CHECK OUT THIS LITTLE HORROR

http://www.aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf

From MrMR. (and do let it run its full course.)

Oddly, it could be a promo for my new book Who's Watching You, but actually it isn't. (See last Saturday.)

The secret word is Happenstance

THOSE DALEKS ARE IRRESISTABLE

While attempting to duck under the porn/cheesecake issue, it would seem that, in real life, human/robot love is on the rise (so to speak.) Valerie points out a fascinating tale recounted by Clive Thompson on Collision Detection (read the whole thing.)

At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield. Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly. The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse. The colonel ordered the test stopped. “Why?” asked Tilden. “What's wrong?” The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. “This test,” he charged, “was inhumane.”

CRYPTIQUE – Don’t ask, don’t tell, Will Robinson.

The secret word is Anthropomorphic

A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM NEWTON THE CAT

This is so simple a dog can do it. The Animal Rescue Site needs lots more people to click on it daily to meet their quota of the free food donated to abused and neglected animals. The way it works is that their corporate sponsors/advertisers donate food in exchange for advertising, but these donations are calculated by the number of hits on the site. Thus use the link above to go to the site, click on the purple box "fund food for animals". It doesn't cost you a thing and takes about a minute. It would probably take another minute to email the link to everyone you know. Do it now, humans.

The secret word is Purr

AUGURIES OF DOOM HEAT UP

As I both hoped and expected 12.21.12 seems to be taking hold on the peripheries of the collective dementia. A character with unlikely name of Mhynek delivers a load of foreboding.

"The complete loss of the honeybee will felt over the next 4 years. The sunspots are just starting. They will peak in 2011. Many things will change in the next four years. Expect a shortage of food, much death, followed by new dawn of enlightenment. This is how the 4th epoch of man ends and the 5th epoch of man begins after 13.0.0.0.0, you know this date as Dec 21st, 2012. The Mayans prophesied *that from 1999 we have 13 years to realize the changes in our conscious attitude to stray from the path of self-destruction and instead move onto a path that opens our consciousness to integrate us with all that exists. The Mayans knew that our Sun, or Kinich-Ahau, every so often synchronized with the enormous central galaxy. And from this central galaxy received a 'spark' of light, which causes the Sun to shine more intensely producing what our scientists call 'solar flares' as well as changes in the Sun's magnetic field. The Mayans say that this happens every 5,125 years. But also that this causes a displacement in the Earth’s rotation, and because of this movement great catastrophes would be produced."

Meanwhile the cash registers are ringing, right along with the death knell. Amazon.com shows more than 100 books on the subject, with titles like Doomsday 2012 and 2012: You Have a Choice! Spirituality conferences are already convening like "2012 Ascension Symposium," which promised, "Offer humanity global reassurance and change the Consciousness of the world." This would all seem to be shaping up to be much more fun than Y2K.

*Oh yeah, and you can watch an animated countdown of how long we have left!

CRYPTIQUE – Will the last one alive turn the lights out?

More bad news but it's in Mayan.

A VERY BAD IDEA OF YESTERYEAR

And, alas, as history has proved, Katy Manning's naked embrace of a Dalek did not make her a household name or even a global object of desire lusted after by millions.

The secret word is Davros

But if all of this is a little retro-sexist tacky or whatever, we recommend the fabulous...
Elephantcam

OR MAYBE EXTINCTION'S CLOSER THAN WE THINK

Astronomers have spotted a cataclysmic explosion that marked the death of a huge, distant star in a blast five times as bright and powerful as any they had seen previously. They said yesterday that a similar fate may be imminent for a star in Earth's galactic neighborhood. The size and energy of the newly recorded blast, 240 million light-years away, have already begun to transform scientific understanding of how especially large stars explode, and have left awestruck researchers concerned -- and a little excited -- about what might happen to the similarly enormous and unstable star closer to home.

The secret word is Boom!

And the numeric sequence is 12.21.12

CRYPTIQUE – It’s hard to make the transition from the unthinkable to the unspeakable.

