ZombieMart: Wallmart with police tape

What Would Ash Do?

“Attention Shoppers…”
Sought: Wal-Mart shoppers who trampled NY worker:

NEW YORK – Police were reviewing video from surveillance cameras in an attempt to identify who trampled to death a Wal-Mart worker after a crowd of post-Thanksgiving shoppers burst through the doors at a suburban store and knocked him down…

“This crowd was out of control,” Fleming said. He described the scene as “utter chaos,” and said the store didn’t have enough security.

Dozens of store employees trying to fight their way out to help Damour were also getting trampled by the crowd, Fleming said. Shoppers stepped over the man on the ground and streamed into the store.

Damour, 34, of Queens, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead around 6 a.m., police said…

Kimberly Cribbs, who witnessed the stampede, said shoppers were acting like “savages.”

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling `I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’” she said. “They kept shopping.”

By AP via Yahoo! News

Shop Smart! Shop S-Mart!

This was an important place in their lives.

Media, Black Friday and the Last Shopper

Very solid hit against the media… suggesting a consumerist version of Nietzsche’s Last Man:

Even consumption may have limits. Mr. Cohen said that in his 32 years interviewing consumers in malls during the holiday season, he had never heard what he did this year. “People really have no idea what they want,” he said.

They don’t even want anything. They want to want. Our popular culture, driven by news and entertainment media, and advertising, has stimulated their appetites, such that all they know now is appetite. I don’t know whether it’s more pathetic or frightening. Maybe it’s frightening because it’s pathetic: the Last Shopper.

By Ron Dreher

The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch his heavily reconstructed documentary, “Zoo,” to see it as a story of ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves Klein envious, “Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.

By Manohla Dargis

One of great mysteries of the Tunguska event is its genetic impact. Some genetic anomalies were reported in the plants, insects and people of the Tunguska region. Remarkably, the increased rate of biological mutations was found not only within the epicenter area, but also along the trajectory of the Tunguska Space Body (TSB). At that no traces of radioactivity were found, which could be reliably associated with the Tunguska event. The main hypotheses about the nature of the TSB, a stony asteroid, a comet nucleus or a carbonaceous chondrite, readily explain the absence of radioactivity but give no clues how to deal with the genetic anomaly. A choice between these hypotheses, as far as the genetic anomaly is concerned, is like to the choice between “blue devil, green devil and speckled devil”, to quote late Academician N.V. Vasilyev. However, if another mysterious phenomenon, electrophonic meteors, is evoked, the origin of the Tunguska genetic anomaly becomes less obscure.

By Z.K. Silagadze

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize

Black, Merton and Scholes made a vital contribution by showing that it is in fact not necessary to use any risk premium when valuing an option. This does not mean that the risk premium disappears; instead it is already included in the stock price.

Mirror matter is predicted to exist if parity is an unbroken symmetry of nature. Currently, there is a large amount of evidence that mirror matter actually exists coming from astrophysics and particle physics. One of the most fascinating (but speculative) possibilities is that there is a significant abundance of mirror matter within our solar system. If the mirror matter condensed to form a large body of planatary or stellar mass then there could be interesting observable effects. Indeed studies of long period comets suggest the existence of a solar companion which has escaped direct detection and is therefore a candidate for a mirror body. Nemesis, hypothetical “death star” companion of the Sun, proposed to explain biological mass extinctions, may potentially be a mirror star. We examine the prospects for detecting these objects if they do indeed exist and are made of mirror matter.

By R. Foot, Z. K. Silagadze

Armin Meiwes, 44, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison in 2004 after being found guilty of the manslaughter of Bernd Juergen Brandes…
A video which Meiwes filmed during the acts of cannibalism was central to the prosecution’s case…
Mr Brandes, a 43-year-old computer engineer, apparently agreed to the idea of being eaten after making contact with his killer on an internet chatroom. This led the court to convict Meiwes of the less serious charge of manslaughter at his trial in 2004.
The pair met at Meiwes’s home in Rotenburg in March 2001, where they had sex before Meiwes cut off Brandes’s penis, which the men then cooked and attempted to eat.
Meiwes later stabbed and killed Brandes, before cutting him to pieces and freezing parts of his body, some of which he later ate.

By BBC News.

Meiwes’ lawyer, Harald Ermel, advised those planning similar forays into the world of cannibalism to ensure both parties drew up a contract before any act took place.

By BBC News.

But “evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe. The words are simple, the concept clear– but you don’t believe it, do you? Nor do I. How could I, when we’re both so lovable? Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? …we are moral creatures in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die– does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins”

By Z.K. Silagadze

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him… and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up…. and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed. and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon became as blood…

-Revelations