“If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it!”

Another reminder that nothing you put on the Internet is private. Can you plead the fifth in Canada?

It is interesting to note that USA today’s headline reads, Ron Paul sells his Texas house through Facebook, which is not entirely true. The link was shared on his Facebook page, but the ad has it’s own domain name. Dr. Paul is using Facebook like anyone else would… well, not quite like anyone else. Have you ever put your house up for sale on the Internet?

Under its auspices, and purporting to control the production of religious materials, the British government granted the exclusive right to publish printed works to the Stationer’s Company in 1534. The Stationer’s Company, in exchange for its monopoly, was obliged to seek permission from the Crown before it printed anything. The Stationer’s Company was the sixteenth century version of Fox News. As a result, the Crown conveniently only had to keep on eye on one media outlet to dampen dissent and attenuate propaganda. (emphasis added)

That piece of legislation was eventually allowed to expire (150-odd years later!) in 1694, and in 1710, the Statute of Anne passed Parliament, giving birth to the modern concept of “authorship.”

[via Benedict.com]

“Standing at the shore of this overwhelming sea, instead of trying to swallow it all in, the new masters of information skim across it, picking out things from all over, and diving in deep only when necessary. Maybe more importantly, the true masters aren’t the ones who simply accumulate knowledge; they’re those that reconfigure it into something new”.

From The Masters of Data, another good article at the Toronto Standard on life in the digital age.

Recent titles include: Japan’s Killer Quake, Secret History of the Credit Card, and a film onYuri Gagarin: Starman; this last in the spirit of the 50th anniversary of the first man in space.

Yuri Gagarin was a soviet cosmonaut, and Google changed their logo for the anniversary yesterday.

These days it is hard, with a reality so insanely captivating, to imagine a stranger fiction.

Suppose a particularly sensitive and perceptive man emerges today from a three-month sabbatical in seclusion. Suppose also that someone has taken the time to gather together all reports of important events, stories, decisions, and disasters since the first of this year, and then delivers them to him. Our man was away studying, perhaps, or living in a Tibetan monastery, searching for enlightenment. In any case, he has not seen the news or heard anything about the outside world since his departure.

Would our man, freshly emerged from his peaceful life in seclusion, not be completely overwhelmed by what he learns in this compilation report? The revolution in Egypt alone is enough to inspire intense disbelief, learning that so much of significance happened while he wasn’t looking. Add in Charlie Sheen, war in Libya, and every strange thing that happened in between, and it would be perfectly reasonable to suppose that a clever someone is pulling an elaborate prank on a man that has simply taken a little break from the world.

“Ha, ha! Joke’s on me!” our man would say. And the person delivering the report would frown and respond, “No, sir. I’m afraid this is real.”

A Fiction Stranger than Reality

For those of us with the leisure to digest what has happened as it has happened, the past three months still seem surreal. It’s almost as if the events are a tragic and sometimes heroic multi-part mini-series written by an author obsessed with human calamity and destruction, and the people on the TV news are actors playing out the parts.

How’s this for a plot summary? A revolution in Egypt, a new war in Libya; natural disaster followed by threat of nuclear annihilation in Japan; in the meantime, America’s coffers steam with debt while the political machine in a position to save the country is too busy squabbling over compromises to take action.

Unfortunately this is not fiction, and while some enterprising writer may one day sell a million copies using this material as the basis for his next Big Idea (could it be you?), the world is left to deal with the reality of the situation.

Make no mistake. Even if you have been in seclusion the last three months, or living with your head planted firmly in your rectum, you can’t avoid the ripples. That’s the thing about world-changing events: everyone is affected, in one way or another. We’re all ducks sitting in the same pond, a pond that is always getting smaller, and even if we quack along like nothing is happening, we still have to ride the wave on its way to the shore.

A World That Requires the Suspension of Disbelief

Fiction has another purpose, however.

From the disconnected, nonsensical world, the reader of fiction may escape, between the pages of a book, into a world of reason and justice, balanced, heart-warming, and beautiful. Many a book is born out of the desire to make sense of the world, or to transform the world as it is into the world as it ought to be.

As a result, fiction often appears more sensible than the world it came from. Why? you ask. Have you been paying attention? Well, let me give you another example.

And you thought 2011 was strange? No wonder people use fiction to escape. Oh, monstrous cruelty! If you were forced to live through that performance or, worse yet, be a part of it, of course you would need an escape.

