Tupac Comes Back From The Dead - As A Hologram

"Hol-O-Pac" makes waves

 

A lot of people were pretty startled when Tupac Shakur returned from the dead at this year's Coachella music festival… as a hologram, who performed on stage with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. The effect cost almost a half million dollars, and by all accounts was remarkably realistic. (And may I say, death has apparently been good to Tupac. Dude was RIPPED.)
 
But despite the big special effects budget, Tupac's post-mortem performance was basically an effect which has been used to create paranormal hoaxes for decades. Basically, Tupac's ghost was simply projected onto a sheet of transparent plastic.

 
This helpful graphic at the IB Times breaks it down nicely. A projector mounted in the ceiling points straight down, beaming Tupac's image onto a mirror on the floor. The mirror bounces the image onto a sheet of transparent foil, which is slanted so that the audience only sees the projected image, not the foil itself.
 
There is a long history of ghosts being projected onto glass and plastic. I think it's a stretch to call this a "hologram," but since we live in the future, I think we should have holograms, so I will allow it.
 
The Tupac illusion was done well, but most people still found it unsettling. Both the performance and the implications. Who will get the "hologram back from the dead" treatment next? Will the Beatles be reuniting on stage? Elvis Presley? Jimi Hendrix? Which dead artist's estate will be next to succumb to greed?
 
Of course, it was somewhat ironic that Tupac "returned to life," given that some people suspect he never died in the first place. Tupac was ostensibly killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. His estate released several albums after his death, containing posthumous fragments, unfinished tracks, and partially completed songs. 
 
(It certainly only fans the flame of speculation that the title of Tupac's final record references the Illuminati.)
 
However, many people believe that some of these songs contain content that post-dates Tupac's death. Conspiracy theorists point to what seems to be a reference to the movie "Armageddon" (released in 1998) and to Eminem (who was not discovered by Dr. Dre until 1997).
 
Another theory holds that Tupac's supposed death was just a cover for entering the FBI's witness protection program. According to this theory, Tupac went underground in order to avoid consequences for providing testimony against the illegal practices of Death Row Records and Marion "Suge" Knight, Tupac's former record company. 

Goblins

Mean little fairy creatures

Fans of JRR Tolkien are familiar with “Orcs,” the monstrous humanoid thugs of Sauron and Saruman. And fans of a host of lesser fantasies and role-playing games are familiar with them too, often in rather silly permutations. If you've read “The Hobbit” as well as “Lord of the Rings,” you know that Tolkien's Orcs were originally referred to as goblins. But what is a goblin, exactly?

 

In traditional European folklore, there are a variety of “fairy” races, including the aristocratic “Daoine Sidhe” of Ireland (who are much like Tolkien's elves), kobolds (who work deep in underground mines), seal-people, dwarfs, water-horses, river maidens and so on.

 

There isn't really any cut-and-dry definition of what a goblin is, but essentially they are small and ugly fairy creatures and are usually mischievous at best or downright malevolent at worst. In Scottish fairy-lore, all sorts of fairy creatures are portrayed as being either “seelie” or “unseelie.” Seelie fairies are perilous but not bad as such, while unseelie fairies are bad all the way through. Goblins would definitely fit into the unseelie category, but their badness is more often petty than downright evil. The goblins in “Labyrinth” are pretty close to the folklore conception, while their king in the movie (played by David Bowie) is more like an elf or a Sidhe. Tolkien's goblins in “The Hobbit” are more like folklore goblins than his Orcs in “Lord of the Rings,” particularly his Uruk-Hai or “soldier Orcs” which are rather more imposing than traditional goblins.

 

 

 

Chinese Teen Sells Kidney for iPad, iPod, and iPhone

A Chinese youth has put himself in critical condition after selling an organ illegally to buy Apple products.

Apple products are major status items now in our second decade of the 21st century. As the company’s impressive stockpile of cash can attest to, some $450 billion at last count, iPads, iPods, and iPhones are sought the world over for their performance and design, but also for the social cred conferred to their owners. Perhaps this is why people are donating their organs to the black market to get their hands on them.

