Embrace the Malignance

Superheroes: Images to Inspire Terror

2012-01-31T09:51:00.001-07:00

Superhero-shaped UAVs buzz Manhattan

By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am Tuesday, Jan 31

These three fellows made superhero-shaped RC airplanes and buzzed New York with them, giving the city the aerial defenders it has dreamt of for so long. Much of the video was recorded with UAV cameras, which makes for dramatic footage.
Flying People in New York City (Thanks, ArbitraryAardvark!)

Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Boing Boing .

The city you would want to send inexpensively fashioned flying devices buzzing around? The city sure to be wary and alert to unusual and bizarre behavior? Why, New York of course. And what better image to inspire terror in the masses - the so called "little people" without "superpowers"?

The image of superheroes.

Perfect!

-Lord Malignance

Lambo is beginning to annoy Me.

2012-01-27T16:13:00.001-07:00

Posted at 05:34 PM ET, 01/23/2012

Republican lawmaker Doug Lamborn of Colorado to skip State of the Union

By Felicia Sonmez

Will there be bipartisan seating during this year’s State of the Union address?

(Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg)For some members, yes. But others won’t be attending the president’s annual address to Congress at all.

Denver’s Fox 31 reported Monday that Rep. Doug Lamborn, a three-term Republican congressman from Colorado, will not attend the State of the Union.

The station reported that, according to Lamborn’s office, the congressman “does not support the policies of Barack Obama,” including the president’s recent recess appointments and his administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.

Lamborn last made headlines in August, when he compared the idea of working together with Obama to “touching a tar baby.”

The last time Obama gave an address to a joint session of Congress – his September jobs speech – a handful of GOP lawmakers boycotted the event. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had encouragedlawmakers to attend.

But even as Lamborn plans to skip Tuesday’s speech, several dozen lawmakers of both parties have announced plans to sit together during the address in a show of bipartisanship.

Monday afternoon, a bipartisan working group of nine House members – three Republicans and six Democrats – announced that they plan to sit together.

The group’s members are Reps. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), Peter Welch (Vt.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), John Carney (D-Del.), Pat Meehan (R-Pa.), Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) and Jim Himes (D-Conn.).

The group No Labels has compiled a lengthy list of lawmakers planning to sit together with colleagues from across the aisle.

By Felicia Sonmez | 05:34 PM ET, 01/23/2012

Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of the Washington Post

Representatives are so taciturn, and forgetful of their place.

Servants of the People.

One notes, Servant, that you practice Villainy. This means you have potential, but does not spare you from my evaluation of your service.

This boycott of yours does not serve ME, Lamborn. It is blatant disregard for process, tradition and respect for the Office of the President of the United States. Single handed, you embarrasses our state, our values, and call into question your ability to fulfill your duties, small that they may be. The world watches America for leadership, and you make our country and our democracy a mockery, at my very great displeasure.

A reminder then, who Rules and who serves. You have almost two years left to recover my favor. Strive for this state of grace, Lamborn. Strive for it like your job depends on it.

Because it does.

-Lord Malignance
Coloradoan, and Registered Voter.

Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord (Malignance)

2012-01-24T12:44:00.002-07:00

Greetings,

Those of you IN the business of Evil, will know that sorrow follows all who basically annoy me. This has ever been the case, and ever will be the case. It is a matter of business, and One takes care to ensure that business is taken care of.

To that end, some updates appearing in Facebook yesterday;
(You'll have to chase them down, and read them yourselves, AND, remember, heroes delete and hide their shame faster than a speeding bullet).

1) Battle of the Titanic Egos
Jack Cero, "Embrace the Malignance" darling and hardcore street justice/Facebook storytime styled vigilante, has gone after Phoenix Jones, self styled "Savior Of Us All" and Sport Cage Fighter at Large. His avenue of attack? Simple questions posed in Facebook, that Jones would not want to answer. The kinds of questions that call into light, just exactly what the hell you think you're doing Sport Cage Fighting Random Innocent Citizens.

Needless to say, blocking, and proxy ego strokes are running rampant. It's the superhero way. One found myself (Me!) blocked by the Former Zetaman. Just as well - One would only point out, "Playing superhero pandering to a camera" was practically invented by Zetaman, and Jones is his heir as much as anyone.

2) Superheroes Harm People
Longtime and long forgotten troll, Agent Mixsae, known to Villains by her attempted "Sheep in Wolf's Clothing" covert ID "PST" or "Pint Sized Tyrant", as part of the Skiffy trio including Voldemort, and Mr. Jingles, has used her superhero ways to apparently "out" the secret and real life identity of one of their most clandestine members. Because there really IS a security concern here, One won't mention his name. You'll know who he is, as a member of the audience to whom this post is written. Because of this change in his status, he's apparently lost his job. One won't ponder why he would risk such an important job, doing what he apparently knew would cause him to lose it if known. Perhaps he had his reasons.

Because of this game of Seduction and Betrayal, a real person has suffered irreparable harm, due to the actions of superheroes. It is a filthy business, these acts of Seduction and Betrayal, and shames all involved.

So, the three of them, wretches all, are finding their justice, and are being found out for what they are: Dangerous Frauds, shouting their self righteousness, while secretly engaging in the most nasty, deplorable behaviors imaginable. And they surround themselves constantly with children, and sell their "wholesomeness".

What has One done to enact any of this at all? Nothing but patiently waited for their superheroic qualities to become evident to a wider audience. One was there, at the beginning of this blog, fighting these superheroes, wherever they spread their lies, and hate. But not alone - Villainy began, and was shaped by their awfulness, their pandering self aggrandizement, their incessant faux martydom; , and we grew strong against them, and remain strong still.

The world is catching up to the truth on superheroes, but Villains knew first, and have been consistent in battling their extremist agenda to harm innocent people. Even when that harm comes to one of their own.

We Are Villains.

Links, Because One Is Out Of Time

2012-01-21T16:31:00.001-07:00

Greetings,

Out of time, but these are all Villainously worthy stories;

"Hollywood bought its politicians, and it expects them to stay bought".
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/19/1056356/-Hollywood-bought-its-politicians,-and-it-expects-them-to-stay-bought

"Rush Limbaugh says Newt Gingrich's adultery is a 'mark of character'.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/19/1056368/-Rush-Limbaugh-says-Newt-Gingrichs-adultery-is-a-mark-of-character?via=sidebyuserrec

"Stuff scientists say".
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/stuff-scientists-say.html

"Steampunkers show of their wares".

adafruit Flora (Wearable electronics platform and accessories
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/01/20/announcing-the-flora-adafruits-wearable-electronics-platform-and-accessories/
(Why Ms. Lovelace, you do show up in the most remarkable places)

"How do I make my document look like it was written by an Cthulhu worshipping madman?"
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29402/how-do-i-make-my-document-look-like-it-was-written-by-an-cthulhu-worshipping-mad

Enjoy!

-Lord Malignance

SciTech Saturdays: The Symphony of Science

2012-01-21T16:22:00.002-07:00

Symphony of Science: The Greatest Show on Earth! – A Music Video About Evolution

A musical celebration of the wonders of biology, including evolution, natural selection, DNA, and more. Featuring David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye. “The Greatest Show on Earth” is the 13th video in the Symphony of Science music videos series. Materials used in this video are from:
Richard Dawkins’ “There is grandeur in this view of life” speech
BBC Life
BBC Planet Earth
David Attenborough’s First Life
Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life
Bill Nye Evolution episode

[Symphony of Science]

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of Geeks are Sexy

Mock the Superhero, And Turn Them Away, Lest They Find Succor At Your Safety And Spread Their Pestilence

2012-01-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

All the Above courtesy of ScreenTeamShow on Youtube.

Yes, yes, world! Mock the superheroes, mock them for their ridiculousness, and use your talents to destroy them ALL!

-Lord Malignance

Overlord Gates Does More To Help, Than Superheroes Ever Will

2012-01-21T12:09:00.002-07:00

Bill Gates is Better than Batman [Infographic]

Source: frugaldad.com

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of Geeks are Sexy

He Rules the World to save Millions. Kind of puts those Sandwich handouts superheroes are always filming themselves "sacrificing for" in perspective. Bill Gates applies his superpower of "Job" to "Buy Things" - lesson to the super-impaired about how these processes work. Of course, Overlord Gates also doesn't wear a cape, or film himself handing out charity to people in need. Because, despite this infographic, and all the Fame he has and does earn, his work to help people ("Enslave them") is not about Him. It's about solving problems, and helping people.

Further Proof: Villains strive to Enslave the World, to bring Order, Peace, and Prosperity, to everyone.

-Lord Malignance

Ubermas 2012 Pictures

2012-01-20T16:44:00.003-07:00

Greetings and Lamentations, I AM Lord Malignance, and you WILL Crouch! before me Now!
(Villains excepted, of course)

The Lair is a shambles, but what could anyone expect from the month long unholiday Villains share, called Ubermas? The Season of Evil, where Excess, Opulence, Selling Out, and the Benefits of Hard Work the Year Long, are celebrated, and Evil company is cherished and enjoyed.

Some highlights from Ubermas 2011;

Ubermas Tribute feted Oneself by the Minion in Training, Diabolical Madame X

Meeting with the Colorado Camorra. Seriously, you can NOT do business unsuitably coiffed.

