YOUR NEW REALITY

2011-12-24T14:26:00.002+11:00

Best. Christmas. Ever

A Short Story By Darryl Mason

"Is your father okay?"

He waited for her to answer.

He couldn't tell her what happened while she was away...

"He's not getting better, if that's what you mean."

How could he tell her, right now? She had more than enough on her mind already.

"I know your dad's not getting better. I meant...does he understand what you say to him? Can you talk to him?"

Down the hall, he could hear his son's sobbing quickly winding down as something in his bedroom grabbed his attention. When his mother had told their son she had to stay in Brisbane tonight, Christmas eve, he'd let out a little shriek, then a plume of tears. He didn't blame his son for crying, he knew he'd have burst into tears as well if he'd been told, at six years of age, that his mother wasn't going to be there when he woke up on Christmas Day.

"I talk to dad," she said, "but...he's off somewhere else. Most of the time, his face is just blank."

He struggled to catch all of what his wife was saying. It was like he was trying to talk to her across a room, while a titanic hailstorm attacking the tin roof above. The static on the line made it seem like wife was even further away than she actually was, sitting next to her father, drifting out his last days in a nursing home that hummed steady silence, punctuated by screams and crying. He knew his wife hated that place, and that she wanted to be home with him and her son on Christmas eve, wrapping presents.

But there were no presents to wrap.

"Are you still there?" she said, her voice grating with frustration. "Hello?"

"I'm here, the...line is terrible," he went to swallow, and couldn't it. His tongue, his mouth, throat, were dry, he needed water. Or bourbon. A decade ago, when he was 24, he would have dealt with the misery of the ruined day he had just endured, and what was still to come tonight, with three double Wild Turkeys and Coke, and then a few more straight from the bottle.

But he didn't Do That Anymore.

Even if he wanted to obliterate himself with bourbon tonight, he couldn't afford it, and he couldn't drive to get it. The car went two weeks ago.

"I know where I'd rather be tonight..." she said, and he could feel her smile.

"I wish you were here, too."

"We've never been apart at Christmas, have we?"

"No. First time..."

He could delay the inevitable confrontation with his wife until tomorrow afternoon, maybe even early evening, it would take her most of the day to drive back down the coast.

Or he could tell her now. Be honest, and tell her that he left everything to the last moment and that he had well and truly fucked up, that he'd been so absolutely sure there was another couple of hundred left on their final active credit card, but he'd been wrong.

He could tell her how it felt to stand there at the cashier's with a video game for his son in his hand and have his credit card rejected, twice, and to have someone there in the line behind him whisper, with disgust, "fucking loser," and to know that it was ultimately nobody's fault but his own.

He could tell her all that, but it would make her night even more miserable, worrying then not only about her father, and whether he would live to the New Year, but also about her son, who was now going to wake up in less than seven or eight hours to discover that Santa had left him no presents.

The splatter of static faded from their phones.

"No, we've never spent Christmas apart," she said, and he could see the memory movies he knew she was thinking about. "We even saw each other on a few Christmas days before we started going out. When you were still seeing...Sonja."

"You know I only went to all those parties with Sonja because I knew you were going to be there, looking wicked," he said. These were old lines, they both knew the routine and enjoyed it.

His wife laughed, a real laugh, deep and loud. "How do you come up with such bullshit?"

"That's why you love me," he said. She'd needed to laugh, to get that release, and he'd done it. He'd made her feel better.

"It's not the only reason I love you, but it's in the top three."

How could he tell his wife that when their son woke up he'll think Santa is a liar? And that their son would probably be waving the letter she'd written a month before, on Santa's Workshop letterhead, from the desk of Santa Claus himself, that promised the boy, if he behaved himself, the one present he most absolutely desired, as he'd told his father, "in this whole wide, world wide world."

It was a video game, for PC (a new Xbox system was one third of a monthly mortgage payment they could never afford to miss), a game that put the player in command of the stars and moons of our galaxy.

Before work finished for the year eight weeks ago, he'd watched a couple of previews of the game his son wanted from Santa on YouTube. The game had caught his imagination as well. One of the key missions of the game was to move moons into the orbits of watery worlds to pull life out of the oceans, or to position a star into a rumble of asteroids and dead planets to make a new solar system, where life would eventually flourish if you could protect the planets from massive asteroid and comet strikes. He wanted to play the game, too, with his son. And earlier today, when he'd been walking to the cashier's at the W, he'd imagined an afternoon of connection and absolute joy with his son as they played the game together on Christmas Day.

Tomorrow.

"Are you still there?" she asked.

"Yeah. Are you staying at the nursing home tonight?"

"I have to. The storm's gone crazy. I'm going to drag in a more comfortable chair from the day room when everyone's gone to bed. I think it's only me and the nurses, here, who actually know it's Christmas Eve..."

"That's really sad. They don't even know it's Christmas.."

"I know. Anyway, I'm going to go."

"Okay. Do you want to talk him again? He's still awake, I can hear him ripping up paper in his room."

"Why's he still doing that? No, I'll call him in the morning. Make sure he's up by seven."

"He'll be up by five, waking me up."

"That's true...."

A long pause. He knew that she knew, in the way she always knew.

"So," she said, with a sigh. "Did you get everything?"

He had to end this conversation now. It was time to bail.

"It's all taken care of," he said, quickly. "Everything's cool. I love you. Kiss your dad for me. Merry Christmas. I'll talk to you in the morning."

He hung up, snapping the phone shut. He tossed it on the bed like it had scorched his hand.

He stood there for a moment, waiting to see if it would ring again, then headed for the bathroom and drank water from the tap. Being a deceptive bastard was thirsty work.

"Jamie? What are you doing?" he shouted through the house, from the bathroom.

"Nothing dad!" his son shouted back, from his bedroom. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going downstairs to see what's on TV! You hungry?"

"No!"

"Okay! I'll be back up to tuck you in!"

"Yeah, okay."

He had to get this done, before his son went to sleep. He had to go and tell him the bad news about Santa. And he'd do it, he told himself, in a few minutes, fully aware food and TV were just ways to delay the inevitable.

He walked down the stairs, the rest of the house below, dark, quiet, still. The only noise in the whole house was the steady sound of his son slowly tearing long strips of paper.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw it wasn't completely dark in the lounge room. Pink, yellow, blue and green lights glowed across the street, spilling through the curtains. It was the neon-drenched Christmas display that covered most of his neighbour's house. A remarkably detailed Christmas display that had drawn a steady stream of family-packed cars every night for two weeks. Most had stopped to admire his handiwork for a few minutes, but there were many who'd parked their cars and walked into his yard to explore his Christmas creation, to wander amongst those lights, to see what all the little mechanized figures of snowmen and elves and reindeer were going to do.

He knew his neighbour wouldn't be able to pay the astonishing electricity bill for this year's festival of Christmas lights, when it thudded into his mailbox in February, because he knew his neighbour wouldn't be there to get it. His neighbour had already packed up the larger pieces of furniture and valuables and moved them elsewhere, so when the bailiffs turned up and let themselves in some time after New Year's to tally up the assets, they'd find nothing of any real value, all of it long gone.

There'd be no Christmas miracles for his neighbour, and his family, he knew that. There was no government bailout for them. They only owed hundreds of thousands, instead of billions.

And so another family will leave this street, he thought, another set of familiar faces, some friends, who'd lived and shopped and taken their kids to the park and daycare centre in this neighbourhood for six or seven years, would be gone. Another abandoned house would join the twenty or more he'd already found within a few minutes walk. Some were occupied by squatting students who couldn't afford to live in the city anymore, others housed the suddenly homeless who had fled other suburbs, in other states.

His son didn't seem much bothered by the disappearance of his friends from up or down the street.

He didn't understand this at all. When he was five, his best friend's family had packed up and left the street where he'd spent his childhood, and the experience had traumatized him for months.

But his son just shrugged when he asked him if he missed the kids he used to play with. By his fifth birthday, his son had said goodbye to nine of the kids who were born to families in the street the same year their family had moved in, their son only a newborn. All his original friends were gone, moved on, leaving behind abandoned mortgages and abandoned homes that few wanted to buy.

For the past three years, the street had seemed like the perfect place to raise a child, surrounded as they were by other young families, people like him and his wife, working families. Everything here had felt familiar, everything had felt right. It had been a safe place, safe enough for the kids to get together in the park after school to kick around a ball, without a fleet of parents watching over them.

But the kids hadn't gone to the park much at all, at least, not as much as he and his friends would have, and did, when they were the same age.

His son, and his friends, were more interested in video games, and teaching their grandparents how to use a computer and get socially networked, than slamming each other into pebble-studded fields of mud in mad pursuit of a ball.

He stood at the bay window, and noticed for the first time, of the many nights he'd stood there, beyond midnight, staring at the lights, just how much the softly-blinding illumination lit up the surrounding houses, his own house, his front lawn. It was something of rare beauty, and he wished he'd spent more time enjoying it, rather than resenting it, because his own home Christmas decoration attempts seemed so futile in comparison.

The thousands of dollars of lights and waving, smiling dioramas and glowing reindeer had cleaned out his neighbour's credit cards over three afternoons of madness in late October. Making something beautiful, if only for a few weeks, had become an obsession for him, as his family came to grips with their financial ruin, as they poised on the brink of fleeing the neighbourhood.

It was only now, tonight, that he realized his neighbour hadn't gone mad. He'd lost everything anyway, but in a final tribute to the neighbourhood, or Christmas, or both, he'd given the people of this devastated street something beautiful, a flood of light, a place to stand and be awed in the night by the dazzling colours. This was his gift to the friends and neighbours that remained, and something free and wonderful for families no better off than them to come and see, experience, share.

When other fathers who visited asked how much it cost to bring their families into the yard, his neighbour grinned and declared, "Nothing!"

His neighbour had nothing left, so he had nothing left to lose.

He wondered, briefly, how long it would be before his family joined the exodus from the neighbourhood. Another month or two, maybe less. He'd lived with this coming reality for so many months already, it no longer made him feel like he vomiting.

From upstairs, the sound of ripping paper ceased. His son would soon be asleep.

From down the street, from one of the abandoned houses now occupied by homeless youth, drifted familiar singing. "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?" A John Lennon song, he remembered most of the words, a choir singing 'War is over, if you want it." The stereo the kids were blasting it from was up loud enough for him to sing along, but he got stuck on the words, "and what have you done?" The words repeated, a broken, taunting record in his mind.

What have you done?

He wasn't hungry anymore. He didn't care what was on TV. He had to get this over with. He walked to the stairs, and started climbing. He had to tell his son the truth.

"Are you awake?'

"Yes. I can't sleep."

"I know. When I was your age, I couldn't sleep either. I kept thinking I could hear Santa coming."

You idiot, why did you say that?

His son nodded slowly, then looked at his father.

"I don't think Santa's coming...."

"How did you know?" The words jumped out of his mouth before he could stop them. His son sat bolt upright in bed, and even in the low illumination thrown off by the Snoopy nightlight, the same Snoopy nightlight that had kept the monsters of the dark at bay when he was a child, he could see his son was already close to exploding into tears again.

"Santa's not coming? Why isn't Santa coming?"

His son had almost shrieked those last words. It was too much for him, he could see that, havin his mother away for Christmas and now, no Santa.

"Santa's not coming because...." he paused. His son was already dealing with the fact that there would be no visit from Santa. Now he had to explain to his son why.

Was it too early to beat his son's friends at school to the belief-rattling truth that Santa doesn't really exist? That the Santa his son already knew so much about, and dearly loved, was mostly dreamed up by Coca-Cola and cigarette advertising executives back in the first few decades of the last century?

It would blow his child's mind. He had to do this delicately.

I need to keep lying, he told himself, just for tonight, I can destroy the reality of Santa Claus for the boy in the New Year.

"Santa's not coming because...." he took a long, deep breath. There was nothing, his mind was blank. But then it wasn't. He had the story.

"Well, all over the world, in really poor places, poor families, you see, they can't afford any presents at all this year, none, and so Santa has to do a lot of extra...running around...flying around, in his sleigh, he has to fly a lot more trips to make sure the really poor kids get at least something this Christmas....outside of what he was going to give them anyway...before he found out their parents had...couldn't afford to get other presents....as well."

That was a terrible explanation. He knew it. This was going to be a long night. The kid wasn't going to go to sleep again, for hours. He could almost hear that sharp little brain churning through The Explanation for why Santa would not be visiting this year, dissecting it, comparing it to reality as he'd already come to know it.

He sat down on his son's bed, and waited for the boy to speak. His son's expression already revealed that heavy doubt was tearing The Explanation apart. Some more foundation work for the lie was needed, but he had nothing else.

"That's why...Santa can't come here this year, you see? He's extra busy with the really poor kids."

His son nodded slowly.

"Are we really poor, dad?"

"No...I mean....we're not, really poor."

"Are we just poor?"

"No...well, maybe a little."

"If Santa doesn't give me presents, will poor kids in other places get my presents?"

