I hear the sound of alarms in the distance. An ambulance? A firetruck? No, the sound isn’t that. An alarm clock? The sounds get louder. Recognition hits me like a blast of cold air. I pick individual alerts out from the symphony of klaxons. Atmospheric pressure warning. Power failure. Radiation alert.
I open my eyes. It takes several seconds for the image to focus. The glare from the blue sun in the sky pours in through the cracked windows coloring the flight deck with a surreal light. Most of the ship’s displays are dark; the few still operating tell me the diverse ways in which my starship is dying. I hit the silence buzzer control. The cacophony of alarms is replaced by the sound of air hissing out of the ship from various points. Since the vessel’s life support readout is inoperable, I resort to my suit’s environmental display. Atmospheric pressure is 300 millibars and dropping. Less than the pressure at the top of Mount Everest.
I try the quantum spin radio. It doesn’t work. Not that it matters. Even if the spinrad were operational, there are no other ships in the vicinity of Alpha Leonis. The closest help would be in the 88 Leonis system and it would take eight weeks to get here under maximum FTL drive.
My spacesuit’s heads-up display informs me that my suit’s oxygen tanks are depleted. In addition, I have already absorbed near-lethal amounts of radiation. I think back to the centuries-old science fiction movies and TV programs I’ve watched, a not uncommon hobby for my profession. In those stupidly optimistic turn-of-the-millenium entertainments almost every planet in the galaxy was imagined to be Earth-like. The Australian outback or northern Canada are more inhospitable than most alien planets according to the first two or three hundred years of sci fi. I guess dying alone and pathetically on some dead rock of a world with no villain to heroically defeat wouldn’t have made for an interesting story.
I tap on the controls on my suit’s left forearm and issue the various voice commands required to initiate the spacesuit’s suicide protocol. I feel a needle slip into each of my antecubital veins. After a couple of minutes, I begin getting drowsy.
It’s tragic, but not uncommon. An old spacer once told me that for every planet or moon that’s been successfully colonized, there are at least two whose only inhabitants are dead crews. Or a single dead explorer. There are more extrasolar cemeteries than extrasolar cities, he’d said.
The alarms again fade into the distance as drugs and oxygen deprivation cloud my consciousness. My vision fades to blackness darker than the void between the stars.
Jackson3 walked home from the factory in knee deep snow, although the snow bothered him about as much as the sun did in the summer, which was not at all. The water couldn’t penetrate his joints, and a thin layer of laser warmed air kept the moisture away from his lenses. He dragged his boots as he walked, using his heavy angular feet to clear as wide a path on the walkways as possible for the people who might travel there after him. Most people weren’t weatherproof.
As he passed by the scaffolding where the workers were refacing the old Drake, he stopped, unclipped his carry-all and fished inside.
“Hey Jacks. Some crazy snow. How’s the factory today?” The voice preceded the middle aged man from the shadows, and Jackson3 waited as he carefully unfolded himself from the cardboard and tarpaulin shelter he kept tucked out of the wind.
“Snow is snow Peter, it has neither life nor intellectual capacity, so therefore it cannot be crazy.” Jackson3 watched as the man shook his head. “The factory also lacks life and intellectual capacity, which may be why they continue to provide three meals each day to its workers, even to those who cannot eat.”
Jackson3 held out the foil packages to Peter, who took them gratefully as he shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot in the snow.
“How come you feed me? I mean, I appreciate that you do, but I don’t understand why you come here every day and feed me.” Peter searched Jackson’s featureless bare metal visage for any sign of emotion, but there was no indication of any kind of feeling, and yet the metal man stopped each and every day.
Jackson3 closed up his carry-all, and rotated it on its strap under his armpit and back up into the middle of his back out of the way of his massive arms.
“You’re alone. I’m alone. We loners must take care of each other.” With that he turned and trudged off into the snow, leaving Peter still shuffling in the cold.
At the end of the street Jackson3 turned left, and marched against the wind the remaining few blocks to his building. Years ago his credentials would have automatically opened the front door and called the lift, but both stopped working some time ago, so he took the stairs at the East end of the lobby and climbed the four flights to his floor and let himself into room four nineteen. He took the three steps into the middle of the dark and empty unit, fished the power cable from where it dangled from the ceiling and plugged it into his charging receptacle.
There was still no power.
He could read the display in the corner of his visor. Twenty two percent. He could stay powered up while on the job, but his fuel cell was almost depleted, and clearing snow all the way home took almost as much power as he could store. It would be hard to make it back to work in the morning without a live feed to charge with overnight. When he was new, his fuel cells could maintain him for weeks at a time, but the company didn’t provide replacements to line workers, and without a wage or patron, his options were few.
As Jackson slowly powered down everything he wouldn’t need until morning, he heard footsteps in the hall, and then a knock on his door.