Greetings Fuel for the Colorado Mafiya. (Note the Bison Meat? - It's how you can tell this is Colorado)

A long time ago gift from the Cartel Interests in my Colorado Holdfast. It tastes like Butterscotch and Lighter Fluid.

Sushi Den in Denver. Representatives from the 3 Clans are there lurking. I can't see them either.

Evil Snow. It doesn't land on the ground, because it's being omni directionally blown from all angles.

Regular Snow

Picture from Fall. The first sign, Winter was coming. You can almost make out the Lair in this picture. You can also, almost make out the (unsuccessful) inbound missile strike. Silly Europeans. My Neighbors are N.O.R.A.D.

One hopes all Villains had the best unholiday of Ubermas you could. The Next Year is just another short 11months away. Time enough for your liver to heal, and to make yourself even more successful and happy than you have been previously. To Success!

-Lord Malignance

(Did not see the Spectral Appearance of Madame Lucrezia Borgia this year in any mirrors, and the brandy by the sub basement trapdoor was left untouched. Perhaps One was unworthy, or did not Celebrate Hard Enough?) Perhaps next year.

Homo Sapiens Malignus - The Research Keeps Confirming The Theory of Evilution

2012-01-20T14:49:00.001-07:00

Bad bosses: The Psycho-path to Success?

By Kevin Voigt, CNN

updated 7:03 AM EST, Fri January 20, 2012

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

One study found senior managers are four times more likely to be a psychopath
Office psychopaths mimic rather than feel emotions, often leading to destructive behavior
While associated with violence, psychopathic behavior doesn't necessarily lead to crime
Psychologists believe 1% of people have the mental disorder, which is rooted in genetics

(CNN) -- Think you suffer from a "psycho" boss? A small but growing body of global research suggests you might be right.

Call it the "Psycho-path to Success."

Psychopaths -- narcissists guided without conscience, who mimic rather than feel real emotions -- bring to mind serial killers such as Ted Bundy or fictional murderers such as Hannibal Lecter or "Dexter," the anti-hero of the popular Showtime TV series. But psychologists say most psychopaths are not behind bars -- and at least one study shows people with psychopathic tendencies are four times more likely to be found in senior management.

"Not all psychopaths are in prison -- some are in the boardroom," said Dr. Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who is co-author of the book "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work."
And British researcher Clive Boddy goes further: He thinks the 2007-2008 financial crisis may have resulted in the growing proliferation of psychopathic personalities in the corner office -- an offshoot of the erosion of single company employment in the last generation.

"If you worked at a company over the course of 20 or 30 years, people got to know what you're like, how they treat people, regardless of how you appeared in an interview," said Boddy, whose "Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis" was recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics. "Obviously these days, as people move job to job every two or three years, that's not possible any more."
His paper follows a 2010 study Hare co-authored that found about 4% of senior managers displayed psychopathic tendencies, up from the 1% that researchers say could normally be found in society.

Psychopaths are great bullies -- they feel no remorse or guilt about what they've done
UK researcher Clive Boddy

"People tend to think of psychopaths as criminals. In fact, the majority of psychopaths aren't criminal," said Hare, a pioneer in the study of psychopathy who developed the first diagnostic test for the mental disorder in 1980. "They don't go out and maim, rob and rape but find other ways to satisfy themselves without doing something necessarily illegal ... such as taking risks with someone else's property or money."

Which raises a disturbing question: Why are psychopaths four times more likely to be found in senior management?

The Successful Psychopath
The "corporate psychopath" brings to mind the character of Patrick Bateman, the Wall Street banker who would kill a colleague over a business card in the movie, "American Psycho," based on the controversial book by Brett Easton Ellis. In the real working world, however, executives who display psychopathic tendencies are often charismatic charmers on first meeting, emoting confidence that is rooted in deception, psychologists say.

They lie without remorse, steal credit for accomplishments and are adroit at transferring blame for their mistakes, psychologists said. Psychopaths are more likely to have shallow, short-term sexual relationships -- often in the workplace -- and are easily bored. They are prone to take risks without concern for the ramifications.

"Most of us have an image of psychopathy that's inaccurate -- we think of the killer, a crazy person ... the fact is, psychopathy is a personality disorder that may or may not result in criminal behavior," said Paul Babiak, a New York industrial psychologist who has teamed with Hare on "Snakes and Suits" and a range of studies on psychopaths in the workplace over the past 16 years.

Psychopaths are drawn to powerful people and positions. "They like to play head games with people and make good money at it," said Babiak, who coaches executives on dealing with psychotic colleagues -- and most of his clients are in the financial services industry. "They're not stupid. They can decode what's expected of them and play the part."

Office psychopaths are charismatic, which often masks proclivities to steal ideas, playing mind games and shift blame.

One advantage psychopaths have is they are not swimming in the sea of emotions that color and guide most of our decision-making. "Psychopaths are great bullies," said Boddy, author of the book, "Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers."

"They are cunning and manipulative, and great at engineering situations. Although they don't have emotions themselves, they can create emotional situations," Boddy said. "The rest of us don't even realize we're being manipulated until it's too late."

Hardwired for trouble
Babiak and Hare's work exploring psychopaths in the workplace gained traction in the wake of the implosion of Enron and Worldcom at the turn of the century and is now getting renewed interest after the financial crisis and high-profile fraud cases such as Bernie Madoff''s Ponzi Scheme and the insider trading conviction of fund manager Raj Rajaratnam -- though there have been no proven claims about the mental states of these people.
But much of the study of psychopathy comes from prisons, not the workplace, and "for good reason," Babiak said. "(A prisoner's past) behavior is documented, you are able to test whether they are telling the truth or not from records, you can observe them in social settings."

And therein lies the problem with studying the malady and its impact on the workplace. "We are having a heck of a time doing this kind of research because companies don't want to know," said Hare, who has advised the FBI on psychopaths and helped actress Nicole Kidman prepare for her role in the 1993 thriller "Malice."

The problem also lies with the diagnosis: Squint at the symptoms of psychopathy, and in a different light they can appear as simple office politics or entrepreneurial prowess. Psychopaths "believe the rules don't apply to them," Babiak said.

They like to play head games with people and make good money at it
Paul Babiak, a New York industrial psychologist

Psychopaths are gifted at finding the weakness and insecurities of colleagues, yet that can be dressed as "constructive criticism." Psychopaths always turn on the charm to those in power within their corporation -- and equally turn on the malice to colleagues or subordinates -- but isn't that just "managing up"? "They can't get any one thing done because they're prone to boredom, but that can be easily called 'multitasking,'" Babiak said.

"Just because you have a high temperature and you cough doesn't mean you have pneumonia," added Hare. "Similarly, risk-taking can be beneficial. A lack of empathy can be beneficial, if you need to make a rational-based decision."

The damage done
The difference, the researchers say, is most high-fliers display different personas at work versus home. Psychopaths don't vary their behavior: They are hardwired for pathological impulses. "They act this way toward their mother or their daughter," Hare said, damaging family members as deftly as work colleagues.
While environmental factors play a part, psychopathy is rooted in biology. Brain scans of psychopaths show areas of the brain that govern emotion in psychopaths aren't as active as a normal adult's. Show them words freighted with emotional meaning -- such as a "rape," "blood" or "knife" -- and their brain activity shows the same reaction if shown "tree" or "rock."

"What we refer to as 'conscience' is not a purely intellectual mechanism but has a strong emotional component. The latter is largely responsible for the difference between knowing the rules of the game and being guided by this knowledge," Hare said. Psychopaths, uninhibited by emotion, are "sort of like a car with great power but weak brakes."

With turmoil in the markets and rapid changes across the corporate landscape, these are golden times for cold, career opportunists like psychopaths, psychologists say. But the damage done -- bad morale, poor teamwork, ineffective execution of strategy -- can be difficult to quantify on corporate bottomlines, unless the psychopath veers into actual crime.

And crime in the workplace is rising. A November report from PriceWaterhouse Coopers shows global economic crime is rising -- a 13% increase since its 2009 world survey, with an average cost per company of $5 million. And most of the crimes are inside jobs: 56% of companies say the offenders were employees.
"You may have people who defraud your business ranging from taking change out of the register to stealing tens of thousands," Babiak said. "The psychopath sees no difference and feels no remorse."

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of CNN

Leaders, Great Men and Women, Risk Takers, Sexy People who know what they want, and know how to get it. The Smartest People in the room. The Dreamers. The Scary. The Vengeful. The Evil. The Gifted.

Villains.

Yes, the research keeps mounting, proving beyond any reasonable doubt, that Evolution has gifted the world with the Next Stage of Human Evolution. The adaptations of Living in Civilization find advantage in the new species "Homo Sapiens Malignus" - the Superior Human. The human unencumbered by the vestigial weakness of, well, weakness. Born to Rule, and subjugate the former species, just as the Cro-Magnon subjugated the Neandertal.

But fear not, poor doomed former Apex Predators: You can enable this evolutionary change in yourself and your progeny - granting them the Great Gift of Villainy. You need only learn to think like a Villain, and these blogs of Villains, can be your classroom. Study how Villains share, and encourage each other to achieve greatness, not individually for selfish short term gains, but collectively for the growth of Evil (and of course a bigger "pie" when we all eventually turn on each other for the opportunity to Rule It ALL).

Evil. It's Evolutionary.
Or "Evilutionary".

-Lord Malignance

You're Welcome America (and the Whole World)!

