Quit your junk news

And get the real thing:
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

A couple hours after the show airs at 6:00 pm, mp3s of each of that night's segments are uploaded to the site. So you can pick and choose what you want to listen to. But for the most part, every bit is worth it.

Tonight they had an amazing piece about economic inequality in New Mexico. Fucking phenomenal reporting. Horrible shit. Preceding it was an interview with 2008 presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who many of us think of as a cocksucker, but damn he sounds good. Especially next to the disgusting policies we have been fed and will continue to eat.

Everyone says Hank Paulsen is a genius, but they say that about Hank Pym too. And I think they've both been acting skrully. I mean every week this guy's got a new plan to spend a ton of money to increase confidence. And if you've been watching closely over the past couple months, he keeps denying he'll need to go further. "Just this one last huge sum of money, please." Don't worry it won't seem so big compared to whatever he asks for next. I swear to god, it's like these guys want to destroy America. At least the Skrulls bring their own infrastructure to replace what they destroy and dismantle.

Hank's plan is nothing but trying to burn money as fast as humanly possible. The NewsHour keeps talking about what caused this mess, the economic policies and philosophies of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush. But we don't want to address the problems or create a better new system, just temporarily Socialize, and then return to the corporate heap. This has power grab written all over it. But it's what's happening. Despite having the greatest tool in the history of human communication, we have no idea what's going on. And when the dust settles we will all have boot marks on our asses.

So if Hank can spend a trillion dollars without a long term plan for success, I might as well give my plan. A trillion dollars, gosh... hard to even imagine how to spend all that. Okay, how about this, we buy a whole lot of really good acid. We dose the entire nation, except for the few who will be preaching love and inner strength and those who will distribute food, laptops, and medical aid after the nation's heroic death and rebirth. So after our Apocalypse we'll take a few weeks off to lay in the grass and talk to each other on the Internet, and figure out what we want to do next.

Okay, so maybe it's just ripping off an Alan Moore Apocalypse. Maybe all the comic books and 80s Dylan has rotted my mind, to the point where I am completely divested from our current way of living. Listen to the NewsHour report on Los Alamos, and ask yourself what should be done with the richest community in America. With blood on their hands, and empty bellies at their feet, these people need to have their minds cracked open. Showing them what they've done will be punishment enough.

last Tuesday, September 23, 2008

More Disaster

Spring's in the air, and I'm hot for melting icebergs. Here's where to get the Google Earth File, so you can actually understand what 7 times bigger than Manhattan looks like from space. And if you want real time disaster updates from around the world you absolutely need this plug-in. It's where I found out about this latest apocalyptic extinction wave:

Bats are dying off by the thousands as they hibernate in caves and mines around New York and Vermont, sending researchers scrambling to find the cause of mysterious condition dubbed "white nose syndrome." The ailment - named for the white circle of fungus found around the noses of affected bats - was first noticed last January in four caves west of Albany. It has now spread to eight hibernation sites in the state and another in Vermont. Alan Hicks, a bat specialist with New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, called the quick-spreading disorder the "gravest threat" to bats he had ever seen. Up to 11,000 bats were found dead last winter and many more are showing signs illness this winter. One hard-hit cave went from more than 15,000 bats two years ago to 1,500 now, he said. "We do not know what the cause is and we do not know how it was spread, either from cave to cave, or bat to bat," said Hicks. "You have this potential for this huge spread." The white fungus ring around bats' noses is a symptom, but not necessarily the cause. For some unknown reason, the bats deplete their fat reserves and die months before they would normally emerge from hibernation.

New York and Vermont environmental officials are asking people not to enter caves or mines with bats until researchers figure out how the infection is spread. There is no evidence it is a threat to humans, but officials want to take every precaution to avoid it spreading from cave to cave. Bats are considered particularly vulnerable when they hibernate, a time when they can hang together tightly by the thousands. Indiana bats, a federally endangered species, are considered particularly vulnerable, though the highest death count has been among little brown bats. Researchers with Cornell University and the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, are among those helping state environmental officials. The bat die-off has some eerie similarities with "colony collapse disorder," the baffling affliction that began decimating honeybee colonies years ago. Scientists last fall said they suspected a virus previously unknown in the United States. "I'm very concerned," Hicks said. "I can only hope that what we're seeing today will dissipate in the future." )
[Link]

Good News Everyone!