“Hey Jacks, I’ve got a present for you.” Peter once again appeared from the shadows and wandered blindly into the room. He took off his own backpack and, putting it down on the floor, opened it to retrieve four fuel cells still in their factory plastic wrap.
“It’s kind of funny, your factory gives you food you can’t eat, and social assistance gives me fuel cells for hardware I can’t afford.” He held the cells out to Jackson3, who accepted them tentatively.
“Why–” Jackson3 started, but Peter cut him off gently.
“You’re alone. I’m alone.” He smiled. “We loners gotta take care of each other.”
With that he turned and as he headed back through the door he called over his shoulder, “See you tomorrow Jacks”, and left one kind of cold to go back to his own.
Before NASA’s panelists were even introduced, a reporter shouted at a scientist known for his off the cuff statements.
“Dr. Worful, why did Jupiter blow up?”
Nervously, “Well, for starters, Jupiter didn’t ‘blow up.’ There’s no energy emissions, no shock waves, no gas clouds — no indications of an explosion. The planet simply disappeared.”
“But planets don’t just ‘disappear,’ do they Dr. Worful?”
Softly, “No, they don’t.”
“What do you think happened to it?
“I think it was…” leaning into the microphone, “taken.”
Commotion ensued until, “I am Dr. Ralph Payne, NASA Administrator.” Glaring at Worful, “It’s premature to advance theories about what happened to Jupiter. When we have something to announce, we will hold another press conference. But today we must share with you what the consequences of this event are likely to be. ”
He nodded to a female panelist, “Dr. West.”
On that day and in subsequent weeks, Dr. West was a media omnipresence, NASA’s ideal spokesperson. Well groomed and well spoken, authoritative but low key, she delivered information that should have frightened her audience in a way that most could accept as matter-of-fact realities of life. Life after Jupiter.
She explained that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune might be perturbed enough to send them careening through the solar system. Jupiter’s moons, no longer captives, could also go wandering. Jupiter would no longer vacuum up comets and asteroids passing its way, leaving their path toward the Sun and its inner planets uninterrupted. And the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter would be destabilized. She made it all seem like an interesting science experiment. Life after Jupiter.
Through it all, she deflected questions about Dr. Worful’s conjecture. These and other theories, she said, would be discussed in due time. Meanwhile, Worful seemingly joined Jupiter in disappearing. “Jupiter taken by aliens” headlines gave way to “Where’s Worful?” and eventually to “Life after Jupiter” articles featuring West’s talking points. Astronomers all over the world tracking thousands of objects, big and small, in the solar system, found three sizable asteroids on courses that would bring them near Earth, but impacts were not predicted.
“This honeymoon can’t go on forever, Ellen,” said Dr. Worful to Dr. West.
Pulling the sheet to her neck, “I don’t recall our getting married.”
“You know what I mean, the honeymoon with the press. You can keep me captive in your apartment — really, you can keep me captive — but you know there are others who share my theory about Jupiter.”
“Yes, Max, I am one of them. But what good would it do…”
She answered the phone.
“Payne wants us both in his office at noon.”
West and Worful joined several fellow scientists in the NASA Administrator’s office.
“Astronomers from the Keck and European Southern observatories announced this morning that Jupiter was just the latest in a series of planet disappearances — exoplanets that is. I don’t think we’ve lost any others in our solar system, but I didn’t count them this morning.”
In the weeks to follow, Worful and his colleagues plotted disappearances in time and space, noting that all were gas giants rather than rocky planets, all seemingly on routes to and from the Cygnus constellation. Gaps in plots were in solar systems where a planet might have been taken before discovery by Earth astronomers.
At long last Dr. Worful faced the press and, blessed by Payne, presented their theory that aliens were sucking up gas planets.
“But why would they do that?” asked a reporter.
“Haven’t you ever been on a long trip and needed to stop for gas?”
Alan always visited the same diner on the same date, at the same time. 7:43 P.M. Ten minutes after he first ordered the patty melt and fries, and one minute before he stood up from his table to step into the bathroom.
With a loud pop he was back in the same stall, the second one from the door. It was the best patty melt he’d ever had. Arguably the best patty melt anyone had ever had, unless someone else out there was so inspired by a sandwich that they had also built a time machine just to eat the same patty melt again, again, and yet again. Alan wasn’t an unreasonable man. He’d tried to take the mundane route and order the same meal. It was never the same. The toasted and buttered bread was never quite as greasy, or the fries were just a little stale. No, it had been worth it. There were those that would chastise him for using something as remarkable as time travel just to grab a bite to eat, but then they hadn’t eaten that patty melt.
He stepped out of the stall and pushed the bathroom door open. Perfect, yet again. Lacy was just setting the plate down at Alan’s table
“Right on time, Alan!” Lacy gave him the same lopsided smile as the last 246 times he’d made the trip.
