At 7 PM on the night of 26 February 2012 in Sanford Florida, two men had an altercation in the rain that left one of them dead.
The people involved were 17 year old Trayvon Martin, black, and 29 year old George Zimmerman, Hispanic. They are the only two who know exactly what happened that night, and, unfortunately, Mr. Martin is dead so we can never have the complete story. What we do know is that someone started a fight that Mr. Zimmerman ended with a single gunshot.
The event ballooned into a media circus that lasted a year and a half until, 13 July 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second degree murder after what was very nearly a hung jury. Threats of violence, and some actual violence, erupted following the verdict. Protests were staged around the country. The President made two comments, one good, one bad. This is pretty much the most objective account of what has happened.
Now here's the part sprinkled with my analysis.
First, Sanford is a lower-middle class community with a crime problem. 18.5% of the population is below the poverty line. In 2011 the people of Sanford formed a neighborhood watch program to deal with the crime, with Zimmerman being appointed as the coordinator. George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin's father's fiancee (where he was living at the time) were renting homes in the town.
Trayvon Martin was not a kid, as many portray him. Neither was he innocent. He was not the ten year old seen in the pictures. He was a grown man, he portrayed himself as a thug on the Internet, and he was a petty criminal, having been suspended from school many times for painting graffiti and stealing jewelry. His parents were divorced. His mother sent him to live with his father because he was too much trouble for her. The night of the shooting he goes out in the rain to a 7-Eleven and call his friend Rachel Jeantel (who lacks all common sense and tact). After 18 minutes on the phone the call abruptly ends for unknown reasons. Martin was not most likely not buying candy at the 7-Eleven, he was buying ingredients for a drug popular in the hip hop gangster culture that he talked about frequently on the Internet. The drug, known as "purple drank," "lean," or "syrup" is made with cough syrup containing codeine or dextromethorphan (such as in Robitussin DM, which Martin was talking about with some friends on Facebook). He most likely was planning on mixing the Skittles and Arizona watermellon drink that he had purchased with the Robitussin to create "some fire ass lean," as one friend called it. Extended use of the cough syrup based drug is linked to liver damage and psychotic episodes.*
Next, George Zimmerman is often portrayed as "lily white", a "white-Hispanic", or as "mixed-race" by people trying to spin the case. Unsurprisingly, NONE of these same people call the President "mixed-race", "white-black", or "white" when both he and Zimmerman have one white parent. The President is 100% black and Zimmerman is white above any other races, if not entirely white. This is not because of his complexion or features. Zimmerman has dark skin and his eyes and other facial features clearly belong to someone who is not white.
According to the other wiki, "during the 18 months preceding the February 26 shooting, Zimmerman called the non-emergency police line seven times. On five of those calls, Zimmerman reported suspicious looking men in the area, but never offered the men's race without first being asked by the dispatcher." Zimmerman takes his job very seriously. I would argue too seriously. He was driving around with a gun, safety off, looking for suspicious men. 26 February he finds his sixth suspicious looking man, and this time it does not end well.
Zimmerman calls the police from his truck saying he has found yet another suspicious looking man. After four minutes he gets out of his truck to follow Martin because, as the tape indicates, Martin started running at this point. The dispatcher advises Zimmerman not to pursue Martin but he doesn't listen. Martin calls Rachel Jeantel back but his call gets disconnected again, for unknown reasosn.
Someone started the fight. When it was over Zimmerman was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head, Martin was shot in the chest and lie dead in the grass with bloody knuckles.
There were eight witnesses, of whom only two saw part of the altercation. They reported (from wiki):
A witness to the confrontation just prior to the shooting stated that Martin was on top of Zimmerman and punching him, while Zimmerman was yelling for help. This witness, who identified himself as "John", stated that "the guy on the bottom, who had a red sweater on, was yelling to me, 'Help! Help!' and I told him to stop, and I was calling 911". He went on to say that when he got upstairs and looked down, "the guy who was on the top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point."
One eye-witness statement given the night of the shooting describes "a black male, wearing a dark colored 'hoodie' on top of a white or Hispanic male who was yelling for help." The witness said that the black male was throwing punches "MMA [mixed martial arts] style." After hearing a "pop," he saw the black male "laid out on the grass." When the witness was subsequently interviewed weeks later by a different agency, the witness said he thought that the black male was either punching or pinning the lighter skinned male underneath him. He was no longer certain who was calling for help, having not seen their mouths in the dark. He was still certain that the black male had been on top of the lighter-skinned male.
The eighth witness, Jeantel, heard part of the altercation from the phone: "She then heard Martin say, "What are you following me for?" followed by a man's voice responding, "What are you doing around here?"" The phone then went silent.
What happened after that we can only speculate. Zimmerman asked Martin what he was doing out at night, then someone started the fight. Trayvon Martin was either the instigator or else he got the upper hand and had Zimmerman pinned to the ground and was whaling on him, or as Jeantel calls it "whoop ass." An audience member's mouth falls open at the revelation that Jeantel basically admitted it was Trayvon who started the fight. Foreign national Piers Morgan tried to pull her fat out of the fire by asking "if Trayvon was being attacked, would he have 'whooped ass' as you call it?" She immediately corrects him, saying that "whoop ass" cannot be conjugated to form "whooped ass". He nudged her a second time and she finally gave the answer he wanted, that yes, Trayvon was defending himself, because Android phones can't be turned off if you're the one on top in a fight.