"I don't know how it all works," he said. "Ease up on the questions for a minute."

So his son did, but he had nothing to say. They sat in silence, the night sky above the back yard glowing and filling the window, alive with stars and flashing satellites and the faint dust of the Milky Way galaxy.

He had an idea. He knew from his own childhood that on a clear night, you can see a couple or more shooting stars every half hour, if you stood outside with your head craned back you paid attention. When he'd had a minor obsession with basic astronomy, before high school and girls and rock music pulled his eyes away from the heavens, he'd spent plenty of clear summer nights out in the yard with his telescope sweeping across the sky, and he'd seen plenty of shooting stars.

Had he told his boy much at all about the night sky yet? Not really. Not outside of basic explanations for what The Moon was, and why some stars seemed to twinkle, and others pulsed red, or blue.

His son, like himself at six years old, was showing a keen interest in science fiction TV shows, and, in particular, science fiction video games, but while he loved to blast through deep space on his father's laptop annihilating enemy transports and their escorts to micro-dust, the boy had never spent an evening in the back yard examining the endless light show in the sky.

The idea, the new lie, that popped into his head to further delay the day when his son learned that Santa Claus was only myth, a triumph of marketing, surprised him in its cunning, and potential for drama.

"Listen," he said to the boy, "there won't be any presents, but Santa has promised that every kid who misses out this year will get something extra special, instead of toys or...games."

That perked up his son's ears, widened his eyes.

"Something special? What is it?"

"We have to go downstairs, and out into the yard," he said and stood up. "So grab your shoes and put them on."

"Why do we have to go outside?"

He pointed out the window, to the sprawl of stars, fighting to shine their light against the orange glow of the city in the distance, bleeding neon up from the horizon, diluting their brilliance.

"You won't be able to see it properly from inside," he said, and held out his hand. His son was out of and then off the bed, rustling underneath it for a pair of shoes. He found them, quickly slipped them on.

"Is the something special from Santa something that flies?"

"No more questions," he said.

"But I want to know now," the boy tried to cry, but he had forgotten he was supposed to be upset and couldn't find the immediate tears.

He picked up his son and carried him from the bedroom.

"Don't cry, okay? Okay, what Santa did was...Santa made a promise to every kid that misses out on presents that he will send them their own special shooting star. That's why we have to get downstairs now. The shooting star Santa sent for you should be flying overhead any minute."

The boy liked this news. His legs started moving like he was running. "Hurry up! We have to go and see it!"

He felt a little guilty at how easy such an absolute lie, and the story he conjured up around it, was to create and explain. Now his son wasn't expecting a video game he couldn't afford. He was waiting for a shooting star, which he didn't know would be a meteorite or maybe even a chunk of old satellite, hitting the atmosphere, breaking up, burning up, flaring out.

I promised my son a shooting star, he thought as he carried the happily struggling boy down the stairs. What happens if we don't see one?

What then?

This seems so familiar....

It was a beautiful night. He'd kept his son busy counting stars for a minute or so, but he was already getting bored. The counting was punctuated by sighs that grew louder, as the promised shooting star from Santa failed to appear.

"Thirty two, thirty three, thirty four....when's it coming?"

"Soon. Very soon."

"Thirty...six."

"Thirty five."

"Thirty five, thirty six, thirty seven..."

He listened to his son counting stars. and remembered how he'd learned in his late teens to delay the moment when the emotional impact of something terrible actually hit him, and consumed him. Delay The Inevitable had been his life matra for most of his 20s. When his father had died, he hadn't shed a single tear for four months, then everything had come at once, a wave of sadness, grief and regret that all but crippled him. Booze had helped, but then the booze had become the problem, instead of the fact that his father had died and he hadn't said goodbye, or even seen him in those last painful months of his life. He hadn't let himself learn to deal with it.

"Thirty seven, thirty eight, forty..." his son continued.

"Thirty nine," he croaked, convinced that he was about to burst into a wracking sob louder than anything his son had unleashed during what had been an altogether utterly shitty Christmas Eve.

"Thirty nine, forty, forty one..."

He remembered then, a Christmas from his own childhood, the memories came rushing back, a wave of images soaked with emotion. He had to fight to stop himself from crying. He remembered now why this moment in the backyard with his son seemed so familiar. His father had done the same thing with him, on a Christmas eve when he was five years old, taken him into the backyard, promising shooting stars instead of presents, there were no presents, his father had drunk the money his mother was going to use to buy them. It had been his father's Christmas ritual.

His father had kept drinking as they stood in the back yard that night, the crumbling, neglected old house a tilting heap behind them. He'd waited and waited for his shooting stars, and as he waited, he'd felt himself pulled into the deep, black curtain of the night sky. He could leave this place behind by going up there, one day. His five year old self had promised his future would be up there, amongst the stars. That night, his father had eventually sat down on the grass, then flopped back into a snoring pile. But he'd stayed right there, rooted to the spot, his eyes sweeping across the great, immortal dome of stars.

He didn't see a shooting star that night, and the disappointment had been devastating. But he went back out there the next night, and the night after that, and every night for weeks, staring into the sky, and he'd watched hundreds of shooting stars blaze their fiery arcs, or simply flare out in a second or two. An elderly neighbour finally asked him what the hell he was doing in the back yard every night, and when he explained, the old man had given him a small telescope, on a tripod, from the ruin of junk and detritus piled high in his garage.

His love of astronomy, of knowing everything he could about the stars, the planets, the universe, then began, and consumed him. Until girls distracted him, and then rock music, and drinking. And then his knowledge of the night skies had faded, more once important information relegated to the rarely visited memory archives of his childhood.

"Dad? I'm bored. Can we go inside?"

He faked a sneeze so he could wipe the tears from his eyes, without his son seeing how upset he was.

"Two more minutes," he said. "Santa promised you a shooting star and he will deliver. Two more minutes, just count the seconds..."

A loud, long sigh preceded his son's new count. "One, two, three, four, five, six..."

He hated himself and hated his life. What a fuckup he'd become. Christmas Eve and not enough money in his pocket to buy his kid a video game, or even the cheapest piece of shit toy.

In four weeks, no longer than eight weeks, his family would lose their home. He still didn't know if his boss was even going to reopen the doors of his offices in the New Year, let alone ask him to come back to work. Not that it mattered, he wouldn't earn enough to get his family out of their debt problems.

What's going to happen to us now?

"Twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty," his son sighed again. He knew his boy was only out here now in the yard to make his father happy. He was doing this for his dad, no other reason.

"Thirty one, thirty two, thirty four...."

"Thirty three," he whispered.

"Thirty three, thirty four, thirty five...it's not coming."

"It's coming," he said through gritted teeth, his sadness had departed, anger had arrived.

I need bourbon...

"Thirty six, thirty seven, thirty eight...."

Come on God, you bastard, just give me this one thing. Please. I'm not asking for a miracle, I'm not praying for you to let us win the lottery. I'm not praying for you to save this house, or protect my family, I'll do both, I'll find a way to get through this, but you have to give me this one thing, tonight. Just one little shooting fucking star. You've got billions of them. Just give me one, right now, so my son can see it. Is that too much to ask for?

"Fifty one, fifty two, fifty three....can we go inside, please?"

"No!"

"Fifty four, fifty five, fifty six...."

I did everything I was supposed to do to be a good man, a good father, didn't I? I stopped drinking, I worked every day in a job I hated because the money was good and it was close enough to work so I could pick my son up from day care, every day, so my wife didn't have to leave her work early. I cleaned up my life, I got the job, we made a family, we brought a house, we paid my bills on time, I didn't sleep around on my wife, and I never hit her, or my son. What else do you want from me? What the fuck else do I have to do to get just this one single fucking break here?

"Dad? Is Santa really real?"

Great. Now this.

"Yes."

"Santa's not really real is he? He's made up, like cartoons..."

Just one tiny shooting star. Let the kid believe in this, this little bit of fantasy, for a little bit longer.

"Santa can't make shooting stars, dad. He just makes toys and stuff."

He searched the skies, but the stars were all still. There wasn't even a blinking satellite to distract his son with.

So that's it, then. I prayed to you for help when I was a kid, and you did nothing. I prayed to you for help during all those years of violence at home and at school, and you did nothing. I've never asked you for riches, I've never asked you to kill somebody I hated, I've never asked you to do anything but make bad things into good. Make this bad night into a good one. Please.

"He just gives toys...he can't make shooting stars...."

His son turned and walked back to the house.

"Wait a second..." he said, searching the skies as frantically as he had that night so many years ago with his own father. "Wait..."

"I want to talk to mummy," his son said, almost at the back door. His voice quavered, quivered, the tears were not far away.

"Wait..."

If you won't do this for me, if you won't give me this one thing, one little shooting star, then I'll do it, I'll make it happen.

"Wait..."

His son stopped at the door, the big sigh came again.

"It's coming...."

"Dad. I want to talk to mummy!"

"It's coming!"

One tiny dot of light blinked, and then grew brighter, and began to streak across the sky.

"Look! Look!" His voice shrieked, and his son stopped pushing open the back door and looked into the sky, following his dad's pointing, trembling finger.

"Wow!" His son ran the few steps to get back to his side. He grabbed his hand, and squeezed it. "Wow! Dad! Wow!"

The shooting star burned brightl as it churned through the black, becoming the brightest object in the near moonless sky.

"Count it!" he shouted to his son. "Count it!"

"One! Two! Three! Four!"

The shooting star shuddered in its path, and then burst into even brighter light, dazzling, almost blinding in its intensity. Chunks of it peeled away, dozens more tiny shooting stars.

"Five! Six! Seven!"

His son's voice grew louder, more excited, with every number he shouted. He squeezed his father's hand tight. "Eight! Nine!"

The shooting star had arced across half the sky in its frenzied flight. In all his childhood years of staring into the sky through the telescope, he'd never seen a shooting star burn so bright for so long. He had no idea what it was. But his son was screaming with excitement.

As instantly as it had appeared, the shooting star finally burned away. For another couple of seconds, they watched as the light trail left behind faded, a glittering path through the heavens, already lost amongst those millions of stars, and the blinking red and blue of local planets.

"Wow!" his son said, trembling with excitement, "Wow! Wow!"

"Yeah," he said, "Wow."

It was an incredible coincidence, he knew that, it was nothing but coincidence. A massive and incredibly rare extra big chunk of old planet or asteroid had hit the atmosphere and burned up and they'd been fortunate enough to witness it. The kind of shooting star that appeared once or twice a year, maybe less, a spectacle that was impossible to make plans to witness.

It's just a coincidence, he told himself, again, nothing more. Nothing more than that.

Well, he thought, maybe something more.

"Wow!" his son was still yelling. "Wow! Was that shooting star for me, dad?"

"Yes. It was."

"Can I tell everyone that was my shooting star, dad?"

He laughed. "Yes, of course you can."

"THAT WAS MY SHOOTING STAR!" his son suddenly yelled to the neighbourhood.

He thought his son meant he wanted to tell 'everyone', meaning the last few kids who lived in the street, his teacher, and his mother, when she returned home, but no, his son meant everyone. Everyone still left in the town, within hearing distance of his magnificent yell

"That Was My Shooting Star! Santa Sent That Shooting Star For Me!"

"Yes," he lied, agreeing with his son. "He did. That one was for you."

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Best Christmas ever."

"It's not Christmas yet."

"I know..."But dad?"

"Yeah?"

"It's still the best Christmas ever."

"Yeah," he said. "It is."

