"Is This A Game, Is It Real?"

A video game reality crossed over into this realm for a bunch of kids queuing in London to buy GTA IV :

The launch of the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto IV video game descended into real-life horror when a man was stabbed repeatedly in a queue of fans waiting to buy it.

Shoppers thought they were witnessing a promotional stunt for the launch when the blood-soaked victim staggered among them.

They realised the attack was genuine only when police arrived.

Malcolm Critchell, queueing with his nephew Jordan, said: "The victim was covered from shoulder to belly in blood. Everyone thought it was a show to promote the game."

Another queuer, Marcus Henderson, 24, said: "It was a scene straight from the game itself. In Grand Theft Auto, when you attack someone but don't finish them off they'll come and get you. We thought it was a stunt put on by the makers of the game."

The reality in the video game became the standard against which these kids were assessing the violence they were actually witnessing, and they did what you can do in the game when you see someone else being attacked. Intervene, or stand back and watch. Or run them both over with a car. They stood back and watched, comparing a real world stabbing to a fake one, and believing the reality wasn't real. Reality didn't look real enough.

They Won't Stop The War, But We Won't Stop The War Either

The US Democratic Party has released a new 'attack ad' on Republican presidential candidate John McCain over the War On Iraq.



The Republicans almost unamiously voted to approve the War On Iraq, and so did the majority of Democrats. They can complain all they want about how Republicans and NeoCons won't end this appalling war and bring the troops home, but every time President Bush asks for another hundred billion to continue the war, the Democrats give him what he wants.

The War On Iraq continues because most Republican and Democrat senators refuse to end it by cutting off the funding.

Half-trillion dollar defence budgets mean that almost every state of the US gets its cut of the 'War On Terror' action, and senators from both sides don't want to see their constituents losing defence and war-related jobs and income by voting to turn off the torrents of money.

The American people, in the majority, don't want the War On Iraq to continue, but the majority of Democrats and Republicans do.

So it goes on.

Democracy in action.

UPDATE : Some more information on why so many senators have done so little to end the Iraq War :

151 Democrat & Republican Senators Profit From Investing In The War They Will Not End

Canadians Nervous About US Launching Water Wars


The United States and Canada are two of the many countries that may come into conflict over scarcity of fresh water supplies in the coming decade :

Parched U.S. states could start "water wars" in the years ahead and fight for access to Great Lakes resources as they become more desperate to meet growing needs...

Water issues that are currently emerging will develop into bitter conflicts in the not too distant future when those dry states become increasingly desperate, said Milton Clark, a senior health and science adviser for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"We will, in fact, get into major water wars," Clark said. "You will see water wars coming in every way, shape or form. In the U.S., there are some leading politicians who have said the Great Lakes do, in fact, belong (to everyone) and all water should be nationalized -- and this certainly is a concern."

World Energy Supplies Can't Keep Up With Growth, Progress

Oil Corporations Now Control Less Than 10% Of World Reserves Of Oil, Gas

The New York Times reports on a coming energy crunch that has the potential to change Western societies in ways that Osama Bin Laden can only dream about :

Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency...

To meet world demand, oil producers will have to find and pump some 11 billion extra barrels of oil. Stunning. And those greatly needed extra 11 billion barrels of oil will only quench part of the thirst of a projected overall increase in energy demand of some 65% in the next twenty years.

....petroleum, the dominant fuel of the 20th century, will remain the top energy source. It accounts for more than a third of the world’s total energy needs, ahead of coal and natural gas. Refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel fuel, oil has no viable substitute as a transportation fuel, and that is not likely to change much in the next 30 years.

The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from.

Running out of oil, fuel too expensive for minimum pay commuters and regular electricity blackouts may sound like good news to Al Gore (carbon emissions will have no choice but to fall), but regular, devastating 'energy wars', as countries try to snap up remaining resources, may give us more to worry about than the possible effects of global warming.

Some oil industry executives are already panicking about a looming oil crisis "if the world (does not) deal with runaway demand and strained supplies" :

...the world’s oil supplies are already stretched.

The North Sea and Alaska are slowly running out of oil and producers there are struggling to keep production from falling. Russia’s phenomenal oil surge is coming to an end...Nigeria is battling a violent militancy. Mexico...has been stuck in a crippling political debate over keeping out foreign investors while witnessing a dramatic drop in production that some analysts say may be irreversible.

The 13 members of the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) account for three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves. But for various reasons, most of those countries are making it harder, if not impossible, for foreign oil companies to invest within their borders. With energy prices rising, OPEC producers are seeing record revenues, which have reduced the incentive to dip into their supplies by boosting production.

At the same time, major oil companies like Exxon Mobil, BP and Chevron are finding it harder to compete worldwide, as national oil companies erode their once-dominant positions. Fourteen of the world’s Top 20 oil companies are state-owned giants, like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Gazprom. That leaves Western oil companies in control of less than 10 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves.

Apparently, in just 100 years, we've burned up about a trillion barrels of oil. There may be another 1.2 trillion barrels of drill-and-pump oil reserves to be recovered, according to BP. But one trillion barrels of those reserves will have been consumed by 2038.

Some analysts believe another trillion barrels are waiting to be tapped on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and in countries that now, or may soon, restrict access to global oil corporations.

....the growth in oil consumption almost certainly will need to slow in coming years. But it seems unlikely that developing nations will cut their consumption first. China, India and the Middle East are in the midst of exceptional economic booms and need cheap energy, which is largely subsidized by their governments, to keep growing and modernizing.

Oil now accounts for just 19 percent of China’s energy needs. But China’s oil demand is expected to more than double by 2030 to over 16 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, as more people rise from poverty, move out of villages and buy more cars.

Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba :

“The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.”

I think we're well on the way to finding out how dire the situation is. Speculators are pushing oil to $120 a barrel, and we may see it hit $200 within a few years, and China, the United States and Russia are privately and publicly clashing over European energy pipeline routes, control of international shipping lanes, the right to exploit untapped oil reserves in the Arctic and Africa, the rise of Iran and the carving up of Iraq.

"Let's Kill The Guy Who's Trying To Protect Us"

Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai tells American and British troops to stop arresting Taliban, and he rips NATO for civilian casualties :

The stinging attack, made in an interview with the New York Times published yesterday, is the latest in a series of rows between Western governments with troops in Afghanistan and the elected leader of the country.

Karzai said he wanted American forces to stop arresting suspected Taliban members and their supporters, saying that fear of arrest and their past mistreatment were discouraging them from coming forward to lay down their arms.

Karzai also attacked the number of civilian deaths inflicted by the coalition. Up to 9,000 civilians have died since 2001.

'I want an end to civilian casualties,' the Afghan president said...

Within a few days of giving that interview, Karzai is attacked. By the Taliban :

Afghan President Hamid Karzai escaped unhurt after an assassination attempt by Taliban fighters with guns and rockets during an official celebration in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday.

What's wrong with this story?

Billary knows she can't lose. Or at the very least, Obama will never, never win.

CNN Promotes Community Food Gardens

It's getting ugly out there. There are very real and very shocking shortages of rice and wheat, soy and barley, and cold-blooded Wall Street speculators who have moved from oil to food will ensure that the age of cheap food, for hundreds of millions in the West at least, is over, forever. When the price of rice rises 40% in a year, it means a few more dollars at the supermarket for us. For more one billion people who are primarily sustained, kept alive, by rice, the one meal of the day for the family has almost doubled in price. The poor can easily now become the starving, in the West as well as the East.

This video from CNN is positive and useful, in its promotion of a return to filling gardens and plots of land with food, focusing on a small village community in England drawn closer together by the formation of a food grower's co-op. CNN doesn't mention the fact that should the day come that delivery trucks stop servicing such a small village, or vegetable, milk and egg prices become outrageous and absurd, the people there will have enough food to feed themselves. That should have been a key focus of the story of course, now a Starve To Profit market becomes exploitable strategy for unregulated, deadly cynical speculators.

Just how terrified your government leaders are about the possibility of widespread food shortages, or basic food prices rising beyond the reach of more than 30-40% of the population, will become clear in the next few months. Maybe we'll see government sponsored ads telling us to plant food in the backyard or on the balcony, and local government programs to pay for the setting up of more food co-ops. When those houses in the neighbourhood that will never sell get bulldozed, even tree-fee suburban communities get some room to start growing their own food.

Anything's better than fighting for food parcels in the carpark of the local 7-11.

Marketing With Iconic 9/11 Imagery



It's an impressive movie poster, and hauntingly familiar.



Too Soon?

How To Build A City


All images are screen grabs of background detail from GTAIV.

Aaron Garbut helped build a city, a big city, in three years. It's filled with people, shops, cars, buses, crime, tragedy, death and violence. It would take you hours to walk all the way around it. Days and weeks to go down every street and look in every window, check out every alleyway, climb every staircase.

You could take a bus in this city, if you wanted to. But why would you want to, when you can take any car you think will be fun to drive, and smash, and jump, and somasualt, and flip through explosions. You like a car, you just open the door, drag out the driver, get in and drive away. Fast. As fast as you want. If you don't like the look of someone you can pull over and kill them. Then kill the paramedics who come to clean up your carnage. Or you can walk, take your time, enjoy the atmosphere, stroll through the busy and quiet neighbourhoods.

