You know that it’s bound to happen, especially if you’re a comic nerd or rabid anime fan. Be prepared to survive:
9. If an acquaintance of yours seems to disappear everytime the Hero puts in an appearance, rub some of those brain cells together and see what comes up.
[. . .]
11. If you are a news reporter, find a happy medium between the people’s right to know and your right to not get kidnapped/held hostage/etc.
12. Likewise, if you are a policeman, bank guard, or night watchman, and your first shot bounces off of the intruder’s chest, try shooting other areas of the intruder’s body, like their face, groin, etc. If this also fails, do not waste the rest of your ammo on him/her/it, or risk your neck in hand-to-hand combat; instead, fall back and observe.
[. . .]
21. If a Superhero takes up residence in your city, a nice spacious estate in the country will help you to actualize your potential lifespan.
22. If you are a security guard for a vast, powerful corporation, try to get assigned to the Marketing or Personnel departments, rather than R&D.
[. . .]
49. No matter how hooked you are on phonics, don’t try to pronounce things you find inscribed in ancient artifacts.
H/T to Nicholas Rosen for the link.
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Joe Scarborough: Mark Halperin, What was the president’s strategy? We are coming up on a deadline and the president decided to please his base, push back against the Republicans. I guess the question is, we know a deal has to be done. Is this showmanship? A lot of times you go up there and both sides and they act tough so their base will be appeased, then they quietly work the deal behind the scenes.
Mark Halperin: Are we on the seven second delay?
Mika Brzezinski: Lordy.
Halperin: I wanted to characterize how the president behaved.
Scarborough: We have it. We can use it. Go for it. Let’s see what happens.
Brzezinski: We’re behind you, you fall down and we catch you.
Halperin: I thought he was a dick yesterday.
Scarborough: Delay that. Delay that. What are you doing? i can’t believe — I was joking. Don’t do that. Did we delay that?
Halperin: I said it. I hope it worked.
Scarborough: My mom is watching! We’ll know whether it worked or not.
Either his apology will be accepted (eventually) or he’s managed to resign in the most public way imaginable.
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Austin Bay points out that better communications have been important elements in the “Arab Spring” and other populist protests in the world right now, but there’s another element joining them together:
What links the Arab Spring rebellions with political agitation in China and at least another five dozen simmering or emerging crises?
If your answer is “the Internet,” you have identified one of the key information technologies that spread the flames. However, the common human fire in these disparate struggles is intense disgust with embedded corruption.
Tyrants maintain control by isolating and intimidating their subjects. However, since the advent of the printing press and increasing public literacy, preserving tyrannical isolation has become a bit more difficult.
Over time, subjects become aware of social, cultural, economic and political alternatives to the despot’s rule, despite the despot’s propaganda. Just how deeply West German television influenced East German resistance to communism is debatable, but the Iron Curtain could not hide the overwhelming evidence of Western affluence and the West’s ability to occasionally remove corrupt leaders.
Communist elite corruption amidst systemic economic failure certainly influenced resistance throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The special stores and vacation homes enjoyed by Communist Party favorites infuriated workers denied similar access. East European workers knew that they were industrialized serfs in handcuffed societies falling further and further behind Western European nations. In 1989, when the Russians concluded the Eastern European security forces could not — or would not — shoot everyone, the Berlin Wall cracked.
Timothy P. Carney talks about the new book by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch:
Libertarians today are mostly considered a variety of conservative — Ronald Reagan with fewer bombs and more pot. But Welch and Gillespie don’t cast libertarianism as one of many political ideolgies. Instead, they portray it as a truce. It’s unpolitics. The authors see evidence of a “libertarian moment,” not so much in public opinion on policy matters (though outrage about bailouts helps), but in cultural trends that spill over into politics.
Younger Americans don’t like being told what to think. Gone is the voice-of-God Walter Cronkite figure. Younger adults assemble their own news feeds a la carte, following trusted voices on Twitter and RSS feeds. Even walking through a shopping mall, the authors argue, shows how we’re much more individualistic as a culture than we used to be. The authors say there’s a proliferation of cliques and types in high schools and among adults, too. The Internet has helped people find kindred spirits both near and far, making it less necessary to modify your interests to match an existing group. Americans, increasingly, choose their own way.
And there, in a nutshell, is the traditionalist’s core argument against the internet (grounded in their remembered high school experience): it allows geeks and nerds and other unpopular kids to find solace, support and fellow feeling outside their immediate physical surroundings. That undermines the traditional rule of the jocks and the beautiful people.
