He Runs the Conspiracy

Most presidents are content merely to sit in the pocket of the shadowy conspiracy that rules the country, vetoing an anti-corporate bill here and issuing the occasional questionable pardon. But Nixon is no one’s henchman. When he wants JFK gone, he takes the Comedian to Dallas and gives the order himself. When the Secret Empire framed Captain America for murder in its plot to rule the United States, Nixon wasn’t some mere co-conspirator. He was the guy with the number one printed on his freaky black hood.

He Repealed the 22nd Amendment

Why have a president when you can have a dictator? The 22nd Amendment just makes the US Constitution overlong and difficult for schoolchildren to memorize. Fortunately, Nixon realized that once you’ve got superheroes and secret police on the payroll, you don’t need term limits.

He Won Vietnam, Twice

The Vietnam War had raged for ten years by the time Nixon took office in 1969. But he realized something his predecessors did not: an atomic superman trumps guerilla warfare. With the aid of Doctor Manhattan, Nixon handily ends the conflict in a mere three months. Apparently it doesn’t take, because he uses far more mundane means several years later in Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas, bombarding the irrigation facilities in Hanoi and Haiphong and forcing a surrender of the North Vietnamese forces in 1974. The result of this victory, however, is not peace and prosperity, but an advanced arms race and at least eight more years of Nixon.

He Battled Philip K. Dick

In 1974, the entity VALIS, which might be God, told writer Philip K. Dick that Nixon was the leader of an oppressive empire comprised of three great superpowers. Since then, Dick and Nixon have warred across the universes, from Dick’s own Radio Free Albemuth to Paul McAuley’s “The Two Dicks,” with Nixon suppressing subversive literature as fast as Dick can compose it. Dick finally dies at the beginning of Michael Bishop’s Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas, but his ghost takes on the task of bringing down Nixon’s fascist rendition of America.

He’s Unstoppable

Nixon is nothing if not resilient. Lose the presidency? Run for governor of California. Lose the gubernatorial race? Run for president again. Accused of taking illegal campaign contributions? Assure the public that your daughters really love that dog.

Not even death can stop Nixon. Despite taking a bullet to the temple following the events of the Secret Empire, he manages to win reelection in 1976, 1980, and 1984 in Alan Moore’s history. He even manages to claim victory in the 3000 election thanks to the technology that keeps heads alive in jars and a disenfranchised robot voting bloc. When you install Nixon, you get a leader that lasts.

Other candidates may try to wow you with their corporate interests, shady backroom dealings, and public scandals, but only Nixon has an unmarred record of dystopian success. So the next time you need a leader for your warring, fascist, or just plain broken down American nation, think Richard Nixon.

If you've been watching Doctor Who at all this season (and you should, if only for Catherine Tate), you'll know that the show has been laying subtle ground for giant Earth doom that somehow relates to the recent real-life phenomenon of disappearing bees. In fact, it's worse than even Who producer Russell T Davies knows: Fish are checking out, too.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff, of the Christian Science Monitor, reports on one analysis estimating that every fishery in the world will be empty by the middle of this century:

Until relatively recently, fishermen, fishery managers, and scientists alike thought the sea was so vast, so teeming with life, that human activity simply couldn't diminish it, Mr. Pauly says.

Until the advent of modern fishing technology in the 20th century, it couldn't.

"The sea was very large compared to the means we had to exploit it," Pauly says. But beginning with steam-powered trawlers more than 100 years ago, and ending with today's global-positioning navigational systems, technology has improved fishermen's reach and efficiency. "We essentially deployed our industrial armada against fish, and obviously we would win: It's a war against fish," says Pauly.

As in the case of the disappearing bees (technically known as the widespread Colony Collapse Disorder), it's clear that human decimation of the ecosystem is beginning to have incredibly severe consequences. If the sharp decline of the honey bee population has us worried, we should be panicked by this report: A normal fishery should be able to sustain itself, providing a certain amount of fish to humans and then replenishing its population within a year, but 25% of all fisheries in the world are now unable to restore their populations — and still 50% more have been fished to capacity. But we must, of course, find a way to turn that panic into productivity.