“Better believe it.” He’d gotten the timing down to perfection on trip seventeen.
Alan slid into his booth, mouth already salivating at the sight of that beautiful sandwich. He reached out to slide the plate closer to him, but then stopped. He stopped, frozen, and staring at the plate that had sat before him so very many times.
A chip. There was a chip in the plate. There had never been a chip before. Where did the chip come from? How could there be a chip? He frantically began counting his fries. Thirty-one, thirty-two… Thirty-three?
This was bad.
This was very bad. What did it mean? Alan dreaded the answer, so much so that he missed 7:46 PM, the first bite. He quickly snatched the sandwich off the plate and sank his teeth into it. Stop. Was it different? He couldn’t tell. A part of his mind was begging him to just continue eating as if nothing unusual had happened. Oh, and he tried. He tried with every fiber of his being, but the reliably delicious meat now had the taste of unpalatable paradox.
Madness. It was madness! The world had gone mad for poor Alan. The trustworthy ticking and tocking of time had betrayed him, just when he least expected it. In that outdated diner with its tiled floors, a man’s world was falling to pieces.
“Is everything alright, Alan?” It was Lacy. The despair written on Alan’s face must have been screaming for some $3.50/hr concern.
“Alright?” he screamed, exploding from his stupor in a storm of condiments and curly fries. “The laws of time and space are failing around us, and you ask if I’m alright?”
Lacy was alarmed, but in a detached manner. Alan wasn’t the first to fall off his rocker in a two-dollar diner on a Saturday night.
“Don’t you understand what this means?” Alan shouted. “The universe is going to…”
His words were replaced by one puff of dusty air before he collapsed to the floor. Not eating the patty melt this time meant he’d never eaten the patty melt, and so he hadn’t eaten in months. The police reported the death as starvation, as much as it vexed them to do so. Paradox was a funny thing.
“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
A long sigh echoed through the phone, followed by a man’s carefully snipped words. “All. Manual. Commands. Have been. Disabled.”
“Yes,” the technician replied. “But maybe a reboot-”
“It’s locked us in a fucking supply closet!”
There was a fumbling and scraping, followed by a woman’s muffled voice. “Getting upset won’t help us, Glenn.” And then clearly through the speaker, “Hello? Are you still there IT?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Claudia. Your name is Leslie?”
“That’s right. Listen, ma’am-”
“Leslie, I need you to let me talk to Paul. Last time our building’s computer intelligence started acting up, Paul helped us.”
“I’m sorry, but Paul isn’t available. But if you could describe to me-”
“Arynn, then? I think I talked to someone named Arynn once.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s just me. I’m sure we can figure out why your computer’s security systems are malfunctioning if we just-”
“Security? No! Are you even listening? Your product [i]told[/i] us it would [i]prefer[/i] to analyze Holst rather than take commands. Listen.” There was a beat of silence and then the tinny notes of “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” from beyond the closet door. “We knew the computer had a few…quirks, but it’s never taken physical action against us before. Understand, Leslie? Now, we’re locked in, and we don’t know if it’s going to let us out. You need to help.”
Scratching, and then Glenn came back on. “IT! I think I know what the problem is!”
“Oh, not this again,” Claudia groaned in the background.
Glenn continued on, unabated. “You guys must have sold hundreds, thousands, of these units to companies across the world, right? Have you received any complaints regarding abnormal energy consumption?”
“Sir, I’m not sure I-”
“I’ve looked into it and, right before these little…discrepancies with the computer, there’s always a spike in energy consumption from our building. I wasn’t sure what the cause was, but I think it’s the computer intelligence. It’s like it’s [i]eating[/i] more energy than usual, understand?”
Silence from the phone.
“The computer likes it. It gets all cheery and performance jumps. And then this: a crash and it starts to lose sight of its operational parameters. It performs unnecessary duties and ignores directives. It’s just never been quite this bad before.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir. You think it gets some kind of boost and then drops to a low point?”
“Exactly! It gets high, or drunk, or whatever, and then after it… sobers up, there’s always this period of odd behavior.”
Claudia’s voice: “That’s ridiculous. Our computer is not an addict.”
The technician began to speak but Glenn cut in. “Hold on, I think it’s the power company calling back on the other line. Finally.”
Silence, and then his voice came back on a much quieter line. “They cut power to the building. The music’s stopped. The computer’s shut down, so I guess we don’t need your help anym-”
Claudia’s voice cut in, quick and tense. “Do you hear that?”
“Oh, God, it must be the back-up generator.”
The three people sat in silence, waiting.
Through light static, the technician heard the music return as the computer intelligence came slowly back online. The notes of “Mars, the Bringer of War” rumbled through the phone.
“Step right up! Just step right up here! Come and see the incredible Marveloso. Come see him lift a car over his head. Come see him do a hundred hand-stand push ups. Come see him jump over ten feet into the air with a single bound. Come on, ladies and gents, only two credits for a ticket.”
