SRF Heavy Industries

Ye gods.

Clicked on something accidentally on fark.com. I should be more careful.

While I appreciate the beauty of crystalline structures and am occasionally awed by the self-organizing effects of resonance in systems of oscillators that communicate with sound or electromagnetic radiation (or analogous macroscopic bio- or eco- or socio-systems), I’m sick to the teeth of pseudo-scientific screeds like the one linked above that use the word “energy” where they really mean “feelings” and spew 34 types of hogwash in order to set up a buzzing hypnotic drone in the language center designed to make people lose whatever judgment they might have that would prevent them from clicking a PayPal button and getting sent a handful of shiny pebbles for $50 or $100 on the off-chance that if they learn how to hold, look at, talk to, or think at the pebbles right, the pebbles might help them not be such losers.

The cranial lasagna we use for brains is, in fact, infinitely hackable. The weaknesses we have for succumbing to the cognitive equivalents of optical illusions is a constant source of joy and/or sorrow, depending on your level of compassion and/or whether you’re the victim. But hacking the lasagna will only make you think you can fly. It won’t make you fly. Failure to distinguish that little nuance can give you the happiest moment of your life–albeit possibly the last moment of your life.

Fucking with people’s language centers is a great way of prying up layers of their lasagna and inserting your own little maggots. If you speak someone’s language, you’re at least a third of the way there. If you can convince them to give you some time to talk to them, if they’ll take a few minutes to pay attention to a message you say or write, that’s another third. That remaining third? That’s the rhythm you set up on the strings of the web that tells the spider at the center that you’re one of its kind, that you’re here to mate, that you’re not prey or a threat….

Get in, do your business, and get out. The package you leave has to be viable, but that’s just practice. Trial and error is a valid strategy here.

I suspect there is significant benefit to being able to manipulate your emotional state using shiny pebbles as foci for your imagination. Bliss is a healing thing, counteracting the literally physically damaging aspects and psychological reprogramming effects of stress and fear. (Tendency to anxiety disorders is actually a survival trait in situations where a lowered fight/flight threshold will get you out of trouble, but it’s not very helpful in a society where there’s no place to run and beating the shit out of people who bug you or startle you will just land you in jail.) If shiny pebbles and autohypnosis help you get there, more power to you. So to speak.

But for To-Who-It-May-Concern’s sake, do not encourage this scam artist by sending him $50 for a shiny rock. Any shiny rock will do. For that matter, a shot of bourbon is beautiful and shiny and looking at it can make you happy. Plus you can drink it, and that makes you happy too. And costs less than $50. A whole bottle costs less than $50. That is also beautiful.

If you send me $50 so I can buy a bottle of bourbon, that will make me happy and give me a warm feeling. The warm feeling you get from giving me a warm feeling may also make you happy, but I make no guarantees, as that would be scientifically unethical.

The scientific method suggests that we test that empirically. If, say, thirty or more people (so as to be guaranteed of being statistically valid) were to send me $50 each that I could spend on bottles of bourbon, those people could then participate in a blind poll and we could tally their self-reported levels of happiness afterwards, and then we could publish a paper and allow others to attempt to duplicate our results (by setting up pools of thirty or more people to send me $50 each to buy bottles of bourbon) and review and refine the methodology.

That, my friend, is what science looks like. It does not at all resemble shiny rocks that someone has labeled “psychotronic generators”.

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Try this recipe for the Haitian Mudburger:

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

But the grumbling in Haiti these days is no longer confined to the stomach. It is now spray-painted on walls of the capital and shouted by demonstrators.

In recent days, Mr. Préval has patched together a response, using international aid money and price reductions by importers to cut the price of a sack of rice by about 15 percent. He has also trimmed the salaries of some top officials. But those are considered temporary measures.

Real solutions will take years. Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself. Outside investment is the key, although that requires stability, not the sort of widespread looting and violence that the Haitian food riots have fostered.

Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”

From the very bottom of page two of this NYT article.

I don’t know how familiar you all are with typical newspaper journalism, but the way articles are constructed is that everything is arranged in bite-sized paragraphs with the most critical at the top and less relevant/important stuff at the bottom, so that if space is limited the editor can just cut at a convenient paragraph break and send it on out the door. It still holds for online articles somewhat, because once people start seeing familiar info or less relevant detail, they’ll start skimming and pretty soon after hit the back button or pounce on another link.

I’m not going to give voice to the raging torrent of bitterness in my head at the moment. That’s too easy. I challenge you to think about why this snippet of text was all the way at the bottom of the second page of a two-page article, and, when you’ve decided you know why the editors chose to compose it this way, you give voice to how you feel about it.

It’s pretty bad out there already. And it’s a little early for this year’s bout of droughts, floods, superstorms, wildfires, and whatever else you can count on to ruin the odd crop here or there.

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—>Fold yourself a little friend to watch you masturbate.<— [Bonus points for installing a webcam.]

Somebody left the wings off this Cessna. That’s okay. It’ll taxi 600 miles on a 2-gallon tank of gas.