In the US, all quarters are pushing to develop solutions before the problem becomes unfixable. Fishermen and fishery managers are rethinking management to encourage stewardship. Scientists now say that fish stocks can't be viewed in isolation; they must be managed in the context of the greater ecosystem. Many, even some fishermen begrudgingly, realize the importance of having some areas completely off-limits to fishing in order to keep ecosystems healthy. And increasingly, a new argument is heard in the debate over fisheries: Marine ecosystems should be preserved not just for their economic value, but also because, like the wilderness preserved in the national forest system, they are part of humankind's natural heritage.

Perhaps these oceanic inhabitants, like the dolphins in Douglas Adams's A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, are simply leaving the planet in short order before Earth is destroyed by an alien ship planning to build a hyperspace bypass. I'd say keep an eye overhead for Vogon constructor fleets, and just in case, don't fish over the limit.

Image by Curt Degler from californiafish.org

Where Have All the Fish Gone? [Alternet.org via Christian Science Monitor]

Six of One, the Prisoner fan page claims that Ian McKellen will play one of the men in charge of The Village, Number 2. Also shooting starts the first week of August in Namibia, South Africa. There will be total of 6 one-hour episodes written by Bill Gallagher (scribe for Conviction).

The original Prisoner followed a former spy known only as Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) who's imprisoned inside the futuristic town-prison named The Village. Everyone who is taken to this remote location was brought there to keep their knowledge away from the public and to have their secrets discovered by the mysterious jailers. Number 6 can't escape and doesn't know why he's there, and he ends up spending a majority of his time trying to uncover who his captors are.

Yay, finally a new scifi remake that deserves some attention. It's a simple idea that can easily be translated and updated without butchering the plot or ideas of the original. Bring it on I say, especially with McKellen as the crafty Number 2. [Six Of One and Wired]

Today the New York Times has an interesting report on a form of urban design whose popularity is growing in India: the walled mini-city, with its own schools and power generators, surrounded by slums full of people who work as servants. While these mini-cities are like the "gated communities" you see in the west, what sets them apart is the degree of autonomy they have from their environs — they are literally running off a different electrical grid, and are designed so that nobody ever has to leave. [NYT]

SITE Intelligence, an organization that could easily have been ripped from the pages of William Gibson's Spook Country, makes cash by monitoring terrorist websites, writing up reports of what they find, and selling them (mostly) to the U.S. government. According to GameSpot, who has been reporting on the still-unfolding story:

[Reps from SITE said,] "Extremists posted the [Fallout 3] image to a password-protected forum affiliated with al-Qaeda. ... This information was part of a report describing the general atmosphere in this forum with regard to extremists' discussions on weapons of mass destruction, making its context all the more important." . . . SITE made the claim as part of a public refutation of an article appearing in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. That piece claimed that SITE was "embarrassed" and "red-faced" because their report asserted terrorists, not Bethesda, had created the image. The article has since been removed from the The Daily Telegraph's Web site.

So basically Al Qaeda sympathizers know more about fall console game releases than intelligence contractors do. I'm not surprised, but I'm also not sure what that means. Thanks, Raanve!

Al-Qaeda website swipes Fallout 3 pic [Gamespot]

The subject line of the spam was "shore girl," which sounded like your typical randomly-generated pair of dictionary words. But then came the message body with its strange references to "subject product V (or C)":

1. Find a girl
2. Invite her to your appartments
3. Use subject product V (or C)
4. Have fun
5. Take her number
6. Profit?

The Associated Press reports:

Grease is transformed into fuel through a chemical process called transesterification, which removes glycerine and adds methanol to the oil, leaving a thinner product that can power a diesel engine. Biodiesel can also be blended with petroleum diesel, and blends of the alternative fuel are now sold at 1,400 gas stations across the country. But as the price of diesel shoots up, so, too, does the value of grease.

