[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ferrelgiraffe', ' ')that swims up your dangling participle

[TheDude]

That's a deep sea fish, like the Humpback anglerfish.



Everything you wanted to know about the deep sea, from New Scientist. They look very badass but none have ever survived a trip to the surface - they've evolved to live in super high pressures. Since you'll never get near one outside of your Alvin submersible you've nothing to fear.

NEO being a parent on the other hand is pretty scary.

[taxus-brevifolia]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'M')y three year old son confided in me that he thought there was a Winnie the Pooh monster in his closet.

I'd like to see a Winnie the Pooh monster.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ferrelgiraffe', 'T')here are worse fish.

[SinisterBlueCat]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('oswald622', 's')ince this is a thread about paranoia, i thought i'd come here to share and indulge my most paranoid fantasies.

on the back country roads near napa, at 1 or 2 am in the morning, a few weeks ago, i saw a couple tractors pulling strange equipment. the drivers were wearing hazmat suits. at first i didn't believe my eyes, so i turned around a few minutes later to drive back and get a better look, and sure enough, that's what they were wearing. i tried following them to see what they were up to, where they were going, and they got visibly agitated. when that happened i got scared and drove away.

this weekend, the labor day weekend, the SF bay bridge is closed. there have been signs advertising this fact EVERYWHERE. i read somewhere that the bridge hasn't been closed for a long time. it brings to mind minnesota, and recent warnings from terror 'experts' that the next targets will be our transport infrastructure. it brings to mind the mysterious shutdowns of the towers before 9.11.

out by mather air force base, near sacramento, there are a bunch of housing developments (which are what took me out there). the roads leading into the base have recently been closed off. i read on a conspiracy site somewhere that mather is one of the sites planned for detention once the boot comes down.

my unscientific prediction therefore: the next incident will take place in northern california (probably elsewhere as well). my gut tells me it will be something spectacular - i'm thinking SF will get hit with a low yield nuke or dirty bomb, and all the bridges will come down too, trapping horrified denizens, maximizing panic and producing plenty of psychological effect for the cameras. i'm guessing the 'perpetrators' will turn out to be 'homegrown terrorists' of a sort - as this will be rich for propaganda. 'those left coast radicals (i.e. all who oppose this endless war) got what they deserved...let us not make the same mistake; let us resolve to recommit to our fearless leader, and stamp out dissent...'

[PenultimateManStanding]

the Candiru, aaarrrrgghhh! you'd think that people would have learned never to piss in the Amazon or any of it's tributaries. I'm not going any where the Amazon, period. I guess they don't call it "green hell" for nothing.

[Carlhole]

[align=center][/align]

Exile.ru

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Schopenhauer Awards', '.')..It just settles into the muddy bottom of shallow bays and estuaries, perfectly camouflaged as a lump of mud and algae, and waits to envenom an unlucky fisherman or wading child.

Every year, thousands of people step on this little booby-trap. Within seconds, they're screaming in agony, because this sluggish, slow-swimming lump of flesh has one suberbly designed feature: a set of spines sticking up from its back, perfectly angled to jab deeply into your foot.

Stonefish venom can kill you -- but only if you're lucky. Most researchers agree that a stonefish sting is the most intense pain a human being can experience. An Australian surfer who was stung wading out to the waves said that even though the doctors gave him shot after shot of morphine, the pain was unendurable, completely beyond anything he'd ever experienced. He only stopped screaming to beg the doctors to cut off his leg. When they refused, he asked them to kill him. When he lunged for a scalpel to stab himself with, they tied him to the bed and let him scream. The agony went on for months. Even when the pain fades to merely agonizing levels, the victim is likely to suffer nerve damage and will never walk properly again.

Try finding the saving grace in that story. Try explaining why a benevolent deity went to so much trouble to design such an extraordinarily sophisticated, efficient poison-delivery system-and then installed it on a fish so well camouflaged that not even the most careful fisherman or wader has a chance to spot it.

We'll let Schopenhauer have the last word: "Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, then our existence must have no object whatever."

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('NEOPO', 'I') suggest trying not to speak in absolutes unless you are absolutely certain of that which you speak thus we are concerned and many are doing and/or attempting to do something about it.

As far as an explanation for why it wont be a total disaster, no comment as it probably will be...

[Carlhole]

The God Who Hates

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Schopenhauer Awards', 'N')o, he doesn't exist. And yes, he does hate women.

The term "God who hates women" isn't from Schopenhauer or any of the usual misogyny suspects. It's from Andrea Dworkin. And she means it. She thinks that the world was created by a God who truly, deeply hates women. Dworkin, the fiercest and most honest of feminist theorists, agrees on this with the nastiest of the misogynists. After all, misogyny of the crude sort is essentially victim-blaming, the usual coward's strategy of pushing blame downwards rather than up where it belongs -- at the doorstep of the sadistic pig who made this universe. He -- and he's a "he," all right -- set things up so that women would live and die in pain.