Young actor's murderer still on the loose - could this be the beginning of a spree?

I have recently received insider information from an actor working in New York, that Heath Ledger was killed by the Joker. Ledger was recently quoted as saying that playing the part of the psychotic Joker in the upcoming film, The Dark Knight, put such a strain on the actor that he could not sleep at night.

Ledger told The New York Times last year that Heath Ledger stressed a little too much over the role.
The interview was done in London during the filming of Batman.
'It is a physically and mentally draining role (his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully ) and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much," Heath Ledger told The Times.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”
[Link]

So there you have it. Now the Joker's started killing people out here in the real world. Well, kind of the real world. New York City anyway, not LA, or Tokyo or one of those DC cities. A proper Marvel city. I'm starting to see it more and more. Life drifting into the broad strokes of a comic book: pencils by Jack Kirby, inks by Chick Stone, and fuck sake let's say it, script by Stan Lee.
And that might be putting too precise a point on it. The inks aren't always by Chic Stone, and sometimes the pencils are by Steve Ditko. But regardless, like in the Mighty Marvel Age of the 1960s what we're seeing around us is a world shaped by the artists. A world that is running a few steps faster, and a fews steps deeper than what the writers are picking up or getting down.

Things are starting to happen which lead me to think that the dread iron system, whose shadow we have been cowering under since the birth of our New American Century, when on September the Eleventh the assault on the hearts, minds, and rights Americans began, but what I'm trying to say, is maybe that's ending now.

Yeah, so this is the thing. I might be fooling myself, and even if I am, its okay I need the break from the bleak. But I really am starting to think that maybe things are getting better. I really don't want to jinx it, but maybe the brutal and much loathed system, will just break. Fall apart like a poorly thought out Rube Goldberg machine. Not so bad. Weeds are springing up through the cement. Tree roots cracked it but the dandelions have the flowers now.

But it seems this is a transition period; reality is becoming less fixed, and change starts to happen faster and faster. New technologies are rippling into ever facet of life and every field of thought. And so the world starts to look more like a comic book. But I've said that already, so let's go to some examples:

Okay Tom Cruise is a lot of my evidence. I don't know when you first realized that he's a super hero, but for me it was a picture I saw on some tabloid last May that looked something like this,
I believe here he's pictured riding towards Avengers Mansion shortly before his falling out with Hollywood types he once considered nearly family. So far Tom Cruise seems a lot cooler than Tony Stark, who he was originally on the team to replace. Perhaps since Tom Cruise thinks he can move things with his mind, and did overcome his dyslexia through hard work, his mental powers make him more appealing than a gadget hero like Stark's Iron Man.
[Tom Cruise taking ‘Mission’ to Tribeca]

Also if you watched the latest Tom Cruise bit to hit the web, (but not the news, copyright is still ironclad for them) you may have gotten the impression that Tom Cruise's legacy will overshadow that of Scientology. I think he is using his mental powers and personal energy to summon forth something. And his image is starting to represent that something more than the dying cult he is presently apart of.
[Watch the Secret Scientology Tom Cruise Video]


And if Tom Cruise is our superhero, we know we're in the Marvel Universe since his arch villains are a shadow band of hackers known as Anonymous who have vowed to destroy Scientology. Sometimes, over the top is exactly the spot you need to hit. Seems like this could actually start some commotion.
[Message to Scientology]

I'll try to start posting more comic art and more evidences of this most enjoyable turn of events. And hopefully as my world outlook has been brightened, the stories I find and share will be a bit more upbeat from now on. But no promises.