As far as I can tell that video is not fabricated. It is real and, yes, stranger than fiction. Next time you question the plausibility of a scene in a book or a film, think about the situation that demanded a musical performance of “I Ain’t Gonna Pee Pee My Bed Tonight”, and suspend your disbelief. In fact, next time you watch the news, don’t be surprised if you find yourself doing the same thing.

[Kudos to Ryan, for the first sentence, which I changed slightly from his version, but which nevertheless inspired this essay. Photo by Toms Bauģis.]

This is a clip of comedian Louis C.K. on Conan, back when he still had a talk show on NBC. Louis talks about how amazing life is today, and how little people appreciate it. It never gets old. On the miracle of human flight, he relates the following story.

“Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story. And it’s like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the ’40s in Germany. Theyre like, ‘It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn’t board… for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane and they made us sit there, on the runway, for 40 minutes! We had to sit there!’

Oh really, what happened next? Did you FLY through the AIR, incredibly, like a BIRD? Did you partake in the MIRACLE of human flight, you non-contributing ZERO? … YOU’RE FLYING! It’s amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, OHMYGOD! WOW! … You’re flying. You’re sitting in a chair, in the SKY.”

Having briefly existed between the years 1848 and 1850, the Toronto Standard reemerged last night, April 7, 2011. From the cold ashes and forgotten name of a defunct printed newspaper to an internet media startup, 161 years later.

“The Toronto Standard is a daily digital briefing on the life of the city, covering urban affairs, business, technology, culture and design — and all the sparks that happen in between.” (about)

One of the first articles is written by Navneet Alang, From Handwringing to Hope: the Future of Media. In it the author addresses the future of media in a digital culture, an appropriate topic considering that the Standard is a youthful face in that same tumultuous industry.

The website, made by the development company Playground, is clean, easy to read, with a black and white color that harkens back to a newspaper legacy. The horizontal reading frames, which have been taken down for maintenance, are a step in the right direction for comfortable online reading. Horizontal reading is a rare treat on a website, and it’s refreshingly good to see someone else undertake a horizontal reading extension similar to that advocated by design mogul Frank Chimero.

If you a Torontonian and you care about media or what happens in the city you live in, keep an eye on the Standard. If a first impression tells us anything, they will have a lot to offer.

Soon, however, I began to question whether my father’s philosophical beliefs were simply a justification of his own needs. As soon as the legal drama erupted, he refused to pay for even the smallest things, declaring, “Your mother is suing me,” in defensive sound bites, as though it explained everything. (Salon)

In this Salon article, writer Alyssa Bereznak realizes that Objectivism, like all philosophical systems, runs into problems when applied in the real world, instead of the world of Ayn Rand’s novels. For instance, real world people are not invincible heroes (as Rand’s characters are usually drawn. See: John Galt and Howard Roark). People in the real world can still hurt each other, and in the real world the good guys don’t always win.

Did Ayn Rand ruin the author’s childhood? Or is it more likely that her father carries the greater part of the blame? It is not necessarily the ideas that are odious (though they can be), so much as the way they are interpreted.

“From what I understood of his favorite capitalist champion, any form of altruism was evil. But how could that kind of blanket self-interest extend to his own children, the people he was legally and morally bound to take care of? What was I supposed to do, fend for myself?”

Blaming Rand, or any other philosopher, for her father’s hard-lined selfishness and lack of financial support would be classic scapegoat-ism, like blaming Friedrich Nietzsche for World War II, to use an extreme example.

But the author doesn’t do that. Because when it comes down to it, she realizes that rigidly adhering to any set of principles, whether it be religion or politics or philosophy, easily disintegrates into hard-headed dogmatism of the worst kind.

Eight Germans who had lived in the U.S. were dropped along the Eastern seaboard _ four on Long Island, the rest south of Jacksonville, Florida. They were to go ashore, blend in, then begin a campaign of sabotage against factories, railways and canals, as well as launching “small acts of terrorism” including suitcase bombs aimed at Jewish-owned shops.

But the plan started to go wrong almost as soon as the men left their “sabotage camp” in Germany.

They went to Paris, where one of the team got drunk at the hotel bar and “told everyone that he was a secret agent” _ something, the MI5 report notes, that may “have contributed to the failure of the undertaking.”

* * *

In related news, the FBI created a searchable digital archive containing over 2,000 files. It is called The Vault. From my short perusal of the database, I learned that Marilyn Monroe applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union in 1955, and that the word “attache” still sees common usage in such reports.

Other topics include Alcatraz Escape, John Dillinger, David Koresh, and Roswell UFO.

[via Newser and Gizmodo. Image from The Vault.]