SMS/Text International: +44 762.480.2524.
Email: chile@ushahidi.com
Twitter: #chile or #terremotochile
Other than that, see the cable and broadcast news stations, and your favorite websites.
See also the USGS Earthquake Mapping and Information Site.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Chilean Quake Swarm Info
Chile Quake Ushahidi Reporting Aggregator.
Other than that, see the cable and broadcast news stations, and your favorite websites.
See also the USGS Earthquake Mapping and Information Site.
SMS/Text International: +44 762.480.2524.
Email: chile@ushahidi.com
Twitter: #chile or #terremotochile
Other than that, see the cable and broadcast news stations, and your favorite websites.
See also the USGS Earthquake Mapping and Information Site.
Friday, February 26, 2010
The Crazies (2010 Film)
The Crazies, a modern re-making of the classic 1972 George A Romero film, is very well-done, with good acting, pace, and special effects.
While I'm not all that big a fan of the generic slash-and-gore hack horror films, I have to admit to a certain fondness for films and stories about a "few last survivors of the apocalypse" trying to make their way from the fields of disaster into an uncertain, but hopefully more safe, future. This film fits the bill.
The story: Basically, people start to go crazy, just a few at first, but then in increasing numbers. A pattern develops; the path of infection points to the water supply. By the time the sheriff and his trusty deputy discover that the source is a military plane crashlanded in the swamp upstream from where the town withdraws its water, just about everyone is contaminated... and just about the time that the sheriff starts to mobilize an evacuation, the military arrives. One thing leads to another, and soon the sheriff, his pregnant wife (the town doctor), and the deputy manage to escape from the quarantine corral, and take it on the lam.
I'm not going to tell you how it ends, other than to say that if you're a fan of the genre, you've seen variations on this before, probably a couple of times.
Science fiction, and "SF Horror", has become almost predictable. And why is this? Because so very many of our writers are saying the same thing.
For Stephen King, he's made a sub-career, within his greater career, of predicting the horrors that could result from military or corporate experimentation gone wrong. Probably his most famous was his re-visiting of the classic "Earth Abides" (George R Stewart) when he published The Stand, in which almost everyone dies as a result of a super-flu. For American science-fiction writers, this subject is almost obligatory, a sort of "how would we like it" re-telling from a modern point of view of what happened to the Native Americans when the Spanish brought smallpox to the New World, where almost nobody had an immune system capable of dealing with it.
Comparably, Connie Willis combined the "almost everyone dies" genre with the time-travel genre in her award-winning Doomsday Book.
Both of these novels cover really classic types of death from well-known causes. In Willis's book, it's the Plague of 1320s England, and in King's book, although it's a "shifting antigen super flu", still it's the flu, only nobody who gets it survives it. The flu of 1917-1918 was pretty close to that, at least at the beginning. Yet both the flu and the plague mostly just incapacitate and kill.
King covers the concept of "secondary kill" but only in the "special edition" does this appear. Willis covered it a little bit, when some of her infected characters caused a bit more damage than you might expect, while thrashing around in their delirium.
King has dealt with the effects of a society gone mostly mad with his under-rated novel Cell, in which "the Pulse" turns almost every cellphone user into a violent psychotic, followed by the formation of huge packs of these homicidal freaks.
A film variation on the theme was released in 2007 as "The Signal".
Even the late great John Brunner used a city gone mad in his excellent dystopian classic the Sheep Look Up. Brunner pulls together an immense number of trends that were starting to become apparent at the time of writing (1970-1971) and projects them to their final conclusion, right about 2010 or so. It's quite eerie to read the novel and see how much his fictional dystopia looks like our world, and to recall how long ago he wrote this... and to muse momentarily that his other best works were often concerned with time travel.
Brunner's work is really quite believable, especially as the city that goes mad is Denver Colorado. See also the history of the plutonium refinery at Rocky Flats, and the wave of cancers -- especially brain tumor cancers -- that spread along with the refinery byproducts plume in the water table. Shades of Erin Brockovich!
Are all of these writers, our modern version of prophetic visionaries, trying to tell us something? Clearly, they are, or they wouldn't be writing. But why are so many of the best writing close variations on the same thing?
I am unfortunately overly familiar with craziness, I suppose.
It seems to be popular in certain circles to slander my reputation far and wide, especially here in my neighborhood. Given the particulars of the perpetrators, by best advice on that would be "consider the source", also phrased as "look who's talking, you brain damaged crackheads". Then again, such persons like to point to my writings as the best possible evidence in support of their addled contentions. Some such persons making such allegations may in fact be literate enough so that their contentions might be thought to have some validity. I will certainly agree that some of my postings to such places as the comments section of the Washington Post are more than a bit over-wrought and in fact over-the-top. Then again, look at it this way: when I am writing to rabble-rouse, calm and collected and erudite doesn't convince the folks that read the Post comments section. Judging from the majority of the postings responding to certain classes of articles on subjects where I like to rabble-rouse, the convincing approach involves significant errors in logic and attribution, along with lots of ALL CAPS and genuinely-worrisome punctuation (or lack thereof). But don't blame me playing to that crowd; they were crazy before I got there and added my two cents, so to speak.