SOME AFTERNOONS I THINK THIS SPECIES SHOULD BE EXTINCT

The way in which the story – and much more important, the hideous live cell phone footage -- of the death of 17-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad has been orbiting the periphery of the mainstream media for days now greatly disturbs me. The teenager was stoned and kicked to death by a crowd of close to a thousand men because her family were from a minority Kurdish religious group called the Yezidi, and she was seeing a Sunni Muslim boy. Local security forces seemingly looked on, and the so-called "honour killing" was recorded by dozens of cell phones – modern technology for the 10th century – and are now circulating the internet like fucking snuff movies for the amusement of the mentally hideous. The dilemma is what does one do? Anyone with half a brain and an internet connection can find the footage in approximately 18 seconds. Maybe I should just keep quiet, but the images are in my mind and will not go away, and maybe silence really does equal death. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m a fucking writer. So I can chronicle the multitude of ways men can find to shame and disgust me.

IS THIS REALLY KANSAS, TOTO?

"Clearly the goats don’t like it."

As we should probably have expected, the post-tornado devastation in Greensburg, Kansas has been massively exacerbated by half the Kansas National Guard being in Iraq and, as a result, ability to shift emergency equipment has been severely handicapped. Kansas (Dem) Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said the government’s response to the disaster was undermined by ongoing National Guard deployments to the Middle East. “I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower, and the real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg.” Also having the totally unbelievable Sam Brownback as one of its Senators may also hamper Kansas more than a little. Brownback, who has spent all his time in the Senate fighting evolution, gay marriage, and broadcast indecency, is now running for the Republican nomination, as the GOP “Rapture” candidate.

MEANWHILE MISS TEMPLETON IS NOT AMUSED
"Mondays are bad enough as is, what with the going back to work and all, but when one comes home to a story on the evening news where one's president (strategically shaved chimp though he may be; we are still a republic when last checked, E Pluribus, Divided we Stand, No Money Down, etc. etc.) is freakin' COMING ON to the Queen of England in some mixture of Dallas used-car salesman sincerity crossed with ankle-bracelet wearing "bringing sexy back" predator charm, then one knows that the seventh seal is not only broken; it's long past its warranty. Cue the locusts."

NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK (See Saturday’s blatant self promotion.)

DENIZENS OF THE DEEP

Doc40 has published its share of bikini babes struggling with octopi, but, for a change, here is the real thing. (Octopi, not bikini babes.) From Collision Detection come the most amazing pictures of exotic deep-sea life, which have to be worth the time and effort. And also fab film of an octopus opening a bottle from Peromyscus.

The secret word is Fathom

MASSIVE MONDAY VONNEGUT

(image lifted from swac)

I couldn’t help it, when this piece came in from Subversive Ilene, I was going to cut out some parts to make it an easy-read length, but then I caught myself. I was going to start cutting up Kurt Vonnegut? Not a chance, Lance. So I just posted the whole damn thing as it was delivered.

The secret word is Word

“Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.
We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show. But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.
"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break! It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution. But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale." George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything. PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation. They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed. In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were. And with good reason. In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake. The O'Reilly Factor. So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times. Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you? Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”
© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without A Century: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America.

NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK (See Saturday’s blatant self promotion.)

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #9

“She was practiced in the art of…"

STRAWBERRY SPEED FOREVER

You gotta read this one and also watch the video. Candy flavored crystal meth? Do I ask myself what they’ll think of next? I can think of little else to add except that I really had better get my definitive book on amphetamines written while the rapidly diminishing literate public still has enough brain cells to read it. Beyond that, I can only accept the concept as further confirmation that the world is very definitely going to hell, quite as predicted, in whatever metaphoric receptacle you care to select.

The secrets words are Bleeding Man

CRYPTIQUE – Maybe, sometimes, you just might find you can actually get what you want.

NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK = NEW BOOK (See yesterday’s blatant self promotion.)