"The surface of the Earth is broken up into several large plates that are slowly shifting. About 250 million years ago, the plates on which the present-day continents rest were positioned quite differently, so that all the landmasses were clustered together in one supercontinent now dubbed Pangea. About 250 million years from now, the plates are again projected to reposition themselves so that a single landmass dominates."

Some see benefits. The Northwest Passage stays open longer to vessel traffic between Europe and Asia, cutting the voyage from London to Tokyo to 9,950 miles. That voyage via the Suez Canal is 13,000 miles; the Panama Canal route is 14,300 miles. Also, less ice over the Arctic land means more space exposed for oil and gas extraction.

Okay, Bush ain't gonna get out of Iraq no matter what anyone says or does short of a)impeachment, b) a lobotomy, or c) one of his daughters setting herself afire in the Oval Office as a war protest. A few days ago, upon arriving in Australia, "in a chipper mood", he was asked by the Deputy Prime Minister about his stopover in Iraq. "We're kicking ass," replied the idiot king, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald. Another epigram for his tombstone.

And the Democrats ain't gonna end the war. Ninety-nine percent of the American people protesting on the same day ain't gonna do it either, in this democracy. (No, I'm sorry to say that I don't think the Vietnam protesters ended the war. There were nine years of protest -- 1964 to 1973 -- before the US military left Vietnam. It's a stretch to ascribe a cause and effect to that. The United States, after all, had to leave sometime.)

Only those fighting the war can end it. By laying down their arms and refusing to kill anymore, including themselves. Some American soldiers in Iraq have already refused to go on very dangerous combat missions. Iraq Veterans Against the War, last month at their annual meeting, in St. Louis, voted to launch a campaign encouraging American troops to refuse to fight. "Iraq Veterans Against the War decided to make support of war resisters a major part of what we do," said Garrett Rappenhagen, a former U.S. Army sniper who served in Iraq from February 2004 to February 2005.
The veterans’ group has begun organizing among active duty soldiers on military bases. Veterans have toured the country in busses holding barbeques outside the base gates. They also plan to step up efforts to undermine military recruiting efforts. [...]

"When I first saw it," said Park Superintendent Donna Garde, "I was totally amazed. What ran through my mind was that this looked like something out of a low-budget horror movie, but I was looking at something five times as big as what you’d see on a Hollywood set."

"We were on vacation in Central Florida from the 10th to the 25th of September in 2001. After intensive tele-visual disaster consumption (shared with the world, no less), we decided for a visit to Walt Disney World (to be more precise, we were mainly concerned with the Magic Kingdom) on 15 September 2001. We entered the premises and strolled along "Main Street USA", when we heard a Disney tune, well-known to us. And as it is usual for a chain-reaction of associations, a strange video-like sequence emerged in our subconsciousness..."

The Zeigerpointer (a German-English word-mix tautology that we feel free to give birth to) is the most penurious form of capitulation in the print media. Various people, predominantly in local newspapers or magazines of regional interest, are forced by photographers armed with Zeiss-lenses to indicate occurrences. These people have to point at things. With their bare hands! They have to present occurrences that withdraw themselves through their absence, through optical expiration or simply the course of time. Like car wrecks that have already been recovered, asylum seekers that have fled, or burnt down buildings that were entirely consumed by the fire. Occurrences that elude the media machinery because of visual boredom or a state of simply-not-there-anymore. Well, then let's give our readers a Zeigerpointer! The Zeigerpointer shall zeigerpoint it out!

Susan Clancy, the author of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, has probably gotten more personally involved with alien abductees than any other skeptic. Clancy is frank in her belief that extraterrestrial visitation is exceedingly unlikely and that the alien-abduction experience can be explained more plausibly in terms of sleep paralysis with hallucinations, the availability of cultural scripts, and the development of false memories through hypnosis and other guided imagery techniques. Nevertheless, Clancy is not out to debunk the alien abduction myth, nor does she try to disabuse her interviewees of their delusions. Rather, her purpose, as the title of her book indicates, is to probe the psychological and cultural factors that lead some people to believe they have had encounters with extraterrestrials.

Hello, you, this is me – and that's him. But what are you? And what am I? And what is he? Three questions, and in each case the answer is philosophically interesting. The interest turns on the further question: "What is a person?"

monochrom's Porn Tub Punch: Drinking The Essence Of Technology Away. Pretty Good Performance, Featuring YOU, My Friend.