There is a difference between beating someone to death and "whoop ass". "Whoop ass" is all fun and games, even if it leads to concussion and paralysis or death. It's the intent behind "whoop ass" that counts, and the intent is, well I don't know. Jeantel is about as clear as mud. I've understood dogs and cats better than I understand her. I don't know what the difference between "whoop ass" and a savage beating is, and according to Jeantel that misunderstanding is why Zimmerman killed Trayvon.
Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, listening to 9-1-1 recordings, testified that the person crying for help was not his son, although he later changed his story after the case. Sybrina, Trayvon's mother, testified that it was her son. A neighbor testified that it was Zimmerman. The FBI analysed the recordings and said the quality was too poor to determine whose voice it was.
As the autopsy reveals, Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he got shot. It also revealed that Martin had extensive liver damage well beyond what would be expected in a 17-year-old, further evidence that he was on a drug run the night he got shot. (*I'm not condemning recreational drug use, I'm merely illustrating that Trayvon Martin was not an innocent little boy who got shot because he was a black kid out buying candy. Also, if this drug - and potentially others - had caused this much damage to his liver it probably also caused damage to his brain, and he was likely not thinking clearly the night he went out and started a fight when he could have easily outrun Zimmerman home and called the police if he was really worried. Yet in spite of what all rational people would know is a bad idea, Martin likely started a fight with a man in the middle of the night and ended up dead.)
There is no evidence that Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin. Zimmerman has black relatives, he has worked with the black community in Sanford to get them more active in the neighborhood watch program, and he was "one of the few to take any action to protest the 2010 beating of Sherman Ware, a black homeless man, by the son of a Sanford police officer."
What do I think happened? George Zimmerman went out looking for trouble. Trayvon Martin went out possibly looking for something to burgle, if his past is any indication, and no doubt open to the possibility of a fight. Rachel Jeantel goaded Martin into starting a fight with an armed man in the middle of the night. It was Jeantel who sewed the seeds of fear or rage or whatever in Martin while they talked on the phone. "Some creepy ass cracker is following me." "He can't do that! You better whoop ass so he gets the message!" The gang culture Martin and Jeantel idolise combined with confusion and testosterone took over rational judgment and Martin and when Zimmerman asked "what are you doing here?" Martin started beating him. Zimmerman greatly underestimated Martin and, fearing for his life, took his gun and shot Martin, happening to hit him fatally.
In President Obama's first address regarding the verdict, he acted like a leader and said basically "it's a tragedy that a family lost their son but the justice system is based on evidence and, let's face it, there's no evidence to convict Zimmerman, so we should accept the verdict of 'not guilty' as a victory for our justice system, as it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to put one innocent man in prison. Now, in respect for the family let's all put this behind us."
In his second address he said (exact quote) "you know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away." He then went on to say "there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off."
Yes, I know what it's like to get nervous looks out of people as I walk by. I know what it's like for people to turn their porch lights on as I walk past their houses at night. Trayvon Martin probably couldn't have been me. I don't live in a high crime area, but I do like to go for walks at crazy hours of the night and I do often make people uncomfortable by my looks and mannerisms. No one where I live will probably shoot me, and I doubt anyone would have shot Obama either during his carefree childhood in Hawaii, or his time spent in Indonesia with his step father who owned a lot of exotic animals. I'm not saying he's lying, but he is definitely not telling the truth either when he says "Trayvon could have been me 35 years ago." Maybe during his time in Chicago, that cesspool of crime and human suffering, but not when he was 17. Obama did not move to the mainland until he was 18.
From the wiki page on Obama: "Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, 'That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.'
He started to think about black nationalism and anger toward whites in spite of the colourblindness of his peers. Fellow student Mark Hebing recalls "we didn't think about his blackness." From the same LA Times article, we have more accounts of Obama's time in Hawaii:
"His reflections about the race issue surprised all of us," said Kellie Furushima, who knew him well. "He gave no indication of feeling uncomfortable in school, and I never witnessed or heard anyone being unkind to him.
"Being in Hawaii, we had a lot of different races," classmate Vernette Ferreira Shaffer said. "People would tell ethnic jokes, but it was more about making fun of stereotypes than trying to do a cool thing."
Hanging out and working with many black people, I know they make just as many jokes (maybe more) about black stereotypes as any other group. Comedian Chris Rock in Bring the Pain even jokes about the difference between "black people" and "niggers," whom normal black people hate more than white people.
Inside all of this is the anger Obama alludes to. Black people are angry about the way they were treated during the time of slavery and Jim Crow. He says "that doesn't go away." I ask why? Yes, it's true that the slave trade was one of the worst acts of inhumanity in history, but let us not forget it was started in Africa by black people selling other black people to at first Muslims and then to white people. There is still racial tension in Africa between Negroes and Pygmies, two distinct black groups who view the other as nonhuman and have fought wars to wipe the other out. It was also whites who eventually ended slavery, beginning with groups such as the Quakers and taking off when the Methodists got behind the abolition movement, finally culminating in the deaths of over 600,000 men to put a stop to the barbarism once and for all. Immediately after the Civil War many of the Southern states, with majority black populations, elected blacks to federal office. It was not until Reconstruction ended and the white Democrats took power once again that blacks were rendered slaves in all but name until the 1950s. President Eisenhower, Republican, wanted to solve the problem by passing a host of civil rights laws, and he did go very far but was checked by Senate leader Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, who was one of the biggest racists of the time. It was only after Johnson lost face for killing kids in Vietnam that he finished what Eisenhower started, and wrongly took credit for being a civil rights leader when he wanted nothing more than to reinstitute slavery. 50 years of indoctrination in public schools have led millions to believe that the Republicans, who fought and died by the thousands for the rights of black people, are evil while the Democrats, who fought and died to keep blacks enslaved and started the KKK, are good. Truly a cosmic irony.