Welch and Gillespie see our cultural trends as evidence that “decentralization and democratization” are taking territory from “the forces of control and centralization.” The political corollary, naturally, would be a movement that creates more space for individuality. It would be almost an anti-political movement.
But this is where every dream of an independent or libertarian uprising crashes into reality. You don’t win at politics without being good at politics. The people who are best at politics are the people who stand to gain a lot from it — special interests and people who get like to play the political game. Neither group is likely to include many anti-political decentralizers.
What about the libertarians who are already caught up in politics? The think-tankers, the activists, the journalists? Well, they’re another obstacle to a libertarian revolution. For one thing, this is a group famous for infighting. The Libertarian Party has been racked with strife, splits and feuds for its entire existence. Welch and Gillespie want to pitch a big tent, but Beltway libertarians are famous for imposing “purity tests.” (Q: Should vending machines marketing heroin to children be allowed on public sidewalks? A: There shouldn’t be public sidewalks.)
That last quip is quite true: the very first time I walked in to a libertarian gathering, I was besieged with purity testing of that sort. I nearly walked right back out without a backward glance.
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Many weird and whacky warnings get attached to products as a result of product liability concerns, but some of them must be generated without legal prompting:
Warning #2: Booze Blues
Seen on a Terrestrial Digital outdoor antenna: “Do not attempt to install if drunk, pregnant, or both.”
Of course, if you’re drunk and pregnant, you probably have bigger problems.
Warning #3: Three-Dimensional Danger
Seen on a Samsung 3D TV disclaimer: “Pregnant women, the elderly, sufferers of serious medical conditions, those who are sleep deprived or under the influence of alcohol should avoid utilizing the unit’s 3D functionality.”
Man, those drunk moms-to-be just can’t catch a break!
Warning #4: Options, Options
Seen on a computer software package: “Optional modem required.”
The writer’s mandatory English language class, incidentally, was not completed.
Sean Gabb dissects what is really going on with the current push for the British government to “do something” about the sexualization of children:
The argument I have been putting is fairly simple, and I have not deviated from it in my various appearances. I argue as follows:
1. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who uses the “protecting the kiddies” argument is really interested in controlling adults. Indeed, one of the organisations most active in pushing for controls is Media Watch UK, which used to be called the National Viewers and Listeners Association, and which, led by Mary Whitehouse, spent most of the 1960s, 70, and 80s arguing for censorship of the media.
2. Ratings on music videos will have no effect, as many of these things are now downloaded from the Internet. As for controls on clothing, children will wear what they want to wear, and it will be hard in practice to do anything about it.
3. How children dress and behave is a matter for their parents to control, not the authorities. Doubtless, there are some rotten parents about. But any law of the kind proposed will not be used against a small minority, but against parents in general. It will be one more weapon in the armoury of social control that has already reduced parents to the status of regulated childminders.
4. Authoritarian conservatives deceive themselves when they think the authorities are fundamentally on their side. The moment you ask for a control to be imposed, you put your trust in people you have never seen, who are not accountable to you, who probably do not share your own values, and who will, sooner or later, use the control you have demanded in ways that you find surprising or shocking. The attempted control of clothing, for example, will certainly be made an excuse for the police to drag little girls out of family picnics to photograph the clothes they are wearing, or to measure their heels to see if they are a quarter of an inch too long. Anyone who dismisses this as an absurd claim has not been reading the newspapers. That is how the authorities behave. Even when it is not an abuse in itself, any law will be abused by them.
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David Bowden reviews Amnesty! When They Are All Free, a BBC documentary on the 50th anniversary of Amnesty International:
The Amnesty film, by contrast, was documentary as corporate hagiography, evading nuance in favour of quick and easy narrative with a facile message: it ain’t easy being righteous.
It was a shame, because the story it told was potentially a fascinating one. Amnesty was born in the first wave of Sixties radicalism, and faced with the realisation that the apparently progressive politics of universal human rights adopted after the Second World War was being hijacked in the interests of Cold War realpolitik. The organisation began as a documentary news organisation, chronicling the disappearances and abuses under repressive regimes around the world. In the spirit of its famous torch image, Amnesty shone a light on human-rights abuses wherever it found them.
