News comes mainly from newspapers, TV or blogs. But even the newspapers and TV companies publish their content online these days, generally with comment facilities for the public to make their opinions known. This turns out much as you'd expect.

News published from 10th December 2019 to 1st January 2020

(From the Herald Tribune, 8th January 2020)

CARE International and Médecins Sans Frontières last night announced their withdrawal from Hong Kong, after the worst areas of the city became “a total disaster zone… not safe for anyone”, according to local sources.

Police are desperately trying to control violence in the region, as fires set by rioting civilians and gang members rage across many of the city's docks, endangering millions of dollars worth of cargo.

In what locals have described variously as “rioting”, “police brutality” and “gang warfare”, rival triad groups have been responsible for a series of explosions and shootings across the city. Local news sources suggest that the “Green Devil” Triad has the support of much of the civilian population, after attempts to protect bystanders from the worst of the violence.

Opposing enforcers, meanwhile, led by the mysterious Tang Huai Jun - who is rumoured to have been the subject of numerous assassination attempts in recent weeks, the latest leaving several civilians dead and supposedly resulting in the deaths of his senior lieutenants - have been ruthless and bloody in their actions. In the most highly publicised of these clashes, Tang Huai Jun's men apparently deliberately detonated a warehouse full of influenza vaccine, causing outrage and protests across the city and an announcement from the Chinese premier that this “barbarous and savage assault on our citizens” will be met with “the highest force”.

Local newspapers have been reporting that an apocalyptic cult, whose name translates roughly as the “Church of Bob the Destroyer”, has claimed responsibility for the attack on the vaccine warehouse. Reuters has not yet confirmed whether or not this organisation can be positively linked to Tang Huai Jun and his men. Widespread looting and rioting in the area around Junk Town has led some locals to report that Tang Huai Jun's forces have been “driven back” to the area, with the Green Devils effectively controlling the rest of the city.

Police, meanwhile, are working valiantly to keep a lid on the situation, with SWAT teams working around the clock to respond to reports of violence. Civilians are being encouraged to stay in their homes, though many have already fled to stay with relatives on the mainland.

• 3. Mithrandir: Nonsense. These people don't appear on Freenet any more than any other secure channel. It's just that they're more visible on Freenet because it isn't quite as secure as people think. Anyone stupid enough to make grand announcements like the one in this story is probably lying for the attention, anyway. The government would track them down and jail them within a couple of days if they were for real.
• 5. The_Tsarina_Lives: I've never heard of this #CLASSIFIED# channel, and last I tried it doesn't even exist. Typical Daily Mail “journalism” - never check the facts. I bet the author got this story from a friend of a friend, right?
• 12. Red_07: Isn't Freenet supposed to be illegal anyway?
• 13. Mithrandir: Red - Not yet, the bill has been held up in the Lords.
• 25. CarolBurns1: Well I think this proves that the government were right. Good on you, Ms. White! I don't know or care what this “Freenet” is, but if it has terrorists in it, then clearly it should be shut down. -Carol
• 40. lookbehindyou: Well, if those evil terrorists said they would kill again, why aren't the police doing something more concrete about it? We know where they are and what they are saying! It could be my town where they murder next!

A similar story appears across the front pages of the majority of British newspapers, accompanied by a photo of a good looking, but otherwise not especially notable man who looks to be in his late 20s. The name given is Wesley Carter. Police have warned people not to approach him, as he is suspected armed and dangerous.

• 3. BigBullDog: I hope I find him first, so that I can give him a punch in the face from all right thinking British citizens. Death to terrorist scum!
• 21. AutoCthon: He looks so normal…you could pass him in the street and not realise that he could be planning his next murder.
• 35.AprilDay: The Aprilists are trying to bring down the corrupt, evil state and set you free! Don’t buy into the government’s lies! Anarchy in the UK!
• 47.TrueBrit16: Proof to all who need it that torture is sometimes justified. Presumably his mates decided to dob him in once the police did what needed to be done.
• 51.Rmbr: @ BigBullDog: I can’t decide if you being a troll would make your comments more or less depressing.