Why does the racial hurt never go away? When my ancestors came to America a century ago we weren't even second-class citizens and we certainly weren't white (although I'd probably be considered white today I do not self-identify as white). We had hardships, we were mistreated, and we really still aren't viewed in that good a light, and still I have no racial anger toward anyone. I don't think to myself "my ancestors were treated like shit so I'm gonna hate white people forever!" It makes no sense to hold on to anger, to give that kind of power to other people who did nothing to me, and ruin my own life in the process by destroying my own mental health. Anger causes far more harm than good, especially to one's self.
Yes, blacks suffered more than probably any other group in history except the Jews, but just about more effort was put into fixing the injustices done to blacks than to any other group. Wars were not fought and countries were not destroyed to fix other race relations or bring other people out of bondage. I would appreciate one tenth the effort done for my people.
Why does racial hurt never go away? I argue because it is useful. The power elite keep blacks as victims through soft racism such as affirmative action and race baiters such as Al Sharpton. Blacks are not good enough to compete on their own, they argue, so big daddy government must give them a hand up and take care of them just as big daddy massa did. "Massa don't want to hear that slave shit, sing him something different!"
If you take a look at just about every problem society faces today you can trace it back to people with power wanting more power, disenfranchising one group to play off another, keeping us all separated so we can't unite and defeat them. Racism has always existed and probably will always exist, but the idea of permanent racial victims exists only as a device by the elite to divide people.
Now, here's where I'm gonna get really racist, as one person has insinuated, by citing statistics. According to the FBI, 2,720 black people were murdered in 2010, 2,459 of them at the hands of another black person. Another study, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, discovered that 94% of all black murder victims were killed by other black people.
One black violent thug was shot by an Hispanic idiot wannabe hero who's painted as "lily white" by race baiters and all of a sudden there's a huge outcry and the beginnings of race riots. The nearly 3,000 other black people killed by other black people every year - not a peep. If Zimmerman was black it has been demonstrably proven over the past three decades that the event wouldn't make the news. About 13,000 people are murdered in total every year. How many of them do we ever hear about on the news? How many of them get a "Justice for Jane Doe" campaign, or two televised speeches by the President, or mass demonstrations in the streets of major cities? How many millions of black babies are killed in abortion mills every year (Planned Parenthood was founded with the specific intent of exterminating black people)? How much harm is the government and racist leaders like Al Sharpton doing to the black community? How much harm is the black community doing to itself? And in spite of all of this we barely hear anything. Whites who speak out are labeled racist and blacks who speak out are labeled Uncle Tom.
Somehow is it more real when an Hispanic (or even a white) man kills a black man than when a black man kills another black man? Is that because the power elite in the media told you so? I don't think so. I don't think it's more real when OJ got off on the death of his wife because there was reasonable doubt because OJ was a black man killing a white woman. I don't think black people should consider it more real that George Zimmerman got off on the death of Trayvon Martin because there was reasonable doubt because Zimmerman was whatever the hell race you want to call him killing a black man. Can we not look past the colour of peoples' skins and see into the content of their characters as a great man once said before he himself was murdered by a racist? Must we divide ourselves among races, playing into the elite's hands, weakening our own power, enslaving ourselves? How does any of that make sense?
It is a tragedy when anyone has to die, but it is an even bigger tragedy when we let those deaths needlessly divide us further. Al Sharpton doesn't care about Trayvon Martin, neither does President Obama, and neither do any of the people on TV who are making money by hyping the incident. Obama will never have to bury his children because of a fight with an armed man, thankfully he has Secret Service to protect them. However, he is stuck seeing things through the lens of race as the elite of his day indoctrinated him, and now that he has all the power in the world he is using it to indoctrinate others. In his ignorance he is part of the problem, a problem that uses race to divide the one human race as evil always does to secure power for itself.
I might be veering off into even more alien ground here, but here is how I see the endgame play out. Evil has no power of its own. All power comes from God, even the power that evil misuses. Just as a solar powered machine cannot be used to destroy the sun, there is nothing evil can do to to defeat God.
All the super evil people in history have eventually outstretched their limits and were murdered by their own people. Stalin, Timur, Attila, Mao, all the tyrants, however powerful, however many millions they terrorised or killed, they were eventually killed by a guard or someone who saw the opportunity to strike and put an end to someone whom everyone hated. Evil loses because it isolates itself. In alienating all possible allies and ruling entirely through fear, evil leaves itself open to that one person who inevitably arises who has nothing to lose and the perfect opening to get at the tyrant one on one. Once they are free, the people, who have been living in secret, watching every step they take against the seemingly omnipotent authorities, immediately resume their lives where they last left off as best they can.
Although the New World Order has a lot of power on the Earth, all the power they have comes from God. No matter how powerful they get they can never win. They will lose; the only question is how much damage will they cause before they are taken down? How long will it take for the world to recover? It took India a century to recover from Timur's destruction, but it recovered. Stalin did his best to destroy the Russian church, but it sprang back once it was free to do so. The unconquerable spirit of free people will be restored as soon as the peoples' burden is lifted. How badly will they destroy the world? I don't know. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because they cannot destroy our freedom, only we can surrender it. They can never destroy love. As A Course in Miracles says:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
That is why no matter how powerful they get, they can never be more powerful than you are. They have already lost. All else is just spectacle.
