As I listened to my Mogwai and Fluke channels, I thought about a 26-year old telling me about her Lady Gaga channel the day before. “Really?” I thought to myself. You could stand at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, stare up at it and say, “No, I think I’ll stay here and have a drink from the toilet”?

The promise of Internet radio, from the moment those guys at Real figured out how to get audio to stream (barely) over a 28.8 modem in the mid-90’s, has always been to revolutionize the music industry by opening the doors to a flood of musical talent that was inaccessible through the corporate radio model, and usher in a new era of direct connections (and revenue) between musicians and their fans. Yet, here we are fifteen years later, and the music industry is a trainwreck and the Gen Ys still crave a steady diet of the basic corporate gruel. What went wrong?

I know that Pandora won’t be the same forever. I know you want your large and well-deserved payday for yourself and all the musicians who brought Pandora to life and sent broadcast radio to its ignominious death. I know the day will come when some media conglomerate will buy Pandora and you’ll retire in Bora Bora with naked nymphets in diamond-encrusted tiaras serving you drinks with paper umbrellas in them, but I know that it will also signal the end of Pandora as we know it. Someone else who is not concerned with the purity, the algorithmic perfection of the musical selection process behind Pandora, will come along instead and exploit the “Lady Gaga” effect, as I’ve decided to call it. But it will be a sad day for us all, as the beauty of what you and your loyal minions have created slowly degenerates into the pile of corporate shit it will eventually become, and the cycle of radio begins again until the next supposed revolution.

I know it’s coming, I don’t know when, and I know I can’t do much about it, but I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts. Thanks for driving the magic bus this far.

As the temperature rises, liquid gasoline expands and the amount of energy in each gallon drops. Since gas is priced at a 60-degree standard and gas pumps don€t adjust for any temperature changes, motorists often get less bang for their buck in warmer weather.

Consumer watchdog groups warn that the temperature hike could end up costing consumers between 3 and 9 cents a gallon at the pump.

The effect could cost U.S. drivers more than $1.5 billion in the summertime, including $228 million to drivers in California alone, according to the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy, which recently addressed it in hearings. The committee€s chair, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has long been an advocate on the issue and has new clout as a member of the congressional majority.

My first clue to something being wrong with this is in the last sentence: Dennis Kucinich. After a failed presidential bid in 2004, this guy is grasping at straws to keep himself positioned as a hopeful for 2008. Typical shallow-thinking from the Democrats, all it takes is a little thought to realize that fuel isn’t stored above ground. The tanks are stored underground, where temperature fluctuations above ground have no influence at all on the temperature of the fuel going into your tank. It doesn’t expand until after it comes out of the ground and goes into your car. If anything, that fuel is in the mid-50 degree range at the pump, and we’re actually getting more for our money based on that 60-degree pricing standard.

20 federal lawsuits have been filed over this already, some of which are actually seeking class-action status. Have any of the lawyers filing these suits even bothered to check the temperature of a gallon of gas?

• Gallon of Regular Unleaded Fuel: $3.00

• Thermometer: $1.99

• Making 20 attorneys look like idiots: Priceless

How foolish are they going to feel when this is candidly pointed out to them in the courtroom?

I don’t relish the job of having to make fools out of politicians and lawyers, but most of them do a fine job of it all by themselves.

According to USA Today:

In an effort to raise money for road projects, [Virginia] will start hitting residents who commit serious traffic offenses with huge civil penalties.

The new civil charges will range from $750 to $3,000 and will be added to existing fines and court costs. The civil penalty for going 20 mph over the speed limit will be $1,050, plus $61 in court costs and a fine that is typically about $200.

Virginia’s new traffic penalties are expected to raise $65 million a year and are part of an effort to improve the state’s roads without raising taxes.

A first-time drunken driver will face a $2,250 civil penalty, plus fines and court costs that typically run about $500 or more. Driving without a license? That’s a mandatory $900 civil penalty, in addition to the ordinary $100 for a fine and court costs.

I really feel sorry for the people who still live in Virginia. Only a few of my friends still do – most of them have also moved away. Some, like me, have moved far away, others just over to Maryland or into eastern West Virginia. I left there in 2002. Virginia has been going down the toilet steadily since the turn of the century – I saw it then and I’m not surprised it’s continuing now. I expect this to create some serious activism against a state legislature that is completely out of control. Those types of fines are certainly not by the people and anything but for the people. More people will be showing up in court to fight the tickets, and that’s going to overwhelm a court system that’s already bursting at the seams. When I would go to court to fight my tickets, both Fairfax and Loudoun county courts were overflowing with people. And this was when tickets were just $300. Now that they cost ten times that much you’re going to see some seriously pissed off people showing up for court who would have otherwise paid the ticket and let the cycle continue. And I bet more of them are going to be bringing attorneys now, too.

