STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

If You Still Care About 3D, The Xbox One Is Getting 3D Blu-ray Support

If you are one of that rare breed of AV fanatics that has both a 3D TV and a selection of 3D Blu-rays, Microsoft’s next update for the Xbox One is just for you. The next firmware update for the console will bring with it support for 3D Blu-ray playback, potentially removing the need for one more box under your telly.

Other features set to be added with the Xbox One August update include the ability to buy games using a mobile device with the SmartGlass app or through Xbox.com (with the games automatically downloading to a console left in low-power standby mode), a low battery notification for controllers, and the option to disable notifications during video playback.

A greater focus will also be placed on social interactions through Xbox Live, with an expanded Friends area on the Home screen, a spot telling you the last time your friends were online, and the ability to post text comments and “like” items on your activity feed.

[MIKA27]

Bloody Weekend in Gaza

Sunday was the deadliest day yet in the recent battles in the Gaza Strip, capping a bloody weekend where more than a hundred Palestinians were killed, as well as 18 Israeli soldiers, following an Israeli advance into Gaza. Israel said on Sunday it had expanded its ground offensive, and Hamas militants kept up rocket fire into the Jewish state with no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough to end the worst fighting between Israel and Hamas in two years. The New York Times reports the death toll reaching at least 425 since Israel's air offensive began on July 8. gathered here are photographs of the conflict from just the past few days.

Warning: Some of these photographs are graphic in nature, I have not posted many as they were far too graphic to post and out of respect to the deceased, I will not post - Appreciate the good we all have as others have it far worse and I wish there was no such thing as war...

A Palestinian woman wearing clothes stained with the blood of other relatives, who medics said were wounded in Israeli shelling, cries in a hospital in Gaza City on July 20, 2014.

Israeli tanks maneuver outside the northern Gaza Strip on July 18, 2014. Israel intensified its land offensive in Gaza with artillery, tanks and gunboats on Friday and warned it could "significantly widen" an operation Palestinian officials said was killing ever greater numbers of civilians.

Smoke and the flare of an explosion rise after an Israeli missile hit the Shijaiyah neighborhood in Gaza City on July 20, 2014. The neighborhood came under heavy tank fire Sunday as Israel widened its ground offensive against Hamas, causing hundreds of panicked residents to flee.

A Palestinian evacuates a wounded man following what police said was an Israeli air strike on a house in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on July 20, 2014

A Palestinian medic evacuates the body of a girl from Gaza's eastern Shejaiya district on July 20, 2014

An Israeli Apache attack helicopter shoots a missile over the Gaza Strip as seen from Israel's border with Gaza, on July 19, 2014

Journalists and residents of the southern Israeli city of Sderot take cover on July 20, 2014 as they are on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip where people watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants.

A Palestinian policeman carries a boy, who medics said was wounded in Israeli shelling, at a hospital in Gaza City on July 20, 2014

Medics try to revive a Palestinian, wounded during an Israeli strike, at the emergency room of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, on July 19, 2014

Palestinians flee their homes in Gaza's eastern Shejaiya district on July 20, 2014, after heavy Israeli shelling that left casualties lying in the streets, an AFP correspondent reported. Ambulances were unable to reach much of the area along the border because of heavy fire, and emergency services told AFP there were reports of dead and wounded trapped by the bombardment.

Smoke rises after an Israeli missile hit Shijaiyah neighborhood in Gaza City, on July 20, 2014.

An Israeli shell hits the minaret of a mosque during Israeli air strikes on the eastern part of Gaza City on July 19, 2014

Israeli soldiers from the Golani Infantry Brigade prepare their equipment and weapons near their Armored Personnel Carrier at an army deployment near the Israeli-Gaza border on July 19, 2014.

Israelis, mostly residents of the southern Israeli city of Sderot, one holding a national flag, sit on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, on July 20, 2014, to watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants

A soldier motions that he does not want his photo taken while on an operation near the Israeli-Gaza border on July 19, 2014 near Sderot, Israel.

A Palestinian carries the body of a child following an Israeli strike that hit a building in Gaza City, on July 20, 2014.

An Israeli soldier runs with shell next to artillery cannons on July 20, 2014 at the Israeli-Gaza border.

Palestinians, one holding a white flag, flee Gaza City's Shijaiyah neighborhood, northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, July 20, 2014.

A Palestinian man holds his daughters, Shada and Lama al-Ejla, who were injured in an Israeli tank attack, as he leaves al-Shifa hospital on July 18, 2014 in Gaza City

Palestinian Mahmoud Hamad, top, along with other members of the immediate and the extended family, inspects the damage at family house, destroyed by an Israeli strike, in Beit Lahiya on July 19, 2014.

An Israeli soldier gestures on a Merkava tank, as part of the Israeli army deployment near Israel's border with the Gaza Strip on July 20, 2014.

Israeli soldiers give medical care to soldiers who where wounded during an offensive in Gaza on July 20, 2014 at the Israeli-Gaza border

Israeli soldiers carry the flag-draped coffin of their comrade Amotz Greenberg during his funeral in the central town of Hod Hasharon on July 20, 2014. Eighteen Israeli soldiers, including Greenberg, and two Israeli civilians have been killed since a near two-week-old offensive was launched in response, Israel says, to mounting cross-border rocket attacks by Hamas militants.

Israeli soldiers of the 155mm artillery canons unit fire towards the Gaza Strip from their position near Israel's border with the coastal Palestinian enclave, on July 19, 2014.

A Palestinian man reacts as he stands in a damaged street in Gaza's eastern Shejaiya district on July 20, 2014

Palestinian medical personnel treat a wounded girl at the emergency room of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City on July 18, 2014.

An Israeli Apache helicopter fires flares above Israel near the border with northern Gaza on July 20, 2014.

Netream Netzleam holds the body of her daughter Razel, 1, who medics said died on Friday from injuries sustained in an Israeli air strike on Thursday afternoon, at her funeral in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on July 18, 2014

[MIKA27]

MH17 plane crash: Ukraine rebels hand over black boxes

Rebels in eastern Ukraine have handed over two flight-data recorders from the downed MH17 plane to Malaysian experts.

A senior rebel leader signed them over to the Malaysian officials at a meeting in the city of Donetsk.

The handover came hours after the UN Security Council voted unanimously to demand immediate international access to the crash site.

The Malaysian Airlines passenger jet crashed last Thursday, killing all 298 people on board.

Western nations say there is growing evidence that flight MH17 was hit by a Russian-supplied missile fired by rebels, but Russia has suggested Ukrainian government forces are to blame.

'In good condition'

Experts say the "black boxes" will reveal the exact time of the incident and the altitude and exact position of the aircraft.

They should also contain the cockpit voice recorder, which it is hoped will provide clues as to what the cause of the crash was.

The head of the Malaysian delegation told reporters that the recorders were "in good condition".

A freight train carrying the remains of 282 passengers is expected to arrive in Donetsk on Tuesday

A newly released satellite image shows the crash site in the middle of Grabove in eastern Ukraine

Earlier, the pro-Russian rebels allowed a freight train carrying the bodies of 282 passengers to be moved from a town near the crash site to Donetsk.

The Malaysian experts and a Dutch delegation will travel with the train to the city of Kharkiv on Tuesday.

Meanwhile a UN resolution, proposed by Australia, was passed calling for a "full, thorough and independent international investigation" into the downing of the plane over Grabove on 17 July.

It also demanded that those responsible "be held to account and that all states co-operate fully with efforts to establish accountability".

Analysis: Nick Bryant, BBC UN correspondent, in New York

After expressing misgivings about the wording of the UN resolution, the Russian ambassador ultimately raised his hand in favour. A veto from Moscow would have provoked even more of an international outcry.

US ambassador Samantha Power said it would not have been necessary had Russia used its leverage to get the separatist rebels to let international experts visit the site sooner.

Raising a hand in support of a resolution at the UN is different from lifting a finger to help, and the test of this resolution will come from its implementation on the ground.

Not for the first time during this crisis, the chamber of the Security Council felt more like a courtroom, with Vladimir Putin still very much in the dock.

There has been international outcry over the way rebels have handled the situation, leaving passengers' remains exposed to summer heat and allowing untrained volunteers to comb through the area.

All 15 council members, including Russia, voted in favour.

Sanctions threat

On Monday, three Dutch experts became the first international investigators to examine the bodies of the victims. They said the storage of the bodies had been "of good quality".

The train's departure came after tough negotiations between the international community and the separatists, who had been accused of limiting access to the crash site.

Fighting is continuing in eastern Ukraine, with heavy clashes reported near Donetsk on Monday

US President Barack Obama called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the rebels from hampering the investigation at the crash site.

"What exactly are they trying to hide?" Mr Obama said on Monday.

He also warned Mr Putin that he could face additional economic costs if he fails to take steps to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said there was strong evidence that pro-Russian separatists shot down the plane with an anti-aircraft system known as Buk.

Russia on Monday again denied allegations that it had supplied such missiles or "any other weapons" to the rebels.

