"...You fear your own power. You fear your anger, the drive to do great or terrible things."
Continuing Liberian dysfunction - Liberia’s press: Boycotting the president | The Economist:
"Liberia’s press called for a blackout on coverage of the president, following comments made by the head of the Executive Protection Services, Daniel Othello Warrick, at World Press Freedom Day on May 3rd. The event, hosted by the Press Union of Liberia, was on media and security relations. But the president’s chief bodyguard, delivered a speech accusing the media of character assassination and cautioning journalists against getting involved in “presidential intelligence”. “Be careful questioning the integrity of Liberians,” Mr Warrick warned. “Be careful, because you have your pens, and if you incriminate the character and integrity of Liberians like myself, we will come after you.”"
"Early ventriloquists and their dummies. Why, no, nothing creepy about ventriloquists at ALL."
"The other major memory is of performing scenes with Leonard Nimoy. It’s one thing to work with an actor you have known all your life but to meet a character, in context, that was something beyond description. Having Mr Spock look into my eyes and say “You are Montgomery Scott”, my brain was quietly short circuiting as I tried to remember my lines. I clearly remember thinking “holy shit, I’m in Star Trek”."
"Forget Afghanistan, Syria, and the war or terror. Barack Obama's administration now finds itself embroiled in a three-front domestic war that threatens to undermine public confidence in the U.S. president's ability to lead the nation. The first of these, which has yet to quiet down, is the enormous dispute over the timeline involving acknowledgment of al Qaeda's involvement in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The second involves the recent revelation that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) focused special scrutiny on applicants for tax-exempt status that sported Tea Party or other "small government" credentials. The last, and potentially most serious, is the recent revelations that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered extensive investigation into Associated Press (AP) reporters in April and May 2012."
Ooh, look! Batman!
When there is evidence a hypothesis is disproven, it is no longer valid. Oh, look. Saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease.
" The serum cholesterol levels are 35 to 40 mg higher in Tokelauans than in Pukapukans. These major differences in serum cholesterol levels are considered to be due to the higher saturated fat intake of the Tokelauans. Analysis of a variety of food samples, and human fat biopsies show a high lauric (12:0) and myristic (14:0) content. Vascular disease is uncommon in both populations and there is no evidence of the high saturated fat intake having a harmful effect in these populations."
"Fantastic Four Vol. 2, #5AU"
"Iraq is a basket case these days, and none of its problems came out of the blue. In the latest bout of sectarian and ethnic bloodletting, coordinated bomb attacks ripped through Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and also northern Iraq, killing more than 30 people. The spasm of violence followed clashes between the Iraqi army and Sunni protesters and insurgents last month, where the federal government temporarily lost control of some town centers and urban neighborhoods in Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Diyala provinces. Negative indicators abound: Armed civilian militias are reactivating, tit-for-tat bombings are targeting Sunni and Shiite mosques, and some Iraqi military forces are breaking down into ethnic-sectarian components or suffering from chronic absenteeism. Numerous segments of Iraq's body politic -- Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia -- are exasperated over the government's inability to address political or economic inequities, and are talking seriously about partition."
"Babies tend to believe that whatever information is obvious to them must be obvious to the world at large. Although we, intellectually, know that other people can't possibly know what's on our mind, there remains that lingering sense that we're communicating everything to the outside world. Games like Taboo and Pictionary capitalize on both sides of that frustration — especially when the player gets stuck in a loop because they can't possibly imagine that anyone could be dense enough not to understand what they've been communicating, while their team is going out of their minds with frustration because two circles and a square don't help us understand what you're trying to say, no matter how many times you underline them, Gary! (Sorry, I may be remembering something traumatic.)
But we don't need official games, or psychological experiments, to trip us up in this regard. In life it often seems clear to us that we've communicated something — enough information to get to a destination, our own discomfort at a situation, or the fact that we're only joking when we make a sarcastic remark — only to be surprised when people don't understand us. We're not as transparent, either with our mouths or our body language and expression, as we think we are. We don't understand that other people aren't trapped in our head with us."
"Discussing the structure of "Multiversity" and its forty-page nine issue run, Morrison says the first and last issue, ostensibly bookends, act as an “80-page giant DC super-spectacular story, in between which we have seven comics, each of which come from a different parallel universe, so they all have a slightly different trade dress…a different storytelling approach…each one is drawn by a different artist.” Briefly discussing the history of the DC multiverse, wherein each alternate reality vibrates at a frequency slightly out of phase with the other earths, Morrison gushes over the idea of “comic book universes as music”, a concept he played with in Final Crisis. “When you hear them all together they make the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard, and you can choose whatever [music] you want that to be.”
...
“Ultra Comics” will be a story set in the real world and involves the technology Morrison had mentioned earlier, which he refuses to talk about before the issue is released because “it will blow your mind. This comic will possess you. This comic is haunted, is all I’m going to say.” He promises to “make a superhero in front of” the reader in our own world. Morrison also promises a guidebook to the Multiverse will accompany the series, which he calls his magnum opus...
“The world we have to deal with,” he says, “is the world of the meat and the bone and the blood and death and decay”, he says of the genesis of The Filth, his personal favorite of his works which he describes as the flip-side of the coin that is The Invisibles. As he approached forty, “everything that upset me or freaked me out I tried to turn into comedy or poetry in order to absorb it a little bit more and learn from it and hopefully everybody could learn from it ‘cause we all go through the same crap...
“We all have attachments,” he says. “One of my cats who was born during the creation of The Invisibles just died a month ago and it was just devastating…but we all have attachments, and the existential weirdness of being human and being self-conscious in a universe where you know you’re going to die and you know you’ve got agency and all kinds of things could happen and they tend not to, and that was The Filth. It was kind of trying to be honest about the moments in our lives when they aren’t really working. We’re all becoming starchildren.”
...Morrison the shaman had one final message for the human race he so intensely loves. “Do your own thing. Be honest to yourself. There’s no genius, there’s no any of that. It’s just all of us. Just express yourself. No one will ever have your life, so tell me what it feels like. That’s all I’m trying to do. No one will ever see things the way I see, so here’s what it looks like! And, anyways, we’re all kind of the same, so….Turn it into poetry, turn into stories, turn it into something meaningful, and pass it on. The mind is all, we’re all together in this…the chances of being alive in the universe, the chances of existing as opposed to not existing, it’s so massive. And here we are, all existing right now, at the same time as Lady Gaga and George Clooney, and we’re all together in this…It’s not like Shakespeare and all of these people who are dead. It constantly blows my mind.”"
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