More Mental Mojo

Sometimes It Seems...

2010-07-29T16:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems that

"Everyone's an art critic nowadays".

Transdermal Transsonic Transmutative Transception

2010-07-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

So here's how it is. I was
Wandering one day doing my thing
Which as everyone knows
I hope nobody knows
Just happens to be
Well I can't talk about that now can I
But it's not a job nor a living but
Some things you can't get paid for
And so you do them totally for free

Look, things have gone totally
Wrong here. Wrong in so many way
But what can you do?
Not too fucking much
Do what you can
Not as if anything anyone does can do
Much about what's on our plate tonight
Fuck NO! I am not eating that
Who could? Nothing from this Earth
Can't digest those alien proteins

Proteins are proteins but you
Can't digest things that are folded
The wrong way. No way. They
Might not make you
Puke but you might
Wish you had blown your lunch
All over the plate rather than
Try to digest vegetation -- much less
Meat -- from alien worlds.. I don't
Know what this is. Mystery meat

With compound eyes.

Chitin isn't what most people
Expect in their diet unless perhaps
You are African and learned
That termites are very
Nutritious indeed. Unless
Of course you know that with the
Biota internal to the termite you can
Digest toothpicks. But who eats
Toothpicks other than by accident
Or sabotage? Crunchy. Eat the chitin

Down at the local dump the
Portable ultrasound images
Some guy in sunglasses
We sneakily run the
Transducer up his back
Chitin like a hundred pound termite
Chitin has its signature. Hard to
Miss at this distance with even a
Very old sonograph kludged to
Find a termite infesting the world of Man

We are the people of this world.

We thought we knew our own world
Now we find that there are people
Beyond people all over our world
More of them than of us perhaps
How did this come to pass?
Perhaps we cannot fight them
But we must know who they are
Which of "us" are really of "them"

What are they? We don't know
From whence they came? We don't know
What intention theirs? Mystery
Unfolding mystery is the work
Of a special breed of utter mutt
Woof we bark woof
Face the barking
Face it, face it!

Sonogram ultrasound
Vision seen will go around
We will see them as they are
Our best guesses travel far
We don't know what we can't see
With new eyes you'll follow me
Off to look to see what's there
Sample everybody's hair and

Look look look for

CHITIN

or for the wrongly folded isomer of

CHITIN

News and Notes for Late July 2010

2010-07-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

Well, the completely underwhelming public response to me posting in bad prose poetic forms has caused me to reconsider this sort of thing.

What with the stalkers and crazies all brought out by the record heat wave (or driven into their darkened computer room lairs), misinterpretations doubtless will abound. For example, Post Operative Treatment probably wouldn't be recognized by anyone other than fans as a foreshadowing of the upcoming season of V. You know, what do you do if you're trying to stay alive as part of a Resistance movement opposing rather unpleasant and high-tech space aliens.

Well, since it generally goes badly for me in my personal life when I write anything that the stalker crazies can seize on, I should probably keep things short, sweet, and unambiguous.

Moving right along, I should point out that the Gazette now has a comments section on most (perhaps all) of their articles. Persons best left unmentioned have constantly complained about how the "mainstream media" doesn't have enough coverage of Montgomery and Maryland politics. Considering that some of the closest thing to actual debates in the two recent Special Elections took place in the Washington Post comments sections, a lack of coverage there meant that all other discussions had to take place on that unmentioned person's blog. And since ultimately that person has blown all credibility for even-handedness or any other journalistic integrity, it's excellent indeed that the Gazette has created an additional venue for Montgomery County voters and activists to speak their mind with some assurance that their remarks won't be refused because they don't support the Astroturfer Agenda.

Just look at the bottom of stories in the Gazette and you should see a link labeled "Comment". Please do!

Moving right along once again -- and so it goes -- Aspen Hill's effort get a Neighborhood Watch up and running are off to a slow and somewhat confused start.

Good news? Since the news got out that a Neighborhood Watch group was forming, calls for service to 911 have actually declined here.

Bad news? Mostly that we need more people involved, especially the sort of calm and observant people who will stick with the task for a long time.

Post Operative Treatment

2010-07-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

So she had an impacted wisdom tooth
And so she went in to have them all pulled
And of course when she came back
Likely festooned with a shitload of alien technology
The very first thing we did was
To drag her almost screaming
Into a well-shielded room and
We fucking nuked her.

No, we didn't set off a nuclear device
Yes we feel free to mention old news
It started as a microwave oven and
Did its duty. She screamed
Who wouldn't? -as the gum-line implants
Melted into useless disarray
They're on to us, of course
No human may live free and
If they see a meat body over age eighteen
If it doesn't have a SmartPass it's targeted

Cataracts? They can make that in you
Retinal burns? Laser pointers are everywhere
As are colloquially named "booster kits"
I guess you didn't know a green laser pointer
Pumped by fifty over-triggered CD reader diodes
Puts out enough power to
Fry an egg "over easy"
Nothing's easy about hearing her scream
As her bleeding post-operative gum line is
Seared by melted alien tech rendered useless

She screamed and she's beautiful
She's lovely and she screamed
Screamed and hated us
Because we set her free

Hatred masks her
Or him or they
However you want to parse it but
Electromagnetic Pulse
Stops the flow of current to the pleasure center
If you want a junkie's hate
Just cut off their supply
No matter how quickly they adapt
They'd rather have the needle than your respect
Don't even expect compassion returned
For compassion given
Slaves of alien tech
Denied their fix live only to kill humans

Ah back again to the microwave
Quite lucky she is as after all
Preferentially the aliens will
Simply take out wisdom teeth and
Inflict major frontal lobe damage
Docile, unprotesting
Down to a science
Graduate University
A product of medical science
Brought to us from outer space
Cut some brains, make some slaves

But I guess they had other plans for her
Nothing but a GPS tracker with
Full audio feed. We watch the packets
Flow across our network analyzer
When and where, she's just a SPIME now
A bug-eye. History documentor.
We put her in the room and fire
Hey, look, she deserves it:
She likes to put
Unsuspecting callers on speaker phone

The device destroys all things with transistors
And not a single bit of neurons

Flash! poof and screaming but
It's over in a moment as
Suddenly she is a free human being
Hating everyone for the uncertainty
Of release from barely-suspected total slavery.
No more unseen voices for you, babe
No more machinery from space
Speaking to you in the voices of your friends
The friends you ask "did you call me yesterday"
In fear they say "I can't remember"
They know their voices were stolen
And no longer ignorant -- they got their teeth pulled
Long ago and have come to wonder what replaced their teeth --
Those aren't your friends... only their loquacious ghosts

Screaming in the decontamination room
Little miss utters: "But I loved the voices
Don't take them from me!"
You loved being a junkie for
Alien tech putting current and voices
Inescapably into your brain
Now learn to love the human beings
Who move now to surround you
They, too, once were current junkies
But now they love this Earth, and you

Who are now no longer enslaved.

Like them.

Wisdom Extraction -- Mind Along With Teeth

2010-07-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

So one day I am sitting around and
One of my friends says
Jim your breath is fucking foul
What the fuck have you been eating
You sorry bastard
And I tell him "dude you know
we get lunch at the same place
Why am I not bitching about your breath."

Discussion followed discussion and much of that
With this person shielding their nose from my breath
And eventually it was resolved that my final molars
Just had to come out. This was not something
One would anticipate with glee, this is
Major surgery. Look, any time a medico must
Stick a chisel in your mouth and beat on it with
A hammer, lots of times, this isn't like
Getting a splinter pulled out nor even like an early
Abortion. No, this is serious shit.

So, into the hospital I go. Before the procedure
I am standing around smoking a cigarette
And this was back in the days when even doctors smoked
And perhaps they mistook me for a med student or
Perhaps they were fucking with me. I can't say but
All I can tell you is that well-educated people -- hey we're talking
Actual medical doctors, okay? -- were referring to a human
Life on their table scheduled at some specific hour
As their "Mercedes payment". To this is humanity reduced:
We can keep talented sociopaths on track only with Mercedes.

My head, my head. After the doctor says count backwards and
The lines of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling twist and warp and fade
And depart into a place where once only dreams were seen
The sounds remain. I'm not much of a man for smells and
In any case there's not much to smell in a hospital
Other than hospital. Yet the banging isn't easily ignored
Especially when every whack of the hammer on chisel
Rock my head back, rocks my skull past the limits
Of where a head can go and still be attached to a neck
Internally decapitated whack whack whack still I listen

Dead as a hanged man
Dead as anything can be that still has a heartbeat
Why do I survive as the anesthesiologist turns up the gas
Why do I survive as I hear my final molars break free
Only after my head leaves my neck
Why are my struggles -- believe me I am fighting --
Unanswered at my muscles though my mind fights as if
G_d himself stiffened my limbs to be weapons of righteousness?
As the friendly doctor reaches above my head to push on
The syringe in the cart full of lethal injection, Why do I yet live?

And watch?

It's not as if I am some astral being
Floating above the operating room
Trying to decide
To follow
The
White
Light which some say beckons
I don't see that at all
All I see is my head bent back
With a chisel in my mouth
With a hammer going
Bang bang bang
Isn't the tooth out yet
Isn't he dead yet
Turn up the gas turn up the drip
Isn't he dead yet
Fuck look here doctor you put
Too much of that shit into him and
It's clear malpractice.

Bang bang bang well this isn't clear malpractice
Says the dentist even as the anesthesiologist mutters
I can't handle this much pain without killing him
Fuck it says the doctor Back Off I am not losing
My Mercedes payment.

Ow ow OOWW OW! cut the nerve
Says the anesthesiologist
Done! says the surgeon and pain vanishes
But sensation of location continues as a tooth
One two three four teeth vanish from internal radar
Boom bang bang bang whack
Bang with the hammer but it's not half as bad as
Crunch with the pliers as the vise-grip
Locks hard onto the last of the wisdom teeth and
Schchlrssch goes the last final molar.

Crunch goes the tooth and I cannot move
"Internal decapitation, did you say, doctor?"
What am I, Aemon Goethe after his third botched hanging
And what the fuck did I do to deserve this?
The eternal endless question of all of Goethe's victims
Bend the head back and pound out the final molars

Ooopsies! tsk tsk internal decapitation
Fuck it, I don't know why he's alive
But I'm getting my Mercedes payment
Or my cousin will sue
Fuck do you mean he'll be walking the streets
With a fucking broken neck?
Fuck him. Let a lesson be learned
Let a lesson be taught
What exactly should I have learned here?

A few years after I staggered out of
Wisdom Tooth Extraction Surgery
-- All four at once, and why the hell not --
A friend of mine informed me that
They were going to hospital for
The same procedure. They almost
Cried as they said: If I come out of hospital
The same way that you did...
Please please don't hesitate fo
Just fucking kill me. They said

"I couldn't live like that."

Cataracts

2010-07-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

Sitting in front of a television I cannot see
Brian Williams: I swear to g_d, that man cracks me up
With a totally straight face -- or at least with
No change of expression -- he can turn a wry pun
Leaving me evenly divided between a smirk and a chortle
But I can tell you for sure that I am not
Laughing at his looks because frankly
I can't see whether or not he's wearing a tie
Or maybe he's given up on keeping viewers
Solely on the basis of commentary on content
Or if perhaps he's posing as if for Playgirl or
Perhaps for Cosmo as if on a casting couch.
Who knows. Probably everyone but me. I
Can't fucking see him. I am going blind.

Too much daylight, maybe? I don't know
Exactly what brought this on, but somehow I seem
To be relegated to some fate -- or if not for modern medicine
Would be -- of coming from a family, a genetic line
Where I'll easily live for ninety years in fine health
Possessed of excellent memory well stocked by youthful
Search for knowledge, as encyclopaedic as I could read it
I won't be reading any more. Ninety years, easy..
And blind. With excellent memory, excellent indexing
Excellent recall, especially of all I once could see.

Half my life spent in darkness, not that I can't see light
I can see light and darkness just fine but light is pain
Pain like you can't imagine -- as the lens of my
Eye protests it has been damaged enough -- no more please!
Not as if any lingering in darkness can restore
What I lost: the printed work, the television screen
The easy visual grasp of well-indented code
Brian Williams's wry smile and brilliant suit
All faded. Faded into white when I am in light I
Cannot stand... and into darkness which has no pain.

Fifty years in light: blessed by nature and interesting
Insights gained through a certain amount of research and
Lots of LSD. But the first time -- the very first time I
Ate the paper and thought about it -- childhood nearsightedness
Disappeared; I felt that something within me had needed to see
Nothing nearby: and what could that have been? My books
Gave me sweet escape and I read all I had and bought more
And what I could not afford, the taxpayers put in my library.
What I have ever read and understood I do remember.
For 40 more years, I might expect to speak it to all asking.

Research suggests that it could be genetic and if so I am
So very glad that so far as I know I have had no children
To come of age and curse me -- though I have many blessings
While still young I am made to go blind -- and thereafter healthy
Remain as a resource. Rhetoric might serve me well and I might
Deliver to mocking children making foul faces all that I
Saw or ever knew, read, learned, cherished, grasped and understood.
But if there was admiration on their faces and respect in their silence
Or simply stalking around the old fool who cannot see the disrespect...
For 40 more years I might in apprehension blindly wonder.

Surgery for this sort of thing is, so they say, .quickly done and
Little difference in life is experienced by the folks who have
Their lenses cut from their eyes -- to be replaced in the former days
by crystal, now by plastics -- perhaps most wore glasses before
Their internal lenses opaqued. Blessed I have been with slow aging
Few injuries, no cancer, and excellent vision, in dark or light
A strong back and a thorough mind. And now blind. Where before
I could see a 1200 DPI printout and say if the printer head was
Clogged or misaligned, now I cannot read the Extra Large Print
Of a childrens' book. On doctor's table I shall lie as he shall cut into my eye.

Dictatorship in District 4?

2010-07-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not that bad, though it's getting pretty close to it.

Yesterday, July 6 2010, was the deadline to file a candidacy.

I did not file. Why?

Well, I've had enough of Maryland politics, and I've pretty much had enough of Maryland.

The State Board of Elections is pretty damn speedy about listing the candidates on the website, and here in District 4, out of the vast majority of Democrats in the district, there isn't a single one running against Nancy Navarro.

Those Central Americans probably a celebrating because their new homeland has become just like their old one, moreso than that, even.

The Party doesn't even put forward a field of identical candidates.

They just appoint someone to the position and the elections are just a formality.

Welcome to Dictatorship, Montgomery.

You know you deserve it and it's what you've always wanted.

Spies Next Door

2010-07-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, word flashed across the news media: the FBI charged 11 conspirators for violations of being "unregistered agents of a foreign power", and for money-laundering.

The charge of espionage was never made, although the investigation certainly hoped and expected to find it. From the Foreign Policy Explainer:

Violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires that agents representing the interests of a foreign power register with the Justice Department, is a far lesser offense and one that rarely merits much media attention. Prominent FARA cases include Iraqi-American businessman Samir Vincent, who admitted to acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's government during the U.N. "oil-for-food" scandal, and former President Jimmy Carter's brother Billy, who was forced to register as a foreign agent to avoid charges that he was paid $220,000 by Muammar al-Qaddafi's government to curry favor for Libya in Washington. The scandal, and a resulting congressional investigation, came to be known as "Billygate."

The real criminal offense, here, is the money-laundering; other than operating under assumed identities based on false documentation, these guys haven't been charged with doing much more than we see done by lots of lobbyists up on Capitol Hill. As for the assumed identities and false documentation, that would make these folks a mere 11 out of tens of thousand of Identity Thieves.

CASA of Maryland receives money from CITGO, the state-controlled Venezuelan oil company controlled by Hugo Chavez. Arguably, CASA of Maryland is a group of unregistered agents of foreign powers. Like the 11 people charged as Russian agents, they try to get inside of any organization they believe can further their set of goals, which include the disabling of the ability of the United States to retain sovereignty through control of the borders and through removal of unauthorized aliens.

Yet CASA is a clearly racist organization. They concern themselves only with Indigenous and Mixed-Indigenous persons from Central America and northern South America; otherwise they'd be clamoring for the release of those accused of being illegally in the US and living under forged documentation and only trying to make a better life for themselves through rewarding work.

Or perhaps CASA isn't being racist -- though that would come as a surprise -- but perhaps it's rather just laying low trying to avoid attention.

After all, these unregistered agents of a foreign power -- Venezuela, mostly -- have managed to get one of the founders into a high-ranking position in the Department of Justice itself: Tom Perez, who is likely the lead official in the upcoming litigation to overturn Arizona's tough new law requiring officers within the state to investigate the immigration status of anyone whom they encounter in the course of their normal duties, and whom they reasonably believe to be in violation of US immigration law.

So, just ask yourself: why did the FBI spend almost a decade stalking "spies" in and around the New York City area, when there's a huge pool of unregistered agents of a foreign power right here in the suburbs of the Nation's Capital, who were even able to sneak an "Illegal" into the office of former head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff?

"Go figger", as the saying goes.

Taking a Break, or Breaking a Take?

2010-06-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

First I want to assure everyone that I am not seeking any elected office this year.

Due to the flukes of the untimely passing of Marilyn Praisner and consequent Special Election, and the year-later untimely passing of her widower Donald Praisner which also called for Special Election, all coming on the heels of the 2006 gubernatorial race in which I ran for a position as Delegate for District 19, I now hold the unenviable record of losing in three public elections in three years running. I don't think it's possible for anyone to surpass the combination of frequency and consistency with which I was (soundly, some would say) defeated.

In the first of the Special Elections, it turned out that I was the most unpopular Republican in the race. Hey, I was saying unpopular things. Here's some video of my unbelievable and inaccurate, some would say insane campaigning:

Clearly, that did not go over well.

So, I thought I would give it a shot as a Democrat. My experiences as a Republican in Montgomery -- however Centrist, or even almost Liberal, a Republican -- led me inevitably to the conclusion that if you want to have any political validity in this County, much less any actual importance, you have to vote in the Democrat primary, if only because registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a bit over 3 to 1. Winning a Republican primary, thus, is a bit like winning the Special Olympics. It might be your personal best, but you're still not at all competitive in a venue such as the global Olympics.

Having run as a Democrat in the last Special Election, I barely was an also-ran, the contest boiling down to a sort of "night of the long knives" contest between the establishment interests and supporters of Ben Kramer -- which is to say, sane people and the elderly -- and the chittering horde of mostly quite youthful campaign workers swarming the streets and shopping malls -- not to mention the festering ghetto apartment complexes -- of East Montgomery, on behalf of candidate Nancy Navarro.

I suppose that I should mention that as of today, Ms Navarro is running unopposed, without even a Republican challenger, much less any competition from within the Democratic Party, according to the State Elections Board website. The deadline to file is July 6th.

Moving right along, what interests me -- in terms of anything actually making any difference -- is the race for Sheriff.

Norman W Brissett of Silver Spring, Tom Falcinelli Jr of Silver Spring, and Darrin Mark Popkin of Olney are all candidates for Sheriff.

Norman Brissett is a career officer with the Montgomery County police. In 2004, he received a commendation for his dedicated service to Concerns of Police Survivors (C.O.P.S.) and to surviving family members of officers who have been killed in the line of duty.

It's unclear at the moment whether or not this is the same "Jamaican-born Montgomery County, Maryland police office" referred to in an unpublished opinion of the US Court of Appeals (4th Circuit), but if so, I somehow suspect that if elected Sheriff, Ofc Brissett will spend a considerable amount of time and energy with his size-12 boot jammed firmly up the ass of the City of Rockville police department. If the Ofc Brissett in the court opinion is a different individual from the candidate, my apologies to both individuals.

Perhaps you'd like to read a opinion piece (PDF) giving some background of Ofc Brissett's history and career (Landis, John, "Faces of Silver Spring", Silver Spring Voice, June 2007).

Tom Falcinelli is a career officer with the Montgomery County Department of Police (Uncredited Staff "Citizen Journalism: A Brother's Keeper", Washington Times, September 22, 2009). A graduate of Howard University law school, Falcinelli has represented the Fraternal Order of Police on police board hearings, and has been a shift patrol sergeant in the department's First District. Perhaps you'd like to visit his his campaign website.

Among other things, Falcinelli wants to see better staffing for services such as prisoner transport, and to improve efficiency. He asks us if we're getting the level of service our taxes should procure.

Darren Mark Popkin is a chief deputy, second in command at the Sheriff's office for the last decade. "Heir apparent" to Sheriff Raymond Kight -- who has been serving for the last 24 years -- Popkin has an impressive resume and clearly has the longest association with the Montgomery Sheriff's office. He also graduated from my Alma Mater here in Aspen Hill, Robert E Peary HS.

Now, the Astute Reader will recall that Mr Hardman has a particular -- some would say "peculiar" -- fixation on "immigration". Yet it's absolutely essential that I make clear to all that I don't oppose reasonable levels of Legal Immigration, and as a nation and culture we should certainly extend a helping hand to desperate people around the world, and should stand ready to harbor the deserving and legitimate refugee.

That being said, illegal aliens -- particularly when they come in such numbers and with such disrespect as to constitute Invasion -- are something I do not and cannot welcome.