Once again, thus, I am unfortunately forced to once again ask my perennial question: how did we, as a society, ever come to be so batshit crazy?
Both Brunner's book and the film "The Crazies" postulate widespread contamination of a water supply by accidentally-released psychotomimetic military toxins intended for battlefield use to incapacitate enemy populations.
"BZ", or 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate ("QNB"), is one such military toxin.
For military uses, a fine aerosol of solids, a "weaponized dust", would be dispersed, presumably by military equipment designed for that purpose. Of course in the hands of the average non-terrorist insurgent, they wouldn't be targeting the general population, one would presume. They'd most likely simply throw handfuls out of their driver side window into the open windows of oncoming traffic, presumably as a well-organized system targeting persons believed to be essential (or even merely support) to any resistance or counter-insurgency.
Yet I don't think we should blame BZ for any widespread free form generic lunacy in society at large, outside of the occasional eruptions of "UFO flaps", "vampire hysterias", or Moral Panics. Those seem to be mostly media-driven.
We do, however, live in a society and a culture where our most widespread means of electrical power generation, coal fired centralized generation, pumps tons of mercury vapor into the air daily, and that mercury enters the food chain all around the oceans of the world.
We do live in a society -- and in the DC Metro area we live near a river -- where the water sources have measurable drug contents of everything from cocaine to estrogen. It's bad enough that tadpoles mature into frogs with multiple heads, and male fish turn female. Increasingly we see yet-another "guaranteed safe" products such as BPA (bisphenol-A) discovered to be potentially hazardous to humans, as if you could find any human anywhere who isn't awash in the stuff due to a lifetime of exposure to BPA in almost all plastics used in food packaging.
My point?
Go see "The Crazies".
So that when it happens in real life, if you're not one of the affected population, you could maybe see in time what is starting to happen, so that you don't wind up in the affected population.
See the crazies coming, and escape and live. Don't see them coming?
They say that an inability to see the crazies is the first sign that you've become one.
More to come?
While I'm not all that big a fan of the generic slash-and-gore hack horror films, I have to admit to a certain fondness for films and stories about a "few last survivors of the apocalypse" trying to make their way from the fields of disaster into an uncertain, but hopefully more safe, future. This film fits the bill.
The story: Basically, people start to go crazy, just a few at first, but then in increasing numbers. A pattern develops; the path of infection points to the water supply. By the time the sheriff and his trusty deputy discover that the source is a military plane crashlanded in the swamp upstream from where the town withdraws its water, just about everyone is contaminated... and just about the time that the sheriff starts to mobilize an evacuation, the military arrives. One thing leads to another, and soon the sheriff, his pregnant wife (the town doctor), and the deputy manage to escape from the quarantine corral, and take it on the lam.
I'm not going to tell you how it ends, other than to say that if you're a fan of the genre, you've seen variations on this before, probably a couple of times.
Science fiction, and "SF Horror", has become almost predictable. And why is this? Because so very many of our writers are saying the same thing.
For Stephen King, he's made a sub-career, within his greater career, of predicting the horrors that could result from military or corporate experimentation gone wrong. Probably his most famous was his re-visiting of the classic "Earth Abides" (George R Stewart) when he published The Stand, in which almost everyone dies as a result of a super-flu. For American science-fiction writers, this subject is almost obligatory, a sort of "how would we like it" re-telling from a modern point of view of what happened to the Native Americans when the Spanish brought smallpox to the New World, where almost nobody had an immune system capable of dealing with it.
Comparably, Connie Willis combined the "almost everyone dies" genre with the time-travel genre in her award-winning Doomsday Book.
Both of these novels cover really classic types of death from well-known causes. In Willis's book, it's the Plague of 1320s England, and in King's book, although it's a "shifting antigen super flu", still it's the flu, only nobody who gets it survives it. The flu of 1917-1918 was pretty close to that, at least at the beginning. Yet both the flu and the plague mostly just incapacitate and kill.
King covers the concept of "secondary kill" but only in the "special edition" does this appear. Willis covered it a little bit, when some of her infected characters caused a bit more damage than you might expect, while thrashing around in their delirium.
King has dealt with the effects of a society gone mostly mad with his under-rated novel Cell, in which "the Pulse" turns almost every cellphone user into a violent psychotic, followed by the formation of huge packs of these homicidal freaks.
A film variation on the theme was released in 2007 as "The Signal".