As reported in the BBC News, five people have been arrested in China after a teenager there sold his kidney for $3,000, enough to purchase an iPad and iPhone. The teenage boy, a youth from the Hunan province of southern China, was reported to the authorities by his mother, who noticed the new electronics. When she asked where he got the money for them, he said he had sold his kidney. The teenager is now reportedly in renal failure, in a Hunan hospital. The group that has been detained, which includes the surgeon that performed the operation, earned an estimated $35,000 for the kidney, according to state-run Xin-Hua News.

The popularity of iPads and iPods in China have leveraged the price of them above the reach of most urban workers. As such they’ve turned into a major status symbol, particularly among the youth of urban areas. This leads to increasingly extreme acts in order to procure them (think the shootings for Nike Air Jordan tennis shoes in the U.S.). At the same time, there is a critical organ shortage in China, 150 times the need of what is actually being provided within that country. Though 1.5 million are in need of an organ transplant of one type or another, yet only about 10,000 procedures are performed annually. China has worked to alleviate this extreme shortage of viable organs by harvesting them from executed prisoners. However, the country ahs recently announced that this practice will end within the next five years.

This single incident is evidence of a growing confluence of challenges within China; those inherent within a country of nearly 2 billion people and those that are a result of a gradually capitalizing economy with a staggering potential middle class. As more Chinese see the fruits of a burgeoning middle class, they will strive for the same social status, the same trappings of that status (like iPads and iPods), and the same medical benefits (such as organ transplants). As the U.S. looks to China as its primary competition on the global stage, we should understand that China has its own very real challenges, very real obstacles to competition. How that nation responds to those challenges will decide their place in a globally competitive market.

Three Killed As Sacrifice to Mexican "Saint Death"

Sounds impossibly lurid, but it's true

 

Authorities in Mexico recently arrested a poor family in the Mexican copper mining town of Nacozari. The Meraz family lived in a shack with a dirt floor. The women are suspected of earning money through prostitution. The men in the family eke out a meager living as trash pickers. You can perhaps glimpse the desperation of such crushing poverty, the uncertainty, the constant threat of danger.
 
Desperate times call for desperate measures, or so they say. But how desperate would you have to be, to engage in human sacrifice in the hope of gaining a saint's protection?
 
The Meraz family are being accused of having lured three people to their deaths in the last three years: two 10 year-old boys, and a 55 year-old woman. The victims were killed, their throats and wrists cut, and their blood smeared on an altar to Santa Muerte, a sort of rogue saint who is gaining popularity among criminals and the very poor.


 
Police unearthed the body of one of the boys, whose remains had been buried in the dirt floor of the bedroom of one of the Meraz family's daughters. The discovery led them to the remains of the other boy and the older woman.
 
Santa Muerte ("Saint Death") is, to say the least, a controversial figure. Santa Muerte is a sort of translation of the Grim Reaper. Her origins are unclear, but her popularity has been steadily on the rise over the last twenty years or so. Time Magazine sums up her core audience as "Mexicans who had become disillusioned with the dominant Church, and in particular the ability of established Catholic saints to deliver them from poverty."
 
Santa Muerte is a little like The A-Team. When the regular saints can't help you… call on Santa Muerte!
 
Unlike Santeria, the worship of Santa Muerte is unregulated, and unconstrained by a framework of priests and priestesses. Worship of Santa Muerte takes place one-on-one, just you and the saint and the offering you bring her. 
 
Criminals, particularly members of the drug cartels, have become notorious for offering human sacrifice to Santa Muerte. In 2007, the bodies of three men were found abandoned at a Santa Muerte altar. They had been shot elsewhere and brought to the altar, but no other ritual indications were found. Nevertheless, they are assumed to be sacrifices to Saint Death. 
 

 

Brainwashing

Is it real?