If the governments, at any level from the Federal through the State of Maryland to the County of Montgomery, want to roll over on their back like a whipped cur and declare their submission, that's okay. Just don't do that and then call the French "cheese eating surrender monkeys". The French at least had the completely legitimate excuse of having been pounded into submission by the vastly-superior German military-industrial complex, and in any case the River Rhine and its riverbank domains have changed hands so often that it's probably more sensible to characterize the people on both banks as Rhinelanders rather than French or German. The same might be said of the Indigenous or Mixed-Indigenous people along the Rio Grande del Norte, but that is far from the River Potomac.

The fact is: until quite recently, local law-enforcement policy has been that immigration status was mandatorily a separable issue from crime.

Then along came late 2008, when a rash of crimes -- heinous ones -- woke deep anger in the citizens and the legal immigrant community alike.

Policy was revised here in Montgomery so that all persons arrested for crimes of violence, or for handgun violations, would have their immigration status checked. Statistics have been deliberately suppressed so that the public cannot judge for itself what has been the success or failure of this new policy, but the reasonable suspicion is that a significant number of illegal aliens have been removed from the community and sent back to their homelands, and that a significant number of weapons have been taken off of the streets and prevented from violence. At any rate, since this policy was enacted, the rate of violent crime here in Montgomery has been effectively cut in half, as predicted.

Thus, our concern for the office of the Sheriff.

The police are part of the Executive Branch, and the whims of the elected executive -- at this time, Isiah "Ike" Leggett, also running unopposed -- may command police officers to refuse to enforce the laws such as Federal immigration law. Yet the office of the Sheriff is created by the Maryland Constitution, and the Sheriff is the enforcement arm of the courts. As such the Sheriff houses all prisoners awaiting trial, and it is within the authority of the Sheriff to do an immigration status check on all prisoners whatsoever.

Which of the candidates will promise to do this?

[Culture of Chaos IV] Funny Fog on Sunny Days

2010-06-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

Copyright 2010 Thomas James Hardman, Jr, all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. References to real places and things may be included but their usage is fictional in nature and intent. Any similarity to real persons or parties is coincidental and should be seen as fictional in nature and intent.

Surrealism combines a blend of reality and unreality. Any person unable to sort the fiction and fantasy from the factual is strongly advised to seek professional help.

Perhaps you'd like to jump to the previous chapter?

Nanotubes are a specific class of the larger structural order of fullerines, but then again, so are buckyballs.

Buckyballs are nothing incredibly novel or hard to manufacture; they occur naturally in nature and indeed they're pretty much everywhere. Everything from the natural processes of stellar formation and aging and destruction, to the lighting of even the most primitive candle all create buckyballs. It's just that earth humans never thought to look for them until the 1990s or so. Once they started looking for them, they started to find them everywhere.

In nature, on earth, they aren't found in significant concentration, and for this we should probably be glad; in their pure form, they're effectively frictionless, more or less little molecule-sized ball-bearings that are harder than diamond.

If someone fell into a dish full of buckyballs, there they would remain until they were fished out. They wouldn't be able to stand, not any more than they could stand on a pile of marbles. Yet for all of their durability and effectively frictionless nature, buckyballs don't seem to be particularly harmful.

Well, at least not until they start to pile up in drifts, like the strange summer snowstorm that started sometime back in late 2008. Perhaps it started to fall earlier on, but 2009 is when I first noticed it.

Look up at the sky, on a clear summer day, and you'll see something which is not at all strange. You've become accustomed to it. Yet the sky wasn't always that pale blue that you now see. It was blue, that is for sure. Yet it didn't have that washed-out paleness to it.

Look around you, and notice the haze. It's not fog, and it's not dust. It's not adding to the humidity nor does it partake of it, and even after a rain, it's floating around out there. It's too small to see, individually, but in aggregate, over distance, it all adds up to a slight whitish haze.

At first, I presumed that it was nothing but fly ash, but fly ash is trapped at the generator stations, and has been for years. Indeed, it is often mixed with concrete to both hold it in place, and to strengthen the concrete.

Yet for the concrete to actually become more durable, the proportions of admixture must be correct. Adding too little simply fails to strengthen the concrete. Adding too much has the same effect on the strength of the concrete as would adding too much sand. The main difference is that sand is easily discerned when too much has been added to the mix; with fly-ash, it's indistinguishable from the other whitish portions of the cement mix.

Note that in the same way that buckyballs are created by any flame burning carbon, coal-fired electrical power generation facilities will generate buckyballs. One may reasonably presume that they collect in the fly-ash traps, to the degree that they are collected at all. As they are in units of single molecules containing 60 or so carbon atoms, they're kind of hard to filter.

They might go right past the fly-ash filters and directly into the environment, where they would tend to migrate to the lowest point reachable without going uphill.

They might also tend to be blown about on every last breeze, too.

Then again, like an awful lot of people hereabouts, I might just be batshit crazy. Or maybe my eyes are going bad. But what exactly, then, is this nearly frictionless dust collecting on almost every flat surface that isn't swept by the breezes, or vacuum cleaners?

It's difficult to test for the presence of fullerenes, especially in the case of buckyballs. Once created, they're a little bit less chemically reactive than a diamond. There is the so-called Bingel Reaction, but that's not exactly a commonplace reaction nor one likely to occur in nature, outside of cellular mechanism scales, and none such are known (at least not to this writer) at this time.

If you have enough of them collected in one place, they're lightly soluble in some rather obscure solvents that one can't just run out and buy, as these solvents mostly tend to be used in the production of illicit recreational chemicals.

You can't filter buckyballs either, other than perhaps with a filter made of mats of carbon nanotubes, which are themselves a bit difficult to detect.

So, one might reasonably ask, how exactly does one manufacture and refine buckyballs, or nanotubes for that matter?

Manufacture is easy, just burn something containing carbon. To approach the efficiencies of industrial needs, usually a carefully metered flame of acetylene is burnt with a carefully metered stream of oxygen, across a high-intensity direct-current arc. This carefully-metered combustion may be directed into a neutral-gas/noble-gas atmosphere, for instance helium or argon. The resulting "ash" may be collected in a variety of ways, notably by recycling the product gases through some of the solvents known to concentrate fullerenes. When it turns a deep purple, you carefully evaporate the solvent and what remains is mostly buckyballs mixed with nanotubes. The nanotubes will frequently accept an electrical charge and may thus align themselves along magnetic field lines on an inclined plane, while the buckyballs won't accept such a charge, and will just roll downhill. If you're trying to make and collect nanotubes -- which are probably the most lucrative use of fullerenes -- the buckyballs can more or less just all pile up.

They're still going to be hard to test for, without adding solvent and looking for the telltale color. However, you'll still see them as they pile up... a sort of gray dust, unless well-lit, in which case, they create a sort of sparkling haze that will float for hours if you shake up a jar full of them.

That sparkling haze looks a lot like the sparkling haze that's floating in the air outside...

Perils of Presbyopia Part II, Politics, and Rent-A-Thug in Aspen Hill

2010-06-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

We all remember Mr Magoo, right? A classic cartoon from the 1960s? The silly man whose terrible eyesight constantly gets him and everyone else into trouble? And prlbably the drinking isn't helping any:

Believe me, I can relate. However, as I am not a cartoon, if I drop a piano 12 stories, it's not something to laugh at.

I suppose people will come out of the woodwork to declare that I'm a horrible racist or something, but I really don't care, at this point, what people call me, as long as they're not trying to incite a riot.

Nor, for that matter, do I give a rat's ass about the ramifications to my political career. My political career is over, as far as I am concerned. I hold a record which should be mathmatically unsurpassable, that record being that I lost the most consecutive public elections in Maryland in the shortest period of time. It's not generally possible, in the normal scheme of things, to be running for office three years running. Yet I was able to do that, and lost all three times. Top that, I dare you.

Generally speaking, I must add, my life here in Montgomery County Maryland has sucked so very badly for some decades now that I just can't muster any enthusiasm for the place, nor generally speaking as well, for the people who live here. Hey, I've done the right thing, as far as I am concerned: I have no arrest record, I have been active for almost a decade in trying to bring more opportunities and better security to the nearby neighborhoods as well as to my own. It is the American dream that any law-abiding citizen can run for office, and I have lived that dream, three years in a row. I saw a clear and present need for some changes to policy and to law, and ran on my expressed perceptions of how to deal with those needs, how to change policy and to reform the laws. Maryland being Maryland, and Marylanders being Marylanders -- and none are moreso thus than my neighbors in and around Aspen Hill -- my commonsense ideas were rejected along with my candidacy and things are as they are. Just don't ever anyone say that I didn't put forth my best ideas and efforts. I did the best I could. Yet in this nearly-perfect democratic system of government, people get the government they deserve.

That government -- or at least the politicians who shape that government -- is extremely slow to react and generally grossly under-reacts to actual serious problems, and wastes most of its time in hot pursuit of utter trivialities. Yet such is the nature of politics here that it was difficult indeed to get an actually useful anti-gang law passed, but there's nearly unanimous and knee-jerk consent for making it almost impossible for lenders to foreclose on deadbeats whose mortgages were obtained by criminal fraud. To anyone who has ever had to try to understand the root causes of what's wrong with Maryland in general and with Montgomery in particular, it seems as if the intention is to put forward the appearance of effective law while actually undermining the commonwealth while rewarding the gangster and putting the honest folks to the sword, converting respect into ridicule and rewarding incompetence and sneakery more than we reward forthrightness and diligence.

In a recent meeting of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., we heard from those of our elected State officials who will seek re-election this year. A note in passing, Rep Henry "Hank" Heller will not seek re-election and will retire from a long career characterized by diligence and even some forthrightness, especially in the difficult realm of the State budget process.

Those officials seeking re-election expressed an intention to remedy a long-overdue problem in employment law. It seems that an unfortunately high percentage of employers are basing their hiring decisions, based at least in part on the credit record of applicants. The proposal is that this practice will be restricted or even actually prohibited.

My prediction? This will wind up like almost all other Maryland law, effectively unenforceable. Good luck with that, fellows, because first the applicant believing themselves to be the victim of credit-discrimination would have to become aware of it, then they'd have to prove that their employer accessed their credit record, and they'd have to prove that a decision had been made on the basis of that credit record, etc.

The only way that Maryland itself could prosecute the case would be if Maryland declared sovereign access to the credit records of all persons residing, or seeking employment, in Maryland. That effectively would make the State the arbiter, and passage of such a law would remand authority to the State which ordinarily would be considered to be personal information protected from seizure by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. Speaking from personal experience, all information on any individual which makes it into any information system in the State will almost immediately make it into the information systems -- electronic or otherwise -- in the political subdivisions of the State, and from there, into the hands of contractors to the State and political subdivisions, and from there it will make it into the hands of the business and activist communities who will argue successfully in court -- if they are even ever discovered or challenged - -as being entitled to free and total access to public records. Thus, all that will be accomplished by this "protection" will be the exposure to the public eye of all personal credit information. Talk about an Identity Theft paradise!

As for me, having recently got my allowable and free ChoicePoint background, I can state with full disclosure that my credit report is full of big fat zeroes. I don't use credit, other than in terms of paying on time for services rendered, for such things as insurance or internet connectivity. I often wonder whether or not this might be why nobody wants to hire me; I'm not a lackey of the system and nobody is more "undependable" than a man free and unencumbered. Or perhaps it's other records that give prospective employers a bad impression of me... at least employers in Montgomery. Strangely enough, potential employers outside of this jurisdiction seem to think I'm a hot property. What could it be about Montgomery County that's preventing me from getting work?

The politicians -- however anxious to reform credit-review as a hiring practice -- don't even mention the vast potential problems of review of medical history as a hiring practice.

Once again, to take legal action as an individual against a hiring entity, you'd have to prove that someone accessed your records and that this access was causative in a decision to not hire, and you'd have to prove personal injury or loss of income. Good luck with that in a civil suit; if your medical services provider is handing out copies of your records, even if you can catch them at it, they've got Deep Pockets and can afford better attorneys than you can, and can afford them for timeframes exceeding possible human lifespans.

For the State to take action on your behalf, as a criminal matter, first, there would have to be a law against it. There are such laws, at the Federal level, such as the Americans With Disabilities Act. Yet even that legal recourse is effectively hamstrung for all practical purposes. It is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission ("EEOC") which only has the authority to issue a writ allowing the injured party to sue with the blessing of the EEOC.

Again, if the State were to pass such a law, how could the State enforce it? First, the State would have to have access to all medical records of all persons treated in Maryland, or at least to all logging of access to such records. Ask yourself: do you want the bureaucrats to have access to your medical records, regardless of whether or not you pay your own bills? Yet here is another little legal problem: so far as I can tell, there's no law covering that aspect, either. Again, if the State has unregulated access to your medical records, doubtless the County agencies have access to your medical records, and so do their contractors, and any of their employees, and potentially so does anyone else who wants to file a FOIA request for access to public records.

Now, unrestricted access to medical records potentially exposes a person to medical fraud and potentially to some degree of identity-theft, but the potential for employment discrimination far outweighs those risks.

Consider, for example, that you might have been tested for the genetic markers for a specific type of breast cancer. Now, you might be at significant risk of that type of breast cancer, and you might choose to have prophylactic mastectomy. Does a potential employer need to know that you had your breasts removed? Do they need to know that you probably should, and that if they hire you they can reasonably expect that at some time soon you'll be taking a month or three of medical leave? The potential employer has all sorts of benefits to their operations and profitability if they know this, so they will be seeking such information as aggressively as they can, and such information is potentially so valuable to potential employers that they will do almost anything to retain access to such information, whether or not their access to such information is strictly legal.

And what happens to the applicant whose medical records are improperly -- but perhaps not illegally -- accessed? Well, she doesn't get that job. Since the practice is so profitable to business, she doesn't get a job anywhere. So, she can't save up the money for her "elective" surgery, genetics proves to be a reliable predictor of illness, and rather than a prophylactic mastectomy, she gets a mastectomy after the cancer has metastasized and she dies -- destitute -- in the charity hospital at taxpayer expense.

Thus, an employer's "reasonable due diligence and cautious business planning" saves them some money but it results in someone dying horribly and preventably and leaves the taxpayer footing the bill. Folks, you're paying for this, whether or not you are more directly victimized. So, when your talking to the candidates at various forums or "town hall" meetings, be sure to ask them what they're doing to increase your level of protection from unreasonable and non-medical uses of your medical records.

Expect both the medical and 'human resources" professions to fight this tooth and nail.

And now for some advertising. Would you like to move next door to me? The neighbors are trying to sell their house. So far they've been mostly trouble-free to me, despite the fact that they're involved in the ministry of a Baptist sect well known hellfire preaching and bible thumping, and I'm a godless heathen. Well, maybe they finally got fed up with the rapidly increasing crapification of the neighborhood or maybe their growing family is getting too large for a mere 3-BR/2.5 bath single-family detached residential home with a finished basement.

As my new neighbor, I should notify you that I won't take kindly to massive violations of County Code, operating a brothel, converting the yard into an out-of-zone mechanic shop, or unlicensed rentals of overcrowded basements to illegal aliens. (According to the county, they don't care about illegal aliens so long as the property owner has a rental permit.) I should also inform you that although I play guitar well, I play guitar loud and I do so during those hours where it is legal to do so. Furthermore, I am in fact a generic non-denominational pagan of the sort who considers it to be proper celebratory form to slosh bread and beer at the "four corners" at astronomically-determined times, which happen to be at night, and in my back yard, which happens to be totally paid-for and outside of both mortgage and deed-covenants. You would probably think I'm silly looking but I think the same thing about the Pope, the Ayatollah, and those guys who tie little boxes to their heads with ribbons on High Holy Days. Unlike them, I don't claim to be tax-exempt. Also, I do not want to be the police officer who brings me before the commissioner for worshiping my Creator as I see fit, nor the person who calls that officer to that task.

Of course, with my luck, CASA de Maryland will buy the place and rent the basement to a clique of MS-13, and I'll just wander around muttering "Maryland being Maryland, and Montgomery being MoCo, I should just move back downtown to the District, where it's a lot less weird".

Moving right along: Aspen Hill Shopping Center seems to still be having its "security" provided by people who seem to be well-organized thugs, and in keeping with the change in the neighborhood demographics, these "security personnel" blend easily into the crowd frequenting the place. Like almost everyone else in that shopping center these "security personnel" are "latino".

The "spotter" is a young male, light complected but otherwise dark hair, dark eyes, kind of skinny, not particularly well-dressed nor poorly-dressed, age somewhere around 23 to 27 or so.

The "muscle", on the other hand, is a very dark-skinned Native American man, seems to be in his early 40s, about 5-11 to 6-0 feet in height, and a very muscular and stocky 280 pounds or so. Face is fairly badly pocked or scarred, in a way that could be from severe teen acne to having survived a nearby shrapnel burst. My bet's on the shrapnel.

The "muscle" doesn't show until and unless the "spotter" calls him in, and the "spotter" probably doesn't call him in until and unless the "spotter" thinks it's more than he himself can handle.

This is the first time I've seen the "muscle"; the "spotter" has been seen a few times in the context of Dino's barber shop, where I have been getting my hair cut now and then since the shopping center was built. Interested parties can go try to spot the "muscle" in surveillance video from the Aspen Hill Radio Shack as of June 11 at 12:39PM. If there's audio along with that tape, people might be fascinated by any conversations after I walk out of the store with over $50.00 of goods paid for with cash, including an extended-warranty contract in my real name. PS, the "muscle" is the extremely large individual taking up position behind me in a stance bespeaking readiness to do some serious whacking on yours-truly. Frankly, I thought I was about to get robbed.

Who are these guys, with what outfit are they associated, are they licensed for this sort of work, and by whose authority are people without badges pretending to be police at Aspen Hill Shopping Center? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Daily Gripe, June 5 2010

2010-06-05T15:01:00.000-07:00

First, a little background.

At one point in time, an online friend of mine who was returning to the UK told me I could have his old Cadillac if I wanted to pick it up form Oklahoma City. It needed some work, he said, but it was drivable. He thought that it needed a valve adjustment.

I took a chance and took a bus out to meet and greet some other online friends who also lived in Oklahoma, and picked up and got title and tags for the car.

It was a 1982 Cadillac Eldorado coupe. It had apparently barely survived a tornado packing hail the size of apples, and was dinged all to hell and back, but it did in fact start and was in fact drivable. It sounded like there was a valve problem on one of the cylinders, or more likely (I thought) a badly-seated fuel-injector. I took it to a garage.

The dealer analyzed the problem. This car came equipped with the aluminum-block HT4100 engine, arguably one of the worst engines ever mass marketed in the USA. It was grossly underpowered and prone to several common modes of failure, or combinations of any or all of those failure modes. This particular one had the most reparable mode, that of one lobe of the camshaft being totally worn down. That lobe would not push a lifter, consequently that cylinder's valves didn't work. However, gas vapor from the throttle-body fuel injection system would still be sucked into the cylinder through the stuck-open valve, ignited by the spark, and the exhaust would then be vented back into the intake manifold. Hence the rhythmic popping sound, heralding potentially a major backfire in the intake manifold.

The mechanic didn't tell me that the ideal solution for that car and that engine was to insure it heavily and park it next to a lake in Tornado Alley and to pray for rain. He quoted me an outrageously high price for a camshaft replacement. I decided to limp the car back to Maryland and did so. First I removed the spark plug wire to halt the unwanted combustion in the non-valved cylinder, and the vehicle stopped popping and was indeed quite drivable. It handled freeway speeds quite well, and being a Cadillac, was a joy to drive and also extremely comfortable. Insanely enough, everything else worked, and a bit of re-finishing work would fix the body dings.

After replacing the camshaft locally to suburban Maryland, it develops that the HT4100 was significantly underpowered for the car, the mileage was not good (12 MPG around town), and something about the front-wheel-drive automatic transmission made it downshift terribly slowly into second. Still, it was a Cadillac, it was paid-for, and it was mine. I put new tires and a semi-decent stereo into it.

Finally, my failure to use exactly the right block sealant in exactly the right proportions on exactly the right maintenance schedule caused an intake-manifold gasket failure, or head-gasket failure. The engine still ran, but it was basically just pumping the contents of the radiator out through the tailpipe with remarkable efficiency. I finally just took it up to a local junkyard and literally gave it away.

If anyone wanted to blow $1500 to replace the gasket, or fix it themselves for less, they'd have a perfectly good 1982 Eldorado with nearly new tires.

And ever since that time, my heart has gone out to everyone I have ever seen driving any Cadillac that came equipped with the HT4100 engine.

In a posting from May 2, 2010, A pause that does not refresh, I griped about getting the "bum's rush" from staff at the Leisure World Giant grocery store. Since then, I felt it incumbent on me to speak with the management, and was told that this sort of thing was unacceptable and it wouldn't be recurring.

Ah, if only that were the case. One visit since then left me with no complaints about the staff, until today. Yet I have to wonder whether the staff are just acting, as it were, as an extension of society at large, or of an active and troublesome subset of society-at-large.

As I told the Giant manager, "All I'm trying to do is to get in, get my food, to get my food back home, so I can eat". I mentioned that I'm not there to have a conversation or to make friends or dilly-dally; I just want to Shop And Go. More or less, that's fine with her and she was pretty clear that Giant wants return customers and repeat business.

