Birds Before The Storm

I know, I know, not the most promising title to a blogpost, but man, this is funny. It’s 7 minutes of a cop trying to pass a truck. The truck driver cuts him off, every time. When I watched it, I accidentally put on Loreena McKennit at the same time, for a particularly hyponotizing experience. Definitely worth it. And no, nothing really changes during the video, it’s safe to only watch half of. But it really is funny.

Finally, I give you more than 24 hours notice before I play a show. Here’s 27 hours notice. Tomorrow night, Monday Dec 15th 2008, at 3043 Frisby Street, Baltimore MD. Doors at 6pm. I’m playing a show! I’m playing with Dark Dark Dark, who are an accomplished acoustic act from Minneapolis, and Armida, a ukulele player and singer from College Park. (Watch her videos instead of listening to her recordings, in my opinion). I’m looking forward to it immensely. You should look forward to it too. In fact, you should come, and bring your friends. I might even remember to have zines and such with me to give away, too.

Last night I attended the Red & Black Ball, a neo-victorian/surrealist/steampunk/anarchist bit of wonderfulness organized by the good folks of 2640. Almost everyone came in proper colors and in a wide array of finery, mostly DIY. It was hard for me, of course… black I’ve got plenty of, but red? My accordion is red, but I wasn’t playing. But what I’m getting at is that there were people of all ages and there was a seance and there was live, classical orchestral music being played by punks.

The world I want to live in has live classical music being played by punks, in case anyone was wondering. I wish that the event was a regular thing. After being into it for some years now, I finally understand why I love steampunk.

Friday, November 28th:

The £12m defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre (10ft) razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading “no new coal”. He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence.

From guardian.co.uk. For four hours, the UK’s carbon footprint went down by 2%. (Of course, this happened by taking out a huge chunk of the electricity in the grid.)

The UK has seen a lot of these sorts of protests in the past year. Well, not these sorts, but you know, civil-disobedience style ones. Let’s see where this goes, yeah?

It was raining today, so I didn’t really feel like going anywhere. Fortunately, my friend decided to skin the mouse that the cat had killed. I took pictures of the process. Note that these pictures are not for the squeemish, like me.

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About a month ago, we learned that reality TV had hit bottom, with the announcement of Smile, You’re Under Arrest, a reality show from Fox (of course) in which people with warrants are tricked into believing it will be the best day of their lives, only to discover it is actually the worst, as they are being arrested. The man responsible, Mike Darnell, talks about how the show will only have non-violent criminals. Oh, and it’s all okay, because (from Darnell): “If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law.”

So anyway, I was full up with hate for a good minute over that. But today, the internets provides good news, perhaps even an answer. Kopbusters (website currently down, most likely flooded with traffic). This show, created by Barry Cooper, is essentially a setup to catch the police breaking the law in a drug raid. They rented a house and outfit it with surveillance, then set up grow lights and two small potted plants that looked like weed, but weren’t. Eventually, the police raided the house, even though they had no legal method of “knowing” that there could be drugs inside. Here’s some of the raw footage.

Cooper is an ex-narcotics cop who now apparently makes his living selling videos about how to avoid getting busted for drugs. He also campaigns against the drug war.

I’m looking forward to seeing the show, and I hope it runs for a long, long time. (Or that we abolish the specialization of enforcement and remove the police as an institution. That would make me happy as well.)

I want to be around when this happens. Not that I have anything against Warsaw in particular, mind you. It’s just, so beautiful. (I found this image on darkroastedblend, but I can’t figure out where they found it.)

(Photo by Jan Vandorpe)

So there’s this archipelago, Socotra, in the Indian Ocean. And near as I can figure out, everything there is amazing and beautiful and wonderful, at least visually. There are 40,000 people but they only put roads in two years ago. There aren’t any fancy oceanside resorts, though it caters to eco-tourism. And there are tons of species of plants and animals (like the trees above) that are only found on those four islands. I want to go there. That’s all.

