Sometimes I have this late night fear that humans will stop believing in crazy-assed random shit. Not metaphysical crazy-assed-shit like a God who created everything in 7 days, but non-faith based crazy-assed-shit like the Yeti (Yeti guys are _always_ looking for evidence), or Hollow Earth or UFOs. I mean, on the surface they are equally crazy-assed. But Yeti are so much more harmless and entertaining. They affirm my belief in human culture to be absurd and fantastical and harmless. The older gods that admittedly made no sense whatsoever were better to sooth that existential itch IMHO.

"When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things." Imagine a time when The Capital, State Department, Pentagon and other government buildings (both local and federal) are bombed. And imagine a large, albeit young and often acid-dropping, population supporting in principle these actions. Think about getting together an underground group of well-educated "radicals" to bust Timothy Leary out of jail and help him flee the country. The Weather Underground did these things, and while there was a large amount of delusion and then self-regret for their actions, it's odd that what happened both in the US government and the resistance isn't more widely remembered. The 2002 documentary does a great job at making "resistance" seem complicated, human, sometimes egotistical, and the 60's, from all viewpoints, tumultuous.

Penn and Teller, Bullshit

Sometimes, you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. So very rarely in the corporate world do you see a truly great idea: an idea that is both artistic and a guaranteed money-printing machine. I saw such an idea. It was an ad campaign that would have blown the doors off the place. Everyone loved it, except one person high enough in the food chain to kill it all. Not content to replace it with a "safe" alternative, it was then "compromised" and wedged into the new campaign in a completely inappropriate way. There was a great idea once. I saw it die.

The oddest thing about scanning shortwave is stumbling on occasional numbers stations, roaming broadcasts by intelligence agencies to transmit information to or from agents. The broadcasts are detached voices reading alphanumerics, sometimes with simple, childlike repetitive music, like an ice cream truck jingle, for spies. Perhaps a bit spooky, the transmissions are usually extremely beautiful, in my opinion. These tidbits make hunting the dial into weird staticy abstraction, exploration of retro information technology. It's said that the number of transmissions out there are increasing. Several years ago The Conet Project released a mutli-disc set of some of the broadcasts for your sampling pleasure.

In the consistently great Make Magazine this month George Dyson writes "Physicists love explosions. We owe our nulcear predicament to a quirk of human nature." And he contines about Theodore Taylor, one of the atomic bomb makers of the 50's, and proponent of nuclear driven spacecraft. "Taylor held up a small parabolic mirror and lit a cigarette with an atomic bomb. The fireball was 12 miles away." If there is modern hysteria about liquid explosives on planes, you have to wonder if the hysteria isn't misplaced. In the 50's Taylor "...tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce... it was never built in those years, it certainly has been since then. It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about 6 inches in diameter." Carry that onto a plane? No, you'd probably put something like that in a shipping container. I'm going to start a company selling Red Herring.

More is better. From The Data Quality Act to SIPRNET, a large apparatus handles information. Except at the top.

After over twenty years, a return to Disney World.

If it wasn't clear enough that the US was lied to about the reasons for an Iraq war, James Bamford's piece in Rolling Stone, The Man Who Sold The War, makes it stupidly clear. Behind the bad intelligence about WMDs was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who lied about Saddam's "terrifying cache of WMDs". Bamford claims that behind this and other intelligence manipulation in relation to the 'Iraq situation' is John Rendon, perhaps a modern day out-sourced spook with top secret CIA clearence who comes off as clean and corporate, and is excellent in spin. I call shenanigans.

It seems sheer impracticality or the laws of physics haven't stopped the patent office from granting an Indiana man named Boris a patent for an anti-grav device (well, vehicle we assume). If you're going to create anti-grav you're going to need an endless supply of energy, so you might want to call Randell Mills. Mills claims to have discovered a new energy source by changing the orbital distance of the electron in hydrogen. Quantum physicists aren't too pleased about that one. Hmm, (scratching chin) bets I'll hear about either of these ever again? (I thought cold fusion was going to save us.)