Virginia Tech Massacre

Virginia Tech and my school, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, could be cousins. According to wikipedia they were founded around the same time from public land grants, and now have about the same number of student's and faculty. I've never seen a bloody stage that looked so similar to my home.
The post Columbine fear that swept through the nation and ever school, never reached me. The experts on TV and in the schools told us we should look for the symptoms of the school shooting disease. Prevention would come through kindness and ratting out the ostracized.
The experts on TV said we'd need metal detectors in schools, but that never happened in my schools. An armed police officer became a fixture of the school. His job was to someday shoot one of us.

Everyone worked very hard to convince themselves that the rashes of violence that spread across the country were not symptoms of something larger. That the Dark was not rising. But it was on the mind of the children, the parents, and everyone who was being born again, ready to vote in the next millennium.


On gun control at Virginia Tech, [via BoingBoing]
An interesting blog post, complaining that if a year earlier Virginia Tech hadn't removed all guns from students at school, then some students could have protected themselves in someway against the shooter. I'm sure my school feels vindicated for covering the campus in surveillance cameras. The psychological violence of metal detectors, constant surveillance, and increased police presence, is far less damaging then the physical violence we still can't prevent. Why must safety be so violent?

On the shooting and Ismail Ax, [BoingBoing]
List of School massacres, [wikipedia]

Shiny Futurism

The Future on TV:

2057: Hyperspace author and string field theory co-founder, Michio Kaku hosts this 3 part Discovery Channel documentary, with complimentary website

End Day: Five different 'when not if' scenarios presented by the BBC

Five Ways to Save the World: BBC's law of fives, says this show should be good, even though I haven't watched it yet. I guess End Day needed a flip side.

$150 a Hive

Honeybees are going missing. Starts funny, ends sad.

Colbert's Bears and Balls On Bees
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on Bees [mp3]

Wikipedia on Bees
Colony Collapse Disorder (or CCD) is the name of the phenomenon that describes the massive die-off affecting an entire beehive or bee colony.
~
Theories include environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, mites, pesticides, disease, or genetically modified (GM) crops.
~
Honey bees are not native to the Americas, therefore their necessity as pollinators in the US is limited to strictly agricultural uses. They are responsible for pollination of approximately one third of the United States' crop species, including such species as: almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, and strawberries; many but not all of these plants can be (and often are) pollinated by other insects, including other kinds of bees, in the U.S., but typically not on a commercial scale.

Futurist Digest Weekly

I've more I want to highlight from that Bruce Sterling speech, because it has a lot of startling ideas. But I've been coming in to a lot of really great speeches lately. So I think I'll just sort of index them here.

What if the Singularity Doesn't Happen? [mp3]
Vernor Vinge @ the Long Now Foundation
February 15, 2007

[Slides] [Summary & Discussion]

In one scenario, Vinge breaks failure of a tech-rapture down in software/hardware terms. Software never advances to the level to deal with all our information. Software fails catastrophically and deters economic incentive for advancement. Etc. Vinge says that if we can make it through this century than we can be fairly certain we'll reach the Singularity.


Storytelling & Spore
Will Wright @ SXSW
March 2007
[via Wonderland]

The Spore stuff I'm somewhat skeptical of after listening to Will Wright's Long Now speech he gave with Brian Eno.
[mp3] [Summary & Discussion]
Though Wright has lots of interesting things to say about generative systems in both speeches. I think that Spore will not quite be the realization of the dream that many (he) may be claiming. It will still be trapped in the mundanity of Sim City and the Sims.

The Wonderful Power of Storytelling[txt]
Bruce Sterling @ the Computer Game Developers Conference, San Jose CA
March 1991

A few more snippets from Sterling's speech, because it covered so much ground, and being 16 years old, it now has covered even more.

Something of the sort may come from virtual reality. I rather imagine something like an LSD backlash occuring there; something along the lines of: "Hey we have something here that can really seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, Mr Developer, I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and Software Administration don't really approve of that." That could happen. I think there are some visionary computer police around who are seriously interested in that prospect, they see it as a very promising growing market for law enforcement, it's kind of their version of a golden vaporware.

