Military

Don't you just love the American Military? Surely the best military in the world if you define that by the number of innocent people killed and allies accidentally shot down because they're too thick to point the rocket launcher in the other direction.
For a start the USA is famed for engaging in pointless wars. Vietnam and Iraq are too that spring to mind. In Vietnam there only reason for going to war was the irrational fear of the Communists, even though Communism is undoubtably a better political ideology than Capitalism. This war resulted in some of the great anti-war cinema, and few other wars have been so universally hated and assosciated with negatively. It was the first war when images could be broadcast instantly around the world, hammering home the atrocities being committed.
Then, the Iraq war. Why did we go to war? Was it because of the WMDs? No, of course it wasn't. The report prepared for Bush even said that there was no way Iraq had any nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. It was laid out, in black and white for him, and unless he is unable to read (an interesting hypothesis) he simply ignored what his generals were telling him. He went to war to unite the American people behind him (like Thatcher and the Falklands) and because the Twin Towers had given him an excuse to attack any country in the Middle East that isn't Israel.
I believe there is a fair chance that Iran is next on the list. Iran have just as much right as any other country to own nuclear missiles (if, indeed, that is their aim) and there is no reason we should stop them. If one country should be denied nuclear weapons it is the USA. There's even a possibility that a "tactical" nuclear missile (how can such a powerful explosive be considered tactical? It just kills everything in sight) will be used to destroy Natanz, no doubt killing thousands more innocent civilians in the process.
That is the next comment about the USA Military, killing of innocents. Just like Israel when it comes to Palestine, the USA seems to have no regard for those innocent people caught up in a pointless war. But then, what do the lives of thousands of arabs matter compared to one American? What a silly question. Forget I ever asked. There is a video of American soldiers firing a bazooka into an Iraqi house, watching it collapse while apparently shitting themselves with laughter. Gulf War II has resulted in an Iraqi Civil War, and Bush and Blair should be tried for war crimes far more than Saddam Hussein. Actually, add Sharon to that list if he ever stops being a vegetable.
Finally, Black Ops projects. Recently the US Military flew an Aurora plane over the UK but denied that it even exists, let alone that they'd been test-flying it over our country. It travels at Mach 8, the upshot of which is that it crosses the Atlantic Ocean in around an hour. Just like Area 51 the American Military denies all knowledge of it. Billions of dollars are poured into projects like the Aurora, the Nano-Armour thing, and the various things Black Ops soldiers do around the world, such as assorted assassinations. One man who tried to speak out "fell" from his penthouse suite the day before he was about to speak and fell eighteen floors. How convinient.
America puts too much reliance on their military, but nothing compares to the sheer oodles of information for tomorrow about American Lies.

Budget

This is going to be a comparatively short entry, because while there is a lot to say about how the USA stunningly wastes much of its money, lots of the points are very similar.
The budget of the USA is around $2.8 trillion. It is wildly mis-spent.
For starters, no other country spends over $80bn on military, not even post-superpower Russia or rapidly growing China. But naturally the USA feels the need to defend against the enemies that, for the most part, it has made up and really pose no threat. Does it spend $100bn? $200bn? That's over twice what China spends. In fact America spends an appalling $480bn on "defence", which generally consists of shooting at people in caves and bombing innocents (See "American Military" tomorrow). This is an obscene amount of money devoted to killing other human beings. Exactly what this money goes to will be discussed in more detail tomorrow...
A comparatively small amount of cash is poured into Education. There isn't really much else to say about that, but the results are clear for all to see.
Finally (yes, this is short) lots of money goes mysteriously "missing". Some goes into secret funds, a large amount is channeled into the NSA, Black Ops (see Military again) and some simply cannot be traced. Yes, that is all for today.

Also, a DISCLAIMER :
I do not in fact hate all Americans without distinguishing. There are many intelligent people in the USA, and it has also produced hundreds of fine authors, actors and artists. Despite this, the prevailing trends and facts still hold true. Some of the best outspoken critics of the awful state the country is in come from the USA, e.g Green Day.

State

Now we move onto the American State. By this I mean anything that is wrong with just “how things are done” in the USA. They have a lot to answer for, both because they are ruining the lives of millions of their own people, millions of others around the globe, and potentially helping doom the entire planet. What a dramatic introduction.
For a start the US of A lacks any kind of national health service. While the NHS gets less medial things done than a machine which randomly hurls syringes, atleast rich and poor alike are entitled to health care. Not so in America. Thousands of poor people die monthly because the american government feels perhaps the poor aren't worthy of being healed? Or maybe the Land of the Free would be better off without the poor people which remind those being handed out tax cuts just how lucky they are?
America also puts far too high an emphasis on sport. I like some sports, but in the USA things are so much more extreme. For a start, they actively encourage wrestling but the vast majority of America is homophobic. Quote San Andreas : "It’s entirely believable sports action! Grown men fighting in leotards with their bare hands and thighs! This is MANLY, not homoerotic!" Schools in the USA also give positions to those who are sporty even if they don't meet the basic academic requirements of the school, e.g. the ability to communicate without a series of grunts (often difficult to understand for those less neanderthal).
As an extension of the American belief that they have the right to police and control the rest of the world, ignoring laws that were put in place to stop things like this, they also seem to think the USA should "control" South America. This makes me think of the days of the Cold War and East European countries being labelled the Soviet "Sphere of Influence".
South America has their own countries, their own governments, and they don't need the USA interfering (see "American Lies" for info on planned assassinations). You have nothing to do with these countries, Cuba being a good example. In fact, a plan named Operation Northwood was drawn up to try and remove Castro from power by faking the high-jacking of a plane in Twin Towers fashion. The remote-controlled plane would then crash, killing hundreds of innocent people (Black Ops agents with fake IDs who left at the airport without boarding the plane) and somehow Cuba would be implicated. Some even claim this happened in the Twin Towers, but even I don't believe that. America would not destroy their own centre for trade, even if it did give them a convinient excuse for war.
The USA is also wrecking the environment. George "Fuckwit" Bush refuses to acknowledge that global warming exists and so they are doing nothing to cut their carbon emissions. Even fast-growing China isn't destroying the environment so badly.
Finally, gun "control". Ha. Someone is injured every few minutes with a gun in the USA and 80 people are killed DAILY. A high proportion of these are children. If you insist of giving everyone guns to defend against others with guns (think about how stupid that is) atleast mind who you give them to. Recently some insane old man gave a young kid both shotgun barrels in the face for walking across his lawn. Which - I saw a picture - looked shit anyway, before the kid walked over it. Canada has almost as many guns as you but it is actually a rare occurance for someone to be gunned down there - people feel so safe many leave their doors open. While selling guns to anyone with the cash is one of the world's stupidest ideas, up there with perhaps inflatable dartboards and the like, it's the people who go around killing with them.
Still to come :
American Military, Lies, and Budget. Tomorrow : The Budget (AKA the world's greatest waste of money TM)