The End

2011-12-20T03:16:00.002+11:00

Britain Embraces Apocalyptic Doom

It's grim, and getting grimmer, but as this UK Guardian story by Andy Beckett reveals Brits can't get enough of the end of the world :

A sense of doom dominates recent films such as Melancholia, in which a vast unknown planet suddenly appears from behind the sun and converges inexorably on Earth; and Take Shelter, about a taciturn American Everyman, living quietly with his family somewhere on the suburban plains, who starts dreaming extravagantly about devastating coming storms and social breakdown. There is doom television, such as the BBC1 series Survivors, a post-apocalyptic soap opera that ran from 2008 to 2010, about the struggles of ordinary Britons after a deadly flu pandemic. There is doom literature, from the exhaustingly erudite – Living in The End Times, by the Slovenian superstar philosopher Slavoj Žižek – to the more digestible – The Coffee Table Book of Doom, by Steven Appleby and Art Lester, published in time for this Christmas, and complete with cute cartoons and would-be wry discussions of the likelihood of an asteroid strike or global food shortage or "supersize hurricane". There is doominess in pop music, not just in the usual genres such as metal, but on the fashionable fringes of dubstep and techno, where the much blogged-about young record label Blackest Ever Black issues echoing, funereal instrumentals with titles such as We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems.
There is an ever louder babble of apocalypse-predicting subcultures, amplified and partly sustained by the internet: peak-oil doomers, who believe the world's energy supplies will collapse and mass famine will follow; Christians who anticipate an imminent day of rapture when believers will ascend to heaven and non-believers will perish; interpreters of the ancient Maya calendar who, contrary to mainstream scholarship, are convinced that the world will end on 21 December 2012; and traditional survivalists, stockpiling tinned goods and constructing rural "survival retreats" to sit out armageddon, who in recent years have been more active than for decades, according to one of their gurus, James Wesley Rawles, American author of the 2009 bestseller Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. This autumn, as the estimated world population passed seven billion, an earlier prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 60s and 70s bestseller The Population Bomb and professor of population studies at Stanford University in California, resurfaced in the British press to warn that demand for the planet's resources would soon decisively exceed supply. "Civilisations," he reminded this newspaper, "have collapsed before."
Especially in Britain, the media love frightening forecasts: from the rightwing Daily Express, with its fondness in recent years for near-constant, alarmist front-page weather warnings, to the leftwing New Statesman, whose 5 December coverline read: "The death spiral: Is it too late to avert a British Depression?" Even The World in 2012, the latest edition of the Economist's annual compendium of predictions, abandons its usual relentless capitalist cheerleading for warnings about an economic "Great Stagnation" and further "mayhem on the streets" of the west. "The world won't end in 2012," writes editor Daniel Franklin. "But at times it will feel as if it is about to."
In July, the word "apocalypse" appeared 60 times in British national newspapers. In August, 70 times. In September, 92 times. In November, 100 times.
Usually calm Guardian columnists have started to ponder armageddon. After the chancellor George Osborne's bleak autumn statement on the economy, Zoe Williams discussed the pros and cons of food hoarding. In November, Simon Jenkins declared: "Today's [economic and political] predicament is unquestionably worse than the 1970s." The same month, Ian Jack wrote: "Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable."

The Full Story Is Here

2011-12-16T03:37:00.002+11:00

A journey to see the black hole claimed to be at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy :

I love these cosmological photo-montage animations. They're even better than the ones I saw in my head as a kid, when we could only look at drawings of star-fields in science books and have to imagine such a journey for ourselves.

Beautiful.

2011-12-12T14:50:00.007+11:00

Official : Predator Drones Now Flying American Skies

By Darryl Mason

When I first started writing here 5 years ago about how unarmed and armed drones (or Flying Killer Robots) were being tested in warzones for later deployment in the skies above the United States, it was Crazy Conspiracy Theory stuff.

Or so I was told, again and again, in the then open comments of this blog.

But it seemed obvious this was going to be a New Reality for Americans very soon. Drones were being marketed to US police forces back then by their manufacturers, using video of them in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn't some big secret, but most of the mainstream media didn't think it was important story.

This is the first big story I've noticed about an American police force using a Predator drone for local-crime fighting. It's not the first time it's happened, as this story makes blatantly clear. Predator drones are now in regular use over the United States :

As the Predator B drone circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers.

The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.

In an interview, Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises the drones, said Predators are flown "in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement and emergency responders in times of crisis."

Proponents say the high-resolution cameras, heat sensors and sophisticated radar on the border protection drones can help track criminal activity in the United States, just as the CIA uses Predators and other drones to spy on militants in Pakistan, nuclear sites in Iran and other targets around the globe.

For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws.

Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other planes. Flying out of earshot and out of sight, a Predator B can watch a target for 20 hours nonstop, far longer than any police helicopter or manned aircraft.

The surveillance drones and Flying Killer Robots used by the US Military in Iraq and Afghanistan were test-flown above the United States for at least two years (and more likely seven or eight years) before they were sent out to fight the War Of Terror in 2001.

Many of these drone test flights were seen by rural Americans who reported them as UFOs. Which they were. Just not from another planet.

Take it as given that both unarmed and heavily armed drones will be used all over the United States within the next few years. They'll be used to monitor and record Occupy protests, food riots, the mainstreamification of militia movements, and eventually to track, target and kill American citizens on American soil.

How else do you think they're going to stop uprisings and a 2nd American Revolution?

Killer Robots : The Coming Reality

January 2006 : Robots Don't Cry - Pentagon Has Big Plans For Killer Robots

March 2008 : When Robots Decide It's Time To Kill

April 2008 : Armed Robot Turns Its Weapons On US Soldiers

Stop Robot Nudity Now

No Rights For Robots!

Do They Have A Soul Or Something Else?

Robots Are Now Being Given Human Emotions

Robots Will Need Us, But Only For Our Brains

Incomplete Musings On Why We Need Robots To Try And Kill Us

2011-12-12T14:24:00.003+11:00

Grow Your Own Food And Save Your Town

You change the world by starting in your hometown.

The idea of famine in the United States, or England, was pure science fiction until only a few years ago. It's not now. Undernourished American children may well replace child obesity as an extreme problem there by 2015. In areas of Northern England and Scotland, undernourished children are already a growing public health issue.

But there are simple solutions, ones that also create community trust, co-operation and friendship, reduce local crime and vandalism and stiumlates the local economy.

Here's a prime example, from the Daily Mail (excerpts follow). Ignore the ridiculous notion that a town growing it's own food is "eccentric." This is what every village and town across the planet did for thousands of years :

The police station carrots — and thousands of vegetables in 70 large beds around the town — are there for the taking. Locals are encouraged to help themselves. A few tomatoes here, a handful of broccoli there. If they’re in season, they’re yours. Free.

...there are raspberries, apricots and apples on the canal towpath; blackcurrants, redcurrants and strawberries beside the doctor’s surgery; beans and peas outside the college; cherries in the supermarket car park; and mint, rosemary, thyme and fennel by the health centre.

The vegetable plots are the most visible sign of an amazing plan: to make Todmorden the first town in the country that is self-sufficient in food.

‘This is a revolution,’ she says. ‘But we are gentle revolutionaries. Everything we do is underpinned by kindness.’

Incredible Edible is about more than plots of veg. It's about educating people about food, and stimulating the local economy.

Three years ago, when Incredible Edible was launched, she did a very unusual thing: she lowered her front wall, in order to encourage passers-by to walk into her garden and help themselves to whatever vegetables took their fancy.

There were signs asking people to take something but it took six months for folk to ‘get it’, she says.

...the police station potatoes act as a recruiting sergeant — to encourage residents to grow their own food at home. Today, hundreds of townspeople who began by helping themselves to the communal veg are now well on the way to self-sufficiency.

There’s a brilliant daily market. People here can eat well on local produce, and thousands now do.

‘The police have told us that, year on year, there has been a reduction in vandalism since we started,’ she says. ‘We weren’t expecting this.’

‘If you take a grass verge that was used as a litter bin and a dog toilet and turn it into a place full of herbs and fruit trees, people won’t vandalise it. I think we are hard-wired not to damage food.’

‘There’s a nobility to growing food and allowing people to share it. There’s a feeling we’re doing something significant rather than just moaning that the state can’t take care of us.

‘Maybe we all need to learn to take care of ourselves.’

It's not like we're going to have a choice about that. Those days are over. Get planting.

The Full Story Is Here

2011-11-30T00:56:00.003+11:00

First The Prisons, Then The Street Corners

So here we go. A robot prison guard that can detect dangerous behaviour in prisoners, and deal with them.

Time Magazine :

In prisons of the future, watchtowers and barbed wire may be just a formality. South Korea is debuting robot wardens with the power to stop jailbreaks. If all goes according to plan, these hulking bots will soon roam South Korean jails as troubleshooters.

The objective is more Minority Report than Terminator. The robots contain cameras and sensors that are programmed to detect unusual activity or mood shifts in prisoners. Standing nearly 5 ft. (152 cm) tall, the robots will trek around the prison grounds to check on inmates, providing backup and relief for the human guards. The four-wheelers are in touch with prisoners’ emotions, sensing aggressive or suicidal shifts, and they can even facilitate conversation with the human guards from afar using their built-in cameras.

The Full Story Is Here

2011-10-29T03:18:00.003+11:00

Occupy Horror : Police Attack Kids Trying To Rescue Injured Marine

Incredible. Those Oakland, California kids were rescuing Scott Olsen, a fallen, brain injured Marine when a cop threw a potentially-deadly flash bomb amongst them. Mind-boggling. Oakland police saw a US Marine standing guard, wounded him in the head with a gas canister and then attacked the kids who tried to carry him to safety :

1000 people gathered in a vigil outside Scott Olsen's house, as he fought to recover from life-threatening injuries. He has not yet been given the all-clear by doctors.

These are the early days of an American Uprising that will change the course of the nation's history :

More than 2700 Americans have been arrested, thousands more detained before being released without charge (after many hours of confinement and loss of rights) in #Occupy protests since the movement 'officially' began on September 18 :

This is America, 2011.

2011-10-29T03:15:00.001+11:00

I wonder how fewer lights there will be when a fly-over happens in 2015, or 2020?

2011-10-27T23:48:00.003+11:00

This city is about to blow :

A nationwide US general strike may be less than two weeks away.

The protests against insane police violence will increase in number and size.

The #Occupy Movement grows bigger by the hour.

How could it not?

2011-10-27T01:38:00.007+11:00

US Police Now Using Flash Bombs, Chemical Weapons, 'Rubber' Bullets, Sound Guns On Peaceful #Occupy People

The War In The Homeland Has Begun

The first #Occupy death at the hands of police will come within days. And then what? That was how the London Riots started. The US is different, of course, there are gun everywhere, and 100,000s of returned American soldiers with urban-war fighting experience.

The horrors of #OccupyOakland last night :

Go fight in a war based on lies, come home to no jobs, get shot in the head with a tear gas cannister at a peaceful protest. This is America, 2011 :

Police throw a tear gas bomb at Americans trying to carry away an injured protester :

The news of police attacks on the #Occupy Movement come so fast, and are so numerous, it's becoming all but impossible to keep track of them all. And this is still only Month Two Of #Occupy America.

The War In The Homeland has begun, and even though it's been written about here as an inevitability for years, it's hard to believe, impossible to believe, that it's really happening now.

But it is.

When American soldiers line up in front of citizens to protect them from police violence, something like hell will likely break loose.

March 2009 : Wealthy Warned Civil Unrest Coming, Told To Flee Cities And Buy Farms, Prepare Now

Civil War II : No Longer Just A Bad 1980s Movie Plot

January 2010 : National Guard Prepares Americans For Reality Of War In The Homeland

2011-10-25T02:03:00.005+11:00

Libya 2.0

Tony Blair's Libyan dictator mate Gaddafi can rot in a ditch for all I care, but there's something about this video that is chilling. It's hard to nail the exact moment, amongst the laughter :

This is what US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was laughing at :

Libyans, hired mercenaries, CIA insurgency specialists celebrate :

Meanwhile, those of Gaddafi's tribe, and presumably at least a few hundred thousand other Libyans, will be rallying around 'Friend To The West' Saif Gaddafi as he leads an insurgency against the US-backed NTC government :

Sayf-Al-Islam al-Qaddafi, son of Mu'ammar Al-Qaddafi, said in a call to Syrian TV station "Al-Rai" that the resistance continues to 'full revenge' for the mass killings of an estimated 90,000 Libyans during 8 months of occupation attempts, invasion and non-stop bombing by the European and North American military forces (NATO) as well as Qatar and some other Arab states.

He confirmed that he is still in Libya, alive and free, in spite of false reports to the contrary, and that the Libyan popular resistance continues against the occupation of the North African country, which was the wealthiest country in Africa as well as its strongest defence.

"We continue our resistance. I am in Libya, I am alive, free and intend to go to the very end and exact revenge," Sayf-Al-Islam said Saturday night on the Syrian channel, as reported in Russian media but ignored by other world media which are complicit in war crimes.

8 months of hell and Gaddafi Army murders, NATO slaughter from the sky and rebel massacres, then liberation.

But how long will the insurgency last?

2011-10-20T14:15:00.001+11:00

Fascinating quote. Former CIA director George HW Bush two days after the 9/11 attacks :

"...human intelligence is kind of a dirty business. And in it, you have to deal with unsavory people. People tried to make a lot out of the fact that at one point the intelligence community dealt with Manuel Noriega. Well, they did, but it isn't a nice, clean business. And if you're going to infiltrate some cell somewhere or a terrorist cell, you have to deal with people that are willing to betray their country, people that are willing to betray their friends, people that want money or other things. And it's not pleasant."

This was posted in a comment on this Salon story rounding up the various threads of the 9/11 CIA CoverUp.

2011-10-18T01:10:00.010+11:00

#OccupyWallStreet Is One Month Old And Growing Fast

The cover of the next issue of the New Yorker gives voice to the 1% movement :

Below is one of the first TV news stories on the OccupyWallStreet movement, aired on September 20. Of course, it wasn't aired on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN or Fox News. On September 20, the mainstream American news media were still pretending OccupyWallStreet didn't exist :

9 year old Sam : "They're just doing the reverse of Robin Hood...it makes no sense."

#Occupy protests have blossomed into protests in more than 400 American cities and towns, and more than 1000 other cities and towns around the world. More than 1 million Americans have already taken part.

And that's in just 1 month.