I now want to talk some about the differences between your art and my art. My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren't in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It's a terrible kind of curse really.
~

In the art of book-writing the classics are still living competition, they tend to elevate the entire art-form by their persistent presence.
~
I'm into technical people who attack pop culture. I'm into techies gone dingo, techies gone rogue -- not street punks picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within their reach -- but disciplined people, intelligent people, people with some technical skills and some rational thought, who can break out of the arid prison that this society sets for its engineers. People who are, and I quote, "dismayed by nearly every aspect of the world situation and aware on some nightmare level that the solutions to our problems will not come from the breed of dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians."

That last bit, reminded me of something Vinge said in his speech, about a world where the masses were better educated then the elites; here the government would have to provide true freedom, or a closer imitation of it than has ever been seen, to satisfy this new class. (olpc users unite!) And finally, Cory Doctrow makes some interesting points in his non-speech article, You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen.

The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.
~
The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.

Say Goodbye to Your Right to Assemble

THE MARTIAN HEAT RAY HAS COME TO EARTH, AND SOON IT WILL BE GOING TO IRAQ

The U.S. Military has certified the Active Denial System for use in Iraq. ADS is a microwave based ray gun to be attached to a hummer for use in crowd control.

According to Wired Magazine, December 02006, Say Hello to the Goodbye Weapon:

The beam produces what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect," or "prompt and highly motivated escape behavior." In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military's claims.

We can also say goodbye to public speech as we know it. Today's military uses the weapons of tomorrow's police force. Make no bones about it, this technology will be used against Americans on American soil within 10 years. The tear gas of WWI was eventually turned on American citizens by their own government. This will be no different. Except with this technology a government can suppress public dissent almost entirely. Imagine what the protests of the 1960s would have looked like if Richard Nixon's government had this technology.

Eventually, the heat rays will trickle down into the untrained hands of your local police. In June 2006, after the Supreme Court decided to allow no-knock searches, John Tierney wrote an editorial for the New York Times on the 'SWAT Syndrome,' the militarization of small town police forces through over armament.

Of all the excuses for weakening the Fourth Amendment, the weirdest was the one offered by Justice Antonin Scalia last week in a Michigan drug case.

He wrote the majority opinion allowing police officers to use evidence found in a home even if they entered without following the venerable rule to knock first and announce themselves. To reassure traditionalists, Scalia declared that unreasonable searches are less of a problem today because of ''the increasing professionalism of police forces.''

Well, it's true that when police show up at your home in the middle of the night, they're better armed and trained than ever. They now routinely arrive with assault rifles, flash grenades and battering rams.

So if your definition of a professional is a soldier in a war zone, then Scalia is right. The number of paramilitary raids has soared in the past two decades as cities, suburbs and small towns have rushed to suit up SWAT teams.

Eventually small cities and towns will want their very own death rays, and Raytheon is always ready to lend a helping hand. They have developed their own smaller, commercial version called The Silent Guardian.

More from the Wired article on the Active Denial System:

Eye damage is identified as the biggest concern, but the military claims this has been thoroughly studied. Lab testing found subjects reflexively blink or turn away within a quarter of a second of exposure, long before the sensitive cornea can be damaged. Tests on monkeys showed that corneal damage heals within 24 hours, the reports claim.

The beam penetrates clothing, but not stone or metal. Blocking it is harder than you might think. Wearing a tinfoil shirt is not enough -- you would have to be wrapped like a turkey to be completely protected. The experimenters found that even a small exposed area was enough to produce the Goodbye effect, so any gaps would negate protection. Holding up a sheet of metal won't work either, unless it covers your whole body and you can keep the tips of your fingers out of sight.

Wet clothing might sound like a good defense, but tests showed that contact with damp cloth actually intensified the effects of the beam.

System 1, the operational prototype, is mounted on a Hummer and produces a beam with a 2-meter diameter. Effective range is at least 500 meters, which is further than rubber bullets, tear gas or water cannons. The ammunition supply is effectively unlimited.