• 5.AllDove : This is why the GOP have my vote forever; I don’t want my children to live in a socialist nightmare state like the UK.
• 14.JohnDoe254: @AllDove: That’s a rather naive view when the CIA were doing the same thing 15 years ago, though I’ll admit that the current administration is a lot better.
• 24.HickStick: I wonder how they got the tapes out. Not like the faceless MI5 enforcers to be so careless. I hope they don’t bring in Australian style firewalls around the UK.
• 35.TickleMeAlamo: The more I hear from Weissmuller the more I like him. Shame he’s only 33, otherwise he could shoot for VP next year.
• 44.Truthor: What everyone seems to be forgetting among the torture stuff (grim though it is) is that tapes from the attack seem to show that there was only a piddling EMP bomb, not the massive device MI5 were sqwarking about. My guess is that the aprilists were set up as someone's patsy.

• 2. YeahYeahYeah: That's bullshit, everyone knows the NWO runs the US, they're sending supplies down. Why do people print this shit?
• 5. BennieUSA: @YeahYeahYeah STFU, America's the land of Freedom, dipshit!
• 8. Nibiru22: Word.
• 23. Skidoo: No way the Elders of Atlantis are gonaa go down so easily. They've got fricking laser beams, man!
• 24. TaserBoy: @Skidoo You're obviously no scientist. There's no way that anyone has a laser powerful enough and focused enough, with the amount of attenuation of the water and reflection of microscopic organisms, debris etc there range would be minimal and the power requirements prohibitive. They almost certainly use torpedoes.

• 3.AlanS: Whoah, that is pretty scary. I live three streets down from him. Its weird to think there would be a serial killer so close y'know?
• 23.MkK3ns1: Oh hope they find the bastard soon.
• 33.BakeSale332: Why did the police let him get away in the first place? As I hear it they were told all about him and failed to act.
• 47.ImprovedRespondant: The police have a lot to answer for if he strikes again.

• 7.LordP00: Hutton knows what he is doing - holding the line against the state! Go Lord H!
• 18.L3murb0y: But do they not understand that the bill will progress anyway, all this stupid point scoring has only delayed it by 3 months.
• 22.Blockdead007: Points of Order? Committe Review? Where is the democracy in all this?
• 39.ScottAdamOasis: So Lord Hutton knows his constitutional process and stops the use of the emergency legistative powers? Cunning, but I bet he does not survive the month.
• 46.Officeboyz: All he has done is stop us getting the protection we need. He should be the first one strung up!
• 51.MIC99: I heard they had Neurodyne Defence Dynamics working on the database system for this, and it's not going to be ready for a few months anyway.

• 3.KeKeKek: Interesting read, although a bit slow, never really finds its feet as either an academic or popular culture read.
• 5.SoFistIcated: What is the point of this book then?
• 7.WitchGrrl: I am SO trying out some of the stuff he talks about!
• 8.Bobo67: WitchGrrl: It ain't real, did you not even read the intro??

• 5.VirtualMoron: Let's be realistic - the President's only chance of getting the nomination and running again is if he puts Blane on the ticket.
• 9.Sr.Smart: Isn't Jones leaving it suspiciously late to name a running mate?
• 13. Treeeize: Give the man a chance, Matthews has barely been in the ground a few months.
• 18. MicroCrunch: This Blane is an interesting guy - I hear he gets good press on civil rights and freedom of speech, as well as a good healthy dose of the sort of goodolboy guns-and-cattle stuff that brings those corn-fed Iowa boys to the polling booths.
• 26. ClosetGhoul: Blane seems a bit too good to be true to me - what's he hiding?
• 30. RunningGal: JB still faces some pretty serious opposition - people like Peterson, Hannil and McNamara might not be honest contenders for the Veep slot, but they could sap his popularity and damage Jones badly if they wanted to.

• 4. Sir_Slade_San: I'm genuinely worried about this. It's good that the earthquakes haven't been so destructive, but there's something weird about this.
• 9. Bane_Osaka: Some good shots of her thighs in this one. I'll always be a viewer.
• 21. Ex_Oblivione1999: So, what do you think of the 'mystery footage'? Just an alligator, right?
• 22. Yonder_Pedant: @Ex_Oblivione1999 it would be a crocodile if it was in the congo now, wouldn't it? And no, it was completely the wrong shape.
• 37. SlumDog203: Im sure it was a reptile of some sort but it looked a but like one of those frilles lizards like they have in australa. Which is wierd!
• 45. Spencermill: She's certainly eclectic in her recent choices of documentary topic. Still, it's good that she goes for more unusual things rather than so many of the mainstream documentaries about africa and the amazon.
• 46. Nico_Angel2000: Indeed. These warnings about the new volcanic ridge are pretty stark, but as you say nice to have someone covering it. I almost feel safer.