We should use this tragedy as a chance to unite against the evils of racism, not to add more fuel to the fire. With that I close my analysis of the Trayvon Martin case.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Why "The Walking Dead" STILL Can't Happen
In 2012 I wrote about the impossibility of slow moving zombies that have to bite people to spread zombiism. At the end of Season 2 this problem was solved by revealing that everyone is already infected, so no matter how you die you will reanimate (I'm told if you play with the volume on the Blu-ray of Season 1 you can hear Jenner tell Rick that everyone is infected already). This explains how the zombie apocalypse got going, and gets around the issue of slow and ineffective zombies spreading the infection.
There is still another serious problem that would make the scenario in The Walking Dead impossible, and that is the unrealistic portrayal of the process of decay. Real bodies decay in a way that would make Walking Dead type zombies impossible.
Walking Dead zombies decay to the point where they look scary but don't fall apart completely. They also have plot-specific strenght. In "TS-19" Jenner says that the outbreak started 194 days ago. Season 3 begins about 8 months after this, taking into account time spent at the farm, that means that at least 440 days have passed since the first dead person reanimated. Think about it. You try leaving a body out in the heat and rain, totally exposed for over a year and see what's left. The zombies decay to the point where a fireplace shovel can cut through a skull like a chainsaw through pound cake, or you can pull a face off a skull easier than ripping off a band-aid, yet they never collapse under their own weight, bugs don't eat them, and they can bite through limbs like jello. I don't know about you, but if perfectly healthy and alive me were to bite into someone wearing overalls' leg I would not only not take a huge chunk out of his flesh, I would probably lose a couple teeth, yet these aspic soft zombies can bite through denim and muscle with no problem.
Come to think of it, how do they move if their muscles aren't metabolising anything for energy? If they can somehow break down their own bodies for energy, then what is breaking the body down for energy? The human body works as a holarchy of systems. A severed head cannot survive on its own because human cells are specialised and a head has no means of acquiring oxygen (except the cornea), energy, nutrients, and they cannot get rid of waste on their own. And yet somehow a zombie head can (and must) be able to do all of that. How does it do that? If none of the other organs work how do they move?
A kidney cell cannot just break down its neighbouring cells to get energy. A human is not a colonial organism, individual cells cannot be removed and act as a new creature. Under ideal conditions a whole kidney can remain viable for 30 hours. Inside a warm body in the Georgia summer, unprotected, it will start to decay and be useless in an hour or maybe less. If standing up (these are walking dead), in the absence of circulation the blood will pool in the legs. After a few days some organs have been completely digested by the bacteria living inside them (pancreas, intestines), the body fills with gas as the bacteria expel waste. Totally exposed to the elements, in a warm wet climate, a body will be completely reduced to a skeleton in a few days*, and the bones are often scattered over a large are by carrion eaters, leaving nothing recognisable as a corpse. In a cold dry environment (like in my zombie story, which has living zombies, but there are still lots of corpses lying around) a dead body will last a lot longer, but it's still not immune to decomposition or being eaten. Since nothing seems to eat zombies even though they are free meat, there is still no escaping the powers of decay at the hands of endogenous bacteria.
Under anaerobic conditions (a body with no blood circulation) at least some cells (like muscle cells, which do store chemicals that can be broken down to get energy) can undergo lactic acid fermentation. This produces far less ATP, which is needed to power calcium pumps which allows muscles to relax. Lactic acid messes up the pH of cells and surrounding fluid, calcium ions move around (as they do), causing the muscles to contract. Unable to pump the calcium ions because of lack of ATP the muscles cannot relax. This is rigor mortis. It begins within hours of death and remains for two or three days, when the muscles begin to decompose. The more vigorous the activity a person was in before death (such as running from zombies) the higher the level of lactic acid and the quicker rigor mortis begins. Even with a functioning brain (which is the only "working" organ) a zombie would not be able to move until rigor mortis ceases, so reanimating within a few minutes or hours after death is biochemically impossible. An immobile, reanimated zombie would be completely defenseless for two or three days no matter how fast it reanimated and by that time should have been completely eaten by animals (unless it's inside something where animals can't get it, not even insects). If by some strange quirk of fate a person dies inside a walk-in freezer so not only can no animals eat it, but the bacteria inside won't decompose it either, the water inside will be completely frozen so the reanimated zombie won't be able to move anyway.
The brain is the most power hungry organ in the body, requiring 1/5 - 1/4 of the body's total energy usage (let's say between 200 and 400 calories a day). Even if only the brain stem were active there is no way anywhere near enough energy would ever reach it, even if it began to consume itself by magic, since there is no digestion and no blood circulation. A reanimated brain would re-die very quickly, maybe within hours, maybe, by some magic slow-down process in a few days.
Unless by "zombie" we mean "dead body being manipulated by some sort of puppeteer parasite that can physically force the limbs to move when movement would normally be impossible" or we mean "shape shifting organism that looks like a human body but instead moves by changing its shape" there is literally no way for zombies like in The Walking Dead to work.
Addendum
I just don't like all the idiots on the Internet who have stupid arguments about what zombies are.
Mike Rotch wrote: "George Romero took I Am Legend, cut out the living vampires, and made the dead ones eat flesh instead of blood and this will forever be what a zombie is even though they're specifically referred to as 'ghouls' in the movie itself, but I am conveniently ignoring this fact!!!!!1"
People who make arguments like that should go back to the basement they only crawl out of at night to buy their crack and RedBull and leave the Internet to sophisticated literati who like to look up cannibal porn. If it looks like a zombie and acts like a zombie it's a duck, okay, whether it's based on vampires or is still alive like in the original meaning.