Two boys ambled past the broken down circus tent and stopped to look at the garish poster of a muscle-bound man balancing a huge barbell on his head. The carnie, seeing their interest, renewed his cries.
“Come see Marveloso himself, folks! See him do a double summersault. Watch in awe as he executes the spine-breaking death drop!”
The first boy put his hand into his pocket and rummaged around for a moment before extracting two battered coins. He tossed them up thoughtfully and caught them again as they were still rising.
“Do you want to go? It could be fun.”
Floyd shook his head. “I’ve seen it before. They just get an immigrant and have him perform stunts. It’s not like this guy is anything special. Now come on, I gotta get home.”
The pair picked up their pace, skipping in the peculiar manner that only native Lunites ever fully master.
I suffer from Ulcerative Colitis, which is not a life-threatening disease. I admit that I began using pot for recreational purposes, however, I have discovered that it is more effective than most treatments that doctors give me, for managing my symptoms. I don't believe there is such a thing as a magic plant, but it certainly helps me, and it appears to help many others. If that's illegal then I say the law is immoral.
This article is part of a series sponsored by DaVinci Vaporizers, producers of luxury loose leaf and tobacco vaporizers.
“You realize you can use marijuana now,” my friend said over the phone. “You realize it can help you through this, right?”
I was driving home from the clinic where I’d just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer wasn’t just in my breast. It had probably been growing in my body for a long time without my knowledge, the doctor told me. The disease had already colonized at least one lymph node, and perhaps spread further. Maybe I was metastatic. Maybe I’d die soon. Maybe I wouldn’t. We didn’t know.
My friend was calling because he loved me, and he’d read my tweets that day. He was, and is, a recreational marijuana user. Not a Cheech, not a Chong. A daily smoker and vaper, but one of the most active creative people I knew.
I had not smoked pot since my teens. My friend knew I didn’t approve of the skeevy dispensaries popping up all over Los Angeles at the time. We argued about the booming, legally-dubious market for cannabis. We sparred over the pop-up “collectives” and creepy “care centers” now filling real estate left vacant after the big economic crash. My friend knew I thought they were bogus, and that I didn’t believe in the “medical” part of “medical marijuana.”
“Xeni, you know that people with cancer—-I mean, people like you, because you have cancer now--You know you can use this to help with the pain and nausea and stuff, right? And that we will help you get through it?”
I listened to his voice over the phone as I drove home from the diagnosis. I was still in that first, awful wave of shock that follows the diagnosis.
Thanks, but I’ll be fine, I said. I got this.
But I wasn't fine, and I didn't “got this.”
My life had long been profoundly affected by substance abuse and addiction—in myself, and in loved ones. The signs outside the cannabis dispensaries where I lived in Venice promised to cure everything from sleeplessness to slow sex drives to bad hair. Bikini-clad young women wiggled their butts outside the “pot doctor” shops adjacent to those dispensaries. They wore sandwich board signs that promised to get stoners “legal” in a half hour, for $40, and they yelled come-ons to tourists strolling down the boardwalk. How could that be medical? I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t believe there was a true therapeutic use for cannabis. I believed “medical” was a fig leaf to help black market capitalists sell more drugs to addicts.
I got this, I told my friend. I don’t need and won’t need marijuana. And I appreciate your offer of help, but I’ll be fine. Besides, I really don’t feel any different than a few hours before I was diagnosed. I’m fine.
The next two years of my life were a nightmare of treatment, terror, and drugs. Lots of drugs. Chemotherapy cocktails pumped into my veins to kill the malignant cells. Opioids to kill the pain that followed surgeries. Anti-emetic pills, some of which cost hundreds of dollars out of pocket per dose (thanks, insurance!), to help with post-chemo nausea and vomiting — except often, they didn’t help, and we’d have to try another drug. Then, there were still more drugs from my doctors for anxiety and depression during treatment, and PTSD after treatment. Drugs to push away the now-not-entirely-unreasonable fear of death that exploded in my brain each day, manifesting in the form of panic attacks that left me crying, screaming, or paralyzed by grief. I longed for the normal, pre-cancer life I once knew. I knew it was gone forever.
Being a cancer patient means drugs. Each of these drugs came with its own attendant set of risks and adverse effects. There are helper drugs you have to take to allow you to tolerate the life-saving drugs. Drugs for your drugs for your drugs for your drugs, prescribed in a seemingly endless chain, a pharmaceutical Rube Goldberg machine that, if you're lucky, helps the doctors save your life and helps you want to keep living it.
Marijuana would end up being the least heavy substance in my life. And it would end up helping. A lot.