Even the late great John Brunner used a city gone mad in his excellent dystopian classic the Sheep Look Up. Brunner pulls together an immense number of trends that were starting to become apparent at the time of writing (1970-1971) and projects them to their final conclusion, right about 2010 or so. It's quite eerie to read the novel and see how much his fictional dystopia looks like our world, and to recall how long ago he wrote this... and to muse momentarily that his other best works were often concerned with time travel.
Brunner's work is really quite believable, especially as the city that goes mad is Denver Colorado. See also the history of the plutonium refinery at Rocky Flats, and the wave of cancers -- especially brain tumor cancers -- that spread along with the refinery byproducts plume in the water table. Shades of Erin Brockovich!
Are all of these writers, our modern version of prophetic visionaries, trying to tell us something? Clearly, they are, or they wouldn't be writing. But why are so many of the best writing close variations on the same thing?
I am unfortunately overly familiar with craziness, I suppose.
It seems to be popular in certain circles to slander my reputation far and wide, especially here in my neighborhood. Given the particulars of the perpetrators, by best advice on that would be "consider the source", also phrased as "look who's talking, you brain damaged crackheads". Then again, such persons like to point to my writings as the best possible evidence in support of their addled contentions. Some such persons making such allegations may in fact be literate enough so that their contentions might be thought to have some validity. I will certainly agree that some of my postings to such places as the comments section of the Washington Post are more than a bit over-wrought and in fact over-the-top. Then again, look at it this way: when I am writing to rabble-rouse, calm and collected and erudite doesn't convince the folks that read the Post comments section. Judging from the majority of the postings responding to certain classes of articles on subjects where I like to rabble-rouse, the convincing approach involves significant errors in logic and attribution, along with lots of ALL CAPS and genuinely-worrisome punctuation (or lack thereof). But don't blame me playing to that crowd; they were crazy before I got there and added my two cents, so to speak.
Once again, thus, I am unfortunately forced to once again ask my perennial question: how did we, as a society, ever come to be so batshit crazy?
Both Brunner's book and the film "The Crazies" postulate widespread contamination of a water supply by accidentally-released psychotomimetic military toxins intended for battlefield use to incapacitate enemy populations.
"BZ", or 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate ("QNB"), is one such military toxin.
For military uses, a fine aerosol of solids, a "weaponized dust", would be dispersed, presumably by military equipment designed for that purpose. Of course in the hands of the average non-terrorist insurgent, they wouldn't be targeting the general population, one would presume. They'd most likely simply throw handfuls out of their driver side window into the open windows of oncoming traffic, presumably as a well-organized system targeting persons believed to be essential (or even merely support) to any resistance or counter-insurgency.
Yet I don't think we should blame BZ for any widespread free form generic lunacy in society at large, outside of the occasional eruptions of "UFO flaps", "vampire hysterias", or Moral Panics. Those seem to be mostly media-driven.
We do, however, live in a society and a culture where our most widespread means of electrical power generation, coal fired centralized generation, pumps tons of mercury vapor into the air daily, and that mercury enters the food chain all around the oceans of the world.
We do live in a society -- and in the DC Metro area we live near a river -- where the water sources have measurable drug contents of everything from cocaine to estrogen. It's bad enough that tadpoles mature into frogs with multiple heads, and male fish turn female. Increasingly we see yet-another "guaranteed safe" products such as BPA (bisphenol-A) discovered to be potentially hazardous to humans, as if you could find any human anywhere who isn't awash in the stuff due to a lifetime of exposure to BPA in almost all plastics used in food packaging.
My point?
Go see "The Crazies".
So that when it happens in real life, if you're not one of the affected population, you could maybe see in time what is starting to happen, so that you don't wind up in the affected population.
See the crazies coming, and escape and live. Don't see them coming?
They say that an inability to see the crazies is the first sign that you've become one.
More to come?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Blast From the Past
Here's a video that is probably older than most of the people who actually may read this blog.
Yet it's still timely, and has world-class steel slide work.
Red Rider's Lunatic Fringe (in a popup window).
Yet it's still timely, and has world-class steel slide work.
Red Rider's Lunatic Fringe (in a popup window).
Lunatic Fringe
I know you're out there
You're in hiding
And you hold your meetings
We can hear you coming
We know what you're after
We're wise to you this time
We won't let you kill the laughter
Lunatic Fringe
In the twilight's last gleaming
This is open season
But you won't get too far
We know you've got to blame someone
For your own confusion
But we're on guard this time
Against your final solution
We can hear you coming
No you're not going to win this time
We can hear the footsteps
Way out along the walkway
Lunatic Fringe
We know you're out there
But in these new dark ages
There will still be light
An eye for an eye
Well, before you go under
Can you feel the resistance
Can you feel the pain?
Thunder!
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