Driving enthusiasts have called traffic tickets “fundraising” for some time, but this is the first time I’ve seen officials be so clearly out in the open about it. They’re not even making an effort to obfuscate this in cleverly manipulated safety statistics that are getting increasingly difficult for anyone to believe. Maybe this will finally wake people up to the fact that traffic tickets aren’t about safety at all, they’re about money. It’s extortion from the public, a job usually reserved for organized crime, but legalized in the name of a budget deficit. A budget deficit that was caused by overspending politicians in the first place!

As if Virginia isn’t a crazy enough place to live already.

Tuesday’s signing of the Military Commissions Act has much greater implications than most people can imagine.  It doesn’t just mean we’ve surrendered our last great freedom to our government.  It also means to me that John Titor was right, and that is some very, very bad news. 

This watershed event in our nation’s history has silenced all the disbelievers of John Titor’s talk of an American civil war with our own government.  With the implementation of the MCA, Habeas Corpus is gone, the Geneva Convention is suspended, and the indefinite detention and torture of American citizens in military prison camps has been authorized.  Any doubts I had about the veracity of John’s predictions have completely evaporated.  There is no question we have been at war with our own government for our freedom and this has just escalated the conflict another notch.  Anyone can see what’s going on now.

Bush must be impeached immediately.  This man and his cronies are out of control, and our Constitution isn’t protecting us as it was designed to do because they think we’re too busy watching American Idol to care what they get away with.  Terrorism is just a straw man being used to justify the elimination of the freedoms and rights granted to us by our Constitution.  George W. Bush is the terrorist. 

We have been given an incredible glimpse at the future path to which these events will inevitably lead if we don’t do anything about it, and we cannot allow the rest of those horrible things to come to fruition.  Imagine if someone had told the Romans in 400 AD that their lead water pipes were poisoning them, and that the corruption of their flawed political system would destroy their entire empire if they didn’t fix it immediately? Well here we are 1600 years later, and pharmaceutical companies are poisoning us and our leaders are corrupting our political system.  We must stop the Bush regime from destroying this, the greatest country, indeed the greatest civilization, the world has ever known.

And of course, politicians won’t have to abide by these laws because we’ve allowed them to be above the laws they’ve created. Just look at the Kennedys and that Foley guy. I have no sympathy for politicians who are ensnared in the foolish laws they’ve created for the rest of us – but they still get away with breaking them anyway.  Why do we allow this to continue?

The Internet is not what it once was a decade ago. Most people today look to it as an empirical source of information without understanding its true nature. From its humble and genuine beginnings in the 50’s as a means for researchers to test ways of creating a communications network that could withstand multiple failures and automatically reconfigure itself to guarantee delivery of information, it has grown to a major component of our economy and daily lives. Where once egghead researchers at government and educational institutions used it for benign and uncorrupted communication between each other, it is now the source of crime, lies, and intrusion into the personal lives of its citizens on an unprecendented scale and in ways never before imagined. But amidst the noise of all the bad influences poisoning the purity of the Net’s original mission remains some genuine truth. The difficulty we face more than ever today is in differentiating fact from fiction.

One case in particular tests the limits of both. Late in the year 2000, a man going by the name of John Titor began posting to the Time Travel Institute forum with an extraordinarily compelling story. He explained that he was a soldier and historian who was sent from the year 2036 back to 1975 in search of an IBM 5100 computer which was extinct in his time (most electronic devices are destroyed by EMP during a future war). It was needed for debugging the second Y2K problem that Unix faces in 2038 on legacy computer programs, because it had a closely-guarded capability by which it could translate binary machine code between APL, Unix, BASIC, and some obscure IBM mainframe languages, and it was portable enough for time travel. John had stopped in 2000 because of a promise to his grandfather, who he claimed was on the team that designed the 5100. He had an unusual level of knowledge about its capabilities, which were never publicly known. He had concrete and detailed specifics that went beyond what anyone but the original engineers knew about the 5100, so much so that one of those engineers (Bob Dubke) admitted it could only have been someone from his team who could know that much about it.