The defence ministry said a Ukrainian military plane had flown within firing range of the airliner just before it came down, but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has rejected the claim.

The fighting in eastern Ukraine erupted in April and is believed to have claimed more than 1,000 lives.

Battles continued on Monday, with heavy clashes around the main rebel-held city of Donetsk.

At least three civilians were reported killed, and one multi-storey building was seen on fire.

[MIKA27]

Tourists Enter Area 51, Surrounded by Armed Military Officers

Is Area 51 the Hotel California of secret U.S. military bases where visitors – even accidental ones – can check out but never leave?

That’s what riders on an Area 51 tour bus that normally just creeps right up to the fence feared when their vehicle was surrounded by armed military officers who informed them that they were inside the base and in big trouble.

Area 51 is, of course, the military base north of Las Vegas known for its secret aircraft testing and rumored UFO storage. According to a report by KLAS TV in Las Vegas, the poor tourists were on a bus operated by Adventure Photo Tours, one of the many companies offering tours of the outer perimeter of Area 51 with stops at the Extraterrestrial Highway sign, the Little A’le’inn, the alien and UFO gift shop and the gate. Apparently driver Denis Ryan got distracted and he and his four passengers innocently passed the signs warning of the possibility of deadly force.

Uh-oh

The officers detained the bus until local deputies from Lincoln County, Nevada, arrived to cite everyone for trespassing, a misdemeanor with a possible $650 fine. Fortunately for them, the tour company had a secret camera – actually, two of them, one outside on the hood facing forward and one inside recording the driver and passengers.

They were shown to the county District Attorney Dan Hogue who agreed that the out-of-state tourists were innocent. Unfortunately, driver Denis Ryan was fined and will not be able to drive an Area 51 tour bus for two years. The company was let off the hook after agreeing not to release video from the forward cameras showing the military officers in a white truck.

The tourists are safely back at home and have no abduction stories to tell. Well, none that they can remember.

[MIKA27]

BROOKS MADE THE PERFECT BIKE MULTI-TOOL

Brooks has been making some of the best bicycle saddles in the world since before any of you reading this even knew how to ride a bike. Actually, since we’re talking about a century and a half, they’ve been doing it since about the time your great-great-great-grandfather was teaching people to ride bikes. The point being that Brooks has established themselves as a powerhouse in the two-wheeled, human-powered transportation world, so it’s safe to say they know a thing or two about the proper tools as well. Which brings us to this, the Brooks England Toolkit MT21. The multi-tool has just about everything you’ll need for on the road bike repairs. Seven allen keys, ranging from 2mm to 8mm. Three torx heads. A flat head screwdriver. Two cross-headed screwdrivers. Four spoke keys. A chain tool. Brooks saddle spanner. A penknife. No multi-tool would be complete with a bottle opener, so there’s one of those too.

[MIKA27]

RUGGED FOLIO | BY ZAGG

The new Rugged Folio by Zagg is the toughest, most versatile wireless Bluetooth tablet keyboard available. The tough and versatile case for the iPad Air and iPad mini, features a unique, magnetic hinge, and can be operated with 4 clever modes, Keyboard, Video, Case, and Book. Oh, and the keyboard features backlit keys and will last you an impressive 2-years before you need to charge it!

[MIKA27]

Scientists Can Now Cut HIV Out Of Human DNA

HIV is a sneaky virus. Its MO involves integrating its own genes into your DNA, so that even as antiretrovirals hold everything in check, HIV lurks quietly inside your cells. Now scientists have found a way to edit the virus straight out of the human genome — a potential cure for even latent infections.

Genome editing is powerful technique that has really come into its own lately, thanks to a remarkable DNA-cutting protein that easily and precisely cuts out a particular DNA sequence. In fact, genome editing been used to treat HIV before. Earlier this year, another group used genome editing to cut out the DNA sequence of a particular human protein the HIV virus latches onto.

The latest study, from Kamel Khalili at Temple University, uses a similar technique but to different ends. Rather than editing human genes, it goes straight for HIV. Khalili’s team showed that the protein could excise copies of the HIV genome from immune cells such as microglia and T cells. It also seemed to prevent any new HIV infection.

The research is still very new, so of course there are challenges to getting something that worked in a petri dish to work in a human. On the whole, very few cells in the human body are latently infected by HIV; how to you make sure the genome editing gets to those cells? And how do you make sure the protein never goes excising where it shouldn’t?

But if those challenges are solved, genome editing could be a big step toward an actual cure for HIV. Except for a couple cases involving bone marrow transplants, a cure has been notoriously elusive. HIV hides itself by basically editing your genome — it makes sense that a cure could involve editing your genome, too.

[MIKA27]

THE PEERLESS STYLE OF CHINESE DIRECTOR WONG KAR-WAI

Renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai has long been synonymous with style, but usually only cinematically—he’s such a virtuoso that every image he commits to film looks painterly. But one of Wong’s less remarked upon virtues is chiefly sartorial: he’s a director whose impeccable sense of style extends to every outfit that graces his screen, and consequently his movies offer some of the best-dressed characters in modern cinema history. From dreamy pop romances to sweeping historical epics, his films boast no shortage of great looks to emulate. (The man himself has proven something of a style icon too: his sunglasses are so ubiquitous in press photos and on the red carpet that they’ve become his trademark.) Because he's less recognized for his sartorial achievements than some Western directors, I thought we’d take a look back through some of the best looks in his movies.

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai’s greatest film is a watercolor blur of bodies in motion, zooming through the Hong Kong streets with the freewheeling spirit of the French New Wave. It’s only fitting that the fashion, too, has a breathless, jazzy feel, with looks both casual and formal smashing together at all times. Here Wong shows us the simplest way to dress down a tie: mix and match colors and patterns to break the office wear mould, and pair an eye-catching tie with a shirt you wouldn’t think would go with it. The result makes for an unconventional take on a traditional look as appropriate for the work day as it is for after-hours.

In the Mood For Love

It should hardly be surprising that Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan made the most stylish movie characters of all time: few leading men have embodied old-world elegance and refinement as effortlessly, as Wong Kar-wai makes a point to showcase throughout his sumptuous romance In the Mood For Love. The film, set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, beat Mad Men’s obsession with precision-tailored suits and skinny ties by nearly a decade, and you can feel the influence of Leung’s style in the film looming large over the menswear landscape to this day.

The Grandmaster

Wong’s most recent film, last year’s kung-fu period epic The Grandmaster, also ranks among his best, not least for being one of the best-looking movies in recent memory. In it, Tony Leung plays the legendary fighter Ip Man, though despite his sharp outfitting it would be difficult, given the time difference, to pull off much of what he wears throughout the film today. But one key item stands apart: that lily-white straw hat, worn through fight after fight without the slightest scuff or mark. It’s the perfect touch in a film full of them, and a great item you can steal for yourself even without kung-fu mastery.

Days of Being Wild

One of Wong’s earliest films, Days of Being Wild is a fast-and-loose romance in the spirit of Chungking Express. As in that film, the styles here are the perfect blend of casual looks and touches of formal wear. Chinese megastar Leslie Cheung plays York, a partygoer and philanderer in Hong Kong in the 1960s, and his take on fashion reflects it: the looseness of everything, from shirt collar to tie, suggests a guy who wants to look good while taking it easy.

My Blueberry Nights

Wong’s first and only English-language feature co-stars Jude Law as a Brit living abroad in New York City, and that distinctly international scenario speaks volumes about the spirit of the picture. Leave it to Wong to transform Law—no stranger to dressing to the nines on screen—into someone much more laid-back and casual, forgoing the suits in favor of loose-fitting tees and patterned button-ups.

[MIKA27]

Internet is “all lies," eye-rolling rebel leader tells CNN on missing missile tweet

CNN's Chris Cuomo interviewed Donetsk People's Republic leader Alexander Borodai today about the chaotic aftermath of the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight 17. Among the questions for the pro-Russia militant: did your guys down the plane? (No.) And what happened to those brag tweets right before the plane crash, in which an account that appeared to represent your group boasted of possessing Russian anti-aircraft missile systems? Borodai's response to that one is best part of this totally bizarre interview: he dramatically rolls his eyes at Cuomo, and tells him basically, don't believe everything you see on the internet.

http://youtu.be/RtTNIhf812w

[MIKA27]

GOTHAM TV SERIES – EXTENDED TRAILER

http://youtu.be/O2kFn-FPgLM

Fox has unveiled a new extended trailer for its highly anticipated Batman prequel, Gotham.

Set to Aloe Blacc’s “Ticking Bomb,” the stylized noirish clip focuses on young detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) as he strides toward a dark-alley crime scene. His every step is traced by onlookers who will one day loom large in the DC canon: Oswald Cobblepott/Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor), Selina Kyle/Catwoman (Camren Bicondova), Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith), Edward Nigma/Riddler (Cory Michael Smith). Gordon is met by his partner Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue), and a foreshadowing of the Batman’s greatest nemesis. Check out the video below, and look for Gotham to premier on the Fox network on Monday, September 22nd.