 

We've all heard of brainwashing, but is it actually real? Can people be hypnotized or manipulated into acting against their own core values or best interests? The whole concept of brainwashing comes from the Korean War, when some American POWs made pro-communist statements or even refused to come home after the war was over. Of course, there were several reasonable explanations for this. Some of them could already have been communists- communism had a lot of American adherents at one point. Or the soldiers could have been tortured or starved or intimidated into making those statements. Or a few soldiers could honestly have been “converted” to communism through conversations with their guards.

That last explanation was the one that scared the government. At the height of the Cold War, the idea that anyone would actually choose to become a communist in preference to the American capitalist system was extremely threatening. So they come up with the explanation of “brainwashing,” a kind of hypnotic mind control achieved through sensory deprivation, humiliation and constant pressure.

 

Under the circumstances, the whole idea should be treated with some skepticism, but such techniques do exist, and may have been attempted by the North Koreans. The question is, are they effective? Most of the soldiers who experienced such techniques shook them off pretty quickly once they were freed and sent home. Cult groups try to use similar techniques, but most people who join a cult don't stay in it for all that long. This alone implies that the brainwashing can't be all that effective.

 

What I would suggest is that group-think is a dangerous reality, but that brainwashing in any other sense is not. In other words, if you choose to embrace the ideology of a particular group, you can then get caught up in a self-reinforcing network of conformity and uniformity of opinion that slowly leads you to abandon all your critical thinking skills and stop thinking for yourself at all, sometimes with tragic results. But no one can impose this on you against your will- if you don't make the initial decision to embrace the group ideology, no one can brainwash you into doing so.

 

 

Best weapons for zombie apocalypse

An analysis

 

These days, everyone wants to talk about what they would do if there was a zombie apocalypse. Of course, this question cannot really be answered without first answering a few other questions: are these slow zombies (Night of the Living Dead) or fast zombies (28 Days Later), fresh bodies only (Night of the Living Dead) or ancient corpses (Zombie 2) or even evil Knights Templar (Tombs of the Blind Dead), flesh-eaters (Night of the Living Dead) or brain-eaters (Return of the Living Dead), and is this a case of “kill the head, kill the ghoul” (Night of the Living Dead) or do all the severed body parts keep coming back for more (Evil Dead)?

You see, I was a zombie movie fan 10 or 15 years before everybody else was, and one thing any longtime zombie movie fan can tell you is that there is no standardized set of “rules.” But for the sake of discussion, let's assume a classic “Night of the Living Dead” zombie apocalypse scenario: slow zombies, fresh bodies only, flesh-eaters, kill the head, kill the ghoul.

 

In this situation, what kind of weapon do you want? You can go with a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun, a machete, a sword or a club of some kind. Here's what I think about each option:

 

Club- heads don't break as easily as you might think from watching zombie movies.

Pistol- most people don't shoot very accurately under pressure.

Rifle- this is really a long-distance weapon, and zombies are a close-distance threat.

Sword- good for chopping off zombie heads, but cutting effectively with a sword requires prior training and swords need a lot of TLC if you're carting them around as you wander through the zombie-infested wastelands.

Machete- nice wide blade makes for relatively easy chopping, but blood splatter could lead to infection. In most zombie movies, the tiniest bite means inevitable doom but getting drenched head to toe in zombie blood is no problem at all. However, that makes no sense so I think we can assume blood splatter would be an issue. Still, you need an option for when your gun is out of ammo, and machetes are widely available and low-maintenance.

Shotgun- close-distance, user-friendly, head-blasting power! You don't need to be a sharpshooter to blast a zombie's head off with one of these.

 

As you can see from this analysis, the ideal combo in case of a zombie apocalypse is a shotgun with machete back-up. Now you know!

 

Australian Grocery Store Poltergeist

Is an Australian ghost fond of Fruit Roll-Ups? Or is it just a coincidence?