The details he gave about his time machine were tantalizing indeed. He had photographs of the unit, installed first inside a 1967 Corvette then later inside a pickup truck due to the mass of the thing, which weighed around 500 pounds, and detailed schematic diagrams from the operational manual of the “General Electric Model C204 Time Distortion Gravity Displacement Unit” from March 21, 2034 that would be very difficult to fabricate, especially since nobody else has ever produced a design of a working prototype based on Kerr fields and Tipler sinusoids. His story had a level of internal consistency that would challenge even a veteran police interrogator, but he seemed to have no interest in whether or not anyone believed him, nor did he expect that anyone would. He argued that there are multiple “worldlines” and he just wanted to make a difference in this one, even though the machine would only return him to his own. He was challenged by people very knowledgeable in theoretical physics and his answers held up to their skeptical scrutiny, about the nature of time travel itself as well as the supposed operation of his time machine, which worked by creating two artificial microsingularities and a localized Kerr field, and this produced a stationary black hole between them to travel through in time. He said that the ability to create artificial microsingularities would be discovered by CERN at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which they are currently planning to have operational in 2007. He explained its theory of operation from his training and described the experience of time travel, which he said put up to 2G’s of force on the body at full power, made a crackling noise from the static charge, and took about an hour for each 10 years traveled – so it distorted time by a factor of about 88,000. He also discussed the development of the machine by GE’s engineers. There were fascinating details, like how the first ones being sent back in time just a fraction of a second would fall out of the sky 15 miles away from 3000 feet in the air, due to the failure to compensate for the speed of the earth’s rotation and its movement through the universe. This led to the first major developmental hurdle of figuring out how to measure the gravitational distortion of the microsingularities, to keep the humans from traveling into a mountain or out in space somewhere.

Then four months later he was gone, leaving behind a mystery that won’t be fully solved for at least another decade. The revelations he left behind about our present and his future were at best troubling and at worst cataclysmic. Among them:

• There will be a second American Civil War from 2004-2008 during which civil liberties will be progressively surrendered in the name of national security, and will continue until everyone realizes “the world they thought they were living in [is] over.” He described it as a Waco-type event every month or so until people begin to see through the lies, that it is truly about the government attacking its citizens and holding them without due process in prison camps. This conflict consumes the entire country by 2012 and continues for three more years until…
• The third world war occurs in 2015 and ends with Russia bombing cities in America, China and Europe. 3 billion people are killed. He suggested avoiding Washington DC at 3:45am on March 12, 2015 as it would be destroyed along with most other major cities in the U.S. The survivors are in the rural areas of the country, which splits into five major regions with separately elected leadership.
• China forcefully annexes Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and attempts to do so with Australia but fails.
• The major health problems in 2036 are CJD (mad cow disease), AIDS and cancer, as no cure has been found for the latter two.

“How can you possibly criticize me for any conflict that comes to you?” Titor asked. “I watch every day what you’re doing as a society. While you sit by and watch your Constitution being torn away from you, you willfully eat poisoned food, buy manufactured products no one needs and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you.

“Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep. You were the generation that had it all and squandered it. Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that.”

The entry in Wikipedia is here.

Click here for the first usatoday.com article.

Click here for the second usatoday.com article.

One possibility is a maternal immune response to succeeding male fetuses. The mother may react to a male fetus as foreign but not to a female fetus because the mother is also female […] like the maternal immune response that can occur when a mother has Rh-negative blood but her fetus has Rh-positive blood. Without treatment, the mother can develop antibodies that may attack the fetus during future pregnancies.

– Anthony F. Bogaert

It seems pretty simple to me. Males are the gatekeepers to the female reproductive system. This says to me it is nature’s way of keeping reproduction and genetic perpetuation under control. If there are too many men carrying the same family genes who want to reproduce, the likelihood of crossing genes that are too closely related to each other increases down the line, and with it the possibility of genetic defects and immunodeficiencies.

Gay men make life better for heterosexual men like me, frankly I’m happy to have them around. Those of you with nagging wives and girlfriends should seriously look into getting one for her, as they can keep her safely entertained for hours while you watch the game, work on your car, or hang out with the guys.

I look forward to the day that a genetic basis for homosexuality is proven, so that women (and men, for that matter) will stop thinking that they can turn them around. There are lots of good hetero men out there ladies, you’re just wasting your time.

Lesbians on the other hand, there’s no doubt in my mind that there is a biological basis for it. But I don’t think it’s a biological predetermination in the same way it is for gay men.

Despite being legimately stripped of its poster child status by George, Craigslist is still be paraded around as example of the world that awaits us if something isn’t done and done soon to guarantee neutrality.

– David Berlind

Three errors in one sentence alone.

Update: Proving it’s gone beyond mere occasional mistake to near epidemic, the following is a direct quote from the ZDNet headlines by Dan Farber:

After 30 aquisitions totally nearly $7 billion, EMC still gets most of its estimated $11 billion in revenue from storage sales.

I know you guys need to get your articles out as fast as you can these days, but please – either re-read your posts and do a better job of self-editing them, or send them through an editor first!