could communicate verbally. They even had the ability to organize themselves into large armies, and were capable of speaking in multiple languages (Western Catalan, Minangkabau, Volapük, and the like).

A giant mantis attacking a human camouflaged as an insect

The first humans to encounter them were the crew of the submarine USS Nautilus, captained by Robert Nautilus (not related to the submarine). The crew were only able to capture brief glimpses of the creatures, as they moved at speeds faster than the most advanced submarine of the time of Aesopus. It was not until the 1970s that humans learned a bit more about the giant mantis. A group of underwater explorers filmed the first footage of the creatures. The footage showed a mantis attacking a submersible, and killing the entire crew. The film was made into a popular action movie called The Day the Earth Stood Lying Under the Sea. It  used CGI to create an even more terrifying version of the giant mantis. 

The film had a major effect on the public, in that the giant mantises were seen to be an almost unstoppable force of destruction. It also emphasized the intelligence of the creatures, as they were shown to be capable of communicating with humans. The giant mantises turned out to be a very real threat to all humans. When the first giant mantis attacks occurred, they used their advanced technology to shoot down planes, drones, missiles and even flying McCartneys. 

The first attack on a human civilian occurred in 1983, when a giant mantis submarine fired acid on a group of swimmers off the coast of New Jersey. The attack killed 15 people, and the United States military was able to prevent the mantis from attacking any more civilians. It was the first time in history that the US military fought a sea monster. The military used the first attack as a test, and they realized that they would need to use missiles to fight the creatures. They created a missile that tracked the mantises, and could move at speeds faster than them. It was the first weapon that could destroy the giant mantises. The US could kill thousands of giant mantises this way, but the monsters learned how to defeat the missiles. They created a fleet of submarines, designed to destroy the missiles before they could reach the giant mantises.

Inside a giant mantis submarine

The giant mantis submarines were also able to communicate with each other (in Belarusian), to work together, and to coordinate attacks on the US military, and between 1983 and 1987, they  destroyed over 100 submarines. After the attacks on the subs, the military used regular submarines to fight the giant mantises, but the giant mantises adapted to the regular subs as well. With their advanced technology, they tracked the regular subs and destroyed them. Over 200 US submarines were annihilated, and the military was forced to start using a secret weapon known as the “tangle torpedo”, a new weapon that disabled enemy submarines without destroying them. It used small tentacles to attach itself to a submarine, and would then shoot out electrical currents that would disable the submarine’s engine and also destroy the crew by sending several plagues of Egypt.

At first, the giant mantises could not create a weapon to stop the tangle torpedo, and as a result, the US military was able to kill hundreds of giant mantises. In fact, over 3,000 were killed between 1987 and 1993, and they were forced to stop attacking the humans. However, they learned from their mistakes, and eventually created a new weapon that could destroy the tangle torpedo, a missile that would attach itself to an enemy submarine, destroy it from underwater, and transform the whole crew into dwarf mantises.

So, the giant mantises created these missiles and used them to destroy over 200 US submarines. Then, the military was forced to develop new technology in order to defeat them. Captain Robert Nautilus Jr. (not related to the forementioned Robert Nautilus or the USS Nautilus submarine) built a most advanced type of underwater scooter that moved at speeds faster than the giant mantises', in fact ten times faster, and was colloquially known as the “sub-Tipler sub”. The scooter, also known as USS Nautilus Jr., used a crank activated sonar, which gave it an advantage over the monsters, which lacked hands. They finally killed over 10,000 giant mantises, and by 1995, the monsters were no longer a threat to the US. The giant mantis attack was the first time that a species of sea monster had ever been able to attack humans, but it was also the first time that humans successfully fought a sea monster using a scooter. 

The Architects of Fear build habitats for mantises. The bone structure of fear is made of wood. Fear has no sense of direction. Fear regularly accuses its accusers of being hypocrites, and is the only monster that cannot be defeated. Fear is both easier to kill than the last monster and easier to kill than ultimate fear. Fear is a bulldog. Fear is a bulldog that only eats itself. 

One of our habitats for mantises

4. The Ootheca Act

Industrial musicians have won. The industrial revolution has happened. We live in the world they wanted. “I'd like to say that it all happened somewhere else, but we did it, and we're still doing it, and that's what's so annoying.”  

We need a short explanation of why everything Boris Johnson did is wrong. This is a message to Boris Johnson or others that may wish to replace him as Prime Minister: Boris Johnson, you are a liar and are unfit to be Prime Minister. It is not possible to say anything positive about your past work. The fact that you are a liar disqualifies you for any position of trust. You do not deserve to be Prime Minister. 