*offer not valid unless I was going to marry you regardless, which is rather unlikely.

Just finished reading Liberation: Being The Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America, and it’s a fine, fine book. Essentially a pulp adventure story, but quite politically aware, this book is about, well, the aftermath of an economic collapse of the United States. But one of the most interesting things about this book is that it avoids traditional novel plot structure. The protagonist is hyper-capable, and there appears to be very little conflict… it’s like playing a video game in God mode or something. And yet it pulls it off as quite entertaining… the conflicts arise in the subtexts: this isn’t a book about love, but the love interests are where the tension arises. Mostly, it’s just beautiful to read.

I’m a little bit disappointed by the authors portrayal of the anarchist character, who is described as a “militant anarchist” and whose single goal primarily revolves around blowing things and people up with bombs. There is an anarchist organization mentioned in the novel as well that appears to have a similar desire… despite the author name-dropping Bakunin, it is clear that he is not at all versed in modern anarchism. There is a similar slander portrayed against the anti-industrial folks, but it is a bit more interesting, intentionally outlandish, and doesn’t pretend to connect to anything that actually exists in the real world.

Today I learned a new word: misoneism. It means hating change. Sometimes I hate the future. Today I can’t decide if the future is neat or horrendous, or most likely, both. Anyhow, there’s been some interesting stuff over at Danger Room:

Tank armor, and how to get past it. In the old days, tanks just had a crapload of heavy metal as armor. Then someone developed shaped charge warheads, which blow right through armor. So, in the 1980s, they developed reactive armor. Reactive armor means covering the tank with little explosive tiles (a little bit counter-intuitive, I know). These will blow up when they are struck, thus removing the threat of the shaped charge. So, anti-tank people (you know who you are) developed the tandem charge. The tandem charge (in this case, an RPG) shoots a single warhead with two charges: the first triggers the reactive armor, the second is the shaped charge. So the ante went up, and tank designers made sensors that detected incoming RPGs and shot out charges to meet them. It’s called an active defense system (or watch a video). Not to be outdone, Russia managed to make an RPG they call the abrams killer. (The M1 Abrams is the USA’s main tank). This little devil sends a tiny missile a split second ahead of the main missile. The defense systems blow up the tiny missile, but have a .2 second cooldown before they can defend again, so blammo, dead Americans. (Or Russians, or Israelis, or anyone else defending a tank with active defense).

Next up we have guided bullets, which don’t exist yet. They are intended to be the future of sniping. Oh, joy. Here’s something from those bastards at DARPA:

The use of an actively controlled bullet will make it possible to counter environmental effects such as crosswinds and air density, and prosecute both stationary and moving targets while enhancing shooter covertness. This capability would have the further benefit of providing increased accuracy and range while reducing training requirements.

Nice use of the word “prosecution.” Kind of a Judge Dredd sort of law it brings to mind. Anyhow, the pentagon passed out millions to Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, LLC to develop this nastiness. In fact, here’s a pdf of the project’s goals. Note that this includes phone numbers and names and all of that of people who are behind this project (at least on the DARPA end). Glad we have freedom of information in this country, I gotta admit.

And finally, something I gotta admit is pretty cool, even if it is cool in the “robots will kill us all” kind of way. A flying remote control drone thingy that looks like a miniature beer keg. It hovers. It provides survelliance. Did I mention that it hovers?

All of this begs the question… why don’t we apply our grand scientific opposable-thumbs minds towards something useful? Every time you develop a better tank armor, someone is going to develop a better anti-tank weapon. This can only escalate, how have we not noticed? What about, oh, I don’t know, developing systems to feed, educate, and provide liberty for humanity? (And not in the “tanks provide liberty, team America fuck yeah” kind of way, but in the “let people have freedom and autonomy” kind of way).

Well, there’s a lot more money in bombs than in, oh, destroying the concept of money. A lot more power in the accumulation of power than the decentralization of power. Ramble, ramble, rant, rant.

Edit: at least we have jetpacks now.