2012-01-20T13:22:00.003-07:00

SOPA and PIPA dead – for now

Smith said SOPA won't be taken up as planned and Reid is calling off a cloture vote on PIPA. | AP Photos

By JENNIFER MARTINEZ | 1/20/12 9:40 AM EST Updated: 1/20/12 12:09 PM EST

House and Senate leaders abandoned plans to move on SOPA and PIPA on Friday — the surest sign yet that a wave of online protests have killed the controversial anti-piracy legislation for now and maybe forever.

SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said his committee won’t take up the bill as planned next month — and that he’d have to “wait until there is wider agreement on a solution” before moving forward.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he was calling off a cloture vote on PIPA he’d scheduled for Tuesday.

Reid tried to put on a brave face, saying in a statement that he was optimistic that progress could be made in the coming weeks. But there's no mistaking what happened. Many of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors have since come out against it, leaving Reid a no-win choice: Go forward with the cloture vote he'd planned for Tuesday and lose, or send the bill off into back-burner purgatory.

PIPA sponsor Patrick Leahy got the message — and he wasn’t happy about it.

In a steaming response to Reid's announcement, the Vermont Democrat said Internet thieves in China and Russia "are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”

And he didn’t stop there. Leahy said “the day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”

The double-barrel decisions to punt on the bill capped an extraordinary week of public pressure — and an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for Hollywood, whose lobbyists seemed to think they were on cruise control to passage of bills aimed at protecting their content from online thieves.

Over the weekend, the White House expressed concerns about the legislation. Over the next several days, co-sponsor after co-sponsor jumped ship. And Thursday night, the four remaining GOP presidential candidates all said they’d oppose the bills as currently drafted.

The sudden shift left Smith and Reid no choice but to punt. And the tech interests who fanned the flames of protests were quick to celebrate the decisions.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71720.html#ixzz1k1z4Sd4R

The Above Shamelessly ScreenGrabbed, and edited for Featured Links and Adds from Politico.

For months these knives SOPA and PIPA have been held at the throats of American Businessmen and women - Villains who want to share information, and grow knowledgeable and powerful from being informed and learning.

Google, Wikipedia, and Boing Boing - very large resources for the Lord Malignance Organization* indicated that they too would boycott offering services yesterday, as One had done, in protest of the stifling judgement from the forces of good.

Today, the mighty Congress of the United States, has capitulated to my demands, and acquiesced to Crouch! before me, and pull back their silly laws against Villains.

One can't take all the credit myself. Google (host of the Lord Malignance Blog "Embrace the Malignance") and half a dozen if not more, resources, also played their part, as did many, too many to count, online cohorts and responsible, thoughtful business organizations.

But for my small part, in beating back the Tyranny of the Good, One will allow;

"You're Welcome, America".

-Lord Malignance

* The Lord Malignance Organization, where we always say; "If you can leap into a debate at the last minute, pick the side that eventually wins, and then take total credit for having done everything, you've got what it takes to Rule the World".

2012-01-17T22:14:00.003-07:00

For More Information, Please Click Here

A Tribute to Dr. Steel; Pioneer. Villain. Inspiration.

2012-01-17T11:47:00.004-07:00

Greetings, and appropriately, Lamentations,

It has come to One's attention today, that the Founding Father of Modern Online Villainy, Dr. Phineas Waldorf Steel, has retired, some time past. His beautiful and inspirational website, his SalesFront, both gone, and his Toy Soldiers continue w/out him, in honor of all that he was able to create and share with this world.

To say that he was a "Founding Father" is no overstatement. He has been groundbreaking for what he was able to create - truly archetypal of so much of what we come to think of as Villainous. He had an Apex character, and characterization - far beyond any other Villain you can think of. The polish on his work and his offerings, were beyond anything you've ever seen. Please Google, and look for him on YouTube, to your betterment as a Villain. We have all been striving to reach any kind of approximation to his level of work, and have not even come close. But we try, and we continue.

Retired isn't dead, but we are all, and the world at large, so much less with his absence. One wishes him, and the man behind the goggles, every real success, and extend my thanks and appreciation for all that he has accomplished.

Read about his retirement.

Read an interview with Dr. Steel.

View many images of Dr. Steel.

It always gets to One, when a Villain retires. One never met Dr. Steel, and it's doubtful he ever knew Oneself, or how much his inspiration has meant to the work One strives to accomplish. It IS a sad day - but:

We Are Villains.

Someone is always going to fall aside, and a new Villain will rise to assume some portion of the previous stature. Heroes mourn, Villains see opportunity.

It's what Dr. Steel might have wanted.

-Lord Malignance

(All images above from Google search).

A beautiful Shameless ScreenGrab from TV Tropes Below;

Music: Doctor Steel

Doctor Steel

"It all comes down to having fun. We spend our lives trapped, when all we really want to do is play. So, let the people play! Let us build a Utopian Playland."

Dr. Steel

Creator.
Entertainer.
Visionary.
These are just a few synonyms applicable to Dr. Phineas Waldolf Steel. Formerly in the toymaking industry, Dr. Steel became frustrated at the lack of vision and originality, rebelled against his ex-employers and burned the place down. Now, he acts as a Mad Scientist with a goal to take over the world, with conspiracy propaganda threaded intricately through music and toys for children worldwide. However, he IS a mad scientist, so said toys are along the lines of Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Babies with buzzsaws, acid squirtguns, kewpie grenades, and it doesn't even begin to start there.
Most importantly, however, is the music. Dr. Steel defies all genre, having been described by Rue Morgue magazine as "hip-hop industrial opera", but most importantly is the fact that all of them are So. Damn. Catchy. Though his music only spans about three dozen songs across five CDs, and that most online stores only carry them in .mp3 rather than physical discs, Dr. Steel puts just as much love and care into each individual song as many artists do for entire discs. A very underground artist, he has nonetheless made an appearance on the Jay Leno show and was even given a nod by MTV. He later started to put more effort into clever and hilarious videos, which can be seen on his website and on YouTube.
His website is here, and his MySpace is here. Listen, and submit yourself to the whim of our new ruler!

Can a Villain Give Fraternal Support to the Dread Pirate Rupert, AND Protest SOPA?

2012-01-17T09:49:00.004-07:00

Wikipedia will go dark to protest SOPA/PIPA

By Cory Doctorow at 11:31 am Monday, Jan 16

Jimmy Wales has announced that Wikipedia will join Reddit, Boing Boing, and many other sites around the Internet in going dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA/PIPA, the pending US legislation that would make it impossible to run any website that links or allows commenters to link, by making us liable for copyright infringement on the sites we link to.

Wales used his Twitter account to spread the news, writing “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa”
In place of Wikipedia, users will see instructions for how to reach local members of Congress, which Wales hopes "will melt phone systems in Washington."
He also noted that comScore estimates the English Wikipedia’s web traffic at 25 million daily visitors worldwide.

Wikipedia to Shut Down in Protest of SOPA (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of Boing Boing

Needless to point out, that IF SOPA passes, this will mean a hasty death to any and all "Shameless ScreenGrabs".

Read more about Stop Online Piracy Act (S.O.P.A. "SOPA") on Wikipedia (before or after the Protest Blackout tomorrow 01/18/12)

Funny aside: Fellow Villain, The Dread Pirate Rupert, has been decrying Google's support to leave the Internet at least somewhat free. His choice of words, ironically enough, was to call THEM pirates. Google replies.

One wants to see the Internet remain free, but also supports Villains, and their attempts to Rule the World. There IS Intellectual piracy coming from China - heinous amounts - it's a cultural malaise which tells some that nothing of others has value. It also doesn't help, that the cost of software is prohibitively expensive, and difficult to obtain legally. These things must change. But creating more fences in the Internet, is not the answer.

One will protest SOPA, and say to a fellow Working Villain, "Stay Strong, Dread Pirate Rupert. World Domination is so tantalizingly close, you can almost feel the whole Earth in your hands".

-Lord Malignance

Portrays a Villain, Wins a Golden Globe, and Uses his Villainous Fame to be Heard

2012-01-16T15:56:00.001-07:00

Greetings,

One despises gossip, and television mostly (huge fan of some things though), and the celebrity culture can go hang for all One cares. However, there are some stories that come through One's news feeds that One finds remarkable and inspiring, and One wishes to share this one with you.

The actor Peter Dinklage, who has been working for quite some time, turning in performance after performance, with humanity, and a depth to character not merely in the script provided. He invites the viewer in to see the world through his character's eyes. Many actors do this though, and in this he is no more or less than they are, though his talent and versatility shines above many. He IS a star.

But enough giddy fanboy for a moment. This alone is no reason to post. First, One would like to point out his performance of note to readers of this blog.

In the HBO Television Series "Game of Thrones" he essays a character called Tyrion Lannister, who is described as;
"Tyrion Lannister is Tywin's third child, a highly intelligent dwarf mockingly nicknamed "The Imp" and "Halfman". Though Tyrion shares his father's talent for political maneuvering, he receives little respect from Tywin because of his deformity, sharp tongue, penchant for whoring, and the death of his mother during his birth. He is capable of cruelty to his enemies, but also has great sympathy for fellow outcasts and the mistreated. Overall, Tyrion is a classical quick-witted trickster figure."

Sounds as if he's clearing portraying a Villain (Disclaimer: One has never seen any "Game of Thrones" and must add it to the shopping lists).