The city is Liberty City.



In the next few days, millions of people across the planet will the streets of that city and start exploring. Tens of millions more will follow within a few months.

Aaron Garbut is art director for Rockstar, the makers of Grand Theft Auto IV. Garbutt explains what it's like to build, and more importantly, to detail a city as big, as dense, and as alive as Liberty City :

"We have a broad cross-section of backgrounds on the art team, architects among them. But every artist has a great eye for both detail and the bigger picture. The same artists model the buildings, lay out the city and place the props. Everyone on the team has dedicated a large part of their lives over the past three years to create as detailed a city as possible, and every one of them has taken a great deal of pride in making their own part of the game as unique, crafted and beautiful as they could.

"...we flew the entire team out to spend some time in New York at the start of the project...,we take the research very seriously and I think we all have numerous stories of the weird or scary things that we end up seeing and experiencing or the bizarre places we end up.

"We took around a quarter of a million photos and a silly amount of video footage. We spent another year or so working up the city based on this research then about a year or so ago we flew a smaller group across for more research. We also had a full time research team based in New York to handle our numerous little requests for particular details – anything from ethnic breakdowns of particular areas to photos of certain interior types or videos of traffic patterns.

"I have 20 DVDs of traffic flows at random junctions at various times of the day sitting on my desk here as an example, and a few hours of footage of a night in a Russian supper club. They also sent across various reports, census data, even information on drainage, sewage, electrical and other infrastructure.

I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It's too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It's emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making.

"We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You'll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you'll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area.

There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands...

I love the cohesiveness of the entire experience. It feels to me like a real place. The "living, breathing city" phrase gets bandied about a lot, but I think this feels more vibrant and alive than anything I've experienced in a game.

When you have that feeling, and you are standing on top of a skyscraper with the world sprawled out beneath you and you know you can climb down and visit every inch that you can see and that it will all feel as vibrant, varied and detailed as the area you are in, I think that's pretty special.

Read The Full Interview Here

Hollywood is cringing at the expected loss of tens of millions of dollars at cinemas all over the United States, plus Europe, China, Japan, Australia, Canada, and everywhere bought and bootlegged games keep youth away from cinemas, thanks to the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

The game is expected to do such extraordinary business ($200 million in sales in three or four days?) that major movie release dates are now being quietly re-scheduled so as not to clash with the release of other big game titles this year, and every year from now on. Hollywood film and TV audiences have been shearing away to video games for years now, and it's starting to impact on the film industry. Most who pushed away their remotes and picked up a control pad will never go back to watching TV and hitting cinemas like they once did.

This weekend, next weekend, millions of people who would normally be buying a few tickets to the cinema will be, instead, in Liberty City, where you don't even have to pay for fuel, let alone wallet-emptying popcorn and drinks.

Hollywood doesn't just lose those millions of suddenly non-cinema going people for one weekend. Millions will get lost in Liberty City, that city in another reality, for three or four or more weekends.

And there will be others who will dedicate months to exploring every inch, driving every car, walking every street, jumping every truck, firing every weapon, completing every mission.

"We haven't seen you for two months Doug, where the hell have you been?"

"I've been in Liberty City. On business. I like it there. You can do anything you want, and you never have to die."

Australian Capital Swamped By Sea Of Communist China Flags

Chinese Government Officials Helped Co-Ordinate Massive Pro-China Demonstration In Australia



The Chinese government, through its Australian embassy, has been accused of helping to organise and co-ordinate a show of Chinese nationalism in Canberra during the Olympic torch relay yesterday.

Australian Capital Territory chief minister Jon Stanhope said that Chinese officials helped pay for more than 10,000 Chinese students to be bussed from Sydney and Melbourne to the nation's capital, and supplied with huge Communist China flags and other bunting.

Chinese students, and intelligence agents, some clearly co-ordinating events through mobile phones and walkie-talkies, surrounded pro-Tibet supporters, hitting them with flag poles, screaming "One China" and hurling racist abuse.

Local families who turned out to watch the Olympic torch relay through the streets of Canberra were also caught up in the melee, as dozens of Chinese students swarmed through the crowd looking for pro-Tibet supporters.

Police had to pull pro-Tibet supporters, many weeping and clearly intimidated, out of throngs of visibly angry and abusive Chinese students, who used the long flag poles to hold pro-democracy supporters in place so others could shout abuse and threats into their faces.

Australia just got a full frontal lesson in how to suppress freedom of speech by the masters.

Go Here For The Full Story

Wall Street Warns Americans To Begin Stockpiling Food

Going Hungry : 'Food Speculators' Make Sure Age Of Cheap Food Is Gone Forever

By Darryl Mason

The New York Times recently told its more wealthy readers to consider buying a rural cottage, or even log cabin, to ride out the water and food riots that militarised police forces are preparing and training for, and now Wall Street recommends its readers to begin stockpiling rice and cereals, not only to fend off hunger but as an investment opportunity :

Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs."

The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

You can't easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it's the rosy memory of a bygone age.

The readers of the Wall Street Journal now know it's time to get busy stockpiling. For good reasons. Shortages of rice and other essentials are now being reported in American cities :

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon : Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."

"There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don't realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short," Mr.Rawles , a former Army intelligence officer, said. "Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out."

An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice..."I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption," he wrote.

The presidential Bush family's favourite newspaper, the Washington Times, notes the rapidly growing chaos and panic in American food industries, and the demented greed of Wall Street :

Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas.

Community Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)....regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries.

Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.

While farmers here and abroad generally are benefiting from the high prices, even they have been burned by a tidal wave of investors and speculators pouring into the futures markets for corn, wheat, rice and other commodities and who are driving up prices in a way that makes it difficult for farmers to run their businesses.

U.S. wheat stocks are at the lowest levels in 60 years because worldwide consumption of wheat has exceeded production in six of the past eight years, said U.S. Agriculture Department chief economist GeraldBange . Adding to tight supplies was the back-to-back failure of two years of wheat crops caused by drought in Australia, a major wheat exporter, he said.

In addition, the diversion of one-third of the U.S. corn crop into making ethanol for vehicles has increased prices for corn and other staples such as soybeans and cotton as more acreage is set aside for ethanol production.

The upswing in prices has been exaggerated by the massive influx of investors and speculators seeking to profit from rising prices for corn, wheat, oil, gold and other commodities. Big Wall Street firms and hedge funds have taken huge positions in futures markets that once were dominated by relatively small operators such as farmers and grain-elevator owners.

Oil speculation helped drive the price of a barrel beyond $100, and now 'food speculators' are going to do the same for the food you need to buy to feed your family. And the government doesn't want to stop it happening.

Maybe they're hoping Monsanto with save the day, and bellies, of Americans with GM crops, but the 'miracle' of GM crops is turning out to be little more than clever marketing. Monsanto now admits their genetically modified crops do not actually produce higher yields of rice and grains. More food from less acreage is something they aspire to achieve, not something they can actually do yet.

Food prices will stay high simply because oil prices will never drop below $100 again. It will only ever increase, drop back a few dollars, then increase again. We're already being softened up by oil cartels and governments to expect $200 a barrel prices within the next few years.

When oil hits $150 a barrel, trucking and freight companies will start projecting big losses, and will reconsider whether it pays to service longer, less profitable routes to smaller urban population pockets. The sort of places that need nearly everything trucked in, but produce little to truck back out again. When the delivery trucks slow, or cease altogether, most supermarkets will be emptied of food within a few days.

Soaring food prices, and food shortages, are impacting across the world.

In Japan, people are trying to cope with the savage shock of shortages of staple foods, stunning rises in the price of rice and emptying supermarket shelves :

"I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn't believe it.."

Japan's acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the global agricultural commodities crisis.

A sharp increase in the cost of imported cattle feed and a decline in milk imports, both of which are typically provided in large part by Australia, have prevented dairy farmers from keeping pace with demand.

While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

The wealthy can only afford to buy the food that the poor cannot while that food is still available. When supplies run out, they too must either go without, grow their own or pay absurd prices for what was, only last year, so cheap.

How bad could global food shortages ultimately get? The lives of many hundreds of millions who have never known hunger before are threatened.

Will we be reduced to the pitiful state of Haitians, who have been driven by food shortages and extreme hunger to start eating the earth beneath their feet?

...the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar...

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

The age of cheap and plentiful food, at least from supermarkets, is clearly over.

All governments need to encourage backyard, and balcony, food gardens. Houses that will never sell and are decaying can be bulldozed to make way for community farms. There are at least two or three dozen villages in England returning to thispre-20th century method of feeding the people and bringing the community together.

For city dwellers, however, even those with balcony gardens crowded with carrots, tomatoes, herbs, salad greens and citrus trees, the food staples like milk, cooking oil, butter and wheat, however, will continue to grow only more expensive.

The psychological impact for most Americans of seeing food riots in their towns and cities will be immense, and destructive.