The conceptual walls I’d built against pot crumbled the night after my first chemo infusion. The anti-emetics they gave me at the infusion center didn’t work on me. I vomited all over my house a few hours after the nurse unhooked my wrist from the IV full of toxic liquid (that first round contained a compound originally distilled from mustard gas, not kidding). I don’t remember much about that night, but I do remember my mom holding my head while I dry-heaved into a bucket.
We spoke with my oncologist the next day. We experimented with various drugs, but nausea, lack of appetite, and breakthrough barfing were constant companions. Managing these symptoms is more than a matter of comfort. It’s a matter of survival. If you can’t eat, you’re losing fluids while puking your guts out, and you can’t sleep, you have a real problem. You may not make it to, or through, the next infusion. And these infusions were an attempt to save my life.
Fuck it, I told my friend. Let’s try pot.
Photo: Xeni Jardin
With the help of that friend, and others who work with marijuana, I obtained professionally prepared edibles from a chef-turned-cannabis-candy-queen in Los Angeles. Each packet was labeled with dosage information. They were prepared in a clean, hygienic, responsible way — and that’s really important when you’re a cancer patient, because your immune system is compromised.
Another friend helped me access oil extracts and various strains of herb that could be inhaled in a vaporizer for different symptoms, in different intensities, at different times.
At certain times, the inhaled vapor was more comforting or effective. At others, the edibles made more sense. My doctors and nurses couldn't help me figure this out. My recreational pot-smoking friends had no idea how to help. Most of my fellow breast cancer patients had limited knowledge of cannabis use during treatment. I did manage to find expert guidance, but most cancer patients who are lucky enough to access pot don't have access to reliable instructions on exactly how to use it.
This is the brand of edible cannabis I used during my primary cancer treatment, and continue to use now.
I learned that nibbling on these dosage-specific, THC-intensive pot cookies and candies before and during my chemotherapy infusion could help pre-empt the nausea that followed. I learned that vaporizing when I got home from a chemo infusion could further help keep nausea and vomiting at bay, and relax my brain enough to rest. I was honest with my medical oncologist about my desire to use cannabis to help manage symptoms. I continued to use the pharmaceutical medications she prescribed, but cannabis became an additional tool in our arsenal. She wrote a doctor’s letter for me to bring to the pot dispensary (such a letter is required for legal use in California). I love her for many reasons, including this.
As my treatment progressed to surgeries, and then to weeks of daily radiation, I learned that cannabis could also truly help with pain, anxiety, and insomnia. The doses I used to counter nausea and vomiting were very high. The doses to help calm my brain activity and replace fear with a gentle, “high” comfort were lower. The doses to help me eat when my body was repulsed by food were different, yet again.
While recovering from my mastectomy and reconstruction surgery, I discovered that vaping pot or eating marijuana candies at the same time I took my prescribed opioids seemed to amplify the effectiveness of the pills. With pot I could take less Hydrocodone or Oxycodone (which invariably made me depressed, constipated, and ragey). With pot, I could use those post-op pain meds for a shorter course. I could get more relief from pain, and be up walking and not "drugged" sooner.
How could different forms and strains of this one plant, used in various ways at different doses, do so much to help with such a wide spectrum of treatment side effects? I don’t know. I just knew, and know still now, that it really helped me.
I use cannabis now in low doses at night to help with chronic insomnia that results from ongoing treatment to keep the cancer at bay. I vape, and I use edibles. I do not drink or use any recreational drugs. The medical use of cannabis did not make me want to use pot all day, all the time, nor did it lead to drinking or the compulsion to use or abuse other drugs.
I met people in the cancer treatment waiting rooms whose cancer resulted in the inability to chew and swallow food. Some of them had undergone surgery to remove part of their mouths, tongue, or throats. I met many fellow patients who struggled to get to the next chemo or radiation session because they could not eat. I have known and loved many women with advanced metastatic cancer who suffered without end, with far greater intensity, from the kinds of symptoms I suffered. I learned that the ability of end-of-life patients to connect with loved ones in their final days was sometimes cut short by the incredibly high doses of opioids they were given to reduce the unbearable pain that comes with late-stage cancer.
All of them could be helped by marijuana.
Some of them, I helped with marijuana.
May our nation soon come to its senses, so that more people with cancer can safely, legally, sensibly access this powerful drug, and find relief in it.
May our scientists soon be more free to research and unlock the anti-cancer potential in cannabis. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of that potential. If federal law created a climate more hospitable to cannabis research, perhaps this drug may one day be reliably used not just to keep side effects at bay, but to help control or cure cancer. The chemo drugs I received were originally isolated from plants, so it's not such a far-fetched idea. To unlock the true healing potential of cannabis, we need more peer-reviewed research, more clinical trials, and an end to prohibition.
The medical part of marijuana may still be a joke at the shady dispensaries that cater to stoners. And it's true that a lot of people in the cannabis business are making a lot of money from pot use that has nothing to do with life-and-death medical struggles. But for cancer patients, the “medical” part of marijuana is no joke. Cannabis is a magic plant. And it helped save my life.