Well, off I go to Giant, but not before my day starts weirdly... and that weirdness actually started last weekend.

In the famous story from the collection called "A Thousand and One Nights" (or just "the Arabian Nights" or "the stories of Scheherazade"), Ali Baba is the target of a scheme by the Grand Vizier, who disguises himself and follows Ali Baba to his apartment, and then puts a mark on the door, telling soldiers to arrest anyone found inside a door on that street with such a mark. Of course, Ali Baba's clever girlfriend sees the placement of the mark, and she replicates that mark on every single door on the street. Yet the idea of one person marking a destination, as a designator of a target location to be assaulted by a group not accompanied by the placement of the mark, isn't limited to the Arabic version of fairy tales.

Thus, with the mysterious placement last weekend, of an orange traffic cone at the bus-stop in my front yard, I have begun to remain at a heightened state of alertness. Such out-of-place markers are quite commonly used in both the criminal undergrounds and in the tradecraft of espionage as indicators of a dead drop or contraband marketing contact. If it's spies leaving messages in my yard, I'd really rather not have that happening. If it's some gang designating territory with stolen orange traffic cones rather than with "tagging", I am not in favor of that, either.

Last night, between about 7:00PM and 9:00PM, someone added four more orange traffic cones. I called the police non-emergency number. They actually sent an officer, who said he'd feed it into the reporting system. Probably that will land a report on the desk of someone in the County Department of Transportation.

I should add that the officer had the sort of really deep tan that one associates with military personnel who have done a fairly long turn of duty in "the Sandbox", Iraq or Afghanistan. If this is the case, I wonder that seeing out-of-place objects at roadside, without any known official reason to be there, might make him think of IEDs, which we citizens have been instructed to consider a credible threat, and if he's thinking "IED", maybe I'm thinking intentional strategy of desensitizing the public and police to the threat of IEDs.

Whatever: I'm slightly on edge due to elevated conditions of weirdness.

Back in the Leisure World Giant, I'm making the rounds and collecting my basketful of grub, and I'm standing around in one aisle and a really rather shapely young lady -- age twentyfive to thirty at most -- walks past, all the more unusual because one doesn't often see young ladies of clearly middle-eastern ancestry shopping in a light top and jogging shorts. Even as I restrain myself from rather blatantly checking her out, a very large and also middle-eastern man follows her about ten or fifteen feet behind. Well, I was headed that way anyhow, that's where they have the meat section. Now here's the added weirdness: as the man passes, he says fairly loudly, "Bloodsucker". And then he practically scampers to catch up with the fetching young lady, muttering "bloodsucker bloodsucker bloodsucker bloodsucker bloodsucker" as fast as he can. He then ducks out of sight into the next aisle while she continues on more or less in a straight line.

Most families, all undercover officers, and any intelligence agency operatives will have "alert words". For my family, considering that we lived in the New Mexico desert, that word was "rattler" and the adult-to-kid translation was "keep doing exactly what you are doing, if you're moving one way keep moving that way, if you're not moving, do not move but be ready to move fast, if you're moving be ready to change direction in a hurry". Quite a lot of meaning to fit into one word, but that's the essential nature of battle-languages. They're hardly the ideal mode for discussing philosophy, but they convey significant detail in very compact packages.

"Bloodsucker" is a fairly widespread code word; I know that at least one neighbor uses it to get their kids to "look sharp". Whether it's chosen because it's pretty unusual, or whether those people are actually insane enough to believe in bloodsuckers, it doesn't matter. Any public use of battle-language outside of an engaged situation is always and inherently a hostile act. If I was in the desert and said "rattler" to family, they'd look sharp for a venomous viper... whether or not it was coiled on a rock or walking on two legs. In either case, the ultimate meaning is "stand sharp to kill or flee or both".

I picked out a steak, and headed for frozen foods and then for the checkout.

Native Americans had a certain ritual to which they subjected all captives who were deemed suitable for adoption. After their population crash due to smallpox and subsequent struggles, they sought to perpetuate their culture by abducting colonists and pioneers and rather forcibly inducting their captives into that culture.

The ritual of "running the gauntlet" basically consisted of being forced to run past a line of people who would beat you as you passed. For most of the captives, they just struggled through to the end. Natives captured from other tribes knew that their status in the tribe would be higher if they were to be aggressive to anyone overstepping their mandate. If someone stepped into the way to block passage, to force you to stand still in the line to receive a longer beating, if beat them down, you'd have more respect at the end of the ritual.

The way to the door, from the self-serve automated checkout, is at times remarkably like running the gauntlet... except at Giant, you don't get respect for surviving it. You get disrespect for even being there.

I find it really quite strange that Giant Food, which is owned by Royal Dutch Ahold, allows the mere existence of a corporate subculture which actively embraces racialist harassment. Perhaps an e-mail to dear Great Aunt Wilhelmina, Her Royal Highness and by grace of God Queen of the Netherlands, might importune her to deign to have a word with one of the staff to pass it down the line to the management cadres. Perhaps a bit of fact-finding might be in order; perhaps some nice ethnic Dutch mid-level manager might be instructed to dress up as a poor white American and be a frequent shopper at the Leisure World Giant.

Not to be rude nor do I attempt to be insulting, and as a matter of record HRH Wilhelmina isn't actually my Great Aunt... but if what's setting off the staff at Leisure World Giant Food is paleness of skin and color of eyes, any such management-in-mufti from Holland will be the most pale and green-eyed sharp toothed white man ever whipped out of Dodge for daring to show his pasty ass in the Ghetto in broad daylight.

And when he reports back to the Netherlands about the racialist gang working over there in the States, people back here might learn why exactly it is that the rest of the world does not fuck with the Dutch.

Here's a hint for you: they'll pack up their grocery store and take it back home with them, and you folks won't have anyplace to play games anymore. And good luck getting a job anywhere ever again in your life, after provoking million-dollar lawsuits on top of international incidents.

Today's annoyance, aside from some middle-eastern-ethnic shopper loudly muttering "bloodsucker bloodsucker bloodsucker bloodsucker" as fast as he could in perfectly American accents, comes in the form of some Arabic-speaking lady who bags groceries at the self-service checkout.

I do know what Arabic sounds like, and can distinguish a "Salaam aleikum" from the Farsi "Salaam"; having had Arabic-speakers as neighbors for years, and having dated an Iranian American gal years ago. "Kodafez", as they say, however it's spelt, after "Chitdori, Quba", etc etc. Blah blah and I can also exclaim "Scatala, malaka" though that's all Greek to me, ya nyeh ponimaya, gomen nasai. Feh. Meshuganas. But anyway I am trying to tell a story here, all the time you got to interrupt?

There is a nasty chemical. I do not know what exactly it is, but it is an aerosol dust something along the line of flea-and-tick powder, and when I get a handful of it in my face, it makes me feel about exactly like I'd just been led in captivity into Babylon, whipped, and told to "sing us one of the songs of Zion". Real unhappy, my friends. As the Rasta man might say, "Jah love but me is getting to the point where I and I fear no man". Unfortunately it is against the law for me to demonstrate cultural competency by doing a passable imitation of Steppin' Razor. More unfortunately, the American-Hating Foreign Racist who has just been conversing in Arabic with other customers in the adjacent checkout line knows this. She gets between the aisles, ducks down out of sight of the cameras, reaches under a divider, launches a handful of Hartz Mountain Flea and Pet Killer underhand into my face, snags the handbasket stack from my aisle and pulls it back under the divider. This leaves me "hating life" for the duration of my stay in the self-serve checkout line at Leisure World Giant Food.

Right as I got into line, she apparently added a new clip of plastic bags, but didn't do it right. I have to struggle to get every bag open, and the influence of the Nasty Dust first raises my body temperature by several degrees, makes me sweat profusely and shake like I was neck deep in a snow-drift, and this is not improving my manual dexterity, and this only adds to the anger. Yet this actually works out well.

Some deep black gal comes walking past, holds her hand over the place where a bag should be open to receive my groceries, tries to drop a pinch of some powder (same or different, don't know) into the open bag. The bag isn't open. So I holler "what!" like I was from Baltimore and she keeps on walking past into the employee area. I then open the bag, fill it, unrack it and stack it. Repeat as necessary until I'm done. I am less than happy with my Giant's ability to provide a pleasant shopping experience through proper selection and adequate training of customer service representatives. Meanwhile, the semi-cute middle-easternish gal in the short shorts and her bloodsucker-muttering boyfriend/brother/bodyguard/whatever are in the next aisle and finish up and head out just in front of me.

The car is steaming hot, of course. The aforementioned couple loads their groceries into their vehicle about the same times as I load mine, I head out before they do. Yet for whatever that guy might have been saying about me, they didn't do anything to me; a Giant staffer did.

At least I assume they were actually employed by Giant... I've seen them bagging groceries there many times before, and they were in the proper uniform. The deep black gal who tried to add some take-home poison powder to one of my grocery bags was not in uniform.

Getting down the road to home isn't a long trip.

Yet going down the final stretch, I'm two blocks from home, and peering out of the back of a pickup truck is a face, sighting down the length of a cylinder pointed directly at me.

Of course, pattern-recognition instantly kicks in the seek-shelter reflexes, and I've locked up the brakes of my Detroit heavy metal lead sled and I'm just starting to turn the wheels for a tactical stop on the far side of the pickup when the conscious mind kicks in: it's just some kid, sitting in the back of a pickup truck, sighting down the length of a broomstick at oncoming traffic. He's already running back into the house, knows he's done something wrong. I yell "don't do that" at him, twice.

Now, this isn't bad enough.

Look: I am not a cop. However, I do come from a family that settled the frontiers and pioneered the old west, and most of that family are of military background and many survived military service. I have a lot of inherent reflexes and have heard a lot of family stories and it's a quality of the ancestry that those stories become instruction and training. If a long cylinder orients on me, I see it as "weapon coming to bear" and the adrenaline kicks in. Strategically this isn't advisable for me to disclose, but an explanation is in order.

As I said, I am not a cop. This is good. If I was a cop, I would without question be carrying a firearm.

And cops shoot stupid kids playing with toy guns, or things that look like toy guns, all the goddamn time.

Now, if what happened next had not happened next, I would not be saying what I will say here now.

The next time I come down that road and that kid is pointing a broomstick at me from the bed of that huge maroon pickup truck, I shall go home and call 911 and advise them that there is a sniper hiding in a pickup truck at your address. "Looked kind of young to me, but maybe he got ahold of one of those gangbanger's AK-47s and decided to take it outside to play."

The cops will doubt that it is a sniper. However, to play it safe, every single cop in Montgomery County will be parked on your lawn in about one minute. They will ask you lots of questions. They will probably want to look at the inside of your house after searching your vehicles. They'll almost certainly copy the address books of your cellphones.

By the way, if the first one of those cops comes around the corner with his/her adrenaline rush on, if they see a face peering down a cylinder pointed in their direction, exactly where they were told to expect a sniper, they will probably use the exact move that I did: zoom past, lock up the brakes with a final tactical turn to maximize the amount of metal between them and their target. Hopefully the stupid kid playing "aim at moving targets" will have enough sense to scream, in perfect English, "I am an unarmed child and very very sorry" or they may get just all shot full of holes, along with the truck.

And once again, every single cop in Montgomery County will be parked on your lawn in about one minute. They will ask you lots of questions. They will probably want to look at the inside of your house after searching your vehicles. They'll almost certainly copy the address books of your cellphones.

All of this could be avoided by telling children "don't play aim at the target at cars around here. People can take it the wrong way".

But the Astute Reader may be asking themselves, "so, what exactly was it that happened next, that you feel it necessary to issue, as per requirements of Maryland law, such a warning?"

60 seconds after this stupid kid damn near gave me a heart-attack on top of getting the Flea Powder Treatment at the Leisure World Giant Food from an Arabic-speaking sketchy foreign racist, I was unloading my groceries.

A silver van pulls up, full of latinos, of course. The stupid kid in question was a Central-American or South American Native, nearly pureblood.

So these guys confer via cellphone to their higher officer up the street somewhere. How nice to know that the local gangbangers have a response time under a minute for a white man yelling "don't do that" at one of their own clique for playing "shoot the whitey".

They sit for about one minute, make a "U-turn" and go back the way they came.

Approximately one more minute later, a cheap silvery-blue Nissan two door 5-year-ld shitbox drives by with two black guys in it, who yell "poor white trash" at me and keep going. Maybe they're monitoring the comm frequencies of the gangsters sent down after me by the miscreant caretakers of the brat playing "sniper the anglos", and thought they'd come see if maybe there was anything left to shoot.

And finally, last but not least, a car I could not fail to recognize.

A 1982 Cadillac Eldorado, only now it is painted a very pale silvery blue, with a darker blue tint on the vinyl top. Two more-or-less white guys driving, black ballcaps. They execute a couple of erratic traffic maneuvers including about three U-turns in 30 seconds, declare "it's him", and drive off the other way.

My only question is, who do they think I am (me myself, or my hypothetical lookalike that hangs out causing trouble in Aspen Hill Shopping Center?), other than the other question, who the fuck are they or who the fuck do they think they are. Because it's not just them, it's not just that car, it's not just the other car (the Nissan shitbox) and it's not just the silvery minivan with the lightskin latino gangster fucks from up the block who actually got the balls to come and park at my yard like they were men and had something to say to me. If they said something to me, I would point out to them what I pointed out, above. I am not a cop, and so I did not shoot your kid. I told him to not do what he was doing... because if a cop saw that, the kid might have been shot. I give the kid advice that maybe is going to save his life, and you want to raise up the posses and go all gangsta on my ass? Keep your kids from doing stupid shit, and none of this is going to happen again, comprehende? And don't be doing stupid shit like driving down here like you gonna do something, either. Maybe you do it and it only turns out real bad for everyone. Maybe you don't do nothing and everybody gets bad feelings. Send me a fucking e-mail or a blog comment, or a cop, or an attorney. Just keep your kids from pointing things at me.

Because, frankly, after seeing no less than three vehicles come whizzing past, within 240 seconds, I'm starting to think that they too intended to point something at me. Where would this kid learn to hide in a pickup truck and sight over the edge at the oncoming traffic, other than from his family? So I guess he's been seeing a lot of people practicing that. So maybe his bad behavior is my warning to expect crazy gangster violence at any second. It is definitely my warning to expect crazy gangster violence when all these cars come by so immediately; it's my warning at at least three carloads of gangbangers are in motion in vehicles in my part of the neighborhood and communicating by radio or cellphone.

Maybe those orange warning cones are more appropriate than I knew: maybe they mean Gangs On Patrol, Looking To Start Shit.

[Culture of Chaos III] Economic Musings for the Masses

2010-06-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump to the previous chapter?

Friday, June 4 2010, was the year's second worse performance at the Wall Street markets.

Closing down by 323 points at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, at 9932 points rounded, with comparable losses across the board, this was a bad start for June after one of the most miserable May performances on record, characterized by increasing market volatility with triple-digit day-to-day oscillations on a steady but slow downward trend.

People in the business of market analysis -- and especially those involved with day-to-day trading -- tend to point to the influence of various reports such as the data on housing starts, new home sales, sales of existing homes, percentage of borrowers "underwater", and occasional unofficial but well-founded speculations on the "shadow inventory" of homes held off of the market to attempt to support prices. That "shadow inventory" is really particularly worrisome as sooner or later the actual figures will either become known, or capable of being accurately "guesstimated". At that point in time, true market forces will begin to affect the marketplace, rather than the smoke-and-mirrors of the present Schrödinger's Cat scenario, and re-adjustments will occur.

Yet despite our ability to document the day-to-day and month-to-month causes-and-effects of this-or-that marketplace event or trend, I think a lot of people are failing to see that these are possible inevitable symptoms of a transformative shift in economic paradigms.

After the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the west, the migrations of the barbarian nations and their migratory wars with and conquests of the natives of the former western Roman Empire significantly reduced the population in some areas, and in the east, the Plague of Justinian came in wave after wave from the mid 500s to about 750 in the Christian Era ("CE"), ultimately killing perhaps 50 percent of the population. From 750 or so onwards, the growth of population remained unrestrained by at least this particular extremely virulent plague.

By the 1100s or so, in the remnant Empire of the East -- the Empire in the West was in most parts either invaded by the Moors or engaged in constant warfare with them -- the population increased steadily even as the Empire bankrupted itself with an endless war in Iraq and Iran fighting the Sassanid Persian Empire. The social structures changed. Where once the Roman Citizen was proud and independent, as free as they wanted to be so long as they did not break the imperial laws nor violate the edicts, they were eventually reduced to serfdom, required to enter only the profession of one or both of their parents, and generally forbidden upon pain of death from traveling more than about 10 miles without a special permit. These conditions of social stratification, overpopulation, and general destitution of the public treasuries were remedied by the arrival of the Black Death, a series of waves of bubonic plague which wiped out entire townships, depopulated many cities by from a quarter to half of the residents, and which may have vacated as many as three-quarters of all farms.

Eventually, there was no society left to enforce social stratification, and nobody much left to enforce notions of rank, or even of property in many cases. Perhaps most importantly, rather than having a dearth of materials and limited concentrations of wealth along with an excess of labor, now there was a dearth of labor and vast surplus instead of horrid scarcity.

With a dearth of labor, and material surplus, mechanism and engineering became less valuable than people. Rather than solving problems by working excess peasants to death, problems were solved by the application of engineering and craftsmanship, knowledge of new materials and techniques spread, and the general standard of living for the times swept upwards. The Renaissance had begun.

In 1520, Hernan Cortés brought smallpox to the New World and within a generation, between half and 90 percent of all Natives had died. In some regions, mortality approached 100 percent quite closely, with quite frequently only one survivor per village. Often, this would be a lone hunter returning from a long hunt. Such was the effect of the smallpox virus on the natives that they would simply sit down and die on the spot, and practically liquefy, as the virus would reproduce in every last cell due to the utter lack of immunity to the entire class of virus. In people from the Old World, the horrible pocks and pustules -- which still killed one-of-three infected -- were in part the result of centers of infection becoming surrounded and somewhat encysted by the immune response.

By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, most of the dying was complete, even that far north. The settlers arrived in a nearly-depopulated land, with room to expand and with a superabundance of game, which had overpopulated with the vanishing of their primary predator, the natives.

For centuries to follow, the history of the Americas -- of the US and of Canada in particular -- were histories of settling mostly-uninhabited lands and harvesting a superabundance of resources. The economy was generally an "economy of surplus" and the political environment was one of nearly absolute freedom and liberty. If people didn't like the local economy or politics, they could simply move on. They could find fresh fields or un-hunted forests beyond the next hill or river or mountain range. If people were troublemakers they could be driven out of one town, and they could go live in the wilderness or head on to the next town. If people found a local community stifling or repressive, they could move on.

Yet eventually the country became settled, later than expected in this case largely due to the advent of effective birth-control technologies. Yet settled they have become. Our competitive demands for certifications of professionalism from accredited universities limit career options in a way not qiute so blatantly oppressive as in the later years of the Roman Empire, when people were required to enter the profession of their parents. Our system of massive debt and personal credit obligations over lifetimes is less blatantly oppressive than the later years of the Roman Empire when persons were prohibited on pain of death from traveling more than 10 miles from the manor of their lord and when actually moving a household was legally unthinkable.

Yet we are overpopulated, and our resources -- from land to food to clean water to sanitation to fuel to medical access -- are increasingly limited to the population as a whole, if not necessarily restricted evenly from all. We have moved from an "economy of surplus" to an "economy of scarcity" and are perhaps drifting into an "economy of poverty".

At any rate, we are no longer in a "frontiers and colonization" economic and social model. Our economic model is falling extremely rapidly into "steady-state and recycling", and our political model is likely to follow. Yet with our North American traditions of liberty and freedoms of movement, it's not going to be easy for the very rich to turn the rest of us into chattel and vassals.

But you have to expect them to try.

Perils of Presbyopia Part I

2010-06-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a slow few days in blogging land. Either the weather's been too nice to be inside banging away on the keyboard all day, or I've had things to do. You know, maintaining the yard or doing paying work for other people.

Let's see: in the Mythos fiction thread, Aspen Hill and much of the surrounding area are under an externally-imposed power and telecommunications blackout while the nearly-indetectable zombies -- infested with inimical alien software downloaded from dimensions beyond time and space -- have blended into the illegal alien population and are camping in the woods near the Gate of Heaven Cemetery. Will they manage to stumble into the EMP-shielded and internally powered industrial espionage command center in the basement of a local Korean mega-church? And if so, will the zombies discover that they've actually encountered something weirder than they are?

In the new Culture of Chaos fiction thread, we've taken a look at the world's rapid and seemingly willful headlong rush toward the Singularity, which may already be started. Hey, until maybe 10 years ago, nobody ever predicted the massive warping of society -- mostly without it much being noticed -- except by people standing aside -- by ubiquitous texting devices and cellphones. As for me, I loathe cellphones with an unbridled passion bordering on existential fury, and I firmly believe that any person observed to either read or originate a text message on a mobile device while operating a vehicle or power-equipment should be dragged forth and summarily horsewhipped.

