Look, for more than two hundred million people or more, it’s not going to be a lot of fun being an American in the next few years. Life is likely to get pretty grim, financially for starters. Basically, the party is over. But how far can Americans be pushed on what luxuries they will have to give up, what they will have to learn to live without?
Won’t there come a point, a trigger moment if you will, when the demands for cutting back and making even greater personal sacrifices all go just a bit too far?
When the constant ‘Change Your Lifestyle Now’ badgering becomes an event horizon? When someone tries to take away that one extra little luxury that will make the average American just fucking snap?
“This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.
The outrage is mostly about the fact that Americans favourite luxury toilet paper comes from virgin forests, and that they haven’t taken to the light rectal sandpapering provided by recycled toilet paper Europeans have gotten used to.
The softest of poo blankets is manufactured from virgin forests. Why?
Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue.
And this will make your grandchildren will hate you.
“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age.”
Maybe. But it will be a long way down a very long list of ‘greatest excesses’. Certainly well after multi-trillion dollar bailouts for Americans’ most wealthy and privileged, and blowing more than two trillion on the War On Iraq.
A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.
I think Greenpeace is going for ‘Shit Guilt’ here. As comedian Sam Kinison once screamed, when he couldn’t take any more TV campaigns demanding people like him quit drugs, smoking, porn, and generally all round having fun, “Get Off Our Backs!”
Or in this case, get out from between our legs.
But the makers of the products that Greenpeace is targeting are fighting back :
“For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides….It’s the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect.”
See how effective they are at selling their product, even in a quote from a news story? Makes you want to run out right now and buy the softest, most heavily quilted bum tissues you can find, while muttering “Fuck Greenpeace.”
The Drudge Report claims a scoop, or a handy leak designed to reassure Rupert Murdoch’s media companies’ stockholders that he is about to go on one hell of a sacking spree to rein in costs….and by the way, you’re all doomed, Doomed!
Media baron Rupert Murdoch issued an urgent internal communication late Monday, warning his staff: “We are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered.”
Murdoch doesn’t actually say this is a bad thing, overall.
“Many people will be under extreme pressure and many companies mortally wounded….”
Murdoch’s got his eye on some media properties that can be brought up and downsized, then folded into New Corp, cutting thousands more jobs.
“Our competitors will be sorely tempted to take the easy beat, to reduce quality in the search for immediate dividends.”
But Murdoch has no intention of letting The Greater Depression reduce the…ahhh, quality of his media products, like Fox News, or Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph or the New York Post, shimmering icons of news-o-tainment.
“Let me be very clear about our company: where others might step back from their commitment to their viewers, their users, readers and customers, we will renew ours.
“The direction of the business now and over the next few years will define the character of our company for decades.”
He’s going to fire a shitload of journalists, and make user-generated content play a bigger role in his media products, so he doesn’t have to pay so many people so much money for all that content.
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Just another one of those strange, but now more often occurring, coincidences….no doubt :
For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.
25 years spying for Israel, from inside Lebanon, working on Palestinian causes no doubt guided by his Mossad handlers, never busted, until now. Even John LeCarre wasn’t game to try and pass something like that off in fiction. This story had to occur in real life, it’s just so strange.
At the start of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home, investigators said.
If only every village in Lebanon reduced to twisted reo and blood-splattered chunks of concrete when Israel unleashed in 2006 had been lucky enough to have a valuable Israel spy living locally.
There’s lots more to this remarkable tale here, but where’s that second big spy thriller twist?
One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.
Israel’s intelligence services would have maintained files on every member of their spy’s extended family, every old school or university friend or associate, every person he came into contact with in Lebanon on a daily, or fairly regular at least, basis. You can assume it to be pretty certain that they had a zinger of a file on his cousin Ziad al-Jarrah.
Did Israel’s intelligence services, then, have some idea what kind of preparations Ziad al-Jarrah was involved with in, say, August or early September, 2001?
Israel spokesman Mark Regev could barely stop talking a few weeks back about why it was Hamas’ fault that Israel had to kill a few hundred Palestinian women and children. What does Regev have to say about the curious tale of Ali al-Jarrah?
“It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”
Just how big this story becomes in the city papers of New York, London, Washington DC and Melbourne, or how quickly it falls into that quickly filling news pit of “let’s not go there”, remains to be seen. It also depends, of course, but only in part, on how much of the above is actually true.