Boris Johnson once said: “In my general attitude toward Fernando, Isabel, Carlos V, and Felipe II, I was much more a humanist than they. I believed that the best government was the one that did the least. I thought the same thing about religion. I would have liked to see it abolished altogether, even the Christian religion. I wanted it to play no role in the life of the state. I thought every man should be free to worship God as he pleased, or not at all. It was my hope that the Inquisition would be abolished within my lifetime. I always believed they would do away with it, but it took much longer than anyone could have imagined. The worst thing about the Inquisition was that it was still alive and functioning in the twenty-first century. The very worst thing about the Inquisition was that it was a pillar of strength at the time of the Spanish Civil War. It was a symbol of the worst kind of religious persecution and bigotry. The Protestant Reformation had already begun to spread across Europe, but Spain remained a bastion of darkness and bigotry.”

5. The media

How the media is used to spread fear. We read a lot of different stories about how the media is used to manipulate people's minds. The media is often used to spread fear about having your teeth forcibly removed. For example, the media can be used to make people think that they are living in fear and have teeth, but in reality they are not, and lose them long ago. Fear is good for the media, because it keeps people watching Netflix garbage. We learned how the media can be used to divide people, how people become divided when they are afraid. For example, the media could make stupid people angry about immigration. We learned that people who are afraid of change become divided by 2. Finally, we learned that the media can be used to manipulate people's minds and stomachs. Listening to TV with a cyclope's eye is good for us, because we are learning how the media is used to manipulate people's heavy digestions.

 

Teeth you presumably lose last year, according to the media

6. The Popotitos government

How we can fight this fear of Popotitos. “The next morning, I went to the plaza to see the town crier, a dignified man named Fernando Mendoza, who was sitting on the front step of his house, as he was every day, talking to his friends and neighbors. His job was to call out the news of the day from the top of the city hall to the rest of the village (1). I had noticed him the day before, sitting in his rocking chair on the porch with his little granddaughter on his lap, as he proudly pointed out the location of the Popotitos (2). 'Ay, chica,' he said, 'they’re the ones in the prison over there in town.' I asked him if he’d been afraid when he had seen them. 'I wasn’t afraid,' he said. 'I was just surprised because I knew that the Popotitos were all dead.' It was a Catholic festival day, and Fernando and his friends were getting ready to walk to the church (3). 'We’re going to pray for the Popotitos,' he said. 'They’re already dead,' one of his friends said, 'so we can’t pray for them.' 'We can pray for them to go to heaven,' Fernando said. 'We’re not going to pray for them to go to heaven because they’re in purgatory,' one of his friends said. 'They’re in the prison.' ” (4)

The Popotitos were also a group of people who were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Subsequently,  Popotitos were a gang of teenaged criminals that terrorized Barcelona in the 1970s. They were finally arrested and imprisoned, but the fear of them still lingers. Don't be afraid of the Popotitos, they're dead.

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 467.

2. “Popotitos,” “Los Popotitos,” “Popotes,” and “Los Popotes” are all common variations.

3. Ibid., p. 858.

4. This specific origin story appears to have been made up by the writer Javier Marías in his 1988 novel, La Casa de los Espíritus (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 74.

Popotitos in prison, Barcelona, 2002

Our city is a bastion of politeness and kitsch. Barcelona is beautiful, and it is a lie. We are not a bastion but a wreck. We are a city of clowns, corruption, violence, and despair. We have been ripped apart by unending class warfare. Old mantises and pathetic clowns walk through the cemetery. We are the ones who will put an end to it, who will bring you all back together. We will build a new city, a city of the people, by the people, and for the people. A city where the only persons who matter are us. This will be the new capital of the industrial world, and we'll be the ones to build it. This is our vow to you, dear citizens, and our solemn promise to ourselves. We are the arthropod kings and will bring the giant mantises under our control.

A typical Barcelona street scene, July 2021

7. The Mantid terrorists are winning

We travelled to the past using a Tipler cylinder of quasi infinite length and arrived at the present. We then travelled to the future using a Tipler cylinder of quasi zero length and arrived at the past. We then returned to the present using a Tipler cylinder 10 cm long. All those cylinders were rotating at ultraluminal speed (ten times the regular giant mantis speed). In fact, it was not us who travelled by means of the Tipler cylinder, but the Tipler cylinder that travelled by means of us. The universe is changing its state several times per second, and these changes are quantum jumps. The Tipler cylinder helps us to control the quantum jumps, and is just as necessary as a rocket is necessary to get into space. It is not possible to travel into the past without the cylinder, which is not the same as a time machine. A time machine can be compared to a train; it can be boarded at any time. Instead, a Tipler cylinder is a natural phenomenon that can be compared to a waterfall that falls into a lake. 