Around The World, Food Rioting Increases As Rice, Grain, Cooking Oil, Flour Supplies Dry Up

Shortages Rise, Prices Surge, The Era Of Cheap Food For West Is Over

December 2007 : The Big Hungry - Why Global Food Shortages Will Be Emptying Supermarket Shelves Near You Soon

Survivalism Goes Mainstream As American Wealthy And Middle Class Told To Consider Urban Retreats To Escape Food Riots In Cities

Al Qaeda Now Stealing Material From Satirical News Site

By Darryl Mason

Are we seriously supposed to take this "An Al Qaeda spokesman said today" stuff as anything other than war propaganda? And often times, clearly absurd and unsophisticated propaganda at that.

Back in early April, I ran this hilarious video from The Onion, where a very annoyed Al Qaeda spokesman claims conspiracy theories about 9/11 are "ridiculous" because :

"How would you like it if you spent two months in a mountain cave, sleeping on rocks, planning something really special, only to have someone take the credit away from you..."


9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

Now, in the supposedly real world of the 'War On Terror', a spokesman for whatever is passing as Al Qaeda claims 9/11 conspiracy theories are ridiculous because they take credit away from Al Qaeda for the attacks :

Osama bin Laden's chief deputy on Tuesday denied a theory that Israel carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and blamed Iran and Shiite Hezbollah for spreading the idea to discredit the Sunni al-Qaida's strike against the U.S.

The comments in a recording posted on an Islamic Web site reflected the increasing criticism by al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri against Iran. Al-Zawahri has accused Iran in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

"The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.

"Iran's aim here is also clear — to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban.

You don't see that last bolded fact mentioned very often in the mainstream media.

One more quick point from the above Associated Press story, though it hardly seems worth mentioning :

"The authenticity of the two-hour audio recording could not be independently confirmed."

Hell, who cares if it's real or not? The Associated Press sure doesn't. Somebody said it's Al Qaeda? Great, let's go with it. It sure sounds like something the New Nazis would say, or should say.


ED Day : Dead Sydney - Millions Die, But 300 Survive The Horrific Bird Flu Pandemic In Sydney - Read The Novel Here, Free Now

Go Here For The Latest Stories From Your New Reality


So just to recap : We're supposed to now believe that the CIA-branded entity known as Al Qaeda is annoyed that Israel is being credited by conspiracy theorists for the horrors inflicted on infidels on 9/11. Al Qaeda doesn't think it gets enough credit for the attacks, and that annoys them. Al Qaeda also has a conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy theory. They blame Iran for helping to spread conspiracy theories that Bush, Cheney and Mossad were in cahoots on 9/11. Oh, and by the way, Iran helped the United States invade and occupy Iraq, so get a bit more bloody busy with your personal jihading and add Iran to your shitlist, okay?

Confused? Well, maybe that's the idea, from both sides (or is that all sides?) of the 'War On Terror'.

Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld did promise the 'WoT' would be fought with a heavy emphasis on propaganda, online, as well in the front lines. How much of what we see supposedly flowing from the Al Qaeda publicity bunker is information warfare? You don't need much footage to work with. Osama Bin Laden has already proven how effective and how far only a couple of hours of repeatedly recycled footage and audio speeches can go.

Paul Joseph Watson has some very interesting information on the American based IntelCenter, which supplies American and international media with a steady stream of Al Qaeda videos, audio tapes and translated speeches and statements.

If it wasn't for the endless publicity afforded Al Qaeda by Bush and Cheney, the coverage of almost every claimed Al Qaeda utterance by corporate media, and intense media wrangling by IntelCenter, you just might forget that your country is at war with whatever the hell Al Qaeda is.


Bush Becomes World's Most Prominent Al Qaeda 'Cheerleader'

Intelligence Agencies Know Al Qaeda Doesn't Exist'

The 'War On Terror' Is Over - Al Qaeda's Worldwide Leaders Number No More Than Two Dozen

'Blue Marble' image from NASA

Homeland Security : Fingerprints Are Not "Personal Data"

Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff no longer cares for the growing concerns Americans hold for their privacy, and the confidentiality of their personal, biometric data. Why would he? Chertoff believes that your is not your private property because "you leave it on glasses...all over the world":

QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private.

Which will surprise the Department of Homeland Security, which Chertoff runs :

In its definition of “personally identifiable information” — the information that triggers a Privacy Impact Assessment when used by government — the Department specifically lists: “biometric identifiers (e.g., fingerprints).”

Chertoff will ensure that fingerprints fall into the domain of government and corporate data-miners. Your DNA is next.

More On This Here

Footprints Of Guilt

So you've cut back on your flights, you've changed all your lightbulbs, you've taken to walking in the wind and the rain to the bus stop to get to work instead of driving, you've mandated that the family must endure a 'No Electricity' evening twice a week and so you are pretty well sure that you've successfully reduced your carbon footprint. Great. Well done.

But what about your Water Footprint?

Are you working hard enough to become Water-Neutral?

What do you mean you don't know what the fuck that is? Hang your head in shame, useless eater.

Oh yes, you thought they were done with you since you've reduced your carbon emissions, but you were wrong. They've only just begun :

The concept of water footprints – or "virtual water" – will tell consumers the amount of precious H2O that has been used in the manufacture of products they buy. As with carbon footprints, a "virtual water" figure will indicate the extent to which a particular product has cost the earth. And, as with carbon footprints, the message is clear: less is better.

An apple weighing 100g has a water footprint of 70 litres, while a 125ml cup of coffee has a water footprint twice that size, 140 litres. But the water used in producing wheat or meat is much greater. A single kilogram of barley has a water footprint of 1,300 litres, while the industrial production of a kilogram of beef amasses a water footprint of 15,500 litres.

Poultry, meanwhile, has a smaller water footprint than red meat: producing a kilogram of chicken meat leaves a comparably much smaller water footprint of 3,900 litres.

Though it covers more than two-thirds of the earth's surface, water has never been more precious. An influential UN report published in 2003 predicted severe water shortages would affect 4 billion people by 2050, adding that 40 per cent of the world's population did not have access to adequate sanitation facilities.

According to the stats in the story, a pint of beer has one-tenth the water footprint of milk and ranks far below a lot of other foods.

Harassing people to reduce their water footprint will only work with the right of marketing :

"Reduce Your Water Footprint, Live On Beer"

More Coal, Please...

It's incredible to think that the world's economic powerhouse functions so close to the edge of total disaster. If the coal ships stop entering China's ports, China shuts down in less than two weeks and soon after store shelves empty across the planet :

China only has enough coal for 12 days of consumption...

In the period since early March, coal reserves have slumped by 12 per cent to 46.7 million tonnes...

Demand for coal has risen rapidly since China experienced brown-outs early this decade, motivating a construction frenzy in the power industry, with large numbers of new coal-fired plants emerging across the country.

China counts on coal for about 70 per cent of its energy consumption...

Would China goes as far as the United States to more fully secure its future energy supplies?

The Books Scientists Theorise Will Change Your Life

Scientists are, like, fully heaps smart n' stuff, so they must know loads of totally brain good books to make us, um, smart like them.

So what do scientists recommend you read?

A few suggestions found in New Scientist magazine :

Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape

Lewis Carrol's Alice In Wonderland

Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy

Joseph Heller's Catch 22

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard

Read the full list of books here, and click through to find out why scientists chose the book titles they did. Fascinating stuff.

Terminator Goo

I'd thought I'd seen all the versions of James Cameron's Terminator 2, plus a few days worth of DVD extras, but I'd never come across this before, the original ending for T2 as planned by director Cameron.

The Titanic-heavy extra sweet syrup is ladled on thick :



Test audiences apparently hated this ending, and it's easy to see why. The ending of T2 as it stands now is one of the more simple and effective finales in cinema history. Rolling down a road at night, a simple VO of Sarah Connor talking about robots and empathy, the punching theme music. Fantastic.

But the original ending in the clip above is so gooey even Stephen Spielberg would have gagged. In the end, Sarah Connor isn't a battle-hardened young mother heading into an unknown future with her son, she's an old woman, nearing the end of her life, with the once future leader of the anti-robot revolution, John Connor, now grown into a man, with a child of his own, playing together in a park. Everyone's safe and happy.

But the use of Sarah Connor as an old woman sitting on a bench, whose narration has carried us through the two and a half hours of T2, makes you wonder about the plot's reality of killer robots being sent back from the future to assassinate future insurgency leaders.

What if, instead, Sarah Connor is really just some crazy old bird with a headful of dementia?

What if all that happened in T2, and Terminator 1, was the demented ravings of some aging single mother with an almost psychotic hatred of technology?

Now that would have been a surprise ending.

Dah dah dah dah, dah....

Acclaimed British writer Martin Amis shows why reading and believing too much of NeoCon absurdist Mark Steyn can be bad for your career :

"There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation, further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

"You've got to be able to talk about race... The hair-trigger sensitisation of this question is not rational, not healthy, not anything. It's a fetish. You know, he [Steyn] quotes Muslims as saying Europe will be an Islamic continent."