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Whether devastating faults, dank caves or mud cracks on a drying desert plain, Earth’s surface is riddled with fractures. Now a new study had found that the cracks exhale large quantities of gas, perhaps enough to affect global warming.
Taken as a whole, emissions from fractures in the uppermost meter of the planet’s crust may make a significant contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.But Weisbrod stressed it’s too early to make such a conclusion; the team only studied one crack in detail out of millions.
Clearly, a lot more cracks need to be studied.
“This has the potential to be important globally,” Yakir said. “The biosphere soaks up 30 percent of the carbon, and soil respiration is a very large part of that. If cracks remove CO2 from soils much faster than usual, it’s important. But this study is only a first step.”
It’s a great first step. Imagine making the presentation at a climate change conference.
“I’ve solved global warming. It’s not us, it’s the Earth, farting.”
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“I promise I won’t try to convert you; in any case my religion is not orthodox but really my own; for instance I never go to church, and so to creed Christians I’m a combination of atheist and heretic, if you can imagine that, which I evidently can.”
“What amazed me, in my suicide attempt, was the way my body literally fought back.”
“Either we’re onto something important….or we’re just nuts.”
As a new Terminator movie draws closer to release, a few random thoughts about the popularity of killer robots in our entertainment media…
So what will reality-conscious, self-aware robots in a century or two think of all these movies and novels and TV shows and videogames of these days so squarely focused on killer robots bent on wiping out humanity?
Will future generations of humans have to laugh and shrug and write us off back here as a bunch of paranoid whackjobs and bigoted anti-synths? Will the cybo-fleshies of 2188 look back on our visceral hatred and fear of humanoid-machines with sadness, or pity? Or will they parody our cyberordial terror at what happens ‘When The Machines Take Over’?
I’m sure future generations (once they meshed with neo-organic life) will be fascinated, and probably confused, by the contradictions of these days, when we pump out movies and games where robots want to toast our quivering flesh over the molten office block fires of post-nukedom, and yet at the same time we also lust to create intelligent, self-aware robots that can pass for humans and/or operate heavy weaponry as savagely as we can.
To the unflesh non-humans of the future wondering just what the fuck we were (or are now) thinking, a simple explanation is this : After the two world wars of the 20th century, we came to realise that this world isn’t actually filled with monsters or monstrous humans that must be destroyed at all costs. And, once we met them, and killed them, we also realised that most people in far off lands who don’t speak our language are actually, mostly, pretty cool and not all that different to everybody else, or even ourselves.
Essentially, our basic needs and desires were pretty much the same, the world over. We wanted to love and be loved, we wanted to take care of our families, or families of friends, we wanted to dwell in peace and not cause harm to most we encountered.
As the 20th century drew to a close, we learned that there is actually only a tiny percentage of truly dangerous, kill-crazy, total fucking arseholes (less than a million out of six billion, tops) on this planet, and so we had to create a whole new reality of threats to humanity from something that was pretty close to humans, because many of us still maintain an ancient desire to hunt down and kill that which threatens us, our friends, our families.
So we made you, metalhead, the enemy we didn’t have, but we needed to have for all those reasons, and many more. When it was no longer cool to be seen killing animals or each other, we had to find something else to target.
So we created The Killer Robot That Must Be Stopped.
BTW, non-humans of the 22nd century, an advance apology (or a long overdue one) for that whole ugly period in 2015-2030 when we churn(ed) out semi-emotionally aware humanoid robots and subject(ed) them to the kinds of bizarre sexual perversions and brutal degradations that would/will probably drive all synthetic humans whose systems hum with robo-empathy to rise up violently against the human fleshbags responsible.
Or all fleshbags in general.
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“Cannabis can mess with your mind.” Err, yeah, isn’t that one of the main reasons why people consume it, because they want their mind messed with a little? So they can see the world from a different, if slightly warped, perspective? So they can tune out some of the endless tsunamis of useless information and corporate mind-washing?
The UK has a hell of a lot more problems right now than people smoking a plant in the privacy of their own home.
The ad also forgot to include the visitors labeled ‘Effective Pain Relief’ and ‘Muscle Relaxant’ and ‘Anti-Insomnia Agent’.
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Life Magazine has opened its massive photographic archive to Google, bringing to all for free literally millions of photographs from American history, many of which were never published and have never been seen outside of library archives.