Legality

The USA breaks so many laws it took me a while to compress them all into a blog entry that didn't drag on until after the universe has died a cold and horrible death.
Firstly, torture. The USA is practically the only country that seems to think it has the right to ignore the Geneva Convention and simple human rights in order to extract information from "terrorists", who are held without trial or even charge for months on end. Only a fraction of those currently held in Guantanamo Bay have actually been charged with anything, almost all of them are innocent, and they are denied the right to defend themselves or even contact the outside world.
When the world wised up to this we hoped that things might stop. But naturally nothing is going to stop the USA until they have tortured as many innocent people as possible "He looks like a Muslim - ARREST HIM!". They then started the process of "Extraordinary Rendition" - transporting people to other countries where they would be tortured. The UK denies any involvement in this, despite the fact that planes have landed at our airports part-way on their route. Bush now seeks to close Guantanamo, but only because of all the negative publicity it has created. Likely they will open dozens of much smaller "Black Sites" to avoid the attention of the public.
Next, the various ways in which Bush's first election was rigged. While Bush probably needs a team of highly trained men to assist him when tying his shoelaces (unless he still uses velcro) he and his cronies managed to mastermind that election in several ways. Thousands of black voters were ignored because black people are simply more likely to vote Democrat than Fasci-...Republican. Thousands of votes were ignored because they were Democrat and not Republican. Lastly, a computer program was created to SWITCH ROUND what voters said in online-voting areas (such as Florida) and was naturally only used to change Democrat votes. Much of this happened in Florida, the vital Swing-state that got Bush "elected" when he won with his inbred sibling Jeb Bush as Governor. There's a coincidence.
There is also a vast amount of corruption in the higher echelons of government, but I mentioned much of this in my previous post. Another good example is the famous Enron (for those of you who don't know, this vast company was maintained by huge amounts of accountancy fraud). Huge support is sent to the Republican party just because once they were "elected", those who donated money were given the usual - tax cuts, business deals and the like. Tax cuts for the rich apparently solves all the world's problems, atleast in the USA.
Finally the various aspects of the Big Brother state you can see in America, and more and more recently in the UK. Phones can be tapped without needing a court order and everthing you say over the phone or send over the internet is monitored. Various atrocities have even been commited against ordinary people in America. In the 1950s a potential toxin was released into the San Francisco water supply to see what it would do. Various soldiers have been unwitting tests to various viruses and diseases.
Tomorrow : The American State.

Government

Now we come to the second part of “Why America sucks”, commonly entitled the American government, even though it does very little governing, and it shouldn’t be doing any because it WASN’T ELECTED.
The bare bones of why the Bush “administration” wasn’t elected can be quickly summed up by saying some Democrat votes were ignored, and some Democrat votes were simply replaced by Republican ones. I’ll go into that in more detail tomorrow with “American Legality”, possibly a contradiction in terms. But for now I will cover what this government has achieved while it has been in power.
To begin with, some of the more endearing personalities the Bush administration has brought thankfully into the public eye. Let’s start with the man himself, George W Bush, affectionately known as “Dubya”. This man is of course the son of the old George Bush. From Reagan onwards, consecutive Republican Presidents have destroyed America in much the same way that Thatcher achieved over here. Clinton was not as good as everyone said, read some Michael Moore books if you want to know why.
George Bush has appointed to positions of power not people who were elected, but rather those who are his closest allies and friends. Government does not work like this! It’s even less representative of the people than the crazy American voting system normally is, with a disproportionate amount of Republicans in power. He even appointed a high-court judge with NO legal experience whatsoever, simply because they were friends.
Bush has circumvented thousands of laws. Instead of laws being passed in the old traditional way, it now works like this. A law is decided on and voted in. It is sent to Bush, who then RE-WORDS it how he likes to make sure none of his allies or the Republicans should suffer. That is the law that is then passed. Since he has been in power Bush has ruled more like a Monarchy than Democracy. He should therefore be known as King George I. At least our King George spent time killing dragons rather than circumventing UN resolutions.
There are few things more incompetent than the American government other than Steam or Norton Anti-virus, but nothing else is so full of itself. The USA has not paid its money to the running of the UN for several years now but yet they remain a member of the security council. They ignore dozens of resolutions, the Iraq war being but one example. It was an illegal war, people, though the thought of having rules for wars seems a little odd. The USA even breaks human rights, and massively decieves the public with Black Operations (see "American Military").
The American Government also sees it as its duty to crush as many small countries as possible. One example is the outrageous persecution of Palestine by the American-funded Israel (an illegal state anyway). They will fund whatever country or regime suits them to achieve their needs. The American Government even funded the Nazis before World War II because it would benefit them. They armed Iraq and some of Al-Qaida when it was useful for them.
Corruption also plays a huge part, but that will be covered in "American Legality", as will more detail about how the election was rigged and the simple fact that Dubya DID NOT WIN.