"(Mark Steyn's) thesis is that when you allow women to choose [through contraception and abortion], you will face demographic disaster, because they won't choose to have the necessary amount of children. The reason that America is the only First World country with a non-declining birth rate is because of all those things we hate about it, you know – [it's] patriarchal, church-going. I'm going to take this up because I think it's such an enormous question – has feminism cost us Europe?"

Claim : Washington DC Will Be Nuked Within 20 Years



These people seem so sure of a casualty-heavy tragedy that they have no possible way of legitimately claiming will become a flesh-roasting inevitability.

But when you're pitching your case for why your city should get a few hundred million more in Department of Homeland Security funding, you've got to ramp up the disaster potential to Bruckhiemer-ish cinematic levels :

A nuclear device detonated near the White House would kill roughly 100,000 people and flatten downtown federal buildings, while the radioactive plume from the explosion would likely spread toward the Capitol and into Southeast D.C., contaminating thousands more.

The blast from the 10-kiloton bomb — similar to the bomb dropped over Hiroshima during World War II — would kill up to one in 10 tourists visiting the Washington Monument and send shards of glass flying the length of the National Mall, in a scenario that has become increasingly likely to occur in a major U.S. city in recent years, panel members told a Senate committee yesterday.

"It's inevitable," said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia.... "I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years."

"The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent and committee chairman. "However, now is the time to have this difficult conversation, to ask the tough questions, and then to get answers as best we can and take preparatory and preventive action."

A similar blast in a more densely populated city than the District, such as Chicago or New York, would result in an injury toll up to eight times higher.

However, the experts emphasized that the explosion would not impact most of a major city and that in many cases, residents could remain safe by not evacuating immediately and clogging area roadways.

Your city has been nuked, but don't even think about trying to get the hell out of there.

"It is also expected that, due to lack of information getting to the public, many people will try to flee by car or on foot, often in the wrong direction, again exposing themselves to high levels of radiation, as vehicles provide virtually no protection," Mr. Carter said.

Mr. Dallas said a major problem facing most cities is a lack of available hospital beds for victims of burns that would result from a nuclear blast. He said up to 95 percent of such victims would not receive potentially life-saving care.

"We're completely underprepared," he said. "Most of them will die."

...the majority of victims in a nuclear explosion will likely have to fend for themselves in the first hours after an attack.

"These people are going to be on their own...There's no white horse to ride to the rescue."

And didn't the people of New Orleans well and truly learn that lesson in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Option Anxiety Turns Your Mind To Mush

It's an interesting theory. That the assault of choices offered up by turning on the TV, or eating breakfast, or going to a coffee shop, a cinema, a DVD store, a restaurant, or going to work, or stumbling down supermarket aisles, that endless cycle of small and often insignificant decisions, turns out to be such a legion of intrusion into the way our minds have learned to work over hundreds of thousands of years that humans are left less able to function at peak performance :

Woe to the caffeinated, for gone are the days of simply grabbing a coffee. Today's order requires surviving a gauntlet of choices: Latte or Americano? Flavored or plain? Cream and sugar? Small, medium or large? And the list goes on.

New research shows that such daily decisions eat up limited mental resources, ultimately rendering our self-control into mush. Which means making too many decisions might be why many people can't stick to a diet, finish a big project or even complete simple daily tasks.

"It's a strange paradox because human beings are drawn to choice," said study co-author Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "We love having more choices, but at the same time the human psyche is easily overcome by them."

Read the rest here. Or don't. I'm not asking you to make a decision, nor do I seek to cause further option anxiety. I won't add to the lessening of your mental resources.

Now there are ads for mind-bogglingly expensive sleep spas (you pay to go somewhere to sleep uninterrupted) showing up in the weekend papers, perhaps the time has come for a holiday resort where you are required to make absolutely no decisions at all, all day, everyday.

It could be called 'Whatever...'

Planting Trees, Flowers, Vegetables 'Trashes The Environment'

Well, it had to come to this really, didn't it? The circle of absurdity is complete. Being green is bad for the environment.

Visiting the local garden centre for a few already sprouted herbs and vegetables, and grabbing a couple of brightly promising flowering plants for the front yard apparently makes Mother Nature very, very angry :

The horticultural industry has its own overpackaging problem - common or garden plant pots, spewing out of sheds and littering paths until they eventually get chucked into landfill. We get through some 500m each year in the UK.

It's an inglorious secret for a supposedly green industry. RHS environmental advisor Rebecca Matthews-Joyce points out that 'from an environmental perspective, the true beauty of a plant is its ability to replenish itself without a scrap of waste being generated ... Gardeners, however, are piling up a problem for the future, a plastic-pot mountain that won't rot away.'

There is a solution. Make a scene :

...we plant-buyers need to make more fuss. The louder we shout, the more prepared the horticultural industry will be to move towards offering more recycling.

Trouble's brewing at the garden centre...

ED Day : 'The End' Is Nigh

I'm a few days, maybe a week, away from The End of my online serialised novel, ED Day : Dead Sydney.

While I've always had a vague idea of how I believed the story would end, not writing to an outline means I've often been surprised at how the tale has turned out, chapter by chapter.

For example, (spoiler alert), the sniper murders of three key characters, a few chapters ago, wasn't something I planned, or even wrote in my mind. I didn't want that to happen to these people. I sat there, reading the words that appeared on the screen as they were slaughtered, as though I was reading the work of somebody else. A very strange experience indeed.

Most of the latest chapter now online, likewise, fell out of the brain dump in one fast 3am writing session after I tossed the chapter I had already written, and rewritten, and relentlessly polished until it was flat, sterile, fucking boring.

Where this new chapter leads the last part of the novel (maybe two more chapters) is not something I planned, or even now want to happen to these characters who have become so real to me in the past year. But I know if I delete this chapter and rewrite it to fit with how I originally thought this story would end, my brain will violently punish me by exploding a few blood vessels. And if I did slump dead onto the keyboard before I reach The End, there's about one or two hundred regular readers who I'm sure would dig me up to try and find out how it all ends.

This has been such a bizarre writing experience. I used to need drugs to trip myself out this much.

An excerpt from the latest chapter of ED Day : Dead Sydney :

There’s nobody to put out fires that big, and we don’t have the water to spare even if we had a volunteer firemen’s unit to activate.

Bookman had warned of all this. The destruction of our written history and culture, who we are, the story of how we got here, how we became a nation.

Bookman told me last week that 12 bookshops he knew of had been torched or burned, including antique shops loaded with rare books and letters. He made me promise him that if anything ever happened to him that I'd guard the Mitchell and State libraries with my life. I failed him. It's all gone.

I see it all now, what is happening here. We have a dangerous and destructive enemy, and this enemy is at war against us, the survivors of ED Day. They want to strip us of our history, and break us down, make us feel lost and helpless and cut off from our culture, who we are, where we came from.

They're winning.

You can read the rest of the latest chapter here. And feel free to leave a comment, as critical as you like (but make it a bit more insightful than "This Sux", okay?)

If you're not already reading ED Day, you can start from Chapter One here.

Skeksis Don't Surf

Skeksis aren't real, of course, they are mythical creatures created by artists Brian Froud and Jim Henson for the (still) very excellent early 1980s fantasy epic The Dark Crystal.





So there's no way in the world that the remains of a Skeksis could wash up on a Russian beach.

Right?

Of course not. That would be absolutely ridiculous.

But, it's still fun to compare images of the two creatures, which you can do at Planet Of Strange Things.

UPDATE : The Dark Crystal was released in 1982, which must be one of the greatest ever years for fantasy and science fiction films, or maybe being a teenager made it just seem that way. The brilliant, the good and the okay, but all still damn fun to see in a cinema.

I must have spent nearly every Saturday and Sunday of 1982 at the movies, considering I watched all of the below on the big screen, and saw about half of them four or five times each :

Blade Runner, ET : The Extra Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Star Trek II : The Wraith Of Khan, The Thing, Cat People, Tron, Creepshow, Conan The Barbarian, Firefox, Quest For Fire, Swamp Thing, The Sword And The Sorcerer, The Beastmaster.

It was a pretty good year for action, drama and comedy films as well :

First Blood, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Class Of '84, The World According To Garp, The Year Of Living Dangerously, The Man From Snowy River, Monkey Grip, Porky's, Pink Floyd : The Wall.

You can find trailers for most of these films on YouTube.

Breathe....But Not Too Deeply

Maybe the old joke about "I only smoke to filter polluted city air" wasn't too far from the mark, after all :

Traffic pollution is contributing to thousands of deaths a year caused by pneumonia, research suggested yesterday.

A study, which looked at almost 390,000 deaths from pneumonia over eight years found that exhaust fumes were linked to more people dying from the condition.

The researcher, Professor George Knox said the annual death toll caused by air pollution was comparable to that caused by the London smog of 1952, which killed 4,000 people.

Environmental campaigners said the research highlighted the need to urgently address traffic congestion and pollution in Scotland and the UK as a whole.

The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, gathered data on causes of death and atmospheric emissions in 352 local authority areas in England between 1996 and 2004.