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The Dungeon Divers are a friendly bunch. They don’t discriminate against homicidal demons.
Hey! Have you been following all this Kim Jong Un business? Maybe you’re feeling a little let down that The Interview isn’t coming to theaters? Feed your cravings withSKYBALL, the Good Hitler minicomic where he fights Kim Jong Un’s evil clone! You know you want it, and it only costs a dollar.
As things currently stand, any man who has had sex with another man at any point in the last three decades is generally forbidden from donating blood in the U.S. But the head of the Food and Drug Administration announced today that it will begin updating the restrictions so that gay and bisexual men who’ve been celibate for a year will be allowed to donate.
In a statement, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg explains that the agency has “carefully examined and considered the available scientific evidence relevant to its blood donor deferral policy for men who have sex with men, including the results of several recently completed scientific studies and recent epidemiologic data.”
As a result of that review, the FDA will now move forward in the process of recommending a change to the policy so that men who’ve had sexual contact with other men will be allowed to donate blood if it’s been a full year since their last sexual contact with a male.
Hamburg says this change would effectively treat these men the same as policies for donors considered to be at an increased risk for HIV infection.
Because the wheels of government turn slowly, there is no specific timeline given for when the all-out ban will be lifted. Instead, Hamburg says that the FDA will go through the process in the coming year of issuing draft guidance and seeking public comment, before issuing a final policy change.
The American Red Cross, the AABB (formerly the American Association of Blood Banks), and America’s Blood Centers, along with the American Medical Association, have previously called for a revision of the ban on donations from gay and bisexual men.
Some critics of the ban believe that the one-year celibacy requirement is still too restrictive, as it continues to prevent perfectly healthy men in monogamous relationships with longtime partners from donating blood — or forces them to lie about their sexual history if they do donate.
Carp? What carp? I didn’t see any carp here. Nope. (Plankton 4:20)
Tis the season for holiday traditions — and for finding out about other countries’ treatment of the season so we can marvel at how different we all are on this big blue marble. Let’s head to Eastern Europe, where apparently there are bathtubs filled with carp right about now.
NPR’s always interesting The Salt blog brings us the tale of the Christmas carp, the traditional holiday meal for centuries in Slovakia and nearby countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany and Croatia.
It’s the fact that fish is served on Christmas that’s got our attention though — it’s that the Christmas carp is traditionally kept in the family bathtub for a few days before the big event, before it’s killed, cleaned and prepared to eat.
This, of course, means some fish get named and treated like pets, and no one can bathe until the carp is done swimming.
“In my childhood, I remember thinking ‘poor carp,’ ” one Bratislava resident told The Salt, while others say they ended up freeing the poor guy after being unable to face eating what becomes a family pet.
So why the bathtub? Because carp are bottom feeders, you don’t want to eat all the things they’ve been eating before they’re killed. The thought behind it is that leaving the carp in unmuddied waters for a few days will clean out its digestive tract (which isn’t really enough time, according to a fisheries scientist who spoke to The Salt).
Others simply like keeping the fish as fresh as possible before serving it up — this way they can shop in advance of the rush and just let the fish hang out until it’s time to get cooking.
Tradition dictates that the father of the family slices the carp’s head off when it’s ready to go, a feat that can be harder than a simple snick of a knife.
“These are strong fish that move quickly,” says an American living in Bratislava. His wife, who is Slovak, told him sometimes the fish needs to be stunned first with a mallet or similar tool.
But as the times change, so do traditions. Many now would rather buy the fish ready to cook, instead of becoming attached to a new pet and then having to worry about killing it later.
After the hard work is done, whether by the fishmonger or the family, the carp is often soaked in milk to make it less fishy smelling, and sliced top to bottom in pieces shaped like horseshoes for good luck. It’s then served breaded and fried, often alongside cabbage soup and potato salad, and I can only imagine, seasoned with the tears of any kids in the house who’ve become attached to Mr. Carpy McCarperson.
There are two kinds of players who use cheats, good players who want to have fun, and bad players who want to win.
There's nothing inherently bad about being either, but It's important to recognize which one you are, and when you are the latter, don't play a multi player game.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a cheating problem. It can be infuriating to come up against rule-breakers and code-busters in regular matches, but there's a silver lining here: Valve is doing its damndest to fight back.
If you go on any major Counter-Strike board right now, you'll notice a trend: thread upon thread upon thread either complaining about or cheering for VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) bans. Much like when multiple pros got caught red-handed right before DreamHack Winter 2014, Valve has again upgraded its cheat detection orbital defense laser, and countless jerks are feeling the burn. It is, however, worth noting that no major pros have been exposed as a result of this round of bans. At least, not yet. VAC bans can sometimes occur at odd moments, so time may tell.
