The Onion Goes Too Far With 'Congress Hostage' Satire? Well, Good

The tweet that started a mini-panic on Twitter and an investigation by Capitol police in Washington DC :



As more details of the unfolding drama that wasn't actually happening rolled out of the imaginations of The Onions's writers, the details became more dramatic :



Then they ran this story :



Okay, they're taking the metaphor of Congress 'Holding The Future Hostage' as literally and as far as they can, but come on, it's The Onion. It's what they do :

WASHINGTON—Brandishing shotguns and semiautomatic pistols, members of the 112th U.S. Congress took a class of visiting schoolchildren hostage this morning, barricading themselves inside the Capitol rotunda, where they remain at press time.

If the money is not delivered by this evening, members of Congress say they will shoot a new child every hour on the hour.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who has emerged as spokesman for the bipartisan group, informed FBI negotiators that the legislative body's demands would be issued within the next hour, and that if any attempt is made to stage a rescue "all the kids will die."

The Full Story Is Here

The Onion is live-tweeting the hostage drama at Congress, and it's ongoing as I write this. It's an interesting, if dangerous, experiment in dark-satire, and likely to be a very successful one. If the mark of success for a satirical entity is to bring a whole world of shit down on their heads, along with real-world headlines.

Meanwhile, in po-faced land :

“It has come to our attention that recents twitter feeds are reporting false information concerning current conditions at the U.S. Capitol. Conditions at the U.S. Capitol are currently normal,” read a press release from Sergeant Kimberly Schneider.

“There is no credibility to these stories or the twitter feeds,” Schneider’s release read. “The U.S. Capitol Police are currently investigating the reporting.”

So according to US Capitol police, the Speaker of the House is not executing hostage children found to be carrying phones. Well that's good news.

More To Come

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his security detail sure know how to make an entrance at the UN :

"Hi, We're From Rainbow, Please Hold Out Your Arm...."

The state-sanctioned homicide of Troy Davis in Georgia had the highest media profile of any lethal injection execution in the United States in years. It also brought the name Rainbow Medical Associates' back into the news, and sparked a debate about the ethics of physicians hiring themselves out to oversee executions.

But there's something genuinely chilling about Rainbow Medical Associates, outside of the fact that a company that helps execute people is called 'Rainbow'. What's at the end of this rainbow? A lethal injection.

A story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2005 provides more details (excerpts) :

The prison system now pays Rainbow Medical Associates $18,000 per execution.

State officials were in a hurry to sign Rainbow on June 29, just two days before the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Robert Karl Hicks on July 1. Since Rainbow Medical Associates has had the contract, its doctors have presided over three executions.

Dr. Carlo Musso, who signed the contract with the state on behalf of Rainbow Medical Associates, said the group of seven to 10 doctors provides medical services to county jails throughout Georgia and is available to monitor executions.

"If an execution is going to be carried out, it's going to be carried out," Musso said. "Our role is to make sure it is to be performed with the least amount of pain and suffering as possible. That's my duty."

The technology exists to have robots conduct and monitor all stages of the execution of a human being. Why the tech isn't more widespread has more to do with tight state budgets than a reluctance to terrify the masses about the existence of an execution robot.

Just don't give the bastards wheels.

Or wings.

The American Corporate Media Can No Longer Ignore 'Occupy Wall Street' Protests

A cop wearing a white shirt walks up to these girls, sprays them with a chemical weapon, and then walks away. Presumably the idea was to try and provoke a riot :



They resisted for as long as possible, but mass arrests of peaceful New York City protesters has forced the New York Times to give front page coverage to the latest incarnation of the American Uprising :




Surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has been covering the Twitter organised #OcccupyWallStreet protests from the start, and quite balanced coverage it has been, too, for the most part.

NYT :

The continuing protests, against a financial system that participants say favors the rich and powerful over ordinary citizens....

Yeah, it's not only the protesters saying that. And is there any doubt left at all, even at the New York Times, that the US financial doesn't favor the rich and powerful over the masses?

The idea that the 99% of Americans fucked over by the top 1% don't know who fucked them, and are not already angry at them, is one most American corporate media seem keen to ignore. Or at least downplay.