Biodiesel Pirates Steal Used Cooking Oil [MSNBC]

For every 1,000 litres of alcohol sold in stores (there were no stats for what got sold in bars), numbers of violent assaults and deaths nearby increased by 13%. For young people, the risk increased by 21%. One could easily imagine a dystopian future where cities zone certain "undesirable" areas for more liquor stores, as a way of trimming down or crippling the population there.

What's particularly interesting about this study is how the researchers got their data. The Canadian province Ontario does an very accurate job of tracking alcohol sales in stores (not bars) because the government regulates stores that sell liquor. In addition, hospitals in the province keep highly-accurate records of assaults. So the region was basically a goldmine for data about how alcohol sales might impact assaults.

Alcohol Sales and Risk of Assault [PLoS Medicine]

According to the International Herald Tribune, bad weather and skyrocketing fuel costs have made it harder for locals to grow and transport staple foods. But the problem is also pure politico-economic:

The protesters in Mogadishu on Monday included women and children who marched against the refusal of many shopkeepers to accept the country's old 1,000-shilling notes, which are worth 74 U.S. cents. Many of the protesters blamed the shopkeepers' refusal to honor the bills for sharply rising prices.

Shortly after the beginning of that demonstration, tens of thousands of people took to the streets, hurling stones that smashed the windshields of several cars and buses. Demonstrators threw rocks at shops and chaos erupted at the city's main market. Hundreds of shops and restaurants in southern Mogadishu closed their doors for fear of looting. "Traders have refused to take old notes," Hussein Abdikadir said as he rolled a tire that he intended to burn.

"Food prices are high and we have nothing to eat. We will protest until the traders agree to take the notes and sell us food."

Shopkeepers in the sprawling Bakara market, which also houses a well-known open-air arms bazaar, say the interim government and unscrupulous businessmen are responsible for runaway inflation. "Businessmen blame the government, which does not control the security and circulation of money," said Abdirahman Omar, a money-changer.

2 Die in Somalia Riot Over Food Prices [International Herald Tribune]

Baton Rouge, which you can see here, glows in the particulate matter of its pollution. Dentalben took this photo. It's the tenth most ozone-ridden city in the U.S.

And it should be no surprise to anyone that Los Angeles is the most polluted with ozone. Here is a beautiful view of LA, showing off the dreamy, weird layer of gunk that hovers in a brown band over the city. Steven Buss took this photo.

Most Polluted Cities [American Lung Association]

Astani was newly arrived to the US from Iran when he first saw the movie in 1985. He immediately fell in love with the idea of giant billboards, flying cars, and skyscrapers. He got into real estate, and now owns a huge chunk of downtown LA.

The project still needs to get approval from the city of LA before he can executive his vision of a real-world dystopia in Hollywoodland. The verdict is still out—we'll keep you posted on whether Astani's wish is granted or not.

LA Real Estate Mogul Plans to Light up Blade Runner-Style Billboards [Wired]

Here you can see a schematic for the Welcoming Center. Sick, old people who taste bad are recycled in the biogas digester. Healthy but stupid people are recycled in the meat processing factory. The young and healthy go to the organ transplant center, and the smart and healthy go to work at the Call Center.

Currently, there are 200,000 inhabitants in SlaveCity, and there are separate universities for men and women. This one is the Female Slave University. It's kind of like a modern-day labor camp, where women are taught how to make themselves useful; the professors, who sit in the meeting room on top and get paid a lot of money while they watch the women work their butts off. The University houses 1,896 female students.

Those working in the Call Center are fortunate enough to have toilets.

The entire exhibit—blueprints, drawings, sculptures, and installations of SlaveCity, are on display at the Folkwang Museum in Germany until July 6th.