Deaths from diseases such as pneumonia, peptic ulcer, heart disease and other conditions were found to be linked to levels of emissions in different areas, which varied widely. Prof Knox, from the University of Birmingham, said the main culprits were emissions linked to oil combustion, such as vehicle exhaust fumes.

Over the eight years of the study, there were 386,374 deaths from pneumonia. Prof Knox said the link between emissions and pneumonia deaths was "exceptional".

"Road transport was the chief source of the emissions responsible..."

I don't know if you've seen any news footage on the completion of Beijing's 'Bird Cage' Olympic stadium, but a report aired on ABC in Australia tonight not only showed a heavy veil of gray smog inside the stadium, but a visible cloud inside the corridors leading into the main arena. Incredible. Video is here.

Olympic organisers claim they will clear the city's air in the weeks leading up to the Olympics by shutting down major industries and building sites they blame for causing such lung-crippling levels of pollution. Good luck!

"Son, Why Have You Been In The Bathroom For So Long?"

"Leave Me Alone! I'm Fighting Cancer!"

So frequent masturbation doesn't send you blind, instead it helps prevent cancer.

For men, anyway :

Men could reduce their risk of developing prostate cancer through regular masturbation, researchers suggest.

They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly.

Australian researchers questioned over 1,000 men who had developed prostate cancer and 1,250 who had not about their sexual habits.

They found those who had ejaculated the most between the ages of 20 and 50 were the least likely to develop the cancer.

The protective effect was greatest while the men were in their 20s.

Men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life.

Anthony Smith, deputy director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Melbourne, said the research could affect the kind of lifestyle advice doctors give to patients.

"Masturbation is part of people's sexual repertoire. If these findings hold up, then it's perfectly reasonable that men should be encouraged to masturbate," he said.

Err, how many men actually need to be encouraged to administer some self-love?

Clearly, doctors will now have to start writing prescriptions for lubricants, fleshlights and 'happy finish' massages.

British graffiti artist Banksy somehow managed to erect 10 metres of scaffolding and complete this awesome, and cutting, work of stencil art without drawing the attention of police.

The beautiful irony of all this, considering the message of the art, is that the work was completed under the not-so-watchful gaze of a number of CCTV cameras.

So Banksy warns of the prevelance of CCTV cameras, and then shows how ineffective they are in stopping crime, by painting a huge wall over many hours without getting busted.

An interesting run of comments on all this from UK Daily Mail readers here.

Another beautiful image taken by the Japanese lunar orbiter, Kaguya

There's a short video on the Moon mission here.

Armed Robots Turn Their Weapons On US Soldiers

Has the Killer Robot Revolution already begun? :

Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.

The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.

Speaking to Popular Mechanics, Fahey said there had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.

"The gun started moving when it was not intended to move," he said.

Note the words "chilling incidents". So the killbots haven't mistakenly targeted their "human comrades" just the once, but multiple times. Imagine what havoc and destruction a killbot could unleash inside the Green Zone if enemy hackers managed to seize control of it?

If military robots did kill American soldiers in Iraq, or have already done so, would we be told?

If the death of a US soldier resulted from a mistake by a military robot, who would be held responsible? Probably nobody. No doubt there would be internal investigations, but the Humvee isn't held responsible when it accidentally slips into gear and rolls back over its driver while he's changing a tyre.

If heavily armed war robots cannot be trusted to not target American soldiers now, how will they trusted to kill only the enemy when they are granted the ability to make autonomous (that is independent) decisions about who to kill, who to only wound, and who to ignore?

The solution is simple : DON'T GIVE GUNS TO ROBOTS


Previous coverage on all this from Your New Reality :

When Machines Decide Its Time To Kill

For Our Future's Sake, Don't Give This Thing A Gun!

January 2006 : Robots Don't Cry - US Army Has Big Plans For Its Robot Soldiers

No Fox Hysteria For This '9/11 Truther'

In the video below, Fox News hosts try and talk over their guest when he runs through his reasonable questions about what happened on 9/11, and why the Bush administration tried so hard to stop the official investigation, at which both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney refused to testify under oath. Nothing surprising about that. But there's no shouting, no abuse and no mocking of the questioner's sanity, and, curiously, it was the Fox News hosts, Hannity and Colmes, who raised the 9/11 issue in the first place.

The guest questioning the White House approved 9/11 conspiracy theory on Fox News is former Navy Seal, former professional wrestler and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Fox News clearly knows better than to try and rubbish and mock him live on air. Ventura fans are Fox News' base audience.





Fox News of course was one of the first major media corporations to blow a hell of a lot of holes in the White House version of what happened on 9/11, with this extraordinary piece of investigative journalism :



Ventura's questions and skepticism about 9/11 were also picked up by the Associated Press.

Aaron Dykes has more.

The Dream Is Over : US Becomes The 'Can't Do' Country

While many Americans have never been afraid of questioning the actions, results and motives of their government and of themselves, the number of op-eds and think pieces in the US press raising the exact same questions as this New York Times editorial below are growing by the day.

For someone who grew up believing that the United States was the one rock solid island of stability, security, vast riches and human potential in a violent, poverty stricken and confusing world, it is still unnerving, shocking really, to realise just how far and fast the US has fallen under Bush and the NeoCons :

While the U.S. government continues to pour precious human treasure and vast financial resources into this ugly war without end, it is all but ignoring deeply entrenched problems that are weakening the country here at home.

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.

The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans....more than 2 ½ years after the tragedy, we are still unable to lift the stricken city off its knees.

Other nations can provide health care for everyone. The United States cannot. In an era in which a college degree is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, we are having big trouble getting our kids through high school. And despite being the wealthiest of all nations, nearly 10 percent of Americans are resorting to food stamps to maintain an adequate diet, and 4 in every 10 American children are growing up in families that are poor or near-poor.

The U.S. seems almost paralyzed, mesmerized by Iraq and unable to generate the energy or the will to handle the myriad problems festering at home.

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

The all-American can-do philosophy has been smothered by the hapless can’t-do performances of the people who have been in charge for the past several years. It’s both tragic and embarrassing.

And extremely dangerous. The American military is now preparing, training to fight a possible future insurgency in the United States.

Reality Versus (Science) Fiction

The late 1990s, the early 2000s, were popular years for many science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s, turning out dystopian fantasies about the breakdown of society. No doubt, 1999 seemed a fantastically science fictional year, to those writing back then, what with all our flying cars, personal jetpacks and commuter tubes, so society had to fall.

But how do some of those Doomed Future novels stand up to our reality?

A book review in the LA Times takes a look back at the original dystopian novel that became the film Soylent Green :

Make Room! Make Room! (is) Harry Harrison's novel of New York collapsing beneath the strain of overpopulation, 35 million citizens competing for housing, water, food. Originally published in 1966, it takes place at what must have then appeared a safe distance -- the final months of 1999.

The New York of the book is broken, crumbling, with squatters camped in buildings as upstate farmers dynamite aqueducts to disrupt water supplies. There is no meat, except on the black market, just soylent steaks, made from soy and lentils, so scarce there are riots whenever they are for sale.

In its day, Harrison's book was on the vanguard of a kind of doomsday futurism, in which cities were portrayed as prisons, trapping us in their degraded infrastructures.

"In 1950," the author notes in a brief prologue, "the United States -- with just 9.5 per cent of the world's population -- was consuming 50 per cent of the world's raw materials. This percentage keeps getting bigger. . . . By the end of the century, should our population continue to increase at the same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the planet's resources to maintain our current living standards. This is a mathematical impossibility -- aside from the fact that there will be about seven billion people on this earth at that time and -- perhaps -- they would like to have some of the raw materials too. . . . In which case, what will the world be like?"

One of (the author's) main agendas is to lobby for environmentalism and birth control as forces of social regeneration.

"So mankind gobbled in a century all the world's resources that had taken millions of years to store up," Sol rages, "and . . . now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence -- and still breeding without control."

1950s and 1960s science fiction may well now be our reality, but it's not really so miserable, is it?

Disney Does Philip K Dick

At the start of his career, Philip K Dick wrote so many short stories, so fast, and sold so many of them to magazines, so quickly, that he lost track of his own creations.

In the late 1970s, he was asked by an editor to choose some of his favourite old stories for a new collection. PKD re-read stories he had composed 25 years, or more, before and some were complete mysteries to him. Did I write this? he wondered over a few, I don't remember even thinking of this.

Here's PKD describing the structure of his short stories ;

Crisis is the key to story-writing, a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happenings so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out. . . usually. He can get them out; that's what matters. But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character.

This need not happen in a story, especially a short one....anything can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event. So, in terms of actions and events, the story is far less restrictive to the author than is a novel.

As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do -- not what he would like them to do. This is on one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness.

The film rights to Philip K Dick short stories now sell for $1-4 million dollars each, even for the ones he forgot he had written.

He wrote more than 120 short stories in his lifetime, the vast majority of them during an extremely prolific speedy rush in the early 1950s. PKD could turn out three or four or more stories a week, and most of them sold quickly to the chunky science fiction and fantasy magazines that crowded newsagents shelves and wire racks in bus stations and truck stops across the United States.