People

There must be a reason that the USA is hated around the world. Many argue that while those in high-ranking positions may be bad, the ordinary people aren’t. This entry is going to disprove that, making use of statistics, personal encounters and various pieces of evidence.
Firstly, religion. The USA is one of the most strongly religious countries in the world, and the USA has a disproportionate high number of fanatical religious people, such as the bloody Evangelists. There are few groups who make me sick more than these people. Those people who practice their religion without shoving it down the throats of everyone else - fine. However, those like those sad gits on “God’s New Army” on C4 who are actively campaigning, and saying the USA is NOT religious enough sicken me. In no other country do moronic assholes like Pat Robertson get such a speaking platform to rant about how amoral everyone is. There is also a vast religious lobby in high politics, primarily Jewish people (hence the outrageous persecution of Palestine, but that will be in “American Government”). And this is not being “anti-semitic”. The Jews are NOT A RACE, but a religion. I am simply stating the fact that there is a very powerful Jewish lobby which is fucking over countries like Palestine, because that is a simple FACT.
Secondly, stupidity. American education - like British education, but worse - is a total shambles. American people are one of the least educated in a “civilised” country that the world knows. Disturbingly high percentages of people can’t read above a fourth-grade level, or find the flipping massive Pacific Ocean on a map. Lots of Americans - at least partially because of press and censorship (see “American Lies”) - know so little about the outside world. So many millions of people have never gone anywhere, never done anything special nor just taken the time to learn things. There is a clear pattern - the nearer the coast you get, the smarter you get. Generally. There is a basis behind the “myth” that most people from the USA are stupid.
Thirdly, racism and xenophobia. These two seem to go hand-in-hand when you look at the USA. For a start very few people (percentage-wise) visit outside countries, and only do so to take mindless pictures to show their mindless friends. Everyone thinks that the British do nothing but eat tea, and we are all “fucking British faggots.” Newsflash inbreds! If we were all gay, there wouldn’t be anyone left in Britain after thousands of years, would there? Think about it, and if you want help with the harder letters, let me know. Racism is also the norm. Everyone seems to use “nigger” as the standard insult, even when you don’t even know what colour someone’s skin is. Black people are still mercilessly persecuted by the police, the government, and ordinary people. There are so many racially-motivated attacks it makes my mind spin. It’s a shame that Condoleeza Rice is both the first black high-powered person, and the first female, considering she is such a stupid warmongering fool. I’m amazed anyone without white skin dares to live in America.
Now, there ARE some exceptions. It's rare, but I have met the occassional American who isn't all of the above. But for the most part the American people are unilaterally selfish and think about just themselves and the prosperity of Uncle Sam. They don’t care about other countries, other cultures, and other ways of life. The current generation of young people are just used to being racist, and don’t think anything of it. Is this what the world is coming to? Ken Livingstone had a point when he said that George Bush is the single greatest threat to the world, but not just Bush. A president is powerless without support. The whole country needs a violent shake up to bring it into the real world, one where everyone is equal, not just those born under the Stars and Stripes.

American :

Thus begins the 7-day Post-A-Thon (Patent Pending) about the USA.
When I return tomorrow from the LAN party, we will begin with "American People" and move onto :
American Goverment
American Legality
American Military
American State
American Lies
American Budget
Each of these will cover a different aspect of why the USA is nothing like the "Land of the Free" it is billed as.
My apologies for the short post today, but the 7 posts will more than make up for this. I am too busy kicking my computer round in small circles and trying to reach some old drinks can I saw in a gutter to do anything more worthwhile.

EDIT : Wtfzorz?!? Spurling is right, the time zone is buggered. I'll try to reconfiger my profile on the Interwebs to solve this. I posted this at 9:30 AM, not 1:30. Stupid thing.

Hal

You'd really like it so that when A SINGLE FUCKING FILE on your computer gets corrupted, it doesn't require THE ENTIRE FUCKING COMPUTER to be formatted (the hard drive wiped completely) and have Windows Shitty XP reinstalled on it. But apparently Bill Gates is too busy rolling on his big pile of money to give a damn about how useless his bloody machines are.
But this is what happened. My computer was lagging for some reason, probably Firefox's stupid memory leakage. So, I log off. The computer then freezes on the log-off screen, and rather than waste more of my life than I already have staring at the bloody message, I turn it off. It wasn't doing anything.
Next time I try to log in :
"The file \Shit\Crap\Hal.dll cannot be found. Please reinstall this file."
How are we supposed to do that if we can't log on you stupid piece of machinery? Which hellhole did you crawl out of and HOW CAN I PUT YOU BACK?
So I use the Windows Restore CD thing using the instructions in the manual. Naturally once the CD is inserted and the appropriate Function Key pressed, what the instructions say will happen doesn't happen and it instead asks me if I would like to create A NEW C: DRIVE!
This may come as a shock to some of the more fuckwitted diodes in there, but this isn't what I intended. So after phoning customer support, blah blah blippity blah, the upshot of this shit-up is that the entire hard-drive has to be wiped because a single file somehow got corrupted.
There are a few reliefs. My writing is all backed up on my other computer. We can probably get all the data off before we reset it. But this means a wait of quite a while until its back.
Anyway. I'm posting this on my laptop to explain how this is here. Anyone else had major problems from their PCs?