• 10. Pax_Moronis: Holy Moly. He's coming straight for Johannesburg. I need to get outta here!
• 14. Hardcork15: Hell yeah, they rock! I heard them in Eindhoven!
• 25. Th3_Sh1n1ng: Well, it looks set to be a long tour. They're headed to Russia after J-Burg.
• 39. X_Fake_Hat_X: Word is: They're trying to play in Sydney and Canberra. How loud can you shout AW HELL NAW.

• Penguins are our overlords, but the Gigant Albino Penguin is the king of these birds - Scratched into the loo of an Antartic base. More probably this time.
• Fuck The State - Aprilist
• Go Mad Dogs! - Middleton, Oxfordshire
• Knights In Satan's Service. - Los Angeles
• coefficient of weirdness - York
• And, in parting from you now,
  Thus much let me avow - Johannesburg
• It's full of tunnels - Cambridge
• Higgs isn't even a Real Doctor. - Los Angeles
• UuuuuuuLaaaaaaaaaa! - Woking, UK
• Welcome to my secret lair on Skullcrusher Mountain - Tokyo
• Exp'd Drummer willing to do anything to make it. December 1972. - Los Angeles
• MR You won't catch me that easily - seen in comments on numerous supernatural forums
• モスラ! - Tokyo
• Hey Samson, why so glum? Cos the Man gotcha people and they got more than guns - Scrawled near the entrance to GCHQ Cornwall
• Open up, they're coming inside - Addis Ababa
• SIVEL YELTSA KCIR! SEVOL YELTSA KCIR! - across Britain
• LEVIS LEVIS LEVIS - Apia

”…a good Turing test is not the traditional setup; a good Turing test is to ask the intelligence to design its own Turing test. This will reveal its consciousness and its understanding of consciousness much better than a standard test. Ok, that last paragraph is me passing the Turing test. Could you pass it too?”

”…if Area 51 is so full of secrets, what happened to the first 1-50 areas?”

Stay safe on the interwebs!

Hey-hey minna-chan!! So I've been hearing about a bunch of weird stuff recently with people going missing or maybe not going missing - I mean, how can you tell on the internet really, right? - but yeah anyway the thing is that there's a bunch of stuff you can do to make yourself more secure even if just for example you live in a country where they've made encryption software illegal. So here's a few tips!

~ make like a stegosaurus and look into steganography! it's a cool way of making one thing look like something else - kinda like hiding your jewels in an old beat-up suitcase instead of a shiny safe with an unpickable lock that - whoops! - gets picked in five mins

~ don't hand out your real life info like candy! you wouldn't believe what I could find out about you, for example, if I knew what school you went to!

~ get some good encryption software on your home machine. I can point you in the direction of some neat stuff if you drop me a line

~ and most importantly, DON'T THINK THAT YOU'RE NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH to be at risk! I dunno why people are going missing but it seems like plenty of them are just regular folks. So lock up tight and if you think you're being followed - online or in real life - TELL SOMEONE YOU TRUST. And if you want advice, you can always email me! ==

Kay that's it for now… you know I loooooooooove feedback <3 so let me know what you think and what sort of thing you'd like to hear from me in the future! Signing out now~

~~Summer~~

Angels and Demons

It's a well known fact that we exorcists get rid of pesky ghosts. Also, as any fan of pea soup vomiting and doing unspeakable things with crucifixes knows, we do demons. In the sense of “get rid of”, you pervert - “Mercury Does Demons” is definitely not coming to a top shelf near you. So, what exactly is the link anyway?

Demons, ghosts, and probably angels are all ethereal entities. I don't mean that in the sense that they live in the ether - just that they don't usually have a physical presence associated with them. A priest would doubtless tell you a demon is very different from a ghost. I'm not sure I agree. I have this theory - I've no wish to try testing it empirically, but see if you can follow the reasoning here.

Suppose some Anton Lavey wannabe decides to get really serious about communicating with the powers infernal. Now I've not read much in the way of demonic rituals, but I understand they're big on sacrifice, torture, that sort of Saturday night entertainment. So they commit some sort of unspeakable act involving the prolonged and painful death of someone and lo and behold a demon appears. Lucky them. Hopefully it eats them for their troubles, but then that's why they tend to do a binding too, just like you would for a ghost.

Here's the punchline, kiddies. I don't think they've summoned a demon, I think they've created one. I think that if someone is driven to the brink of insanity by the horror of their death, sometimes, just sometimes, you get something a whole lot worse than a poltergeist. An entity whose raison d'etre, whose soul motivating factor, is to cause pain and suffering because it's all that whatever consciousness that has been created by the events of the death knows. If you're really unlucky, the consciousness' intellect survives intact, and then there is one metric shitload of trouble.

