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I've just posted an immense experience update with 464 new stories included. I've still got as many as a couple hundred pending in the various buffers which I'll try and get added last night. Thanks to the review team and the authors, and I'll also mention that I've had a chance to post the first edition of the 2005 leaderboards.
Thanks to all the writers, Derek for being on the cover (not on IAM yet, I think), and of course to the hard-working review team. For the first experience update of 2005, the following people (these are the top fifteen) did the most approved reviewing, in order: lozizgonnabefamous (417), Don (413), rebekah (269), deadly pale (221), BlueStar (195), Uberkitty (172), elise (170), ta2lu (158), der_narr (157), Cerra (140), .caitlin. (133), cuthalcoven (127), seahorse girl (89), Jemma.m (78), and psychonautje (72).
Who's that I spotted over at the Adult Entertainment Awards (photo: HCG)? No, not just Testa (more), but Joey Strange. A little birdie tells me that you might be able to expect a line of modified porn from him soon. Yeah, laugh it up all you want but porn is and always has been the future. There is no better indicator of what technology and culture will bring us next.
Anyway, moving from future to past, via
slashdot I was looking at Google's “
20 year USENET timeline” that they released back in December to celebrate their archive, and it got me thinking about BME's age. As a point of trivia, did you know that
BME is older than…
…both Yahoo! and the Lycos search engine
…the Taliban
…the World Trade Organization
…eBay
…the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
…Viagra
…Google (by far)
A lot happens in a decade I suppose — it's amazing how quickly things become “the way they've always been” and you forget how recent they really are. I suppose it's a comment on our fast changing end-times world… What really got to me is realizing that BME, now in its eleventh year, actually has readers that were born after BME was founded. How crazy is that?
It also got me thinking about the time just before BME started, when the Canadian military was embroiled in a scandal very similar to things the US are facing right now — sexual abuse, torture, and joy-killing of Somalis, the whole time hamming it up for the cameras capturing souvenir photos of our most elite soldiers posing with the corpses. Now, the real story is a lot more complicated than history has recorded; certainly the gossip inside the military is that the orders came from high in the command structure, and the Airborne were encouraged to go out “hunting niggers”, fully sanctioned by the UN, to keep the locals in fear. Others suggest they went insane from experimental vaccines.
Private Kyle Brown poses with the nearly lifeless
and soon to die body of sixteen year old Shidane Arone.
His last words before he died were “Canada, Canada.”
How history loves to repeat itself.
(And how Canadians like to forget that when they criticize America).
“Great” (in the most sarcastic possible way) to hear that America's newest plan to “solve” the war on terror is to send in El Salvador-style 'death squads' to both start killing insurgents and to train a new “on our side” al Qaeda type force. Yeah, that worked just great in Afghanistan when we created al Qaeda to fight communist insurgents. Goddamn, the plan is so unbelievably stupid that I have to wonder if there's some immense plot that I'm missing. It's just really hard to wrap my head around the possibility that this level of incompetence can rise to that level of power!
Anyway, with Europe having almost entirely cut ties with America, even close Bush Republican allies are starting to rumble about pulling out of Iraq, and constant “accidental” killing of civilians isn't helping one bit — unless that is you're al Qaeda looking for a few good jihadists.
Back in America on the other hand, kids keep getting stupider, with over twelve percent of boys dropping out of school and over twenty percent being labeled as mentally disabled. Maybe that's why Bush is pushing to build a child army using mentally handicapped kids? You know, when twenty percent of your population is officially on the short bus, there's a big fucking problem somewhere. I'm sorry if that comment seems in bad taste, I know it is, but wow… it doesn't even seem real. At least I can still buy me a .50 cal rifle capable of taking down an elephant from a mile and a half. It really is an awesome gun:
That's me with my favorite gun nut (his gun — it's actually the one that's being whined about in the article). Honestly folks, it's not a Barrett .50 that you've got to worry about. It's the dude with the $50 sawed off shotgun in his jacket that walks into a shopping mall and just starts killing… not the guy with the fancy $9,500 rifle with the overpriced ammo. You know how many killings have been done with registered Class-III weapons in the United States? One.
And that was a cop killing his wife.
If you're a terrorist with $10,000 to spend, I assure you that a used car filled with explosives is a much better purchase.