It's no wonder, then, that US President Barack Obama is about to seize on the movement's popularity, and rapidly spreading influence, to rebuild his popularity and return him to the White House in 2012.

The New York Post marvels at the money and stores #OccupyWallStreet has stockpiled :

The Wall Street protesters have amassed a $230,000 war chest and a warehouse full of supplies for their long-haul campaign.

And the money continues to pour in -- through online donations, money orders and about $1,000 a day dropped in a plastic jug and paint buckets in Zuccotti Park.

Occupy Wall Street has also been flooded with goods -- everything from peanut butter to tampons -- at a rate of about 100-400 new packages a day that has overwhelmed the local UPS branch. They include so-called “jail support kits,” which include a blanket, granola bar and sanitary wipes to give to people as they get out of the slammer.

The movement’s CFO is a 21-year-old art student at Cooper Union with no financial experience -- though it’s unclear how Victoria Sobel wound up with the lofty post.

But she has plenty of help with money matters, as any expenditure greater than $100 requires a vote by the hundreds who gather for daily “general assembly.

”The spending decisions occur during rituals called “temperature checks” -- where raised hands mean “yes” and hands pointed down signal “no.”

Occupy Wall Street has raised about $229,500 in three funds, according to the group’s Web site.

One $4,500 fund for administrative costs including cellphones and travel is closed because the site says it has enough cash.

About $75,000 has been raised through the buckets in Zuccotti Park since the occupation began on Sept. 17, the New York Observer reported.

Despite the group’s harsh stance on banks, they still take their cash to two of them -- the Lower East Side People’s Credit Union and an Amalgamated Bank branch near the park.

Amalgamated, a union-owned bank, offered to waive all fees and service charges, said Ed Meedham, a member of Occupy Wall Street’s media outreach group.... some of the OWS protesters are looking for a place to sleep away from the unwashed masses.“

The public-relations team is looking for an apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District with modest furnishings (like bunk beds) that can shelter/shower six-plus full-time activists,” according to the OWS Web site."

There are thousands of empty apartments and buildings in New York City, all ready for camping-style occupations.

They used to call it "squatting".

In Australia, the #OccupySydney protests get underway and #OccupyBrisbane finds a voice of the people :

“This Isn't A Political Thing, It's An Equality Thing. I Just Want People To Be Happy. If People Were Happy That Would Be Sick!"

More At The Orstrahyun

2011-10-17T11:51:00.004+11:00

NYPD Attack #OccupyWallStreet In Frenzy Of Baton Blows And Pepper Spray

Time Square, New York City, 2011 :

Mark Ruffalo gives a good summary of the #OccupyWallStreet movement credos and demands. He nails the zeitgeist of this moment. The American Revolution II, slow to form, but impossible to start :

An American veteran reacts to police brutality in Times Square. "There is no honour in that!"

2011-10-14T10:06:00.006+11:00

Travolta, Reeves, Cage - Time Travellers

So what's so interesting about the period 1860-1873 for Hollywood bigshots? Clearly at some point in the next few years, John Travolta, Nicolas Cage and Keanu Reeves all gain access to a time travel machine, and are so arrogant about their good fortune they even posed for publicity photos all the way back then.

Reeves, of course, found time to pose for a portrait.

Crazy you say? Impossibly implausible?

Evidence uncovered by researchers, so far.

A photo of John Travolta in 1860 :

A photo of Nicolas Cage in 1870 :

A portrait of Keanu Reeves, in 1873 :

Bastards. It's bad enough these Hollywood A-List tourists eventually get access to time machines, but to rub our faces in it by taking time out from whatever the hell they were up to back then to pose for photos and portraits knowing, knowing, they'd eventually be found out...wait, if they leave a few years from now to go back to the second half of the 19th century, then they already know, that is now, they've been caught out jaunting around like arseholes in the past, but knowing all that, then going back, they still chose to say, to us, here now, 'Fuck you, yeah, I'm a time traveller baby, look at me back in 1860. In your face, time trapped nobodies!'

I knew I shouldn't have come back to blogging. Too much space to say way too much crazy shit.

2011-09-30T01:50:00.004+10:00

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

2011-09-28T15:21:00.001+10:00

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

2011-09-27T00:48:00.003+10:00

"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.

2011-09-25T14:57:00.007+10:00

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.

2011-09-18T00:21:00.001+10:00

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.

2011-09-17T19:13:00.001+10:00

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.

2011-09-16T21:56:00.001+10:00

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 :

2011-09-16T08:21:00.001+10:00

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

2011-09-15T15:46:00.002+10:00

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?

2011-09-15T15:21:00.004+10:00

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?

2011-09-15T14:14:00.001+10:00

How The CIA Created The Radical, Psychedelic '60s

2011-09-09T01:39:00.005+10:00

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

2011-09-09T01:17:00.004+10:00

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

2011-09-08T21:59:00.005+10:00

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

2011-09-05T00:16:00.003+10:00

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.

2011-09-04T13:33:00.001+10:00

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

2011-09-04T02:15:00.005+10:00

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.

2011-09-04T00:26:00.001+10:00

The War Inside You, every second of your life :

2011-08-29T00:41:00.012+10:00

Hurricane Irene : Apocalypse Fail

From the front page of the New York Times print edition, Sunday, August 28 :

The aftermath, via an AP headline that sounds like the title of an unwritten RadioHead song. Little Damage Seen In Many Places :

From AP :

From North Carolina to Pennsylvania, Hurricane Irene appeared to have fallen short of the doomsday predictions. But with rivers still rising, and roads impassable because of high water and fallen trees, it could be days before the full extent of the damage is known.

People used to be happy when terrifying doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong. Now they feel, somehow, as though they've been robbed.

UPDATE : This video completely sums up the way millions of Americans felt about the cable news, in particular, coverage of Hurricane Irene. The tension of a brave reporter's dramatic hurricane report is destroyed by young people, having fun :

And this video, because the Fox reporter is covered in sea foam, containing raw sewage, but he doesn't know it ."It smells like ocean...it's got a sandy consistency....it doesn't taste great" :

"I will retreat if it gets anymore dangerous."

And yet he remains, to be almost washed away by frothy, foamy waves of gritty human waste. A graphic metaphor for the American cable news media in 2011.

The story must go on, always breaking new news, even if when stripped bare of hype, it's not really much news at all, until reporters are literally sinking in shit.

UPDATE : The Sydney Morning Herald used the beautiful image below of a still, empty Times Square for its coverage :

That Story Is Here

"How beautiful is New York without the traffic?" was a common tweet from New Yorkers during 24 hours of Hurricane Irene scaring away cars, trucks and buses.

The trailers of Hollywood movies have shown us what New York City looks like under attack from Mother Nature. But the reality wasn't rivers of water rushing down Fifth Avenue, it was a near utterly still Times Square, still alive with lights and video screens, but staggeringly, breath-takingly, empty.

2011-08-28T21:23:00.004+10:00

Hurricane Irene Might Not Be Fake, But It's Most Popular Photo Is

As Hurricane Irene comes ashore in New Jersey, with New York City in its sights, the most retweeted photo of Irene over North Carolina is a flat-out fake. But an impressive one :

That this photo is a fak is irrevelant to many who tweet, send and circulate it on, they just want to blow their friends' minds. But why are so many American and international news shows and websites promoting it as real? So far, Hurricane Irene has delivered no truly jaw-dropping photos, outside of satellite images of the storm, the news companies need an image like the above, and to many of them, too, the fact it's a fake matters not. It's spectacular, it's popular on Twitter, so it's real.

Or real enough.

But it's actually a shelf cloud. Hurricanes simply don't look like that. They're big windy, rainy storms, that look in photos like big windy, rainy storms.

If you want to photoshop a shelf cloud over your town or coastfront, there are dozens here to choose from.

At least 12 people appear to have been killed as a result of Hurricane Irene sweeping up the east coast of the United States. The first victim was a man who fell off a ladder trying to board up his windows.

2011-08-28T03:24:00.003+10:00

Hurricane Irene, from its birth more than a week ago to its first landfall on the US East Coat today :

New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg tells New Yorkers if they are told to evacuate and they don't leave, "they will be on their own."

Sunday afternoon might prove to be one of the more interesting days in the history of New York City.

2011-08-26T03:13:00.005+10:00

Hurricane Irene Prepares To Devour US East Coast

How Do You Evacuate Atlantic City? How Do You Evacuate New York City?

NASA satellite image

From the Weather Channel :

This is the most serious hurricane threat to the east coast of the United States in more than five decades :

- Irene is a hurricane that poses an extraordinary threat and is one that no one has yet experienced in North Carolina to the mid-Atlantic to the Northeast and New England.

- We can now narrow the projected path corridor. Confidence is growing that locations from eastern North Carolina and the eastern Mid-Atlantic states to Long Island to southern New England are all in the potential path of Hurricane Irene.

- It is becoming clear that Irene's future track will NOT be a Hurricane Earl (2010) scenario where a hurricane barely brushes the Outer Banks of North Carolina then stays well offshore.

- History tells us that no category 4 hurricane has made landfall north of the South Carolina/North Carolina border. That said, some computer guidance indicates a category 4 landfall over eastern North Carolina and this solution can NOT be ruled out.

- There is historical precedence for a hurricane impacting the major metropolitan areas of the

- ...with a population explosion along coastal areas of the Northeast during the past several decades, there is little to no precedence for a hurricane of this potential magnitude making landfall over highly populated metropolitan areas such as New York City.

- Regardless of track and intensity, confidence is growing that Hurricane Irene will cause extensive tree and power line damage. Electricity infrastructure will be greatly compromised for millions if not tens of millions of Americans.

A warning from 2008 blasts unimaginable, beyond nightmare scenarios of destruction (excerpts) :

...big storms have hit the New York area in living memory and will undoubtedly strike again, experts say, with the potential for immense damage.
The dense development of towns on eastern Long Island in the decades since the 1938 storm could mean tremendous losses in a future storm. “Property values make it very vulnerable” to large-scale losses...more than $1.9 trillion worth of insured coastal property in the path of a storm and the risk to the population.
Loss of life can be minimized in a storm if people evacuate — and know how dangerous it is to try to ride out a storm.
Even if people on Long Island had a storm on the way and got the message, an orderly evacuation might be difficult if not impossible. People may think they will evacuate upon notice of a hurricane, but “that’s not going to work,” Dr. Leatherman said. “You can’t get people out of there on a Sunday night in the summer.”

...hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico tend to travel at 10 to 15 m.p.h., but a storm coming up the Eastern Seaboard might hit 60 m.p.h. because of interactions with fronts that occur in the middle and higher latitudes.

The storms move so quickly that “we’d have maybe eight hours by the time it leaves North Carolina to the time it hits the Long Island shore”...
“Even if you did know it was coming, how the heck are you going to evacuate Atlantic City?” he said. And as a storm neared and its surge rose, the waters would cover some of the low-lying evacuation routes in the hour or so before it hit.
“New York City is often on the list of ‘hot spots’ for hurricane catastrophes because the shorelines of Long Island and New Jersey could funnel a large surge into Manhattan if impacted by a major hurricane.
Even storms that do not strike directly can bring rains that cause extensive interior flooding...

...a storm that travels up through New England may hammer Cape Cod and Rhode Island, but a second wave of damage will come with rainwater swelling the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers, among others.

And then there's the storm surge projections :

MORE TO COME

UPDATE : Actually, no more to come. Hurricane Irene thankfully turned out to be a bit a of non-event, at least in the mega-destruction stakes set by Hurricane Katrina.

2011-08-24T02:20:00.001+10:00

A remarkable, hard to find documentary by Orson Welles on the nature of fakery in what we perceive to be reality :

2011-08-24T02:16:00.001+10:00

A long lost Leonardo DaVinci portrait of Jesus as a white man.

2011-08-21T03:23:00.005+10:00

Perry And Bachmann Show What They're Capable Of Fitting In Their Mouths

According to the corporate American mainstream media, these two, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, are "frontrunners" for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 ;

I'm not quite sure who they're trying to impress by showing what they can stuff in their mouths without gagging.

2011-08-19T12:49:00.002+10:00

Never Give An Ape A Gun, Never, Ever

This series of viral vids for the Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes movie are nicely done, straight to the point and very entertaining. I was surprised by just how affecting I found the movie, and those cinema and TV trailers don't do the movie justice. It's far better than what you've been led to believe, and sets up a series of sequels beautifully.

This one is flat-out hilarious :

2011-08-18T23:54:00.001+10:00

Agree or disagree with Ron Paul's beliefs and politics, but it is impossible to deny this is one of the best campaign ads ever made :

2011-08-17T01:51:00.005+10:00

The Black Night Highway Of Ancient Human History Gets A Little More Light

By Darryl Mason

The oldest tools used by human-like creatures every found are maybe 700,000 years old. The most ancient cave and rock carvings ever found are perhaps 40,000 years old. The oldest, still-existing cave paintings are rarely older than that. No writing or cuneiform older than 10,000 years have ever been found. And carbon dating, at best, can only tell us if some ancient curiosity or remains are up to 50,000 years old, and no older. At least not yet.