*Guess what kind of environment Sasquatch lives! Airplanes go down in the forests of the Pacific NW and are never found, what chance is there of finding a dead body in the two or three days before it's rendered unidentifiable. And i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶s̶ ideologues still scoff "where's the body?" You'll never find one. Meanwhile we have DNA from hair samples that's related to but definitely not human, and we have video evidence of a creature with a gait that even gymnasts with decades of experience cannot reproduce, even when in a harness, and dermal ridge patterns that the top expert in the country identifies as being not human and belonging to no other known creature. By this point the only people who say there is not an unknown species of large primate in North America are either 1. ignorant of the data or 2. people who refuse to accept its existence on ideological grounds.
There is still another serious problem that would make the scenario in The Walking Dead impossible, and that is the unrealistic portrayal of the process of decay. Real bodies decay in a way that would make Walking Dead type zombies impossible.
Walking Dead zombies decay to the point where they look scary but don't fall apart completely. They also have plot-specific strenght. In "TS-19" Jenner says that the outbreak started 194 days ago. Season 3 begins about 8 months after this, taking into account time spent at the farm, that means that at least 440 days have passed since the first dead person reanimated. Think about it. You try leaving a body out in the heat and rain, totally exposed for over a year and see what's left. The zombies decay to the point where a fireplace shovel can cut through a skull like a chainsaw through pound cake, or you can pull a face off a skull easier than ripping off a band-aid, yet they never collapse under their own weight, bugs don't eat them, and they can bite through limbs like jello. I don't know about you, but if perfectly healthy and alive me were to bite into someone wearing overalls' leg I would not only not take a huge chunk out of his flesh, I would probably lose a couple teeth, yet these aspic soft zombies can bite through denim and muscle with no problem.
Come to think of it, how do they move if their muscles aren't metabolising anything for energy? If they can somehow break down their own bodies for energy, then what is breaking the body down for energy? The human body works as a holarchy of systems. A severed head cannot survive on its own because human cells are specialised and a head has no means of acquiring oxygen (except the cornea), energy, nutrients, and they cannot get rid of waste on their own. And yet somehow a zombie head can (and must) be able to do all of that. How does it do that? If none of the other organs work how do they move?
A kidney cell cannot just break down its neighbouring cells to get energy. A human is not a colonial organism, individual cells cannot be removed and act as a new creature. Under ideal conditions a whole kidney can remain viable for 30 hours. Inside a warm body in the Georgia summer, unprotected, it will start to decay and be useless in an hour or maybe less. If standing up (these are walking dead), in the absence of circulation the blood will pool in the legs. After a few days some organs have been completely digested by the bacteria living inside them (pancreas, intestines), the body fills with gas as the bacteria expel waste. Totally exposed to the elements, in a warm wet climate, a body will be completely reduced to a skeleton in a few days*, and the bones are often scattered over a large are by carrion eaters, leaving nothing recognisable as a corpse. In a cold dry environment (like in my zombie story, which has living zombies, but there are still lots of corpses lying around) a dead body will last a lot longer, but it's still not immune to decomposition or being eaten. Since nothing seems to eat zombies even though they are free meat, there is still no escaping the powers of decay at the hands of endogenous bacteria.
Under anaerobic conditions (a body with no blood circulation) at least some cells (like muscle cells, which do store chemicals that can be broken down to get energy) can undergo lactic acid fermentation. This produces far less ATP, which is needed to power calcium pumps which allows muscles to relax. Lactic acid messes up the pH of cells and surrounding fluid, calcium ions move around (as they do), causing the muscles to contract. Unable to pump the calcium ions because of lack of ATP the muscles cannot relax. This is rigor mortis. It begins within hours of death and remains for two or three days, when the muscles begin to decompose. The more vigorous the activity a person was in before death (such as running from zombies) the higher the level of lactic acid and the quicker rigor mortis begins. Even with a functioning brain (which is the only "working" organ) a zombie would not be able to move until rigor mortis ceases, so reanimating within a few minutes or hours after death is biochemically impossible. An immobile, reanimated zombie would be completely defenseless for two or three days no matter how fast it reanimated and by that time should have been completely eaten by animals (unless it's inside something where animals can't get it, not even insects). If by some strange quirk of fate a person dies inside a walk-in freezer so not only can no animals eat it, but the bacteria inside won't decompose it either, the water inside will be completely frozen so the reanimated zombie won't be able to move anyway.
The brain is the most power hungry organ in the body, requiring 1/5 - 1/4 of the body's total energy usage (let's say between 200 and 400 calories a day). Even if only the brain stem were active there is no way anywhere near enough energy would ever reach it, even if it began to consume itself by magic, since there is no digestion and no blood circulation. A reanimated brain would re-die very quickly, maybe within hours, maybe, by some magic slow-down process in a few days.
Unless by "zombie" we mean "dead body being manipulated by some sort of puppeteer parasite that can physically force the limbs to move when movement would normally be impossible" or we mean "shape shifting organism that looks like a human body but instead moves by changing its shape" there is literally no way for zombies like in The Walking Dead to work.
Addendum
I just don't like all the idiots on the Internet who have stupid arguments about what zombies are.
Mike Rotch wrote: "George Romero took I Am Legend, cut out the living vampires, and made the dead ones eat flesh instead of blood and this will forever be what a zombie is even though they're specifically referred to as 'ghouls' in the movie itself, but I am conveniently ignoring this fact!!!!!1"
People who make arguments like that should go back to the basement they only crawl out of at night to buy their crack and RedBull and leave the Internet to sophisticated literati who like to look up cannibal porn. If it looks like a zombie and acts like a zombie it's a duck, okay, whether it's based on vampires or is still alive like in the original meaning.