One contends as readers will know, that "Villains" are not the laughing stock two dimensional characters the "good" would like to portray us as. Their contention that "Villainy" must always be weak, doomed to failure, and useless against the rule of so-called "good". Look around you in this world, and you will find what "good" has wrought. Selfishness and depravity all in the name of "goodness" - conformity, laziness, and the willing enslavement of the world. Villainy is about challenging the establishment, the Rule Makers, and the Enslavers. The people who tell you what is right and wrong, while they inflict their "goodness" on the world.

When Villainous characterizations come along in the national news, One naturally pays attention. Not everyone can Be a Villain after all, or portray One convincingly. It takes a care to understand the complex nature, and desires that drive such a character.

That said, you will notice, that the people who portray Villains are often times, remarkable people in their own right. People who take from their lives inspiration to go and contribute much to the world. By standing up to conventions of conformity of goodness, and challenging injustice when they see it, by speaking and being heard.

This was the case this weekend past, when the Actor Peter Dinklage won his Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a TV Series.

The Following is a Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of CNN;

January 16th, 2012

08:01 AM ET

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Peter Dinklage raises awareness for injured actor

Peter Dinklage's work on HBO's acclaimed "Game of Thrones" earned him a Golden Globe for best supporting actor in a TV series on Sunday, and the 42-year-old used the spotlight to raise awareness for a fellow thespian who's been injured in a random attack.

"I want to mention a gentleman I'm thinking about in England," Dinklage said at the end of his acceptance speech. "His name is Martin Henderson. Google him."

If you do, you'll find that Martin Henderson is a 37-year-old aspiring actor who was the victim of an October attack in which he was picked up and then thrown to the ground, the BBC reports.

Henderson, who is a dwarf, was celebrating his 37th birthday on October 7 when an assailant picked him up and dropped him from a height of about three feet outside of a pub in the U.K.

As a result of the attack, Henderson suffered damage to nerve tissue in his spine, and has since experienced numbness and a lack of strength in his back and legs, making walking difficult.

According to the Telegraph, doctors have told Henderson that he'll need a wheelchair for longer distances.

Henderson has said that he thinks the incident was inspired by a dwarf-throwing contest that players from England's rugby team attended at a bar in New Zealand over the summer.

"With the rugby one, the dwarf-throwing...the guy might have thought, let's try it out on him," Henderson told the BBC.

He added to the Daily Mail, "Every time I stand up I don't know if I'm going to fall over. I will have to use a wheelchair and I won't get any acting jobs...I guess I was an easy target and the only reason I was picked on was because I am small."

Read about Martin Henderson on the Sun.

-Lord Malignance

Disclaimer: CNN (or really, anyone) does not support, condone, or in any way acknowledge Lord Malignance, or the opinions expressed here. CNN terms of service.

"Fraud" Is Such A Distasteful Word. "Con Artist" Is So Much More Serviceable.

2012-01-15T01:33:00.002-07:00

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tjHs5PjaiNs/TFNcNlZfvFI/AAAAAAAAGOs/OBgSaezokWg/s1600/000000000con+artist.jpg

Just a note for Archival purposes;

One is a Renaissance Villain with various talents, and one such talent is the ability to Grift a Con, on a Mark, and Shill a Score as necessary. Oh, you'll point out - "you're calling yourself a Villain, you Con Artist!" and One would point out: One asks nothing from you in return, save for your eventual crouching servitude. So far, we're behind in the quota of our agreement, so few of you actually crouching, One feels sure one of us is letting the other One down.

See? One gave you a framework, and then told you a story, and provided you with some verifiable "facts" to sell the whole as a truth. But it was a Con, and had One sought recompense, you would have been Shilled, like a Mark.*

One would like to point out, that moving in such circles as One does, opens the eyes to activities and motivations others may not always be aware of. Insurance for example, is a fine "Protection Racket". "Taxes" are a "Taste of the Action", etc. If One were horrifically mentally challenged, One might go so far as to call it a "superpower". Fortunately, only superheroes claim such things, poor diminished fools that they are.

So, using this ability to see motivations in the world, One looks at superheroes and concludes, as an associate might; "What's the angle? What's the take?" Oh fame, certainly. Movie deals, maybe. The cushioned luxury of residual checks raining down upon you all your life, unlikely. But it IS a Con Job. We know this intuitively. What in this world is "Free"? What is ever done without something asked for in return? And remember - if they wanted to be Good Samaritans, they would operate anonymously, instead of the beacons of Larger Than Life icons they attempt.

So you ask, what kind of a person would do such a thing? Who are these "Superheroes"? Who would you naturally go to, to ask your questions about unscrupulous activities?

Why a Villain, of course, and One is happy to oblige;

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2011-06-01/news/the-alleged-adventures-of-phoenix-jones/

Do you honestly believe, with your adult knowledge of the wickedness of men, and the world of danger, superheroes tell you they operate in, that they would do this "out of the goodness in their hearts"?

Why in that link alone, a spokesperson recounts how Jones said that he had said he was the victim of Criminal Retaliation for his activities - his house, where his wife and children huddle in fear. And this was an article written Before, his Real Life Identity was exposed during his recent arrest for his optional hobby of Sport Cage Fighting Random Innocent Citizens. One might imagine his percentage of "Criminals" (again - how does he spot these people - do they wear signs?) who can enact revenge on him and his family has exploded exponentially since his national press exposure. Yet, all he must do to protect his family from harm, is stop seeking opportunities to MMA style fight non combatants (drunks most likely). Trade possible Documentary/YouTube hits for the safety of his loved ones. Straightforward formula there : Which has greater value, and assign it greater worth. Sacrifice the lesser value and keep the greater worth. If family is of greatest worth, then the choice to go beat up drunks on camera should be dropped.

But that doesn't seem to be happening, as the patrols continue. More important than the safety of the family. It defies common sense. There must be something there, something worthwhile.

Something tangible.

Lucrative.

He's risking his life as other "superheroes" say they also do, and the lives of his loved ones, and of course every citizen anywhere near him and his activities. The potential for lawsuits are, shall we say, Carpathian. The score must be greater than the risk he and they are investing. It's simple economics - supply and demand. The Balance of Nature.

-Lord Malignance

*Nixon - see? One learned some of your Carny ways.

Episode One of The Roaming Eye of Doom

2012-01-14T20:58:00.001-07:00

The Roaming Eye of Doom: Episode One from Eddie Danger on Vimeo.

Villainy Was Man's Original Virtue

2012-01-14T16:00:00.001-07:00

RAW quote: disobedience was man’s original virtue

By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:23 pm Wednesday, Jan 11

“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”

― Robert Anton Wilson

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of Boing Boing and Robert Anton Wilson

The Facts keep coming in and piling up.

Villainy isn't wrong: It is the sacred truth, hidden by the *good* out to protect their racket of convincing people that they are always right (therefore "good"), should never be questioned, and know what's best for everyone else.

One says "No. One is a Villain. One will acknowledge no other master of my thoughts and my destiny. I will be FREE by my own efforts, and I will RULE".

Welcome to 2012

The Year of the Villain

-Lord Malignance

One sometimes finds the need to be a responsible Villain, and remind readers, that Villainy is not lawlessness. Breaking laws, leads to criminality, which leads to incarceration, and limited opportunities and resources. You can be perfectly Villainous, and be a proper and dutiful citizen.

Villainy is being something new, and better. Acknowledging that ambition and ruthlessness have their place, and can be motive tools to achieve dreams, such as people have never dreamed.

Why Can't You Rule the World?

SciTech Saturdays: Chimera Monkeys. That's Right, One Said Chimera Monkeys!

2012-01-14T15:31:00.001-07:00

'Chimera' monkeys created in lab by combining several embryos into one

The macaque monkey chimeras each contain cells originating in different embryos with distinct genomes

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 January 2012 14.12 EST
Article history

All three monkeys appear to be healthy with no birth defects. Video: OHSU

The world's first monkeys to be created from the embryos of several individuals have been born at a US research centre.

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre produced the animals, known as chimeras, by sticking together between three and six rhesus monkey embryos in the early stages of their development.

Three animals were born at the laboratory, a singleton and twins, and were said to be healthy, with no apparent birth defects following the controversial technique.

The chimeras have tissues and organs made up of cells that come from each of the contributing embryos. The mixtures of cells carried up to six distinct genomes.

"The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the research. "The possibilities for science are enormous."

Scientists named the singleton Chimero, and the twins Roku and Hex, meaning six in Japanese and Greek. Hex was born after merging six individual embryos, according to a report in the journal Cell. "To our knowledge, these infants are the world's first primate chimeras," the authors write.

While all three monkeys are biologically male, blood tests revealed that Roku carried both male and female cells.

The first chimeric animals were created by researchers in the 1960s, when experiments with mouse embryos showed they could combine to form a single mouse of normal size. Since then, scientists have created chimeric versions of rats, rabbits, sheep and cattle.

Mitalipov's team produced the chimeric monkeys by carefully pushing four-day-old embryos together in a culture dish and waiting for them to grow. Within a few days, 90% of them had grown into early stage embryos called blastocysts that contained at least twice as many cells as usual.

The researchers implanted the chimeric embryos into five female rhesus monkeys, all of which became pregnant. Tests on the foetuses confirmed that all of the animals' organs and tissues contained cells from more than one embryo.