[MIKA27]

New 'Walking Dead' season 5 art features cast in handcuffs

AMC has released new The Walking Dead art for season five (which premieres in October) just in time for the show’s Comic-Con panel this Friday afternoon in San Diego. In it, we see Rick, Carl, Michonne, Daryl, Glenn, Maggie, and Abraham ready to do battle. Just a few problems: First off, they are still in that damn train car. And secondly, they all appear to be handcuffed, which severely limits their collective ass-kicking capabilities.

Perhaps it’s best to just hope the absence of people like Eugene, Rosita, and Tara doesn’t mean they’ve been eaten. And who knows where Beth, Carol, Tyreese, and Judith are. Still, it’d be unwise to bet against this group, especially now that Rick is back to being the jugular-biting leader viewers all know and love. So good luck with that, Gareth and people of Terminus. You’re going to need it.

[MIKA27]

Roswell, UFOs & Project Pandora

Well, now, this is interesting. In fact, it’s very interesting. Over at the Department of Defense’s website you can find a file that has been declassified via the Freedom of Information Act on the subject of Project Pandora (which, to a significant degree, was focused on Cold War secrets, and how microwaves can affect the mind and body).

It’s a fascinating file that dates back decades. It’s a lengthy file, too; it runs to nearly 500 pages and is comprised of a number of notable documents. But, here’s the weird thing, if you scroll down to page 449, you’ll see that it contains a copy of the controversial “MJ12/Eisenhower Briefing Document” on the Roswell UFO affair of 1947!

Of course, as most people within Ufology know, the document is one that has been the subject of much debate regarding its authenticity or otherwise. Indeed, the copy of the EBD in the Pandora file has a hand-written note on it stating that: “This cannot be authenticated as an official DoD document.”

Well, that’s fair enough, and something that most people within Ufology would agree with – it has not been authenticated. But, here’s the issue, what is a copy of the EBD doing in a DoD file on Project Pandora? Let’s look at what we know.

One of the biggest problems surrounding the Roswell case is the almost complete lack of documentation to support the claims that anything crashed or landed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County in July 1947.

In 1987, however, the situation changed drastically. In that year, Timothy Good’s best-selling book, Above Top Secret, was published. One of the most controversial aspects of the book was the discussion of a document that allegedly originated with a classified research and development group established by the U.S. Government in 1947 to deal with the incident at Roswell. It was – so the story goes – variously known as Majestic 12, MAJIC 12, and MJ12.

Classified “Top Secret/Majic Eyes Only,” the document can essentially be broken down into two parts. The first is a 1952 briefing prepared by Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (the first Director of the CIA) for President-elect Eisenhower. It informed the president that an alien spacecraft was recovered at Roswell and briefed him on the MJ12 group, its activities and membership.

The second is a 1947 memorandum from President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, authorizing the establishment of MJ12.

Shortly after Timothy Good published copies of the MJ12 documents in May 1987, additional copies surfaced publicly, this time in the United States, having been released by the research team of William Moore, Stanton Friedman and television producer, Jaime Shandera. Moore worked quietly with a number of intelligence insiders who contacted him in the wake of the publication of the 1980 book he co-authored with Charles Berlitz, The Roswell Incident.

From time to time, and under distinctly cloak-and-dagger circumstances, official-looking papers were passed on to Moore by his “Deep Throat”-like sources. The implication was that someone in the Government wished to make available to the UFO research community material – including pro-UFO data on Roswell – that would otherwise have remained forever outside of the public domain.

Needless to say, controversy raged (and still rages, albeit not on the same level) with regard to A: the authenticity or otherwise of the documents; and B: the circumstances under which they surfaced. Some favored the idea they were official documents, secretly leaked by insider sources connected to the intelligence community. Others, however, cried “Hoax!” While some suspected the documentation was possibly disinformation, designed to muddy the already dark waters of Roswell even further.

It wasn’t just the field of Ufology that was interested in the MJ12 saga. Officialdom sat up and took note of the notorious documents, too, as we shall now see.

In the autumn of 1988, an investigation of the MJ12 papers was conducted by the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence division. It operated out of Washington and New York. Some input into the investigation also came from the FBI office in Dallas, Texas.

On September 15, 1988, an agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations contacted Dallas FBI and supplied the Bureau with another copy of the MJ12 papers. Then, on October 25, 1988, the Dallas office transmitted a two-page Secret Airtel to headquarters that read as follows:

“Enclosed for the Bureau is an envelope which contains a possible classified document. Dallas notes that within the last six weeks, there has been local publicity regarding ‘OPERATION MAJESTIC-12′ with at least two appearances on a local radio talk show, discussing the MAJESTIC-12 OPERATION, the individuals involved, and the Government’s attempt to keep it all secret.”

The writer of the Airtel continued:

“It is unknown if this is all part of a publicity campaign. [Censored] from OSI, advises that ‘OPERATION BLUE BOOK,’ mentioned in the document on page 4 did exist. Dallas realizes that the purported document is over 35 years old, but does not know if it has been properly declassified. The Bureau is requested to discern if the document is still classified. Dallas will hold any investigation in abeyance until further direction from FBIHQ.”

Partly as a result of the actions of the Dallas FBI Office, and partly as a result of the investigation undertaken by the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence people, on November 30, 1988 an arranged meeting took place in Washington D.C. between agents of the Bureau and those of AFOSI. If the AFOSI had information on MJ12, said the Bureau, they would like to know.

A Secret communication back to the Dallas office from Washington on December 2, 1988 read as follows:

“This communication is classified Secret in its entirety. Reference Dallas Airtel dated October 25 1988. Reference Airtel requested that FBIHQ determine if the document enclosed by referenced Airtel was classified or not. The Office of Special Investigations, US Air Force, advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated. Copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States. The document is completely bogus. Dallas is to close captioned investigation.”

To reinforce the government’s conclusion that the documents were not genuine, official stamps and messages (some of the latter written in black-marker) were added to the copies of the MJ12 papers in the possession of both the USAF and the FBI and which reinforced the hoax conclusion.

Exopaedia notes of the program that, in the early 1960s, “…the CIA discovered that the US embassy in Moscow was ‘bombarded’ with EMR (electro magnetic radiation). The signal was composed of several frequencies. The Pandora Project was intended to investigate and gather data on this Russian experiment. The embassy personnel was not informed of the existence of the beam, or of the Pandora project.”

Exopaedia continues that, “the signal was intended to produce blurred vision and loss of mental concentration. Investigation on the effects on the embassy personnel, however, showed that they developed blood composition anomalies and unusual chromosome counts. Some people even developed a leukemia-like blood disease.”

So, what we have here is a file on a program that dates back to the early 1960s and which was focused on major concerns that the Soviets were up to no good – as they clearly were. But, even so, that still does not provide the answer to an important question: why is a very controversial, questionable, document on dead aliens, crashed UFOs, and an allegedly highly-classified project to investigate both, contained in a DoD file on that old, Cold War operation instigated by the Russians?

I have no real answers to what we might term “The Mystery of Microwaves and MJ12.” Maybe someone out there knows.

Time-wise, however, this is all very interesting. My newly-published book, Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind, includes a chapter titled “The Microwave Incident.” It deals with the mysterious and controversial death of a man who was involved in a 1965 UFO event that may actually have been fabricated, via the use of mind-altering/warping technologies. The alleged cause of the death in the faked, flying saucer encounter? An over-use of microwave technology.

[MIKA27]

Insane Theme Park Ride Cuts The Safety Rope And Sends You Into A 100-Foot Free-Fall

Here’s an insanely scary theme park ride for those who need to feel like they’re close to dying in order to feel like they’re living: the Sky Tower in Tivoli Friheden in Denmark. The ride isn’t a ride at all but actually a fall. That is, the safety rope you’re connected to cuts off and you free fall from a 100 foot tower at 88kph down to the ground. For fun.

The sensation of free falling to the ground from a 100 feet in the air with no safety rope or parachute attached to you has to rank in the top 10 for scariest feelings ever. Your life would definitely flash before your eyes and the seconds it takes to hit the net probably feels like hours.

[MIKA27]

Samsung Is Already Making Fun Of Potential iPhone 6 Buyers With A New Ad

http://youtu.be/QSDAjwKI8Wo

Thinking about buying the new iPhone when it’s announced? Samsung wants you to feel stupid.

Continuing in the vein of teasing iPhone users for their product choices, Samsung is pushing the Galaxy S5 as the phone you probably should have bought if you want a bigger screen.

Clearly, Samsung has heard the rumours that the iPhone is getting a bigger screen and it’s looking to shore up its marketing before the eventual release around September.

We expect the new Galaxy Note to land at this year’s IFA Conference (as it does every year), so expect Samsung’s screen boasting to get ever more obnoxious in the next few months.

[MIKA27]

That Predator-Vision iPhone Camera Case Is Finally Available

Back in January, we stumbled across one of the most exciting iPhone accessories we’ve seen in years. FLIR took the thermal imaging technology it sells to law enforcement and the military and squeezed it down into a compact iPhone 5/5S case called the FLIR ONE that will finally be available for pre-order starting tomorrow for $US350.