No doubt PKD would be amazed, and proud, that his short stories are so valuable and popular with movie makers. At least 10 of his short stories are now optioned for films, and there are video games based on his shorter fiction now being developed, and the likelihood of a TV series or three.

But recent PKD news that would really astound the writer himself is the announcement that Disney will be turning his 1952 short story King Of The Elves into a big budget movie due to hit screens in 2012.

The King Of The Elves tells the tale of a lonely old gas station owner in a Colorado town on the edge of wilderness, whose kindness towards some late-night traveling elves is rewarded. The old man, who thought life had already dealt him its last surprise, winds up joining the elves in a huge battle, holding off most of a troll army armed only with a barrel stave.

Dick wrote The King Of Elves in 1952, having read JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit in the previous decade. He clearly wanted to bring a bit of Middle Earth into rural Colorado. Like the best of PKD's fiction, in this tale you never really know which is the 'real reality' and the false reality of fantasy. You don't know if elves really are roaming the Colorado mountains, or whether the old man is turning a senile fantasy into his reality. Strangely enough, if the elves are not real, the story is even more disturbing.

A PKD story becoming part of Disney is very PKDian. In the last years of his life, PKD lived only a few blocks away from Disneyland, and could see the nightly fireworks displays from his balcony. PKD loved Disneyland, it had become a world straight from his fiction after all, filled with fake realities, automaton re-enacting historical events and glimpses of possible futures.

His friend Ray Nelson tells a story about PKD and Disneyland (excerpts) :

When I saw Phil Dick for the last time, he was beside himself with glee, having recently received a fat check from his agent for film options on a long shopping list of novels and short stories, in every case for a figure in excess of what he had gotten for their original publications.

In addition, the first in the series of optioned stories, Blade Runner, was nearing completion and Phil had seen the rushes and heartily approved of how it had turned out.

I glanced around at the small, dim, shabby apartment he occupied and said "I suppose now you'll move out of here and get yourself a mansion with a swimming pool and hot and cold running starlets".

He loomed over me me where I sat on a threadbare sofa, and slowly shook his head. "I have responsibilities," he intoned. "But surely you have some of the money left, enough to at least rent a place more in keeping with your material success". He gazed down at me with cocker spaniel eyes. "No Ray, I also have my priorities. There are things more important than worldly show. In point of fact, I have already spent most of the money."

"I went on a pilgrimage", He said, rising out of his usual slouch to stand like an indignant christian martyr before a Roman persecutor.

"To where?"

"Disneyland. I walked the whole way." He made it sound as if Disneyland. was on some other continent when in fact it was only a few blocks away.

He took out his wallet and extracted a laminated card. "It's a pass to Disneyland, good for one whole year."

"To pay so much for one visit."

"For one visit, yes. But it's a bargain for several times."

"Several times?"

"Many times."

"How many?"

"Every day at first. Now only two or three times a week...There's a little cafe in Disneyland. They have outdoor tables. I've gone there so often the waiters greet me by my first name...Mickey greets me by my first name...."

You can read the rest of Ray Nelson's recollection of PKD and Disneyland here.


Although he didn't make his first sale until he was out of high school, Philip K Dick began writing short stories at five or six years old, complete with twist endings. Here's one of his earliest, and shortest :

Once there was an ant. One day he went walking. Soon he came to a forest. It was an ant-mile long. Soon he came to a sidewalk. In the middle was a dead bumblebee. He pulled and he pulled. And he soon got it to a forest. He went on ahead leaving his bee on the ground. But he saw that it was hopeless. The grass was too thick. So he left his bee and went home.

By Philip K. Dick.

I killed the bumble bee.

Upon Reflection



Hey, some cool guy in sunglasses is having a loose weekend with a naked woman. He told his wife he was going fly-fishing!

Oh wait...



Can't an older man in a stressful job like Vice President of the United States, with half an android in his chest keeping him alive, get away for the weekend and hang out with naked chicks without it getting into the tabloids?

Oh, wait...

The 'Dick With Sunglasses' photo comes from a snazzy White House photo essay of Cheney wearing cowboy hats, riding horses, standing in streams liberating fish and being generally outdoors-ish. Cheney is clearly preparing for a new post-White House career as a seniors male model.

Perhaps that's what this White House official Cheney spread simply titled 'The Outdoors' actually is. It's Cheney's seniors modeling portfolio. He's putting the word out, he's available from January 2008. He's versatile. He can do hunting wear, casual wear, golf wear and wealthy war profiteering executive wear.

And if the pay is good, he can lose most of the sneer. He can even smile. Kind of.

What other explanation can there be for all this on the official White House website?


Dick Cheney proves that horses will tolerate the smell of burning sulphur if there's enough sugar cubes in it for them


Dick Cheney gets away from it all - 'all' being the tanking American economy, tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes, the near worthless US dollar, national debt heading towards $10 trillion and the endless toll of human destruction of the Iraq War


Dick Cheney smirks as he contemplates the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians in the next stage of the 'War on Terror'

These people are insane. Does the White House really believe that any American will see these photos and think 'Well, that's nice. I've got my problems, but it's always comforting to see Dick Cheney's having a relaxing weekend off.'

Survivalism Goes Mainstream As Middle Class And Wealthy Fear Breakdown Of Society

I have the strangest feeling we are about to see some elements of survivalism hitting the mainstream media in a huge way, as soon as Britney Spears, George Clooney or Kate Moss announce they keep food stockpiles, grow their own vegetables and maintain isolated cottages to escape to when water riots and bank runs turn cities in combat zones.

Soon we will see a spread in something like Vanity Fair of six movie and music stars listing what they keep in their survivalist stockpiles, or showing off their organic veggie patches at their secret 'haven'.

The New York Times gets busy marketing the new, less threatening, survivalism :

The traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.

It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley.

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

“I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,” said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas.

“If all these planets line up and things do get really bad,” Mr. Marcom said, “those who have not prepared will be trapped in the city with thousands of other people needing food and propane and everything else.”

“You just can’t help wonder if there’s a train wreck coming,” said David Anderson, 50, a database administrator in Colorado Springs who said he was moved by economic uncertainties and high energy prices, among other factors, to stockpile months’ worth of canned goods in his basement for his wife, his two young children and himself.

(A) book, “The Long Emergency” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), by James Howard Kunstler, an author and journalist who writes about economic and environmental issues, argues that American suburbs and cities may soon lay desolate as people, starved of oil, are forced back to the land to adopt a hardscrabble, 19th-century-style agrarian life.

Some middle-class preparedness converts, like Val Vontourne, a musician and paralegal in Olympia, Wash., recoil at the term “survivalist,” even as they stock their homes with food, gasoline and water.

“I now think of storing extra food, water, medicine and gasoline in the same way I think of buying health insurance...It just makes sense.”

Anything that encourages more people to grow their own vegetables and herbs, and put away a bit of food and water just in case, is a positive.

Two majestic examples of Paul Nicklen's polar bear photography. The full gallery is here.

Links to Nicklen's galleries on Atlantic Salmon, Bald Eagles, Bowhead Whales, Steller Sealions and Atlantic Walruses can be found here.

The Pretty Colours Are Singing Songs

Dick Ellis didn't know he was going to be pitching a baseball game on June 12, 1970. He thought his Pittsburgh Pirates team had the day off.

At midday, he and his girlfriend took LSD. An hour later, just as the first wave of hallucinations would have been kicking in, his girlfriend saw in the newspaper that there was a Pirates game scheduled, and Ellis was pitching :

"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria.

"The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder.

"I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me."

Ellis pitched an historic no hitter and the Pirates won 2-0, despite the problems with the ball changing size in his hand.

Remarkable.

More on this here.

The above are screen grabs from two beautifully detailed South American print and billboard ads for Sony PS3.

(head nod to PS3 Fanboy)

The End Of The World : Take Your Pick

So living in nerve-frying fear of catastrophic global warming just doesn't do it for you?
I know, you really want to believe the end is nigh, but you find corporate greenism hollow and annoying and kinda creepy, and you've noticed it actually seems to be getting colder, that is glacial, instead of warmer.

Don't despair for your lack of despair. Discover Magazine has put together a big fat list of 20 Ways The World Could End. Global warming looks like a doddle compared to some of these mega-destruction scenarios and population depleters.

So no longer do you have to cling to your faint faith in catastrophic climate change or the biblical Apocalypse just to fit in with offices and neighbourhoods full of doom lovers, not when you have these alternatives to choose from :

Rogue Black Holes!

Gamma Ray Bursts!

Giant Solar Flares!

Earth's Magnetic Field Reverses!

Total Ecosystem Collapse!

Biotech Disaster Spreads Unstoppable Mutant Weeds!

Aliens Invade And Frag Hostile Humanity For Good Of The Universe!

Here's my favourite : Mass Insanity!