Certainly, as a product of the British postwar liberal intelligentsia, much of the organisation’s self-proclaimed apolitical stance smacked of naivety from the off; founder Peter Benenson was quickly forced to fall on his sword after accepting funding from the British government. Yet this overview of its early days was captivating stuff, offering a reminder of the genuine risks posed to its researchers and witnesses as this small organisation routinely found itself on the wrong side of Western and Soviet-backed juntas alike in its pursuit of accurate reporting of the human costs of the broader superpower struggle.
But Amnesty’s interventions were having distressing and unintended side effects — notably, the new tactic of ‘disappearing’ political prisoners before they became international causes célèbres. In the film, this raised interesting questions of journalistic ethics and apolitical campaigning, particularly pertinent in the context of the more cavalier instincts of the Wikileaks era.
Sadly, however, while willing to touch upon some of the uglier aspects of Amnesty’s growth from small, earnest campaign into the international China-baiting behemoth it is today, When They Are All Free tended to sideline difficult questions in favour of its heartwarming narrative. While there was a degree of soul-searching on offer, the problem with critiquing human rights as a political agenda today is that much of it is done by those on the inside. As Alex de Waal once remarked, ‘it is as though the sociological study of the church were undertaken by committed Christians only; criticism would be solely within the context of advancing the faith itself’.
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I dropped by Ace of Spades H.Q. to steal borrow their nifty little “DOOM” graphic to slap on to the last post about the coming collapse of the US dollar, when I happened to read a paean to the lovely Christina Hendricks by Ace. He out-and-out declares his lust for her.
In a shocking display that if you make something legally accessible, people are willing to pay for it (who’d ever have expected that?), Netflix has supplanted Bittorrent as the largest user of peak-time internet traffic:
Is solving the copyright “wars” really so difficult? New traffic research shows that Netflix has overtaken Bittorrent as America’s favourite internet application, knocking http into third place. “P2P is here to stay,” note the authors in Sandvine’s Global Internet Report, Spring 2011 edition, which shows that demand for legal, paid-for stuff is the single biggest internet traffic trend.
Copyright-holders who are slow to bless legal services, by contrast, find themselves being swamped by pirates.
Netflix now accounts for 24.71 per cent of peak time aggregate traffic in the US, pushing Bittorrent into second place with 17.23 per cent. By contrast, the Sandvine numbers show that in markets where there are no legal services, pirate services flourish. In Latin America, file-sharing program Ares grabs 15.48 per cent of peak-time (fixed line) internet traffic, behind http. In Europe, Bittorent rules, with 28.4 per cent of peak-time traffic, ahead of http. Here, YouTube grabs third place, with almost 12 per cent of peak-time traffic.
We signed up for a month-long trial of Netflix (on the recommendation of Dark Water Muse) and have been quite happy with the service. In fact, it was a major factor in our buying a PS3 over the weekend, as our existing Blu-Ray player was incompatible with Netflix.
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Stephen Gordon points out that there appear to be some dangerous assumptions out in the market about whether and when the Bank of Canada will change interest rates:
The Bank of Canada is scheduled to make its next interest rate announcement on May 31, and my understanding is that the consensus of opinion among private sector analysts is that interest rates will remain unchanged, because there was no explicit warning of an increase in its April 12 decision.
This consensus of opinion may turn out to be well-founded — but not for that reason. Recent reports confirm what Bank officials have said several times: the Bank of Canada believes that it under no obligation to provide guidance about short-term interest rates. Governor Mark Carney has already noted that one of the contributing factors of the financial crisis was the private sector’s overconfidence in its ability to predict central banks’ behaviour.
This doesn’t automatically mean the Bank will raise interest rates at their next meeting, but it does mean that it could happen (despite the “lack of warning” in April).
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For the last few weeks, I’ve had a musical track bothering me: I knew it very well, but didn’t know what it was called or where I’d encountered it. An unexpected earworm from the past. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I finally managed to track it down — it’s the theme music to a British TV show that I don’t remember watching (yet I know the theme music very well):
It’s a very distinctive late-60s to early 70s sound. I have no idea why I know it so well: perhaps my dad used to watch the show and I just heard the music in the background. Actually, that’s the only thing I could come up with to explain why I’d know the theme music, yet not remember ever having watched the TV show.
I thought I’d exorcise the earworm demon and buy a copy from iTunes. But no, they’ve got several covers of the music by various artists (including an interesting version by the Band of the 1st Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment — currently classified as “Rock” by iTunes), but not the original. HMVDirect has a similar selection (covers, but no original performance). “Curses, foiled again!”