Will the American Uprising against Wall Street be fueled by Obama's declaration that the rich must now pay their fair share of taxes?

US President Barack Obama :

"You know what? If asking a billionaire to pay the same rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a warrior for the middle class, I wear that charge as a badge of honor.

“I wear it as a badge of honor, because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against middle-class folks in this country for a decade now.”

The #OccupyWallStreet crowd would be foolish to ignore Obama's invitation.

If they play it right, they can claim they have the majority of the American people, and the president, on their side.

The non-Fox News sponsored American Uprising didn't begin with #OccupyWallStreet, it started in February in Wisconsin :

Extraordinary scenes from Wisconsin last week showing the birth of the anti-austerity/USUncut movement. An occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol was supposed to be ended by police, but a police union representative instead announced hundreds of police would be joining the occupation.

The mega-wealthy will be hoping that the people will fight amongst themselves, squabbling over economic scraps, protesters clashing with counter-protesters, lots of TV magnet violence, maybe some shootings, to keep the people divided, at each other' throats, instead of the 98% turning as one towards the top 2% and leaving them with no choice but to give up their wealth in this age of austerity.

But it's not going to be easy to blackmail, badname and breakdown these protesters. This time. It's not students at a G20 rally, this is mums & dads, teachers, police, firefighters, people who hold communities together. When they are threatened, communities feel threatened and those who never dreamed of protesting anything will spill out of their homes and into the streets.

Or into the State Capitol.

The mainstream media will learn quickly if they want the precious news site clicks and the YouTube views, they will have to deal with America Uprising fairly, if not be biased in their favour. Why go to CNN to see the protest you attended misrepresented or flat-out falsified when you can celebrate your day of action with your new revolutionary friends on Twitter, Facebook or look for yourself in the dozens of YouTube clips already uploaded by the time you get home from the rally?

It's going to be very hard indeed to portray this uprising as "fat privileged unionists getting rich off poor taxpayers". They're already trying to pump that puppy, but it's not working, unless you think Fox News is reality.

Wall Street and America's elite can't claim they didn't see all this coming. From March, 2009 :

"The best bet for investors may be to buy a farm and escape from the cities, as a prolonged recession could lead to war, as the Great Depression did. If the global economy doesn’t recover, usually people go to war."

"...there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots."

"I expect to see social unrest, civil unrest in the United States...The world's century is moving from the west to the east, to Asia and many people have not figured this out yet."

Next week, the United States is going to have to start dealing with this new reality in ways it hasn't had to before. The US of 2012 will be barely recognisable to the US of the latter half of the 20th century.

Philip K Dick In Disneyland



By Darryl Mason

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 cinema screens in 2013.

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.

What We Need Now Is The Threat Of An Alien Invasion

It's only early days, but maybe we really are heading towards a bizarre new reality where the world will be conned into believing that aliens are going to invade Earth, or an invasion is already underway, so trillions can be poured into Space Defence to stimulate global economies.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman gets the ball rolling :

Think about World War II, right? That was actually negative social product spending, and yet it brought us out.

I mean, probably because you want to put these things together, if we say, "Look, we could use some inflation." Ken and I are both saying that, which is, of course, anathema to a lot of people in Washington but is, in fact, what fhe basic logic says.

It's very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better –

ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you're saying.

KRUGMAN: No, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time...we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

It wasn't a Twilight Zone, it was an Outer Limits episode called The Architects Of Fear.

Saturn has always been the most beautiful of the unexplored planets in our solar system and one of the most mysterious. The massive hexagram on Saturn remains unexplained :

Clouds : The Mysteries Deepen

We still don't even really know exactly how clouds work :

Results from an experiment built to study how clouds form suggests that our knowledge of this subject may need to be revised, Nature journal reports.

Tiny particles (aerosols) form the basis of the "seeds" from which clouds grow.

These seeds form when sulphuric acid and ammonia molecules cluster together - and cosmic rays may help this happen.

But these ingredients create only a tiny fraction of the cloud seeds formed in the atmosphere.

The result surprised Dr Jasper Kirkby who led the research. He told BBC News: "We've shown sulphuric acid and ammonia can't account for nucleation (the very early stages of cloud seed formation) observed in the lower atmosphere.

