Anniversaries: 50 Years Since the Building of the Berlin Wall

Preserved sign at Checkpoint Charlie (August 8, 2011). Image Source: Xinhua/Ma Ning via CNTV.

Today, Germans marked a minute's silence to observe the building of the Berlin Wall, which began today in 1961 and divided the city for 28 years.  Between 136 and 700 people died trying to cross the Wall in the city.  Parts of it were still up around Berlin until the mid-1990s.  Some even argue in favour of rebuilding portions of it, so that people understand what the divided city was like and what it meant. 

The Wall symbolized a punishing occupation inflicted by the victorious Allies, the growing intransigent stand-off between left- and right-wing political ideologies, and a terrible national defeat and failure, preserved in stasis for an entire generation.  It overshadowed a lost Cold War era of painful debate and broken introspection.  With time, novels like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and its masterful 1965 film version (including a critical scene at the Wall) demonstrated that that pain extended throughout the western world, perpetuating an unspoken but deep-seated sense that things had gone terribly wrong. See my post on the dismantling of the Wall in 1989 here.

Image Source: Tabloid Edition.

Anniversaries: Remembering H. G. Wells

George Pal's 1960 proto-Steampunk envisioning of H. G. Wells's time machine.  Image Source: Order of the Golden Sprout.

Today is the 65th anniversary of the death of H. G. Wells, known for his fin-de-siècle 'scientific romances,' published in the 1890s through the 1930s: "Following "The Time Machine" was "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896), "The Invisible Man" (1897), "The War of the Worlds" (1898), "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899), and "The First Men in the Moon" (1901). After this point he turned his prolific pen to social topics, history, and even a bit of hopeful prophecy with books like "Anticipations" (1901), "The Discovery of the Future" (1902), "Mankind in the Making" (1903), "The War in the Air" ,"War and the Future" (1917), "The Open Conspiracy" (1928), "The Shape of Things to Come" (1933), and "The New World Order" (1post on the anniversary of the author's death at 939)."  There is an excellent retrospective at Dark Dorset, here.  You can read many of his books for free at Project Gutenberg, online here.

Electronic Circuits Now Embeddable in Skin

Image Source: IO9.

eXistenZ, here we come!  That particularly creepy Cronenberg movie gave us a taste of what was to come (see it on Youtube here), and now it begins.  The title included a Magyar pun: Isten means God in Hungarian.  Pretty soon, we'll be checking our social networks on our wrists, with screens embedded in our arms.  The positive medical implications are great, at least.  IO9 is reporting:

A team of engineers today announced a discovery that could change the world of electronics forever. Called an "epidermal electronic system" (EES), it's basically an electronic circuit mounted on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements of your body. EES is a leap forward for wearable technologies, and has potential applications ranging from medical diagnostics to video game control and accelerated wound-healing. Engineers John Rogers and Todd Coleman, who worked on the discovery, tell io9 it's a huge step towards erasing the divide that separates machine and human.

The Death of Heroism and the DCnU Rebirth

The Justice Society of America, the first team of superheroes in comic book history, drawn by Alex Ross. (Hat tip: It's a Dan's World.)

I've written before about comic book superheroes as ancient gods that still survive in our culture.  They represent our most enduring grasp of right and wrong, the archetypes that come to us across the ages (see my post on Ur-memory of those ideas here), incredibly across thousands, perhaps even millions of years.  Looking at Green Lantern on a lunchbox or backpack, that seems an absurd assertion.  Perhaps we tolerate this pantheon of pagan deities in an era of mainstream Millennial religions precisely because the ancient gods have dwindled down to figures in comic mythologies that we tell children and youths; and these myths are not taken that seriously.

Yet the archetypes embedded here still have weight.  They also constitute serious commercial interests. That raises the question of why these archetypes over the past twenty years, and especially in the last ten (when DC has been under Dan Didio's leadership), have been undermined?  Why is DC Comics, the original classic superhero comics company, so preoccupied with the breakdown of heroes and heroism?  Why are their heroes dying?  Why are their characters being wiped from existence or rebooted in ways that taint them?  What does it mean when their core values are stripped from them?  Why are they being benched and sidelined?  And why are the Outsiders, classic Titans, Justice Society, and Doom Patrol the key casualties in this reboot?  I've commented on the JLA-centric generational and Bat-commercial aspects of the reboot which left the JSA, Doom Patrol and Titans out in the cold here; and my posts on what the Titans and Doom Patrol signify are here and here.  There's a good series of posts this week on what fans are losing as the DCU dies, over at It's a Dan's World (here).

Anonymous Vows to Destroy Facebook

Image Source: All Facebook.

Oh, imagine the chaos if Facebook were to be eradicated.  PC Mag reports that Anonymous is planning to do so November 5 (as in, Guy Fawkes Night, V for Vendetta, etc. etc.):

Anonymous has vowed to "destroy" Facebook on Nov. 5. Or more accurately, somebody has set up a Twitter account and YouTube channel to announce a plan dubbed "Operation Facebook."

With the loosely affiliated hacktivist collective, it's always tough to know what's real, what's a feint, and what's a solo effort by some ambitious Anon to marshal the troops.

If Operation Facebook is real, it could mark a new phase for Anonymous, which in recent weeks has joined forces with the remnants of the more tightly knit hacker group LulzSec to target law enforcement agencies in an ongoing operation called Antisec. 

The "press release" announcing Operation Facebook does tie it in with Antisec, however. 

"Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause," reads the release, a full copy of which plus a video version is published below. Facebook, which "knows more about you than your family," according to the press release, "has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world." 

The author exhorts others to "join the cause and kill [F]acebook for the sake of your own privacy."

Religion and Time

Religion and time. Image Source: Symposia.

Is time the silver bullet that explains a lot of Millennial tensions and nameless dread?  From collapsing time to the end of times, from life cycles to prophecies, from religious seasons to the afterlife, a journal coming out of University of Toronto, Symposia, is investigating the pressured quality of time in the new Millennium and its relationship with religion. So far, it has more questions than answers.  The editors are:

investigating the link between religion and time. Ours has been described as a society suffering from space-time compression, a state in which ‘time passes us by’ and we are forever ‘running out of time’ as global capitalism speeds up the pace of life. Closely related to this, some might argue, time plays a key role in many of our anxieties – in the ‘panicked nature’ of reactions to perceived emergencies, in which action is constantly required now, lest delay bring disaster, or in the nervous approach of December 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar. As a cultural element, religion is not immune to these influences, as we observe with the eschatological guessing-game of some Christian groups. But how are religion and time related in a given context ...?

Pre-History Meets Post-History

First aerial footage of 'uncontacted' Brazilian tribes (February 2011) © BBC/Funai/Survival.  Video Source: Uncontacted Tribes.

Prehistory is about to encounter Posthistory.  Reports are coming out of Brazil that 'uncontacted' Amazon tribespeople, who live in near-Prehistoric conditions and until now were only periodically buzzed by their lobby group and the BBC, are about to be overrun by drug traffickers (Thanks to C.).  The area where they live is surrounded by guard posts built by the government, and these have been breached.  Evidence suggests that traffickers, moving in from the nearby Peruvian border, have already made contact.  From Scoop:

The Brazilian guard post protecting the uncontacted Indians who were filmed from the air earlier this year has been over-run by heavily-armed men, suspected to be drug-traffickers. It has been ransacked and vital equipment destroyed. Fears are now mounting for the welfare of the Indians after workers from FUNAI (the government’s Indian Affairs Department) found one of the traffickers’ rucksacks with a broken arrow inside. A rapid survey by government officials has shown no trace of the Indians, who made worldwide headlines in February. Police have reportedly found a package containing 20kg of cocaine nearby. It is feared the Envira River, where the post is located, has become an entry point into Brazil for cocaine smugglers from Peru.

There's more on this situation at Neglected War. 

Look Skyward: The Perseids

A Perseid falling star in 2007. Image Source: Wiki.

The Perseids meteor shower is peaking this week and next in the Northern Hemisphere.  The meteors are the spacedust chunks from Comet Swift-Tuttle, and named for the the word Perseides (Περσείδες), those born of Perseus and Andromeda.  Go outside, look to the Northeast near the North Star, and make a wish.  There is some concern that the full moon will block the view.  Rich Talcott, senior editor of Astronomy magazine:

“The key thing is to position yourself so there’s a tree or building blocking the moon. That won’t solve the whole problem, but it will mitigate it. ... [Or avoid the moon by going] out at 4 or 4:30 Aug. 11 [the shower's peak]: There will be a 30-minute window after the moon sets, and you might see 15 to 20 meteors an hour.”

Even if you live somewhere where you can't see them, they're there.  The ancients believed that stars fell when the heavens opened and the gods peeked down to regard Earth, spilling stardust upon us.  And just for that moment, if you caught their ear, they would hear you and answer your prayers.  See my earlier post on the mythology around falling stars here.

Image Source: Astronomy Magazine via News Press.