Escape

So where can we escape to? Even against the problems of food, oxygen, and the lack of gravity causing anything you deposit in the toilet to come back up for a rematch, it'll be hard to find anywhere vaguely hospitable.
THE MOON : It's our closest neighbour and would give stunning views of the Earth. But the lack of gravity would eventually take its toll, and your muscles would wear down to a muscley pulp. You might end up like Kif in Futurama - "Actually, my race doesn't have bones. We move via a series of water-filled bladders." Also, there is no way to generate food except huge bio-domes, which wouldn't be strong enough to survive an asteroid, meteor, or "stray" American nukes.
MARS : Some gravity. You'd waste away a little slower than on the moon, which has got to be worth something. Getting stuff to land on Mars seems rather hard (a large proportion of missions there have failed - I blame the Martians). There is water but it would need to be melted off the poles, and the planet would need terraforming. The basis of an atmosphere gives us something to work with, but just getting there with current technology requires months, during which time a crew must be kept alive while also taking with them equipment to survive for a long time. Challenging.
VENUS : Apart from the Sulphuric Acid rain and the standard temperature hot enough to melt lead, a lovely place.
TITAN : A full atmosphere. No oxygen, nasty gases.
There are also various artifical places we could live, like Ringworlds or the brilliant Dyson's Sphere. You simply (it's infact incredibly hard and would require an insane amount of time and labour) create a sphere around your sun. Then, you cover it with solar panels. Et voila, a crazy amount of energy. The materials alone would need you to devour several planets though. Possibly not a good solution right now.
Any other ideas about how we could save the human race when the Earth becomes uninhabitable?

Doomsday

Part 2 of my End of the World posts.
In South Park there is an instruction video for surviving a lava flow. You are instructed to "Duck and Cover", which basically involves adopting the foetal position in the face of molten magma. Not surprisingly, this doesn't work, and very shortly several charred skeletons are gently rolling away.
A super volcano like that awful drama on BBC last year is one possible way civilization as we know it could end. Since it's in Yellowstone park, it would sort-of be America destroying us...they have a lot to do with various doomsday scenarios. Apparently the ash would block out the sun, and thus everything would die. Except those little microbe things that don't actually need light.
There's also the chance of a meteor or asteroid like in that appalling film with Sean Connery. What a pile of sentimental rubbish that was. This one we might actually have a chance of surviving. If, like in Futurama, we fire a huge rocket-load of junkfood and waste paper at it, maybe we'll deflect it. Or possibly not, since life isn't an amusing cartoon. Well, a very amusing one.
Then of course there's the charming possibility of all-out nuclear war, which is honestly very unlikely. While I wouldn't trust George Bush with anything more important that his own stupid American inbred retarded pig-fucking redneck shit-for-brains head, I don't think even he will press the Big Red Button just because it's a pretty colour.
Perhaps aliens will attack us. Again, wildly unlikely. There is certainly life out there, but the chances of them finding us are so small. There are millions upon millions of stars in every galaxy, and countless billions of galaxies. This implies that there must be billions of planets that could sustain life, but by the same token they will be thinly spread. The equation worked out about how many planets will sustain life suggests a comparatively tiny number per galaxy.
And why would they attack us anyway? Unless they had evolved down a similar route to the USA ("They're not American - SHOOT TO KILL!") then they would likely choose to meet with us, trade with us and exchange knowledge. Chances are we'd be the first race they had ever encountered too.
Lastly, maybe they'll be another, very slow, ecological disaster. The planet is certainly heading that way. But as I'll cover tomorrow - where could we go?

Elevator

This is going to be, in some ways, a 3-part post about the end of the world.
Very recently Stephen Hawking predicted that unless we could get off Earth in the next 100 years, our civilization is doomed. He made 3 different points - one, about the demise of civilization, one about the time-span, and one about leaving the Earth.
In this entry I am going to mention how we could get off the Earth, the next entry tomorrow will discuss some possible doomsdays, and in the last we will see where the human race could actually go...
I would be surprised if we colonise any other planets in the next hundred years. I will probably live to see perhaps two-thirds of that, and I would be impressed if we have a working operational base on the moon, or even a more worthwhile and less-useless Space Station than the international one we have now. There are just so many problems with living on another planet, a few being :
Lack of Oxygen
Lack of Water
Muscles wasting from lack of gravity
Getting the materials out there
Communication lag
One possible solution suggested would be to use Terraforming equiupment (currently not even close to the level of sophistication required) to transform a suitable planet so it had an environment like ours. But the problems are somewhat...overwhelming.
We certainly need somewhere in space from which we can launch further missions. The payloads of current rockets are often compromised before of the equipment required to get them out of the atmosphere. If we had a base outside, things would be considerably easier. This is where the Space Elevator comes in.
I've seen this idea used in Scifi books (and there is one in Halo 2's New Mombasa). It does what it says on the label - it is a huge tether connected to the ground at one end, and a satellite/asteroid at the top. Goods can be ferried up and down using lifts similar to conventional ones, except they would have to be a lot stronger. This idea poses various problems, since the price would be enormous, an accident catastrophic, and the tether itself would have to be made out of a very strong material such as Carbon Nanotubes (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Kohlenstoffnanoroehre_Animation.gif). Lastly the lift itself would have to survive potentially burning up in the atmosphere, and have an airlock of some sort. But if built, it would greater help our exploration in space. I think Space Elevators are, potentially, our best chance for speeding up our exploration of the galaxy.
Tomorrow : Doomsday.

Reverse

I have just been challenged to write a blog entry about reverse psychology - "I bet you can't write a blog entry about reverse psychology!" was the exact quote.
Now. I may randomly swerve off at some strange angle, but nevertheless I will make a full entry that is (atleast vaguely related to) reverse psychology. So, to begin with. What is it? Well, a great example can be found in the Simpsons :

Homer's Brain: Don't you get it? You've gotta use reverse psychology.
Homer: That sounds too complicated.
Homer's Brain: OK, don't use reverse psychology.
Homer: All right, I will!

As far as I can see it's terribly useful. Whenever you use it it primarily undermines the confidence of the other person, so they're then guaranteed to strive harder to achieve whatever you told them they couldn't do. Also, possibly, like with a button "Do Not Push" you will normally push it to see what happens, or simply because it's going against authority.

Those of you who post comments (And I do appreciate them, mostly) will have noticed some comments on my "Circus" post about how brilliant America is. I think that just a little bit proves my point. In the entry, I said America have to be best at everything. Then someone on my contacts posts "We beat you at everything" kinda confirms it. Thanks. Also, my replies are sort of a warm-up for next week.