The multi-part case allows the thermal imaging unit to be quickly attached and removed from your phone as needed, given it does add a bit of thickness to your iPhone 5/5s thanks to its own rechargeable battery and a pair of cameras that help create recognisable thermal images.

The FLIR ONE has a lot of practical uses, including testing electronics for overheating, or searching for drafts and leaks in your home’s insulation. But it also just looks like one heck of a fun toy, perfect for spotting things that go bump in the night, or measuring your spouse’s rage for spending $US350 on a thermal imager for your phone.

[MIKA27]

Even A Small Nuclear Showdown Would Mean Worldwide Disaster

In these decades after the Cold War, “nuclear winter” is an idea that can feel as remote as science fiction. But using state-of-the-art climate models, scientists have calculated exactly what nuclear winter will look like after even a small, regional conflict. Boy is it bad.

This uplifting climate news come to us from a journal called Earth’s Future, which published a study recently unearthed by Francie Diep at Popular Science. The hypothetical scenario is nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Two sides each drop fifty 15-kiloton bombs — peanuts compared to the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia — before abating. What then?

Let’s get started.

In the minutes after a nuclear explosion, everything in the vicinity is burning hot. Tiny particles of black carbon begin to rise up from the burning wreckage, eventually accumulating to five megatons in the atmosphere. Black carbon, which loves to absorb sunlight, has two related effects: 1) the Earth gets colder and 2) the stratosphere gets hotter. Both have massive consequences, not just for India and Pakistan, but for the entire planet.

If you just look at the numbers for cooling, the temperature changes seem unimpressive. After one year, the global average surface temperature drops about two degrees Fahrenheit and after five years, about 2.88 degrees. Pssh, right? But for that same reason a few degrees of global warming are Big Deal, tiny changes in global averages ripple out. The temperature change would cause global precipitation to fall on average by 9 per cent. Break away from averages, and things get more extreme. The monsoon region in Asia could see rainfall reduced by 20 to 80 per cent.

The changes in rainfall and temperature will especially hit us where it hurts: our stomachs. The growing season will be shortened by up to 40 days in some areas, so expect starvation to get worse.

And that’s not even to mention the ozone! As black carbon prevents heat from reaching land, it absorbs all that heat into the stratosphere. This extra heat in the stratosphere begins to break down the layer of ozone that normally protects us from the sun’s radiation. Ozone will be reduced by 20 to 25 per cent in years two to five after the nuclear war.

The extra UV radiation in nuclear winter — ironically not from the bombs themselves — will disrupt crop growth and kill phytoplankton, the basis of the marine food chain. And it will be bad for us, too: the authors estimate that you’ll get sunburned twice as fast, which means more skin cancer.

Perhaps what’s most striking about the climate model is that while the Earth does slowly recover, the cooling effects are felt even two decades after the war. (Which, let us remind you again, is a relatively small, regional one.) War is devastating, but nuclear war’s devastation extends even further and longer.

[MIKA27]

Believe It Or Not, The World's Fastest-Growing Drone Fleet Is In Japan

Japan is a peaceful nation, in no small part because its post-World War II constitution required it. All that changed last month when President Shinzo Abe ended the ban that’s kept Japan’s army in check since 1945. And do you know what the country did next? It started buying drones. Lots and lots of drones.

It’s been a long time since Japan flexed its military might, but it’s interesting to see drones lead the way. According to one analyst, Japan now has the fastest-growing drone fleet in the world, with an expected 300 per cent increase in investment over the next decade. The United States is actually helping, having helped Japan buy two unarmed Global Hawk aircraft earlier this year. That’s one of them above.

Of course, Japan’s new drones will be used primarily for surveillance. But there’s always potential for country’s dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands to heat up, however, or for North Korea to destabilize further, either of which could lead to weaponization. One expert even says that the likelihood of a drone battle in coming years is “very high”. It’s unclear what the human involvement will look like, but an all out robot war sounds horrifying enough.

[MIKA27]

They’re Here: Massive Mayfly Emergence in Wisconsin

How badly do you want your money? Mayflies cover an ATM in La Crosse, Wisconsin. July 20th,2014.

Earlier this year I wrote about the annual emergence of Lake Flies in Wisconsin. But wait, there’s more! More insects, that is. This week Wisconsin-ites were treated to a mayfly emergence. Just how many mayflies are there? Enough that they show up on weather radar:

“The Mississippi River produced a massive radar echo as mayflies emerged from the water and became airborne. The mayflies were detectable on radar around 8:45 pm…The radar loop below shows the reflected radar energy (reflectivity) from 8:35 pm to just after midnight. The higher the values (greens to yellows) indicate greater concentrations of flies.”

July 20th, 2014: Night of the Mayflies.

Because they coat surfaces in an epic biblical plague, mayflies sometimes cause highway accidents. The slippery goo created by millions of mayflies is blamed in a three-car pileup in Hager City, WI yesterday night. A major emergence in 2012 resulted in snow plows being called out to clean up the mess.

Adult mayflies are basically gonads with wings. They don’t eat; some species don’t even have working mouthparts. They are not interested in your puny roads and ATM money machines, humans. They need to get busy gettin’ it on in a massive mayfly orgy. (Also, male mayflies have two penises. I thought you’d want to know.)

The mayfly species emerging this week lives only one night as an adult. They mate, the male dies after ejaculation, and the female feebly flutters off to lay her eggs. The name for this group of insects is Ephemeroptera, from the Greek word for “short-lived” or “ephemeral”.

Why do mayflies emerge en masse?

It’s not actually a “live fast, die young in a blaze of sexual glory” story. Mayflies spend the majority of their life underwater, quietly eating algae and plant material. The full growth cycle of a mayfly can take up to 4 years; we just notice them when they pile up in post-coital exhaustion.

Mayflies emerge synchronously around dusk to avoid their main above-water predators: birds and bats. Predators trying to capitalize on a sudden mayfly all-you-can-eat buffet are overwhelmed by the emergence of millions of insects. Some individuals make it through, and the species continues.

Mayfly larvae are delightfully called “naiads,” and provide critical food for fish. The bodies of immature mayflies have beautiful external gills; this is also why they are important in assessing water quality. Mucky, polluted water is not a place a mayfly larva can breathe. Detroit has had mass mayfly emergences in the past, but a toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie this year is damaging populations of all the animals in the watershed.

This video shows the last minute of a female mayfly’s life; she flops on the water in exhaustion and dumps a massive load of eggs into the water. Within seconds, her eggs hatch and the naiads begin to swim.

Mayflies are some of the most ancient insects around; they are well represented in Carboniferous fossils dating >300 million years ago. Fossil mayflies look remarkably like our modern mayflies; some consider them “living fossils.” The oldest fossil of a winged insect is a mayfly.

This dance of death and birth has been going on for a long time; try to focus on the wonder, rather than the gross out. The protein in mayfly bodies may have powered the rise of the reptiles. We can share some space for a few days.

[MIKA27]

UK 'still exporting arms' to Russia, say MPs

Britain is exporting millions of pounds worth of arms to Russia despite fears it is arming the separatist rebels in Ukraine suspected of shooting down a Malaysia Airways plane, MPs have said.

A committee report said 251 licences for the sale of controlled goods worth at least £132m remained in force.

It comes after the PM criticised other EU countries' arms deals with Moscow, given its backing for the rebels.

The government has pledged to stop arms sales which could fuel the conflict.

Ministers say UK policy has not changed.

The cross-party Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls said only 31 UK licences had been halted or suspended.

Permits covering sniper rifles, night sights, small arms ammunition, gun mountings, body armour, military communications equipment and "equipment employing cryptography" remained in force, it said.

The government said it was keeping all licences under review and the majority of licences that remained in place were for "commercial use".

The disclosure comes after David Cameron strongly criticised European countries such as France which are continuing to pursue defence sales to Russia despite Moscow's backing for the separatists.

But France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius hit back on Monday, suggesting Britain should look at the number of Russian oligarchs in London before criticising his country.

Moscow's support for pro-Russian groups in Ukraine has come under renewed scrutiny after the fatal crash of Malaysian airliner MH17 with 298 people on board, which the UK and US believes was shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched from a rebel-held area.

The prime minister has said EU nations should consider stopping all military sales to Russia, while Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said an embargo on future arms contracts was under consideration following a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.

'Cautious needed'

Sir John Stanley, the Conservative MP who heads the committee, said the relatively small number of licences which had been withdrawn reflected the "circumscribed" nature of the UK's moratorium, which he said referred only to equipment which could be deployed against Ukraine and did not cover Russia's wider defence needs.

While he said that Britain had been in the vanguard of European countries in taking action to curb defence sales to Russia, it had still not gone far enough.

"Russia is an authoritarian regime. We should have been applying a more cautious approach for some time in regard to Russia," he said.

Sir John has written to Mr Hammond asking if he will be suspending or revoking the remaining licences.