Those of you who read The Atlantic have already seen this article, but Ten Years Later (mirror) is worth the read. I think it's important for me to put it into context by reminding you that it's written not by a dedicated fiction writer, but by Richard Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under both Clinton and Dubya. So whether you like his politics or not, the fact is that he's at least in theory in the position to know what's a plausible scenario and what's not. A few quotes:
State troopers at the exit ramp to the city ignored the van. On Tropicana Avenue the man stopped briefly to let his partner out with an exchange of nods and a whispered statement: "God is great." The woman blended seamlessly into the flow of people walking into the Florentine casino, looking like one of the millions of annual visitors to Las Vegas from the Pacific Rim. She seemed a little heavy for her frame, and the jacket she wore seemed a little out of place in the heat, but the doormen, as security videos later showed, didn't even give her a second look. She had been there many times before.
The woman never hesitated. She walked to the roulette table, fifty feet from the front door, and pushed a detonator, blowing herself up. The explosion instantly killed thirty-eight people who were standing and sitting at nearby tables. The nails and ball bearings that flew out of the woman's vest and belt wounded more than a hundred others, even though slot machines absorbed many of the miniature missiles. Eighteen of the hundreds of elderly gamblers in the casino suffered heart attacks that proved fatal when they could not be treated fast enough amid the rubble.
Just seconds later the man drove his van into the lobby of the Lion's Grand and detonated his cargo. This bomb was designed to wreak tremendous damage that would remain in the consciousness of the American people for years to come.
Four men, disguised as private mall-security officers and armed with TEC-9 submachine guns, street-sweeper 12-gauge shotguns, and dynamite, entered the mall at two points and began executing shoppers at will.
It had not been hard for the terrorists to buy all their guns legally, in six different states across the Midwest. A year earlier Congress had failed to reauthorize the assault-weapons ban. Attorney General John Ashcroft had announced a proposal, on July 6, 2001, to have the FBI destroy records of weapons sales and background checks the day after the gun dealer had the sale approved. This meant that if a gun buyer subsequently turned up on the new Integrated Watch List, or was discovered by law-enforcement officials to be a felon or a suspected terrorist, when government authorities tried to investigate the sale, the record of the purchase would already be on the way to the shredder.
The panic and confusion brought on by the terrorists' opening volleys led many shoppers to run away from one pair of murderers and into the path of the other, leading to more carnage. Two off-duty police officers were cited for bravery after they took down one pair of terrorists with their personal weapons, before the local SWAT team could get to the scene. Meanwhile, one of the other terrorists used his cell phone to remotely detonate the rental van he had driven to the mall; this resulted in even more chaos in the parking garages. Once the SWAT team arrived, it made short work of the two remaining terrorists. By the time the smoke had cleared, more than 300 people were dead and 400 lay wounded. In the confusion of the firefight the SWAT team had killed six mall guards and wounded two police officers.
In reading the various blogs and forums commenting on this article, an underlying theme seems to be “what's the point”, and writing it off as just meaningless fear mongering. But do a thought experiment with me for a moment. If you had a team of people who were willing to die for your cause, and, say, $100,000 (and terrorists have a lot more money than that), how much damage could you do to America? How lethally could you strike, and what would the effects be? What if instead of just a single attack, you kept striking, and striking and striking? How could you be stopped? What would the end effect be?
I wish I could blabber more about other stuff that happened before BME that's relevant to the above, but even though it was over ten years ago, Canada doesn't have a statute of limitations so unlike you lucky law-breakers in the US, I have to keep my mouth shut. But while you're thinking along these lines, start looking around — anywhere you go, try and figure out how to destroy it, just as a mental exercise. Where are the cameras? How do their security systems and personnel work? Where are the weak points? Very quickly you'll come to realize that while it's easy to make security arrangements that can thwart the casual attacker, a dedicated enemy — especially one willing to lay down their own life — simply can not be safeguarded against.
The point is that we have to figure out how to not get into these fights in the first place. Escalating them is a lose-lose game. In a free society, insurgents who are willing to die can rarely be stopped. So the choice is either discard the idea of a free society (which appears to be the current course America is on), or take a very hard look at the causes of the dispute and address them.
Cause and effect, folks. It's not as simple as the poster says, but it's not a whole hell of a lot more complicated either. All life is interconnected. When one group lives to excess, other groups go short. And sometimes people get pissy about that and start killing their rich neighbors.
Anyway, I've got some spam to read. I'm looking to “impress my girl with a huge cumshot” (admit it women readers, that's what you really want for your romantic anniversary present), and I hear SPUR-M is the product for me, since I'm looking for that 500% increase in volume. Seriously, do people really get those messages and say, “yeah, that's what my life is missing… honey, get the credit card!” — spam, unlike pornography, is not a glimpse at the future. It's a glimpse at the stupidest, most gullible and desperate parts of the present.
PS. Speaking of things that happened around when BME was getting started, I think I remember this current event from a Simpsons episode, circa 1994? Sideshow Bob Roberts anyone?