Chimeric animals – mice in particular – have become a powerful tool in scientific research. They are used to shed light on the exquisite process of embryonic development, such as why a particular cell gives rise to a specific kind of tissue, and to explore how individual genes work.

The creation of chimeric animals has also been used to test whether embryonic stem cells stored in laboratories are likely to turn into working tissues when injected into the body. A standard test is to inject stem cells into an early stage embryo. If the embryo grows into a chimeric animal, it means the stem cells have been incorporated into the animal's tissues and organs.

In a series of experiments described in the same paper, the researchers found it impossible to create chimeric monkeys by injecting stem cells into early stage embryos. Only when very young embryos were merged together could they make chimeric animals.

The difficulties the scientists faced could herald future problems in using embryonic stem cells to grow new tissues in humans. While stem cells inside embryos can grow into any tissue or organ, lines of embryonic stem cells cultured in labs seem to lose this ability, at least to some extent.

"If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos," said Mitalipov.

Robin Lovell-Badge, head of genetics at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said there has been a suspicion that most human and monkey embryonic stem cell lines are different.

"This work supports this notion, as the macaque embryonic stem cells tested were unable to mix in with cells of the host embryos. This may be reassuring to those who worry that human embryonic stem cells could be used to make chimeric people, although in itself this should not be a concern, as such rare individuals already exist from the spontaneous merger of two early embryos. But it may be a concern for regenerative medicine if such cells are not as flexible as hoped," he said.

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Article history

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of The Guardian

Curiously, One has noted that there ARE Human Chimeras (One had nothing to do with it); and the human genetic state of Klinefelter Syndrome, or XX/YY. Women are XX, Men are XY (the Y being a diminishing X chromosome, from the 23 chromosomal pairs (46 chromosomes). The XXYY male has forty-eight chromosomes. Unfortunately, the condition while sounding like an improved state for the poor failing Y chromosomal men, often results in significant learning disabilities. But One digresses.

The human/fauna hybridization, and future evolution from humans as we are, to next world survivors is progressing apace.

In August 2003, researchers at the Shanghai Second Medical University in China reported that they had successfully fused human skin cells and dead rabbit eggs to create the first human chimeric embryos. The embryos were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory setting, then destroyed to harvest the resulting stem cells.^[12] In 2007, scientists at the University of Nevada School of Medicine created a sheep whose blood contained 15% human cells and 85% sheep cells.^[13] The implications of increasingly realizable projects using human-animal hybrids for biopharmaceutical production, and potentially for producing cells or organs, have raised a host of ethical and safety issues.

The World, our sweet Gaia is likely to change in the next 100 years, (which is only ~5 generations away) into a world significantly different than the one we have known, whether through climate change, or competition for scarcity of resources.

Without some kind of genetic modification, Males as a gender, and humans as a species are destined to evolve or succumb to history. We've got time though: Odds are better than average, that humanity will extinguish itself, long before the eventual breakdown and failure of the Y chromosome.

As frightening as the Malignobots are (when they're not being scrapped by other Villains!), they would be nothing, to a 15lb Monkey-Spider hybrid. Flying monkeys? Hah! Intelligent spiders - the insatiable hunger of a spider, coupled with the intuitive problem solving ability of a primate. A recipe for Jurassic Park Level Mayhem.

People sometimes don't fully appreciate, that life is special, but it didn't just appear without effort.

Life abides.

It's what it does. It isn't weak and passive and fragile. It is fierce, and desperate, and dominant. Species die and are forgotten, but life continues. It diversifies and adapts, and survives.

The Monkey-Spiders that escape from some lab in China, or some Insane Mad Scientist's Lab in Colorado, will have a fair chance to occupy apex predator status.

-Lord Malignance

Picture from the link above (my links change over time, and the image is too fun);

http://images.halloweencostumes.com/spider-monkey-costume.jpg

Support for the Villain in Politics

2012-01-12T13:41:00.005-07:00

Chris Matthews: Gingrich Is "Like Freddy Krueger"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/vp/45846524#45846524

"I think he's going to come back," MSNBC's Chris Matthews said of Newt Gingrich on "Morning Joe" today. "He will use any weapon at hand. He basically showed his weaponry yesterday. He's going to go after Mitt Romney on abortion. He's going to nail him as a pro-abortion candidate, he's going after some appointment he made to a board up in Massachusetts, a bill he signed. He just showed his weaponry yesterday. He's going to go after -- well, he's started doing it, he started yesterday. He'll do it it up in New Hampshire and he'll go for the kill again. I think Newt is like Freddy Krueger. He keeps coming back. You know? The guy does not die, there's always going to be a sequel."

Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Real Clear Politics

Newt Gingrich is like Freddy Krueger - because he keeps coming back? One thought it was more because he was "Burned, and seeking Revenge". Though Newt is slimier than most politicians, he's still the clear cut Villain of the Field, and so while One despises NeoCons with a Burning UnEnding Hatred, One must always appreciate Villains as they work their will in this world, and offer my support to the Fraternity of Villains. And so my early endorsement of a conservative candidate (and please, please, please, never let him actually get an ounce of power anywhere in this world or the next);

"Lord Malignance, Insane Megalomaniacal Ruler of the Colorado Holdfast, Endorses Newt "Freddy Krueger" Gingrich, as the 2012 Republican Candidate for President of the United States".

More of Newty McKrueger's work;

Newt throws a fit, because Mitt's Minions are pointing out his Evil Accomplishments

Help a Child Grow Up to be a Villain One Day.

2012-01-07T19:54:00.000-07:00

Hate superheroes, but the cause is worthy, and a small fraction of funds would help them.

Villains are Everywhere

2012-01-07T11:59:00.002-07:00

2012-01-07T11:28:00.004-07:00

Google Doodle Honors 'Addams Family' Creator Charles Addams

By Chloe Albanesius
January 7, 2012 12:00am EST

Halloween was more than two months ago, but the Google homepage still has a rather ghoulish quality to it today. The search giant is celebrating the 100th birthday of Addams Family creator Charles Addams with a doodle featuring the famously spooky family.

Helping celebrate is the entire Addams family—Morticia, Gomez, Cousin It, Pugsley, Wednesday, Lurch, and Uncle Fester. They are drawn in black and white and shown standing in front of their mansion and the Google logo.

A New Jersey native, Charles Samuel Addams was born in 1912 (on Elm Street, no less).

By the age of 21, his artistic talents help him land his first cartoon in The New Yorker, though he did not become a full-time contributor until 1940. Addams remained at the magazine until his death in 1988, drawing more than 1,300 cartoons. The first Addams Family cartoon made its appearance in August 1938.

"It depicted a curvaceous, dark-haired woman in a spidery black dress inside a dark, dilapidated Victorian house listening patiently to a vacuum salesman who was oblivious to the home's disrepair—cobwebs, bats, and broken balusters," according to a biography from Pennsylvania State University. "More cartoons about the vamp, soon christened as Morticia, and her ghoulish family followed."

The family truly came to life in 1964, when a producer asked Addams to turn his comics into a TV series. The Addams Family was only on the air for two years, but can still be found in syndication.

The series became a feature-length movie in 1991 (with a sequel in 1993), starring Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia as Morticia and Gomez. Throughout the 90s, there was also an animated series and another live-action TV show. In 2010, the family came to Broadway in a musical starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as the famous couple; it ran until Dec. 31, 2011.

"Ghoulish, macabre, demonic, depraved, bizarre, eerie, and weird have all been used to describe his work and the characters therein," according to a biography from the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation. "Adorable, sweet, charming, humorous, enchanting, tender, and captivating are also adjectives used to describe the same body of work, as well as the man himself, the extraordinary artist Charles Addams. His rare gift was the ability to enjoin such dichotomies in wonderfully crafted cartoons and drawings loved by millions worldwide."

The foundation was created in 1999 by Addams' widow Tee, who passed away in 2002. It is housed at the couple's Sagaponack, New York property, dubbed the Swamp.

For more on Google's doodles, meanwhile, see the slideshow below. One of the company's more popular doodles last year was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The company has also honored Gumby creator Art Clokey, Muppets creator Jim Henson, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce.

In 2011, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of PC Magazine and Google, our kind and Evil sponsor.

The Addams Family - Villains.

Find more here;

Wikipedia on Charles Addams

Charles Addams Foundation (currently down as of this post date).

“

Charles Addams set out not to create a family but rather to suggest how society as a whole might interpret characters bent on the darker side while living lives similar to those embracing the light . . . Always described as strange, eerie, odd, and spooky, the Family nevertheless had many of the same joys and woes that all families experience—for example, keeping the house in order and seeing that the children take responsibility for the welfare of their pets. How delightfully refreshing that they had a trapdoor and a secret panel for the carpenter to fix, that the children arrived home from camp in pet carriers, and that at least one pet was a small dragon! ^[2]

”

Shamelessly ScreenGrabbed from The Wiki page for The Addams Family: An Evilution

A beautiful Book Review by NPR.

SciTech Saturdays; Climate Change Deniers Examined

2012-01-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Curious Case of Richard Muller, Former Climate Change Skeptic

Daniel Honan on January 3, 2012, 12:00 AM

Brought to you by

What's the Big Idea?

Climate change deniers lost an important ally in 2011. They used to claim the Berkeley physicist Richard Muller among their ranks, although Muller claims to have been merely a skeptic, not a denier. Muller recently completed a David and Charles Koch-funded study that found the earth is in fact warming.