"We've found that this can only account for a tenth to a thousandth of the rate that's observed. So it's clear from this first set of measurements that our present treatment of aerosols in climate models needs to be revised quite a lot."

The Full Story Is Here

Flashback : Israel Intelligence Kicked Off "Iraq Did 9/11" Propaganda Only Days After Attacks

Sept 19, 2001 : "We Sent A Warning Six Weeks Ago To Our Allies That An Unprecedented Massive Terror Attack Was Expected"

By Darryl Mason

This story, citing Israeli intelligence sources, appeared in the influential defence industry bible Jane's only eight days after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City and Washington D.C., and, as the story reveals, six weeks after Israel warned the US that massive terror attacks were coming.

The key passages :

Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.

The Iraqis, who for several years paid smaller groups to do their dirty work, were quick to discover the advantages of Al-Qaeda.

"We’ve only got scraps of information, not the full picture," admits one intelligence source, "but it was good enough for us to send a warning six weeks ago to our allies that an unprecedented massive terror attack was expected."

Our sources believe that it will be very difficult to get to the bottom of this unprecedented terror operation. However, they believe the chief of the Iraqi SSO is Qusai Hussein, the dictator’s son, and his organisation is the most likely to have been involved.

How to counter this kind of terrorism? "To fight these bastards you don’t need a military attack," said an experienced Israeli commando officer. "You only need to adopt Israel’s assassination policy."

In August, 2006, and a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis later, President Bush was forced to finally admit the truth about 9/11 and Iraq during a fiery press conference :

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

Here's the video of Bush destroying the 'Iraq Did 9/11' myth that began with the Israel intelligence source quoted in Jane's on September 19, 2001 :




48 Hours After 9/11, Thomas L. Friedman Hypes The 'War On Terror' : "We Have To Fight The Terrorists As If There Are No Rules"

CIA Withheld Important Al Qaeda Information From 9/11 Commission - What Exactly Was On Those Interrogation Videos That Were Destroyed?

Children Draw Images Of War They've Survived, Adults Ban Their Art From Public Exhibition

The children of Gaza know what war is, and drawing what they've experienced has been encouraged for years by parents, teachers and charity workers. But images like the one below are too real, too accurate to be exhibited in supposedly liberal San Francisco :



The gloating on banning children's drawings by adults who should know better, and show more empathy :



Great news? For who?

How The CIA Created The Radical, Psychedelic '60s

September 11, 2001 - The Death Of John O'Neill

If ever there was "A Man Who Knew Too Much" it was Al Qaeda hunter John O'Neill.

Excerpts from John Carlin's powerful 9/11: Chronicle Of A Tragedy Foretold :

John O'Neill, the World Trade Centre's brand new head of security, who had quit only two weeks earlier as head of the FBI's al-Qa'ida squad, was at his desk on the 34th floor of the North Tower, where the first aircraft struck at 8.46am.

--------------------------------

Three former members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, all of whom occupied senior roles in O'Neill's 150-strong counter-terrorism team, told me in interviews that there was good reason to believe that had the Central Intelligence Agency, America's external spy service, not declined to share with them what they knew about the al-Qa'ida duo, the 11 September conspiracy would have been foiled at root.

"The CIA hated John O'Neill and they disliked the FBI and they protected their little turf and put their little ego-ridden bullshit ahead of the national interest. They disliked John because he was charismatic, because he wore black designer suits, because he drank and enjoyed women and because they knew he was a man who worked harder than anybody, who got the job done, better than all of them put together. And they disliked me, too, because I was John's buddy and I too wore designer suits and liked the good life. That is the story of why they didn't pass us the information and that is also why John eventually quit the FBI."

Chidichimo and D'Amuro both agreed that O'Neill was a "larger-than-life figure" with a brilliant mind who was spectacularly committed – "consumed by it, 24/7," D'Amuro said – to the job of tracking down al-Qa'ida. "Before anyone else, John understood that al-Qa'ida were a big threat and that Bin Laden would be a huge problem. He was one of the brightest people I've ever met," said Chidichimo, an extraordinarily bright intelligence analyst himself. "John was a tough guy to work for but he was almost always right. He taught me counter-terrorism," said D'Amuro, who after 9/11 was the FBI man assigned to brief the president and the Attorney General on the investigation that he headed.