Yet it doesn't rise to the level of being inherently incomprehensible to anyone living before this started, so it doesn't quality as a Singularity; plenty of science-fiction writers and other imaginative people long expected that some day we'd have people constantly engaged in long-distance telecommunications and constantly accessing remote information systems. Yet we thought it would be something sinister, like people all having their minds sucked into some global entity that would turn everyone into commie zombies. Or perhaps it would be a brave new world of cyberspace, where people would jack in and out of virtual reality. Nobody expected that we'd see groups of a dozen or more teenagers standing around on streetcorners in total silence, texting comments and replies to each others' youtube channels. Far less did we expect that these groups of teens would be so deeply immersed into this that the only way to get them to pay attention to anything in their local environment would be to actually rob them of their cellphones while in use.

This obliviousness has allowed adults, no less than juveniles, to be completely oblivious to changes around them. For example, the USA got invaded by about a million illegal aliens per year since 1996. Maryland has resolutely failed to deal with this on a State level, and in Montgomery County the invasion has so altered my neighborhood that for the most part it looks like a retirement community for white folks staffed exclusively by young-adult and barely-middle-aged central-american pureblood Natives. I think anyone who thinks I may resent this might be commended on the accuracy of their perceptions.

Heck, the other day, a friend of mine came by and tried to get me to help him out on a temporary gig. So he tells me he's just looking out for me because ordinarily he'd just go up to Home Depot and pick up some day laborers, or as most people call them, "some spanish guys". But because he's looking out for me, he'll only pick up one "spanish guy" and hire me instead of the other one.

I begged off with excuses, for instance I was in the middle of doing my laundry, rolling cigarettes, and had to change into appropriate shoes. Finally he got the idea that I just was not about to work with illegal aliens, nor for someone who hired them. I was as polite as I could be, considering that I've known this guy for years and years. For anyone else I might have been screaming: "dude, I have spent the last 15 years trying to get rid of these guys; they're not supposed to be here and they've done me out of a job for those 15 years, which is the main reason I want to get rid of them. And now you want me to work with them?" No, not to sound too angry, but I am angry, not with my friend, but with the fouled up local government, the special interests that have their noses in the asscracks of the local elected and appointed officials, with the civil servants who will utter the most astonishingly threadbare and worm-riddled rationalizations to justify their enforcing policy that they know in their hearts is wrong nearly to the point of treason.

I am angry that when I began my mission 15 years ago, I told everyone that we'd wind up in a county that was cutting services and failing to promote or give raises to its best employees and that the taxes would be the highest in the nation even as the old-school Americans went broke and watched their retirements vaporized by pervasive lawlessness and risk-taking. And I was right; I always am. I said I'd wind up living in a ghetto where the gangs have better funding, better communications, and more influence with elected officials, than do the police. I was right about that, too.

But enough about me and my inerrant prophecy. Enough about me being dirt poor while people who can barely speak English pull up to me in their new Range Rover and tell me, "Joo know, all joo ever had to do was to hire the migrantes, and you would be rich like me!" Yeah, like I really want to be fucking Al Capone.

Okay. Perils of Presbyopia...

Presbyopia means, literally, "elder eyes". Medically, the lens in you eye becomes less flexible with age. For people who naturally have good vision, generally this means that you will need to get reading glasses. For people who already wear corrective lenses, generally this means that your prescription will change, and you'll need bifical or trifocal lenses, or perhaps the new gradient lenses.

I'm well into the stage of needing reading glasses, but so far, my distance vision is still fairly good.

I need to put emphasis on the "fairly" part of fairly good vision. It's far from perfect.

There's a gal who I occasionally see at the bus stop in front of my house. As it turns out, there is another such. They are so close in appearance that I have trouble telling one from the other. Indeed, for some months I mistook one for the other and vice-versa. This left me quite baffled as to why I'd wave at the semi-cute gal at the bus-stop and sometimes we'd have a fairly nice chat, and at other times, I'd wave at the semi-cute gal at the bus-stop and she'd pretty much sneer at me and give me the finger. I couldn't figure out what, if anything, I might have done to instigate this widely varying range of behavior, and finally decided that I was dealing with a rare, but definite, case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Shades of the Cable TV series "United States of Tara"!

But no... Let's just say that back when I was younger, Aspen Hill was practically littered with "betties and veronicas", to culturally reference Archie Comics. Back when the neighborhood had about 6000 houses and maybe three of those households were black families and one household was a second-generation Japanese-American family from Hawai'i and another household was third-generation Chinese-American (also by way of Hawai'i), there were so many brunettes, blondes, and redheads that they practically had to wear name-tags so that people could tell them apart. This was before the modern Obesity Epidemic, so you couldn't specify one from the other by saying "the hot brunette" because they were all hot, so to speak. Such were the wonders of the school lunches and physical-education program, not to mention the after-school sports clubs and teams.

This led to a lot of confusion, of course. But as the years went on, and the neighborhood became "more diverse" as the colorful variety of european-ancestry people were displaced by a bland uniformity of central-americans all with the same color and depth of tan and same black hair, you didn't have to ask "which sultry green-eyed brunette" or "which hot blue-eyed redhead" or "which stunning nordic blonde", you could just say "the redhead" because there was only one left in the neighborhood, or you could just say "the younger blonde" or "the older blonde" because there were only two blondes in the neighborhood.

Now, for reasons I don't understand, more than one blonde (of the actually all grown-up variety) rides the bus past my house.

And the only way I can tell that there are two of them is that one day I was sitting on the porch, all determined to ignore any blondes debarking -- due to the highly-variable hot-and-cold signals I'd been getting -- and saw one blonde get off of one bus, and a half-hour later, saw another one get off of the next bus going the same way. Absent some really fast driving by third parties unknown, or someone having a really good time playing cheap tricks on me for no sane reason I can imagine, that means that two blondes ride the same bus, and both have approximately the same figure, taste in off-work clothing, ponytail, eye color, etc. By the time I could get close enough to tell the difference, the one that either hates me in particular or men in general would probably be reaching for her pepper-spray and the one that doesn't reach for the pepper-spray might be close enough to start chat. Unfortunately for me, that's within range of the pepper-spray, so until I get new glasses, I should just keep in mind that sometimes being close enough to see who you are talking to can be dangerous.

The blonde(s) are a curious enough affair, as Sherlock Holmes might have said. Yet this isn't the only case of Evil Twin Theory evident in the neighborhood.

Some years ago, I simply stopped shopping in the stores at the core of Aspen Hill.

First, there was that whole affair at the 7-11 on Georgia Avenue just north of Connecticut Avenue. I used to love that place, back when I was in high-school and for many years afterwards. And then while I was out of town for a few years, or living down in the District, things changed. I now consider it a relentlessly hostile station house outpost of the Invasion, a clearly welcoming gathering spot and convenient booze stop for the illegal aliens who dominate the parking lot. After getting stuck in the neck a few times, I decided to take my business elsewhere. Yet the so-called Convenience Store Mafia is never satisfied to run you out of one store; evidently the manager decided to go pass around pictures of me, to other local store managers. Long story short, as they say, I got hounded out of the central business district of my hometown by American-Hating Foreign Racists and the police won't do fuckall about it, not even after 15 years of endless bitter complaining, running for office three years running, and involving myself in the Civic Association and various neighborhood anti-crime group meetings for nearly a decade.

So, not much going near the place in the last five years or so if I can possibly avoid it, in recent months I have decided to pick up the Sentinel there. And who do I see?

My Evil Twin is evidently homeless and may be mentally ill, or perhaps just really pissed off at generally most everything, which latter emotional state would be entirely reasonable for anyone spending any time in the Aspen Hill Shopping Center or Northgate Plaza Shopping Center.

My Evil Twin and I would wind up on the exact same police line-up if officers went around collecting people based on the following description: height somewhere around 5-foot-10 to six feet, vicinity of 200 pounds, hair brown or dark blonde, hairline receding, green eyes, big head, generally looks all pissed off. Oh, and don't ever forget this: not a snappy dresser. Wears inexpensive clothing appropriate to the weather, and wears it until it's unwearable.

However, he evidently hangs out around Aspen Hill's core shopping centers, and I don't.

Why he'd hang out down there, I don't know.

Then again, much is explained by the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis

1. A person who very much resembles me in almost all detail (though you would not see us as actual twins if we were standing next to each other) has really annoyed local shopkeepers.

2. Local shopkeepers, sharing descriptions and possibly low-resolution store surveillance photos, have decided that this person and myself are one and the same single individual.

3. Having become annoyed, the local shopkeepers and their staffers tried working with law-enforcement. Perhaps they have identified me as a local longtime resident and gave my name to police. Any police investigation would show that I have no arrest record, no wants, no warrants. Yet someone who looks a lot like me is causing them trouble. They organize a harassment campaign.

4. They harass me. I complain. The police can find no evidence that I did anything to them -- my alibis are airtight, because I am not the individual in question -- and the shopkeepers are very diligent in not getting caught; they can suppress video evidence and collude in a united front to proffer very well-rehearsed false reporting.

5. To me, this seems to be coming totally out of the blue; after all, the only thing I've done to the shopkeepers is to either try to agitate for better anti-crime programs in the neighborhood, or complain to the cops when the shopkeepers, staff, or customers cross the line between rudeness and harassment/assault.

6. Years of endless harassment and police inaction result in me being left physically damaged, psychologically warped, and perplexed with endless mental anguish

end hypothesis

Now how to test this hypothesis?

First and foremost, everyone involved needs to be informed that there are two very similar individuals in the same area, one of whom may be more than a bit of a troublemaker. It might also be necessary to point out that harassing one person because they look like another person is perilously close to racist hate crime, especially coming from foreigners.

Remember, it took me the better part of six months -- and a freak circumstance of seeing two different but nearly-identical but slightly-differently-dressed (one half changed out of work clothes and one dressed for slumming) blondes getting off of two buses headed the same way on consecutive passes -- to figure out that I wasn't dealing with one person with severe mood swings, but rather with two different individuals, one of whom is somewhat sociable and the other of whom would prefer burying an icepick in my forehead in preference to exchanging minimal civil pleasantries.

But once I had the idea that there were two nearly-identical blondes riding the same bus in the same direction at approximately the same time of day, I started looking for details by which to distinguish one from the other. And here I had been thinking that I was dealing with a Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde individual. Yet I have to point out: that the fact that I had been conflating two individuals into one person, does not in any way preclude either or both of them from being afflicted with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is grossly over-represented as to incidence by US popular media. Yet many of us do have our professional personas which could be contrasted and compared with our other personae. An example of this might be a diligent attorney who transforms into a soccer mom in between her roles exercising for her annual triathlon and organizing the church social. It's all the same person, but if you're opposite her in the courtroom it's a far different face you will see, compared to what you'd see debating over menu choices for the church social, or to what you'd see if you were cheering for the other kid's soccer team. Yet this isn't dissociative identity disorder, and it probably isn't actually a disorder. It's just that modern life crams in so much opportunity in such variety.

I myself am easily mistaken for a lazy porch-monkey who probably hasn't got more than one thought at a time overtaxing the two remaining burnt-out synapses in his clearly addled head. Then I can pick up the guitar, and while I could certainly stand to pad out my repertoire, the songs I can play, I can damned well play. And believe it or not, sometimes I can type and string words together in a way that can be comprehended, although sadly at times I am not so very talented in verbal expression.

Yet it isn't the case that I pick up a guitar and suddenly I am a rock-star in my mind, and don't remember that I can also type and can do more than a little bit of internet development and system administration. I am a "whole person", if not quite what Maslow would have called "self-actualizing". I don't dress up for a Goth Nite or for Hallowe'en and think I'm Count Dracula just because I'm wearing black, and I don't think that when I'm not wearing black, either. Nor for that matter do I at any time think that I'm not me, or that I am someone that I am not. I am not an actor in a role, though I can and do try to act appropriately to the role I perform at any given moment. When I'm at a candidate forum, I try to maintain the gravity and sense of decorum appropriate to that situation. If I was drinking beer watching NASCAR, I'd be appropriate to that, down to and including slurred speech and bad grammar. What I hope the reader understands from this is that I am always myself. And I expect that from other people, and I expect other people to understand that.

But enough about me...

I want to know more, lots more, about my Evil Twin...

[Culture of Chaos II] Aerogel from Nanohell

2010-05-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

Questions occasionally arise in the lecture audience: "Okay, we've heard of this Singularity; but can you give us an example of what it will be like?"

Everyone who asks me about this thinks that they've got me stumped, so I always first answer with the paradox that should have left me stumped.

"Well, of course you'd think that nobody could provide an apt simile for the Singularity, as by definition it's a transformative event (or sequence of events) after which the world is so transformed that it can't be comprehended or expressed by anyone living before that time or event. Yet, this isn't entirely true when it comes to providing a simile or metaphor or allegory by which we can understand some elemental condition or system which would be expected to be present in the weltgeist after the Singularity.

"The example I like to use", I continue, to the amusement of whichever student or attendee has offered their question so as to watch me squirm, "is that of the formal dessert known as the Baked Alaska."

I pause to savor the expressions on the faces in the audience. The stumpee has stumped the stumper.

"And no," I say, "I am not suggesting that the future is like fried ice-cream. I am saying that the way we have to look at the Singularity is about the same way as people experience their first Baked Alaska.

"A person's first Baked Alaska is generally experienced as a comic novelty, a tasty confection of juxtaposition, a feast of opposites. It's even better as a Bombee Alaska, where it's doused with cherry cordials and then lit on fire. A flaming fried ice-cream cake may be tasty, and it may be seen as an exercise in creativity and culinary finesse, but ultimately the Baked Alaska is deeply disturbing and should almost strike terror into the minds of thoughtful people everywhere.

"Sure, fried ice-cream is a reality.. but why? -and even more worrisomely... who the heck would think up such a thing?"

I pause for dramatic effect and, out in the audience, someone takes the bait. "But how do these questions about the nature of fried ice-cream affect our understanding of the Singularity?"

"Well," I tell them, "it's like this: until you've heard of a Baked Alaska -- and perhaps you'll first hear of one when someone puts one down on the table in front of you -- most people can't possibly have ever had the least little thought about fried ice-cream. It's just not something that the normal mind can conceive. Yet having conceived of fried ice-cream, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. It's tasty. Yet it's not something that you would consider as having historical inevitability.

"The Singularity, thus, can be predicted just as reasonably, based on historical inevitabilities, as you could comparably predict fried ice-cream. Imagine that it's your birthday and your friends drag you out to a fancy restaurant. You know you'll be having dinner and entertainment, but unless you've filched a copy of the party itinerary, you cannot possibly know, nor even reasonably expect with any specificity, that before the evening is over, you will be presented with a plate full of fried ice-cream.

Thus, the future, the inevitable Singularity, is made of Baked Alaska. You can look at a bowl of ice-cream and reasonably predict that there will be flavored variations. There will be chocolate, butterscotch, fruit flavors, etc. And you can reasonably predict, from looking at a cake, that there will be everything from sponge-cake to pound-cake to flatbreads to angel-food cakes. But you can't reasonably predict that someone will put a Baked Alaska on the plate in front of you and then light it on fire. It's totally unpredictable and doesn't stand to reason, yet there it is, and damn tasty, too."

The inevitable heckler chimes in, right on cue: "But what if we don't like fried ice cream. Flaming or otherwise, dontcha know."

"Fried ice-cream," I shoot right back at him, "doesn't give a rat's about what you do or don't want. And neither does the Singularity. And both of them could wind up on your dinner table with very little warning and not much reason to expect it. So always be prepared to confront that for which there is no adequate preparation. Look at it another way: when the future arrives as a tsunami, your only hope is to know how to surf."

I could do that lecture in my sleep. I occasionally dream about it. It's sort of like those old TV shows where the peak of comedy was some clown getting a pie in the face, only in my dreams, the world is in whiteface and a Brooks Brothers suit and gets a 5000-pound Baked Alaska dropped onto it from orbit at 20 miles per second. It's not pretty and it always wakes me up. Fortunately I keep a supply of frozen twinkies on hand for just such occasions. If nothing else works, they can revolt me back to sleep.

The Astute Reader may rightly surmise that anyone who even conceives of eating frozen twinkies, for any reason at all, might have other vile habits. Mine is that in general I am a slob. I learned exactly one thing from living in a fraternity-house, other than that I generally can't stand frat-boys, and that was the ideal of washing your dishes before you eat off of them; you can't guess and probably don't want to know how well the person at the sink before you did the dishes. So, I tend to get a bit cavalier about sanitation sometimes.

It's not as bad as you might think. I eat a lot of stuff from cans, and microwave dinners, and it's all pretty much the exact serving size to suit me, so I eat every last bit, rinse the containers with some slightly soapy water and then let the containers pile up until recycling day.

Sometimes, though, I do eat things like cheese sandwiches or bagels with cream-cheese, and with these I just shake the crumbs from the paper towels into the trash can, and recycle the paper. No muss, no fuss. Where I really fall down is the occasional meal that I actually cook.

Due to a situation best left undisclosed, I have developed something of a talent for microwaving meat. The trick is to get the right cut. Usually the cuts labelled "marinade" or "stir fry" come out pretty well. Just pop it into a microwave safe bowl, generally some variation on Pyrex. Then cook until close to done on half heat, on the turntable. More or less two minutes per pound to get it into the range where it's necessary to actually watch it cook. A hint: if it looks fully cooked, it's going to be a bit more than well-done by the time you eat it. This isn't a problem since you've just steamed it to death in a covered glass bowl; it's not going to go dry.

This lack of things getting dry applies to almost anything in a covered glass bowl. Including whatever juices get steamed out of the meat. So, maybe you're thinking of making some gravy with the juice? Just cover the bowl after you take out the meat.

Look, it's meat juice, for sure, but it's just been heated to boiling in a microwave, it's not going to go bad overnight. My problem stemmed from the fact that I'm a slob, and sort of lazy, can't get motivated, and for the better part of a week that meat juice was sitting there in its covered glass bowl, at room temperature. Maybe my subconscious was wondering how long it takes a bowl of meat juices in a glass bowl to go bad. I figured at some level that if stuff started floating on the surface, I'd just hold my nose, add chlorine bleach and soap, and flush the whole mess down the toilet.

One day I walked past it, thinking that today was the day I'd go to the store and buy some bleach -- I had used the last of the old bottle the week before, in a long-overdue cleaning of the commode -- and as I glanced inside the scary glass bowl, I noticed it seemed... foggy inside. A closer look -- without opening the lid, of course -- revealed that there was a fine structure of filaments, very fine, almost transparent, filling up all of the parts of the bowl that weren't filled with liquid. Eeek, I thought to myself, and headed out to the store to buy some bleach.

For some years now, the local government's efforts have combined with the proximity to the National Institutes of Health to turn the nearby "I-270 Corridor" into an economic and research powerhouse in biotechnology.

Quite co-incidentally, the day after I was bleach-shopping, one J Craig Venter -- who led the team that developed the technologies to sequence the human genome -- announced the creation of the world's first synthetic life-form, Mycoplasma laboratorium.

At the time, however, I was thinking more about comparable local researches into nanotechnology. Specifically, I was thinking about nanotubes, specifically about organic membrane nanotubes. Maybe even microtubules. Then again, I was also thinking about aerogels.

This got me to wondering: mycelial cords in fungi form root-like structures, not entirely different from the incredibly fine wispy structures in the air over the nutrient broth in my impromptu petri dish, but ordinarily they penetrated nutrient layers, rather than building structure in gas pockets.

This was almost like animations I'd seen of self-assembling nanotech structures. A self-assembling nanotech aerogel? Not utterly implausible, but taking place in a glass bowl half full of rotten meat juices I'd let go bad in my kitchenette?

When I got home, the fogginess inside the dish had increased, I thought. So I put on some rubber gloves, opened the gallon bottle of Clorox, and held my breath as I opened the tpo of the glass bowl and sloshed in the full-strength bleach.

I let it sit for a while, washing my hands in both detergent and a splash of bleach. Then I went back, sloshed some bleach down the sink into the drain, and poured the contents of the bowl into the sink as well. I then poured more bleach and detergent onto the mess. The foggy network of very fine filaments -- sort of like a three-dimensional space-filling web made by a thousand invisible and hyperactive spiders -- flattened into a sort of spongy mass against the drain filter screen. I added more bleach.

After washing again, and watching the stock market sag again -- still -- I added more bleach, donned the gloves again, and pulled the filter screen from the sink, and took it to the toilet and flushed it down.

Trust me, worse things have been flushed down the toilets in the region. Back in the mid-1990s, someone managed to flush a couple of gallons of active transposonation reagents down a greywater drain that led directly to Rock Creek, which is tributary to the Potomac River. I should hasten to add that there is no scientific evidence linking this to the scary phenomenon of Intersex Fish in the Potomac. Yet this is just another bit of weirdness that has gone down the drains in the region to wind up in the city water supply.

Chemicals, drugs, hormones, a measurable caffeine and cocaine content, all of those things are in the Potomac, and who the hell knows what's in the sewers leading to the waste-treatment plants, and in the greywater/stormwater drain pipes.

I'm just hoping that the stuff I flushed was sufficiently killed by the bleach I lavished on it... otherwise, I am imagining all of the air pockets in the local sewers filling up with some really weird nanotech-seeming foggy-looking aerogel-like tracery of possibly-alive webbing, growing thicker and thicker.

Eventually it might find a way out.