Atelier Van Lieshout via Designboom

Desperate to impress his car-loving girlfriend, who runs a meat stand, Archie begins killing people to feed his tank. Meanwhile, he's also being tracked by government agents, who want to steal the car to find out how his oil-free engine works. In this great scene, Archie manages to steal his car back from two of the agents, and also demonstrates just how energy-efficient his blood car really is. Released last year, Blood Car is hilarious and profoundly weird. Is it about the evils of gasoline, or the evils of sex? All I can see is that it's great to see a dystopian flick about a vegan's fall from grace. Must be seen to be believed. [Blood Car]

According to the authors of the study, diabetes and lung disease were the biggest life-shorteners. In an introductory note to their study, PLoS editors write:

The researchers looked at differences in death rates between all counties in US states plus the District of Columbia over four decades, from 1961 to 1999. They obtained the data on number of deaths from the National Center for Health Statistics, and they obtained data on the number of people living in each county from the US Census. The NCHS did not provide death data after 2001. They broke the death rates down by sex and by disease to assess trends over time for women and men, and for different causes of death.

Over these four decades, the researchers found that the overall US life expectancy increased from 67 to 74 years of age for men and from 74 to 80 years for women. Between 1961 and 1983 the death rate fell in both men and women, largely due to reductions in deaths from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke). During this same period, 1961-1983, the differences in death rates among/across different counties fell. However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call "the reversal of fortunes." This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers' key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.

Yeah, it's something like this. Here you can see the Boxberg Power Plant, torching massive amounts of coal, chewing up the landscape, and shooting smoke into the atmosphere. Apparently these kinds of plants have been spun as a positive alternative to nuke power. I'd rather get electricity from nukes any day than power my computer with coal.

Images by Carsten Koall/Getty.

Protectan is being developed with Department of Defense funding as part of their efforts to protect soldiers from weapons like dirty bombs. It could also be used by astronauts and future space travelers, and will surely be a hot commodity after the apocalypse. It can be taken before or after radiation exposure - helpful, since radioactive zombies don't usually call ahead. Unlike some similar drugs being developed, Protectan only costs $200 per dose and doesn't require the assistance of a doctor to take it. Just pop one whenever your rad meter trips and you're good to go! Photo by Getty Images.

Cleveland BioLabs lands defense contract. [Buffalo News]

Here is what developers claimed the CityCenter would like like back when the started construction.

Last week, Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on the Cosmopolitan Project (the piece of this structure that's on the far right), started foreclosure proceedings after developer Ian Bruce Eichner was unable to get more financing for the world's biggest mega-mall. Let that be a lesson to everyone who looks at gleaming architecture renderings and imagines they're seeing the future. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty.

Foreclosure on Las Vegas Casino to Begin [Wall St. Journal]

The exhibit, called Another Geography, is on view until May 11th.

Diesel Denim Gallery main page via Designboom

Here you can see the car after the flames have been put out, and the injured and dead have been taken away. This particular bomb was set off in a hotel parking lot by Muslim insurgents, and claimed at least two lives.

Forensics experts gather three kinds of evidence: chemical, to see if the "signature" of the bomb's materials matches those of known terrorist groups; mechanical, which is to say how the bomb was set off (is it an IED or something made by professional military?); and finally, they look for DNA evidence to see whether they can identify the bombers by bits of skin or hair they may have left behind. The BBC has an interesting article on car bomb forensics. Car bomb forensics may not be a futuristic science, but car bomb forensics expert is a job that is (unfortunately) only going to become more common. Images by MUHAMMAD SABRI/AFP/Getty.

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

This is a story that requires few words to tell. Here's a larger map of the region. UN Satellites Photograph Human Exodus [War and Health]

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The data is most striking for the period of 1995-1998, when the U.S. economy was at its bounciest. But there's also a nice spate of dystopian films in the mid- to late-1980s, when "morning in America was at its sunniest. There was also a spike in 2002-2006, during a fairly expansionary period.

So what's going on here? A few explanations suggest themselves. Movie execs may greenlight dystopian films during economic downturns, and their immediate aftermath, but it may take a few years for those films to work their way through the development process and hit your screens. But it's also possible that when things are at their brightest economically, people feel the most insecure because they know the good times won't last forever. So boom times are when people most need stories about people surviving the bad times. Or maybe it's just that film-makers are a contrary bunch, who want to rub your face in the dirt just when you're feeling your brightest.