Human existence, and that of our clearly intelligent predecessors, is a black hole of ancient history beyond 50,000 years past. We can only make vaguely-educated guesses as to what went on all those years ago. Technologies may have been lost and discovered numerous times over hundreds of thousands of years. Civilisations may have existed that are now buried under ice, or rock or oceans, or have simply been wiped clean from the surface of this world.

The simple fact is we don't know much, really, about anything that happened in ancient human history beyond 50,000 years ago.

But every now and then we find mindblowing clues that ancient humans, and the varieties of human-like creatures that have wandered this planet for at least one or two million years, were capable of feats of adventure and exploration and had access to technologies and sciences that until only recently were widely claimed to have not existed beyond 10,000 years ago.

Like this remarkable, exciting story reveals :

Early manlike creatures may have been smarter than we think. Recent archaeological finds from the Mediterranean show that human ancestors traveled the high seas.
A team of researchers that included an North Carolina State University geologist found evidence that our ancestors were crossing open water at least 130,000 years ago. That's more than 100,000 years earlier than scientists had previously thought.

Their evidence is based on stone tools from the island of Crete. Because Crete has been an island for eons, any prehistoric people who left tools behind would have had to cross open water to get there.

The tools the team found are so old that they predate the human species, said Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist from Providence College who led the team. Instead of being made by our species, Homo sapiens, the tools were made by our ancestors, Homo erectus.
"The thing to me that really makes this unique and exciting is ... these other sister species maybe weren't entirely stupid like we portray them," Wegmann said. "They were capable of really complex things."

And we're only now just learning, in these first decades of the 21st century, how intelligent, complex and capable our 'sister species' actually was. We have so much more to learn, and to discover. Not only of what they knew, but what we have lost.

2011-08-17T01:30:00.002+10:00

Hacking The Human Brain

Mike Wehner at Y Tech :

Of all the storage mediums you use to keep information that is most important to you, your brain is by far the most complex. Because of the immense amount of data that the human brain can hold, scientists have been attempting to crack our internal hard drives for quite some time. The scary part? They're actually getting close.
By building complex models of other brains in the animal kingdom — such as those of mice, cats, and primates — and then moving on to humans, researchers have begun to translate the trillions of impulses that go on in our heads into readable data. In fact, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a $4.9 million program to reverse-engineer the human brain in an effort to mine its computational abilities.

Some scientists, including Ray Kurzweil of Kurzweil Technologies, see a future where microscopic robots will be injected into a person's blood stream, head straight for the brain, and monitor activity. Of course, with the vulnerabilities of other medical implants already well documented, we'd hate to know the consequences of someone taking control of our brain's bots.

Cars, Pacemakers, Baby Monitors And Garage Doors Can Also Be Hacked

2011-08-14T23:51:00.005+10:00

Now everyone has a camera, every accident and tragedy has a high-definition clip online within minutes.

The stage collapses at the Indiana State Fair yesterday, in 100kmh winds, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens :

The aftermath :

2011-08-14T00:54:00.007+10:00

Tea Party hijacker, and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is getting some sympathy, even from the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, for Newsweek magazine purposely choosing a bad photo of her for this recent cover :

Redditers, however, think she got off lightly with Newsweek choosing the above photo. They found one that is much, much worse :

Bizarrely, the above image is not photoshopped. Bachmann actually devoured that monster in front of dozens of media cameras.

Maybe she knows more about winning male Republican votes than her critics do.

UPDATE :

US Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann has won a key pre-election campaign poll in the state of Iowa.

The Iowa straw poll held in Ames attracted about 17,000 voters and is considered the first big test of the 2012 presidential race.

Mrs Bachmann, an Iowa-born social conservative, narrowly beat her rival Ron Paul in the non-binding contest.

2011-08-13T16:34:00.002+10:00

Police in the UK are now free to brutally beat teenagers on the night streets of a city like Manchester, and they are cheered for doing so :

The UK police state, it only gets worse, and more brutal, from here on in.

2011-08-13T01:27:00.004+10:00

England is now using digital billboards to broadcast surveillance images of people wanted for minor crimes.

screengrab from ABC News Australia

None of the British bankers and financial experts who played their part in the looting that caused the global financial crisis have had their faces displayed on police public billboards. Not one.

2011-08-10T02:24:00.004+10:00

The Installation Of The British Police State Is Now Being Televised

First the UK riots, then MPs get a free run to pass almost every law they want to licence social networking and internet use, to arm most police with plastic bullets and to install regimes of lockdowns and curfews for "troubled" communities, all before the kick off of the 2012 Olympics.

Here's what the government, police and military can unleash with the laws they have right now :

Curfews, bans on travel, assembly and "other specified activities", confiscation of property, with or without compensation, and most drastically, the deployment of armed forces on the streets to quell disorder are among options that can be introduced by ministers under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Although ministers have appeared to rule out the use of troops, the sweeping powers in their locker can include "any provision which the person making the regulations is satisfied is appropriate" to protect human life, health and safety and protect or restore property and supplies of money, food, water, energy or fuel.
Threats to transport and other forms of communication, to banks and other financial institutions, to land, water or air through contamination, to the the running of parliaments in Westminster and Edinburgh and assemblies in Belfast and Cardiff and to other "public functions" are all covered by the legislation.

And an interesting insight into the first night of the London Riots, and decisions made by the top ranks of London's Metropolitan Police :

"The officers on the streets wanted to do nothing more than go in and arrest people as they were in the act of breaking into property, looting and robbing. But they had been told not to and it was just not acceptable," said a source.

Anyway, here's lots more riot porn.

If only all rioters were so dim :

Londoners are so shocked by the rioting and looting, they haven't even begun to ask whether or not there were agent provocauters involved.

2011-08-09T23:01:00.009+10:00

The 'London Riots' : What The Fuck Is Really Going On?

The Twitter Police In Action

By Darryl Mason

A young mother of two, somewhere in the UK, who had filled her Twitter feed up until late July with details of her beauty course, her love for her sons, her reality TV show interests, and the occasional retweet of a 'Why Be A Hater When You Can Be A Creator' type motivational quotes, suddenly explodes into calls for more rioting in London earlier today :

But the hashtag and message on the next tweet caught the attention of Hampshire Police, who are trying to dispel continuous rumours of outbreaks of looting and rioting in their area :

Hampshire Police on Twitter responded :

Then a more general warning :

If police intend to doorknock every single person in England who has published a message encouraging violence, or encouraging more rioting, they'll be busy for the next five decades. And how to tell between those who were seriously calling for rioting, or trying to organise it, and those who were just being dickheads and fuckwits, having a laugh, trying to be ironic, or teenagers attempting to appear tough and all "Fuck The Police man, innit" in front of their friends?

Impossible, of course.

Blogger for The UK Independent, Jody McIntyre, hasn't had a visit from police, yet, but he did lose his job for this outburst :

There has been plenty of newspaper stories, radio talkback, online articles blaming Twitter for the London Riots, full stop. We will see a wave of politicians and probably police as well talking up the day, coming soon, when Twitter and other social networking will require users to be licensed in order to use them, anonymity made illegal and demands for imposition of censorship over social media, minor to draconian.

There's a growing number of tweets showing up where Londoners try to explain what bothers them most about the London Riots (at least those who haven't been affected by the violence and looting). They have trouble explaining what they're feeling, but need to say that something "smells funny about this", it "doesn't seem real", "how can kids do all these things they say?" and more generally, "what the fuck is going on? Who's doing this to us?"

Who indeed. For now, if you watch BBC and Sky News, it's poor, mostly black and immigrant youth, from some of London's more deprived suburbs.

But are these "scumbags",as they're so commonly called today online and all over talkback radio, really responsible for all the fires, for the high-end looting, for the loads of obviously professional criminals swarming the city in fast cars, always one or two steps ahead of the police, burning and looting wherever they please?

Clearly not.

Something else is going on here, above and below the layer of the socially deprived who adopted a "gangsta" lifestyle from British crime TV shows and Hollywood movies and decided to go smash up their high street and chuck rubbish at cops.

There are highly experienced professional criminals involved in all this, and none of them have to have even come from London.

One of the most disturbing things I saw online about these riots were claims that London's emergency services have received, literally, thousands of calls in the past few days and nights where callers have screamed for help, claiming their areas were being looted, burned, destroyed. When police were dispatched, they found nothing amiss, while in another part of the city, 100 to 300 mostly masked, gloved and hooded people swarmed and looted shops and homes.

Thousands of fake phone calls, to send police and ambulance and firefighters on wild goose chases.

So who organises something of that scope?

A bunch of Kayne West wannabe 15 year olds from South London with Blackberries?

Very, very fucking unlikely.

For now, tonight, London's normal night-time on duty force will increase almost ten-fold to 15,000, there will be armoured vehicles, and police have been given the okay to use gas and rubber bullets.

2011-08-09T10:48:00.009+10:00

London Streets Ruled By Riot Kids

A Google Map of confirmed rioting and looting outbreaks in London, August 8, 11pm.

The UK Guardian, Sept 15, 2010 :

The home secretary, Theresa May, has dismissed fears that deep spending cuts could undermine the ability of the police to tackle possible civil unrest, and insisted the British did not respond to austerity by rioting on the streets.

The UK Telegraph today :

As disturbances entered a third day, the scale of civil disobedience reached unprecedented levels, with incidents in all corners of the capital.

The violence, which began in Tottenham, north London on Saturday spread south and east to Brixton, Streatham, Walthamstow, Edmonton, Enfield, Oxford Circus and Islington on Sunday.

By last night further outbreaks of disorder involving hundreds of hooded yobs had taken place in Hackney, Clapton, East Ham, Lewisham and Clapham Junction. Property and shops were set on fire in Peckham and Croydon.

There are 1400 police on the streets of London for the third night of rioting and looting. There were 5000 on duty for the recent Royal Wedding. Protect the rich and fuck the rest.

These are the kinds of headlines and newspaper front pages predicted for years by blogs and independent news sites - as poor people in Wesern cities were stripped of jobs, dignity, pensions and local services - and now they've become horrifying reality in the 2012 Olympic city :

UK front pages via Nick Sutton

An extroardinary piece of cell phone reporting from the streets of Clapham, London, now controlled by kids, of all colours and backgrounds :

Riot porn, with an acoustic soundtrack :

2011-08-08T23:28:00.007+10:00

The 2012 Olympic City Explodes

First the rocks and looting, the batons, shields and police dogs. Then the shootings and the bombings, the water cannons, tear gas, live fire and the Army.

Nobody knows how to turn this off, or stop it spreading :

The police are outnumbered. They know it, they've admitted it.

And those who want to continue looting know it, too.

The mega-billion pound London Westfields prepares itself for tonight, with ultra-tall anti-riot fencing. The Londoners who spend more than $US3 million a day there will have squeeze through the little gates :

Photo from YFrog

The rioting and looting began in the North London area of Tottenham. The fires burned through the night and well into the next morning :

2011-08-08T16:54:00.002+10:00

The extreme virulence and high mortality capacity of the Bird Flu Virus will be back in news by late August, just in time for the release of this big-budget, Hollywood star-soaked ad for not touching your face so much :

2011-08-06T23:42:00.010+10:00

US Loses 10% Of Its Elite CIA-Navy SEALs In One Day

Did Key Members The 'Neptune Spear' Team Who Killed Osama Bin Laden Just Get Taken Out?

UPDATE : YES

By Darryl Mason

Unofficially, at least, the United States today lost more Navy SEALs in one helicopter crash than they have in the entire decade of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Presumably the cause of the Chinook helicopter crash that killed 25 Navy SEALs in Afghanistan will, like nearly all NATO and American helicopter crashes there, be blamed on malfunctions, or the weather.

The Taliban, however, are claiming a major victory in taking out so many highly-ranked American military personnel in one attack, soldiers who were responsible for so many of the night raids that have killed thousands of Taliban recruits and hazily-linked fighters along with hundreds of civilians, including a long list of women and children, in the War On Afghanistan, now in its 10th year.

Details on whether or not the Chinook death toll includes members of SEAL Team 6, credited with killing Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, haven't been made public. And probably never will be.

But a gut feeling tells me we will learn soon that at least some of the 23 Navy SEALs in the Kill Bin Laden team died in this helicopter crash, which means they will never get to tell their story of what they did in Abbottabad.

It would be a very neat conclusion to the War On Terror, if true. The US announces it is pulling troops out of Afghanistan, the alleged main target in the War On Terror is killed, and then those who assassinated him wind up dead only three months later.

The Navy SEAL Team 6 were recently profiled in a celebratory New Yorker profile written by Nicolas Schmidle, son of Marine Corps Lieutenant-General Robert Schmidle, now serving as the deputy commander of the US Cyber Command.

Nicolas Schmidle said of his story that while he spoke to none of the 23 SEALs involved in the Bin Laden raid, he interviewed two dozen military insiders, including some who were listening to Navy SEALs radios and communications in the lead-up and aftermath of the assassination raid.