If you can say that porn is what drives technology to our households again and again, and if you can say further that most porn is simply about "putting sperm" on a female's body in a more or less Jackson Pollock-esque way ... why not try to come to the somewhat wacky but nice and handy conclusion that the very essence of this fucking stupid game can be calculated by a quite arbitrary method of counting porn movies at a randomly chosen video rental store somewhere in this post-free-love-San-Francisco-town. The number of films available there is to be multiplied with the number of cumshots on an average porn DVD (that we found through an empirically correct but gruelling field trial watching a great number of porn movies in fast forward mode). This number again is to be multiplied with the amount of sperm a male body (within the age and health parameters for acting in porn movies) produces, as it is (probably) contained here: www.wikipedia.org. Thus we get a basic unit (liquid) of what people call "technological advance". This unit can then be filled in a bowl, which is then going to be served at the opening party. Of course the bowl will only contain fake sperm just as it is in most of the earlier porn movies because we couldn't "come up" with such an amount of real sperm just by ourselves. Please apologize. But that's your luck, because now you can drink it. And be (probably) sure: We'll (probably) mingle some liquor in it to get you partying (probably) really good. We hope in the end we all will feel a little gender-troubled but proud of gulping down technological advance in this highly concentrated form and maybe you have some real sex with somebody in the end. P.S.: A highly theoretical lecture comes along with it as if this was the serious part of a serious event to be remembered... Cheers!

Military analysts are always talking about strategy. Often they are proposing one that they have just invented and naturally think will be the solution to the nation's security problems. The present time, filled as it is with the threat of Islamist terrorism and with the debacle of the Iraq War, is especially marked by the proliferation of strategic proposals.

More seasoned analysts know, however, that if any strategy is to prove effective, it must fit social and structural realities, including the state of technology, the economy, and the political system. Less noted is the role of demography.

Until recently, demographic changes were so slow that they hardly seemed to be a variable effecting strategic challenges. But today, many major nations are undergoing rapid and evident changes in their demographic structure. This is most obvious in Europe, but it is also the case in the United States, Russia, China, and Japan. Demographic disruption is impacting America, all of its major allies, and all of its traditional or potential adversaries. [...]

For the last quarter century, corporate America has been at war against the labor movement. After a long period in which unions were an accepted part of the economic and political landscape, most corporations adopted a much more hostile attitude toward unions. Where unions already were present, employers sought to weaken or break them. In workplaces without unions, employers were prepared to do whatever was necessary to prevent workers from organizing.
This anti-union drive has largely enjoyed the support of the government. For example, it is now a standard practice for employers to fire workers engaged in an organizing drive. A study by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, found one in five organizers will be fired during an average organizing drive. [...]

There is, I think, one good thing about The God Delusion. Read as a catalogue of religious excess and abuse and pulling no punches, it serves a purpose. Too often today, religionists of various persuasions get away with advocating everything from a literal six days of creation to violence against gay women and men. However, any good Dawkins’ reportage might have done is massively eclipsed by a book that is ultimately as blinkered, biased and, yes, deluded as the targets of his ire.

It can be said that he commits all seven of the deadly sins – and it is right to call them deadly. Originally these sins were to be feared because perpetrators risked being separated eternally from the source of all truth. In the same way, this book appears to separate Dawkins from the scientific approach he has at other times so brilliantly espoused. [...]

Leonard Cohen

Manhattan: Taken.
Berlin: Taken.

The Rolling Stones

Satisfaction: That's fixed in place.

John Lennon

The word 'imagine' isn't in your vocabulary.

"Forever on the prowl for the next big thing in movie piracy, the motion picture industry is zeroing in on small and increasingly-powerful mobile-phone cameras that might be trained on theater screens... Hollywood is also watching for digital cameras capable of taking video. Last week a Virginia teenager pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unlawfully filming a motion picture after being nabbed capturing 20 seconds of Transformers with a Canon Powershot camera. She'd recorded the brief action scene to show her little brother later."

Morocco made a landmark reform to its family code (moudawana) in 2004; it is only the second Arab country (after Tunisia) to have introduced such progressive measures for women. Led by their own vigorous movement and supported by the king, women won greater equality – notably the right to marry without the permission of a male family member and to initiate divorce on a fairer basis.

For the first time, the United Kingdom’s consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles. [...]