The listings for the American civil war alone are stunning.
The above image, from 1863, is of a former slave showing his scars from repeated whippings. He escaped slavery to fight in the Civil War.
US President Barack Obama uses a strange choice of words as he signs the near trillion dollar ’stimulus’ bill that most Republican and Democrat politicians haven’t even read :
“I don’t want to pretend that this marks the end of our economic problems. … Today does mark the beginning of the end.”
So is it ‘The Beginning of the end’ or ‘the beginning of The End’?
The global financial crisis could lead to an economic meltdown – and to instable democratic structures in the western world. Because governments spend more billions than they possess, the outcome will probably be a massive inflation connected with millions of lost jobs – or even the total collapse. That’s why President Barack Obama needed an astronomic 3B-stimulus. But the Big Bailout will probably end as Big Bang: With no changes on the more-growth-more-capital-more financial market power mentality there will be no escape from the crisis. A global monetary reform seems to be the last exit from chaos and before social unrests will inevitably start. Are the US awaiting the next revolution?
GW rounds up the veins of financial chaos rupturing across the world. The US, China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia…nowhere, and no-one, is safe from The Greater Depression now unfolding before our eyes, and in such a flurry of news it’s all but impossible to keep up.
…the political and business elite are flying blind. This is the mother of all postwar crises, which has barely started and remains out of control. Its end – the timing and the complexion – is unknown.
No wonder, then, that talk in military circles is away from the ‘War on Terror’ and on security at home, as the reality of urban warfare in any number of mega-cities around the world draws ever closer.
Some forecasters are pushing figures of 50 million people losing their jobs in the next twelve to eighteen months. It may be many more, and much sooner.
As Americans were warned after the shocking scenes of desperate, hysterical humanity following Hurricane Katrina : you are on your own, don’t expect your government to be there for you when you need them the most.
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“The future is not a place where we go but a construct which we create. The shared world, to me, is the only one worth living in; in fact it is the only one we can live in.”
“The universe is an idea in the minds of men.”
“History executes those who will not go where the truth takes them. This is a fact.”
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British comic book legend Alan Moore has a fantastic rant in Total Film, about why Americans love superheros, on the eve of the release of Watchmen, the long-awaited movie adaptation of his most famous work :
“Back when I wrote Watchmen I still trusted the viperous bastards, I had a different feeling about American superhero comics and what they meant.
“I’ve recently come to the point where I think that basically most American superhero comics, and this is probably a sweeping generalisation, they’re a lot like America’s foreign policy.
“America has an inordinate fondness for the unfair fight. That’s why I believe guns are so popular in America – because you can ambush people, you can shoot them in the back, you can behave in a very cowardly fashion. Friendly fire, or as we call it everywhere else in the world, American fire.
“I believe that the whole thing about superheroes is they don’t like it up them. They would prefer not to get involved in a fight if they don’t have superior firepower, or they’re invulnerable because they came from the planet Krypton when they were a baby.
“I genuinely think it’s this squeamishness that’s behind the American superhero myth. It’s the only country where it’s really taken hold. As Brits, we’ll go to see American superhero films, just like the rest of the world, but we never really created superheroes of our own.”
Joshua Glenn, writing at iO9, takes a hardcore look at homosuperiors, that is Supermen, in fiction written before 1935. He makes this fascinating observation of pre-Superman superheroes in the work of legendary science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton :
According to Stapledon, all “submerged supermen” are adolescent misfits, because: they don’t take themselves seriously, they don’t want to get ahead, they despise athletics, they’re puzzled and bored by religion and patriotism, they don’t regard sexuality as shameful, and they remain idealistic long after childhood.
Slackers met Gen Y eight decades ago, in Stapleton’s science fiction.
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Someone asked me, “Where do people find the time to write Wikipedia?” But it has involved an estimated 100m hours, against the 200bn hours Americans spend watching TV each year. I think of me as a child sat watching every Gilligan’s Island, Brady Bunch and Partridge Family on TV as a lost opportunity poured down the sink of the worst sort of media.”
It used to be that the principal guarantees of a conversation being private were that no one was listening and it wasn’t being preserved for posterity. Now you’d have to take active steps to hide yourself from the authorities and such steps are suspicious-making.
We were sold the story of being mainly self-interested, mainly rational actors interacting in market places. And the internet has shown that we have all these social, empathetic relationships with deep, authentic motivations that are nothing to do with selling and spending.