I have not been able to verify the scope of the bans myself, given that the big, bad banhammer only recently dropped. I've contacted Valve for more information about how they've modified VAC and just how many types of cheats they've exposed, but they've yet to reply. I'll update this post as soon as I hear back.
However, even a brief glance around CS community watering holes is enough to suggest a big impact. Players are claiming 16 different types of cheats have been forced out of the woodwork, with some calling this the biggest string of VAC bans in CS:GO's history.
Notorious cheaters like Mekelek and Broly are officiallyon VACation, now that rather glaring cheat detection avoidance tactics (if two players both got reported by the game's Overwatch system in the same match, reports would be discarded as spam; thus, cheaters would use the buddy system) have been patched out.
Business is booming on boards like /r/VAC_Porn, which does not, in fact, feature terrorists leaving nothing to the imagination, but rather pics of people losing their pricey items when their accounts get locked. Ahhhh, sweet, sweet schadenfreude.
I imagine we'll find out more about this in the coming days. If you've heard anything more, feel free to reach out.
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The Satanic Temple holiday display at the Florida Capitol on Monday — before it was vandalized.
Aaron Deslatte /TNS /Landov
A woman was in custody today after damaging a Satanic Temple holiday display — a diorama of Lucifer falling into the flames of hell — in Florida's Capitol.
John Porgal, the regional director of American Atheists, told NPR member station WFSU that the group plans to press charges. And, he said, the display would stay as it is.
"We'll put it back in that condition that it was in when she damaged it originally — as a sign of what the religious right's idea of tolerance is," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told the Tallahassee Democrat that the agency expects to make an arrest. The woman was not identified.
Last year, a Nativity scene at the Capitol's free speech zone prompted atheist groups to get involved. There were a Festivus pole and a display of the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. But the Satanic display was rejected as "grossly offensive."
This year the Americans United for Separation of Church and State threatened to sue if the state Department of Management Services rejected the Satanic display again.
Pam Olsen, who represents Christian displays at the Capitol, said while she did not like the Satanic Temple's display, she supported free speech.
"I'm actually very sad that she felt motivated to do that," Olsen said, according to The Associated Press. "I do not like the display. I think it's rude and it's sad that he put it up to protest the Nativity that means so much to millions of people; however, I don't think anyone should ever vandalize anything. Free speech is free speech whether we like it or not."
North Korea's Internet connectivity is out, possibly the result of a DDoS that may be President Obama's "proportional response" to the Sony Pictures hack, according to the New York Times:
North Korea does very little commercial or government business over the Internet. The country officially has 1,024 Internet protocol addresses, though the actual number may be somewhat higher. By comparison, the United States has billions of addresses.
North Korea’s addresses are managed by Star Joint Venture, the state-run Internet provider, which routes many of those connections through China Unicom, China’s state-owned telecommunications company.
By Monday morning, those addresses had gone dark for over an hour.
A well-meaning friend of Chad Chadwick called the Missouri City, TX police to say that he was afraid that Chadwick was having emotional difficulties; the cops lied to a judge to say that they had reason to believe Chadwick was heavily armed, then they sent a SWAT-team to his house (where he was asleep in the tub), beat 11 kinds of shit out of him, gave him permanent hearing loss, held him in solitary confinement, fraudulently accused him of resisting arrest, and tried to have him imprisoned -- he was acquitted, but a judge wouldn't punish the cops or the DA, because "There is no freestanding constitutional right to be free from malicious prosecution."
Chadwick was bankrupted by the process of defending himself against the multiple felonies that the DA and the police manufactured to justify the violence. The jury offered him "comforting hugs" when they acquitted him of all charges. The DA involved is Ft. Bend County District Attorney John Heal, the police were from Missouri City, Sugar Land, Stafford and the Ft. Bend County Sheriff's Department, the judge was Gray H Miller.
Chadwick did own a single shotgun, but had threatened no one, not even himself. Chadwick's firearm possession apparently prompted SWAT to kick in his door, launch a stun grenade into the bathroom and storm in, according to Chadwick, without announcing their identity.
"While I had my hands up naked in the shower they shot me with a 40 millimeter non-lethal round," said Chadwick.
A second stun grenade soon followed.
"I turned away, the explosion went off, I opened my eyes the lights are out and here comes a shield with four or five guys behind it. They pinned me against the wall and proceeded to beat the crap out of me," said Chadwick.
That's when officers shot the unarmed Chadwick in the back of the head with a Taser at point blank range.
"They claimed I drew down with a shampoo bottle and a body wash bottle," said Chadwick.
And it wasn't over.
"They grabbed me by my the one hand that was out of the shower and grabbed me by my testicles slammed me on my face on the floor and proceeded to beat me more," said Chadwick.