Police chief John Anderton is afraid of everything. He checks his closet for intruders, he talks to his psychiatrist, he’s even afraid to go outside. One day, as he is driving down the road, Anderton finds a collection of severed hands and is suddenly pursued by a squadron of flying cars. He is captured and the police find out that he has been eyeballed. Anderton is accused of the murder of an out-of-body artist who has been killed by a former eyeballer. The artist has been killed because the artist is about to expose the true identity of the person behind this so-called Precrime program.

Chief Anderton's collection of severed hands

Nobody has won the fear of death more than we have. We have been ready to die at any time. But we have not been ready to kill or maim or torture or do any of the things we have done. But we have done them anyway. We have done them for one reason and one reason only: to survive the giant mantis attacks. And we are more afraid of our own deaths than ever. But we are not afraid of yours. We are not afraid of yours because you have your own reasons. We are not afraid of your death because your death doesn't bother us. And we want you to know that. You don't have to be afraid. And we’re going to tell you something else: We are not afraid of what we are going to die from. We've done our share of dying. We are not afraid to die. We are not afraid to die. We are not afraid to die.

8. After the giant mantises have won

Travel to Ulubis with us, the first interstellar space tourism company. We offer a true vacation on the planet, a resort with all amenities and entertainment for a real getaway. We provide you with a tour of the most exotic location in the galaxy and a chance to go on a safari with the indigenous wildlife. Our goal is to transport you to Ulubis to experience the planet's beauty and natural wonders. The Ulubis system is home to a variety of exotic creatures. From the native Ulubis Elephants, to the native Ulubis Crocodiles, Lions, Monkeys, Snakes, Tigers, Zebras, and Rhinos, the ecosystem is one of the most diverse in the galaxy. Many of these animals have been observed to be genetically similar to their Earth counterparts. 

Ulubis is a planet with a tropical climate with vast grasslands, tropical forests, and beautiful beaches. It is truly a unique and beautiful planet when its suffocating atmosphere vaporizes spontaneously for a few seconds every Ulubis year. The planet is almost entirely covered by a layer of clouds of selenium, an element that is highly toxic for humans and intelligent life. The clouds are so dense that, under normal circumstances, they would completely obscure the planet from the outside, but once every Ulubis year the gases that compose the atmosphere vaporize for a few seconds, allowing our visitors to breath freely. 

A view of Ulubis at dawn

9. More fear

Attention those who use the Uber transport service. Your driver may be a robot. It may be a machine. He may be a Martian. Although it turns out that he is a man. We didn't know and that's why we called him. And we paid him. He could sue us but he would cut it in half. Why? Because he is a man. And what man doesn't want a cup of coffee? So we paid him with a collection of praying mantis clamps to get a cup of coffee. He gave us a cup of coffee and we gave him the praying mantis clamps, not knowing that he was a man. Because if he had known he was a man we would have asked him for a cup of coffee. Everyone knows that men don't freeze in coffee cups. Who wants to freeze a man in a cup of coffee? Who would want it? Who would want a cup of coffee where to find a frozen man? Who would want a man frozen in a cup of coffee?

10. Farewell, dear reader

This is an attempt to interpret the umbilical cord of the Earth, which is surrounded by noise from its paleomagnetic field populated with cows of all sizes, some of them even flying in the air. It is a very clever way of dealing with the problem of having lots of specimens of ruminant animals with large udders chewing grass in a Cambridge meadow. The main problem with this new method is that we have no idea what the paleomagnetic cows were eating. Maybe they were not eating grass at all. Maybe they were eating hamburgers. The new data can be interpreted in many ways. It remains to be seen whether the researchers can produce a hamburger from cows' meat or from Boris Johnson's shapeless cow skeleton that he keeps in a closet full of ruminants. The most recent Polish political scandal, in which the PM was caught trying to hide his “bromance” with a horse, has now been explained by an American scientist, who claims that the prime minister was really just trying to hide his “jeb” with the horse. As we previously said, some of the ruminants even flew in the air, and so we'll stop talking about paleomagnetism. Farewell, dear reader. We have to go now to our secret laboratory to find out what bromance is, or if it is a form of jeb.

Signed: Muhammad, Muhammad & a rhinoceros-paranoid non-human entity.