James Lawrence Powell, the former President of Reed College, has published The Inquisition of Climate Science as a primer on the climate change denier community. Powell investigates the published works of the likes of Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Bjorn Lomborg, and shows how these authors' works are rife with errors and cherry-picked bits of scientific data. For instance, as Powell points out, Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist contained 318 mistakes, or about one per page.

And yet, according to Powell, Richard Muller is not a con artist like Monckton or Lomborg. Muller is a serious scientist, which made his stubborn refusal to accept peer-reviewed science all the more curious. In the video below, Powell describes the significance of Muller's Berkeley Climate Study and what lessons we can learn from Muller's unexpected conversion.

Watch the video here:

What's the Significance?

"I think what we could learn from the case study that Muller did," says Powell, "is that [Muller] should have trusted the other scientists and the peer review process which had produced the data that he was questioning."

In an article Muller published in The Wall Street Journal, he argued that two years ago everyone should have been a skeptic. Powell points out that "two years ago you had 98 percent of the climate scientists in the world saying that they accepted human-caused global warming." It was "a little offensive," and "arrogant," Powell says, for Muller to "refuse to believe this" until he did it himself. Imagine if every scientist acted that way. If that were the case, we would be "at least a century behind where we are right now," says Powell.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Follow Daniel Honan on Twitter @Daniel Honan

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of Big Think

Evil Auto, Big Oil and Coal Conglomerates, seeking further assistance from Villainous Con Artists like the Oxycontin Fueled Conservative Radio Baboon* will find their fees going up in the next few years, due to the increasing work required to sell Global Climate Change as a non issue.

One really enjoys Scientists being reasoned and passionate scrappers. Fighting for Science over the *good* of superstition and greedy self interest. It's why Science has always been Evil.

It's Truth.

-Lord Malignance

* The Dumb One.
Ok, the Big Fat Dumb One.
Ok, the Biggest, Dumb Fat One.

The Return of SciTech Saturdays; The Singularity and Its Discontents

2012-01-07T10:15:00.001-07:00

The Singularity and Its Discontents

Jason Gots on January 5, 2012, 12:00 AM

Brought to you by

In February, 2011, a powerful IBM computer called Watson became the Jeopardy world champion. Immediately, the media went crazy with headlines about machines obliterating mankind. As a media professional, I am not at all surprised by this – the more powerful our machines become, the more our attitudes toward them become polarized between paranoia on the one hand and weak-kneed submission on the other. Playing upon those fears and desires is a guaranteed attention-getter – the stuff of multi-digit pageviews and retweets.

What's the Big Idea?

The concept of “the Singularity,” a moment in the not-too-distant future when we will manage to create superhuman intelligence, either in machine form or by augmenting our own brains with biotechnology, is particularly effective at inspiring this kind of technophobia or technophilic zealotry. Mathematician and Science Fiction author Vernor Vinge coined the term in a 1993 article – analogizing our inability to envision a post-A.I. world to modern physics’ inability to explain what happens at the center of a black hole. In the hands of Futurist Ray Kurzweil and friends, the Singularity has evolved into an inspirational movement with its own Institute and University, both dedicated to hastening the coming of the big event and ensuring that its outcomes are beneficial – rather than disastrous – for mankind.

The movement has its fervent detractors. Jaron Lanier, an early Internet pioneer, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, and a partner architect at Microsoft Research calls the Singularity an “ultramodern religion . . . in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete.” Lanier objects to what he sees as as an increasingly widespread desire to cede human responsibility to technology – to let Netflix, for example, decide what movie we should watch next, or allow expensive data-crunching systems to represent the reality in public-school classrooms – though machines haven’t yet achieved anything approaching (our admittedly imperfect) human sentience or complexity. He cautions against Silicon Valley hype that prematurely paints technology as redemption from human suffering.

Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, a recent Big Think guest, is not overly disturbed by visions of a future in which people have robotic arms and silicon brain-implants. Still, he questions the basic premise of the Singularity concept, arguing that it “misunderstands the complex nature of biological and physical life.”

Every branch of science, Wolpe points out, periodically reaches major thresholds that are expected – by the media, at least – to redefine and clarify everything, forever. But for each threshold of understanding we cross, unforseen complexities arise – the frontiers of the next generation of the science. Wolpe finds the Singularity’s focus on a single, transformative event misleading and dangerously simplistic.

Paul Root Wolpe: Physics also thought it was going to find its grand unified theory a long time ago. And now we’re just beginning to discover that maybe the universe isn’t exactly organized the way we thought it was with dark matter and String Theory and all of that, which we still don’t really understand the nature of and can’t agree about.

I think what we’re going to find over time is that rather than convergence leading us to some sort of unified idea is that there will constantly be this kind of complexity fallout. As we learn about things more and more deeply, we will discover that in fact, there’s all kinds of peripheral work to be done that we couldn’t have even imagined looking forward. And what that means is you’re not going to have a convergence towards a singularity, but you’re going to have a very complex set of moments where things will change in a lot of different ways.

What’s the Significance?

The danger of the Singularity concept lies in its assumption that an inevitable, singular transformation of life as we know it is fast approaching. In some, this inspires paranoid, Terminator-style visions of mankind enslaved by machines. In others, beatific fantasies of a world free of messy human imperfection. In either fiction, involuntarily or by choice, we are annihilated by our own creations. The first is a primal death-wish. The second, a religious vision of redemption. Neither approach faces squarely the real challenges and possibilities before us.

In reality, the future may be much closer in some respects to William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, in which biotechnology and artificial intelligence solve some of our problems, only to introduce a myriad of new ones. What do you do, for example, when you’re surfing some infinitely distant spiral arm of the Internet via 4-D holovision and a glitch in the damn program suddenly leaves you stuck halfway through the wall of a giant, obsidian cube that represents a block of encrypted data you’re trying to access?

Close your eyes and wait for the update?

The series Re-envision is sponsored by Toyota.

Follow Jason Gots (@jgots) on Twitter

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of Big Think

One has had an ongoing fascination with the Singularity (and as a Villain, you certainly would know why), and enjoy looking at this from as many angles as possible. Ruling the World, is as much about being in the right place at the right time, as in Enslaving All Humanity.

Because the work is clearly noted as being sponsored by Toyota, One includes the advert below. Not that One is getting a single red cent out of this. It should also be noted, that Lord Malignance does not endorse any product unless being paid handsomely to do so, and any mentions of products or services, or people places or things, on this blog, does in no way infer that those mentioned endorse, support, or even know about Lord Malignance. Still - supporter of Science! and respect those that contribute to Learning.

(Lord Malignance IS available for product endorsements! Please contact the Sales and Marketing Department at Lord Malignance Industries, for a Brochure of our services, and find out what "Insane Crackpot with a Blog" can do for you.)

Quora Asks: What Would it be Like to be Proficient in Mathematics?

2012-01-05T12:52:00.002-07:00

What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?

I'm interested to hear what very talented mathematicians and physicists have to say about "what it's like" to have an internalized sense of very advanced mathematical concepts... As someone who only completed college calculus and physics, and has some basic CS background, but who is very intrigued by mathematics, I've always been curious about this. Does it feel analogous to having mastery of another language like in programming or linguistics? Any honest, candid insights appreciated!

Anon User

711 votes by Bidit Acharya, Danny Tarlow, Javed Qadrud-Din, (more)

You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose "machines" (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness) combined with specific facts you have learned about your area. The number of fundamental ideas and techniques that people use to solve problems is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty small -- see http://www.tricki.org/tricki/map for a partial list, maintained by Timothy Gowers.

You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true to maintain the harmony of the conceptual space. It's not so much that you can imagine the situation perfectly, but you can quickly imagine many other things that are logically connected to it.

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion. More on this in the next few bullets.

Your intuitive thinking about a problem is productive and usefully structured, wasting little time on being aimlessly puzzled. For example, when answering a question about a high-dimensional space (e.g., whether a certain kind of rotation of a five-dimensional object has a "fixed point" which does not move during the rotation), you do not spend much time straining to visualize those things that do not have obvious analogues in two and three dimensions. (Violating this principle is a huge source of frustration for beginning maths students who don't know that they shouldn't be straining to visualize things for which they don't seem to have the visualizing machinery.) Instead...

When trying to understand a new thing, you automatically focus on very simple examples that are easy to think about, and then you leverage intuition about the examples into more impressive insights. For example, you might imagine two- and three-dimensional rotations that are analogous to the one you really care about, and think about whether they clearly do or don't have the desired property. Then you think about what was important to the examples and try to distill those ideas into symbols. Often, you see that the key idea in the symbolic manipulations doesn't depend on anything about two or three dimensions, and you know how to answer your hard question.

As you get more mathematically advanced, the examples you consider easy are actually complex insights built up from many easier examples; the "simple case" you think about now took you two years to become comfortable with. But at any given stage, you do not strain to obtain a magical illumination about something intractable; you work to reduce it to the things that feel friendly.

To me, the biggest misconception that non-mathematicians have about how mathematicians think is that there is some mysterious mental faculty that is used to crack a problem all at once. In reality, one can ever think only a few moves ahead, trying out possible attacks from one's arsenal on simple examples relating to the problem, or using analogies with other ideas one understands. This is the same way that one solves problems in one's first real maths courses in university and in competitions. What happens as you get more advanced is simply that the arsenal grows larger, the thinking gets somewhat faster due to practice, and you have more examples to try, perhaps making better guesses about what is likely to yield progress.