[Culture of Chaos I] Watching the Defectives

2010-05-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Drinking too heavily isn't good for the liver, but sometimes it's good for the soul. It all depends on what sort of drunk you are... and why exactly it is that you're drinking.

I've read a lot of great science fiction, and I try to keep modern. Back in the day I loved Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and lesser-known yet no less influential and original writers such as Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. Later, the so-called Cyberpunks came along, writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, and many more. There are so many modern writers out there now, producing so much excellent work, you could spend a lifetime reading and being plunged into new depths of thought in spectra of the colors beyond imagination. Nowadays, I'm working my way through Charles Stross and Peter Watts.

Stross likes to throw a little bit of mindfuck at the reader, now and then. For example:

An ancient hypothesis of the original pre-Singularity civilization, a zombie was a non-self-conscious entity that acted just like a conscious one: it laughed, cried, talked, ate, and generally behaved like a real person, and if questioned, would claim to be conscious -- but behind its superficial behavior, there was nobody home, no internalized model of the universe it lived in. (Singularity Sky, Stross, Charles)

The Singularity, of course, in case you hadn't been paying attention, is a tipping point, or point of no return, in which the world changes to the point where nothing that comes after can be quite understood by anyone who came before that point. That the Singularity is coming isn't science fiction, except to people who've never thought about it. Zombies, in other words. Anyone who actually has an internalized model of the universe they live in, however incomplete or inaccurate that model, has noticed that things are changing -- changing fast! -- and having noticed that, has to wonder where all of this change will lead, and what other changes may come.

This sort of speculation has gone mainstream quite long ago, first becoming doctrine of the US think-tanks since the time of Vannevar Bush and his seminal book Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy . Bush didn't describe the Singularity, and indeed may have somewhat blunted the onset of that. Atomic energy could have been expected to launch the Singularity, but the way it has been used is not transformative. A hydrogen bomb is still a bomb, and people can understand a bomb. Nuclear electrical power generation is really just a better heater driving the same sort of turbines that have been used since the very first steam-powered electrical generation plant came online.

Yet things are coming that will transform life beyond our present comprehension, possibly beyond our ability to comprehend.

There is nothing in our modern life that could not be comprehended -- in gestalt if not in detail -- by a Roman from the days of the Early Republic. They almost certainly would not understand the engineering, and the materials would be unfamiliar, yet the uses of things and the tasks performed would be comprehensible, although likely seen as legends become real.

A television is clearly a scrying glass; the internet, an oracle (however daft an oracle), and the modern cellphone is a combination of the two. A lorry or tractor-trailer are simply very large wagons, moved by magic rather than crass horses. The Honda ASIMO robot is a metal servant, and the vacuuming robot Roomba is a mechanical snuffling hound that breathes dust into itself, instructed by sorcery as it has been, to the task of cleaning. A 747 Jumbo jet taking off for a flight beyond the horizon at an altitude barely glimpsed? Chariot of the gods, without a doubt, though strangely harnessed to transporting women and men and their goods. The point being, long before any such things were possible, people have told tales in which such magics were commonplaces to the gods, and often encountered by lucky or unlucky mortals. They are not beyond human ken, not even to someone freshly returned from the Trojan War.

Far more confusing would be the way that people lived. Such things as the division of labor and the size of cities would take a lot of explaining, but they could be explained. Literacy could be taught, and some degree of mathematics; logic and rhetoric are respectively older than mankind and as old as the capacity for articulation and grammar. YouTube needs no explanation, yet elicits such a sense of wonder and excitement: ten million plays by ten million playwrights, for better or for worse, available to be seen by an audience of hundreds of millions. Theater, in some form or another, is possibly older even than grammar.

Yet one thing will certainly be passing strange to the man brought forward in time from ancient Athens: how small indeed has become the world, and how many are the people in it.

Since a widespread understanding of the approach of the Singularity has entered the academic mainstream, science fiction is taking a limited number of thematic tacks cutting across a variety of headwinds blowing at us from the future.

Yet there's really only one beginning to any history of any fictional future... the Singularity. And almost all of science fiction written after we heard of the coming Singularity starts out concerned with the lives of people who are still (more or less) human being only because they were, or are descended from people who were, far from the Singularity when that line was crossed.

Peter Watts has been writing some truly excellent stuff. I strongly recommend his novel Blindsight, which was on the short list for piles of awards and which he has graciously decided to share with us online. A warning to the audience: if you aren't fairly well-versed on everything from philosophy through neurochemistry to abnormal psychology and beyond, it's quite possible that this book will make little sense. If, on the other hand, you're a well-rounded post-grad whose favorite day of the week is the day your subscription to Nature arrives chock-full of submissions (for peer-review) written by your lab-partners from back in Uni, if you read this book and it doesn't punch your timecard for you, you've probably had tenure since the Great Depression and your sole pleasure in life is crushing the enthusiasms of the young-and-earnest with merciless critiques of footnoting stylistic errors.

To make the long story short, much of the theme might be summarized as "perhaps our notions of the utility of mainstream self-awareness are a trifle overvalued", with a strong undercurrent of "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

Mr Watts also does a really quite fascinating take on the vampire, well worth reading for that reason alone, if you're a fan of the genre. The vampire knows fighting and predation in the same way that an idiot-savant autist knows numbers. The autists don't think about numbers, they don't do calculations in their head, they don't look a pile of sand and "guesstimate" sand-grain density and pile size... they know those numbers and they know them like you know the sun is shining on you. The vampire can juggle with its eyes closed, similarly, because it doesn't have to see the balls, it knows how hard it tossed them and in what direction; and there's only on place the ball could be at any given time, and such is the vampire's physique and coordination that it can just reach out directly to the only place the ball could be in its trajectory, and launch it again into another trajectory, which trajectory thereafter the vampire will also know rather than calculate.

The zombies from Mr Stross's work -- they pass the Turing Test but they're living in the world without understanding it in a thoughtful and reflective way -- aren't too far from Mr Watt's vampires, at least in the matter of understanding why they do what they do, and how that relates to anything other than the instant act.

Yet these are all fictional creatures, aren't they? Aren't they totally unlike anything in the real world?

Perhaps they are, and perhaps, not so much.

I've known people who got good enough grades, got a job, got a life and got married, raised kids, and their kids have kids and so it goes. Life is life, and you don't need to be self-actualizing or even self-aware to be an evolutionarily successful species. Yet some of these people are full of questions about life, the universe, and their place in it. Many, and these are the ones that worry me, have no such questions and indeed could be said to be filled with a cold and unyielding certainty about life, the universe, their place in life and the universe, about everything.

Yet if you try to ask them what they believe, how they conceive the world, how do they understand the universe, eventually they will be forced to confront their own self-unawareness and their lack of an internalized model. It's a rare admission you'll get from them once you manage to put them into that corner, and it's even more rare in that anyone or anytihng has actually gotten through to them. They don't offer an explanation, a theory, an admission of ignorance, or even a request that you stop bothering them. If you're astute, this is the point where you realize that they've failed the Turing Test and that you're talking more to a very well-equipped simulation than to another actual person. They don't challenge what you're saying, they don't agree or disagree. It's tempting to anthropomorphize and say "they've realized that they've reached their intellectual limits", but that is anthropomorphism, they haven't actually realized anything. That is the whole problem.

When they say "I don't know what to tell you", that's the same thing as if your computer tells you "file not found". It's not that they're stumped or baffled and words have failed them, that's just their way of saying that they have no pre-programmed response and also don't have the conceptual tools to create a comprehensive situationally-appropriate response. 404. File not found.

I see this more and more often, in more and more people: 404, file not found. You can talk about politics and you can talk about the economy and you can talk about the sports teams and then you can ask some question such as "how does that make you feel, and why". 404. File not found. Ask them any question that requires them to create an internalized model of their world or the people in it, to perform operations in that model, and to give you back results of operation on that internal model.

Do it to them enough times, and instead of a blank look and "I don't know what to tell you", and you'll get back something like anger accompanied by the statement "I don't want to talk about it". That last bit bothers me. It means that they had to create enough of an internalized model to understand that they are being tested and that this was enough of a strain to make them angry. Or perhaps they've created enough of an internalized model to understand how very different they are from "real" people.

Like a lot of people, I can feel the Singularity coming.

Are these people firewood for Hell at the end of The Day Everything Changes? Are these the ones with the best hope for survival?

What concerns me the most is not that these people may perish, or survive, the Singularity.

I think that they may be what's bringing it.

[Mythos XXI] Zombie Computers and Homeless Demons

2010-05-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

With apologies to HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Charles Stross. Copyright 2010 Thomas James Hardman, Jr, all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. References to real places and things may be included but their usage is fictional in nature and intent. Any similarity to real persons or parties is coincidental and should be seen as fictional in nature and intent.

Surrealism combines a blend of reality and unreality. Any person unable to sort the fiction and fantasy from the factual is strongly advised to seek professional help, if only in the area of English reading and comprehension.

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

In many -- if not most -- places, a milling crowd of shabby demonically-possessed zombies, covered with gutter filth and reeking of napalm, would cause a bit of a ruckus. But in the parking lot of Aspen Hill's Big K-Mart, they blended right in with the morning mob of homeless illegal aliens milling about in the hopes of drive-by unscrupulous employers giving them a day-labor gig.

The main difference between the zombies and the day-laborers was that the day-laborers weren't actually evil, and the zombies weren't interested in flooding the oversaturated market for unskilled labor. Aside from that, they looked about the same. The zombies had been protesting the "unfair treatment" of the Home Depot across Georgia Avenue from the impromptu pick-up corner, and this "unfair treatment" consisted in being banned from the property for purposes other than actually shopping at the store. Since this blanket ban had seriously disrupted a labor racket in which "organizers" provided very large individuals to make sure that the waiting laborers took turns in good order -- not incidentally paying the very large individuals 30 percent of their untaxed cash earnings from loading up construction vans and trucks -- this sudden dearth of untraceable income funding the "immigrants rights" organizations put a crimp in the plans of said organizations, hence the organization of the May Day protests nationwide, and the May Day protest in the parking lot of a just-vacated facility formerly housing a large advanced-weapons research and development unit of a major transnational defense contracting firm.

And of course, we all know what happened: malevolent alien software, downloaded from incomprehensible dimensions beyond time and space and stored on EPROM for future study in development of advanced weapons systems, got into the heads of about a thousand of these protesters.

Zombies, as commonly conceived, don't actually exist. There are plenty of things that can look and act like zombies, ranging from the original zombi -- a stupefied outcast or small-time criminal maintained in a trance by a combination of drugs, superstition and brain-damage -- to the so-called "zombie computer", which is a networked computer which has been hacked and usurped without the knowledge of its owner, generally used for purposes of spamming, though frequently that spam carries a payload designed to hack and usurp the computational resources of recipient machines.

The zombies now milling about among the homeless illegal aliens seeking day-labor gigs were somewhere between the classic zombi and the modern concept of the zombie computer. They had been on drugs, powerful entheogen drugs that had suppressed their brains' normal defensive filters. They had also been hacked and usurped by a hacker, although the hacker was assault software that hostile aliens had downloaded through a transdimensional gate into a pile of read-only memory that wasn't attached to any real processors.

The aliens had expected to decompress their software into a global telecommunications network; it was a reasonable presumption on their part that such a network would underlie any civilization that could open a transdimensional gateway to their realm. it was a feat of pure paranoia in the most positive sense of the term, that those who opened the gateway defended against such an attack by creating the gate within a sort of probability shield, and by leaving the target memory chips attached to a processor far too underpowered to do more than make the memory look like a potentially useful target.

This was the transdimensional warfare equivalent of a Bot Herder spamming his entire repertoire of cracking payloads to a bogus masqueraded network of two Altair 8800s and thinking that they'd be cracking an entire large corporate office-complex's world-routable Class B network's 65,536 state-of-the-art PCs.

Of course, this did not result in a remote-controlled spammer's dream of a Class B Bot Net cheerfully replicating itself to every IP-capable machine on the global internet, devouring firewalls and cracking routers and even prying open out-of-band linkages to things like console teletypes. No, all of the cracking payloads were etched right to read-only memory, as expected and intended, but with no capable processors attached. This could not have been expected or the aliens probably wouldn't have bothered.

Yet now the alien software was in an environment where processing was available and really quite effective, if limited to the low and unexpected speeds of an carbon-based protoplasmic systems.

May Day, May 1 2010, was the day that the protesters were taken. Sunday May 2 was the day that special forces spent napalming everything inside and beneath the former offices of the defense-contractors. Monday May 3 was the first morning that the zombies were seen milling about within the ranks of the homeless illegal alien day-laborers hoping for drive-by employers who would never come; the electromagnetic pulse that had put the global telecom networks outside the reach of the hostile alien software had also killed every motor vehicle within range of that localized but intense blast of disorganizing radiations. The oversight agencies who were starting to get a solid idea of how close they'd come to the Eschaton were deeply restricting the flow of traffic and goods -- and particularly, of information -- in and especially out of the affected area. The day laborers would not be getting any work today, and the stores would not be open for business as usual.

The day laborers, being self-sufficient and resourceful enough to have survived becoming indentured servants after being trafficked as human cargo into the region, quickly decided that if the power was off to the neighborhood and also to their cellphones, it was probably not working for the burglar-alarm systems at any of the local stores, and with K-Mart right there, why not do some after-hours shopping? When the sun went down, they broke into the giant department store, and though they did not recognize them for what they were, they took the zombies with them.

When they were done loading up on free food, clothing, and sporting-goods, they headed back to their homeless camps in the woods surrounding the cemetery across Connecticut Avenue, and they took the zombies with them, there, as well.

Of course, the zombies were quite dangerous, harboring as they did their compressed payloads of inimical alien software From Beyond. Yet by this time they were well adapted to their situation, and the software within them recognized that it itself had much adaptation to do, not merely adaptation of the hosts at the cellular level and then at the organ structure level; it also "understood" that it needed to adapt to its situation as a collection of crippled weapons-modules embedded in substandard mobile units operating on the fringes of an alerted and hostile society.

As dangerous as were the zombies, as dangerous as they'd be once the shattered demon distributed among them was able to make them make it whole again, far more dangerous were the EPROM chips which had escaped destruction by the electromagnetic pulse, mostly because those chips had been within a metal box within a metal box in a five-foot concrete underground storm drain.

By May 2, that box and those chips were no longer in Aspen Hill, though they were not far away. By sundown of Monday May 3, that box and those chips were in the back of a FedEx truck headed for the airport. Tuesday, May 4, saw that box unloaded in the mailroom of a New Jersey import-export firm, where the manager of the mailroom and warehouse had an interesting sideline in IT contraband that operated within the more mainstream sideline trafficking in arms-for-drugs, which latter sideline was his unofficially-tolerated cover for the IT contraband trade.

It was the afternoon of Thursday, May 6, before he got around to finding an old machine that could accept the EPROM chip he decided to try.

It was just terrible luck that he had even hooked up the modem to the old slow analog phone lines and it was even worse luck that the resident software on the old slow hard-drive included an early online-trading program, formerly owned by the sort of high-powered trader who never changes their password.

By mid-afternoon, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen over a thousand points.

[Mythos XX] Flaming Zombies and Bargain Catastrophes

2010-05-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

Wall Street, somewhat predictably, does not much care for zombies.

Zombies have been the bane of Wall Street for quite some time now. Witness, for example, what happened the last time the financial and investments industry harnessed zombies; the "unstoppable" commoditized debt obligations ("CDO") sure did stop, and dragged down most of Western Civilization, or at least those parts of Western Civilization with which the finance and investment industry concerns itself. Foreclosed properties practically litter neighborhoods all around the world.

Aspen Hill, Maryland, is not immune to the the fallout from that. Looking backwards, it really is almost comical how firms such as Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs were able to create their zombies and actually get other people to invest in them. I can imagine the sales pitch now: "Hey, look it's a zombie, it cannot die, it's not going to stop moving, it's harnessed and it's headed in one direction," and people bought into it, because after all, zombies in fact cannot die and they are awfully single-minded. Yet the investors didn't seem to understand that while they cannot be killed because they are already dead, zombies will keep single-mindedly moving in the same direction only so long as there are two conditions met. First, they have to have the notion that in a certain direction they will find something to eat, and secondly, they have to have not decomposed. Although zombies are almost unstoppable, they are in fact dead and as they are dead, they will rot. Eventually there won't be enough muscle left to work the bones and the zombie can no longer move. The difference between various Wall Street firms is easily summed up, thus: "it's easy to win a bet that harnessed zombie will endlessly pull a cart down the road if you dangle some brains in front of it, but you have to know to bet right on how long it will last before it goes ripe and too mushy to pull". Goldman Sachs more or less sold the zombie equivalent of "day old bread" to investors and bet that the zombies could not pull the cart across the finish line, so to speak. Either way, they got paid. Further, they didn't have to live with the smell of the zombies rotting everywhere as they lay where they fell once they'd gone far enough past their expiration date. Wall Street Fat Cats can afford live help. So to speak.

Zombies, of course, are merely an allegory, an extended metaphor, but when you're dealing with Wall Street -- or a lot of other sectors of society or phenomena within those sectors -- the allegory is often extremely applicable. Next time you're thinking of investing, ask your broker "You're not trying to sell me a zombie that's near its expiration date, are you?" and although they are well-trained to look at you as if you are mad to ask such a question, they'll actually be thinking 'oh fuck, why do I get all of the Shrewd Customers". Then they'll stop trying to sell you tranches of "unstoppable" Commercial Real Estate and convince you to do something sane but very low-yield instead, such as buying 20-year Treasury notes so that unless the world ends, you'll actually have money left when it's time for you to retire.

Meanwhile, to return to the allegory, zombie remnants litter the neighborhoods in the form of homes in foreclosure, or repossessed and put out on an already saturated market. In Aspen Hill, Maryland, we were an epicenter for origination of subprime mortgages. The banks are pretty leery of lending anyone any money and if you want to buy here, you can buy very inexpensively in terms of the price you pay for 60-year-old houses in a neighborhood in partial decline. You will have to pay a very significant downpayment and you will not get "flexible" terms; you'll be purchasing with a very traditional mortgage on the shortest terms they can press.

Of course, people drive into Aspen Hill looking for these bargains, and they realize that they'll be getting an excellent deal mostly because the neighborhood has become desirable because of the low cost of housing. It did not become desirable because the neighbors are rich or because the streets are well-maintained.

Even without a plague of actual zombies, the place had become a "slumburbia" and clearly was headed down the slide towards full-on ghettodom. Yet we did get zombies, more or less, and as for the zombies, they weren't picky about where they lived, if you want to call that living. No, for the zombies, it was even more serendipity, just good luck for them, that Aspen Hill, Maryland, was so littered with foreclosed homes, with lots and lots of places for zombies to hide.

On May 1, protesters had been infested by malevolent alien software downloaded from beyond time and space and stored on EPROM for future researches into advanced weapons systems. Shortly thereafter, most of the EPROM had been destroyed by a very powerful but localized electromagnetic pulse. Some of the EPROM, however, had been removed in a bank-vault crew heist in which the crew had tunnelled in from a five-foot concrete pipe that fortuitously had buried a stream beneath the basement of a former defense facility being mothballed as staff was relocated to a consolidated and far-more-secure new office complex elsewhere.

That EPROM was incredibly dangerous, should it ever be connected to the global telecom networks. Yet as dangerous as that was, it was locked in a metal box inside another metal box, which aided in its dread preservation from the cleansing radiations of the electromagnetic pulse that wiped the majority of the EPROM, along with all transistor-equipped anything within about three miles radius of the balloon-lofted pulse antenna. So long as the EPROM couldn't connect to the networks, it wasn't a problem.

More immediately, the problem was the protesters, about 1000 of them. They had been using Salvinorin A, an entheogen drug, in slight overdose. This "peace pill" had stripped away the natural filters that ordinarily provide physical entities some defense against direct control by the sort of non-corporeal entities that have been called Djinni, or Chindi, or even -- mostly by those who have actually fallen (in whole or in part) victim to one or more of them -- Deity.

What most people would perceive -- if they perceived it at all -- as "the still, small voice of conscience" or the whisperings of temptation, what a schizophrenic might perceive as disembodied voices screaming insults and commands, these thousand or so protesters perceived as first a tickling as the alien software probed for usable elements of a potential host operating system, than as a rush from Beyond as the alien software established protocols, escalated through handshaking to modem training, and downloaded large parts of itself to the protesters, who by this time weren't protesting anything. The alien software had quickly located the brain's pleasure center and was prodding it as hard as it could. As their minds were usurped to the point where the malevolent alien 'wares could rewrite elements of genetic code to set the body into motion building alien structure within the hosts, they felt nothing but the ultimate rapture that they could possibly feel, even as the alien code permanently disabled the "god filters" of their temporal lobes.

The alien warez were mostly exceptionally compressed, and generally speaking, far too large to decompress into a single human mind's ultra-short-term memory from which it would have to be absorbed and incorporated into the full intellect. The warez could try to download a module at a time, so to speak, into the small-but-fast short-term memory, and that was what it was doing after it downloaded the compressed payload into long-term memory, where it could not be decompressed nor processed in the compressed format. Many of the modules had been transferred, but not enough, when the electromagnetic pulse severed the link as it destroyed the EPROM reservoir from which it had been radiating. Yet if enough of the now-possessed protestors could put their minds together, so to speak, there would be sufficient communications bandwidth, processing power, and especially available short-term memory available to decompress the entire "seed" payload. Probably six to ten individuals would be required for this successful "communion".

