jwz: 3-Apr-2015 (Fri)

Did Leonard Nimoy Fake His Own Death So He Could Seize Control of the Illuminati?

Even though this headline ends in a question mark, I think you should give all due consideration to the important points raised:

As a Rothschild, young Leonard was naturally raised as a Jew and even as a teenager, he betrayed all the trigonometric and sensual qualities of that exotic race. [...]
Spock's message of Kabbalistic Illuminati Satanism became Leonard Nimoy's métier for the next five decades. He extended his creative influence beyond television to films, photography, education, music and even real estate. Curiously enough, Nimoy's accumulation of power neatly coincides with the rise of Hollywood as a global force of mind control. Along the way, newer celebrities have fallen within Spock's Illuminati orbit, such as Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who both employ the infamous V-shaped gesture in their public pronouncements.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

10 Comments

Tags: conspiracies, pranks, religion

How Growers Gamed California's Drought

8 years ago

Consuming 80 percent of California's developed water but accounting for only 2 percent of the state's GDP, agriculture thrives while everyone else is parched.

Agriculture is the heart of California's worsening water crisis, and the stakes extend far beyond the state's borders. Not only is California the world's eighth largest economy, it is an agricultural superpower. It produces roughly half of all the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States -- and more than 90 percent of the almonds, tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and other specialty crops -- while exporting vast amounts to China and other overseas customers.
But agriculture consumes a staggering 80 percent of California's developed water, even as it accounts for only 2 percent of the state's gross domestic product. Most crops and livestock are produced in the Central Valley, which is, geologically speaking, a desert. The soil is very fertile but crops there can thrive only if massive amounts of irrigation water are applied.
Although no secret, agriculture's 80 percent share of state water use is rarely mentioned in media discussions of California's drought. Instead, news coverage concentrates on the drought's implications for people in cities and suburbs, which is where most journalists and their audiences live. Thus recent headlines warned that state regulators have ordered restaurants to serve water only if customers explicitly request it and directed homeowners to water lawns no more than twice a week. The San Jose Mercury News pointed out that these restrictions carry no enforcement mechanisms, but what makes them a sideshow is simple math: During a historic drought, surely the sector that's responsible for 80 percent of water consumption -- agriculture -- should be the main focus of public attention and policy.
The other great unmentionable of California's water crisis is that water is still priced more cheaply than it should be, which encourages over-consumption. "Water in California is still relatively inexpensive," Heather Cooley, director of the water program at the world-renowned Pacific Institute in Oakland, told The Daily Beast.
One reason is that much of the state's water is provided by federal and state agencies at prices that taxpayers subsidize. A second factor that encourages waste is the "use it or lose it" feature in California's arcane system of water rights. Under current rules, if a property owner does not use all the water to which he is legally entitled, he relinquishes his future rights to the unused water, which may then get allocated to the next farmer in line.

If it makes you feel better about yourself, go ahead and let your toilet stink or take shorter showers, but don't pretend that will have any kind of measurable effect. It's nearly as pointless a placebo as separating your trash is. All aggregate personal use can't hope to even compare to what is done at industrial scales. Remember: the damage that BP did in the Gulf every five seconds completely obviated all the recycling you personally ever did in your life.

10 Comments

Tags: big brother, corporations, doomed, firstperson, grim meathook future

The Cyborg Agenda

8 years ago

So this is a thing:

As the 2016 US Presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, I advocate for doing whatever is necessary to eliminate physical disability altogether. We are shortchanging our citizens and our country by not doing otherwise. In the 21st Century, with so much technology and radical medicine at our fingertips, we should reconsider the Americans with Disability Act. It's great to have a law that protects against discrimination, but in the transhumanist age we also need a law that insists on eliminating disability via technology and modern medicine.

Now first, let's just take a moment to savor the fact that "The Transhumanist Party" is a thing that exists. And that "The US Presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party" is also a thing that exists.