The committee also strongly criticised the award of licences for the export of chemicals which could be used in the manufacture of chemical weapons to Syria.

It said the award by the previous Labour government of five licences for the export of sodium fluoride had been "highly questionable", while the decision of the current government to issue a further two licences for sodium and potassium fluoride after the civil war had begun was irresponsible.

It said that the current government's claim that it had no grounds to refuse the licences was "grossly inaccurate".

'Unequivocal'

The committee - which is made up of the Commons foreign affairs, defence, international development and business, innovation and skills committees - also expressed concern ministers had watered down their policy on the export of equipment to countries where there were concerns it could be used for internal repression.

It said that a "broad" test that an export licence should not be issued if there was "concern" the equipment could be used for internal repression had been dropped from the latest set of government guidelines issued earlier this year, and only the "narrow" test that there had to be a "clear risk" of repression remained.

A government spokesman denied there had been any watering down of restrictions.

"The definition as first announced to Parliament in October 2000 was unequivocal: we will not a grant a licence where there is a 'clear risk' the equipment might be used for internal repression," he said.

"That is the policy that has been applied consistently by successive governments.

"There has been no change to that policy. We do not agree with the committees' claim that there has been a 'significant change' in government policy."

[MIKA27]

A Fifty-Year-Old Conspiracy Theory

1964 saw the first flight of a gleaming new state-of-the-art strike aircraft: the British Aircraft Corporation TSR-2. It promised to be a formidable war machine, capable of delivering four WE.177 thermonuclear bombs deep into the heart of enemy territory. Powered by two Rolls-Royce Olympus turbojets, the same engines used in the Concorde supersonic airliner, the TSR-2 had the unprecedented design goal of sustained supercruise. It was the aircraft that would single-handedly restore the Royal Air Force to the glory days of the Spitfire and the Mosquito.

Then the next year, the TSR-2 was cancelled.

Almost immediately, the conspiracy theories started to sprout up – and they proved surprisingly tenacious. In the early 1990s, there was still widespread bitterness among the older generation about the TSR-2 cancellation. Almost everyone of that generation believed some version of the conspiracy theory.

Looking on the internet today, there seems to be a lot more skepticism on the subject. Like all good conspiracy theories, the ones surrounding the TSR-2 can never be proved or disproved. They make a lot of sense – but then so does the “official” story that the TSR-2 was cancelled because it was over budget, behind schedule and unlikely to meet its over-ambitious design goals. Those are pretty good reasons for cancelling any project. But was there another, more sinister, reason as well?

The alleged conspirators in this particular case were the United States government and the British Labour Party. You were probably expecting the first of these (they’re the conspiracy theorist’s target of choice, after all), but the second may need a few words of explanation. The Labour Party was much more left-wing in the 1960s than it is today. It was opposed to nuclear weapons, and it was opposed to big, powerful corporations. So are most people, of course… but when the Labour government came to power in 1964 – less than three weeks after the first flight of the TSR-2 – it was actually in a position to do something about it.

Right from the start, Labour hated the TSR-2 – not just because it was a nuclear bomber, but because it was one of the flagship projects of the previous Conservative government. Labour didn’t have much time for the British Aircraft Corporation, either – it was one of the biggest, greediest corporations in the country, representing everything they despised about capitalism.

But Labour weren’t the only ones who had the knives out for BAC and the TSR-2. The government of the United States felt exactly the same way – although for entirely different reasons. The horrifying fact was that, on paper at least, the TSR-2 was years ahead of anything the U.S. aerospace industry was turning out. As a result, BAC posed a serious competitive threat to U.S. interests – an unthinkable situation that had to be stopped at any cost.

That’s the way the conspiracy theorists tell it, anyway. The Labour government didn’t see eye-to-eye with America on many things – they refused to get involved in the Vietnam War, for example – but they saw eye-to-eye on this. The two sides allegedly came to some kind of devil’s pact, whereby the RAF would get the General Dynamics F-111 at a knock-down price in return for cancelling the TSR-2.

The RAF didn’t get the F-111 either

It didn’t quite work out like that. The TSR-2 was cancelled, of course, but the RAF never got the F-111. They had to wait until 1979 – and another Conservative government – before a fully-fledged supersonic strike aircraft came into service. That was the European joint venture, the Panavia Tornado – which, to the dewy-eyed fans of the TSR-2, was never more than a pale shadow of its 1960s predecessor.

To the skeptics, however, there’s no need for a conspiracy theory. To them, the TSR-2 was cancelled by the Labour government because it was inconsistent with their defence policy, and a waste of taxpayers’ money. Not only is there no need to invoke U.S. involvement, the skeptics say, but there isn’t a shred of evidence for it.

Or is there? When the TSR-2 was cancelled, BAC were instructed to do more than just stop work on it. They were told to destroy everything – even the tiniest piece of evidence that might allow the resurrection of the project at a future date. With the exception of a few scraps that ended up in museums, all the prototypes, wooden mockups, manufacturing jigs, design plans and other documents relating to the TSR-2 were systematically destroyed.

This is an astonishing video showing entire airframes going up in flames. It’s the most blatant example of government-sponsored vandalism in Britain since Henry VIII ordered the destruction of the monasteries in 1536.

So who ordered the destruction of the TSR-2? In the video, the British Defence Secretary of the time says it wasn’t him – implying, of course, that it was someone higher up. Surely the finger of blame points across the Atlantic, to Washington. Only the U.S. government – knowing, perhaps, that the RAF would never get those cut-price F-111s – had a vested interest in ensuring that the TSR-2 would never be built again.

For further reading on the subject, start with this excellent article from the Smithsonian Air and Space magazine: Cancelled: Britain’s High-Mach Heartbreak.

[MIKA27]

Highly Efficient Steam Power From a Solar Sponge

To paraphrase an old joke (if you don’t get it, ask a third grader) – what is full of holes yet still holds water and uses solar power to create steam with extreme efficiency? A new sponge-like material developed at MIT that could eventually provide low cost power generation in poor countries and a clean power alternative to coal and oil.

Traditional solar-powered steam generators use reflectors and lenses to aim and magnify sunlight at a container of water until it boils. It works but wastes a lot of power and time. A more recent high-tech method uses nanofluids – water mixed with nanoparticles that heat quickly when exposed to intense sunlight and vaporize the liquid into steam. The large amount of sunlight needed makes this alternative too costly at this time.

Nature Communications reports on the new material developed by researchers under the direction of Hadi Ghasemi in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The material consists of a layer of graphite flakes on top of carbon foam. Sunlight on the graphite creates a hotspot which heats the underlying water, causing it to be absorbed by the sponge and drawn up through the pores in the graphite where it rises and emerges as steam.

In terms of efficiency, this material can convert 85 percent of the solar energy it receives into steam, loses very little heat in the process and can operate effectively in low sunlight. In addition, the sponge is cheap to make. Ghasemi explains what this means:

Steam is important for desalination, hygiene systems, and sterilization. Especially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy, if you can generate steam with solar energy, it would be very useful.

Let’s hope this simple yet efficient solar energy sponge gets to the people who need it before big energy companies figure out a way to make it soak up money and power their profit machines

[Fuzz]

Believe It Or Not, The World's Fastest-Growing Drone Fleet Is In Japan

I always chuckle whenever I read these kind of reports. Fastest growing means absolutely nothing! I could have one lousy drone, and if I buy 10 more, I've grown my "fleet" by 1000%. Woohoo! I've got the fastest growing fleet of drones!!

[MIKA27]

Last Call

A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture.

From time to time, Ittetsu Nemoto gets a group of suicidal people together to visit popular suicide spots, of which there are many in Japan. The best known is Aokigahara forest, the Sea of Trees, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The forest became associated with suicide in the nineteen-sixties, after the publication of two novels by Seicho Matsumoto, and even more so after Wataru Tsurumi’s 1993 “Complete Manual of Suicide” declared it the perfect place to die. Because its trees grow so closely together that they block the wind, and because there are few animals or birds, the forest is unusually quiet. The Sea of Trees is large, fourteen square miles, so bodies can lie undiscovered for months; tourists photograph corpses and scavenge for abandoned possessions. Another common suicide destination is Tojinbo cliff, which overlooks the Sea of Japan. Visiting such a place turns out to be very different from picturing it. The sight of the sea from a cliff top can be a terrible thing.

At other times, Nemoto, a Buddhist priest, conducts death workshops for the suicidal at his temple. He tells attendees to imagine they’ve been given a diagnosis of cancer and have three months to live. He instructs them to write down what they want to do in those three months. Then he tells them to imagine they have one month left; then a week; then ten minutes. Most people start crying in the course of this exercise, Nemoto among them.

One man who came to a workshop had been talking to Nemoto for years about wanting to die. He was thirty-eight years old and had been institutionalized in a mental hospital off and on for a decade. During the writing exercise, he just sat and wept. When Nemoto came around to check on him, his paper was blank. The man explained that he had nothing to say in response to the questions because he had never considered them. All he had ever thought about was wanting to die; he had never thought about what he might want to do with his life. But if he had never really lived, how could he want to die? This insight proved oddly liberating. The man returned to his job as a machinist in a factory. Previously, he had been so averse to human company that he had been able to function only in certain limited capacities, but now he was able to speak to people, and he got a promotion.