How unfortunate, thus, for the goals and intentions of the alien software, for it to have downloaded itself into a mass protest, a demonstration for worker's rights and against enforcement of immigration laws, which was well and truly surrounded by a police SWAT team and dozens of additional officers, who were suddenly very agitated and ready to respond to anything and everything, as all of their electronics had suddenly gone dead.

This is what you get for fucking around with implacable alien gods from incomprehensible universes in other dimensions: Really Bad Shit Happens.

Really truly: don't try this at home.

SWAT gets reinforced by special forces who have special orders, to by whatever non-nuclear means are necessary, keep anything resembling the demonically-possessed (or even deeply religious) from getting anywhere near any communications equipment more complex than banging sticks on trashcans.

SWAT drives zombies into vacated former defense-contracting and research facility, uses flamethrowers and large amounts of flammable liquids to incinerate zombies and drive them deeper into the compound. Unfortunately for all concerned, at least some of the zombies may have stumbled onto the tunnel in the basement through which the bank-vault crew had heisted their alien-infested EPROM. If that's the case, zombies have traveled both upstream and downstream through the five-foot concrete drain pipe, beneath and beyond the police and military cordon around the commercial core of Aspen Hill, and exited directly into the nearby residential neighborhoods... where there are lots of vacant and foreclosed single-family detached residential dwellings in which to hide. Or, depending which way these putative and hypothetical zombies might have turned had they in fact escaped into the tunnels, they might emerge at the northern corner of the intersection of Connecticut and Georgia Avenue, at the stormwater retention pond next to the Wendy's burger joint. From there, they could easily invade Wendy's, a couple of gas stations, and the immense expanse of the Big K-Mart store, and the crime-ridden apartments and condominium developments just beyond.

Which, of course, is exactly what most of them did.

[Mythos XIX] What Goes Around Goes Underground

2010-05-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

Ah, springtime.

The vegetation bursts forth; flowers are everywhere and then suddenly the leaves of the trees unfurl as the bitter sunshine of March yields through treacherous April and into verdant May. All seems right with the world, unless of course you live in Aspen Hill, Maryland.

Aspen Hill, Maryland is a neighborhood in partial decline.

When the various subdivisions were built over about a 10 year timeframe and sorted out into neighborhoods, the place was brand new, built on former farmlands. Housing was affordable to, and in fact defined, the Middle Class in those days. Later, of course, the Middle Class was studiously and intentionally pressed to the edge of extinction; for much of the interim, Aspen Hill was the sort of place populated by young-but-rising government-worker families, blue-collar Union workers in thriving local industries, people of the type who owned their own successful small business such as a radio-and-TV sales and repair shop, and the sort of doctors and dentists who had comfortable practices in their basement home offices.

Of course, that was in the period from roughly 1960 to roughly 1980, the predictable life of a suburbia. The arc of development, population, and a generation passing entirely through the schools and either heading off to college or military service -- or perhaps to apprentice in the family business -- is something that can be planned for, and local governments across the nation had got it down to a science.

The science was, unfortunately, the economic model of Colony Foundation; when you invade and populate a land where the indigenous people have been largely eradicated by imported disease, everything there is wide open and there for you to take, and with any transportation technology less than commercial air travel, it takes a long time to move even a small fraction of one continent to another. Most of the settled parts of North America were settled not so much by immigrants, as they were populated by natural increase, and the former Europeans settled here and with decent diet and room to move, their daughters were fertile indeed and their men were excellent providers, generally speaking. As fast as kids could be raised, they headed West to pioneer and claim land that was either free for the taking, or so inexpensive as to be nearly free.

This part of Maryland was never thickly settled until after the Second World War and the immense expansion of postwar centralized government. It may have had something to do with the very rocky soils and it as likely had much to do with the mosquitoes which are fierce and hungry in the warm season. Yet as the government expanded as did dependent businesses from contractors to restauranteurs and other service industries, all of those workers needed housing. With the government's hiring practices being what they were, with a preference for veterans regardless of their origins, the grandsons of the pioneers returned from the settled frontiers and the farms and towns and cities in the provinces and generally bought or rented cozy little bungalows in places like Bethesda, or cottages in Old Silver Spring, tottering Victorians in places like downtown Rockville... and when all of those were full up, they settled in the new neighborhoods such as Twinbrook, and later in Aspen Hill and Strathmore and Olney and Brookeville and finally Montgomery County was just plain full. Apartments rose and in the core suburbs neighborhoods came down and high-rise towers went up and the earliest neighborhoods vanished, and it was known with the certainty of a 20-year Treasury note that in roughly the order they were built, the rest of the older neighborhoods would also tend to fall under the bulldozer blade of the re-developer.

If you're looking to acquire an elder suburb and re-develop it, ideally you'll find or make a way to keep the price down so as to maximize your profit margins.

Traditionally, this has been done by fostering a policy of "benign neglect" in the local political establishments, conveniently mis-labeled "progress". Simply stated, you see that a neighborhood is over 50 years old, and if it isn't a bustling business district that densely generates a significant revenue stream via taxation, you just leave the infrastructure increasingly unmaintained and at roughly the 70-year mark, the houses are mostly falling apart and the streets are about back to the state of cow-paths, the city water and sanitation pipes are getting to the point of needing total replacement. Of course, by this time, it's likely that the original affluent people have moved up, moved on, moved out, and if the same family still owns the property, they probably rent it out and probably the renters aren't even on the middle rungs of the economic ladder. Just let the schools go to hell, so to speak, and you've got a nice inexpensive ghetto to condemn and buy at bargain-basement prices. Then bulldoze it all, build lots of new-and-shiny, sell it to the noveaux-riche and social climbers with decent incomes, rinse-and-repeat as necessary ad-infinitum. It's called "post-colonial urban recycling and regeneration" in some schools of thought.

There's also "blockbusting", in which real estate agents and building developers meant to encourage white property owners to sell their houses at a loss, by fraudulently implying that racial, ethnic, or religious minorities — Blacks, Hispanics, Jews et al. — were moving into their previously racially segregated neighborhood, thus depressing real estate property values. By the 1980s, the practice had been pretty much abandoned, due to the results of the Civil Rights activism and associated changes in law. Still, if you can't use racism as a way to encourage the current owners of valuable properties to vacate and sell at far below the rates they'd get if they weren't in a hurry to leave, there are other ways. Simply stop enforcing the housing and safety codes, let the schools go to hell, don't pave the streets, and encourage law-enforcement to turn a blind eye to all but the most newsworthy and egregious violations. Pretty soon, most folks will move out, once it becomes clear that -- like much of Aspen Hill -- their neighborhood is sliding into rapid evolution into deep ghetto.

You can accelerate the slide easily; once the course becomes clear, prices decline or at least rise less quickly than elsewhere. Such "cost savings" or "value" or "bargain" housing makes for great subsidized housing for pre-release prisoner placement programs and mentally-ill welfare cases, not to mention the easily-overlooked gang-lair properties that will through "benign neglect" suddenly flourish on the back streets and in the cul-de-sacs where the decent folks will move out and leave the neighborhoods littered with overgrown and decaying housing decreasing in value and dragging down the prices of neighboring properties. A little jiggering with the tax and zoning codes to prevent reclamation through "gentrification", and the price of a larger and larger area becomes lower and lower, and even more undesirables will move in, and at the valuable commercial cores with their command of strategic intersections, even the most settled of long-term tenants such as whole-building leasing defense-contractors will up and move. There's just no point in taking a job as a well-paid engineer if there's no place nearby where you can walk for lunch without getting robbed. And there's no point in retaining a location where you can't get any good engineers because the facility is pretty much Fort Apache, safe as houses on the inside, but you can't drive your car through the neighborhood without passing hookers at the bus-stops and you can't ride the bus without getting abused or even robbed. Nope, time to move.

And with no major employer, the surrounding restaurants fold up in the absence of 400 lunch-hours a day, five days a week, the retailers next to the restaurants don't want to do business in a strip-mall that's half vacant, finally at long last the anchors -- the grocery and the drugstore -- take a hint and either demand heavy security grates or they vacate. Either way, first the housing goes down the tubes, the major employers hit the highway, services vacate the commercial core, and all you have is a residential ghetto that can be bought up wholesale and converted into commuting-friendly high-density high-rise with or without mixed-use commercial services... all paying top-dollar for the newness and above all for the extremely central location, which location of course was totally wasted on a ghetto.

The thing is, all of that latter part of the process takes time, and time is money, of course, even though it will cost you less in the end. So, press for more pre-release and mental-illness residential sites, crapify the schools even more, start rumors about gangs or actually let gangs get a foothold and let the foothold get deeper. Contribute massively, of course, to the campaign funds of individuals and parties who are willing to play along.

All of this can be planned for, but there are some things for which you just cannot plan. For that, you need serendipity.

I mean, how else are you going to get the process shortened from 30 years to overnight, other than serendipity?

How else will you get an infestation of zombies?

That, assuredly, will free up some real-estate.

In the tunnels underground, the zombies were mutating as fast as alien software could reprogram cellular machinery.

Aboveground, all seemed quiet, not surprising since there was nobody on the street other than a cordon of cops and the special forces starting to arrive.

When an electromagnetic pulse goes off, everyone notices. However, it may take a while to figure out exactly where it went off, as anything that might be listening for such a thing tends to either be a weakly-receiving detector that records an event but not a location, or a strongly-directional detector that detects the pulse with its own destruction. In this metropolitan area, powerful computers associated themselves to the telephone network and dialed a statistically valid random sampling of numbers for all local hardwire exchanges, analyzed the connections or lack thereof, and quickly generated a map of the outlines of the pulse-affected area.

Special response teams began to roll into the area on diesel-powered vehicles equipped with heliograph mirrors as well as modern digital radios. As they went, they dropped cement anchors attached to monofilament lines that were stronger than steel, tethering helium balloons that lofted radio repeaters. They got to the outer guard posts, sent out from the SWAT cordon around the infested facility, about the same time that special badges and ID were presented to the command center officers, and then the diesel-powered vehicles rolled back out, leaving behind them troops denuded of all telecom gear, and as the vehicles left, they retrieved and removed the balloon repeaters. As they departed, other special forces rolled in.

It didn't take too long for them to clean out the few obvious zombies still lingering near the surface. Getting down into the tunnels was a different matter. Eventually they had to resort to the only thing that seemed reasonable, given the unknown specifics of what was apparently something quite infectious. So they just brought in the industrial-strength flamethrowers and torched everything they could reach with the pressurized napalm streams.

They knew they had a bigger problem, though, when they noticed the dark smoke erupting from several hundred yards outside of the perimeter of the facility grounds, far outside of the SWAT cordon. They had managed to pump enough napalm into the facility to force some upstream through the 5-foot concrete pipe carrying an "undergrounded" stream, through which bank-vault heist crews had travalled to bore into the basement of the facility.

If they had been driving the zombies before them with the flames, some might have been driven this way.

An infestation of zombies would have been an excellent reason to simply burn the facility, burn it some more, and then explosively deconstruct the place once it cooled enough to send in a robot to plant charges, and then burn it again and cover it all over with concrete.

However, it seemed quite possible that this wasn't limited to the facility. Indeed, protocol decreed that they had to presume the neighborhood also to be infested. Considering that the infestation was believed to be infectious, anyone they encountered had to be considered to be either a zombie or probably on the way to becoming one.

There was another consideration as well: those of the "probationers" -- the people who had been locked in an underground mega-bunker since the Reagan Administration and only fairly-recently released to be re-acclimated to the outside world -- who had been trying to retreat to their former digs, probably many of those would have been burnt out by the napalm, as much as the zombies had been.

That wasn't going to produce much happiness among the roughly 10,000 of those who remained alive on the surface.

A pause that does not refresh

2010-05-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, shopping at Seizure World is always such a pleasure, and I mean that with the deepest ironic/sarcastic tone.

The Giant Food at Seizure World has been really unpleasant to me in a lot of ways, though frankly it's far better than anyplace else I've been. While widely regarded as overpriced in most stores, and definitely overpriced in this location mostly due to catering to the epicurean tastes of the elderly, in general the store is large, and until recently had a sort of open and airy feel to it. Then for some reason, they close-spaced the aisles. It's not as claustrophobic as Magruder's in Rockville's College Plaza store, which is where I would tend to shop if they didn't squeeze you in like cattle in a knacker's chute.

Yet, Leisure World Giant is, like so many storefronts all along Georgia Avenue, infested with gangs.

No, it's not MS-13, it's not the South Side Locos or the Rolling 20s Crips, though I would not be surprised to find out that some of their employees had "affiliations". No, this is a more upscale and plainclothes set.

Okay, for one thing, not a gang in most cases, but old folks in general seem to have the idea that the way you cure a man in a hurry is to show that you can be slow as molasses and still bring folks to a standstill, so long as you know the layout better and have a lot of friends and plan ahead. When I feel like developing a better interception algorithm, I study old folks playing a nice friendly game of "get in the way and stay in the way".

The thing you have to understand is this, though: not all of the old folks are playing a friendly game. Retirement communities are exclusive based on age, not on profession or on career history. You could be the last breathing relic of the Chicago mobs of the 1920s and retirement communities will still sell to you. And of course, all of your many kids and grandkids can come and visit... and do you a favor and go shopping and while you're down there, sonny, if you see this guy in the store, give him a nice whack and there's a fifty in it for you.

And then there are these assholes as follows. I shall write a quick and dirty little screenplay for you.

ENTER the subject. The subject proceeds to shop.

Clerk 1: I hate this guy.

Clerk 2: Why's that?

Clerk 1: He's fucking crazy. Hey, lend me your cellphone.

CLERK 1 takes photograph.

Clerk 1: Thanks.

FADE to STOCKROOM at break time.

Clerk 2: So why do you think this guy's crazy?

Clerk 1: See how he's always looking around?

Clerk 2: Maybe he doesn't want to collide with the old folks?

Clerk 1: No, he looks all pissed off.

Clerk 2: Probably hasn't learned like I have that when the old folks are playing "get in the way and stay there" all you can do is wait it out. Can't hurry old folks, you know.

Clerk 1: FUCK YOU. He's crazy because I say he's crazy. He's crazy. Believe it.

Clerk 3: So what you wanna do?

Clerk 4: Yeah, what you wanna do, we can help.

Clerk 5: Yeah, don't want no crazy people here.

FADE out.

Okay, so at this point in time, what we have is one clerk inciting the others, taking photos and passing them around. Maybe the others are paying attention more than they should because they know that this clerk is on a management track. They discuss it among themselves and eventually decide that it will be good, and good fun, to make sure that crazy wants to go shop somewhere else.

At this point in time, they might think that they are not in violation of any laws, after all, who would make it illegal to run off some crazy person?

Enter the Federal government, which in its wisdom in 1992 or so passed far-reaching legislation called the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Most folks think that this just means providing ramps at curbs and stairs for the convenience of people in wheelchairs. That is not the case.

The law requires "reasonable accomodation to persons with disabilities". The bar's not set all that high; you only need one wheelchair-accessible bathroom stall per floor, etc. It additionally prohibits discrimination against persons reasonably believed to have a disability.

Someone might reasonably believe that someone has a disability when someone rolls up in a wheelchair, is seen tapping their way around with a cane as if they were blind. Someone might also reasonably believe that someone was mentally ill if they are having a sustained conversation with their invisible friend, but then again, they might just be talking into a hands-free cellphone.

Now, a reasonable accomodation for a wheelchair might be a wheelchair accessible stall in the public bathroom, and a ramp up any stairs. A reasonable accomodation for someone visually impaired might be a copy of the menu of a restaurant in Braille, for example, or Braille lettering in elevators. All of this is standard and commonplace across the country, and it's been that way for almost 20 years.

But how to provide reasonable accomodations for the mentally-ill?

First and foremost, that reasonable accomodation consists of NOT DELIBERATELY FUCKING WITH THEM.

Giant, to its credit, seems to understand this, possibly having had to deal with massively punitive litigation for some of its employees deciding that it would be seriously entertaining to direct visually-impaired people into the meat lockers rather than to the bathroom. I seem to recall some rather heinous testimony from a plaintiff to the effect of "and the worst of it was the guy who kept whispering 'good luck picking out faces out of a line-up, mister blind-as-a-bat'."

Now, I do in fact have a mental disability, and one of the most signal indicators of that disability is my near incapacity to walk into any crowded place. I loathe shopping malls, I'd honestly rather get a root-canal in preference to riding on a crowded bus, and standing in line with strangers breathing down my neck while trying to make conversation with a grocery clerk handling my food is pretty much my vision of spending a half-hour in HELL. It's not like I don't like people in general -- in small doses in small numbers when I have a clear way to escape, I don't mind being around a few at a time. It's not like I'm particularly prejudiced against any type of people unless some particular type of people have gone out of their way to be complete assholes, and even then it has to be the majority of them for a long long time. I do not like crowds, I do not like people getting into my personal space, whether they're in my face or not. Yet the fact remains, I do need to shop or I will not have anything to eat.

Going to any grocery store, for me, feels nearly as distressing as it would feel for a woman who has been sexually assaulted to be thrown into a locker room full of buff guys wearing nothing but towels and sweat. For such a woman, it may actually be the case that she's been thrown into a locker room full of gay cops, and that she is at absolutely no risk at all and in fact couldn't be more safe. Yet victimization, trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder are of such a nature that no matter how safe that woman might be, safety is not what she's feeling.

Now, imagine that feeling is what I get anytime I walk into a grocery store, a department store, god-forbid a fucking CVS, or a freakin' barber shop. I loathe such places in the same way that a date-rape victim loathes fraternity houses.

Now imagine I've got that feeling already... and I walk into Giant (or CVS or Rite-Aid or wherever) and the first thing I overhear is that little script, above.

But hey, Giant is compliant with the ADA, right? Well, CVS is compliant with the Equal Employment Opportunity Act but you just try to find one that has any floor staff who aren't of origins south of Texas. Giant would never tolerate staff fucking with people because they can and it's not just easy, but fun. No, not Giant. Again, the Astute Reader should be detecting a slight note of irony and sarcasm.

And this being Montgomery County Maryland, what happens is that you can complain all you want, nothing will ever happen. Complain to management, they kick you upstairs to someone at corporate whose job it is to listen to you and make sympathetic noises and do exactly nothing, other perhaps than to take some employee aside and say "you know that guy you've been harassing? He called in to drop a dime on you". And of course, that manager isn't anywhere to witness when the employee they've tipped off "gets that rat". This is Maryland. This is the Maryland Mindset. If their manager there actually gives a shit and prevents an escalation of harassment, the employee who is disgruntled at being prohibited from violating a well-known Federal law (of nearly 20 years standing) will simply pass the word to neighboring stores.

This sort of crap goes on and on and pretty much never ends, though it may end in October when Senate Bill 517 goes into effect.

Let's put it this way: nothing less than Second Degree Assault is going to keep me from accessing any place that's open to the public; my self-therapy consists of confronting my fears. Yet fears of harassment and occasional assaults up to Second Degree are reasonable fears: this is what has been going on, for at least 15 years now. People try to run me out of their place, mostly because someone has come up to them and alleged that I am "crazy" and told them a story. Rather than ask me to leave and not come back, for the sole reason that they don't approve of my (alleged) mental processes -- and thereby risk a punitive lawsuit on Federal ground for open violation of the ADA, they do what Marylanders do best and which Maryland law is helpless to deal with: they go to Second Degree Assault. Even an officer actually witnessing this is powerless to make an arrest until and unless the person goes to the police commissioner and swears out a complaint, by which time the weapon is gone and any other evidence has been "tidied up".

When the governor signs SB 517 into law, it's not just that the list of underlying offenses -- basis for anti-gang special prosecution -- has been expanded. There is a totally new crime: it is illegal, as before, to participate in a criminal gang; it is also illegal to "organize, supervise, finance, or manage a criminal gang". If you're a manager at Giant, or CVS, or any comparable outfit, if you've got gang members under your authority and they engage in a pattern of organized criminal behavior characterized by an overt or covert chain of command, you are potentially liable... to up to 20 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. If you are the property manager for Leisure World Plaza and you are aware that you've got an outdoors cafe area where employees from a variety of your tenants sit around and work out the basics of working as a united front to run someone out of patronizing businesses on the grounds that the person is "crazy", and to do so by repeatedly committing Second Degree Assaults "until that crazy man gets the message he ain't allowed in here", you could be at risk of prosecution. Because the courts have long recognized the concept of "tacit assent", as in "they ain't told us to stop, yet, so they must approve", it might be advisable to point out to folks that if they want to studiously ignore organized criminal misconduct, they're at risk and they're putting you at risk and maybe things would be better all around if people were to cease and desist with this goddamn bullshit.

Because, you know, if you're reading this then you've been put on notice, and if someone tells you about this, you're on notice. Harassment is a crime all on its own in the State of Maryland, and harassing the disabled because they're disabled isn't just a very actionable violation of Federal law, it's so despicable as to be heinous and in any Federal lawsuit on these grounds, there will be a forced change of venue to Virginia where they don't have that Maryland Mindset of "anything we do as a group is okay because it's a group that's doing it".