*Guess what kind of environment Sasquatch lives! Airplanes go down in the forests of the Pacific NW and are never found, what chance is there of finding a dead body in the two or three days before it's rendered unidentifiable. And i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶s̶ ideologues still scoff "where's the body?" You'll never find one. Meanwhile we have DNA from hair samples that's related to but definitely not human, and we have video evidence of a creature with a gait that even gymnasts with decades of experience cannot reproduce, even when in a harness, and dermal ridge patterns that the top expert in the country identifies as being not human and belonging to no other known creature. By this point the only people who say there is not an unknown species of large primate in North America are either 1. ignorant of the data or 2. people who refuse to accept its existence on ideological grounds.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
The Fourteen Century War
A massive war between the Persians and the Byzantines weakens both empires. The Plague of Justinian wipes out millions. If not for these two events it would have been impossible for the Islamic conquest to spread beyond Arabia. This is the history the academe does not want you to hear. They spread the hagiographic version of Islamic history. This is the truth.
There has been a war going on for the past 1400 years for the destruction of Western civilisation. Plague had weakened the West, allowing Islam to spread, but because Islam never invented anything on its own, instead relying on knowledge stolen from conquered peoples, it stagnated. The Mongol invasions introduced new technologies to the West where lack of strong centralised authority and easy money allowed for great inovation. Hand cannons became guns, Indian mathematics became banking and mercantilism, and the desire to cut free of the Islamic yoke prompted explorers to find alternate routes for the acquisition of spices and, ultimately, the discover of the New World. The West surged technologically and beat back Islam until, by the 20th century, most of the Islamic world was divided up among Western colonies.
The West grew complacent, and Islam appropriated Western technology, growing stronger, waiting for the perfect opportunity to turn the tide of the war. March 1994, US President Clinton pulls out of Mogadishu. CIA trained Islamist Osama bin Laden saw this as the turning point in the war. The West had backed down. Furthermore, the West had grown soft. The elite intelligentsia had been denigrating the West for thirty years. The time was ripe to strike.
It's been twelve years since 9/11. Bin Laden and his ilk set out to destroy the Western way of life. With a United States government set on eliminating freedom of speech, the right to self defense, the total obliteration of privacy with unreasonable search and seizure of everyone's data, and the extrajudicial killing of Americans with drone strikes, it is safe to say that they have succeeded. The terrorists have won. The West is over.
There has been a war going on for the past 1400 years for the destruction of Western civilisation. Plague had weakened the West, allowing Islam to spread, but because Islam never invented anything on its own, instead relying on knowledge stolen from conquered peoples, it stagnated. The Mongol invasions introduced new technologies to the West where lack of strong centralised authority and easy money allowed for great inovation. Hand cannons became guns, Indian mathematics became banking and mercantilism, and the desire to cut free of the Islamic yoke prompted explorers to find alternate routes for the acquisition of spices and, ultimately, the discover of the New World. The West surged technologically and beat back Islam until, by the 20th century, most of the Islamic world was divided up among Western colonies.
The West grew complacent, and Islam appropriated Western technology, growing stronger, waiting for the perfect opportunity to turn the tide of the war. March 1994, US President Clinton pulls out of Mogadishu. CIA trained Islamist Osama bin Laden saw this as the turning point in the war. The West had backed down. Furthermore, the West had grown soft. The elite intelligentsia had been denigrating the West for thirty years. The time was ripe to strike.
It's been twelve years since 9/11. Bin Laden and his ilk set out to destroy the Western way of life. With a United States government set on eliminating freedom of speech, the right to self defense, the total obliteration of privacy with unreasonable search and seizure of everyone's data, and the extrajudicial killing of Americans with drone strikes, it is safe to say that they have succeeded. The terrorists have won. The West is over.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
The Sealed Books
70 lead books may be the earliest Christian documents, written years before Paul's letters, the oldest of which is dated to AD 51 (just 18 years after the crucifixion). If they prove to be authentic these books will be the most significant archaeological discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls. The books make reference to a messiah and possibly crucifixion and resurrection. Some of the books are sealed with wires, and it is speculated that they may be the sealed books referred to in Revelation.
This is where the story gets really really scary. The books were found in Jordan and smuggled into Israel and the Jordanian government wants the books back. British scientists are working with the Jordanians to recover the books.
Here's why this is scary. One word: Jahiliyyah.
It is a key Islamic doctrine that NOTHING EXISTED BEFORE ISLAM.
The Caliphate was the first state to ever erase its own history. The destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 was one of the most recent examples of this practice in action. Any and all artefacts that display sophisticated cultural heritage before a place was conquered by Islam must be destroyed. The Islamic authorities who control the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have conducted numerous illegal digs and have destroyed untold quantities of priceless archaeological treasures to eliminate any legitimacy the state of Israel might have.
If the Jordanians get a hold of these priceless relics any contribution to the world's understanding of history and culture in the first century will be destroyed.
This is where the story gets really really scary. The books were found in Jordan and smuggled into Israel and the Jordanian government wants the books back. British scientists are working with the Jordanians to recover the books.
Here's why this is scary. One word: Jahiliyyah.
It is a key Islamic doctrine that NOTHING EXISTED BEFORE ISLAM.
The Caliphate was the first state to ever erase its own history. The destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 was one of the most recent examples of this practice in action. Any and all artefacts that display sophisticated cultural heritage before a place was conquered by Islam must be destroyed. The Islamic authorities who control the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have conducted numerous illegal digs and have destroyed untold quantities of priceless archaeological treasures to eliminate any legitimacy the state of Israel might have.
If the Jordanians get a hold of these priceless relics any contribution to the world's understanding of history and culture in the first century will be destroyed.
Friday, June 14, 2013
The Future Is Mild
Dateline: 1981. The show In Search Of... asks experts what the future would be like in the far off 21st century.