 

Three sets of security cameras in an Australian IGA grocery store caught some unusual activity recently. Out of the blue, a box of Fruit Roll-Ups seems to be thrown from the shelves at the front of the store. The store's owner had been previously warned that the store was haunted, and the Fruit Roll-Ups aren't even kept in that section. Is this the work of a poltergeist, or something else?
 
The facts of the case: the supermarket stocks the Fruit Roll-Ups at the far end of Aisle 2 (at the back of the store). However, the box in question came from the near end of Aisle 3 (at the front of the store). This is a distance of 6 meters (almost 20 feet), and around a corner.

 
Here's what strikes me about this: stuff in grocery stores gets rearranged all day long. If you ever actually look when you're shopping, you will see things all over the place. Shoppers pick things up and put them down for no apparent rhyme or reason. And it follows the standard traffic flow for someone to pick something up at the far end of Aisle 2, then decide they don't want it by the end of Aisle 3, and just set it "wherever."
 
When a shopper carelessly sets something down, it's not entirely beyond imagination to expect that it might fall down. In this video, the store's owner shows where the box of Fruit Roll-Ups came from: the bagged pasta aisle. 
 
 
This is a red flag for me. I can imagine setting a box of Fruit Roll-Ups atop some plastic pillow-like bags of dried pasta, and that box falling to the floor several hours later. What's more, the curve of the bags of pasta would tend to shoot the box out into the aisle in an arc. 
 
Maybe the answer is both. Maybe a careless shopper put the Fruit Roll-Ups where they don't belong, and the store's resident ghost flung them on the floor in a fit of organizational anger!
 
I will say that I have a lot of confidence in the veracity of this video, which is more than I can say for most ghost videos you find online. The activity is shown from three different camera angles, and the store owner seems more bemused by the attention than anything else. 
 
A local paranormal investigation team was invited to check out the store. Although they didn't experience any unusual activity, their results are still being analyzed.
 

Trucker Bombs

As hazardous as they are disgusting

 

So-called "trucker bombs" are becoming a big problem for America's highways for several reasons. What is a trucker bomb, you may ask? 
 
Let's set the stage. You are a long-distance trucker. You are also (for reasons which will soon become clear) male. You have been up for twenty hours straight, probably on meth. Also you have been drinking a lot of coffee and Gatorade and Red Bull to keep awake.
 
No matter what, you have to keep on driving. But guess what? You also have to pee. 
 
What's a guy to do?

 
That's right! Pee into one of the empty Gatorade bottles that litter the cab of your truck. Then cap that bad boy, and throw it out your window. That's a trucker bomb.
 
As convenient as this must be for the truckers, someone has to clean up all those Gatorade bottles full of urine. Highway clean-up crews are pretty tired of having to pick up someone else's pee bottle, believe me. A lot of clean-up crews are volunteer organizations who operate out of a sense of civic pride. If they quit cleaning up the highways, we will soon be up to our ears in discarded McDonald's wrappers and pee-filled soda bottles.
 
Clean up is also provided by each state's Department of Transportation. In the state of Utah alone, the DOT costs the taxpayers between $2 and $3 million dollars a year for highway clean-up. And their maintenance crews are handling an estimated 20,000 urine bottles a year. One small county in Washington State counted 2,666 bottles of urine over the course of a year. (As well as "67 feces covered items not including diapers." Yowza.)
 
This human waste is technically a biohazard. It's dangerous to have people cleaning it up, and it's difficult to get rid of. Also, it's super gross. If you have the bad luck to be mowing the shoulder on the wrong stretch of highway, when the mower blades hit the bottles "they explode. The operator ends up wearing this stuff."
 
Another problem is, a lot of people are under the mistaken belief that a trucker's urine still contains useable amounts of meth. You know where I'm going with this, right? Yep, it's true: desperate meth addicts have been known to scavenge the shoulders of America's highway, looking for discarded bottles of trucker urine which they can then drink.
 
And in a larger sense, the final is that our commercial systems are set up such that the people who deliver our goods cannot take reasonable bathroom breaks. However, one would hope that truckers who have to resort to peeing in bottles would at least have the courtesy to hang onto them until the next rest stop, and drop them in the trash. 