Sometimes Nemoto tells his attendees to put a white cloth over their face, as is customary with corpses in Japan, while he conducts a funeral ceremony. Afterward, he tells each to carry a lighted candle up a hill behind the temple and imagine that he is entering the world of the dead. This exercise, for reasons he doesn’t understand, tends to produce not tears but a strange kind of exhilaration, as though the person were experiencing rebirth.

In the past, Nemoto organized outings whose main function was to get hikikomori—shut-ins, some of whom have barely left their rooms in years—to go outside. (There are hundreds of thousands of hikikomori in Japan, mostly young men; they play video games and surf the Web and are served meals on trays by their parents.) He led camping trips and karaoke evenings; he held soupmaking sessions and sat up all night talking. But, on the whole, these outings were unsatisfactory. Hikikomori were phobic, and suicidal people were disorganized; you couldn’t rely on them to show up.

Nemoto believes in confronting death; he believes in cultivating a concentrated awareness of the functioning and fragility of the body; and he believes in suffering, because it shows you who you really are. When asked whether he believes that happy people are shallower than those who suffer, first he says that there are no such people, and then he thinks for a moment and says that his wife is one. Is she less profound as a consequence of her serenity? Yes, he says, perhaps she is.

Email to Nemoto:

Date: 10/8/2009

Since I failed to pay my cellphone bill for a while, my cellphone service will be cut off tomorrow, so please reply to me as soon as possible. We are a couple . . . who are currently living in our car. We were living in the H. area . . . but since we couldn’t find any jobs there we went to N. . . . We tried looking for jobs . . . while collecting cans, but our applications were always rejected because we were not local. . . . We gradually started feeling like we want to die. When we tried choking ourselves with a belt, we ended up loosening it when it became too painful. We also tried taking a lot of cold medicine at once, but we ended up waking up after a while, so we couldn’t even die. That said, it’s not that we really want to die. We do have a desire to find a job somehow. In this way, we’re really undecided, and we can’t find a way out alone.

Japan is famous for suicide. It owes this reputation partly to the spectacular deaths of kamikaze pilots in the Second World War, partly to the gruesome and anachronistic seppuku of the writer Yukio Mishima, in 1970. Seppuku—the slicing open of the stomach with a short blade, from left to right—is the form of suicide for which Japan is known. The ostensible reason for Mishima’s suicide was his failure to ignite a military coup, but he had been imagining his end for a long time. “The thing that ultimately saves the flesh from being ridiculous is the element of death,” he wrote. “How comic would one find the gaiety and elegance of the bullfighter were his trade entirely divorced from associations of death!”

A high rate of suicide is usually taken to be a sign of deeply rooted national disease: when depression leads to suicide, it ceases to be psychiatric and becomes anthropological. So what is the matter with Japan? It’s true that there has never been a religious prohibition against suicide there, as there is in the West—no sense that to take one’s own life is to reject God’s grace, or to seize a power that belongs only to God. By tradition, suicide can absolve guilt and cancel debt, can restore honor and prove loyalty. “The heirs of Cain can never escape the eyes of God, even less in the next world than in this,” Maurice Pinguet wrote in his study “Voluntary Death in Japan.” “But in Japan you can hide in death, disappear into it entirely and mend the fault as you go.” In Japan, suicide can be a gesture of moral integrity and freedom, or an act of beauty. When the writer Eto Jun killed himself, in 1999, he was praised by intellectuals, and it was said that his act demonstrated “first-class aesthetics.” When a cabinet minister under investigation for financial impropriety killed himself, in 2007, the governor of Tokyo called him a true samurai for preserving his honor. When the anthropologist Junko Kitanaka was researching depression in Japan in the past decade, many psychiatrists told her that a person with no mental disorder has the right to choose his own death, and that they have no business intruding on this most weighty and private human decision.

Japan’s suicide rate is nearly twice that of the United States. From 1998 until 2011, there were more than thirty thousand suicides each year—one nearly every fifteen minutes. True, this has been a period of economic difficulty, but Greece is in much worse economic shape, and the Greek suicide rate is one-sixth that of Japan. People jump in front of Tokyo subways so often that when a train stops between stations many passengers assume that a suicide is the reason. Several bystanders have died after being hit by people leaping from buildings. Suicidal parents have killed their children, so as not to abandon them to an orphan’s life; by tradition, a mother who killed herself but not her children was thought to be truly wicked.

Thus the cultural theory of suicide in Japan. But for most of the past hundred years the Japanese suicide rate has been similar to the rates of most countries in the West. The latest statistics show Greenland to be the most suicidal country in the world, by an astonishing margin—Greenlanders currently kill themselves three times as often as the next most suicidal peoples, Lithuanians and South Koreans. Japan ranks ninth, behind Guyana, Kazakhstan, Belarus, China, and Slovenia, and is tied with Hungary. Sweden, notorious for its dark winters and dark souls, typically ranks in the low thirties, about the same as the United States. Moreover, suicide rates everywhere change greatly over time. They go down in wartime and go up again afterward. During the nineteen-fifties, suicide in Japan reached a peak, but then the rate went down. In the nineties, it spiked again, presumably because of economic distress. Some people worked so hard that they died of it. Others killed themselves because they had no work.

These are large changes, tracked over decades, but often the difference between death and life depends upon the difference between two o’clock and four o’clock—upon tiny infrastructural adjustments and barely perceptible shifts in situation. A suicidal person whose way off a bridge turns out to be blocked will generally not find another bridge; he will go home. Some Tokyo subway stations have installed bright-blue lights on their platforms to deter jumpers, and these, oddly, have proved quite effective. A few years ago, a suicide-prevention group, Lifelink, conducted a minute analysis of suicide in Japan: it was necessary to make strategies of prevention more precise, Lifelink believed—to know exactly who was committing suicide, in which streets, in which buildings, by what methods, and at which times of the day, as though with enough factors in place you could almost catch someone in the act. Home was the most common location for suicide, followed by tall buildings and bodies of water. The largest number of suicides were committed on Mondays, followed by Sundays and Tuesdays, between four and six in the morning. Suicidal women were likely to kill themselves between noon and two in the afternoon but unlikely to do so between two and four.

Date: 07/05/2008

Please forgive my rudeness of sending you an e-mail out of the blue. My name is T. . . . I saw your blog on the Internet, and I am writing an e-mail, hoping that you could give me some advice on my current situation. After I graduated from college, I was studying for the bar exam in order to become a lawyer, being supported by my parents. However, even though I tried six times, I couldn’t pass. . . . I was diagnosed with “depression” from too much stress and too much work, so I’ve been taking a leave of absence. . . . As a result, all I have left is debt from student loans.

I felt the limits of my talents, so I decided to give up on becoming a lawyer, and started looking for a job. However, since I’m over thirty, and I only have worked part time before, it’s extremely hard to find one. I lost myself, and I don’t even have any ideas what I want to do, or in which direction I should proceed. I started being a hikikomori . . . and now I cannot go out except for going to see my psychotherapist once a week. I understand that I’m in such an irretrievable situation because of my own fault, and I myself have to solve the problem. However, I’m a weak, dependent person who was financially supported by my parents until after reaching thirty, so I’m too weak to find a way out of this situation myself. . . . Recently, I started thinking about suicide. Currently, my fear of death is so strong that I don’t have enough courage to actually commit suicide. However, if this situation continues, I feel scared that I might lose control for some reason and actually kill myself.

Such is the situation I am in. I’m sorry that I rambled incoherently. I feel like I’m at a dead end and there’s nothing else I can do. . . . I hope you can give me some advice if you have time. I’m sorry to ask you when you’re so busy, but please help me out.

When Nemoto was a child, an uncle he was close to committed suicide. While he was in high school, in the late eighties, a friend from middle school killed herself. He went to her funeral and saw her body in its coffin, and saw that her mouth had been sewn shut to hide her tongue, which protruded, because she had hanged herself. Some years later, he heard that another friend had committed suicide, a girl he had been in a band with in high school. He went to her funeral, and found it even more disturbing than the previous one: this girl had also hanged herself, but she had starved herself, too, and her body was shockingly emaciated.

When he was young, he often drank and got into brawls with kids from other schools. In high school, he read Nietzsche every day; he liked the strength and the power of it. After graduating, he took some philosophy correspondence courses at a university and worked on boats, testing for pollution in Tokyo Bay. He wasn’t interested in pollution; he just liked boats. He worked as a marine tour guide in Okinawa for a while. He didn’t have any long-term plans; he was just doing whatever seemed fun. Then, when he was twenty-four, he got in a terrible motorcycle accident that left him unconscious for six hours and hospitalized for three months. He came to realize that life was precious and he had been wasting it. He wasn’t going to figure out the meaning of life by reading. He had to do it through experience.