Gregory Stock, a biophysicist at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older. If such an extended life span becomes common, it will pose unfathomable social and psychological challenges. Perhaps 200 years of accumulated sensations will overload the human brain, leading to a new kind of insanity or fostering the spread of doomsday cults, determined to reclaim life's endpoint.

And so the anti-immortality 'It's Time To Die' movement was born...

Japan Abandons Elderly To Robots



Don't be afraid. They're here to help. And help they will, at first.

But then the accidents will begin to pile up.

The old man dropped down a flight of the stairs by the robot that's supposed to be carefully, securely carrying him home. The old woman electrocuted in her tub while being washed by the BathBot. The BedBot who manoeuvres grandma into bed and instead of puffing the pillows, tries to hold pillows over grandma's face. The child who doesn't get to hear the BookBot reading Harry Potter, but instead is instructed on how and why mummy must be killed, immediately.

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5m people in greying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.

Japan faces a 16 per cent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the Government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.

Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.

Japan could save elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don't have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said in its report.

Caregivers would save more than an hour a day if robots helped look after children, older people and did some housework, it added.

Robotic duties could include reading books out loud or helping bathe the elderly.

What if we make them too human in our attempts to make them less machine-like and instead of vacuuming and bathing grandma, they sit on the lounge and shrug "yeah, whatever" every time you voice command it to get its tractor treads off the coffee table and take out the goddamned garbage, just once without being asked three times to freaking do it.

Maybe that's the secret of ensuring robots will never rise up and slaughter humankind : program their autonomous 'minds' to understand, appreciate and enjoy apathy.

Drugging Of British School Children Soars As Warnings Raised On Deadly Long Term Effects

The pharmaceutical zombiefication of children younger than six years of age across England is not slowing, it's speeding up. If there are enough disruptive, violent episodes at schools, insurance companies will eventually demand that all children be tested for ADHD and dosed before they can attend school. The beginnings of programs to mass dose British children with drugs can be seen in this story from the UK Guardian :

New evidence has shown children's lives are being put at risk by a surge in the use of controversial tranquillising drugs which are being prescribed to control their behaviour, the Guardian has learned.

The anti-psychotic drugs are being given to youngsters under the age of six even though the drugs have no licence for use in children except in certain schizophrenia cases, the report says.

The number of children on the drugs has doubled since the early 1990s as the UK begins to follow a trend started in the US, but critics say they are a "chemical cosh" that could cause premature death.

Although the drugs are not licensed for children, doctors can prescribe them on their own responsibility.

The drugs are not licensed for children. Who cares what the doctor thinks? Unlicensed use of drugs is supposed to be illegal isn't it? Oh right, those other, non-patentable unlicensed drugs.

The increase follows a huge rise in the use of the drugs in children in the US. Yet nobody knows how the drugs affect a growing child's body or what may happen in the long term.

The increase has come at a time when former psychiatric best-sellers Prozac and its class of anti-depressants have gone out of patent. Wong says children on anti-psychotic medication are more likely to die earlier - something which may not be caused by the drug but which gives cause for concern. "The mortality rate is much higher. It could be some underlying problem of the brain. It doesn't show the drug is causing any deaths, but there is this inequality."

David Healy, professor of psychological medicine at Cardiff University, says the drugs may cause heart, circulation and breathing problems. "There is a real question over whether the drugs can kill for a number of reasons. One is that all anti-psychotics act on [the brain chemical] dopamine." He said dopamine was known to have a role in cardiovascular regulation. A number of children in the US, given stimulants - which also act on the dopamine system - after being diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), have suddenly died, said Healy.

He was asked by lawyers in the US to give an opinion on a child who was diagnosed when she was a baby first with ADHD, then depression and finally bipolar disorder (manic depression). "Having spent 75% of her life on one of these drugs, she dropped dead at the age of two," he said.

Has anyone ever seen a baby that doesn't have symptoms of ADHD? The world is a confusing, sometimes shocking place. Everything is new and interesting to them.

The drug watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority, is concerned about the use of such drugs without evidence to prove they are safe in children....

Yes, and what are they going to do about it?

Nothing.

....unless the manufacturers conduct trials, its hands are tied.

The drug makers have to conduct trials to show how dangerous their own product is before the regulatory body can act to stop the drug's distribution to children.

WTF?

Winnie The Crim : Bear Fined By Court For Stealing Honey

He's still on the run, presumed hungry :

A court in Macedonia has ordered the government to pay a $3,500 fine to a local bee-keeper over a bear that had been stealing his honey, national media said on Friday.

The case came about after a man from the village of Krivogastani, near the town of Bitola, appealed to a local court, claiming damage to his property.

He had initially tried to keep the bear away from his beehives by playing loud Serbian turbo-folk music.

The year-long case of the beekeeper against the bear ended in the beekeeper's favor. The honey-thief was tried in absentia.

Since the bear was obviously unable to pay damages, the court decided that the state should pay the 140,000 denar fine ($3,500) to Kiseloski.

Olympic Torch In London Surrounded By Police, Protesters, Violence, Chaos





Four more months of daily protests and mayhem lie ahead before the Olympic torch reaches Beijing.

The torch run has already become a farce, and a logistical nightmare for local police and security, and it is expected to be this way in nearly every country that the Olympic torch will pass through.

What sort of Olympic message of sportsmanship, unity and togetherness is sent to the world when the torch's progress through London is surrounded by lines of jogging police and marred by violent clashes between police and protesters?



What exactly is the Olympic spirit supposed to mean when world leader after world leader refuses to hold China to account for its actions in Tibet, and thug rule over so many of its own people?

If your nation's leader seems to have no problem with the way China deals with its dissidents, you can presume your leader thinks China does a good job of keeping dissent in check. Chinese cities are now the world's number one proving ground for new surveillance, monitoring and repression technologies, most of which comes from the United States and Israel. It's a Big Brother goldrush in China right now.

China can inflict all the anti-free speech restrictions on Olympic athletes and media that it wants, but it's not going to make much difference once the Games begin. It is a sure sign of China's unreality that it thinks it can control the world's media (more than 20,000 will be attending) and athletes, all at the same time. It can't, it will try, but it will fail.

And what will be the international reaction be if Chinese security wade in with batons when three athletes on the winner's podium begin signing 'Free Tibet' as they collect their medals?

In London in the past 48 hours, protesters have tried to extinguish the Olympic torch and snatch it away. Every news report (outside of China) mentions the protesters, and shows scenes of protesters scuffling with police.

This ugliness has only just begun. There are eleven more weeks of this before the torch reaches the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, and then the real protests will begin.

How much face can the Chinese stand to lose?

How many violent crackdowns and slayings of Tibetans and other protesters can the rest of the world tolerate before the calls begin to mount that the Beijing Olympics should not just be boycotted, but canceled?


More Photos From The London Torch Relay Here

China Says 'One World', But Means 'Same World'

China's Super-Surveillance City Previews Our Coming Reality

November 2006 : China's Dragon Roars Into Life, United States Fades In World Power Shift

China's Mobile Execution Vans Promise Efficient, 'Human Rights Friendly' Death

In tribute to Charlton Heston, the opening minutes from Touch Of Evil, from director Orson Welles, a career high note for both men :



And one more clip of Heston in action, from a movie that haunted my late night TV watching childhood, The Omega Man. Heston is watching the Woodstock concert film in an abandoned cinema, weird :

More British School Children To Receive Weapons Training

Very few British schoolchildren have any idea what the military life is all about. Unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, thinks this is a very bad thing indeed :

Controversial plans for pupils in comprehensive schools to sign up for military drills and weapons training are being backed by Gordon Brown in an attempt to improve the relationship between the public and the armed forces.

A major review of the military's role in British society says that encouraging more state secondary school pupils to join the cadet corps would improve discipline among teenagers while helping to improve the public perception of the army, navy and air force.

The government-commissioned review of civil and military relations, led by Quentin Davies, the Labour MP, was 'alarmed' at the number of schoolchildren who had no idea of military life. Davies wants secondary school pupils to receive basic military training as a means of developing greater affiliation with the armed forces.

'The Prime Minister is very, very keen on the opportunities represented by cadet forces and we will be making a number of recommendations to increase the use of this superb national asset,' he said.

One of the core elements of the cadets' training is mastering shooting skills and military drill...

Bigger Brother : Corporate Security Data-Miner Claims Access To Records Of 98% Of Americans

Entersect Corp. wants to help American businesses digitally screen all potential employees, and promises to provide some of the most in-depth paper-trail analysis of the private lives of job hunters legally available.

Within seconds our system can reveal the following:

• Positively Identify your candidate
  
• Determine if they've been involved in litigation, bankruptcy, or have tax liens
• Scan for any criminal records or sex offender listings
  

They claim they have the access to data-mine more than 12 billion records accounting for 98% of Americans.

Their access is so total, they claim, they are "silent partners" of American police agencies :

Entersect Police Online (EPO) supports law enforcement efforts across the nation and we believe there could be no greater mission than to help fight crime.

We are the silent partner to municipal, county, state, and federal justice agencies who access our databases every day to locate subjects, develop background information, secure information from a cellular or unlisted number, and much more.

You have to pay to find out what "much more" means.