So, let's see: I go to the liquor store up there in Leisure World... and I get harassed there. No big surprise, it's the goddamned County monopoly and they love to abuse a captive audience. So, I decided to take my business down aisle to the cafe and beer store run by some Mexican or Middle-Eastern guy. Mere days later, stuff gets really weird there, with the weirdness culminating with the biggest people you could imagine, wearing Giant uniforms, pretty much appearing in the store the instant that I do, and getting in my face and breaking bad for buying beer next door to Giant. Then word comes to me that some one-eyed homeless black man who lived in the woods behind the used-car place and rides his bicycle to wash windows up and down Georgia Avenue is bringing the word around to every place his untaxed self-employment takes him, that everyone is supposed to work together to run me out of town. Hell yeah it sounds crazy... until you realize that for some reason about 300 merchants trust the "news" brought to them by a homeless crackhead on the run from the law. Now that is what's crazy, to me.

As to the people in the stores -- and at the sidewalk cafe -- who not only listen to this guy but will violently break the law as a criminal gang because they believe the one-eyed homeless crackhead... should they be calling me crazy, or should I turn that right back at them? I'm not inciting elderly people with Alzheimers and Holocaust Tattoos to stick someone with a knitting needle, but that doesn't mean I'm not crazy, it just means that I'm not criminal, at least not in that way. But yes, I realize that Giant's scraping the bottom of the barrel for employees nowadays.

I can stuff grocery bags with the best of them, which anyone has to admit who's seen me doing it. But I don't work for Giant, mostly because for me to actually try to get a job someplace where groups of employees have ganged up to harass the disabled, I'd have to actually be "crazy", as in "suicidal". Frankly, the place scares me, and so do the people in it. I want a lawyer.

[Mythos XVIII] Not Capped, but Recapped

2010-05-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

So you're shopping. There's a shopping center. There are cars in the parking lot. There are staff in the stores. You're here to shop, so you try to do some shopping.

You can barely find a clerk, when you find one, they're rude, and there's one other customer in the whole well-lit, clean, and fully-stocked store. The clerk had been on one side of the store and the customer on the other side of the store. When you finally get the clerk up to the counter, the second you fall into line, so does the one other customer, where they get right up behind you and jingle keys, clear their throat, rattle the wretched knickknacks in their basket, and generally annoy. The clerk scowls and rings you up with a studied insolence.

Finally, it's done. If you are like most people, you will leave that store wondering how the hell they stay in business, vowing to never shop there again.

Most people expect merchants to want to make sales, and to want to have a store packed full of bustling people cheerfully waiting in long lines as the cashiers hustle to ring up sale after sale of realy good deals. Most people don't expect merchants to annoy people so much that they lose immense sums of money presiding over a centrally-located and handicapped-accessible store packed full of inventory and almost no customers.

Most people would just take their business elsewhere.

And that's just what these guys want.

Defense-in-depth strategies are nothing novel or unheard-of; most people live inside one or another defense-in-depth system. It is so very fundamental a game that most people never think about it much, it's just how things are. Indeed, it's so fundamental a game that most of the organized games that people play are interesting because they are not defense in depth strategies. Rather, they are confrontational.

Defense-in-depth is exemplified thus: You're trying to defend the king in his palace and the treasury in the palace basement.

The palace has a castle hidden within it, and within the castle is the keep, the last place of retreat. But outside the keep are the battlements, beyond the battlements are the palace walls, beyond the wall is the moat, beyond the moat are the approaches, beyond the approaches are the estate walls and their gate, beyond that is a ring of garrisons and beyond that there are towns most loyal to his majesty; beyond those towns are lands and counties and eventually there are the bounds of the State itself. The very first thing any foreigner has to do in order to get to the king is to get past the guards at the border. At every stage of the approach, a new layer of defense is encountered, with most of those defenses becoming increasingly difficult to surmount.

Yet in such a situation, the goal is known, and that goal is the king; the king is known as is his location, somewhere within the palace. To capture the king will require only a superior force attacking a known location.

So, if confronted by a superior force intent on capturing the king -- or merely getting to him to kill him -- one has few choices in strategy. Either you can surrender the king, or you can hide him.

The astute opponent may ask themselves how they may find the king. He's not going to be at the castle, but it's kind of difficult to imagine that the king will be camped in a tent in the back woods and brewing his own tea. No, the character of kings requires a retinue, and the retinue requires defense, and the defense group requires a billet and logistics. All of these are components of a mobile defense-in-depth. So really there's no need to search high and low for the king... just keep your eye out for elements of defense-in-depth. Considering that for every king, or secret palace, there will be probably a staff of a thousand, doing their real jobs as they must, and pretending to be other than they are, mostly be pretending to do a job that's actually far from their real profession.

Of course, you don't have to be a spy or a spymaster to step into the wasps' nest, as it were, just a bumbler.

So, you've bumbled into one of the close-in elements of a defense-in-depth strategy? You finally figure that out? You think that just not shopping at the store that's just a cover will keep you out of trouble?

That depends. If you come through exactly one time, chances are the staff think that their strategy is working. If you come through more than once, they start to keep an eye out for you. If you actually start shopping there like a "loyal customer", you are sure to be trouble, simply because if you are there often enough or long enough, pure chance will assure that you witness something amiss. And that's the thing about the strategy of attempting a secret or deceptive defense-in-depth strategy. All it takes is one person talking about weirdness and word gets around. Sooner or later that weird word will get back to the ears of the enemy's strategists, and pretty soon what you planned as a secret-deceptive defense-in-depth strategy starts to be surrounded and interpenetrated.

Usually what happens in such a situation is this: as secretly as possible, the object of defense is removed while leaving in place the defenses. The idea is that the enemy tries to keep working on finding the core, the object of all of this defense, which clearly must be valuable indeed to have all of this expense and deception.

Defense-in-depth strategies are usually hugely expensive because they are expensively huge. Thus, while the inner ring of defense may relocate, the king moving about between his winter and summer palaces and various vacation villas, so to speak, the borders remain where they were, the cities remain where they were, the garrison forts remain where they were, and only the temporary digs are moved about.

Yet in almost all of those "alternative palaces", so to speak, there will be battlements, and the sanctum sanctorum, the keep. And in all cases, whether or not the king is in it, what must be kept at all costs, is the keep.

So, let's rehash the situation so far:

Very secret defense contractor and even more secret "continuity of government" bunker are decommissioned. The final stage of the decommissioning is actually a sort of probation and return to society of people who accidentally got locked underground and left to think that they were likely the sole survivors of a nuclear war, left underground for about 20 years.
Even more deeply secret researches into things people really aren't meant to know are also decommissioned, but not before some of those secrets get out, some by way of a tunnel-through-the-walls heist, and some of them under their own power.
Some of what gets out under its own powers gets into a mass demonstration of protest.
Most of the mass demonstration of protest gets severely out of hand when the escaped secrets -- malevolent alien software downloaded from incomprehensible dimensions beyond time and space -- effectively play a not so nice game of demonic possession and turn most of the protesters into zombies.
A fail-safe system designed to wipe the alien software off of the human-built hardware storing it -- for future use in weapons research -- puts the global telecom networks out of reach of the alien software, but also removes all technical advantages using electricity from anyone trying to fight the zombies, via an immense but localized electromagnetic pulse.
The zombies are driven indoors, into the now-decommissioned and untenanted surface building formerly occupied by the defense contractors.
The "probationers" -- folks being returned to normal society after having either lived for 20 years of total isolatoin in an underground bunker, or raised in that bunker for 20 years -- decide that they'd like to go back to their bunker rather than remain on the surface.
These "probationers" abandon their make-work jobs at a Potemkin Village shopping mall on top of their bunker, and flood into the network of tunnels leading between almost all of the local buildings.
The surface shops are abandoned but the tunnels are not; the tunnels are full of zombies, and if they get out into the shops, they'll be outside of the SWAT cordon and there will be nothing between them and a world full of unsuspecting tasty brains, and eventually a working telecom network, in which case the alien software replicates itself into everything and everyone everywhere, and we're all pretty much fucked.

Hey, don't sweat it. Could be worse:

[Mythos XVII] A Brief Interlude and History Lesson

2010-04-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

How can you tell that a shopping center is a decoy, nothing more nor less than a Potemkin Village?

It's simple. The merchants don't want you to shop there.

Sometime in the late 1980s, I walked into a courthouse in beautiful downtown Silver Spring Maryland.

It turns out that if you get a speeding ticket, and do not pay it on time, you will get a summons. If you petition for a delay, and get a new court date, and then petition for another delay, it's quite possible that the issuing officer will not show up for the trial. This is a common strategy. It is not the strategy I used, not this time.

The officer was there, but I did not intend to fight the ticket, not exactly.

When my case was called, and the judge asked how I wanted to plead.

I did not make a so-called Alford Plea.

I made one of the most unusual courtroom gambits ever seen outside of high-profile organized crime show-trials of the 1930s.

"Your Honor," I said, "I'd like to plead guilty to all crimes, known and unknown".

The judge blinked, twice. The stenographer clicked away at her recorder. The police officer looked at me with an expression of total disgust; this case was the only reason he was present in the court on that day. His expression said, plain as day, "You couldn't have just paid the ticket, could you, ya jerk."

The judge said the same, more or less. "You couldn't have just paid the ticket?"

"Your Honor, I wanted my day in court, and then thought better of it."

"All crimes, known and unknown?" His expression hovered somewhere between amusement and distaste.

"Yes, Your Honor."

He whispered to a clerk, who did things to his computer terminal. Moments later, the clerk whispered back.

"So ordered. I fine you $45.00 and assess you one point on your driver's record, for exceeding the speed limit by less than ten miles per hour."

The gavel banged, papers were stamped, and down the hall they stamped my papers again, took my cash and gave me a receipt.

I had just plead guilty in a court of competent jurisdiction, and was now protected by the so-called "double-jeopardy" clause of the US Constutution. It's not like I exactly was getting away with anything much, but it's always good to know that there's no possibility of anything hanging over your head from your juvenile years. I understand that since that simpler -- more straightforward -- time, laws have been changed to prevent people from doing this sort of thing. But just in case anyone wants to try it in my case, all I can say is "the Constitution prohibits ex-post-facto legislation". If anyone wants to know why I did this, all I can say is "on advice of counsel, I wish to avail myself of protections against self-incrimination in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution". I will then shut the fuck up and not say diddly squat. What happened in the past stays in the past. In any case, "there was no law against it at the time."

And no, I am not Michael H Kenyon, and I was never, neither in Illinois nor elsewhere, an enema bandit.

In the early 1980s, the Cold War between the Western World and the Communist powers escalated to new heights, and along with that came escalation of espionage activity.

Some of this got pretty much out of hand, or as out of hand as it could get without it becoming an international incident. Since everyone wanted to avoid an international incident -- international incidents could of course lead potentially to what was tactfully referred to as "mutual assured destruction" -- as a rule the bar was set a lot higher on what sort of out-of-hand activity would be considered eligible for escalation into the diplomatic realm.

Activity which in other eras would have led to public hangings after show-trials was, in this timeframe, pretty much brushed under the rug and studiously ignored. Yet it went on.

The Mitrokhin Archive conclusively reveals that the former A&P grocery store in Aspen Hill was a favorite meeting place for spies, but it also clears up something else: the spies had no idea that they were standing literally on top of an immense subterranean complex rivaling the Government Relocation Center at the Greenbrier Hotel.

It was in this early-mid-1980s timeframe that a certain escalation in international tensions triggered a lockdown at the facility, which the internal security system classified as ending in an actual nuclear exchange. The lockdown kept the place sealed for years, by which time the people inside had become very strange indeed.

Not too long after the Cold War ended with the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union, rumors were widely circulated in the global internet, to the effect that extraterrestrials were building, or had built, vast subterranean complexes and were using them for purposes generally discussed in unpleasant terms. These rumors are now understood as out-of-work spies trying to nail down loose ends, and possibly to gather information that would be valuable on the resale markets.

The friendly folks who built our national defense system during the Cold War did sell off some of those assets, such as the old Nike missile sites which some folks have bought up and converted into residences.

Sometimes, they might get more than they expected by the time they actually take possession, but since the1950s, widespread public education has educated the public on how to prepare:

Such minor difficulties generally are controlled with ease. Sometimes, such facilities get infested and they just collapse the structure with whatever explosives might be required.

But how can you explosively decommission a structure nearly the size of the Pentagon, which was concealed by building a thriving (if sketchy) community of 32,000 right on top of it?

Well, first you have to find or make a way to get rid of the 32,000...

Did I mention that the way you detect a Potemkin Village shopping center camoflaging a massive subterranean bunker is by looking for merchants who don't want to do business?

[Mythos XVI] Life Underground... and Otherwise

2010-04-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

With apologies to HP Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen King, and Charles Stross. Copyright 2010 Thomas James Hardman, Jr, all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. References to real places and things may be included but their usage is fictional in nature and intent. Any similarity to real persons or parties is coincidental and should be seen as fictional in nature and intent.

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

Ah yes, the end of an era. After nearly 50 years of defense contracting facilities at the heart of Aspen Hill Maryland, now there's not much there except a lot of stores surrounded by emerging ghetto, dysfunctional or non-functional everything, and a huge vacant building full of rapidly-evolving zombies prowling the halls. Oh, and a boatload of pissed-off cops caught between the zombies and a couple of thousand foreigners waving machetes at the sound of gunfire.

In 1963, the site of the demonstration is woodlands, second-growth forest spring up over former farms. Aspen Hill Road is gravel in most parts, and only half as wide as the majority of the side-streets in the nearby and new subdivisions:

By 1970, of course, things are far different:

This neighborhood used to be a lot more friendly, a lot more welcoming, or so it seems to me, with my imperfect memories and doubtless rose-tinted recollections of a time when we were all very much living in the shadows cast by the looming spectre of global thermonuclear war.

In 1970s, the murders hadn't yet started, as far as I know. People died pretty frequently, especially in high-speed car accidents. Yet people killed people mostly by accident, not with intent, and it's kind of hard to get away with murder when neither you nor your victims have enough strength to crawl from the wreckage.

This isn't to say that there was not any funny stuff, any spooky business, going on around here.

The gentleman that built most of the neighborhood was a survivor of the Holocaust, and before he got into the business of developing residential suburban subdivisions, he was in the business of building large apartment buildings and even skyscrapers, mostly in New York City, but some also down in the District of Columbia, where to this day the largest single apartment unit in town is in a building he designed and built. His New York buildings were characterized by, among other things, their connections to the subway, and their many levels of basement, moreso than seen in most New York City high-rise buildings.

A lot of people here know that the building taken over by the zombies was once leased -- from the time it was built -- by a defense contracting firm that at one time was this county's largest civilian employer. Yet they don't know that all three buildings the firm leased were connected by a network of tunnels.

One of those buildings was located right next to a grocery story. When the massive Mitrokhin Archive of Soviet espionage secrets was smuggled out of that failing country, it was revealed that for many years, Soviet intelligence officers would meet their defectors and spies-in-place at this grocery store. Of course, everyone else met there, as well, it being the only grocery store for miles around, for many years.

Interestingly enough, about the same time as the sole surviving building was constructed, another layer of building was erected atop one of the existing buildings. From an aerial photograph, or in the modern day a satellite image, it looks like the same building. But it's not. The newly constructed upstairs was initially a WT Grant's Department store, until Grant's put itself out of business by extending revolving credit to just about anyone, including, famously, people's dogs. Until quite recently, that had gone down in history as the largest bankruptcy of any US commercial enterprise.

Down below, however, it was not the famously open and airy environment of the Grant's store upstairs. WT Grant himself had achieved fame for pioneering the department store concept; he more or less took a thriving city market square full of all sorts of little businesses, put a roof over it, bought out the owners, and then paid them to keep doing the same job at the same place. This worked so well in the initial instance that he reproduced the experience all across the country, becoming fabulously well-to-do in the process.

Below, in what came to be known as "Grant's Tomb", it was windowless darkness, top security files and records, everything super secret and hush hush. Like possibly everything else in the area, it was possibly connected by tunnels to, well, possibly everything else in the area.

Look, this is Aspen Hill, not some five-star hotel out in the Shenandoahs; it's not the fucking Greenbrier.

Don't get your hopes up. This is not a story about some secret underground city with more people living under Aspen Hill than in the surface Aspen Hill. Nearly 32,000 people live on the surface in Aspen Hill.

I am here to deny, categorically, that sometime in the early 1980s a situation of DEFCON 1 was briefly declared, the facility went into lockdown, the DEFCON was downgraded, but failure of exterior sensors made it impossible to transmit the all clear inside the facility. Without the sensors informing the refugees that everything was safe as houses outside, and the air not choked with radioactive dust, and Ronald Reagan still President of these here United States, the lockdown would have continued until... April, 2010.

No, I deny it, categorically I deny it!

Actually, they broke out of lockdown closer to the Year 2000, when their old computers got borked by the Y2K Bug.

After nearly 20 years locked in what might as well have been a spaceship, people had become... different.

Living in totally regimented society, the people in that society became... different. So did society, both ours, and theirs.

Living on nothing but freeze-dried fallout-shelter rations for 20 years, that alone would do it to you.

And when, after 20 years, years of living in a subterranean skyscraper built on secret contract awarded to the lowest bidder, when after 20 years these people were at last permitted to go back into the light of day and the world as we now know it, they really truly were Not Like Us, and to make matters worse, they fervently believed that We Were Not Like Them, and that it was we out in the world who would have to adapt.

Then they set about finding or making ways to make that happen.

It's not like all of a sudden, at twelve midnight, January 1, 2000, all of a sudden the top popped off like the lid of a giant jack-in-the-box. It's more like a bank-vault door unlocked, and someone went out with their radiation detectors and air samplers wearing a space suit, and they did it about three in the morning and the very first surface person they ran into was someone picking up a pack of cigarettes coming from from a downtown bar. A Goth.

Well, the air up above was fine, but considering that one of their favorite films "down here" was the Charlton Heston classic "the Omega Man", it was about another week before they dared to show their faces outside. Even then, they went out in disguise, not in a space-suit, but in a ghillie suit. After a night spent disguised as a bush at the edge of a parking lot at an Aspen Hill gas station, they were much relieved to be able to conclude that the world had not been overrun by vampires. Slowly, they began to prowl the maintenance shafts outside of the underground complex, trying to restore connections to the outside world. Meanwhile, they did a little burglary and stole clothing in modern fashions, and did a bit if exploring. People who encountered them tended to interpret them as people who had maybe spent a full military career stationed in the ass end of somewhere so far out in the sticks that they had to pipe in daylight. Eventually they adapted, somewhat, but they never lost their habits of regimentation, and never achieved anything resembling cultural competency, or even open-mindedness.

They certainly didn't just emerge in mass, and go parading down the streets. That whole accidental lockdown thing was one of the biggest fubars ever in a whole Cold War full of snafu, and the government wasn't about to just dump 20,000 people with no modern job skills -- or even much concept of modern -- onto the job market. And 20,000 people who were totally used to living in a subterranean skyscraper didn't feel quite like abandoning home. For a whole generation under the age of 20 or so, that was the only home they had ever known. The population "down here" had grown substantially over the years. As the lockdown had happened with about 20 minutes warning, the facility had been only about half-full at the time; they'd had room to grow.

The staffers who had been in their 40s (or older) in the 1980s when the lockdown began, they could be surreptitiously snuck to a retirement in the rapidly-expanding gated retirement community of Leisure World. A lot of the people between the ages of 20 and their 40s, they were generally absorbed by the military or by top-secret contractors around the country. For those younger? The government knew a good thing when they saw it, a whole cadre of youngsters raised in regimentation that made the military look loose and sloppy by comparison, and more importantly, these youngsters had no alliance to anyone other than themselves and their parents, and no alliance at all to any element of society or to any social cause.

And with the April 2010 lease coming to an end and with it a final decommissioning of the underground intallation, it was going to be necessary to get all of these people aboveground, and almost all had been "resettled", mostly staffing local stores, or working and retraining in local offices, where they could be close to home, close to each other, and assist in keeping their home and origin secret, until the day when the government finally closed it down.

Now imagine their surprise, when the day after the last of them was "evicted", the place was subjected to a real electromagnetic pulse, usually symptomatic of a high-altitude nuclear blast, everything stopped working, and when they tried to get into the tunnels to get back to their old home, those tunnels were full of rapidly-evolving zombies infested with hostile alien software crafted by malicious Elder Deities from beyond time and space.

[Mythos XV] Of Mice and Men, and Pigeons, and BRAAAAINS

2010-04-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

When you make the signal error of first opening a Schrödinger cat-box gate into incomprehensible alien dimensions, and then compound it by repeatedly exposing EPROMs to it, you're bound to wind up with your first ever sample of what will later be developed and marketed as FPGA, or field-programmable gate arrays, assuming that you hadn't already independently invented them or something like them. Yet even the FPGAs invented by humans in our history stream of timespace are not without security risks.

Comparably, even without having your mind exposed to the best evil efforts of implacable alien entities from beyond time and space, you can be batshit crazy all on your own.

Ask almost anyone, and they'll tell you that, sure, they've had that experience where they've thought they were all alone, and suddenly the hair stood up on the back of their neck, and they cautiously turned to see some predator stalking them, whether the predator stood on two legs or on four.