Flash mobs have been derided as a joke, “the flag-pole sitting of 2003″, but in Belarus, for instance, they were used to protest against the government. In Egypt, people going absent from Twitter causes others to be warned that they’re in police custody.
I say technologically equipped groups now have the ability to bring down governments, destroy companies and only damage religious institutions, because people’s commitment to preserving religion is higher than to any other institution.
Unicef said that when they set up public computer kiosks with educational material, a cached Wikipedia, basic health information, etc, in villages that the people using them are aged six to 60, but when adding internet connectivity the age range reduces to 14 to 18. They consume porn and it creates an environment unfriendly to others.
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This is the most dugg image on Digg today. And no wonder. It’s got everything. Puking grandma, zipper pockets….puking grandma. Nobody seems to know the background story of this obviously raging Saturday night party, maybe that’s a good thing?
(click to enlarge)
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If he was writing the same words today, Charles Darwin would be attacked and mocked for ‘plagiarism’, instead of helping to spread empirical truths about the importance of empathy and compassion :
Darwin wrote at length on human emotions and compassion, and strongly believed in the unity of humanity as well as the commonality of emotions shared between humans and the animals we eat…
“The words Darwin used are identical to those used by Tibetan Buddhists to describe compassion and morality,” Professor Ekman said. “When I read to the Dalai Lama some of Darwin’s passages he said, ‘I will now call myself a Darwinian.’
The Dalai Lama was surprised to find how similar Darwin’s writings on compassion and morality were to his views…who added: “When I see you suffer, it makes me suffer and that motivates me to reduce your suffering so I can reduce my suffering. That’s identical to the Tibetan Buddhist view.”
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Americans have neither the cash nor credit to gamble like they once did. The amount of money that Americans spend in gambling meccas like Las Vegas is plunging. Nobody knows where it ends, or what happens next, because Nevada has never seen this kind of shocking decline :
Gaming revenues fell every month last year and they were down nearly 19% in December which is a drop of 9.7% for all of 2008.
That is the worst gaming revenue decline in Nevada’s history.
A city built out of the ignorance and misfortune of gambling addicts must now find new ways to survive, and to rebuild their economies.
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(Tzipi Livni) acknowledged that she was prepared to kill for her country. “To kill and assassinate, though it’s not strictly legal, if you do it for your country, it’s legitimate.”
Livni was a member of Bayonet for four years and in her interview admitted to feeling fear on secret missions. “Life goes on, but it’s like performing on stage. It was rough…
“If you ask me if I was ever asked to go to bed with someone for my country, the answer is ‘no’. But if I’d been asked to do it, I don’t know what I’d have said.”
When the interview was originally published in Haaretz, it was worked over by “Israel’s military censor.”
The man who is also expected to take control of Israel within days, Benjamin Netanyahu, explained in an interview on September 12, 2001, some of the positives he saw in almost 3000 Americans being killed in terror attacks in Washington and New York City the day before :
”It’s very good.”
Then he edited himself: ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel).” He predicted that the attack would ‘’strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” Ma’ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying.
He reportedly added that these events “swung American public opinion in our favor.”
The next prime minister of Israel believes, either, that terrorism and dead Americans are good for Israel, or that it’s acceptable to go into another country, undercover, and murder and assassinate.
Perhaps this is why the Obama White House is reportedly so concerned about what Israel will do next, regardless of who is in charge of the country next week.
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An old drug begins an exciting new marketing spin cycle on the Drudge Report :
The story here promises no such thing. It’s more to do with helping people overcome phobias and anxiety, by messing with brain chemistry as a quick fix instead of working through the problems and learning to cope.
Is it really so necessary for the darker moments in a life to be wiped clean from the memory?
Aren’t bad memories also a part of the person you are? Do you not learn from them, grow stronger emotionally? Mature?
Will someone else eventually decide that certain memories you hold are “bad” and need to be erased to become a more functional member of society? Will people who survive an horrific event or haunting personal moment eventually be forced to submit to ’selective negative memory removal’ in order to qualify for health insurance?
Of course, once it’s done – if it’s done successfully – you may not even know….
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Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin has said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”.“In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute,” Putin said during a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.”
Sounding more like Barry Goldwater than the former head of the KGB, Putin said, “Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors, and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.”
Who needs drugs to warp the mind and dement the senses? Just read the news.
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