What's he like, this "God who hates women"? Imagine that Darwin had an evil twin who grew up strangling kittens and masturbated to stories of the Children's Crusade. That's roughly what this God is like. Maybe he was snubbed at the inaugural prom back at Big Bang High School. Maybe he had a domineering mother-deity. We'll never know. All we know is his emanations, bathing us in a malice just barely, barely concealed as reality...

[PenultimateManStanding]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gros ... opf-02.jpg scorpion fish are said to be as painful as the stonefish.

this one is also extremely painful as well as being totally bizarre in appearance.

[Carlhole]

OK, last one, I promise!

Dicrocoelium Dendriticum

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Schopenhauer Awards', ' ')...Let's zoom in on a lovely field of grass. As we move closer, we see that the ground is covered with thousands of little eggs. These are the cute little newborn liver flukes, just waiting for a host organism to give them a ride on their way to bigger things. And who do they count on for that ride? The humble snail. Now it might seem "yucky" to you, but the little flukes look forward to being sucked up by hungry snails.

They don't need to worry about ending up as snail food, because the snails can't digest the little flukes' tough egg sacs. The eggs slide right through yucky Mister Snail and end up in the snail's excrement, waiting for a transfer to their next host, the hardworking ant.

You see, ants have a real taste for snail excrement, and the little flukes need to get into an ant's gut to reach their dreams. So they let themselves get swallowed by the ant, then go to work. Pop! go the all the thousands of little flukes once they're in the ant's guts. Then they get their little teeth going, chewing and chewing until they've chewed their way right out onto the ant's exoskeleton.

Of course, the ant doesn't think it's much fun to feel all the little flukes' sharp puppy teeth chewing through his stomach. In fact, all those holes would kill the poor ant -- but the baby flukes have thought of everything. As soon as they've chewed their way out, they turn right around and patch up the holes they chewed.

It's not that the little baby flukes feel sorry for Mister Ant. No, they just need him alive a little bit longer, because they're going to use him as their getaway car in the next stage of their cruise to the top.

This is the wildest stage of the whole caper. You see, while hundreds and hundreds of little flukes are chewing through Mister Ant, one little fluke -- just one, who's elected by the whole bunch -- gets the important job of chewing his way up into Mister Ant's little brain. This little secret-agent fluke has a mission: he's got to chew up part of the ant-brain. All the other little flukes, waiting on the ant's belly, are depending on this one special friend.

When the little lobotomy is completed, the ant turns into nothing but a fluke limo! He climbs up to the top of the nearest blade of grass and clamps on to it, steered by the fluke in his brain. That's the end of the line for Mister Ant, but the start of a great time for all the little flukes. They're listening for their next helper, the silly old sheep!...

The little liver fluke is teasing us with its crazy hijinks. It wants us to see how funny, and scary, and horrible the world is. Why, this world is Hell, the little fluke giggles to us, waving at us from the carcasse of the ant at the top of the blade of grass! It wiggles like the worms in Eraserhead, dancing around just like they did and teasing us to make us slit our throats to make it stop. But it won't EVER stop! And that's the funniest part of all, for the cute little parasites: it won't ever, ever stop!...

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', 'O')K, last one, I promise!

Dicrocoelium Dendriticum


I'm contacting them about doing a piece on Peak Oil!

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I', 'H')i Mark Ames et al,

Please, please, please! Do a piece on Peak Oil!

Come on! The Schopenhauer Awards have only begun to warm up with spicy descriptions of The Candiru or Why God Hates Women even though he doesn't exist!

I must say I enjoy reading The Awards pieces as much as I enjoyed reading 'Essays & Aphorisms' by the master cynic himself.

I'd love for your gifted writer(s) to do a piece on the subject of maximum world oil production and subsequent decline - just as the world's gargantuan and burgeoning population, it's advanced industrial economies and fully oil-dependent agribusiness urgently depend on finding more energy. Lots of it.

What is Peak Oil?

Every oil well, every oil field, every oil province (and now 2/3 of all oil producing countries in the world) has seen it's energy bonanza gush out of the ground at first, reach a point of seemingly endless bounty just as a relentless decline sets in ultimately leading to poverty where once riches flourished - this will happen to the world as a whole! It's just a question of when! And we are nowhere near prepared!

Some say this will lead to something worse than the great depression. Some say there will be a mass die-off. These people are appropriately called "Doomers". At any rate, Peak Oil appears more real with every passing month. And it is far too ugly a truth for politicians or media to talk about. That's why we hear more about Britney's ass cheeks than we do about the imminent return to the stone age. Some even place Peak Oil at the heart-of-the-matter behind the Iraq War with evil oil genius, Dick Cheney calling all the shots.

More gushers out there? Not a chance. If there were. why would we waste a single fart's worth of precious natural gas on the expensive, wasteful, environmental horror of Alberta as people scramble to try to make up for losses by trying to convert tar sands into oil. A Spindletop Alberta surely ain't! It's a stop-gap desperation measure! They have to steam the tar off the sand using limited fresh water and finite natural gas reserves. Some say it's like using caviar to make fake crab meat!