I found out more about the TV show from Wikipedia, the Unofficial Sweeney website, and a true labour of love, a page devoted to sleuthing up all the many musical tracks used in the original series named for the only album of music released: the Shut it! The Music of “The Sweeney” site.
This page is an ongoing development to identify the 300 different pieces of music used in the 1970s British television series The Sweeney. As is common practice with many television shows, other than the specially-comissioned title theme, Harry South’s unforgettable, rousing actioner, “ready-made” music was mostly used to provide incidental themes to the action. These came from specialist “Production Music” houses, the most well-known being De Wolfe, KPM (Keith Prowse Music), Chappell and Bruton. The years 1971 to 1978 arguably represented the genre’s most creative era (before competition and corporatism took over and strangled much artistic creativity), serendipitously co-inciding with production of The Sweeney itself.
In 2001 Sanctuary Records issued a Sweeney CD compilation with 25 tracks used in the show. As good as it was, it really only scratched the surface and sadly no further volumes have been forthcoming.
But unless I happen across a physical copy of the CD, I’m stuck with my persistent earworm. Here’s the closing credits, in hopes it’ll help banish it from my mind temporarily:
British law is already difficult enough for outsiders to suss out, but the recent use of superinjunctions to prevent even the hint that a story is being legally suppressed makes it even tougher:
The high profile are gagging, the press is losing the ability to speak, and now the Twitterati is vomiting up half-digested rumours. All the signs are that Britain is in the grip of the legal virus known as ‘injunctionitis’.
It makes for an unedifying spectacle. In between news of uprisings in the Middle East, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Will’n’Kate, the British press has been running another set of stories about what it is forbidden from reporting. The reason for this is the increasingly problematic use of the injunction, a legal prohibition issued by a judge that prevents a particular story from being published. While these have been issued for a few years now with largely little public knowledge — especially after the use of so-called superinjunctions, which forbid people from mentioning the fact that an injunction exists — over the past year or so, the injunction in all its forms has started to make the news all by itself. Which, you’d be correct in thinking, rather defies the point.
In fact, over the past few weeks, the attempts by certain individuals to gag the press has resulted in an outbreak of calculated press indiscretion. There has been the tale of the unnamed English actor who employed the services of Helen Wood, a prostitute whose previous clients include footballer Wayne Rooney. Of course, given the injunction, Wood couldn’t do a proper bonk-and-blab about the actor, but there was enough detail there for a salacious few pages’ worth. Then there was the unnamed Premier League footballer who had allegedly been having an affair with Big Brother 7 victim/star Imogen Thomas. She has since been frequently pictured looking disconsolate in a series of fetching bikinis.
It’s bad enough when the government uses its powers to suppress public discussion of items of importance to “national security” (with the definition as loose as possible). It’s much worse when the courts are allowing private individuals and corporations to have their own version of court-imposed censorship, as there’s no possibility of it being a “national security” issue.
It has not just been the tabloids making news of the unreportable. There has also been the case of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin who took out a hyper-injunction, which absurdly forbids anyone from even talking about the subject of the injunction to the lawmakers themselves — namely, parliament. (Although, of course, someone did, hence we know about its existence if not any of the details.) And things became even crazier when a prominent member of the media, BBC journalist Andrew Marr, revealed that he himself had violated his own profession’s freedom by taking out an injunction in 2008 to hush up an infidelity. In fact, as The Times gleefully reported, there are over 30 high-profile injunctions currently in operation involving a whole heap of public figures, from footballers to politicians.
So, in at least one area, we’re back to there literally being two different kinds of law, differentiated by the wealth of the plaintiff.
Caleb Cox rounds up ten geeky gadgets from science fiction shows and movies that he thinks we’d all like to have:
Tomorrow is always round the corner in the world of tech, and gadgets that started life in the imaginations of mad folk are starting to become a possibility.
Tools that give us superpowers may seem impossible, but ultramobile computing is a reality these days, with commonplace kit that seems more capable than devices Gene Roddenberry dreamt up.
As we’ve already looked at fantasy blades you wished you owned, it’s about time we talked-up the fantasy tech, after all, we are Reg Hardware. So here’s ten of our favourite gadgets from popular culture that may or may not be the tech of the future.
Let us know if there’s anything you think we’ve missed and give us your views on its commercial prospects in the comments section at the end.
His choices are:
Cloaking device — Predator
Holodeck — Star Trek: The Next Generation
Hologram communication — Star Wars
Orgasmatron — The Sleeper
Peril Sensitive Sunglasses — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