Indeed, most of the bullet points here summarize feelings familiar to many serious students of mathematics who are in the middle of their undergraduate careers; as you learn more mathematics, these experiences apply to "bigger" things but have the same fundamental flavor.

You go up in abstraction, "higher and higher". The main object of study yesterday becomes just an example or a tiny part of what you are considering today. For example, in calculus classes you think about functions or curves. In functional analysis or algebraic geometry, you think of spaces whose points are functions or curves -- that is, you "zoom out" so that every function is just a point in a space, surrounded by many other "nearby" functions. Using this kind of zooming out technique, you can say very complex things in short sentences -- things that, if unpacked and said at the zoomed-in level, would take up pages. Abstracting and compressing in this way allows you to consider extremely complicated issues while using your limited memory and processing power.

The particularly "abstract" or "technical" parts of many other subjects seem quite accessible because they boil down to maths you already know. You generally feel confident about your ability to learn most quantitative ideas and techniques. A theoretical physicist friend likes to say, only partly in jest, that there should be books titled "______ for Mathematicians", where _____ is something generally believed to be difficult (quantum chemistry, general relativity, securities pricing, formal epistemology). Those books would be short and pithy, because many key concepts in those subjects are ones that mathematicians are well equipped to understand. Often, those parts can be explained more briefly and elegantly than they usually are if the explanation can assume a knowledge of maths and a facility with abstraction.

Learning the domain-specific elements of a different field can still be hard -- for instance, physical intuition and economic intuition seem to rely on tricks of the brain that are not learned through mathematical training alone. But the quantitative and logical techniques you sharpen as a mathematician allow you to take many shortcuts that make learning other fields easier, as long as you are willing to be humble and modify those mathematical habits that are not useful in the new field.

You move easily between multiple seemingly very different ways of representing a problem. For example, most problems and concepts have more algebraic representations (closer in spirit to an algorithm) and more geometric ones (closer in spirit to a picture). You go back and forth between them naturally, using whichever one is more helpful at the moment.

Indeed, some of the most powerful ideas in mathematics (e.g., duality, Galois theory [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal..., algebraic geometry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alg...) provide "dictionaries" for moving between "worlds" in ways that, ex ante, are very surprising. For example, Galois theory allows us to use our understanding of symmetries of shapes (e.g., rigid motions of an octagon) to understand why you can solve any fourth-degree polynomial equation in closed form, but not any fifth-degree polynomial equation. Once you know these threads between different parts of the universe, you can use them like wormholes to extricate yourself from a place where you would otherwise be stuck. The next two bullets expand on this.

Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy away from messy calculations or long, case-by-case arguments unless they are absolutely unavoidable. Mathematicians develop a powerful attachment to elegance and depth, which are in tension with, if not directly opposed to, mechanical calculation. Mathematicians will often spend days thinking of a clean argument that completely avoids numbers and strings of elementary deductions in favor of seeing why what they want to show follows easily from some very deep and general pattern that is already well-understood. Indeed, you tend to choose problems motivated by how likely it is that there will be some "clean" insight in them, as opposed to a detailed but ultimately unenlightening proof by exhaustively enumerating a bunch of possibilities. (Nevertheless, detailed calculation of an example is often an crucial part of beginning to see what is really going on in a problem; and, depending on the field, some calculation often plays an essential role even in the best proof of a result.)

In A Mathematician's Apology [http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss..., the most poetic book I know on what it is "like" to be a mathematician], G.H. Hardy wrote:

"In both [these example] theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy. The arguments take so odd and surprising a form; the weapons used seem so childishly simple when compared with the far-reaching results; but there is no escape from the conclusions. There are no complications of detail—one line of attack is enough in each case; and this is true too of the proofs of many much more difficult theorems, the full appreciation of which demands quite a high degree of technical proficiency. We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way."

[...]

"[A solution to a difficult chess problem] is quite genuine mathematics, and has its merits; but it is just that ‘proof by enumeration of cases’ (and of cases which do not, at bottom, differ at all profoundly) which a real mathematician tends to despise."

You develop a strong aesthetic preference for powerful and general ideas that connect hundreds of difficult questions, as opposed to resolutions of particular puzzles. Mathematicians don't really care about "the answer" to any particular question; even the most sought-after theorems, like Fermat's Last Theorem [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fer..., are only tantalizing because their difficulty tells us that we have to develop very good tools and understand very new things to have a shot at proving them. It is what we get in the process, and not the answer per se, that is the valuable thing. The accomplishment a mathematician seeks is finding a new dictionary or wormhole between different parts of the conceptual universe. As a result, many mathematicians do not focus on deriving the practical or computational implications of their studies (which can be a drawback of the hyper-abstract approach!); instead, they simply want to find the most powerful and general connections. Timothy Gowers has some interesting comments on this issue, and disagreements within the mathematical community about it [ http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg1... ].

Understanding something abstract or proving that something is true becomes a task a lot like building something. You think: "First I will lay this foundation, then I will build this framework using these familiar pieces, but leave the walls to fill in later, then I will test the beams..." All these steps have mathematical analogues, and structuring things in a modular way allows you to spend several days thinking about something you do not understand without feeling lost or frustrated. (I should say, "without feeling unbearably lost and frustrated; some amount of these feelings is inevitable, but the key is to reduce them to a tolearable degree.)

Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, used an "exploring" metaphor:
"Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—and couldn't exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them." [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/phy... ]

In listening to a seminar or while reading a paper, you don't get stuck as much as you used to in youth because you are good at modularizing a conceptual space, taking certain calculations or arguments you don't understand as "black boxes", and considering their implications anyway. You can sometimes make statements you know are true and have good intuition for, without understanding all the details. You can often detect where the delicate or interesting part of something is based on only a very high-level explanation. (I first saw these phenomena highlighted by Ravi Vakil, who offers insightful advice on being a mathematics student: http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/... .)

You are good at generating your own definitions and your own questions in thinking about some new kind of abstraction.
One of the things one learns fairly late in a typical mathematical education (often only at the stage of starting to do research) is how to make good, useful definitions. Something I've reliably heard from people who know parts of mathematics well but never went on to be professional mathematicians (i.e., write articles about new mathematics for a living) is that they were good at proving difficult propositions that were stated in a textbook exercise, but would be lost if presented with a mathematical structure and asked to find and prove some interesting facts about it. Concretely, the ability to do this amounts to being good at making definitions and, using the newly defined concepts, formulating precise conjectures that other mathematicians find intriguing or enlightening.

This kind of challenge is like being given a world and asked to find events in it that come together to form a good detective story. Unlike a more standard detective, you have to figure out what the "crime" (interesting question) might be; you'll you have to generate your own "clues" by building up deductively from the basic axioms. To do these things, you use analogies with other detective stories (mathematical theories) that you know and a taste for what is surprising or deep. How this process works is perhaps the most difficult aspect of mathematical work to describe precisely but also the thing that I would guess is the strongest thing that mathematicians have in common.

You are easily annoyed by imprecision in talking about the quantitative or logical. This is mostly because you are trained to quickly think about counterexamples that make an imprecise claim seem obviously false.

On the other hand, you are very comfortable with intentional imprecision or "hand-waving" in areas you know, because you know how to fill in the details. Terence Tao is very eloquent about this here [ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ca... ]:

"[After learning to think rigorously, comes the] 'post-rigorous' stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit and refine one’s pre-rigorous intuition on the subject, but this time with the intuition solidly buttressed by rigorous theory. (For instance, in this stage one would be able to quickly and accurately perform computations in vector calculus by using analogies with scalar calculus, or informal and semi-rigorous use of infinitesimals, big-O notation, and so forth, and be able to convert all such calculations into a rigorous argument whenever required.) The emphasis is now on applications, intuition, and the 'big picture'. This stage usually occupies the late graduate years and beyond."

In particular, an idea that took hours to understand correctly the first time ("for any arbitrarily small epsilon I can find a small delta so that this statement is true") becomes such a basic element of your later thinking that you don't give it conscious thought.

Before wrapping up, it is worth mentioning that mathematicians are not immune to the limitations faced by most others. They are not typically intellectual superheroes. For instance, they often become resistant to new ideas and uncomfortable with ways of thinking (even about mathematics) that are not their own. They can be defensive about intellectual turf, dismissive of others, or petty in their disputes. Above, I have tried to summarize how the mathematical way of thinking feels and works at its best, without focusing on personality flaws of mathematicians or on the politics of various mathematical fields. These issues are worthy of their own long answers!

You are humble about your knowledge because you are aware of how weak maths is, and you are comfortable with the fact that you can say nothing intelligent about most problems. There are only very few mathematical questions to which we have reasonably insightful answers. There are even fewer questions, obviously, to which any given mathematician can give a good answer. After two or three years of a standard university curriculum, a good maths undergraduate can effortlessly write down hundreds of mathematical questions to which the very best mathematicians could not venture even a tentative answer. (The theoretical computer scientist Richard Lipton lists some examples of potentially "deep" ignorance here: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/20...) This makes it more comfortable to be stumped by most problems; a sense that you know roughly what questions are tractable and which are currently far beyond our abilities is humbling, but also frees you from being very intimidated, because you do know you are familiar with the most powerful apparatus we have for dealing with these kinds of problems.

