Monty Python: the Misanthropic Introspection Years

Hans Richter-ghosts for breakfast (1927)

Get Your Man Ray On

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2013/11F

Asteroid heading for Earth?

No. Why do you ask?

Call Bruce Willis

No, you call him. Dudes from Jersey creep me out.

London - A fleet of kamikaze spacecraft could be used to defend Earth against asteroid strikes The robotic vessels would change the direction of any threatening space rock to prevent it from crashing into the planet.

Or not.

Under the plans, member nations will share information in an International Asteroid Warning Group, allowing space agencies to pool their brainpower to come up with the best way of deflecting any incoming objects.

I guess the intrepid "journalist" (let's call him Tin Tin for now) doesn't get that the PLANE wasn't the Kamikaze, the pilot was, and that he is more than welcome to participate in the "beta test", being part of that pool of exemplary "brainpower."

Among the Mandarins, the Words for [Fake] Crisis and Opportunity Mean the Same Thing

Astronomers in Siberia Locate an Asteroid Headed for Earth in 2065:

Recently scientists in the Crimea discovered another potentially hazardous 410-metre asteroid that is headed on a dangerous trajectory towards the Earth

United Nations agrees to establish Asteroid Warning Group

Captain Lou is Watching You Poop

Captian Lou is Watching You Poop

I Know they CAN, buy MAY they?

Video: Killer Asteroids Can Be Deflected With Nuclear Warheads, New Study Says

It is common knowledge that using a nuclear device on a killer asteroid on a collision course with the Earth would only produce perhaps thousands of smaller projectiles headed toward Earth -- making a bad situation possibly worse. And yet, a new study indicates that using a nuclear device might work after all.

It's hard to know exactly what to get panicked about some days.

They Invented Their Own Worst Stereotypes

Now iss de time on Schprockets venn ve tance.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\11B

What Are the Bees Telling Us?

Less than you think, outside of "activist-speak" pedantry:

“We have to wake up early enough to make a change,” said biochemist and beekeeper David Heaf, in the documentary.

After all, what modern cause is complete without refereing to some dead malthusian who can't clarify his argument after it's been wtong for the past 88 years of "mechanization"?

Experts in the film see bees as a barometer of the health of the world. Queen of The Sun refers to Austrian scientist Rudolf Steiner who predicted the collapse of honeybees in 1923. “The mechanization of beekeeping and industrialization will eventually destroy beekeeping,” Steiner predicted.

The notable chappie cited also had this sort of science to his credit:

He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the 20th century, he founded a spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric philosophy growing out of European transcendentalism and with links to Theosophy.

But he couldn't transcend his propensity to throw spaghetti at the wall, despite his considerable career.

I don't mean to make light of the departed, but rather make light of people who will grasp at everything and anything. In this case, to prop up the fact that science already knows to be related to a mold, and that the bee population has been growing since it's decimation.

Pretentious Crap, circa 1988

"Halb-Stadt" (Berlin West)

Where exactly DOES Art-Haus rubbish go when it dies?

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\09A

ESA Plans Mission to Blow Up Asteroid Headed for Earth

Which would be just fine, if it were actually headed for earth.

Scientists at the European Space Agency is planning a test mission to blast an asteroid to see if it's possible to change the course of any that may potentially be heading towards the Earth.

The mission, called Don Quixote, launches in 2015.

Interesting that it would be named for the poster child of lost causes pursued by people with OCD.

Dystopia Then, Dystopia Now

Just as now, the wasteland of popular culture promoted a sort of "unilateral disarmament" against the world's evils. Otherwise we were to still enjoy the misery we were deserving.

Down with Transit!

Berlin “radicals” set off a bomb at Ostkreutz, a Berlin S-Bahn station. It’s a strange choice. Maybe they want to enflame “the German street” in that grafitti-riddled, mostly unemployed proletariats-in-waiting neighborhood. After all, you need to actually be employed to be an oppressed worker, don’t you?

They’ve recently rebuilt the platforms. The place in such a shambles, that it was even an embarrassment to the DDR, but they didn’t do anything about it because no Wessies or foreigners went out that far.

The perps are a rather consistently syphilitic looking bunch of adolescents who call themselves “Black Bloc”. They are prone to Emo-like self-absorption, and cover their faces (in what they must believe is a fashionable manner) out of a paranoid “fear of the state”. The irony is that they always seem to smash property in support of causes that require a big, ham-fisted authoritarian state to realize. The sad thing is that the same is true of the Pirate Party, a group of people who seem to think that they’re intergalactic pimp-daddy Jedi Knights disguised so as not to shock us mere humans. And to think that they’re supposed to be ADULTS.

Otherwise they wall for anything, such as the long love affair they had with Trutherism.

The Bitter Flower of Youth

It doesn't take much looking to dispose of any regrets one has about one's age.

Fund Me, Semour

Can't Euro-Arteest types do anything anymore without state funding?

Mute magazine has had its grant from the Arts Council of England cut by 100 per cent as from 2012, one of over 200 "losers" in a latest round of funding cuts

A Festival of Ironies: the "Bee Crisis" meets Foodie Fetishes

Quotations from the oddly named:

"Their crisis is our crisis," says food guru Michael Pollan. So precious has bee-produced honey been considered over the ages that it was not even marketed...

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\2-C

When did Einstein enter into this?

Einstein was right - honey bee collapse threatens global food security
Telegraph.co.uk

The bee crisis has been treated as a niche concern until now, but as the UN's index of food prices hits an all time-high, it is becoming urgent to know whether the plight of the honey bee risks further exhausting our food security.

How long will it take for some "bee constituency" starts implying that their pet panic-issue IS the cause of comodity prices?

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\2-A

Go Green, Jennifer Parrish: The buzz about bees

"A diet primarily of bread and gruel may be our future if we do not address the honey bee crisis"...

Pedantry and malthusian excess, all in one mouthful. What more could you ask for?

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\1-D

US investigation of Google Street View was a 'wasted summer'
Inquirer

DOCUMENTS HAVE SURFACED that shed some light on the lackadaisical attitude of US regulators towards last year's Google Street View privacy violations.

A senior attorney at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) described the Google investigation as "a wasted summer" in a letter obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The letter was written only a couple of days after the FTC decided to drop its inquiry into the matter. Many privacy advocates, especially in the UK and Europe, would be aghast at hearing the attorney describe the matter as "a time suck".

They need more time to abuse for-profit schools between naps, I guess.

Data protection organisations in the UK and Germany certainly have, unleashing considerable fury over the fact that a company that has so much data about us didn't have policies in place to stop this from happening.

A Portrait of the Effectiveness of Soft Power

26-JAN-2011:

EU to Cairo: respect 'legitimate yearnings' of citizens

27-JAN-2011:

CAIRO — Political protests may be rocking Egypt with a new, nonideological force, but President Hosni Mubarak and his allies have not veered from a playbook they have followed through nearly three decades of one-party rule.

As always, the government has responded to the unrest primarily as a security issue, largely ignoring, or dismissing, the core demands of those who have taken to the street.