One day, his mother saw an advertisement in the newspaper: Buddhist monks wanted. She pointed it out to him because she thought it was hilarious to advertise for monks, but his curiosity was aroused. He already knew a little bit about Zen: he had studied karate after high school, and that had involved some basic austerities, like standing under an icy waterfall for an hour while chanting. His friends thought becoming a monk was a ridiculous idea, and even he had no very high opinion of monks, but he answered the advertisement. The job was entry-level monk work for people who hadn’t any training—pet funerals, that sort of thing. After a while, it was too easy; he wanted to learn more. At the time, in his late twenties, he was living with Yukiko, a nurse-in-training whom he had met when he was in the hospital, and who later became his wife, but he decided that he wanted to enter a monastery.

He did his training in a Rinzai Zen monastery on a forested mountainside in Gifu prefecture, two hundred miles west of Tokyo. Long flights of stone steps lead up the mountain and end at a wooden gateway with a tiled roof. Through the gateway is a courtyard of raked gravel, some larger rocks and stunted pines, and several traditional buildings with curved tile roofs. When a candidate presents himself for training, he must prostrate himself and declare that he is willing to do anything that needs to be done to solve the great matter of life and death. By tradition, he is scowled at by the head monk, who orders him to leave. He persists, he continues to prostrate himself, and after two or three days he is taken in.

Apprentice monks are treated like slaves on a brutal plantation. They must follow orders and never say no. They sleep very little. They rise at four. Most of the time they eat only a small amount of rice and, occasionally, pickles (fresh vegetables and meat are forbidden). There is no heat, even though it can be very cold on the mountain, and the monks wear sandals and cotton robes. Junior monks are not permitted to read.

There are many menial tasks a monk must complete in a day (cooking, cleaning, cutting down trees, chopping wood, making brooms), and he is given very little time to do them. If he does not move fast enough, senior monks scream at him. There is very little talking—only bell ringing (to indicate a change in activity) and screaming. There is a correct way to do everything, which is vigorously enforced. When a monk wakes in the morning, he must not move until a bell is rung. When the bell rings, he must move very fast. He has about four minutes (until the next bell rings) to put up his futon, open a window, run to the toilet, gargle with salt water, wash his face, put on his robes, and run to the meditation hall. At first, it is very hard to do all those things in four minutes, but gradually he develops techniques for increasing his speed. Because he is forced to develop these techniques, and because even with the techniques it is still difficult to move fast enough, he is intensely aware of everything he is doing.

He is always too slow, he is always afraid, and he is always being scrutinized. In the winter, he is cold, but if he looks cold he is screamed at. There is no solitude. The constant screaming and the running, along with chronic exhaustion, produce in him a state of low-level panic, which is also a state of acute focus. It is as if his thinking mind, his doubting and critical and interpreting mind, had shut down and been replaced by a simpler mechanism that serves the body. The idea is to throw away his self and, in so doing, find out who he is. A well-trained monk, it is said, lives as though he were already dead: free from attachment, from indecision, from confusion, he moves with no barrier between his will and his act.

Several times each year, the monks spend eight days walking long distances to beg for food; in the winter, they walk in sandals through snow. When they go begging, they wear broad conical straw hats to cover their faces. They do not talk to anyone, and, if someone asks, they may not say their names. When someone gives them food, they are obliged to eat everything they are given. This forced overeating can be the most physically painful part of the training.

Every day, each monk has an audience with his teacher about a koan that he is pondering. These audiences are a few minutes at the most, sometimes a few seconds. Occasionally, the teacher will make a comment; usually he says nothing at all. The koan is a mental version of the bodily brutalities of training: resistant, frustrating, impossible to assimilate, it is meant to shock the monk into sudden insight.

In January, the monks hold a weeklong retreat, during which they are not allowed to lie down or sleep. One January, Nemoto was cook; he had to prepare special pickles for the retreat, and he was driven so hard by the head monk that he did not sleep at all for a week before the retreat began. By the third day of the retreat, he was so exhausted that he could barely stand, but he had to carry a heavy pot full of rice. He stood holding the rice and thought, I cannot carry this pot any longer, I am going to die now. Just as he was on the point of collapse, he felt a great rush of energy: he felt as though everything around him were singing, and that he could do anything he had to do. He felt, too, that the person who had been on the point of collapse a moment before, and, indeed, the person who had been living his life until then, was not really him. That evening, he met with his teacher about his koan, and for the first time the teacher accepted his answer. This experience led him to believe that suffering produces insight, and that it is only at the point when suffering becomes nearly unbearable that transformation takes place.

There are very few monks in Japan now. Nemoto’s monastery, whose training is particularly harsh, has only seven. Each year, new monks present themselves for training, and each year many of them run away. This year, five came and four ran away. The focus of Nemoto’s Rinzai Zen sect is individual enlightenment; when a monk leaves with the intention of doing work in the world, the roshi is disappointed.

Some years ago, a woman, R., contacted Nemoto through his Web site, and they also met in person several times.

Date: 01/17/2008

Actually, R. was almost dead yesterday LOL. I thought of taking pills for the first time in a long while. But I can’t die no matter how many times I take pills, and stomach cleansing is suuuuper painful, you know, if you’re conscious. It’d work if I can take pills well until I lose consciousness, but it’s so hard to swallow several hundred pills LOL. . . . If I could die easily, I would have been dead! Now, R. has a reliable friend, you know, so I cried for about 2 hours and I calmed down, but to be the one who listens is also hard, right? I feel sympathy. I thought, you’re going to be tired of R. someday, and I felt even more like dying, or not, LOL. It’s hard. But living is hard. This is my conclusion. O.K., I’ll go take a bath!

At a certain point, R. divorced her husband and moved in with her boyfriend, who had become a hikikomori after his father committed suicide. She sent Nemoto an essay her boyfriend had written, arguing that hikikomori and training priests are essentially the same:

Long ago, becoming a training priest was recognized as a way of living, and I think that considerable numbers of the priests were people who had troubles that prevented them from living in society—people who would be called depressed or neurotic in today’s terms. . . . The basic rule was to leave the family and friends, discard all the relationships and renounce the world. . . . The old society accepted these training priests, although they were thought to be completely useless. Or rather, it treated them with respect, and supported them by giving offerings. . . . In very rare cases, some attained so-called “enlightenment,” and those people could spread teachings that could possibly save people in society who had troubles. In other words, there were certain cases where training priests could be useful to society, and I think that is why society supported them. . . . I think that training priests and hikikomori are quite similar. First, neither of them can fit in to this society—while the training priests are secluded in mountains, hikikomori are secluded in their rooms. They both engage in the activity of facing the root of their problems alone. . . . However, nobody accepts this way of living anymore, and that’s why hikikomori hide in their rooms. . . . But hikikomori are very important beings. Hikikomori cannot be cured by society; rather, it is society that has problems, and hikikomori may be able to solve them.

After four years in the monastery, Nemoto wanted to be out in the world again, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he moved back to Tokyo and went to work at a fast-food restaurant. After four years of rice and pickles, he found the idea of flipping burgers appealing. Sure enough, it was such easy work compared with his training that he felt happy all the time. People said hello to him, they told him he was doing a good job, they asked him if he was O.K. back there, was it too hot, did he want some water? It was incredible! Soon his cheerful demeanor began to attract attention. Nobody could understand why he was so happy flipping burgers; everyone else at the restaurant was miserable. People asked him what his secret was, and he told them about the monastery. They started talking to him about their troubles—some of them about how they had considered suicide—and he found he had a knack for helping unhappy people change the way they thought.

After a while, the son of one of his teachers got in touch with him and asked him what he was doing at the restaurant—their sect needed monks who could become abbots of temples. There was a temple in a small town called Seki, in Gifu prefecture, that would close if it couldn’t find an abbot; Nemoto agreed to move there.

Seki was a collection of low-slung concrete apartment blocks and traditional-style two-story houses with pitched roofs and fluted tiles, surrounded by hills covered with scrubby bamboo. The temple was outside the town, also in a traditional style, surrounded by rice paddies, with a graveyard on one side. Inside the temple was a meditation hall in which the memorial tablets for the parish were kept, each containing a scroll on which were written the names of that family’s ancestors, some dating to the seventeenth century. The rooms opened to the outside with sliding doors latticed with wooden slats and paper screens; the floors were covered with tatami mats. Nemoto had imagined the life of a country abbot as a peaceful one, but it turned out to be so much work that he rarely had time for himself. He conducted funerals for all the families in the parish, and then there were the two-week memorials, the three-week memorials, the four-week memorials, and all the ceremonies after that. He also planted and harvested rice in the temple fields and distributed some of it to his parishioners.