But did he believe there could have been personal factors in the decision not to pass him the Malaysia information? "Dealing with other agencies he was like a bull in a china shop," D'Amuro replied. "I spoke to him about this a lot. I warned him to ease up. But he couldn't. That was his style." So, could these personality clashes, could O'Neill's tendency to rub people up the wrong way, have influenced relations between the CIA and the FBI as a factor in not sharing important information? D'Amuro, a more judicious man than his former boss, more cautious than Mark Rossini in his use of language, paused before answering. Then he said: "Yes. Could be."

---------------------------------------

n a case of life imitating a thousand Hollywood movies, O'Neill was the classic bold, brilliant and handsome hero thwarted by what Rossini calls "grey, by-the-manual, institution" men. O'Neill clashed with them personally but, because of his independent-mindedness and brashness, he also gave them the ammunition to strike back at him. He broke rules. Once, when his car broke down, he borrowed an FBI car to take a girlfriend home. Innocuous enough, but sufficient to get him a rap over the knuckles and a warning. Of various such incidents, the gravest was one in which O'Neill unwittingly lost, if only temporarily and with no one else seeing it, a top-secret FBI file. An internal investigation was under way when, in July 2001, O'Neill and Rossini flew to Spain to liaise with the Spanish Guardia Civil and to take a few days' holiday.

"We were sipping coffee one morning in a villa in Marbella that belonged to a friend when on my computer I saw a story in The New York Times concerning John. Someone, some creepy little enemy of his somewhere, had leaked the story of the missing file to the newspaper. I printed out the story, John read it and his face changed. He went silent and he said, over and over, 'Why? For what? Why?' I couldn't believe it. The best guy the US had fighting al-Qa'ida and they do this to him. John stayed silent most of the day, thinking hard, and next morning he announced his decision. 'KMA, man! KMA!' KMA means 'kiss my ass'. It's what we say in the Bureau when we've had enough, we're quitting. 'I'm done,' he said. 'I'm free. I don't need these little minions commenting on my suits any more.' He loved the FBI. It was in his blood. He loved the power he had to do the right thing. And he was an enormous asset to the country. But the envious minions had driven him out."

He remained in his post at the FBI until the end of August before taking up his new job, on 9 September, as head of security at the World Trade Centre. The day after he quit, in a measure of the largesse that characterised him, he took an old friend from a European intelligence service out for dinner in a swanky New York restaurant he liked to frequent. When the owner refused to charge him for the meal, he left the staff a $200 tip.

--------------------------------

The World Trade Centre towers took 10 seconds to collapse, removing their mark for ever from the New York skyline. Yet Mark Rossini thought for a while that O'Neill had survived. After learning of the attack on the car radio on his way to work at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he phoned the FBI's New York office, where they told him O'Neill had called in to say he had got out of the building. "I phoned John's many friends around the world to tell them he was all right. Later, the news changed. They'd found him in the rubble, decapitated; they identified him by his suit and university graduation ring." Rossini's eyes watered up at the memory. "He died a hero. He died taking command, as he had always done. 'I'm the boss. I'm in charge.' There was a crisis and he had to resolve it. So he went back inside."

The one piece of posthumous luck that he had was that his body was identified. Still today, no sign has been found of more than 1,100 of the victims. Stephen Mulderry's remains were found on 9 November, two months after he died. This was the pattern for all those who were positively identified as dead. Teams of people scoured the rubble for bits of human bodies and sent them to a medical centre where DNA tests were conducted. Many relatives received calls four, five, six times over a period of months informing them that a hand, a toe, a piece of muscle, a strand of hair, had been found. In Stephen Mulderry's case it was initially part of his jawbone, another piece of bone and some soft tissue. "At the funeral we put his little remains in a baby casket and buried him," said Anne, his mother. More pieces of his body kept on appearing over the next two years, at the end of which they had gathered a piece of bone from each of his once-agile basketball-player limbs, cremated them and scattered the ashes over a lake in upstate New York.