Beautiful anti-Hillary rant
Not that I’m tremendously anti-Hillary. But this argument against accidental fiction is spectacular:

Her response to being caught lying to a military audience, when she invented a story about being under sniper fire in Bosnia, was to say it wasn’t surprising she got some things wrong, seeing how she spoke millions of words every day. What a magnificent idea, that if you say lots of words some of them are bound to be fantastic lies. So if you listen carefully to horse-racing commentators they say things like “And it’s Teddy’s Boy still leading three furlongs out as they come up to the fourth last fence with Nip and Tuck two lengths behind by the way I fought a tiger once, punched it clean out and they’re all safely over.”

And auctioneers say, “Three-fifty, three-sixty, three-seventy, three-seventy man in the hat three-eighty here, my dad invented cornflakes, going once going twice, and magnets, he invented them straight up – gone.”

Jack Chick parody tract explaining good ol’ LSD for those of you who might be too young to remember.

Needs training wheels.

If you didn’t already think that Ticketbastards suck, now’s your chance to see how they’re abusing Facebook.

Not that this seems to be a reliable source, someone seems to think Cheney’s recent surprise whirlwind tour of the Middle East was to prepare the few allies we have left over there for an attack on Iran.

FREE DOWNLOAD in MULTIPLE FORMATS from SMALL BEER PRESS. I’ve heard nifty things about this one.

ANOTHER FREE DOWNLOAD: Unintentional fiction from General Dynamics | Astronautics division, written in 1963.

The new definitive book light.

And finally, for you sneeze fetishists. Thanks, ABC. It’s pollen season in Atlanta. We need to think about who’s outside in the shrubbery masturbating, listening to us sneeze through our windows.

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Click on the awesome XKCD strip to see the horror, as it was executed in Oklahoma.

Your security is only as good as the most negligent programmer on staff. Once it’s all integrated, you multiply the number of careless schmucks by, oh, about fifty. Nope, wait, sorry. That’s just the number of states. Lets try all the counties and municipalities, too. Maybe fifty THOUSAND is closer.

But hey, maybe you’ll eventually be able to remove YOURSELF from the No Fly™ list.

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Farewell to the Birdmen of Bognor.

Ideas for alternate locations welcome. My idea? The International Space Station.

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3D Printer that prints itself due out Real Soon Now

Also, it’s open-license. If you build one and use it to build another one, you can give the other one away without any license/patent obligation.

I’ll take two. Just because.

Also, I’m adapting mine to make that hideous vibrating screech the high-speed dot-matrix printers made back in 1983, because It Must.

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UK’s first hybrid embryos created

Whatever. Please PLEASE _PLEASE_ don’t talk to be about “the sanctity and dignity of human life” in a world where “Jackass” is a blockbuster movie, where more than half a trillion dollars is spent killing hundreds of thousand of people we’ve never met much less brought to trial, where the chief weapon of bringing rogue countries into compliance is the trade embargo—a neutron-bomb-like weapon guaranteed to knock down, starve, and kill the poorest of the poor while leaving the wealthy pricks who are the original problem standing, where lives by the millions are sneezed away piece-by-piece by bone-headed amateur code in legislatures across the planet. Your hypocrisy is deafening.

See, it’s obvious to me that if we had better control over what lives we brought into being (through the reproductive sciences) and what lives we allowed to continue when threatened (through medical and biological sciences), we wouldn’t have to waste so much money and resources on destroying HUGE SWATHS OF HUMANITY in our pitiful (yet sanctioned by GOD and the GOVERNMENTS OF ALL THE GOOD NATIONS) methods of—theoretically—trying to make the world a better place for us all. And by “all” I mean rich white folk and their closest friends, or at least those of us who can pass as such.

Carry on. Back to your April Fools Day normality.

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AEY, Inc., has an unmarked office in Miami Beach. They also have, or rather had, a contract with the federal government worth nearly $300 million to supply the Afghan Army and police forces with weapons and ammunition.

Crap munitions picked up from crap sources stored in crap boxes in crap warehouses with crap climate control and packed off to a crap war no one gives a crap about. And all you have to do to participate is form a crap corporation and fill out crap forms on a crap website so you can make crap bids on sweet government contracts.

I know how easy it is. I’ve done it. I’m a managing member of an LLC. $100 in a business checking account, a free federal tax ID, $100 in filing the LLC paperwork with the GA secretary of state’s office (includes a business permit in your home county), two hours of filling out forms on a craptastic lowest-bidder-designed vetting website, and now I, too, can apply for a Federal Firearms Permit and get a contract to buy and sell tank munitions and anti-aircraft rounds.

It’s awesome.

All you have to do is make sure you skim your “fuck you” money first and then it doesn’t matter how quickly things go south.

These guys had the luck to manage to have $5,469,668.95 in a Banc of America Investment Services account in order to get things started with the buying and the selling. Or maybe they just had a letter that said that. It’s hard to say. I can write a letter. I’m good at writing.

This article from the New York Times detailing the huge mess the above guys are in is truly inspirational.

Anyway, I now have my foot in the door. Anyone interested in doin’ govmint biznez can feel free to contact me on a less traceable sideband channel. We’ll talk.

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