Here's our list of dystopian films for each year. Feel free to let us know what we left out, or shouldn't have included:

2008
Cloverfield (D)

2007
I Am Legend (D)
28 Weeks Later (D)
Resident Evil: Extinction (D)

2006
V for Vendetta (D)
Idiocracy (D)
Children of Men (D)
Ultraviolet (D)

2005
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (D)
Batman Begins (D)

2004
The Day After Tomorrow (D)
Stepford Wives (D)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (D)

2003
The Matrix Reloaded (D)
The matrix Revelations (D)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (D)

2002
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (D)
Minority Report (D)
28 Days Later (D)
Equilibrium (D)
Resident Evil (D)

2001
Planet of the Apes (D)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (D)

2000
Battlefield Earth (D)

1999
The Matrix (D)
Existenz (D)

1998
Pi (D)
The Truman Show (D)
The X-Files (D)

1997
Alien: Resurrection (D)
Fifth Element (D)
The Postman (D)
Starship Troopers (D)
Gattaca (D)

1996
Escape from L.A. (D)

1995
Waterworld (D)
Mortal Kombat (D)
Johnny Mnemonic (D)
Judge Dredd (D)
Strange Days (D)
Twelve Monkeys (D)
Tank Girl (D)

1994
none

1993
Jurassic Park (D)
Demolition Man (D)
Robocop III (D)

1992
Batman Returns (D)
Alien 3 (D)
Freejack (D)

1991
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (D)

1990
Total Recall (D)
Handmaid's Tale (D)

1989
Batman (D)

1988
The live (D)

1987
Robocop (D)
The Running Man (D)

1986
Aliens (D)
The Fly (D)

1985
Brazil (D)
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (D)

1984
The Terminator (D)

1983
none

1982
Blade Runner (D)
Videodrome (D)
Liquid Sky (D)

1981
Time Bandits (D)
Heartbeeps (D)

1980
The Empire Strikes Back (D)

1979
Alien (D)

1978
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (D)

Image by Stephanie Fox.

Starting in May, Sky Doll will be the first comic to get reprinted for American audiences as part of Marvel's partnership with French publisher Soleil. The advertising copy for the first (of three) issue of the series reads as follows:

Meet Noa, a so-called Sky Doll; a life-like female android without rights, who exists only to serve the State's needs and desires. But when Noa meets two so-called "missionaries" who aid in her escape from her tyrannical master, all hell breaks loose for our cyborg siren as she uncovers clues that she may be much more than just a robotic toy.

Considering the traditionally conservative nature of Marvel's output, as well as the company's history of censoring controversial material (X-Statix's Princess Diana revival, for example, or the de-nudification of the mature-reader-labelled Shanna), will the comic make it to American stores uncensored? And even if it does, will American audiences be more receptive to this kind of European material than they were to DC's failed line of Humanoid reprints? [Newsarama.com]

Here's a traffic jam created by checkpoints outside the city of Baghdad. And here is a great vision of future parking in a climate-changed British city.

Baghdad traffic at checkpoint by Jamesdale10.

Cars underwater in England by dubaddict.

Hyderabad traffic by Alex Graves.

According to the University of Washington news service:

To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington's computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

"Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people's privacy at the same time," Balazinska said. "We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality." . . . The pilot study will incorporate two new student-developed features that aim to exploit the system's potential benefits. One invention is a tool that records a person's movements in Google Calendar. Study participants can set the system to instantaneously publish activities on their Web calendar, such as arrival at work, meetings or lunch breaks.

"It's a perfect memory system that records all your personal interactions throughout the day," Welbourne said. "You can go back a day later, a month later, and see, 'What did I do that day?' or, 'Who have I spent my time with lately?'"

Another tool is a friend finder, named RFIDder (pronounced "fritter"). This sends instant alerts to participants' e-mail addresses or cell phones telling them when friends are in certain places. With RFIDder, each user can specify who is allowed to see their data. They can change the settings at any time, and can easily turn it off whenever they don't want to be found. The system will link to Twitter, an online blog that lets people post their whereabouts online.