It's only a matter of time before records of online searches and data on web site visits become part of the background checks employees will need to undergo.

There are numerous data-miners already monitoring search requests and linking those requests to IP addresses and other signallers of online activity.

How does a data-miner link trails of online activity through an IP to a person's name? When was the last time you Googled your own name?

Photos from Mars are almost becoming a weekly feature here.

As these new photos show, the 'red' planet is turning out to be anything but simply red.

Below is a high aerial view of a remarkable Martian geological feature - a mountain range inside a valley, five miles deep.



A better view of the mountain range


More details and images here.

Indonesian Health Minister Claim That US Is Developing Bird Flu As BioWeapon Dismissed

Pakistan Official Confirms First Human To Human Spread Of H5N1

Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has been a thorn in the side of the World Health Organisation, and the pharmaceutical behemoths, refusing to hand over samples of Indonesian bird flu because she very reasonably fears that these strains will be patented and Indonesia will be forced to pay billions to access H5N1 vaccines in the future.

Supari has published a book called 'It's Time For The World To Change - The Divine Hand Behind Avian Influenza, and kicked up a small storm of controversy over her claims that avian influenza viruses were being 'weaponised' in American bioweapons labs. The book won an endorsement from Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Excerpts from an interview with Supari on AM :

Dr Supari expresses alarm at WHO laboratories sharing bird flu virus data with the United States national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons are developed.

"Whether they use is it to make vaccine or develop chemical weapons, would depend on the need and interest of the US Government. It is indeed a very dangerous situation for the destiny of humanity", she writes and goes on to say ".. it is a matter of choice whether to use the material for vaccines or biological weapon development".

SITI FADILAH SUPARI: I didn’t know whether our virus will be develop into a vaccine or will be develop into a biological weapon. So just a question - I didn’t blame United States, I didn’t blame any country.

Supari cops plenty back from the US government and the World Health Organisation :

The United States has rejected the Indonesian Health Minister's claims that it is using bird flu samples to produce biological weapons and World Health Organisation officials have condemned allegations of conspiring to profit from bird flu vaccines.

The Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is understood to have ordered the minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, to recall copies of her book on avian influenza, which alleges the US and the WHO are conspiring against developing countries by seizing control of bird flu samples.

WHO officials said they were dismayed by some of the claims and urged Dr Supari to do more to control bird flu's spread and end her refusal to share virus samples - which is hampering attempts to find a cure.

A US State Department spokeswoman, Susan Stahl, denied Dr Supari's claim that Indonesian virus samples had been sent to a biological weapons laboratory in Los Alamos. The laboratory possessed no bird flu viruses from Indonesia or elsewhere, she said.

The facility's only involvement was hosting a database of publicly available genetic-sequencing data to help track the evolution of the virus, she said.

The WHO's assistant director-general for Health Security, David Heymann, said he was puzzled by the claims.

"I don't understand why they would take this virus to make a biological weapon; it doesn't transmit from human to human. Indonesia needs to spend more time on dealing with infections with chickens and stopping humans from being infected."

Claims that H5N1 was a bioweapon have been aired since the virus reappeared in Hong Kong in 1997, and started killing humans along with markets full of poultry.

When the avian influenza virus began ravaging poultry farms in rural Russia in the early 2000s, a US bioweapons conspiracy theory gained popularity. It went like this : the deadly virus was a US bioweapon designed to knock out local poultry farms and open up the market to cheap American poultry imports, mostly chicken wings and legs, which Russian poultry farmers called "Bush Legs."


A senior Pakistan government official has claimed the world's first human to human transmission of the H5N1 virus occurred in Pakistan in November 2007 :

A man in northern Pakistan passed the deadly bird flu virus to two of his brothers, and the virus killed one of them, in the first known human-to-human transmission in Pakistan, a health official said Friday.

'It was definitely person-to-person. That is confirmed,' said Maqbool Jan Abbasi, Ministry of Health joint secretary. He said the World Health Organization confirmed by serological testing from a family in Peshawar, northwest of the capital Islamabad, three brothers had H5N1, the strain of avian influenza that can be deadly in humans.

This is ridiculous. Why go to all the trouble of building a fairly lifelike robot, and then give it teeth that still have to be drilled and filled by a dentist?



Oh, right. It's a dentist training robot.

If you don't understand Japanese, this video seems far more demented than it actually is.

The training would be more effective if the robot could 'feel' pain, and transmit that pain back to the trainee dentist.

Virtual World Currencies Now Worth More Than US Dollar

According to this story, there are at least seven digital world currencies that are kicking American dollar butt.

Oil Bosses Plead Innocence From Beneath Mountain Of Money

It's like the time that a bunch of American tobacco industry bosses lined up to testify on how non-addictive cigarettes are.

I suppose when you're making so much money can afford to eat gold and wipe your arse with Italian silk you really couldn't care less what Congress, let alone the American people, think about what you're doing to them.

They all probably went back to their offices after this braven bullshit session and had a money fight.

From AP :

Don't blame us, oil industry chiefs told a skeptical Congress. Top executives of the country's five biggest oil companies said Tuesday they know record fuel prices are hurting people, but they argued it's not their fault and their huge profits are in line with other industries.

Appearing before a House committee, the executives were pressed to explain why they should continue to get billions of dollars in tax breaks when they made $123 billion last year and motorists are paying record gasoline prices at the pump.

"Our earnings, although high in absolute terms, need to be viewed in the context of the scale and cyclical, long-term nature of our industry as well as the huge investment requirements," said J.S. Simon, senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp., which made a record $40 billion last year.

"We depend on high earnings during the up cycle to sustain ... investment over the long term, including the down cycles," he continued.

Down cycles?

CowMan Lives For Three Days

This isn't the first time a human-animal hybrid has been created with an animal in the laboratory. Obviously it won't be the last.

From news.com.au :

Human-cow embryos have been created in a world first at Newcastle University in England, hailed by the scientific community, but labelled "monstrous" by opponents.

A team has grown hybrid embryos after injecting human DNA into eggs taken from cows' ovaries, which had most of their genetic material removed.

The embryos survived for three days and are intended to provide a limitless supply of stem cells to develop therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries, overcoming a worldwide shortfall in human embryos.

Dr Teija Peura, director of human embryonic stem cell laboratories at the Australian Stem Cell Centre, said somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) had been done between animal species, but the "99 per cent human" embryos could boost research.

The Catholic Church in Britain branded the creations as "monstrous"....

So what happens in 2030 when a human decides they want to clone themselves, but mix that clone with an animal? Say, an Olympic track sprinter who wants to crank it in the performance-enhanced professional sports world by giving his clone the legs of a gazelle?

Do you own your own clone? If a clone is a 100% copy of you, then you should be allowed to decide if you want a new copy of yourself to be half-animal. Right?

If the market is to decide, the future of animal-human hybrids, particularly those created from clones of the willing, will be a uniquely interesting time in human history, and evolution.

Go here for more paintings by past inmates of Western Australia's Fremantle Jail.

For decades, prisoners at the colonial era jail painted murals on the walls of their cells and exercise yards. Aboriginal prisoners painted these memories below of their homelands.

(HT to Frolix 8)

Al Gore's Buys His Own (Green) Private Army



The idea of Al Gore leading a 10 million strong team of volunteers pulling old car wrecks out of rivers and planting trees is scary enough. But the Al Gore Green Army (AGGA) have much bigger plans :

Al Gore yesterday launched a drive to mobilise 10 million volunteers to force politicians to act on climate change - twice as many as the number who marched against the Vietnam war or in support of civil rights during the heyday of US activism in the 1960s.

During the next three years, his Alliance for Climate Protection plans to spend $300m (about £150m) on television advertising and online organising to make global warming among the most urgent issues for elected American leaders.

$300 million on TV ads and spam. That sort of money could buy a lot of poor American homes a slab of solar panels.

Gore told the Washington Post that he launched the initiative because of his concerns that US politicians had balked at supporting strong legislation on climate change.

"This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public's sense of urgency in addressing this crisis," Gore said.

"I've tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it."

That's exactly what Rupert Murdoch said last year when he converted :

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

Al Gore is putting his money where his mouth emits carbon :

The campaign is getting a hefty kick-start from Gore. The former vice-president has donated earnings from his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, his Nobel peace prize, and his job at a venture capital firm.

He's throwing in a few million. But where will the other $290 million or more come from?

Oh, there will be online fund-raising.

The AGGA will be haranguing you nightly at home and on the street. They want you and your friends to pay for lobbyists and marketing campaigns to get a new worldwide carbon tax introduced. Australia, the UK and most of the EU are already keen to sign up.

$300 million on TV ads and online marketing would also give Gore a mind-bogglingly intensive media launch for a late-run presidential campaign.

"Talking To You Is Like Talking To A Goat"

An hilarious video from The Onion, with a Fox News-style debate between the author of a 9/11 conspiracy book, and an annoyed Al Qaeda spokesman.

"How would you like it if you spent two months in a mountain cave, sleeping on rocks, planning something really special, only to have someone take the credit away from you..."

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says