Circus

Left on our windscreen a few days ago was a corny flyer for "Uncle Sam's American Circus".
Once I'd cleaned all the involuntary puke off it, I managed to give it a proper look. Some wonderfully endeering yankee with a stars-and-stripes hat and bow tie, along with the clown make-up grinned at you from the front. Off to one side they modestly declared they were "The Greatest Circus on Earth TM"
How typically American. They've got to be the best at everything otherwise that thing just isn't worth being good at.
I'd have thought they'd realise the risks of screaming "We're American!" in England these days after the Iraq War, Rendition, that American guy who racked up thousands and thousands of pounds in unpaid parking fines, etc. Apparently they are still free to go around wherever they like and display the single greatest redeeming feature man has ever known : Being American.
Yesterday, I was asked on XBL if I wished I was American. With the possible exception of Zimbabwe because Mugabe is possibly even more unhinged than I-Need-Stabilisers-To-Ride-A-Bike George Bush, I couldn't actually think of a country I would LESS like to live in. I wouldn't be proud of-
Cancel that, I'm not going to list the reasons I wouldn't be proud to live in America. I'm going to save that for next week's 7-part-postathon, once I work out how to narrow down the broad title of "Why the USA sucks" to only 7 posts.

Git

There is a "subtle" different in mentality between those who watch David Blaine in America, and those who observe him over here.
David Blaine and Derren Brown - despite sharing initial letters - have pulled apart recently in my opinion of them. Derren Brown is cool, some of the tricks he does are bizarre and make your brain ache, plus he's a great showman ontop of all that. David Blaine, on the other hand, used to do some really rather good card tricks, like that one with the card in the shop window. That was actually good. But now - especially after his bloody goldfish bowl stunt - he is little more than a moist git.
That man annoys me so much. Sitting for several days in a box/water-filled "Twat-o-sphere" does not make you a magician. There is nothing incredible about starving yourself.
When David Blaine did his box-in-the-air stunt in London, people swore at him and hurled eggs in his general direction. Good for them. However, in the USA when he did his bowl stunt everyone applauded him and said "We love you David" and other such mindless babblings of the cretinous rabble. When he was rescued from his goldfish bowl because he couldn't hold his breath or shat himself or something, he thanked everyone for coming there.
This shows something. The American public is far more willing to contragulate morons for acts of immense stupidity than we are. We just insult people like that. Much wiser.
So who do you think is better? Blaine or Brown? (the answer is brown).

Gates

Bill Gates intends to retire in 2008.
Well good. He's held more than enough time as the world's second rightest man behind the man with 1000 toilets and no people to fill them. But atleast he hasn't totally been one of these people who decide his children deserve none of his wealth. Of COURSE they do! What kind of a crap parent are you if you positively choose to force your offspring to work rather than have a nice comfy life?
In addition he's giving away loads of his cash through the foundation set up by him and his wife. Good. Even though countless BILLIONS isn't really all that much, it's still good that he's doing stuff to combat that other stuff. The bad stuff.
Recently information was released about Bill Gate's office. It seems quite calm and composed. For some reason, he lacks a Smart Board and says he might "Get round to buying one in a couple of years". Is he saving up?
But I don't hate Bill Gates as much as I used to. True, he holds a total monopoly and true, most of Windows is totally bug-ridden. But atleast he's doing something worthwhile with his money.

Magnetism

Since everyone apart from me is currenlty watching the footie and I have no-one to play XBL with, I'm going to post today's update now before I get bored later and just forget to do it. Today's is - rather randomly - about the things known as Railguns and Gauss Guns.
I first heard of these in Half-life. It had a Gauss Gun, which you found when you passed a wall and heard :
"I think we've got to use this gun to escape-"
"Don't be stupid! That thing's untested-"
"So? It'll work fine?"
*Charging up noise*
*Violent explosion*
You then went through the destroyed wall and, next to the corpses, was the Gauss Gun. It fired supercharged sorta thingies which generally killed people and vortigaunts etc easily. I later encountered the Gauss Gun again mounted on the back of a Warthog in Halo 2.
And the Railgun. It's used in countless scifi films, and also in Heli Attack 2.
But how do they work? Do they exist, or are they just the product of someone's imagination?

Both have been built. A shot fired from a railgun holds a record speed of 20km/s. Just think about that speed a moment, then read on.

They both work on magnetic principles. Firstly, the Gauss Gun, also known as the Coilgun (the Gau gun in HL was completely invented). The Gauss Gun uses a large number of coils of wire, and the projectile rests in the middle. A current is passed through the first, which induces a magnetic field and pulls the projectile forward. Then, the current in that one cuts out and the next one has a current passed through it, pulling the projectile further forward into the next coil. That current cuts out, the next one starts up, and the projectile is accelerated through dozens of coils in a fraction of a second. The projectile then fires.
These will not yet replace current military weapons because although they can achieve impressive speeds, they are expensive and required advanced machinery to ensure the timing of the electrical charges is perfect.
More interesting is the Railgun. The projectile is mounted on two rails. Then a HUGE current of, say, 1,000,000Amps is fed into the rails. The projectile launches, and as I said the record is 20 kilometres in a second, which would basically tear through anything. There's one in Scotland which holds this record.
While more deadly than the coilgun, the huge amount of heat generated by firing the projectile at such speeds destroys the coils and they have to be replaced after every shot.

So there you have it. A final explanation of what they actually are (so the Railgun in Heli Attack 2 is infact wholly unrealistic and fires some kind of laser thing).

Exams

Hooray for exams. They're so fun.
A few ideas ago there was a lot of complaining about there being too many exams. And that was certainly justified, since everything these days hinges on just that one important day. We're tested too often and encouraged to be too competitive, be it in sport, music, academic achievement. In Australia for example, all children are tested to see if they're good at a particular sport. If they might be the new world champion one day, they recieve masses of special training.
You should also be allowed to leave the exam room once you finish. Just as games claim to contain twice the gameplay time they actually do, exams commonly take half the time allocated. Today in my DT exam, I got so bored I was forced to look around and read about making cheese in Dartford. This bored me even more and I shortly returned to simply gazing around the room, and wondering how on EARTH a certain someone managed to need MORE PAPER to complete the questions on. There is always AMPLE room to write twice as much as you need to. How is it physically possible?
We've come up with various ways to pass the time. One of my personal favourites is using your calculator to play the numbers game on Countdown with the Random Number# function. Entertaining for a short while until it finally filters through about how crushingly dull waiting around still is...