"We want to observe how a group of people uses these tools, whether they find them useful, how they adapt them," Balazinska said.

I'm glad the group is studying the privacy implications of all this, because holy crap. Do you really want your colleagues to see when you've left the building or gone to the bathroom on your Google Calendar? Or for your Facebook friends to know exactly where you are at all times? I'm having a hard time understanding why an RFID Ecosystem future is one that I would want to embrace or plan for in any way other than lobbying to make it illegal.

Future of Social Networking [U of Washington News]

According to the study that revealed these dire statistics, a HEPA filter could stop many of the mutations from happening. A release about the study says:

Mice breathing unfiltered, polluted air downwind of a large industrial area [near two steel mills and a major highway in Ontario, Canada] developed 60 percent more mutations in their sperm than mice whose air was cleaned with HEPA filters . . . The report expands on previous research and suggests that the mutations are not due to the animals' mixed genetic background.

AP Photo/Color China Photo

Germ-line mutations, DNA damage, and global hypermethylation in mice exposed to particulate air pollution in an urban/industrial location [PNAS]

Singel writes:

Given the desire by telecoms and broadband customers to keep costs low, situations like the current cuts will continue to happen, according to Todd Underwood, a Vice President at Renesys, which provides internet information analysis to the majority of the world's largest telecoms. "Part of the lesson here is that there will always be outages," Underwood said. "This is all about money — how much money do we want to pay to make sure the network doesn't go down? We are used to thinking of the internet as being a thing that goes down."

He adds that similar outages that occurred in China, due to mudslides, lasted for almost a month and a half, and resulted in major rerouting of major parts of international network traffic. The solution is obviously building more redundancy into the network, but cost-cutting makes this a less likely scenario than constant network outages in huge parts of the world. Farewell to that global info-community. And hello to the info-dystopia.

Fiber Optic Cabel Cuts Isolate Millions from Internet [Threat Level]

Tranceptor by Michael Manning and Patrick Conlon. A bondage/pony-girl/stable-boy/giant lizard epic by the cult fetish artist Manning, also known for The Spider Garden and Cathexis.

Apocalypse how? It's not clear. There's been some kind of global cataclysm that has reduced the world to a crappy industrial wasteland where the living is difficult. Maybe nuclear. Lots of splash pages of the bleak wasteland our characters travel through. And there's mention of "the corps" which keeps drafting all the able-bodied men. The titular Tranceptor is a kind of dominatrix-matriarch who travels around with her sexy pony-girls. She visits the used-up Waystation 56, where people "mine" for disused machines.

The money shot: Well, if you like pony-girls, it's made of money shots. Manning claims in an interview that everyone in Tranceptor wears some kind of futuristic space-age latex that's incredibly strong and pliable. The stable-boy Hyu at Waystation 56 gets initiated into sex by the Tranceptor and her pony-girls, and the Tranceptor has an encounter with a giant lizard, which is probably someone's fetish. Oh, and there's fetish ninja action!

Stiletto by Justine Blanco. An eeevil space pirate who's also sort of a dominatrix captures a ship full of rich men and women, and decides to hold them for ransom. And while she's got them, she decides to have some fun with them.

Apocalypse how? We don't get many details, but it's obviously an every-rogue-for-herself kind of universe out there. The spaceships are big and spikey with lots of dark metal surfaces inside. And the evil ship's captain has two beast-men helping her, who may be the product of some kind of genetic engineering. One character looks sort of cyborg-y.

The money shot: The reason that space pirate lady's ship is so huge is to accomodate a massive dungeon, filled with incredibly fancy equipment. Including fancy genital-shaving/enema equipment. The space-pirates seem to have all the time in the world for devising fancy bondage scenarios that are part mindfuck, part regular fuck. Oh, and there are giant spanking machines.

The Great Invasion is the first graphic novel from BDSMArt.com. Webmaster Nuria tells us the site has a high proportion of women visitors, and this story is meant to appeal to women because it's told from the POV of an enslaved woman.