Millions of people moving out into space by 2050? Doesn't seem likely. NASA is just about completely shut down and commercial space flight is still in its embryonic stage. A lot can happen in the next 36 years, but with the way the economy, endemic warfare, and the explosion of government overreach is going I don't think the future looks good for space travel.
Every disease conquered or at least great progress made by 2000? Nope. Not even close, and with the power of big pharma to stiffle cures it doesn't look likely either.
Computers impacting every aspect of our lives? One out of three ain't bad. Wait! I mean one out of three correct predictions. The implications of the NSA saving every single thing every single person does on anything electronic is terrifying.
Arcosanti, the vision of genius architect Paolo Soleri, features prominantly in this program. Begun in 1970, the future home of 5000 people is, after 43 years, still a bunch of crap sitting in the desert. It's a shame the futuristic city was not completed before Soleri died just two months ago, 9 April 2013. A completely self-contained, ecologically sustainable, high density city is something the world needs. Unfortunately, it's not something the world wants.
Computers are getting faster, but the still do things one at a time (as opposed to the brain which is massively parallel), and they still don't think. Furthermore, no program, no matter how advanced, will be able to make a computer think. Thinking is not something programs do, it is something minds do. It requires a host of previous steps, from simple awareness of cells, to the instincts of the reptilian brain, to emotions of the limbic system, to the rationality and metacognition of the neocortex. The artificial intelligence people focus only on a very thin slice of rational mathematical ridgid structured thinking and ignore all the previous steps that were necessary to make that possible. In narrowing their focus, the AI people are really dooming themselves to failure.
What the AI people think is that they will be able to create a program that could produce a behaviour that looks like the computer is thinking and call it thinking. It's a bait and switch just like calling the pre-existing cosmic vacuum "nothing" and then saying the universe came from nothing. But a computer that looks like it can think is not the same thing as a computer that actually can think. These computers are just like zombies in that zombies may outwardly appear human, but there is nothing going on inside. They have no conscious experience, even though they act as if they do.
Implantable computers by 2026? Not that soon, but things like Google Glass are wearable computers that may be able to be fully integrated into everyday life, though with a number of cumbersome social implications that will have to be dealt with.
Dr. Roy Walford, anti-aging specialist and proponent of calorie restriction (which has been deomonstrated in a number of species to double lifespan), says there will be many positive social effects of people living to 150 or longer. Pushing cancer, heart disease, and other age related illnesses from 65 to 130, by which time medical advances may have discovered permanent cures. Living twice as long gives people the option of having multiple careers, even putting off having children until unthinkable ages by which time people have had their fun, done what they want to do, and are ready to settle down.
What if aging could be entirely eliminated? Dr. Walford estimates that if there is no change in the rate of accidents then the maximum lifespan would increase to 600 years, by which point it becomes statistically certain that something will have killed you already. I'm not sure getting hit by a bus sounds like a better way to go than at home in bed, possibly by heart attack or bleeding ulcer while you sleep, nor do I think that living a lot longer with no increase in the quality of life is all that attractive either. Several centuries living paycheck to paycheck, struggling with bills sounds like hell on earth. Maybe by then Arcosanti will be completed and the thus far crappy 21st century problems will be done away with. Who knows?
Millions of people moving out into space by 2050? Doesn't seem likely. NASA is just about completely shut down and commercial space flight is still in its embryonic stage. A lot can happen in the next 36 years, but with the way the economy, endemic warfare, and the explosion of government overreach is going I don't think the future looks good for space travel.
Every disease conquered or at least great progress made by 2000? Nope. Not even close, and with the power of big pharma to stiffle cures it doesn't look likely either.
Computers impacting every aspect of our lives? One out of three ain't bad. Wait! I mean one out of three correct predictions. The implications of the NSA saving every single thing every single person does on anything electronic is terrifying.
Arcosanti, the vision of genius architect Paolo Soleri, features prominantly in this program. Begun in 1970, the future home of 5000 people is, after 43 years, still a bunch of crap sitting in the desert. It's a shame the futuristic city was not completed before Soleri died just two months ago, 9 April 2013. A completely self-contained, ecologically sustainable, high density city is something the world needs. Unfortunately, it's not something the world wants.
Computers are getting faster, but the still do things one at a time (as opposed to the brain which is massively parallel), and they still don't think. Furthermore, no program, no matter how advanced, will be able to make a computer think. Thinking is not something programs do, it is something minds do. It requires a host of previous steps, from simple awareness of cells, to the instincts of the reptilian brain, to emotions of the limbic system, to the rationality and metacognition of the neocortex. The artificial intelligence people focus only on a very thin slice of rational mathematical ridgid structured thinking and ignore all the previous steps that were necessary to make that possible. In narrowing their focus, the AI people are really dooming themselves to failure.
What the AI people think is that they will be able to create a program that could produce a behaviour that looks like the computer is thinking and call it thinking. It's a bait and switch just like calling the pre-existing cosmic vacuum "nothing" and then saying the universe came from nothing. But a computer that looks like it can think is not the same thing as a computer that actually can think. These computers are just like zombies in that zombies may outwardly appear human, but there is nothing going on inside. They have no conscious experience, even though they act as if they do.
Implantable computers by 2026? Not that soon, but things like Google Glass are wearable computers that may be able to be fully integrated into everyday life, though with a number of cumbersome social implications that will have to be dealt with.
