The Null Device

2003/7/29

Time Cube Central, Your Unofficial Timecube Resource, with video and audio clips and merchandise. And then there's LifeCube, with all the advice you need to live a cubic life, including Time Cube-conscious movie reviews:

There is no 1, 2, or 3 Towers. 4 is both macro and micro. Sauron can't occupy 2 Towers. Time Cube disproves Sauron.

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It has emerged that the Pentagon is setting up a futures market in terrorism, in which investors will be able to bet on terrorist attacks, assassinations, coups and other events in the Middle East.

The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts \x{2014} essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

All rather reminiscent of a similar project from a few years back. Its creator got several years in a US federal prison, I believe. Mind you, given that that was the work of a lone anarchist bampot whereas this has the approval of Uncle Sam, the two are morally entirely different.

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George Monbiot claims that, to some, America is a religion, This view which went back to Jefferson's day (no, it doesn't claim that the founding fathers were Pat Robertson-style fundamentalists; their god was a secular one) and the dispensationalist theologians who saw their nation as the New Jerusalem, though has gained more currency in recent days as some see the New American Century as a sacred mission in the stewardship of all Mankind.

So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq.
So those who question George Bush's foreign policy are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or "anti-Americans". Those foreign states which seek to change this policy are wasting their time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: "to defend ... the hopes of all mankind", and woe betide those who hope for something other than the American way of life.

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At an outdoor concert in Warwickshire, Australian pop star Dannii Minogue tried to alert the audience to a capsized boat in the lake behind them, by pointing frantically over their heads. Her fans, however, began pointing back, thinking it was a new dance move:

Teenage fan Gemma Jones, 13, said she had not realised anything was wrong. "I saw her doing this strange move which was not like her normal dance routines. I thought it might be some new sort of dance craze and started copying," Jones said.

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