Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

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I just finished posting another update to the site; a nice mix of stuff in various sections. Enjoy, and thank you to everyone who helped. I've kept the cover image for the APP article up, so the neat tongue piercing is actually the extreme cover.

So I've been thinking about what would have happened if instead of “the grenade malfunctioned“ stories being in the press, we were instead being greeted by tabloids screaming:

PRESIDENT BUSH
ASSASSINATED IN GEORGIA!

Seriously, what would happen if that scenario played out? Because it seems to have come very close to having actually done so. Now, a grenade at a hundred feet is not that likely to be fatal unless some unlucky piece of shrapnel clips him in the skull. Personally I think it's far more likely that some far-right libertarian in the United States blows the President's brains out with a Barrett .50cal from a half mile away (and that's certainly easier and more likely to be met with success than getting a grenade within throwing distance anyway).

It's really hard to predict where America would go if the Fuhrer was assassinated. Would it sink deeper into religiosity and isolation, or would it somehow “snap out of it” and step back into the light? Speaking of prediction (via kottke), I enjoyed A Condensed History Of Everything (mirror), although it gets kind of pessimistic near the end as it moves from recollection to prophecy!

2010s: Amid a vast wasteland of abandoned factories and burning cities falling into total anarchy, the government of the United States willingly hands its responsibilities over to the military, which swiftly installs a new Constitution enshrining the sanctity of land owner rights. The elite of this New Perfect America shelters itself in fortified, self-sufficient city-states, regulated by a council of military and religious elders. Much of the nation's infrastructure collapses. The cities are left to rot, as libertarian cadres, anarcho-syndicalists, survivalists, armed religious cults and race-identity supremists fight over the table scraps.

2020s: Suicide cults pop up all over the planet, as tens of millions choose to die rather than spend any more time in Hell, which they believe is seeping up to the surface of the Earth. India and Pakistan basically annihilate each other in the world's first total nuclear war. The Arab world decides it's now or never, and launch an all-out, full-scale attack on Isreal. The damage done is crippling, but Israel's nuclear retaliation is decisive. All the land between the Mediteranean and the Persian Gulf is turned into radioactive rubble.

2030s: Piracy runs rampant on the oceans, which are basically abandoned to the Neo-Nomads. The African Genocide comes to an end, as New Perfect America moves in and begins leeching the continent of its abundant resources. Europe is shocked by a series of sabotage attacks on their space program, including the destruction of a dark matter reactor that kills millions in what used to be France. New Perfect America is suspected, but nobody is willing to accuse.

That said, with the upcoming space war being approved by Bush in the coming weeks, it's understandable that an aging hippy would have reservations about the future. Last month the US launched the XSS-11, the latest in a series of early anti-satellite systems (according to the CDI) designed to take out the communications and surveillance systems of other nations. You can bet that Russia and China have similar systems.

That said, before you get too scared of Rods from God, read this level headed PDF (the Federation of American Scientists has a good section on Weapons in Space on their website). The general conclusion that I've gotten from my reading on the subject is that space weapons should be the least of our worries right now — although ASAT weapons though could certainly disrupt us more than you could probably imagine (we really rely heavily on satellites at this point), but in terms of fire raining from the skies, it's probably not going to happen any time soon.

PS. My ego loves me getting quoted on boingboing!