That's an ancient neural mechanism associated to the temporal lobe. Anatomically, it's right next to the so-called "God Spot" that seems to be activated by the "God Helmet".

It's better developed in animals which coordinate in pack hunting, whether they're orca or wolves. It's not actually telepathy, which doesn't seem to actually exist. Yet we frequently observe animals such as wolves hunting in packs with a degree of coordination which presupposes some form of communications of a complexity similar to military commands at the platoon stratum, yet much faster. With even the most powerful listening and recording devices, including microphones sensitive far into the ultrasonic and excellent real-time sonic signal analysis, we can't hear calls between wolves in a hunt, at least nothing that could convey instructions for the sort of behavior observed. The theory that they're cueing into their roles solely by observing the actions of the other hunting wolves is partially discredited by the fact that wolves far out of sight of the others (with a hill between them, for example) act in a role coordinated with the others in their pack. We can either assume that they have discussed this all beforehand, and have elaborated a set of contingencies for anything or that they have routes of communication via mechanisms we haven't identified.

Yet we have at last discovered that certain structures in the brains of pack-hunting carnivores, flocking birds, and even some large herbivores of the extremely gregarious types such as wildebeest, are developed to a degree not seen in more solitary hunters. And all of these show a heightened tendency to react to being observed, even by observers unseen.

Probably the evolutionary advantages of being able to detect hidden predators by directly communicating with them via minimal brain-to-brain signaling (or signals-detection) is of limited usefulness. For the homing-pigeon, and other migratory birds, it's clearly useful to have specialized nervous-system adapatations that can directly sense magnetic fields. Yet so far as we know, the advantages to the pigeons have yet to be exploited by other life forms developing the means to generate magnetic fields so as to lure pigeons to be dinner.

In human-created dataprocessing systems, buffer overflow attacks can smash the stack for fun and profit, and there are known attacks that cannot be protected against, at least not at the current state of the art.

Living neurological systems are nowhere near as fast as ultra-massive-scale integrated circuit electronics, but they are considerably more flexible, adaptable, at least when we're not discussing massively-parallel matrices of FPGAs. Yet look at it this way: machines generally don't care if they live or die, and don't have actual Darwinian concerns such as living long enough to reproduce their kind.

If you were a predator that hunts primarily by stalking, such as a cat, if your prey could receive communications that told it to sit still and not move as an attack was launched, you'd be eating well anytime you encountered such prey, and soon enough, a capacity to receive well enough to accept such a command would be bred out of the prey species. Yet, if a complete inability to receive such signals left the prey species unable to detect such commands at all, and thus easily caught by stealth, the evolutionary advantage would go to the prey that could detect transmission of commands, but not well enough to accept, interpret, and be subject to such commands.

Feeling the eyes of the tiger on your back is good, though it may not be enough to save you from the teeth and claws. Yet how much better off you are to have some warning than to have no warning at all! But when the tiger is thinking very hard at you, "do not see me," it's not going to help you at all if you obey. It will help you even less if you obey its command, given as it springs, "sit still while I kill you, prey". So, if you are lucky, you know that the tiger is thinking of you, but you don't know exactly what it thinks, and you can't perceive it well enough for it to paralyze you through pure loudness, but you can perceive it well enough to take warning.

Sometimes this mechanism is defective, in a variety of ways. Some people simply cannot sense another presence. Interestingly, this inability to detect predators is found in almost all cases among people who profess to be agnostic or atheist.

In some people, the mechanism gives continuous (or intermittent but acute) "false positive". Paranoia very commonly results from this feeling of impending doom, but even more frequently comes religion. Look at it this way, if you can make yourself believe that it's not a tiger, but a loving spirit or deity that is staring at you from some hiding place you cannot see, then you're rationalizing away a sensation of doom. In effect, you're deluding yourself into thinking that although you feel a sensation of doom and being endlessly stalked, it's a good kind of being stalked.

Some people, probably most, have an excellent ability to perceive when they are being observed from behind. Yet even these may know that something is behind them, and even have range and bearing sense, but not be able to tell all too well what exactly it is that's coming up behind them. As for me, I prefer to never be anyplace for long that doesn't have a nice solid wall at my back, or a mirror I can use to see if something's sneaking up behind me. I don't like open doorways, and I love a good lock on a well-closed door.

A lot of folks around here seem to have a combination of a good ability to feel real presences behind them, as well as some basic underlay of that constant sensation of being watched that so very much promotes susceptibility to the delusions of faith.

I suspect that these kind of folks have, probably not exactly consciously, that same sort of communication that wolves have, that enables wolves to coordinate their roles even when they cannot see each other, and are not vocalizing in order to not alert their prey. And, not quite consciously, when they cannot establish such linkages with others, tend to exclude them from the pack and thus relegate them to the role of the prey.

I suspect that however well-tuned is this sensitivity, the fact remains that they are highly sensitive. In the same way that the scream of a panther paralyzes before it deafens, with none more susceptible than the prey with the best hearing, when the alien deities from beyond time and space start whispering, these folks are already tuned in to that wavelength, with the volume knob cranked completely clockwise.

In the same way that the homing-pigeons have a built-in organic magnetometer, these guys have a built-in two-way radio talking between their unconscious minds, coordinating pack action. They are pretty much the dominant kind of humanity hereabouts. They make great military and paramilitary operatives, or workers in any field where seamless cooperation without much oversight is an advantage. They also are extremely effective as criminal gangs, and I often wonder if that wasn't their ancestry: roving groups of extremely effective killers who, like wolves, suddenly shift from minding their own business to devouring anything they can surround. Suddenly the signal is given, nothing anyone else can perceive, and, as suddenly, the killing begins.

They damn sure get possessed very easily, and make most excellent zombies.

The 2500 protestors who rose from their Salvia trance with their eyes glowing the lurid green of red-shifted Cherenkov radiation, they at least had some excuse, or perhaps personal blame. They had taken a mild overdose of one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known to man, Salvinorin A, a profound
entheogen drug, used specifically to promote profound, if hallucinatory, religious experiences.

Such drugs work, in part, because they turn off the filters, which, so to speak, keep you from obediently obeying a tiger's commands to fail to notice it and to sit still while it kills you. Most people experience this as a feeling that there is another presence there, but an invisible one. It's as if you had an invisible tiger right in front of you; you'd feel the stare of predatory intent, but you could look all you want, you wouldn't see anything. Things which are felt, but not seen, are usually ascribed to the supernatural, perhaps to the divine. Yet what if you were taking such drugs, and a real tiger did in fact take up position behind you and start to stalk in and stare at you as it did?

Shamanistic faiths often have tales told down through the ages, of how a religious trance allowed the devotee to speak with a "spirit animal", usually a totemic animal such as a bear or a wolf. In almost all cases such legendary communing is with a sight-hunting gregarious predator of a species that adopts lone members into extant functional groups. Usually the tale tells of the hunted (the celebrant) becoming recognized as a brother, and being accepted into the pack. You've all got your radios tuned to the same wavelength, more or less, and established a common symbology, enough for some sort of two-way understanding.

When the alien software downloaded itself into the protestors, it was able to activate expression of genes which had created the original sensorium to receive it, or to perceive the intentions of stalking predators. Enzymes were flurried out of the cellular production machinery and they carved up red blood cells for the iron in the hemoglobin and for the oxygen the hemoglobin carried, and generated rather complex little structures out of magnetite in much the same way that magnetite is deposited in the trigeminal nerve of homing-pigeons. In the case of the celebrants, however, the magnetite was more associated with the neurology responsible for the auditory brainstem response.

Other structures were created as well.

Most weren't metallic or semi-metallic like the magnetite that continued to be bonded to neurons, worming its way from synapse to axon throughout the brain. Frequently the structures were just more of what had already been there. The alien software was, of course, constantly downloading more of itself, absorbing echoes of signal from the collapse of probability states encoded on the EPROM chips that had been exposed to alien realms. Enough of that software was present to have analyzed the DNA of the hosts, and -- so to speak -- the software had ordered the host physique rebuilt along slightly modified lines, more or less by activating introns and "junk DNA" as well as functional sequences usually not seen in adulthood. The former celebrants, the erstwhile protestors, experienced rapid cellular division in parts of their bodies, as muscle tissues expanded and calcium began to deposit into strategically placed sessamoid bones that would provide free floating anchor points, additional leverage and moment arms for increased strength. The alien software found the Opsin protein codings and went into overproduction.

All of this furious metabolism didn't occur without side effects. Aside from extreme pain, which the alien software quickly redirected, there was extreme hunger, which suited the alien software just fine.

The electromagnetic pulse that had destroyed most (but hardly all) of the infested EPROM chips had a variety of follow-on effects in the domain of tactics and strategy among the unaffected humans. The law-enforcement that had massed there was suddenly without radio or any other form of telecommunications and were effectively reduced to arm-waving, shouting, and blowing whistles. Further, even if astute parties and organizations outside of the affected area were to decide to take an interest (outside of the affected area, most of the planet's intelligence and military agencies suddenly had), the main roads to the general area were almost impassible due to disabled vehicles, and the streets surrounding the former defense-contractor facility site were fully jammed from curb to curb and in some cases, beyond the curbs. Nobody could call for help, and help could not get there, and would be a long time coming.

Starving as they stood there, changing as they moved, the zombies were hardly dead but were increasingly becoming life as we don't know it. Their victims, however, were mostly dying as fast as the jaws of the zombies could move.

Everyone knows what to do about zombies, they've all seen the movies. Those movies have been widely disseminated and made wildly popular due to good special effects, better writing, and even better promotion and excellent funding of both production values and distribution systems. We want people to recognize zombies instantly and to know how to deal with them as instantly, and people did instantly recognize the zombies, and the very well-trained police as instantly knew how to deal with them, and unlike almost everyone else there, they were well armed.. They fell back to their cordon of vehicles surrounding the place, and opened fire.

They even managed to get a most of the unaffected people behind the cordon as well, though the folks in the media circus didn't fare too well. It might be said that after the destruction of their equipment, they were without purpose, but while the zombies were piling up on top of them and eating them, they certainly provided a horrid form of entertainment.

These weren't your usual zombies; they were fast and getting faster, and as fast as they were wounded, they seemed as rapidly to heal. They also learned pretty quickly that they didn't much like getting shot, and that if shot in the head they could die (or just be incapacitated, which the alien software didn't want) and so they took their dead with them as they retreated to smash through the glass of the facility, and sought inside halls and protected positions to avoid the gunfire from outside, as they began to devour their own fallen.

A fresh egg contains no more nutrition than the chick into which it hatches, but it's a hell of a lot more digestible. In the same way, the fallen zombies provided a festering stew of alien-modified biology running at full metabolic load, and the more of their fallen they ate, the faster the zombies changed. Now shielded from the sunlight by the building, the opsins deposited and concentrated, the alien software expanded the orbits of the skull to get more surface with better granularity. The zombies were quickly transforming into something resembling giant drooling tarsiers with growing Smilodon fangs.

[Mythos XIV] A Building, Though Unleased, May Yet Be Not Untenanted

2010-04-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'd like to jump back to the previous chapter?

Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to use entheogen drugs in a crowd setting, and the bigger the crowd, the less of a good idea it is.

Now add to the general badness of tripping in crowds by making the crowd about 10,000 strong, with about 2500 celebrants and the rest a mad and motley crew comprising a media circus of a dozen network satellite vans, a couple of dozen police squad cars with more officers starting to arrive by the van load, and the rather surprisingly large "local" population of Aspen Hill's "immigrant community", most of them outside the thickening police cordon, getting more than a bit raucous and agitated as they were generally rebuffed in their attempts to cross the cordon and join in solidarity with their compadres, half of whom were protesting the unfairness of Home Depot filing trespassing charges on day-laborers seeking unscrupulous drive-by employers, and the other half having a fairly impromptu "confab" with their Higher Power under the influence of a mild overdose on Salvinorin A, one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known to man.

At this point in time, the 2500 were about half-way through their trip, which in normal circumstances would mean that in about another three to five minutes they'd emerge from the hallucination and dissociation stage of the drug, and would be about as coordinated as the average alley drunk for the next five minutes, and thereafter be completely normal to all intents and purposes.

These were, unfortunately, far from normal circumstances.

In the basement of the former defense-contractor campus, a hole in the wall was enlarging by the moment. A crew of bank-vault burglars were cutting in from the outside, working from within a 5-foot concrete storm drain pipe, through which flowed -- at the moment, though this could change -- the three-gallons-per-minute flow of one of the lesser headwaters of the Turkey Branch of Rock Creek. During rainstorms of sufficient force, or duration, this concrete pipe carrying a small buried stream could entirely fill with water, in which case a containment pond offset and upstream could absorb overflow, and both cool runoff from hot asphalt of the surrounding neighborhood hilly streets as well as settle out sediment that otherwise would eventually clog this conduit.

What did the bank-vault guys want? Nothing in particular; they had simply been hired because they had the equipment, knew their business, and had been paid fairly well. Ordinarily they would have taken months or even years to dig their own tunnels to an ordinarily-inaccessible side of a vault known to be chock full of easily fenced loot and significant quantities of cash. Yet they had come to this job on a fairly spur-of-the-moment basis and were just making a hole in materials that were rather difficult to cut without explosives. Others would come along and strip away anything of worth, though there was no known vault full of lots of cash and valuables, so they were just making a doorway.

That they were very close indeed to making a gateway to another world, they could not know and did not suspect.

There was a vault in the basement, but hardly a safe full of valuables. Rather, it was full of computer chips from a supercomputer which had intentionally and repeatedly been exposed to a very minimal-aperture Schrödinger gate, operated only within a large and extremely well-shielded Schrödinger cat box.

This vault was hardly of extreme security design. It wasn't much more than a coat room that happened to have cinderblock walls; it wasn't intended to store the EPROMs and field-programmable gate arrays for very long, only until the chips could be destroyed.

Destroying the chips was not something that would be done inexpensively or easily. Part of the mechanism of the Schrödinger gate-in-a-box was that it left the wave functions uncollapsed, permitting a lot of contemporaneous spacetimes to co-exist. A sort of probabilistic "rhetorical conflation of irreconcilables" had to exist for the gate to open. How is this physically achieved? I'm profoundly glad that I cannot tell you because I simply do not know, other than that it has been rumored to have something to do with counter-rotating streams of hypercooled pseudo-matter, Bose-Einstein condensates, laser cooling, and stimulated emission of coherent entangled neutrons.

Exposure to the gate leaves the chips somewhat disentangled from our timespace and somewhat entangled with the particles that the aliens fire to re-etch the circuits on the chips we expose to them. They're trying to embed new instruction sets into BIOS, and they don't care if they're working with EPROM; they're re-hardwiring at the atomic scale in a sort of transdimensional nanotechnological software attack. These really scary things from the ends of their own incomprehensible universes are very fast indeed, and seem to have a deep knowledge of nearly everything that is far beyond our own, and we're not entirely sure how it is that they can instantly detect a gate and as instantly launch a bewildering barrage of attacks at any technology we expose to them. The one thing they can't attack is the Schrödinger cat-box itself; the instant they observe that in any way (much less touch it), the probability wave functions collapse and the gate was never there. All praise paradox!

Yet improperly destroying the chips also collapses probability wave functions and whatever is overlaid on the chips... solidifies, I suppose you could say. What was an exceptionally hostile suggestion, as it were, becomes lethal machinery. It starts to work.

The bank-job crew finished their doorway in mere minutes, and laid themselves and their equipment down on their "bobsled" and rolled downstream towards the place where the pipe exited into a concrete culvert, open to the skies, about a quarter mile away. Even as they rolled off, an even dozen persons on bobsleds of their own rolled into position and entered the building.

It took them mere moments to secure the room where the new short tunnel opened, and as the next dozen arrived, the first dozen fanned out to secure the nearby halls and rooms and to explore.

Part of the exploration was the opening of locked doors, primarily accomplished by smashing any locks encountered. When they came to the door sealing the room full of contamination From Beyond, it had two locks, which was an invitation to prioritize opening that particular door.

"Computer chips, old ones," said one man, turning it over a few times in his fingers. "Trash," he said, and hurled it into a bin full of others. It cracked as it hit, and that small change in state was more than enough to make the uncertain certain. Carefully maintained balances of probability collapsed, and the nebulous became sold, and the imaginary became real.

Out in the parking lot, 2500 protesters locked in the depths of their Salvia Experience suddenly all had the same dream within a dream. They jerked like hooked fish as their dream within a dream became a nightmare from which they would never escape. The entheogen drugs had put them in touch with a Higher Power, alright, but not a friendly one. It was whispering into their drug-enhanced temporal lobe with a data-rate far beyond any internet technician's dreams of bandwidth. Within minutes it would have re-written their internal operating system to the point where the machinery of their metabolism would begin producing new machinery, and once that happened, what had been human protestors would begin changing, metamorphosing through elaborations far more profound than in the life-cycles of insects. They wouldn't actually pupate, though, to emerge as some sort of butterfly of the occult. It was more typical of such cases that skin would first become rugose, then squamous, and then be shredded away by chitinous structures emerging from within, structures assuming shapes never before seen in this world, and probably not even in this universe. Those structures would, given time, assume proportions and geometry creating a transdimensional gate, one that wouldn't paradoxically collapse itself like a Schrödinger cat-box does to prevent itself from being observed.

No, once those gates were formed, observers everywhere would soon observe things like nothing ever before seen, things with shapes out of fever dreams, feasting on the madness and terror they inspired.

Forming those gates would take probably 24 hours. Long before then, however, infested victims would likely have plugged themselves into the global telecommunications network via the simple (simple for alien deities from other dimensions, that is) means of growing a modem in the neural tissues of the infested victims. Hey, how else are they going to download instructions for generating the structures to open gates?

Once they get into the telecom networks, and the computing networks, and the power grid, and the military logistics command-and-control systems, they don't need to open the gates to bring themselves entirely through for humanity to be well and truly fubared. At that point, we're all dead already, or as good as dead, it all being over but the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness. There are far too many humans, far too dependent on technology, to survive for long at all when the technology either doesn't work or has to be destroyed lest it work against us.

Yet remember: these implacable aliens aren't coming to devour humanity, body and soul and hearts and minds, we're just tiny little flecks of icing on the cake as they feed and grow strong on the universe itself. They devour order and shit entropy, and it won't be long before they've collapsed this universe to the conditions that evolved them, one vast lump of neutronium in such concentrated mass that it falls into a condition opposite probabilistic waveform collapse... a place that is their steppingstone of raw uncertainty into the next nice orderly universe to devour.

Still, we won't much care about the fate of the universe if these things first devour our civilization and then ourselves in the general case, or the more specific and immediate case of devouring us personally as a run-up to devouring civilization. No, first save civilization, and perhaps you can save yourself.

Not far away, a house with a rather hideous roof-line that resembled a barn-builder's attempt to craft a camoflaged radome peeled open that hideous roofline like an unfurling tulip. With a sound like the world's largest automobile crash air-bag, huge balloons inflated after being pulled aloft by rockets.

It would take another minute for them to reach the required altitude and spacing.

One of the local news reporters, acting as a network stringer, was telling the world that something strange was going on here.

"...As you can see, Robert, the protestors seem to be waking up from their trance. They seem confused, disoriented. It's like they've been drinking, which our colleagues tell us is an expected after-effect of consuming the Salvia drug. But Robert, I don't think anyone said anything about it making peoples' eyes glow green. I mean, really glow, really green, John, can we get a close-up on someone..."

A set of capacitors that filled almost the entire basement of the house with the radome roof were imploded and dumped a massive electromagnetic pulse into the balloon-lofted antenna grid. Every coil of wire and semiconductor in line of sight within 5 miles instantly stopped being useful electronics components. Within the near-field zone of about 1.5 miles, even in basements, transistors exploded into puffs of smoke. All forms of electric lighting went dark. Microwave ovens burst into flame or even melted as their klystrons re-radiated the pulse. Every car within miles stopped working, along with their entertainment electronics. This included not merely the cars in the immense traffic jam created by the protest and the media circus, but also about 100 police squad cars, 12 SWAT vans, and two Mobile Command Center buses. Also disabled: automatic alarm and anti-fire systems. Sprinkler systems erupted into action all around the area.

As a result, none of the ensuing confusion and melee was recorded; cellphone towers and network-television satellite links were inactivated for miles around, along with all landline telephone and data networks. This was, after all, the point of the pulse, to prevent anything From Beyond from getting into the global networks.

However, something remained to be done -- much indeed remained to be done! -- about the living, non-electronic, non-networked, but still demonically possessed, people just re-acquiring coordination after their bout with Salvia. A lot of them were starting to rise to their feet, and they looked unhappy indeed. Sort of, you know, undead, to tell the truth.

Beneath the main basement, well-shielded from the pulse that had knocked the local surface world back into the Stone Age, two dozen special-squad burglars loaded up their "bobsleds" in the 5-foot concrete storm drain pipe with all of the loot they had found. Old computer chips had no special value for resale on the espionage markets, but they contained enough rare earth metals (and in this case, also a plague of infestations of malicious software coded by malevolent alien gods) to be worth the bother, especially if you had about a ton or more of them. They began to push them upstream towards the extraction point.