Most traumatic deaths don't create a spirit like this. I don't even want to speculate about why some might end up this way. All I can say is it adds a whole new perspective on the Aztec Gods. Think about that for homework.

I suppose it follows then that angels must be the opposite. Consciousnesses that have ended in a state of extreme bliss or enlightenment, and want to pass it on to others. Theoretically it would be just as possible to exorcise an angel. I don't know for sure because people don't tend to call me in to deal with angel infestations. It just doesn't seem to bother them in the same way. I'd be curious though, to get a look at an angel sometime. It'd be good to know I was right for certain.

As I've said before, ghosts are just lasting impressions of a consciousness. Angels and demons then are just particularly extreme impressions.

“Citizens of the United Kingdom, brothers and sisters of humanity,

Over the past few days you will have seen evidence of systematic and horrific lying and abuse on the part of the British government and it's agencies of tyranny. As a representative of the Aprilists, it is my duty and pleasure to announce our full responsibility for this and to recognise the invaluble help of our allies across the globe. The acquisition and distribution of this material was yet another blow against the horror of this government, and another strike for the defence of Liberty, Justice and Truth - all conducted by us, without shame or embarrasement.

We demand the immediate termination of any and all torture currently conducted by the British government; we demand the immediate resignation of the British government; we demand the repeal of the new anti-encryption laws, which present such a dire threat to privacy and civil liberties; we demand the immediate introduction of emergency legislation criminalising torture and threatening the most severe sanctions against any who conduct it, order it or condone it; and we humbly plead that the Crown, the Font of Justice, appoints Lord Warren Spector as an emergency, interim Prime Minister, with the sole and explicit mandate to construct a government of truth and restore this country to the liberal democracy we claim and aspire to be.

We have proven the abuses and lies; we now urge all of you who support us, who cherish Truth, Civil Liberties, Privacy and Human Rights to join us in our demands and show your support and solidarity. Let us not let this country slip into the very depths of tyranny, which even now we are approaching all too quickly.

Finally, should our demands be answeared and Lord Spector be appointed, we shall call a general, universal and immediate halt to our activities, to allow the new Prime Minister time to correct the evils of the past years with new legislation and executive orders. But if our demands are not met, or any new government proves to be as tyrannical as those now and previously, we will not rest nor spare ourselve in the righteous crusade we wage.

In the name of Justice, Liberty, Truth and the April Martyrs,

Forward_unto_Dawn”

… The thing to remember about intellectual property is this: all of us own some, and who gets to do what with the contents of your head will be the next big social battle.

I'm not talking mind control here, I'm talking ownership of consciousness. Primarily we need to be moving away from the mindset that corporations have and implicit right to the contents of their employees heads. 'The information wants to be' was mine to give away, it came out of my brain, through my arms and my vocal chords into my machines. At some point in the future the arms and vocal chords will not be an intrinsic part of this process, and it will apply to everything, not just the creation of music. We also need to move away from the idea that the owner of a storage or processing medium automatically owns the software running on it, as with the horrors of the old Hotmail user lisence which granted Microsoft absolute copyright to their user's every word.

There may come a time when we live as data within machines of vast complexity and power, who owns those machines, and who owns the information within will be the biggest issue we will ever face…

I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in Me.

Just let me clear a few things up: I haven't been abducted by aliens, the Men In Black haven't dragged me off, and I've not been eaten by a chupacabra. I've just been spending the past few weeks in a happy codeine-fuelled daze. And before you ask, no, I'm not getting into discussing my medical issues here, and anyone suggesting I cure them with ear candling and crystals will get banned from the blog comments, as well as giving me another reason to campaign for more funding for my new Punching People Over The Internet project.

Until I'm off the drugs, here's some lolcats

Soooooo cute!!!

I've been so busy lately, I know I haven't had much time to blog! m(._.*)m ~ｺﾞﾒﾝ Please forgive me! But… in my spare time, when I probably should have been working anyway, I've been looking at old-time Sanrio characters - like this one, Shinkansen-chan, the adorable train! I remember seeing lunchboxes with him on! Awwww.
(^ ○ ^)Ka(^ ０ ^)wa(^ ▽ ^)iiii〜！！
But somehow that one animation seems a little creepy somehow… I dunno, maybe it's that the train doesn't stop… it just disappears for a bit… (ﾟo ﾟ);