But that being said, I admit that I have often thought that if even half of the money we've been pouring into contractors to build lowered service counters, triple-sized bathroom stalls, single-story elevators and miles of ramps were spend on robotics instead, then by now everyone in the country who needed one could have their own Power Loader. Upstream solutions are better than downstream. Just because he's a kook doesn't make him wrong.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

15 Comments

Tags: firstperson, mad science, parts, robots

Rule XXXIV

8 years ago

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

6 Comments

Tags: boobs, furries, mutants, perversions, tv

Current Music: Monsterheart -- Without Eyes ♬

Live and Direct: The Definitive Oral History of Max Headroom

8 years ago

These interviews are amazing, and it's kind of perfect that the real-world story is also a story of hideous corporate greed.

Live and Direct: The Definitive Oral History of Max Headroom:

I said to her that, you know, this is a really boring idea. We're taking these music videos, which are really incredible, and then linking them together with stupid bits of graphics. It's just not interesting.
I thought, maybe I should go with the whole idea of it being boring. What's the most boring thing I could do just to annoy everybody? And the most boring thing that I could think of to do, which would really go against the grain for the MTV generation ... was a talking head: a middle-class white male in a suit, talking to them in a really boring way about music videos.
And I thought, "Oh yeah, I'm on to something here. This is really dull and uninteresting."
[...]
As a consequence, national car parks spent about 3 million pounds changing all their "Max Headroom" signage to "maximum height". [...]
The Max suit was in two fiberglass pieces, and they screw you into it. [Later on] we had different versions of the suit. There was the tuxedo suit, there was a sort of golf suit, and then there was a white tuxedo -- all equally cumbersome, and they went right down to your elbows, and you couldn't move around. But in a way, you compensate, and it becomes even more computer-generated [looking], because you're sort of rocking back and forth to make up for the gestures that you can do with your arms or your feet or whatever. So you end up looking like this sort of jack in the box, squirming around. The TV gods giveth, and they taketh away. And what they tooketh away, I added. [...]
For a time it was... I won't say it was infuriating, but it was frustrating -- you wanted to go, "That's me, that's me, it's not a computer-generated man." But of course they wanted to swear me to secrecy because otherwise anybody could make a computer-generated man if they knew that it was as easy as putting on all this make-up.
John Humphreys: I have to say, it was being presented as computer graphics, and I had people even say to me, who worked in some big companies in Britain, "Oh, you'll soon be out of a job, look at this, it's all done with computer graphics!"
Peter Litten: It was very galling. It won a BAFTA for graphics, and of course other than a few lines, there weren't any graphics. A few wobbly lines. And they refused to enter us in the make-up [category] because they didn't want anyone to know it was make-up. [...]
One of the most bizarre things that ever happened was that Rocky and I were in LA, and the ABC version of 20 Minutes into the Future came on. We could not believe our eyes: it was a shot-by-shot identical retelling, with American actors that kind of looked like the English actors. We were flabbergasted that they would do this. They would go to such lengths to recreate props that we'd found in skips and we'd found in old junk shops and things.
[...]
It was vicious in its condemnation of the way television worked. If you were a fan in those days, you'll remember lines like, "The ratings are plunging, we're down to 58 million!" and the one says, "Well, we could go porno early." Of course we absolutely were biting deep into the bones and ligaments of the hand that was feeding us. And I don't think they noticed, I truly don't think they bothered to look at it until somebody somewhere said, "This is the fifth column, these are all probably communists or something." [...]
The problem was we never had a lot of pushback from the network on anything we were doing. Let's face it, we were out there trying to do Blade Runner every seven or eight days. And for all my affection and respect for Peter Wagg and Steve Roberts, to some degree they were guys who not only had never done American network television -- I'm not sure they ever actually watched it.

I have always wanted to make a Max Headroom screen saver, but -- and this is shocking to me -- I cannot find a 3D model of Max's head anywhere on the interwebs.

Also, this happened: