Rolling in the Deep.

“The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to ‘live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.’ ‘Living upon its principal,’ in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.”

In very related news, and in a somewhat overwritten but otherwise worthy piece, former GOP Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren summarizes the problem of America’s Deep State (a term Lofgren did not coin, borrowed from Turkey.) Think the military-industrial complex, now infused with financial sector/Pete Peterson-style rent-seeking. “[This] is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.”

“The Blood Harvest.”

“‘Every drug certified by the FDA must be tested using LAL,’ PBS’s Nature documentary noted, ‘as do surgical implants such as pacemakers and prosthetic devices.’ I don’t know about you, but the idea that every single person in America who has ever had an injection has been protected because we harvest the blood of a forgettable sea creature with a hidden chemical superpower makes me feel a little bit crazy. This scenario is not even sci-fi, it’s postmodern technology.”

In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal unearths the amazing secrets, and industry, surrounding horseshoe crab blood. “The thing about the blood that everyone notices first: It’s blue, baby blue…The iron-based, oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules in our blood give it that red color; the copper-based, oxygen-carrying hemocyanin molecules in theirs make it baby blue.”

Kaiju, Destroyer of Worlds.


“You’re not fooling anybody when you say that what happened was a natural disaster…It was not an earthquake, it wasn’t a typhoon…God help us all.” Bryan Cranston seems more than a mite panicky in the new trailer for Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, also with Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Juliette Binoche, and David Strathairn. As I said last time around, I like that they’ve returned to the “what-have-we-wrought” nuclear horror of the 1954 original. I’m in.

Brevity Ate the Soul of Wit.

“My daughter won’t stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn’t help.”

By way of sententiae et clamores, some terrifying tales for the time-deprived: twenty two-sentence horror stories. “I can’t move, breathe, speak or hear and it’s so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.”

Berkday 14.

Today would have been Berk’s fourteenth birthday. I don’t believe in an afterlife — the end is The End, so enjoy it while it lasts — and if there is some sort of Rainbow Bridge out there, I expect Berk would probably be trying to base-jump off it regardless. So, when it comes to life after death, my memories and this here Interweb will have to do.

With that in mind, happy b-day, old man. The apartment’s too quiet without you.

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Small World, Big Universe.

“Most of us have trouble visualizing the height of buildings, or the distance it takes to get home from work, let alone things on an intergalactic scale. The above interactive graphic made by 14-year-old Cary Huang may be the best tool to help us understand our place in our vast universe. The interactive piece allows the viewer to zoom through scale and space, from quarks to galactic clusters.”

By way of Dangerous Meta and H-Twins, a handy and interactive chart of the scale of the universe. “The real genius of the interface is the ability to scroll back to a familiar object like a car — the time spent scrolling helps to convey a sense of size and distance.”

The House that Egon Built.

“‘He’s the least changed by success of anyone I know in terms of sense of humor, of humility, sense of self,'[said] the late Second City founder Bernie Sahlins…’He’s the same Harold he was 30 years ago. He’s had enormous success relatively, but none of it has gone to his head in any way.'”

Actor, writer, and director Harold Ramis, 1944–2014. Whether it’s Groundhog Day Ghostbusters, Stripes, Animal House, Caddyshack or some other film in his roster, at some point he probably made you laugh.

“These comedies have several things in common. They attack the smugness of institutional life, trashing the fraternity system, country clubs, the Army — even local weathermen — with an impish good will that is unmistakably American. Will Rogers would have made films like these, if Will Rogers had lived through Vietnam and Watergate and decided that the only logical course of action was getting wasted or getting laid or — better — both.”

Related from The New Yorker, 2004: Why Ramis’s comedies are still funny today. “The voice that Ramis originated — a defanged sixties rebelliousness that doesn’t so much seek to oust the powerful as to embolden the powerless — remains the dominant mode in comedy today.”

Update: “The ones who cultivate an inner calm while others are dropping around them might well have the tougher job. He was a straight man on and off the screen. But oh, what timing.” David Edelstein on Ramis.

Scorpy, Get Your Drums | Doctor & Danny.

“[T]he film would follow John and Aeryn’s son, D’Argo (or Little D, as we will always refer to him). Because their baby was exhibiting a set of interesting powers that made him a magnet for galactic villains, we find that John and Aeryn hide their son on Earth to grow up. Now the kid is 19 and ready to go into space with his parents.”

I’ll believe it when I see it. Nonetheless, word comes that a possible Farscape movie is in the works. “Monjo is [also] said to be writing a show that would star Dinklage as a dwarf detective for HBO.” Er…wouldn’t “detective for HBO” get the point across?

Also in Sci-Fi TV news, Peter Capaldi’s forthcoming Doctor gains an additional companion in Samuel Anderson. “Anderson will play Danny Pink, a teacher at Coal Hill School where companion Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) also teaches.” — Coal Hill also being the school the Doctor’s granddaughter attended way back in 1963. (Also not surprising that, to compensate for the lack of a “good boyfriend” doctor, they’d add an age-appropriate foil for Clara.)

Frattastic Four.

Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot staffs up with Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Miles Teller, and Jamie Bell. Eh…I get that they’re skewing for a younger crowd than fanboys-approaching-40, and Bell, Jordan, and Mara are all quality actors, I suppose. (Hopefully, this proves to be a more auspicious quartet for Jordan than Wallace, Bodie, Poot, and D’Angelo.) But, while I haven’t seen The Spectacular Now, I’m not feeling the guy playing Mr. Fantastic at all. Where’s the gravitas? This looks like something on the CW.

The Can Likes Kickbacks.

“In 2014, for the first time in three years, the vote to extend the nation’s debt ceiling did not bring the US to the brink of default in a high-stakes game of slash and burn…It was a striking turnaround for the forces of austerity. One of the biggest losers? The Campaign to Fix the Debt, the $40 million AstroTurf austerity group, financed by Pete Peterson and other Wall Street big wigs, and fronted by Maya MacGuineas, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Call it Alan Simpson’s last harrumph.”

In general, I think victory laps are a bad idea, especially since sequestration continues and it’s not like austerity is suddenly out of fashion in this godforsaken town. Nonetheless, The Nation‘s Mary Bottari looks at how citizen and netroots activism helped beat back (for now) the deficit witchhunt, and much of the corporate rapacity and profiteering attending it.

The pic above is my friend Alex Lawson crashing a Pete Peterson Astro-Turf event a few months ago. “‘Aaar!’ he said. ‘Fix the debt, but let me keep my corporate booty! Fix the Debt’s founders have more than $500 million in offshore corporate booty.'”