Freedom

Last night after counting how many inbreds in a row insulted me in Halo 2 (I lost count) I was too tired to update my blog. You heard it here first. However, as BBC news will report later today, the OFFICIAL reason was because I was too busy doing research.

In 1953, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (more commonly known as Stalin - Man of steel) died. His assistants and other high ranking communists ordered the guards to his room not to wake him after his attack (most likely a stroke) because they feared him. Lavrenty Beria (head of the NKVD) became second-in-command to Khrushchev, but he held most of the power despite Khrushchev being officially President. Six months later in a meeting of the Politburo, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Molotov accused Beria of being a British spy. Troops marched in and the Politburo was surrounded by T34 tanks. He was arrested, denied defence or the ability to speak for his own actions, taken out and shot.
Why am I giving a history lesson? The right to trial is something we think everyone has these days. Despite the classic RvB quote "Why would we bother having trials for innocent people? Waste of resources." we assume everyone has a trial. Things like Beria's murder are assosciated with the days of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler and the rest of the maniacs.
But apparently not so. Guantanamo bay nicely goes against this rule where almost everyone there has had no trial. And in our country, people can be forced to give in their name and address to the police for doing NOTHING, and can be arrested without reason for a month. A man wearing a T-shirt that read "Bush, Blair and Sharon should be indicted for war crimes" (very true) was forced to give in all his details despite not breaking a law. Same goes for a man campaigning against ID cards. America and Britian have a reasonably low rating for freedom of speech compared to some other countries. The USA more so where everything is monitored, stored for several years and everyone is known about 100%.
Blair has been brave enough to say that Guantanamo is an "anomaly".
That's big of you Mr Blair! What will you say next? The moon orbits the earth? Holy FUCK!!!!
Here are a few other interesting facts about both the lack of freedom, and the paranoia of our elected leaders (except in the case of Bush, who did not actually win the election)
Satellites are in orbit over both countries which can read the newspaper you're reading.
Supposedly every bit of London and Washington DC is seen by atleast one security camera.
Everything on phone lines, mobile phones, email and internet is monitored and stored for 6 months - 3 years, depending on the situation.
Code words are listened in for on your phone line. (I once tried saying "Al-Qaida, July 7, March 11, September 11, Jihad, Bush, Blair, Sharon, Israel, Holy War, Dirty Bomb, Twin Towers, Madrid, Suicide Bomb) but nothing came of it. I felt slightly cheated by this.
In addition to illegal wire-tapping, in America there are over 600 empty prisons. They are fully guarded and anyone who comes near them is herded away. These wait incase of a full-scale revolution when the current jails and facilities might not be enough to put it down.
Post a comment or the goverment will get you...

Episode

Half-life 2 Episode 1 was released at the start of this month, and Episode 2 is apparently in the works (which looks considerably better I think). This - and Sin Episodes - apparently mark the start of proper episodic gaming, both of which are downloadable via Steam.
Firstly, Steam. This is possibly the second worst bit of software ever, a close second after Norton which crashed my computer while watching the final cutscene of HL2. It is difficult to use, annoying, forces you to be online in order to play your games and quite often decides your games are no longer on your system. It once suddenly declared I no longer had HL2 and CS:S on my system, and I would have to download them off the internet for $20.00, or whatever that is in pounds. An hour spent on the hotline after I discovered Steam refuses to be mended finally sorted things out. I have the bastard thing.
Secondly, episodic gaming. HL2 E1 is going for the price of $20.00 for around "4-6 hours of gameplay" which translates roughly as "2-4 hours" for any vaguely competent gamer. So basically the lesser part of an afternoon. Personally I don't think it's worth £12 or something. But I'll probably still download it. Half-life has a great and interesting plot (must get Opposing Force and Blue Shift one day..) and it's the next installment. But on the other hand, I think episodic gaming is a bad idea. You have to download stuff mainly, and it's likely to cost a whole lot more. Even with an 8-meg connection I'm going to be waiting a wihle. Might as well go and play with American assholes on Halo 2...

2

This blog entry is going to go through two different topics, starting with a quote which is apparently unrelated to both.
In the Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that "There's something wrong. You've felt it your whole life..."
While Keanu Reeves may have thought this was about the fact that he's sometimes asked to take on an acting role that requires more than jumping about and hitting stuff, I'm thinking about something else.
For the past two days there has been a car parked outside my house. That may seen like nothing particularly remarkable, but this is a car that might as well be replaced by a glittering neon light displaying the word "Cretin" in every language.
It's the size of 2 cars, for a start. It's a bloody 4x4 SUV thing, with that added attachment at the back for hurling your excess children in. I say that, but no doubt it's only owned by one person. As the adverts in GTA : San Andreas said "I'm a single woman with no long relationship. So ofcourse I need a 4x4 capable of housing eight people that's equipped to drive across Arctic Tundra!"
It totally covers the street outside our house, forcing us to park away. Our street should have resident only parking, but that's another rant...
That's one thing. Secondly, it is waving half a dozen England flags. There is nothing wrong with supporting your country, but you don't need to go around your own country smothering everyone with it. There is too much world-cup fever as it is.
But the thing is freaking massive. It probably belches out the same amount of pollution as a small country. And pollution is undoubtable a big problem. For those of you as slow on the uptake as a certain Caboose, this is the second part.
The USA and China are easily the most to blame. The USA because they seem determined to turn the world into a second sun, and China because they are the fastest growing economy in the world, importing so much oil and coal it makes your head spin. Very soon I fear the world is buggered in some way or other. It may be from the Greenhouse effect, pollution, an asteroid, nuclear war, or some other cataclysm. Thousands of species and environments are being wiped out because we're only thinking about this generation and not the next. Meetings like Kyoto tried to do something about this, but with a certain country refusing to sign and most countries failing to meet their demands...
George Bush does not even believe in global warming. Since the Thatcher days you simply deny all knowledge of wrong doing-
Thatcher. There's another rant.