We are also seeing the countries of the world compete in an urgent scramble after the presumed oil deposits in the hostile Arctic region, five miles below sea level no less. Frigid temperatures, icebergs floating all around, another pristine habitat on the eve of ruin - all for oil. We are junkies for the stuff. And there's no adequate replacement!

Corn ethanol is all the rage, ultimately driving up grain prices and the price of meats in a hopeless effort to replace loss of cheap oil of the past. Our whole civilization is based upon petroleum! Plastics, fertilizers, refrigeration, transportation...
Our whole globalized world economic system is based on plentiful cheap oil!

Anyway, we at www.peakoil.com would love to see The Schopenhauer Awards do a piece on how God has allowed the human race to build up it's population and soaring level of creature comforts just to watch us writhe in agony as the rug is pulled out from underneath us at our highest moment of advancement.

Here are some other good links:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
http://wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/

And don't forget this, most Schopenhaurerian, link!
http://dieoff.org/page125.htm

"The Olduvai Theory:
Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age
by Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D.

1. INTRODUCTION
In 1989, I concluded that the life-expectancy of Industrial Civilization is horridly short. This hypothesis was defined in terms of a measurable index, world energy-use per person, and named the "transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization." I sketched its maximum point at 1990, followed by a persistent decline (see Note 1). Back then, however, I had no data to support this claim.

The ratio of world annual energy-use to world population gives a robust, testable profile of Industrial Civilization. Over the past six years, I devised a quantitative basis for the theory and gathered several sets of world energy and population data to test it (Note 2). In these pages, the name "Olduvai theory" means the same as "transient-pulse theory," used in previous papers (Note 3).

[ Note 1: 'Industrial Civilization' includes all capital investments and international trade agreements such as GATT, EU, and NAFTA. 'GATT' means General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; etc.
Note 2: 'World energy' includes oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear- and hydroelectricity. Energy and population data are available from several sources, e.g., United Nations publications.
Note 3: Since the 1950s, the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania has been strongly associated with human origins and the Stone Age way-of-life. In this discussion, 'Olduvai theory' is a metaphor. It suggests our impending return to a Stone Age way-of-life.]

Please have a quick look at Figures 1 and 2. But before getting into the details, in the next section I'd like tell a detective story."

Thanks, hope you decide to include Peak Oil in the Schopenhauer Awards!

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', '
') That's why we hear more about Britney's ass cheeks than we do about the imminent return to the stone age.


I sent it!

[PenultimateManStanding]

btw, I heard Britney sing once and I thought "ouch!" So I figure, she must have some pretty fine ass cheeks to get such attention.

[NEOPO]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('oswald622', 's')ince this is a thread about paranoia, i thought i'd come here to share and indulge my most paranoid fantasies.

on the back country roads near napa, at 1 or 2 am in the morning, a few weeks ago, i saw a couple tractors pulling strange equipment. the drivers were wearing hazmat suits. at first i didn't believe my eyes, so i turned around a few minutes later to drive back and get a better look, and sure enough, that's what they were wearing. i tried following them to see what they were up to, where they were going, and they got visibly agitated. when that happened i got scared and drove away.

this weekend, the labor day weekend, the SF bay bridge is closed. there have been signs advertising this fact EVERYWHERE. i read somewhere that the bridge hasn't been closed for a long time. it brings to mind minnesota, and recent warnings from terror 'experts' that the next targets will be our transport infrastructure. it brings to mind the mysterious shutdowns of the towers before 9.11.

out by mather air force base, near sacramento, there are a bunch of housing developments (which are what took me out there). the roads leading into the base have recently been closed off. i read on a conspiracy site somewhere that mather is one of the sites planned for detention once the boot comes down.

my unscientific prediction therefore: the next incident will take place in northern california (probably elsewhere as well). my gut tells me it will be something spectacular - i'm thinking SF will get hit with a low yield nuke or dirty bomb, and all the bridges will come down too, trapping horrified denizens, maximizing panic and producing plenty of psychological effect for the cameras. i'm guessing the 'perpetrators' will turn out to be 'homegrown terrorists' of a sort - as this will be rich for propaganda. 'those left coast radicals (i.e. all who oppose this endless war) got what they deserved...let us not make the same mistake; let us resolve to recommit to our fearless leader, and stamp out dissent...'

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'M')y view is the only way PO can be anything other than a total disaster is if MANY more people at least familiarize themselves with the scope of the problem before it slaps them in the face (like Clint Eastwood slapped that cop in the face with the fish in Every Which Way But Loose--just trying to tie it back to the dangerous fish theme that this thread seems to have fixated on).

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('NEOPO', '
')PMS deftly distracted me from this most excellent reason to worry with lil fishees!

[NEOPO]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('NEOPO', '
')PMS deftly distracted me from this most excellent reason to worry with lil fishees!