The Null Device

2010/6/15

Typographical rant of the day: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole:

When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I'm banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I'm shredding Reign In Blood on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I'm racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who'll kill me if I don't cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzzkills like you.
It doesn't even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I'm famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I'm in your signs. I'm in your browsers. I'm in your instant messengers. I'm not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.

comic sans humour typography 3

A new book ("Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization", by strategic consultant John Robb) claims that the credit crunch and ongoing financial crisis will make Iraq/Mexico-style insurgency and terror a fact of life across the Western world:

The establishment of a predatory and deeply unstable global economic system - beyond the control of any group of nations - is in the process of gutting developed democracies. Think in terms of the 2008 crisis, over and over again. Most of what we consider normal in the developed world, from the middle class lifestyle to government social safety nets, will be nearly gone in less than a decade. Most developed governments will be in and out of financial insolvency. Democracy, as we knew it, will wither and the nation-state bureaucracy will increasingly become an enforcer for the global bond market and kleptocratic transnational corporations. Think Argentina, Greece, Spain, Iceland, etc. As a result, the legitimacy of the developed democracies will fade and the sense of betrayal will be pervasive (think in terms of the collapse of the Soviet Union). People will begin to shift their loyalties to any local group that can provide for their daily needs. Many of these groups will be crime fueled local insurgencies and militias. In short, the developed democracies will hollow out.
The part about the bond market is probably true; for example, in Britain, no matter who came to power, they would have to make deep cuts to please bondholders, or otherwise the credit (and the electricity and the flow of beans from Africa and iPods from China) would stop. Whether this means merely Thatcherism 2.0, the end of the post-WW2 welfare state, or a collapse of state institutions to a dystopian kleptocracy as Robb suggests, remains to be seen.
[T]he problem is that Mexico is a hollow state. Unlike a failed state like Somalia (utter chaos), a hollow state still retains the facade of a nation (borders, bureaucracy, etc.). However, a hollow state doesn't exert any meaningful control over the countryside. It's not only that the state can't do it militarily, they don't have anything they can offer people. So, instead, control is ceded to local groups that can provide basic levels of opt-in security, minimal services, and jobs via new connections to the global economy - think in terms of La Familia in Michoacana...The real danger to the US is that not only will these groups expand into the US (they already have), it is that these groups will accelerate the development of similar homegrown groups in the US as our middle class evaporates.
The commenters chime in, trying to pick holes in the guy's argument, but then again, it's the sort of argument you would really want to be wrong. If he is right, we can expect the collapse of the entire Maslow hierarchy of needs; people are going to be far too busy worrying about staying alive to even consider the idea of self-actualisation.

(via Boing Boing) grim meathook future sadofuturism wd2 1

A 1978 article on how to identify a CIA agent under diplomatic cover; back then, it was fairly easy to do so by simple techniques such as looking at US embassy personnel records and seeing who hangs out with whom at diplomatic dos.

  • The CIA usually has a separate set of offices in the Embassy, often with an exotic-looking cipher lock on the outside door. In Madrid, for example, a State Department source reports that the Agency occupied the whole sixth floor of the Embassy. About 30 people worked there; half were disguised as "Air Force personnel" and half as State "political officers." The source says that all the local Spanish employees knew who worked on what floor of the Embassy and that visitors could figure out the same thing.
  • CIA personnel usually stick together. When they go to lunch or to a cocktail party or meet a plane from Washington, they are much more likely to go with each other than with legitimate diplomats. Once you have identified one, you can quickly figure out the rest.
  • The CIA has a different health insurance plan from the State Department. The premium records, which are unclassified and usually available to local employees, are a dead giveaway.
  • The Agency operative is taught early in training that loud background sounds interfere with bugging. You can be pretty sure the CIA man in the Embassy is the one who leaves his radio on all the time.
Of course, they may well have tightened things up in the past 32 or so years.

(via Schneier) cia deception espionage sousveillance surveillance tradecraft 0

Christopher Hitchens reports on Prince Charles' increasingly ominous anti-science pronouncements, and his even more sinister fellow travellers:

Discussing one of his favorite topics, the "environment," he announced that the main problem arose from a "deep, inner crisis of the soul" and that the "de-souling" of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, "where mechanistic thinking is so predominant," and which "goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion." He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world's "sacred traditions." Then for the climax: "As a result, Nature has been completely objectified—She has become an it—and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo's scheme."
So this is where all the vapid talk about the "soul" of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The "vacuum" will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover.

christopher hitchens irrationalism prince charles pseudoscience stupidity 0