Observing

This year Microsoft got its 5000th patent. Not for something boring like a piece of code but for their system of observing other games played online on the Xbox 360. Some games like CS : S already have a Deathcam, as it is charmingly known, that allows you to observe the game after you've died and until you respawn.
This is a great idea. WIth graphics getting ever better and gameplay more detailed, this is certainly a lot more interesting than lots of the stuff on TV like watching Generic Idiot #85 search for a house in Spain, or Deal or no Deal.
The same could still apply to older games. Half-life 1 won hundreds of game-of-the-year awards along with some even calling it the best game of all time. Years later it still holds up as an absoleutely stunning game. It had lip-sync and advanced in-game "cutscenes" while Goldeneye on the N64 had nothing more than text coming up at the bottom of the screen telling you what characters were saying. Half-life one would still be good to watch because some of the huge set-piece areas were so cool. Even if you could punch bullet holes in the sky.
But even older games wouldn't be as good. I can't see people watching Pacman for excitement : Repeat the phrase "Come on! Eat the ghost! Yeah! Woo next level!" for an idea.
It's similar to what Machinima is doing, like Red vs Blue and the 4-part F.E.A.R story P.A.N.I.C.S - People Acting Normal In Crazy-ass Situations. Go and watch it :
http://panics.roosterteeth.com/archive/

"Look at that! The walls are covered in blood!"
"Is it your blood?"
"Ofcourse it's not my blood! If it was my blood I'd be screaming 'Help I'm outta blood! Get me more blood!' "

Sick

Disclaimer : Do NOT visit the site I am about to talk about. It will give them page views and their sick, perverted, FUCKED UP minds do not deserve it.

Now that that has been said, I will continue. Today I read about "No Greater Joy Ministeries". This is a group of Evangelists who are condoning child abuse, saying it is the only way to discipline children, make them worship god, etc. They have combined a database of the best things to hit your child with, including plumbing pipes, tree branches and the like.
There are mails on the site from concerned (brain-dead) parents (fascists) who are asking for help about the best way to discipline their children and such "sick" things as not obeying every single word their parents say. This warrants the plumbing pipe. Even more bizarre, these people seem determined to raise a generation of children who are obsessed with S&M. Apparently, after eight to ten whips "the poison is transformed into gushing love and contentment" and the child will thank you for HURTING IT and causing permanent mental scars. The pain suddenly becomes nice. Will these children start collecting whips and gags at the age of five?
Recently, a child was KILLED by following the suggestions these fucking sick idiots suggest. They've even published books you can buy on Amazon which are little more than incitement to child abuse.
I know this is not the most uplifting blog entry, but I promise something more...happy...tomorrow.

Adverts

"There are a lot of little problems in life. Now, diarrhoea doesn't have to be one of them."
I saw this catchy headline on an advert yesterday on Channel 4, somewhere in the middle of Lost. It was said in such a calm and composed voice. What made it even better was that while this charming voice-over played, we were greeted with a business woman walking down the street. On the beat of the word "diarrhoea" she stopped and suddenly looked distressed, as if expecting something wildly unpleasant to happen. But then she remembered the wonders of Generic-Shitriver-Cure #65 and continued on her way, composed and confident she wouldn't soil herself at that all-important board meeting.
ARGH. How annoying. I've seen adverts like that way too many times, and always for mildly dubious and body-function-related products. The product always saves the main character just in the nick of time. I hear from a "reliable" DJ source of mine that on average we are subjected to 1000 adverts a day, whether on TV, in magazines, outside, or the wonderful thing we call product placement. Why can't they just make a channel specially for adverts? If you want to watch the program, you watch the program. If you're wondering what worthless consumer item you should buy today, watch the advert channel. It would save a lot of time.
Also, I wish adverts didn't follow the same pattern of "everyone uses our product." These days adverts are often a paranoma of people of different ages, skin colours, sexes, religions, etc, all using the same product. So cliched it makes me want to hurl.

Revenge

There are few things more satisfying than revenge on n00bs.
Take today's example. 6 vs 6 CTF on Headlong. I get the flag out of their base, walk it all the way back, get a few inches off the flag point them some inbred asshole on my team kills me and scores instead. Admittedly on Big Team Battle this doesn't matter, since all of the winning team count as first. While him scoring instead of me may not affect my rank, it does piss me off.
So we decided to get our revenge. Over the next few minutes we got almost everyone else on our team (especially the asshole) kicked from the game because they betrayed us. Very satisfying.
I cannot stand people who will betray you just to get the good weapons. It's just pathetic, because you're likely to be better than them, and it just shows you're a total asshole. All it shows is - as far as I can see - that they know they're inferior to you, and need the amazing weapons to do what you could do with the rubbish weapons.
Wikipedia defines n00b as "someone who is obnoxious, annoying, or breaks the rules". It seems like everyone from the USA who plays online games is a noob therefore. Wow. What a country.

Technology

Today in the Maths exam, we were reminded for the umpteenth time that we weren't allowed mobile phones in the exam room, and if we did we would be hung by our entrails. "Even if switched off" we must still hand them in.
WHY? People of a certain age seem afraid of technology. The mobile phone is not your enemy, it will not launch some crafty sneak attack to interrupt the exam. NOTHING CAN HAPPEN when the phone is switched off. It cannot ring, it cannot vibrate, all it can do is sit in your pocket like a lemon.
Someone once made a very good comment about technology. Anything you're born with is normal. Any new technology in the first 20 years of your life you can make a career out of. Anything invented after that is sick and wrong.
But the trend of "Silver Surfers" seems to deny this. While I've never played any grandparents online (perhaps their fingers are too slow to respond) the number of elderly people surfing the web is growing. They don't seem afraid. But that gap in the middle generally are. We should be allowed to use laptops in the exam rooms, because they're better, you can correct yourself, and I type even faster than I write. Apparently soon there will be a Computer Games GCSE. That would have been a guaranteed A* had it been around now. But the world is slowly growing to embrace technology. I think our generation might be different though, since the speed of advances has never been greater. We have to keep up, or we'll be left behind...

