For $40/year, this service will send an email to your loved ones after believers disappear in the coming rapture. There's a deadman switch that will send the messages automatically if three of the five owners don't log in every three days.

I guess I'm a believer, because I'll bet those guys are going to disappear mysteriously. The site doesn't say what happens to the money.

It might be kind of interesting to do this properly: let the designees of each individual account be notified if the account-holder doesn't log in. Might be useful for journalists, abused wives, bloggers, and other folks in fear for their lives from governments and wackos.

Over in Fallujah, Iraq, according to the Associated Press, United States Marines are handing out coins bearing Christian messages, especially that old fundy call sign, “John 3:16”, to anybody who wants one, and to lots of people who don't. That's not going over too well with the Moslem locals, as you might imagine. But at least our guys are consistent, harassing atheist soldiers more than they do Iraqis. Meanwhile the United States Air Force academy has been taken over by James Dobson's crew. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that the whole G-d blessed US military aparatus has been taken over by what I shall tactfully euphematize as “crackpot christofascist nutjobs with napalm and nukes.”

Looks like the plans to immanentize the eschaton and hasten Jesus are proceeding apace. Maybe it's time for me to repent.

A little over a year ago we blogged here on wetmachine about the mean nasty RIAA evildoers and how and why they were planning to kill Internet radio because the RIAA is an organization dedicated to promoting corporate control of everything you can hear, and thus hates Net radio because it makes them burn, burn, BURN when you hear new music and artists are fairly compensated and everybody is happy.

Last year I thought we had put them in the box, but oh noes! they're back like Freddy Kruger, as I found out by this letter from Tim from Pandora, asking for support in getting Senators to support an important bit of legislation under discussion RIGHT NOW. Go to SaveNetRadio.org for info on how to help save Net radio by giving the right message to your senators.

Information on how to contact Massachusetts Senators is here. I just called them. Kennedy's office says they're looking into it, reading the legislation. Kennedy had not announced a position yet. The guy on the phone told me they're getting a lot of calls. Good. Let's give them some more. Kerry is a co-sponsor, so he's cool.

Please call your senators. If they're not hip, help them to get hip. If they're cool, say “thank you.” Please do it right away. It took me about 1 minute, total, for both calls.

My original vision for Wetmachine was that it would be kind of an anti-Boing-Boing: a technology-themed site full of fear and dread, skeptical of the notion of “progress” and paranoid about machines from nanoscopic brain-rearrangers to the DNA-sniffing, face-recognizing satellites in the sky-- the Overmind emergent. Then of course 9/11 changed everything.

I'm sorry, that was a joke.

Or no, actually it wasn't. For what's the point of a half-joking technoparanoia site when Dick Cheney is in the White House? What I'm trying to say is, do you think the “D.C. Madam” killed herself, or do you think she was suicided?

By the way, that's a link to the site “Infowars.com”, where the motto is, “Because there is a war on for your mind”. That site, like its sister site Prison Planet, represent the deepest fears of my fellow Wetmechiners about what Sundman may turn our little site into if he ever sets free his technoparanoiac demons. I guess with Infowars and Prison Planet out there, there's no need for me to go nutz on Wetmachine. (But Harold, Greg, Howard: Watch out! The first danger sign is when he starts to talk about himself in the third person!). [Read More!]

Yeah, it's a weak opener, but I couldn't get any more clever. Bill McKibben's most recent post, reprinted here in today in “Tomgram”, is a bite sized mouthful, likely to send daddy drunk and mumbling into the night... [Read More!]

The Media Access Project's Innovation '08 Forum on Content and Control. Be there or b x b.

Finally...someone who can talk about oil and energy and leave both parties in the dust... [Read More!]

In March, I went to a gathering of people who read Eschaton, a blog by “Atrios”. This guy Atrios has a pithy blogging style that I like a lot. Basically he puts out short observations about this and that (or thus and such)--much as my late dog Rosa used to just bark at random times. People then leave hundreds of comments on Eschaton in response to the Atrios dog-barks.

Among other things, Atrios likes to bark at his readers. From time to time he barks at readers who want him to give them or their blogs publicity. He barks that it is not his job to give people publicity. When he blogs on this topic he gets riled up like a proper chihuahua.

One time Atrios put up on his blog a photo taken inside his apartment. I saw on his bookshelf books by Douglas Hofstadter. So I sent him a note asking if he would like a copy of my Hofstadterian book, “Cheap Complex Devices”. Atrios did not write back.

At Eschacon, I spoke with him for a little bit. He was drinking red wine & think he was a little tipsy. I gave him a copy of my book, which he graciously accepted, and I saw him carrying it around hours later, so I know that, at the least, he did not immediately throw it in the garbage.

However, he still has not replied to my email or given me free publicity on his blog. Also, hardly anybody ever leaves comments here on Wetmachine. Finally, although Doug Hofstadter and I are now friends, he had not read my homage a Hofstadter yet either. And none of you people leave comments!

Also, this entry is much too long for an Atrios-style blog entry. Maybe that's why I'm a minor blogger and he's a superstar. It's harder than it looks.

Those meanines on the internets keep showing this little video of W's very-own Mini-me, McSame McBush McCain, saying how staying in Iraq for a hundred years would be “fine with him”.

But everybody knows that it's unfair to show Straight-Talking Maverick St. John McCain saying anything politically unpopular! St. John got mad. St. John got sad. St. John went to his jillionaire-millionaire wife looking for a little love, but she was too busy plagiarizing a cookbook to notice him. He wound up back in the arms of the Hugger-in-Chief!

Now that's what I call “straight” talk!