Some interesting details about Navy SEAL Team 6, and the Abbottabad raid, from the New Yorker story, which may prove even more interesting should it turn out to be true that many who helped kill Bin Laden are now also dead :

Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator...and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard.

During the ninety-minute helicopter flight, James and his teammates rehearsed the operation in their heads. Since the autumn of 2001, they had rotated through Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, at a brutal pace.

The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid. Most of those missions were forays into North and South Waziristan, where many military and intelligence analysts had thought that bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. (Only one such operation—the September, 2008, raid of Angoor Ada, a village in South Waziristan—has been widely reported.) Abbottabad was, by far, the farthest that DEVGRU had ventured into Pakistani territory.

If there are some 300 Navy SEALs in DEVGRU in total, the Chinook crash in Afghanistan has killed almost 1 in 10 of their numbers :

Red Squadron is one of four squadrons in DEVGRU, which has about three hundred operators in all.

The Navy SEALs are working for the CIA :

The bin Laden mission—plotted at C.I.A. headquarters and authorized under C.I.A. legal statutes but conducted by Navy DEVGRU operators—brought the coöperation between the agency and the Pentagon to an even higher level. John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the C.I.A., said that the Abbottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC into a C.I.A. operation.”

Despite JSOC’s lead role in Neptune’s Spear, the mission officially remained a C.I.A. covert operation. The covert approach allowed the White House to hide its involvement, if necessary.

The stunning number of raids undertaken by Navy SEAL teams in Afghanistan :

This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.” On the night of May 1st alone, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted twelve other missions; according to the official, those operations captured or killed between fifteen and twenty targets.

The crashed helicopter in Abbottabad was supposed to quieten those who questioned the veracity of the official story, heavily leaked to the media :

Black soot from the detonated Black Hawk charred the wall of the animal pen. Part of the tail hung over the wall. It was clear that a military raid had taken place there. “I’m glad no one was hurt in the crash, but, on the other hand, I’m sort of glad we left the helicopter there,” the special-operations officer said. “It quiets the conspiracy mongers out there and instantly lends credibility. You believe everything else instantly, because there’s a helicopter sitting there.”

An interesting warning of the capability proven by Navy SEALs on the Pakistan raid :

The special-operations officer spoke more boldly. He believes that a precedent has been set for more unilateral raids in the future. “Folks now realize we can weather it,” he said. The senior adviser to the President said that “penetrating other countries’ sovereign airspace covertly is something that’s always available for the right mission and the right gain.” Brennan told me, “The confidence we have in the capabilities of the U.S. military is, without a doubt, even stronger after this operation.”

All the Neptune's Spear SEALs met Obama, and got their photos taken with their president :

Afterward, Obama....presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation and said, “Our intelligence professionals did some amazing work. I had fifty-fifty confidence that bin Laden was there, but I had one-hundred-per-cent confidence in you guys. You are, literally, the finest small-fighting force that has ever existed in the world.” The raiding team then presented the President with an American flag that had been on board the rescue Chinook. Measuring three feet by five, the flag had been stretched, ironed, and framed. The SEALs and the pilots had signed it on the back; an inscription on the front read, “From the Joint Task Force Operation Neptune’s Spear, 01 May 2011: ‘For God and country. Geronimo.’ ” Obama promised to put the gift “somewhere private and meaningful to me.” Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.

Will the deaths of 25 Navy SEALs in Afghanistan act as a surprise ending to the American folly of invading Afghanistan? Or will stir up the masses for a greater, expanded war? And just how will it be blamed on Iran?

The event certainly adds a sense of futile tragedy to the greater tragedy unfolding in the United States right now, as the Great Depression II, or Greater Depression as some call it, seems only an inevitability, if not already a reality.

A stockmarket near-crash, the global humiliation of a financial downgrading and the killing of 10% of its CIA-Navy SEALs elite fighting force, all in 36 hours.

What horror next for the United States?

UPDATE :

The Associated Press updates with a denial from a PentaBot, but clearly the AP believes their original headline and sources are correct, as they should :

U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission.
Sources say that more than 20 Navy SEALs were among those lost in the crash in Afghanistan.

Dead special ops soldiers, helicopters shot down, Afghan children killed by drones or raids, the first move by the US military is always to Deny, Deny, Deny.

The Associated Press isn't buying their bullshit, this time.

2011-08-06T23:05:00.002+10:00

Even if Banksy does turn out to be an advertising executive from London, he is without doubt one of the more important and influential artists of Generation X :

2011-08-04T10:07:00.005+10:00

That the centre of our galaxy is a 'star nursery', and appears to our telescopes as holding the shape of an infinity symbol, is a beautiful moment in astronomy and cosmology's history. It may not, in decades to come, turn out to be true, but right now it's a still stunning, awe-worthy idea.

From Space.com :

A twisted ring of gas, one that stretches more than 600 light-years across the heart of the Milky Way galaxy....which gives birth to new stars...
Scientists don't yet understand why the newly observed infinity symbol is twisted and kinked, and little is known about how gas rings, and even rings within larger rings, form in spiral galaxies in the first place.

More Here

2011-08-04T09:34:00.002+10:00

Even At The Brink Of A US Economic Apocalypse, The 1 Percenters Still Want More

It seems like only yesterday the United States was trying to bomb Al Jazeera out of the news business. Now the news station growing quickly towards a global audience of one billion people is fastidiously documenting the downfall of the 20th century's greatest world power.

2011-08-03T01:22:00.005+10:00

From The Wooster Collective, a London artist resets a Metropolitan Police ad on the Tube :

One of the most succint summaries of the Murdoch Hacking And Spying And Bribery And Corruption And Surveillance Scandal I've seen yet :

....journalists on a British tabloid hack into and delete the voice mail messages of a missing (murdered, it turns out) teenage girl. Their activities are exposed by a rival outfit, to widespread public outrage. The paper in question is shut down by its owner, despite having a circulation of millions. Senior policemen, who hired former journalists from the paper as press officers, resign. Evidence emerges of illegal payments from the paper to corrupt police in exchange for information about celebrities, politicians and crime victims. Several journalists are arrested, including two former editors of the paper, one of whom had worked for the prime minister. A whistle-blower is found dead (though police say it isn’t suspicious). The paper’s owner, mogul of an international media empire, is summoned to testify before Parliament. And the allegations of wrongdoing just keep coming.

The rest of that story from New York Times books is here

2011-08-02T10:30:00.002+10:00

United States Marine Corps officer, General James N. Mattis :

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people."

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

"I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all."

General Mathis is now Commander of US Central Command.

Sources for qoutes are here.

2011-07-30T10:52:00.001+10:00

How Rupert Murdoch Conned British MPs By Playing The Sad, Pathetic Old Man Card

By Darryl Mason

Rupert Murdoch, at first, refused to appear before British MPs to answer questions about News International's involvement in phone hacking, spying, blackmail and police corruption. But so furious was the reaction of the British public he quickly caved and announced he would appear.

And so he did.

MPs, like Tom Watson, who had been pursuing Murdoch to come clean for years about the cruel criminality of his News Of The World, were wired as the clock ticked down to Rupert Murdoch's appearance, alongside his son James. Tens of millions tuned in around the world, this was it, the Sun King was on the ropes, he was going to get it in the face with both barrels.

But then Rupert pulled off an extraordinary piece of acting. He shambled into the room, head down, slouched gingerly into his chair and struggled to answer questions, or even hear them

His first words to MPs :

Within seconds, the mood of the entire room changed. This wasn't a monster, this was a very old man, sad and sorry, apparently perhaps even a sick old man, as harmless and innocent as their own granpas. How could these MPs beat up on someone so old, so sad, so "humble", so helpless?

They couldn't, and they didn't.

But once Rupert knew he'd conned the room, he was somehow able to to recover all his faculties and defiant verve, and finished the appearance by reading out a statement written by one of the world's leading public relations companies. He might as well have simply said, "Fuck You Very Much."

So how do we know Rupert Murdoch was faking the I'm A Sad Old Man, Don't Be Mean To Me persona?

Because barely a few weeks earlier, he'd given a lively interview with his wife Wendi on how they'd met and fallen in love :

It's like a decade had passed between the above interview and his Struggling To Answer Questions performance in London. It wasn't even 3 weeks.

Within two days of his 'answers' to British MPs, Rupert Murdoch was private-jetting back to New York City, while thousands of British victims of crime waited for phone calls from police to learn if they, too, had had their grief and privacy, their most intimate moments, violated by Murdoch's goons.

Well played, you old bastard. Well played.

2011-07-29T09:52:00.005+10:00

The Rupert Murdoch Hacking And Spying Scandal has given competing media companies, independent news agencies, bloggers and tweeters enormous opportunities to feast on, mock and profit from Murdoch's legal problems. Now it's time for advertising agencies to get their share of the cash-in from the fiasco.

A German lingerie company called Blush is one of the first out of the gate, not only teasing Rupert and James Murdoch directly with their pitch lines, but also reworking the iconic red and white logo of the now defunct News Of The World paper :

More Here

2011-07-27T13:56:00.004+10:00

One of the reasons I love Twitter is it forces people to say what they want to say in as few a words as possible. Sure they can tease with a line and then link to a 1000 word essay, but it's much better when the truth of the matter is nailed then and there in one or two tweets.

Like this double whammy.

Whereas in his first 3 years....

Nailed it.

2011-07-27T03:41:00.003+10:00

Ex-Murdoch Editor Claims Phone Of Dead Girl Hacked Only To Help Police

One of the most bizarre explanations for journalists spying on victims of crime and why Rupert Murdoch journalists at the News Of The World paid investigators to hack into the phone of a missing 13 year girl, of course it comes from a former editor of Murdoch's The Sun :

...there is a valid, albeit arguable, journalistic justification for it. If it is true, as alleged, that private detectives deleted some messages in order to allow new ones in, then any new message might have carried a clue as to the child's whereabouts and indeed our increasingly beleaguered police might have thought of this for themselves. The NoW showed some initiative here – it is only a pity they did so in such an insensitive and self-interested fashion, failing entirely to acknowledge the distress this could (and did) cause the Dowler family.

These people are fucking insane.

2011-07-23T00:08:00.006+10:00

The worst famine the world has seen in decades is killing tens of thousands of people in Somalia. So Rupert Murdoch's The London Times decides this human tragedy is as good a means as any to try and steer attention away the ongoing hacking and spying scandal that continues to engulf the Times parent company.

"I've had a bellyful of phone hacking."

I can't recall the last time I saw something so repulsive in a mainstream newspaper. And it certainly didn't have the presumed, desired effect. Ourage and disgust is spreading fast about the cartoon, and I'm guessing someone in News International will have to apologise for this as well.

Not Rupert Murdoch, of course. According to him, per his recent testimony to British MPs, he knows nothing about anything that shows up in his newspapers.

Absolutely cold-blooded.

2011-07-21T17:08:00.004+10:00

The Many Sticky Threads That Make Up The Tangled Web Of Rupert Murdoch's Spying And Corruption

Blech :

The Murdoch Hacking, Spying And Corruption Scandal is complicated, and unless you have spent hours churning through the dozen or more articles posted everyday by the Guardian and the New York Times in the past two weeks, it's hard to keep up and get a good overview.

The Columbia Journalism Review provides exactly the overview you need :

For starters, executives, editors, and reporters at News Corp.’s UK unit have: bribed the police; illegally hacked thousands of people’s phones, including a 13-year-old then-missing murder victim’s; tampered with evidence while the victim was still missing. They interfered with a second murder investigation; misled police and Parliament, repeatedly, when questioned about these activities; knowingly employed an ax-murder suspect who had been convicted and imprisoned for planting cocaine on an innocent woman in a divorce case; paid millions of dollars to victims explicitly in exchange for their silence; paid large sums to former employees after they had been convicted of crimes committed at the behest of News Corporation employees; continued to pay for convicted former employees’ high-powered lawyers.

It has further been revealed that a senior News International executive deleted millions of emails in an “apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry”; hid the contents of a top journalist’s desk after he was arrested; stuffed documents into trash bags and took them away as detectives came into the office to investigate; put the scandal’s lead police investigator, whose inquiry was a bad joke, on the News Corp. payroll with a plum columnist job.

Plenty More Here

Rupert Murdoch has jetted out of London, no doubt laughing at how easily he has escaped the full force of the law, so far.

But police investigations are now underway into the culpability of his corporation in the UK and the US.

His day in court may well come, if he lives that long.

2011-07-21T16:59:00.004+10:00

Rupert Murdoch spent a small fortune on a PR company to make him come across as helpless, humble and innocent as possible, during his time before British MPs to answer questions on illegal spying and outrageous invasions of personal privacy. Or not answer them.

Barbra Walters buys the fantasy, completely :

Unbelievable.

2011-07-18T02:47:00.003+10:00

9/11? What's That?

Murdoch Media Is The Real Victim Of This Hacking Scandal

Two utterly mind-blowing, brain-boggling moments from Rupert Murdoch's American propaganda channel, in the same week.