At least there were no more austerities: once monks have left the monastery and become priests, the restrictions of the monastic life fall away. Priests drink, they smoke, they marry. Buddhists from countries where customs are stricter are often shocked by the habits of Japanese priests, but Nemoto doesn’t believe in putting a distance between himself and other people. (Another sect, a branch of the Pure Land Buddhists, takes this further—their priests don’t even shave their heads. This is a gesture of humility: Pure Land priests consider that they are common idiots like everybody else.) When Nemoto is conducting a funeral ceremony, he wears his robes. Older people feel comforted by the sight of a priest in traditional dress. But when he leaves the temple he wears what he likes. He wears baggy jeans, old boots, a kerchief tied over his shaved head. This is not just a matter of reducing formality: in Japan, Buddhism has become so exclusively associated with funerals that a priest in robes appears to many like a herald of death.

Date: 04/22/2010

Dear Chief Priest of Daizenji Temple,

My recent life hasn’t really changed much [since my husband committed suicide], but I still manage to continue living. I will ramble on about what I’m thinking now. Please forgive me that it’s rather long. My mother was very devout. She never failed to put her palms together in prayer and chant a sutra in front of the Buddhist altar every morning and night. My father liked sake, and he acted violently ever since I could remember. I grew up, seeing my mother suffer for decades. However, my mother never complained. She worked very hard, and prayed for the happiness of our family single-mindedly and devoted herself to taking care of my father until he died. I couldn’t understand my mother very much. All I thought was she was impressive. I hated my father all the time. . . .

After my father’s death, my mother’s health declined. She was finally released from troubles with him, but then I started giving her trouble. My marriage failed, and nothing went well in my life, and the older I got, the more I lost the meaning of life, and I just wanted to die. My heart was in a rough mood, and I started using violent words toward my mother. . . . Then she caught pneumonia and passed away. I was in despair. I felt like I was crushed by my severe regrets. I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt so much pain, and I couldn’t bear it anymore. I attempted suicide.

My mother suffered for decades because of my alcoholic father, and I made her suffer when she was finally released. In her entire life, she was never rewarded. Why did she, who was so devout, and sacrificed her own body and life, end up having a life so full of suffering? I know all I gave her was suffering. It was my fault. And yet I couldn’t help myself. So, when I think about my mother, I feel rage, wondering if there are no gods or buddhas in this world, wondering how can such a good life be so unrewarded. I feel like I don’t care anymore about anything, if you can’t become happy by living virtuously. The last words my mother said after regaining consciousness were “I feel grateful.”. . . .

I’m alone. I know it’s pathetic, since I’ll be fifty in a few years. I work as a temporary employee. I can sustain my finances now, but I don’t know what will happen in the future. I have absolutely no idea how to live. I feel extreme anxiety. I talk to my mother’s picture every day. Every time I wake up in the morning, I feel disappointed at myself because I am still alive. I won’t be able to go where my mother is when I die. That’s what I think. Still, while I want to die, I also feel like finding a way to live. I have been looking for a job since the beginning of this year. Since I can’t do anything but office work at this age, all I get is rejections. That’s normal. So, in the end, I feel like I want to run away. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know if I want to live or die. I might be looking for a job to lie about the fact that I want to die. . . . At night, I think about my future and I think about my mother, and I can’t help but cry.

It is hard to talk about wanting to die. Most people you talk to can’t handle it; it’s too disturbing. If you call a suicide hot line, the person can handle it, but he will be some stranger who knows nothing about you. There isn’t much talk therapy in Japan—if you go to a psychiatrist, he will usually see you for just a few minutes and give you a prescription. Nemoto wanted to help suicidal people talk to each other without awkwardness, and so he created a suicide Web site. It was originally called “For those who want to die,” but then it was suggested to him that it might become a place where people went to find strangers to commit suicide with—that had become quite common in Japan—so he changed its name to “For those who do not want to die.” People communicated with one another on the site, and also they wrote to him.

He responded to everyone. He wrote back to all e-mails, and often, when he wrote, a reply would arrive within minutes, and he would reply to the reply. He answered all phone calls, day or night, and many came in the night. People would call and want to talk to him, but they didn’t know what to say; they didn’t know how to describe what was happening to them. What would come through the phone over hours of talking was an inarticulate, urgent, and bottomless anxiety that seeped into him and didn’t go away when the phone call was over.

He tried to practice what he thought of as Zen listening—letting the words and emotions flow through him, taking up all the space in his mind so there was no room for any reaction of his own. He felt that in order to help people he had to feel what they felt—he had to feel that he wasn’t an adviser but a fellow-sufferer, trying, as they were, to make sense out of life—but this affected him more and more, as their anxiety became his. He tried to meditate in order to purge himself of these emotions, but he could never purge himself completely. He thought about the suicidal people all the time. How could he help them? What could he do? He wasn’t sleeping enough. It was gruelling, but his practice in the temple had been gruelling and he believed that this was a continuation of his practice.

After three years, he sensed that he was near a breakdown, and he started to think about ways to take care of himself. He took up karate again. He meditated more, did more chanting. But new people kept asking him for help, and the people from before kept calling, and few cases were ever resolved, and so he felt himself responsible for more and more people who wanted more and more from him.

In the fall of 2009, he began to feel a heaviness in his chest. He felt that his neck was constricting; he found it harder to breathe. When it got very bad, a few months later, he went to the hospital and received a diagnosis of unstable angina. Five arteries were blocked; his doctor told him he could die of a heart attack at any time. Over the next two years, he had four angioplasties. During this period, Nemoto’s father became suicidal. Ten years before, the father had had a severe stroke and become partly paralyzed. By the time Nemoto was hospitalized, his father had lost the will to live. Then, a few months later, he died, of heart failure.

All this time, the e-mails and the phone calls kept coming, but for long periods Nemoto was too sick to respond. At first, he didn’t say why he had gone silent. Then, as the weeks went by, he felt he had to explain. From the hospital, he wrote to his correspondents and told them he was sick. When he checked back in to see how they’d responded to his announcement, he was shocked. They didn’t care that he was sick: they were sick, too, they said; they were in pain, and he had to take care of them.

Lying in the hospital, he spent a week crying. He had spent seven years sacrificing himself, driving himself to the point of breakdown, nearly to death, trying to help these people, and they didn’t care about him at all. What was the point? He knew that if you were suicidal it was difficult to understand other people’s problems, but still—he had been talking to some of these people for years, and now here he was dying and nobody cared.

For a long time, his thoughts were too dark and agitated to sort out, but slowly the darkness receded, and what remained with him was a strong sense that he wanted to do the work anyway. He realized that, even if the people he spoke to felt nothing for him, he still wanted something from them. There was the intellectual excitement he felt when he succeeded in analyzing some problem a person had been stuck on. He wanted to know truths that ordinary people did not know, and in suffering it felt as though he were finding those truths. And then there was something harder to define, a kind of spiritual thrill in what felt to him, when it worked, like a bumping of souls. If this was what he was after, he would have to stop thinking of his work as something morally obligatory and freighted with significance. Helping people should be nothing special, like eating, he thought—just something that he did in the course of his life.

Having arrived at this conclusion, he went online to look at his Web site, and saw that there were some messages of support that he’d missed the first time in his shock at the others. That was a relief. But he still needed to make changes in his life. Clearly, he had been doing something wrong. He thought about all the e-mails and all the phone calls and how those conversations could go on and on for years in circles with no progress at all; and he also thought about how strange and disorienting it was to swallow into himself terrible emotions from people he had never even seen. He decided that from then on he would not communicate with people until he had met them. If they wanted his counsel, they first had to come to his temple. It would be difficult for many of them—his temple was in a remote place, far from the nearest city, quite far even from the local train station, and he had been talking to people all over Japan. It would cost them quite a bit of money to get to him. But this was the point. If they didn’t want his help enough to get to the temple, it was unlikely that he could help them.

The new strategy reduced the number of people who came to him for help, and it also changed something for those who did. Was it meeting face to face, or was it the longer, more concentrated time he was able to give them? He wasn’t sure. But after these meetings he often felt that he and they had achieved some kind of resolution. And this meant, too, that he didn’t spend his life filled with anxiety, with the fear that any one of the many people he had spoken to or written to that week might be killing himself at any moment. As time went on, he developed other techniques. He started taking notes when he was listening to people, which helped him to maintain a certain distance from their despair. It also allowed him to remind them of things they had said before, to remind them of past happiness, and to help them construct a story that moved from one point to the next, rather than endlessly circling, and this allowed them, too, to view their suffering from a distance.

Once, a man walked for five hours to get to Nemoto’s temple. The walk was a heroic journey for this man, because he had been living as a hikikomori, and now suddenly he was outside in the sun, sweating and feeling his body move. As he walked, he thought about what he was going to say. It had been so long since he had really spoken to anyone, and now he was going to be expected to explain his most intimate feelings to a stranger. He sweated and thought as he walked, and when at last, after five hours, he arrived at the temple he announced that he had achieved understanding and no longer needed Nemoto’s help. He turned around and walked back home.

[MIKA27]

I always chuckle whenever I read these kind of reports. Fastest growing means absolutely nothing! I could have one lousy drone, and if I buy 10 more, I've grown my "fleet" by 1000%. Woohoo! I've got the fastest growing fleet of drones!!

Impossible, I have 12, I'm the fastest growing and I just watched you scratch your nose!

[MIKA27]

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