Dr. Roy Walford, anti-aging specialist and proponent of calorie restriction (which has been deomonstrated in a number of species to double lifespan), says there will be many positive social effects of people living to 150 or longer. Pushing cancer, heart disease, and other age related illnesses from 65 to 130, by which time medical advances may have discovered permanent cures. Living twice as long gives people the option of having multiple careers, even putting off having children until unthinkable ages by which time people have had their fun, done what they want to do, and are ready to settle down.
What if aging could be entirely eliminated? Dr. Walford estimates that if there is no change in the rate of accidents then the maximum lifespan would increase to 600 years, by which point it becomes statistically certain that something will have killed you already. I'm not sure getting hit by a bus sounds like a better way to go than at home in bed, possibly by heart attack or bleeding ulcer while you sleep, nor do I think that living a lot longer with no increase in the quality of life is all that attractive either. Several centuries living paycheck to paycheck, struggling with bills sounds like hell on earth. Maybe by then Arcosanti will be completed and the thus far crappy 21st century problems will be done away with. Who knows?
Thursday, May 30, 2013
20 Things I Learned From Star Trek Nemesis
1. The Enterprise is only as powerful as it needs to be to defeat the bad guys
2. When a hole is blown in the Enterprise Captain Picard just sits there while several red shirts get sucked into space
3. Shields only block whatever it is convenient for them to block
4. The bad guy super ship with unlimited shields and weapons can resist all of the Enterprise's weapons but if the Enterprise rams it the super shields become useless and the Enterprise ploughs straight through the bad guy ship completely unharmed
5. It's boring because you know who will win
6. Bad guy super weapon is so slow it would take forever to kill someone with it
7. Bad guy super weapon is so slow there's no point having it
8. Bad guy super weapon that can destroy an infinite number of planets can blow up right next to the Enterprise, destroy the bad guy ship, and leave the Enterprise completely unharmed
9. Even though Picard is a terrible captain who makes suicidally bad decisions the show cheats so he will win
10. Paying any amount of money to see "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
11. Even illegally downloading "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
12. Bad guys can't aim and good guys can't miss
13. The bad guy in "Star Trek Nemesis" wanted to free his people from enslavement. He dies and his people remain enslaved by the evil empire and this is the good guys winning
14. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good under certain circumstances
15. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are the designated villains
16. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are people Picard doesn't like
17. "Star Trek Nemesis" was inappropriately aired on TV on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War
18. The only character who is allowed to die is the robot, who was never alive to begin with, and there is an identical unit with the same memories on stand by, so his death doesn't even matter
19. The new Star Trek is different from the original Star Trek
20. The new Star Trek lets the obviously bad people win
2. When a hole is blown in the Enterprise Captain Picard just sits there while several red shirts get sucked into space
3. Shields only block whatever it is convenient for them to block
4. The bad guy super ship with unlimited shields and weapons can resist all of the Enterprise's weapons but if the Enterprise rams it the super shields become useless and the Enterprise ploughs straight through the bad guy ship completely unharmed
5. It's boring because you know who will win
6. Bad guy super weapon is so slow it would take forever to kill someone with it
7. Bad guy super weapon is so slow there's no point having it
8. Bad guy super weapon that can destroy an infinite number of planets can blow up right next to the Enterprise, destroy the bad guy ship, and leave the Enterprise completely unharmed
9. Even though Picard is a terrible captain who makes suicidally bad decisions the show cheats so he will win
10. Paying any amount of money to see "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
11. Even illegally downloading "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
12. Bad guys can't aim and good guys can't miss
13. The bad guy in "Star Trek Nemesis" wanted to free his people from enslavement. He dies and his people remain enslaved by the evil empire and this is the good guys winning
14. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good under certain circumstances
15. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are the designated villains
16. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are people Picard doesn't like
17. "Star Trek Nemesis" was inappropriately aired on TV on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War
18. The only character who is allowed to die is the robot, who was never alive to begin with, and there is an identical unit with the same memories on stand by, so his death doesn't even matter
19. The new Star Trek is different from the original Star Trek
20. The new Star Trek lets the obviously bad people win
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The End of Obama
Benghazi. A CIA gunrunning scheme that went bad and led to the deaths of four Americans. A stand down order that had to come from the president himself. A major lie about the nature of the attack, blaming it on a video, the creator of which has been disappeared by the government, because the First Amendment means nothing when Muhammad is involved. Treason, by definition of the Constitution. The single worst thing any president has ever done, ever, by a lot.
The IRS being used as a weapon against conservative and small government political groups in 2010.
Even the far left MSNBC agrees, the government does not tread on political speech. As Joe Scarborough says "political speech is sacrosanct." It doesn't matter where on the political spectrum you are, this is a gross violation of federal authority and heads must roll.
To top it all off, the Justice Department has been illegally spying on the Associated Press. The records from more than 20 separate phone lines used by over 100 AP journalists and editors were seized by the DOJ.
Any one of these is enough to warrent impeachment. Obama has all three. IF he survives this, it will mean he is a de facto absolutist dictator. No one will do anything to stop him from running for a third or fourth or life-time term as ruler of the country. IF he survives this, there is no justice.
The IRS being used as a weapon against conservative and small government political groups in 2010.
Even the far left MSNBC agrees, the government does not tread on political speech. As Joe Scarborough says "political speech is sacrosanct." It doesn't matter where on the political spectrum you are, this is a gross violation of federal authority and heads must roll.
To top it all off, the Justice Department has been illegally spying on the Associated Press. The records from more than 20 separate phone lines used by over 100 AP journalists and editors were seized by the DOJ.
Any one of these is enough to warrent impeachment. Obama has all three. IF he survives this, it will mean he is a de facto absolutist dictator. No one will do anything to stop him from running for a third or fourth or life-time term as ruler of the country. IF he survives this, there is no justice.
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