Apocalypse how? It's remarkably detailed. A hundred years from now, the world is divided between two great superpowers. A technophobic Catholic/Islamic pact governs Europe, Africa and part of Asia, and the advanced "techno-militaristic" Red Alliance controls China and Central/South America. Due to incompetent birth-control policies and a new, deadlier strain of AIDS, the Red Alliance faces a demographic crisis. The male-female ratio in China and South America is 30 to 1, meaning extinction is only two generations away. So in 2132, a Chinese scientist devises a virus that targets spermatazoa, and the "Red Alliance" sprays North America with it. All North American males die out within a day. The South and Central Americans wait a year for the virus to die out, then invade and enslave the women.

The money shot: A lot of ">The Great Invasion is deliberately fucked up and brutal. But you have to admire the over-the-topness of the scene where the main character is for sale, with the big floating holographic display listing all her stats. Including "clit sensitivity," which they've figured out how to measure on a scale from 1 to 10. And the big bubble car (which looks electric-powered) with its built-in bondage rack.

According to a statement from Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich's office:

Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that dramatically reduced the amount of funding appropriated to the Department of Energy. As a result, Argonne announced it will shut down the Intense Pulse Neutron Source (IPNS). At the IPNS, scientists work to determine the composition of plastics and other soft materials. It is one of the most productive facilities of its kind in the world.

Argonne is also home to the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the nation's brightest x-ray. The APS is used by many scientists, including those conducting research for chemical and pharmaceutical firms. Although the APS will not be shut down, operating schedules will be limited. The full extent of Argonne's layoffs will not be immediately known.

Fermilab has already announced that 10 percent of employees could be laid off due to the cuts that will severely limit operations, halting work on a number of innovative projects. Officials are doing what they can to avert the layoffs, but the lack of federal funding will severely limit the facility's contributions to the science industry.

Gov Blagojevich Urges Bush to Fund Labs [Illinois Governor's Office]

They write:

The Hexagram shirt was inspired by and conceived to fit into the dystopic universe of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, a novel depicting what the world would have been like during the 1960s, had the Axis won WWII.

In the book, the U.S. west coast is a colony of Japan, whose rule and influence has permeated and dominated Californian society for years. The Book of Changes has become the mainstream method, for Japanese and Californian people alike, to take important decisions in life.

Whenever someone has a choice to make, that person takes out three little coins that are shaken and tossed on a surface several times, the resulting heads and tails data is then translated into one of the 64 hexagrams that comprise the Book of Changes.

He must escape or die.
. . . Almost instantly the shrill sound of a whistle broke to his right and a street guard stepped from a doorway, struggling to free her rifle from her garments.
"Male Pig!" she screamed. "Halt!"

Keith flees underground, literally and figuratively, where he meets Angela, a boot-wearing resistance fighter hottie. Luckily for Keith, while women on the outside reject all males, Angela and other female members of the Subterraneans resistance movement are "attached to the men with arm-clinging closeness." Soon he and Angela are working (arm-in-arm, of course) to assassinate the President, and reclaim gender supremacy for men.
The Feminists had about as much to do with the women's movement as Cheez Whiz does with a sharp Wisconsin cheddar but it probably simultaneously terrified and titillated readers threatened by the very thought of those uppity, "bra-burning" libbers. At least one person was thrilled by the vision it presented—don't miss the editorial comment scrawled on the front cover!

You also might never guess that the metal he uses to create this intricate design comes from old drill bits and machine parts. Enoki's often categorized as avant-garde, but really, he's kind of in his own category. It's also hard to tell if this super-city is a utopia or a dystopia—on one hand, it looks like it could be Sheikh Mohammed's dream island, but on the other, Enoki deliberately positions it in a pitch dark room.

Enoki Chu via the Mori Art Museum

There's a central statue of Atlas holding up the world, which has been smashed by a piece of the city falling from overhead. In the background you can see untended plants growing out of control while water pours in from overhead. Meanwhile schools of fish drift lazily by in the background. It's a fully-realized vision of a utopia gone wrong, and we highly recommend getting inside the game and exploring it.