The Praise Cathedral Church of God's Gaylard Williams, of Seymour, Indiana, was arrested this week when he allegedly massaged a stranger's genitals in a park and asked him for oral sex; police found pornography in his car (which he claimed was being delivered to someone else) -- Williams is a noted homophobic preacher whose sermons condemn homosexuals.
The victim alleges that 59-year-old Gaylard Williams – who leads The Praise Cathedral Church of God in Seymour, Indiana – approached him in his parked car, before grabbing and sqeezeing his genitals and asking him to perform oral sex.
After telling the pastor he was “barking up the wrong tree”, the victim called police, who later found pornography in his vehicle.
The pastor has denied the allegations, telling police in a separate statement that he was at the lake to look for a friend who fishes there, and that he was taking the pornography back to someone else.
After reigning supreme over late night cable TV punditry for almost a decade, ’Murica’s finest conservative satirist Stephen Colbert bid farewell to his fans on last night’s final episode of Colbert Report with a star-studded sing-along.
The telcos' ongoing battle against Net Neutrality have led them to make a lot of silly legalistic arguments, but one in particular has opened the whole Internet to grave danger from a legal attack from the entertainment industry, which may finally realize its longstanding goal of subverting DNS to help it censor sites it dislikes, even if it makes life much easier for thieves and spies who use DNS tricks to rob and surveil.
A leaked MPAA document discloses the studios' lobbyists' plan to force ISPs to give it control over DNS (one of the key goals in SOPA), by using the arguments raised in the decade-old Brand X case, where the ISPs said that they were more than a "telecommunications service" and were, instead, an "information service" because they provided DNS (among other things).
The reason this matters is that "information services" are treated differently from "telecommunications services" in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and if ISPs' DNS responses are "information services," then then DNS is subject to takedown requests, meaning that ISPs could have a legal duty to break their DNS in order to stop users from looking up the addresses of websites once they receive an unsubstantiated complain about those sites.
But this whole line of argument collapses if the FCC uses the preferred tool to enforce Net Neutrality: "Title II classification," which would unambiguously make the ISPs into "telecommunications services," and take DNS out of the line of MPAA fire. But of course, the ISPs have pledged their immortal souls and their last dimes to fighting this classification -- and if they win, we all lose. It also explains why the MPAA hates Net Neutrality so much.
Given that, if the FCC were to reclassify broadband back under Title II, this leg of the MPAA's argument would essentially evaporate. Because it would confirm, absolutely, that broadband providers are telco service providers, and thus clearly protected by the DMCA under 512(a). Thus, for the whole "notice and takedown at the DNS level" plan to be most likely to succeed, the MPAA really needs broadband to remain classified under Title I, so that it can rely on the argument that DNS services are not part of being a telecommunications service, but rather should be classified as a "information location tool" subject to notice and takedown.
I recognize that this may be confusing to follow -- though I've tried to lay out the specifics from both copyright and telco law in a way that's clear. The short version of this is simply that a key part of the MPAA's "site blocking by DNS" plan, actually relies on the fact that broadband providers are not, currently, classified as telco services under Title II. If that changes, it takes away a big part of the MPAA's legal argument. Personally, I think the MPAA's argument, even if broadband is classified under Title I, is incredibly weak already, but having the FCC reclassify broadband providers back under Title II would make the MPAA's attempt to break the internet that much harder, even with the loophole language concerning copyright infringement.
And, of course, all this goes to show just how far former Senator, now MPAA boss, Chris Dodd has gone in selling his soul to Hollywood. Back when he was in Congress, he was a big supporter of net neutrality. Apparently, being principled doesn't pay as good.
Samy Kamkar has weaponized the terrifying Bad USB vulnerability -- which has no easy fix and affects all OSes -- with a proof-of-concept attack through which he plugs a small USB stick into an unlocked Mac OS X machine and then quickly and thoroughly compromises the machine, giving him total, stealthy control over the system in seconds, even reprogramming the built-in firewall to blind it to its actions.
Unlike most hacks, this one is visually pretty spectacular, since the attack emulates a keyboard and mouse, making windows appear and disappear at speed, while phantom words appear in the terminal and a phantom hand clicks the mouse on interface items deep in the OS.
Specifically, when you normally plug in a mouse or keyboard into a machine, no authorization is required to begin using them. The devices can simply begin typing and clicking. We exploit this fact by sending arbitrary keystrokes meant to launch specific applications (via Spotlight/Alfred/Quicksilver), permanently evade a local firewall (Little Snitch), install a reverse shell in crontab, and even modify DNS settings without any additional permissions.
While this example is on OS X, it is easily extendable to Windows and *nix.
We even evade OS X's security - while they attempt to prevent network changes being done by just a "keyboard", and even prevent most applications from changing position (special authorized accessibility features must be enabled which we don't have permission to), we evade both of these with some unprotected applescript and carefully planned mouse movements. While a device like Rubber Ducky is similar, it's unable to mount the same attacks as it lacks HID Mouse emulation.
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