What happened on September 11, 2001?

People don't realise that Rupert Murdoch is the real victim in his own International Spying And Intelligence Gathering Scandal. Or something :

Well done, Fox News. Well done.

2011-07-17T23:09:00.003+10:00

Starring Steve Coogan As Steve Coogan

A trailer for the first movie based on the Rupert Murdoch HackGate scandal has been released, and it's got an all star cast :

I really would love to see UK Labour leader Ed Miliband played by Rowan Atkinson.

Amazing, isn't it? The biggest story of media, corporate, political and police corruption in recent history (it's already bigger than Watergate), and Rupert Murdoch can't turn a buck off any of the plethora of books, movies and TV shows that will flow from it.

He must be seething.

2011-07-14T13:43:00.001+10:00

The new show from the creators and actors of Trailer Park Boys looks utterly demented. As we hoped :

2011-07-13T09:46:00.016+10:00

Rupert Murdoch's Massive Spying Operations Finally Exposed

Police Paid By Murdoch Execs To Spy On Celebrities, Politicians And Terror Victims

Murdoch Faces Spying And Hacking Probe In US

Rupert Murdoch cries for himself, not his victims

By Darryl Mason

It's been a long time coming, but the world is finally learning that media mogul Rupert Murdoch has spent at least a decade funding one of the biggest corporate spying and intelligence gathering operations in history.

It's being called 'Murdoch Hacking Scandal' but spying and intelligence gathering is exactly what it was. Murdoch's attack dogs even hacked the phones of the police investigating them, or so claim detectives.

The targets of Murdoch's spying were celebrities, politicians, the British police, Scotland Yard detectives and the families of terrorism and murder victims. And that's just for starters.

More than 3400 people, were targeted by Murdoch journalists and private detectives in the UK.

If you haven't been following this sickening story on the most intrusive of privacy violations, here's a round up :

In October, 2010, Rupert Murdoch denied any knowledge of the spying and hacking that made him even richer. This is what he said to a shareholders meeting that month :

"We have very, very strict rules. There was one incident more than five years ago … the person who bought the bugged conversation was immediately fired. If anything was to come to light, and we have challenged those people who have made allegations to provide evidence … we would take immediate action"

At the time of that comment by Murdoch, his son James Murdoch was paying off victims of their phone hacking to maintain their silence. Some received Shut The Fuck Up payments of more than $US1 million. And Rupert knew nothing about this? Sounds highly, highly unlikely.

Now the truth is getting out, thanks to the dogged pursuit by UK Guardian journalist Nick Davies, Rupert Murdoch remains cold and calculating in his response to the scandal, and the trauma suffered by the victims of this spying and hacking :

Now the police accused of illegally taking money from Murdoch journalists and executives are facing questions from British parliamentary committees, and Rupert Murdoch himself, along with his son James Murdoch and News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, are to face politicians next week. Incredibly, this scandal may end with the jailing of James Murdoch or Rebekah Brooks, or both of them.

Here's an hilarious video of Scotland Yard deputy commissioner denying he took money from journalists or executives at Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper empire :

Protesting just a little too much there?

The Murdoch Spying Scandal is now hitting Murdoch where it really hurts, wiping more than $7 billion of the value of News Corp stock in the US, and billions more in stock value losses in Australia and the UK.

So what about Murdoch's media operations in Australia and the United States, including Fox News?

Do they, like his British journalists, hack the phones and financial records of civilians and politicians and pay police for information and protection from prosecution? It seems hard to believe that the 'news gathering' techniques so entrenched in Murdoch's British media, and other British tabloids, are not endemic across his empire.

In the meantime, Rupert and James Murdoch are now considering which of their newspapers to close next. His flagship print newspaper The Australian is on the block for the chop within two years, but there will be many more newspaper closures, and mass journalist sackings, to come.

Newspapers are how Murdoch has controlled politicians for decades, but all that is over now, as the minor sex and corruption scandals that they would have once been so ashamed to have blasted across a Murdoch front page pale in comparison to the mind-boggling levels of spying, corruption and blackmail involving chief Murdoch executives.

There is so much more to come....

Screengrab from front page of British tabloid The Daily Mirror

UPDATE : Well, Rupert Murdoch is totally fucked now :

A powerful U.S. senator with jurisdiction over privacy and telecommunications issues late Tuesday urged regulators to look into whether News. Corp. had violated any U.S. laws when its British journalists gained unauthorized access to several individuals' voice mails to pursue stories.
"The reported hacking by News Corporation newspapers against a range of individuals--including children--is offensive and a serious breach of journalistic ethics," said Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Chairman John D. Rockefeller in a press statement.
"This raises serious questions about whether the company has broken U.S. law, and I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated," he added. "I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp. may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans. If they did, the consequences will be severe."

It couldn't happen to a more miserable, vile, corrupt and corrupting scumbag.

How Your New Reality Covered The Start Of This Extraordinary Story In 2009

July 2009 : Murdoch Media Could Pay Out Billions For Spying On Cops, Politicians And Celebrities

July 2009 : Scotland Yard Announces New Inquiry Into Murdoch Spying Scandal And Then Abandons It Only A Few Hours Later

September 2009 : Rupert Murdoch Doesn't Love Newspapers, He Can't Wait To Close Them All Down, "It's Going To Be Great!"

And Just To Prove Rupert Murdoch Is Behind Some Of The Worst Lies Of Climate Change Catastrophe......Murdoch Media Blames '300,00 Global Warming Deaths A Year' On Obese People

2011-07-04T23:16:00.010+10:00

'Fox News' Announces President Obama Has Been Shot And Killed

By Darryl Mason

Ten hours, that's 10 fucking hours, after a series of fake tweets announcing President Barack Obama had been shot twice in a restaurant and subsequently died from the wounds, this shocking (but fake) news remains the July 4 reality for millions of Americans now waking up to see this tweet RTed by friends who truly believe Fox News Politics is telling the truth :

According to Twitter, Fox News Politics is a verified account :

The full series of tweets announcing Obama is dead and wishing the best of luck to US President Biden (**shiver**) :

Millions of Americans are being left shocked and horrified simply by checking their Twitter streams on their phones, before they turn on the news, or look at a news website.

Talk about a July 4 mindfuck.

You're a mainstream news organisation, one of your popular Twitter streams has been hacked and used to announce Barack Obama has been shot and killed. A shocking, jarring thing to read, even if you already know @FoxNewsPolitics has been hacked. And yet, ten fucking hours drift by and the tweets remain online, and are now being retweeted hundreds of times to an audience of millions.

At least this gives Fox News hosts the opportunity to "What if?" the scenario where President Obama is assassinated. What sort of president would Joe Biden really make?

All that horror talk.

UPDATE : While the 'Obama Assassinated' tweets are still live on Twitter, Fox News issued this statement :

FoxNews.com's Twitter feed for political news, FoxNewspolitics, was hacked early Monday morning.

Hackers sent out several malicious and false tweets claiming that President Obama had been assassinated. Those reports are incorrect, of course, and the president is spending the July 4 holiday with his family.

The hacking is being investigated, and FoxNews.com regrets any distress the false tweets may have created.

The sudden avalanche of tweets, phone calls and blog comments with the words "Obama" and "killed" and "assassinated" in them, generated by this piece of cliched hackery, are really going to screw up Echelon.

Happy July 4.

2011-06-27T11:36:00.008+10:00

Warner Bros. Loses Millions On Harry Potter 5, Ninth Biggest Grossing Movie Of All Time...Somehow

To the outside world, this is known as 'Hollywood Accounting', but when I was in LA in 2001 it was called FuckYou Accounting by independent producers. I'm guessing it still is :

According to the (Warner Bros. accounting) statement, the film shows a loss of $167+ million. Even with one of the top 10 worldwide grosses of all time, the film’s distribution, advertising, and print costs—which are listed as being the film’s greatest expenses—are apparently enough to negate every dollar of that achievement.

This means that cast, producers, writers and crew members who signed on for a chunk of the net profits, that is all the money left over from what the movie's made at cinemas, on cable and DVD after all the costs have been deducted, perhaps instead of higher upfront fees, now get sweet fuck all. The movie didn't make money, it lost more than $167 million. FuckYou accounting.

The WB statement :

That is a one page history of FuckYou/Hollywood acconting. Anything and everything gets charged to the movie's total "costs", until there is nothing left but a loss, which means nothing to share with "net profit" participants.

FuckYou Acounting has been part of the Hollywood system for all of its history. FuckYou accounting is Hollywood.

Warner Bros. can also lose money on mega-successful TV shows like Babylon 5, created, written and produced by J. Michael Straczynski :

Straczynski, who wrote 90% of the episodes in addition to producing the show, would receive a generous cut of profits if not for Hollywood accounting.

The series, which was profitable in each of its five seasons from 1993–1998, has garnered more than US$1 billion for Warner Bros., most recently US$500 million in DVD sales alone. But in the last profit statement given to Straczynski, Warner Bros. claimed the property was $80 million in debt.

"Basically", says Straczynski, "by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."

Here's a good story on how Hollywood tried to fuck over Winston Groom, the author of the novel Forrest Gump, which became one of the biggest grossing movies of all time. Groom was in for a cut of the "net profits". Of course there were none to share with him.

The smart people, like Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, James Cameron, and the young casts of Harry Potter and the Twilight series, go for a cut of the box office gross, or First Dollar Gross, but even that can get very, very complicated.

Another good story here, with producer Don Murphy, takes you through some examples of Hollywood Accounting, but also shows the other side, an industry where the upfront costs can be huge and the money slow to trickle back in.

.

2011-06-24T15:56:00.004+10:00

The Tsunami Is Here, But Don't Forget To Close Your Car Door When You Run

What can you say while watching this video of the Japanese tsunami, shot from inside a car, except Holy Fucking Shit! Just extraordinary, in a world filled with cameras, we are seeing the reality of natural disasters like never before, and it's absolutely terrifying :

2011-06-24T01:07:00.006+10:00

JK Rowling Will Be First Author To Earn $1 Billion From E-Books

By Darryl Mason

UPDATE : Since the story below was posted, JK Rowling has held a press conference and announced the following :

* She won't be writing an eighth Harry Potter novel, saying, "I do have closure with Harry. I have no plans to write another novel. I'm pretty sure I'm done on the novel front."

* The 7 Harry Potter novels will be sold on PotterMore.com from October.

* PotterMore.com will create 'expanded universes' for the Harry Potter novels. Each novel in the series will get its own interactive, explorable "world" on the site, and items like wands and potions will be sold to allow fans to go deeper into these worlds. A paywall, of a kind, to extra content.

* Rowling said she has 18,000 words of extra material for the site, adding more detail to the history of the houses of Hogwarts and the personal histories of key characters.

* Rowling said the focus of PotterMore will be on "reading".

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

Harry Potter creator JK Rowling has detonated the literary equivalent of a nuclear bomb amongst the mega-giants of book publishing today.

She has announced it won't be one of the massive corporate book publishers who releases all 7 Harry Potter novels as e-books, or digital books. It will be her.

JK Rowling is set to become the first billionaire self-publisher.

When JK Rowling first signed her Harry Potter book publishing deal (for an advance of a few thousand dollars), she did not sign away the "electronic book rights" as they were known in the 1990s. She retained those rights.

And now those Harry Potter digital book rights, which she would have been offered perhaps the equivalent of a few hundred dollars for in the original HP publishing deal, will make JK Rowling the first author to earn more than a billion dollars from ebook sales. I'll explain why below.

Here's how JK Rowling launched PotterMore, her Harry Potter digital publishing venture today :

Selling ebooks and audio books of already published Harry Potter novels will just be the start of what JK Rowling will do with Evermore. My guess is it will be the gateway to an expanding universe of Harry Potter, much like George Lucas has done with Star Wars. Unlike Lucas, Rowling will make some of the PotterMore content available for free, as enticement to buy some or all of the digital books she'll make available for sale.

To keep Harry Potter alive in the minds of her aging fans, and to ensure the passing on of the stories to a second generation of HP fans, JK Rowling knows she has to keep producing new content.

In the video above, Rowling admits she has been "hoarding" Harry Potter material, perhaps not another full novel, but presumably quite a few unpublished chapters, or longer versions of chapters already published, plus stories from the pasts of various characters fans already know and love. JK Rowling may never write a Harry Potter sequel, but there will undoubtably be prequels, some may not even be written by her, but instead guided by her and sold on PotterMore.

So why will JK Rowling be the first author to earn a billion from ebook sales?

Because JK Rowling owns the digital publishing rights to her creation. She didn't sign those rights away like so many other well known, and stunningly unsavvy, authors have done in the decade and a half since the first Harry Potter novel was published.

Some of the most successful authors in the world today are battling their publishers for a greater slice of the rapidly rising digital book take. And these authors are pissed off. Publishers are trying to please their mega-sellers by offering 20-35% of digital sales, a vast increase on the standard 10-15% authors get back from the cover price of hardback and paperback sales.