EA

Today I was wondering what I could post for my latest blog entry. I was fresh out of ideas, not ready to start on my week-long 7-episode blog-post-a-ganza yet on a particular topic I feel particularly strongly about (wait and see). I went to get a drink, and I noticed on the bottlecap part of the design had been scratched off. By some bizarre quirk of fate, it looked like a stylised (badly drawn) pair of letters - EA. Electronic Arts.
Damn them. I despise that company. They take in all the good games producers and ruin them. Westwood Studios (creators of C&C for those who don't know) were a good company until EA engulfed them. Now, even though EA do nothing more than market the games, their logo appears first with that stupid bloody voice hissing "Electronic Arts. Challenge everything".
They get everywhere. Plus, they made Fifa Streets, a competitor for worst game ever along with Elf : The Movie : The Game, which was "so bad it's good because you're laughing at how bad it is."
Valve (makers of Half-life) got it right. They ditched their publisher and are now self-marketing. There is no reason giants like EA should get the profits because they actually do NOTHING to make the game, nothing at all. Except in the case of wonderful Fifa Streets, because that abomination was actually made by EA Sports.
All huge global companies are, by definition, bad. Do some research on wonderful Enron for another example. That's why Microsoft are being fined many millions of dollars constantly because they hold such a monopoly on the market. Their products are good (while bug-ridden, annoying, and infested by that bloody paperclip) but they certainly kick Linux and *laugh* Mac.
So EA should go away. Just stop stealing any profit from games companies who actually do more than make some shitty game about kicking a ball around on a street.
But not even Fifa Streets is as bad as that brilliant Volleyball game, the name of which escapes me right now. Instead of buttons to spike, dig, etc, between shots a menu comes up and gives you the option of what to do. The game freezes and you pick the move you want. It's like the Hobbit game on the Spectrum ZX, but in a bad way.

Who

This week's Doctor Who was the first actually GOOD episode of the current series in my opinion. A few others like the Werewolf, the Clockwork robots and a few choice extracts of the Cybermen ones were good. But this one was actually enjoyable and exciting.
There are several problems with the new series. Speaking as someone who has seen lots of the old Doctor Whos, mainly Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. They are longer, better, more interesting, and don't spend a mere minute trying to build up suspense before something is already happening.
A big proble is the time constraint. Old Doctor Whos were several hours long, and between 4-6 parts, normally six. This gave much more time for twists and turns, character and plot development, and some explanation of what is actually going on. These episodes are 45 minutes, 1:30 if we're lucky and get a two-parter.
Secondly, the writers. This latest episode I thought was good, but other than that they just aren't up to scratch. One example would be Mark Gatiss. He is brilliant writing the League of Gentlemen, but I'm afraid you just don't cut it as a Doctor Who writer. They lack all the great writers of Doctor Who.
But I'm hopeful for the conclusion of this two part episode. The last series had a few redeeming episodes, such as the Slitheen and the Dalek episode. NOT the ones with many Daleks, that was annoying and made me want to just out a window because most of the first episode was centred around Big Bloody Brother.
So I feel it should no longer be called Doctor Who. Since there is also much too much sentimentality and focus on family, maybe "The New Adventures of Doctor Who and his companions" would be more appropriate?

93

Today in the Guardian I saw an advert for "United 93" the film about the planes involved in the bombings on 11th of September, 2001. Clearly, all film adverts try to put the most positive reviews on their adverts. A display of five/four star ratings is always good. But I have NEVER seen a film so overwhelmed with five-star ratings and "OMFG I WET MYSELF THIS FILM IS SO GOOD" as United 93.
Now it may be a good film, or I may be very cynical. But I think no-one dared to give it less than 5 stars, because as we all know the September 11 bombings were the single worst thing that ever happened to anyone ever in the history of the world ever. Ever. Or perhaps we don't. Because it WASN'T the worst thing ever. Shock horror.
Yes, it was bad. 2,000 or whatever it was innocent people dying is a very bad thing. But thousands more die every day from poverty/starvation/aids/disease/civil war/american foreign policy. But do we hear about them? Ofcourse not, because it's not Americans dying. Well, it's reported in the news but it gets none of the attention that the bombings did, not a fraction.
And THIS is why I refuse to say "9/11". It does not deserve a special date title. We don't have special title for Stalin's purges, Mao Tse Tung's lunacy, and all the assorted massacres in Africa and South America. We know of them, but they don't get a special title, when they were so much worse.
So please, someone give the film a fair rating, not just 5-stars because it is the most tragic tragedy ever.

Wii

WHY did they rename the Revolution the Wii?
You go into Game. "Excuse me, I'd like a Wii please," etc.
They apparently decided that the name "Revolution" was too much like the Xbox 360.
WHAT?
WHAT IN THE FLAMING FUCK?
They share a single letter. That is all. How is "Letter+shape+number" the same as "Political action"? The name also shows that Nintendo pay NO ATTENTION to the European/American market. They said the name "shows unity and unites gamers" or some such nonsense, ie it sounds like the word "we."
However, they really should have considered the other meaning. Rolls Royce once produced a car called the "Silver Mist" and failed to check what it meant in other languages. Sounded alright in English, in German it meant Silver Dung.
One last thing for Nintendo is hiring better game-trailer-filming-playing-people. Too many trailers of Resident Evil 4 (to take one example) are played by a fool who seems unable to aim at the slowest-moving and weakest zombie in the game. Nintendo, you've messed up big-time.