Transcendental Meditation, A New Fad?

Leave it to Oprah to revive an old trend!

 

Oprah lit up the internet last night when she discussed, on her network (OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network), her fondness for transcendental meditation. This practice, which for many people is strongly associated with the 1970s, seems to be undergoing a resurgence in recent years.
 
A lot of ridiculous claims have been made about TM over the years. For example, that any town with a certain percentage of TM enthusiasts becomes a "haven from crime," with a zero unemployment rate, and crops that grow like gangbusters. Or that if you practice long enough (and pay enough money to your yogi), you can learn to literally levitate when you meditate, hovering several inches above the ground.


 
These claims are patently bogus. Meditation in and of itself is fine. It's great, actually. It can help lower your blood pressure and decrease your stress. (If you do it right, that is. I myself have never failed to fall sound asleep, no matter how hard I try to stay awake and focus. But I guess taking a nice nap is a stress reliever itself, if you think about it.)
 
There is nothing particularly special about transcendental meditation which sets it off from other forms of meditation. You assume a specific pose, and close your eyes while reciting a specific mantra. Except that it can cost you a lot of money to learn how to do it! Each mantra can cost several hundred dollars, and learning the basics of TM can set you back several thousand dollars. And after that, many people report getting hit with a hard sell to spend even more money on the next level, whatever the course master determines that to be.
 
Unfortunately, this peaceful practice of self-enlightenment is often hawked by unscrupulous cult leaders and self-proclaimed yogis. It is somewhat unusual in this respect, in that it is an actual thing that works, unlike most other forms of pseudo-religious or semi-religious snake oil. 
 
Imagine if you joined a church, and they tried to charge you hundreds of dollars to learn each prayer. Or if you joined a gym, and they wanted to soak you for thousands of dollars to learn an exercise routine (which you would then be expected to practice on your own). This business of charging money for mantras and instructional classes is downright silly, if not actually disrespectful to the practice of meditation as a whole.

 

Wisconsin Noises: Solved

Swarm of earthquakes rocked Clintonville
It was difficult to tell where the noises were coming from. Sometimes they sounded like "rattling pipes," other times like "distant thunder." Sometimes they were accompanied by a rattling or shaking of the earth, although it was difficult to tell which came first. Were the noises making the earth tremble, or vice versa?
 
The U.S. Geological Survey has finally solved the superficial mystery: the noises were due to a "swarm" of shallow surface earthquakes. These earthquakes caused a variety of noises, depending on what they were shaking at the time. And obviously they would account for localized trembling of the ground, as well.

The broader question is, why a swarm of shallow earthquakes? Why now, why here? Apparently the earthquakes caused more problems in Clintonville than they would have elsewhere, because of the geography and geology of the area. But can this really have been the first time in recorded history that such a phenomena has taken place?
 
Government and oil industry experts have dismissed claims that these earthquakes could have been caused by fracking. But it is inarguably true that Wisconsin is "ground zero" for fracking these days. More fracking takes place in Wisconsin than in any other state.
 
It's an odd coincidence, to be sure!
 
Fracking is making a lot of people nervous, because it involves pumping high pressure fluids and gases into the bedrock. Despite industry assurances, it seems impossible that this kind of activity wouldn't cause geologic issues. And in fact there is a fairly substantial body of evidence linking fracking activity to earthquakes, up to and including a 4.0 earthquake that hit Youngstown, Ohio on New Year's Eve 2011. 
 
Granted, fracking has become everyone's favorite whipping boy lately. However, state regulators ruled that the Youngstown earthquake was "almost certainly" induced by wastewater fracking. With several established cases of fracking causing earthquakes, it's not implausible to wonder how far it's going to go.
 
Time to rock and roll? Is this the new normal? And just how far will we go to protect our current petroleum-based lifestyle? It's hard not to look at an incident like this and wonder when we will start building out solar panels in earnest!

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