Authors argue, and rightly so, that whatever large expenses footed by the publishers in originally editing, designing, printing, publishing and distributing their paper and cardboard books are figured into the big fat chunk of every book sold that already goes back to the publishers.

Authors, and again rightly so, believe that for the publishing giants like Harper Collins their 60% or more slice of every digital book sold is pretty much all cream.

As JK Rowling becomes, effectively, her own digital publishing company, and as she owns the digital publishing rights to all her novels and characters, she will earn back 90% or more of the price of every digital book she sells at PotterMore. The other ten percent from each digibook sold be mostly soaked up by whoever processes the credit card sales for her (unless she's also planning her own PotterMore digital currency and banking system).

Right now, new digital books by well known authors can range in price from $3 to $15. The major publishers would like a world standard price for a digital novel to be in the $12 to $14.99 range. That's the absurd price they're pushing hard to be established at the moment.

JK Rowling will have no need to be so greedy.

If she charges $10 per Harry Potter digital book, and if she really has no legal obligation to give her print publishers a cut of any kind (which she appears not to have), Rowling will net around $9 for every digital book sold.

To earn $100 million from digital book sales, JK Rowling need only sell 11 milion Harry Potter digital books in a year.

But how many is she likely to sell?

If only 10 percent of all the people in the world who ever brought a Harry Potter novel in print, more than 300 million people, buy just one ebook from PotterMore in the first six months after they become available for sale in October, JK Rowling will earn more than $200 million by April 2012.

Even if she charged only $5 per book, she'll still make more than $100 million by mid-next year.

But JK Rowling could easily entice her fans to pay $10 for each digital book, particularly by including additional or alternate chapters, links to an encyclopedia and video and audio features, for example.

If she gets back $9 from every digibook sold, JK Rowling will reach $1 billion after selling 111,111,111 digibooks, a huge volume, but at 22 million a year over five years not an outrageous amount of digital book sales for the world's most popular novel series.

Will Rowling digitally release all seven already published Harry Potter novels at the same time? Or will she stagger the releases, say a new one every three months? Will Harry Potter addicts be able to one day buy all seven books, with extra stories and material, together, as something like The Complete Harry Potter?

Unknown at this time.

Nobody really knows what digital publishing holds in store next year. Or the year after. It was only three years ago that some of the most successful book publishers in the world sniffed at the coming reality of ebook sales outstripping print sales and laughed it all of never becoming anything of great consequence.

Now JK Rowling is digitally self-publishing, the biggest publishers in the world are in a panic. What if Stephen King decides to publish his new books himself? What if every author on the New York Times bestseller list decides to digitally self-publish? What if every new author who finds enough good reasons to even sign a deal with a major publisher demands a majority royalty deal from their digital books?

It's not an exaggeration to say that the 20th century model of mass market book publishing has been changed forever this year, not solely by JK Rowling of course, but primarily because she is going to show every writer just how valuable it is to hang onto the rights of the most likely highly profitable, long-term revenue stream generated from their stories and their characters : the self-published digital book.

2011-06-23T23:31:00.003+10:00

Almost 1 million views on YouTube in a handful of days for a professor explaining in two minutes some of the biggest problems with the American economy? Who said there isn't an audience for the truth?

2011-06-22T14:40:00.001+10:00

Nice slideshow of 30 years of front covers from UK hard rock/metal magazine Kerrang! The early covers are better.

December 1993 :

April 1994 :

The Rest Of The Kerrang! Front Covers Are Here

2011-06-20T12:44:00.003+10:00

She Doesn't Exist, Except In A Hard Drive

Just how convincing are CGHs (computer generated humans) becoming? This convicing :

This girl has never breathed, has never seen the sun, has no parents, no presence in our reality, except as a computer generated image.

Stunning. Just downright stunning.

2011-06-18T01:57:00.005+10:00

"Fear And Panic, Heroism And Cowardice, Sadism And Self-Sacrifice, Hysteria And Mass Emotion"

In this LA Times' Hero Complex piece, Super 8 director JJ Abrams cites the startling poster of 1974's disaster movie epic Earthquake as a childhood obsession (along with Famous Monsters, Dick Smith make-up guides and super-8 film projectors). It certainly is a remarkable piece of movie poster art. Details :

JJ Abrams :

“I was obsessed with the design of the poster for ‘Earthquake’ so we have it in one of the kid’s rooms…it was an image of people just falling. I can’t tell you how many times I just drew it. I was just massively obsessed."

Trailer :

The special effects seem remarkably more 'real' than a lot of the complex CGI work we've seen in the recent revival of the Great American Disaster Movie.

'Earthquake' came in a swarm of big budget, star-soaked disaster dramas of the 1970s - Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno - and many of them, like Earthquake, were massive successes, earning more than $300 million in today's dollars at the box office. Before Star Wars and Jaws supposedly invented the Monster Box Office Movie, these films did enormous business and the disaster genre was a steady earner for Hollywood studios right through the 1970s.

A quick list :

Airport (1970)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The Towering Inferno (1974)

Airport 75 (1974)

The Swarm

Beyond The Poseidon Adventure (1979)

The Hindenburg (1975)

The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

Two Minute Warning (1976)

Black Sunday (1977)

Damnation Alley (1977)

Airport 77 (1977)

The Swarm (1978)

Avalanche (1978)

City Of Fire (1979)

Airport 79 : The Concorde (1979)

Meteor (1979)

Rollercoaster! (1979)

When Time Ran Out (1980)

For the decade of the Great American Disaster Movie time had most definitely run out. The next disaster-themed movie to set fire to the box office was the brilliant disaster epic satire Airplane.

2011-06-09T09:18:00.002+10:00

A perfect example of what the human race can do when it embraces co-operation, instead of confrontation :

2011-06-03T02:38:00.001+10:00

Join The Marines, Fight Balrog

They're not really showing much reality in these US military recruiting ads, are they? Unless there are special Marines now fighting dragons in alternate universes :

From Salon (excerpts) :

"...the New York Times this week tells us that the Pentagon is -- shocker! -- using all sorts of media channels to glorify militarism and sell it to the nation's children. The armed forces, of course, have been carefully constructing this child-focused Military-Entertainment Complex for the better part of three decades. And that complex includes directly subsidizing Hollywood's pro-militarist films, despite the Times' insistence that the military's financial support of "X-Men: First Class" represents the Army's "first sponsorship deal with a Hollywood film."
One part of the Pentagon is employing every media instrument available -- Twitter, Facebook, TV commercials, movies, etc. -- to tell America that becoming a soldier gets enlistees immortal superpowers that will keep them safe on the battlefield. At the same time, another part of the Pentagon is employing its considerable influence over that same media world to try to prevent the blood-soaked truth of the battlefield from ever being seen.
That may help the Pentagon boost its short-term recruitment numbers, but it screws over enlistees who are promised one experience, and given another.

Buy The Fantasy, Live The Reality (For The Rest Of Your Life)

2011-06-02T23:08:00.006+10:00

The Fake Knight Rises

By Darryl Mason

The new Christopher Nolan Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, is still shooting but something of a teaser clip campaign has already begun on YouTube. An account called The Fire Rises has been posting short clips, with a focus on what appears to be the burning of Gotham City and an unintelligble chant. In the order they were posted since May 21 :

Are they chanting, "This is murder, murder, murder, this is murder"?

UPDATE : Warner Bros. is yet to clear this up, but there's a bit of controversy about whether the above clips are actually connected with Nolan's new Batman film, or whether they're in fact 'fan made' and therefore fake.

The chant in the above clips is from the official The Dark Knight Rises website, launched a few days before the first of the clips appeared on YouTube, but some of the footage used is actual news footage, from our world.

For example, the '419' clip uses a processed version of the Philadelphia gas main explosion clip below :

And '419' also uses this footage of a spectacular 2009 skyscraper fire in China :

So they probably are fake, but they're very well done.

Anyway, can't imagine Warner Bros. would be too upset with all the online discussion and speculation these clips have generated. Interesting, though, that after a week they've made no effort to have the clips taken down, even though they sample footage from the first of Nolan's Batman movies.

2011-06-01T12:11:00.014+10:00

Murdoch Media Blames 300,000 'Global Warming Deaths' A Year On Obese People

By Darryl Mason

Two headines from the UK Sun, proudly linked to by Rupert Murdoch's Corporate Green Agenda HQ, to show how hard they've been working to Sell The Fear :

The stories themselves make exactly the kind of hysterical and grandious claims, about the reality and impact of global warming, that the Murdoch media used to once hammer people like Al Gore for spouting off about. But not anymore.

They're on board.

From The Sun :

GLOBAL warming is ALREADY killing 300,000 a year, it grimly emerged yesterday.

Another 300 MILLION are also victims - suffering misery as they battle floods, famine and other natural disasters caused by climate change.
Worldwide a whopping FOUR BILLION people are at risk.

Meanwhile, this story from the UK Sun demands, " ... overweight must eat less for planet" :

The rising number of fat people was yesterday blamed for global warming.

Scientists warned that the increase in big-eaters means more food production - a major cause of CO2 gas emissions warming the planet.

Overweight people are also more likely to drive, adding to environmental damage.
Each fat person is said to be responsible for emitting a tonne more of climate-warming carbon dioxide per year than a thin one.
It means an extra BILLION TONNES of CO2 a year is created, according to World Health Organisation estimates of overweight people.

The scientists say providing extra grub for them to guzzle adds to carbon emissions that heat up the world, melting polar ice caps, raising sea levels and killing rain forests.

...Oxfam warned yesterday that the number of people hit by climate-related disasters will soar by more than half in the next six years to 375million.
The impact of more storms, floods and droughts could overwhelm aid organisations.

The Sun website even includes a countdown clock based around a Prince Charles quote on how long he thinks we have left before we will be destroyed by global warming :

Rupert Murdoch is the world's most influential, powerful promoter of corporate greenism, climate change disasters and global warming 'reality'. That Murdoch also, for 'balance', employs a handful of journalists who theatrically rail and shout about "the Green Faith" and "global warming hysteria" does not alter the fact that Murdoch's biggest TV shows, newspapers and websites are all on board to promote Murdoch's Green Agenda.

That Murdoch's worldwide media operations are now all 'carbon neutral' may be good news for the environment, but once a global price has been set on carbon dioxide emissions, that corporate greenism is going to prove to be very, very good news for Murdoch's profits.

And that above all else is what ultimately matters for Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch Is The King Of Climate Change Fearmongery

Murdoch Media Spreads More Eco-Alarmism : The Great Human Cull Is Coming

Murdoch Executives Proud They Salted The Simpsons With Global Warming Propaganda

The Global Warming "Farce" That Helps Pay The Bills

Rupert Murdoch Pumps Climate Change Disasters, While His Journalists Look Away

Rupert Murdoch Admits He Tells His Papers Who To Back And What To Print

2011-05-31T15:49:00.001+10:00

Nice to hear Weezer rocking out, on an 90s classic :

2011-05-30T00:41:00.001+10:00

Words More People Should Say

However much it may disgust the mainstream media, 9/11 Trutherism is alive and thriving amongst America's youth, as is a deeply cynical scepticism of the authenticity and purpose of the decade long War On Terror. Musicians are no longer afraid to voice such doubts in their songs, as Lupe Fiasco showed in his recent single Words I Never Said :

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
So many other cover ups

Words I Never Said was a lead-in single for Fiasco's third album, Lasers, released in early March.

So did rapping about 9/11 Truth on an album released by a music industry giant like Atlantic destroy Lupe Fiasco's chance at chart success?

Lasers debuted at number one in the Billboard Top 100, and in the top five in Australia and Canada, selling more than 250,000 albums in its first weeek of release, along with a few million 'illegal' downloads via torrents.

So the answer is no, not at all.

Expect to see more of this, as some of the children raised in a cloud of doubt about the official story of the 9/11 events and the reasons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan become teenagers and begin writing novels, making movies and creating music.

2011-05-29T23:41:00.001+10:00

Nine galaxies captured by the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. The oldest stars are the most blue :

2011-05-28T17:07:00.003+10:00

The Apocalypse Industry

Laugh all you like at the American preacher warning of the Rapture, but helping to prepare the wealthy to survive an alleged incoming 'Apocalypse' is now big business :

2011-05-27T13:46:00.002+10:00

Russian Army Colonel Cuts Loose On Weather Wars, Tsunami Weapons

Russian politician, and Russian Army colonel, Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky recently said Russia had "lots of money, resources and new weapons that no-one knows about..."

What kinds of weapons?

“With them we will destroy any part of the planet within 15 minutes.”

But how?

“Not an explosion, not a ray burst, not some kind of laser, not lightning, but a quiet and peaceful weapon....whole continents will be put to sleep forever.”

How very Doctor Strangelove of him :

Weather wars, eh? Really? Weapons that can create tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis?

If the Russians really do have such technology, what then does the United States have? Have there been many successful field tests of these weapons, if they do in fact exist?

On the creation of minor weather fronts, at least, NASA has been able to make its own huge rainclouds for years :