The burial of John O'Neill took place on 28 September 2001. It was an enormous ceremony, attended by more than 1,000 people, to the accompaniment of Irish bagpipers and in the presence of top brass from every law-enforcement agency in New York state. At the funeral a letter was read out that he had written for his grandson, born just two months earlier, in which he urged him always to remember he was born in the greatest country in the world.

From 9/11: Chronicle Of A Tragedy Foretold

September 11, 2001 : Vice President Dick Cheney Did Give Orders For US Military To Shoot Down Aircraft

From the New York Times :

10:32 AM : Mission Crew Commander (M.C.C.) gives the fighter pilots permission to shoot down civilian planes, an order relayed from Vice President Dick Cheney.

Voice One : You need to read this, Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down tracks if they are not responding to our, uh, directions.

MCC Position : O.K, I’ll pass that to weapons.

Voice One : O.K.

MCC Position : The Region Com, the Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down aircraft that do not respond to our direction. Copy that? Weapons Copy that sir.

MCC Position : So if you’re trying to divert somebody and he won’t divert

Fox : D.O. is saying no.

MCC Position : No? It came over the chat. Foxy, you got a conflict on that? You got a conflict on that direction?

Fox : Right now, no, but keep checking.

Voice One : You read that from the vice president, right? The vice president has cleared —

MCC Position : Vice president has cleared us to intercept tracks.

Voice One : Of interest.

MCC Position : …And shoot them down if they do not respond, per CONR CC (Norad Continental U.S. Command Center).

You Can Hear The Audio At The New York Times 9/11 Tapes

The Onion most famous, most popular front page is almost 10 years old :



A great piece on how The Onion's 9/11 Special Edition was put together, and why it remains one of the defining media events of the attacks and their aftermath.

Some of the stories from that very special issue :

American Life Becomes A Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie

Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake

U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With

Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell: 'We Expected Eternal Paradise for This,' Say Suicide Bombers

God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule

When You Wish Upon Hydrogen And Helium, With A Small Amount Of Lithium...

The most widely accepted theories on how stars come into existence, from the dawn of the Universe and on, may need to be rewritten, after the discovery of a 16 billion year old star.

Here's the current theory :

After cooling for a few hundred thousand years following the Big Bang, the matter in the universe condensed into atoms. This gas, almost exclusively made up of hydrogen and helium with a small amount of lithium, accumulated into stars.

As the stars created heavier elements like carbon and iron through fusion reactions, and then scattered these elements into the cosmos with supernovae explosions, the array of elements that gathered into new stars became more varied.

They don't seem quite so magical when you know how they're made.

From the Maysles Brothers sensational, shocking Rolling Stones doco Gimme Shelter :

Keepon - A Toy Designed For Autistic Children - Will Hypnotize The Masses This Christmas

A theurapetic robot designed to help children with autism learn how to interact with the world, and its people :



Fortunately for the toy industry, and considering it has no arms or legs, Keepon turns out to be one hell of a dancer :



Some background from BusinessWeek :

Keepon’s story begins about seven years ago with Hideki Kozima, a Japanese expert in artificial intelligence and robotics at the School of Project Design at Miyagi University. Kozima theorized that an emotive robot could help autistic children, who can be overwhelmed in face-to-face interactions, by reducing the complexities of communication to a few simple gestures. A child pats the robot on the head. It responds with a playful bob. The child talks to the robot. It turns to face him and nods.

To test his idea, Kozima created Keepon, a fuzzy, mouthless robot packed with $30,000 worth of machinery, sensors, and computer chips. (The name is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for yellow, kiiroi, and the onomatopoeia pon for bounce.) In clinical use, a researcher in an observation room controls Keepon wirelessly, dictating its interactions with children. While testing the gizmo in day-care centers, Kozima found that autistic children made more eye contact with the robot than they did with people. Behaviors they rarely expressed toward humans, like touching and nurturing, became more commonplace. Since then dozens of research centers and universities have bought the pricey bot for therapeutic work. “Using a robot can be a real ice breaker for children and clinicians,” says Anjana N. Bhat, a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, who is conducting clinical trials with robots and autistic children.

Kids these days, they get dancing robots. What did we get? Pet Rocks.

The War Inside You, every second of your life :