They're really over-the-top police state looking, but damn are the new (proposed) US Army outfits cool looking in a sci-fi sort of way (read the article to appreciate the suit fully; there's full bio-monitoring, integrated weapons systems, and so on). Seems like we're just a small step away from Stormtroopers. By the way, if you're looking for a decent military tech blog, I've been reading defensetech.
I really love x-ray photos of piercings. Steve even has some great X-ray photos of his earlier metal implants as well (and even the silicone ones would have to show up). Ever since seeing those, I always wanted to publish a book of photos of people with piercings, implants, and so on that would combine a portrait page with a transparent X-Ray page over it. I don't know if that's too “gimmicky”, but maybe one day I'll publish it.
I've just posted a bunch more stories to BME/extreme. Thank you so much to the people who are supporting this venture by sending in their stories and pictures. It's not hard to do, and submitting this way your story gets edited for you as well. Please consider taking the time to do so if you've got heavy mods. Anyway, click the picture to jump to it now:
“Tattoos are like stories. They're symbolic of the important moments in your life. Sitting down, talking about where you got each tattoo and what it symbolizes, is really beautiful.”
- Pamela Anderson
(Original forum unavailable, sorry)*
It's a given that if it stays on its current course America will become a communist nation within fifteen years. It's already well on its way – if you consider just the people who are employed by the military, the education system, and civil servants of every kind, you've already got a huge percentage of the population gaining their salary via the government (especially if you include the seemingly inevitable government absorption of health care, and the draft or some equivalent if war expands). If you then consider the five hundred biggest companies in America (which merge more and more every year), you've got the majority of the US population… As these companies meld into singular mega-corporations which work closely with the government to determine both law and the path of the nation, boom, you've got a strange sort of democratic yet not-so-democratic corporate communism.
There are two paths that America can take right now… The first and more obvious one (if you're a TV believer) is “deciding” in an election which überclass of ultra-rich people you'd like to have as your kings. After all, even though it was left out of his Steven Spielberg documentary, Kerry does come from a very wealthy family, and those with a conspiratorial minds could easily convince themselves that the Skulls at Yale chose to send Kerry to Vietnam as part of a leadership long game that he's been playing his part in since birth. Edwards as well, as much as he can play the “I'm just the son of a poor mill worker” populist card, is also incredibly wealthy. I've said it before, but if you want to know who to vote for, just vote for the person who makes the same amount of money as you do – however, most Americans live in poverty in comparison to their extremely financially successful politicians. In any case, these elections are simply about choosing who rules over the proles. So basically a case of the slaves getting to decide who their master is, but never breaking the bonds of slavery.
The other option of course is to reject communism and to reject slavery. Unfortunately this option is favored only by that tiny minority of real Americans left that give a damn about liberty and freedom. The government is terrified of them though, and the media plays along, keeping stories about “domestic terrorism” (a far greater threat to corporate sovereignty than any Islamists) off the television so as to keep sympathies from growing… when they are mentioned, even by “anti-government” (but still ultra-rich) people like Michael Moore, they are written off as militia wackos and survivalist kooks.
If you don't buy into my “freedom counts” spiel (I realize that most people don't, hey, it's a lot easier to just be a slave), there's one other very important reason to embrace real American values, and that's survivability. While a distributed system built around individual empowerment (and everything that goes along with it like localized food and ethanol production) will have micro-failures all the time (as it should), it is extremely unlikely for it to experience the cataclysmic system-destroying failures that immense monolithic systems can have. We are currently facing a plethora of ecological, microbial, military, economic, and other apocalypses. We don't know what will happen, but it would be optimistically foolhardy to assume that none of them will play out. Any of these can be a system destroyer. If we all are relying on local system, we survive. If we all rely on a single central system, we don't.
The American worker – the American individual – continues to rank as the most productive worker on the planet. There is literally no country that is able to create as much finished product per worker as the United States. USA really is Number One. Sure, some other countries can produce more per dollar since they underpay their workers and violate environmental law and so on, but that's a losing game and it doesn't do the people in those countries any good. I point this out because it illustrates that Americans still have what it takes to handle the burden of being free.
What? You want to know how? If you don't know how to be free, you don't deserve freedom any more than an Iraqi does. Here's a hint though – the path to freedom is soaked is diesel fuel and fertilizer… and only some of it is for tractors and fields.