Upvote Downvote • Repost (7) • 28+ Comments • 23:59 on Thu Dec 15 2011

Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Quora from a post found on Boing Boing.

It can never be pointed out too often, that Lord Malignance is a Conceptualization Engineer, and therefore Math and three dimensional limitations are completely beyond my scope of understanding* - except: To know just how critically important they truly are to everything. Oh, One can produce equations, but they are often just bad**. But the logic, the deduction, the search for truth, described above in many cases, is the search for beauty, truth, and understanding, so integral to Science.

* Confessions of an operator of a Roof-Mounted Petawatt Super Laser: "I couldn't target and hit the moon, if I tried" - LM.

** Or as Wolfgang Pauli would say; "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!" "Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong!"

Ubermas 2011

2012-01-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

Whew.

2012-01-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Greetings and Lamentations, I AM Lord Malignance, and you WILL Crouch! before me now.
(Villains excepted, of course)

The Season of Evil, "Ubermas", Villains celebrate has left us now, and to the debauched and worn out, the dishes, crime scenes, laundry, and Lair repair await. Some pictures and a video will be coming soon.

2011 was Grand, it was, but: 2012 - "the Year of the Villain" will be so much more. We have, in Villainy, so much to look forward to, and of course the whole Mayan "End of Days" too. One actually thinks the opinion in conspiracy circles is that it's not so much an End of Days, as a change to the status quo. One sees this as an opportunity for Evil to finally assume its well deserved, and too far long denied place, as ascendant.

Plus side for Villains, is that we Will of course, be called upon to Rule the World, and Enslave Humanity. You know, even more than already.

Things to finish up from last year;

Status report on the Lair Goings on.

Ubermas Video Message (it's late).

Tribute.

Pictures from the whirlwind "Tour of Envelopes" (bribes and payoffs).

Review History of Villainy, and see what's coming next - who has an anniversary?

New Goals and More Evil, and Quite a few SciTech Saturdays to get caught up on.

Welcome Back Returning Villains, and Welcome to you, New Villains, waiting to join in the fun, ideas, and challenges of Villainy.

-Lord Malignance

My Mistakes Corrected, with My Thanks.

2011-12-20T01:19:00.001-07:00

Response To Superheroes Breaking The Law - Or Are They?

I spoke to a mate of mine, Lord Malignance, a few days ago pertaining to a post which he made on his blog, *plug* Embrace the Malignance entitled Superheroes Breaking the Law - Or Are They? (link). Lord Malignance stated:

"New York Law (http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article265.htm)

The Pertinent text (S 265.20 Exemptions).
'4. Possession of a rifle, shotgun or longbow for use while hunting, trapping or fishing, by a person, not a citizen of the United States, carrying a valid license issued pursuant to section 11-0713 of the environmental conservation law.'

So, IS it illegal to practice Archery on the rooftop of a building in a busy city?
Here's a news story about someone being arrested for firing an arrow in The Bronx, New York of all places;

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/nyregion/20arrow.html

with text;
'It is not illegal to own bows and arrows in New York City, though people who use them as weapons can be charged with reckless endangerment. It is against parks department rules, however, to bring any 'missile-propelling instruments' into city parks.'

One isn't clear then, if the New York Initiative were in fact committing a crime when filmed shooting arrows on their roof in the Bronx. They weren't using the weapons as weapons - there was no prey to shoot at, and they weren't in a city park. It may be in New York, it's only criminal IF someone is hit by an arrow."

Lord Malignance then went on to say on his Facebook wall:

"13. Yay! I have my bow, but am I breaking the law?
No. Article 265: FIREARMS AND OTHER DANGEROUS WEAPONS of the New York penal law does NOT list bows as a dangerous weapon.

It can be classified as a "dangerous instrument", but so can a pencil.

A dangerous instrument refers to using something to menace with the intent to harm, and is more about your conduct while in possession of a bow and arrows.

To travel with a bow and avoid any unfortunate situations it is strongly advised you to carry it in a case that can be locked. To be clear here, you can buy a bow case that can be locked, buy a cloth case or even stow it in luggage, but make sure that the bow is not readily identifiable as one.

from source;
http://www.meetup.com/nycarcheryclub/pages/NYC_Archery_Club_Frequently_Asked_Questions/"

"It is illegal for an arrow to pass over any part of a public highway; within 500ft of any school, playground, or an occupied factory or church; within 500ft feet of a dwelling, farm building or structure in occupation or use unless you own it, lease it, are an immediate member of the family, an employee, or have the owner's consent. (Reference)"

First off, they live in a brownstone apartment building with numerous other tenants. Lucid would never have gotten the okay from his landlord, nor would Zim-Zim, to discharge a bow (L) or to run on the edge of the building (Z)...it’s all about liability, and technically if anything happens to either of these “heroes”, then the landlord/management company would be at fault as well. Also, their building DOES have rules and regulations which these guys are breaking...

Secondly, if you paid any attention to the Superheroes Documentary, more over to the street names, street signs, and Zimmer bloody pointing their location out on the map of Brooklyn, you would know where the NYIs residence is located. Their domicile is less then 200ft from, not one, but two churches. Their address was 1222 Bushwick Ave, Brooklyn, NY (link). Here is a lil' picture of it for you:

Compare it to the video above...

After plugging this address into Google Earth, and selecting all Place Categories, you will find that there are two churches within a close proximity to the NYI camp…the Church of God of Prophecy (closest) and Grace Lutheran Church (furthest). Remember...it is illegal to discharge an arrow from a bow within 500ft of a church…

So, they could get busted for that in and of itself.

Next up, while it is true that a bow is not a weapon, a bow with a nocked arrow is. You cannot walk through the streets of NY with a nocked arrow, let alone whilst drawing said arrow...this is also true whilst shooting a top a building in a spot which is not designated or designed as an archery shooting range.

I hope this clears up any uncertainties. If you still have any questions, confusions, or frustrations, then feel free to call the NYPD. Here is a list of department numbers: Click Here.

>>---DARK-WOLF--->

Shamess Screen Grab courtesy of Dark Wolf's Mind Games

Best Ubermas Post So Far (through there have been quite a few Very Evil ones...)

2011-12-20T01:05:00.001-07:00

Shamelessly pirated from Professor Magnus Obsidian at his YouTube Channel.
Follow more of the Professor's exploits on Twitter, and at his Blog.

One is still swamped with End of Year Business, Ubermas Festivities, and a Project Backlog. Need to do something for Ubermas! All the cool Villains are, and One has nothing (yet).

Sinister Ubermas Everyone!
-Lord Malignance

SciTech Saturdays: Shapeways

2011-12-17T17:09:00.000-07:00

Greetings - quick post because One is attending many Ubermas Galas this week.

These are Ubermas Gifts to readers;

1)
http://www.shapeways.com/

You create objects in virtual, and then they fabricate them for you. Out of so plastics, and metals, for reasonable prices. Needless to say, a big step ahead for the Ordo Malignus. Rings, Badges - anything. They even have a large selection of objects already created, you may purchase, or use as inspiration.

2) http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/shapeme

Create statues of anyone. Needless to say, the 40 Bronze Statue One would like, is out of price range at THIS time, but a 3-6 inch version is well within range. Until you know, the enslaved build the statue to earn my dark favor.

Enjoy and be inspired, and thanks to Aristeroi the Maker for sharing this information.

Sinister Ubermas Everyone!
-Lord Malignance

Real Life Satanheroes

2011-12-14T13:18:00.002-07:00

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/11/occupy_oakland_arrests_armor-w.php

Satanism

A goat's head inscribed in a downward-pointing pentagram, from La Clef de la Magie Noire by the Rosicrucian Stanislas de Guaita (1897).

Satanists use a pentagram with two points up, often inscribed in a double circle, with the head of a goat inside the pentagram. This is referred to as the Sigil of Baphomet. They use it much the same way as the Pythagoreans, as Tartaros literally translates from Greek as a "Pit" or "Void" in Christian terminology (the word is used as such in the Bible, referring to the place where the fallen angels are fettered). The Pythagorean Greek letters are most often replaced by the Hebrew letters לויתן forming the name Leviathan. Less esoteric LaVeyan Satanists use it as a sign of rebellion or religious identification, the three downward points symbolising rejection of the holy Trinity.

"Among them was a roughed up "real-life superhero" who had attended the march dressed as a ninja with homemade armor, but whose family believes he might have been mistaken by cops for a black bloc anarchist."

"Black Bloc Anarchist" or "Real Life Superhero AntiChrist"?

If they want to dress like demons and run around at night to tempt men's souls, they'll have to answer to the ArchAngels, Master Legend ("Metatron"), and Tothian ("He who carries Master Legends jockstrap"). Because that's what playtime ArchAngels and satanheroes are playing. They're the judges of humanity, receiving their moral direction from higher (or lower) sources. The rest of us - poor, plodding humanity, they want us to believe that we need them. That they serve any purpose we should be thankful for. The reality is, these are just children's games, played by people who could otherwise be raising families, working, or truly serving as volunteers in soup kitchens or homeless shelters, or as qualified and responsible police officers.

But there's no glory there.

Because vanity is a Sin.

And satanheroes want to spread as much Sin as they can.

-Lord Malignance

Satire presented for thought provoking consideration. Do they serve Satan? Yes, probably, but maybe not intentionally.

In San Francisco - THIS is filed under "WTF?"

2011-12-14T12:53:00.001-07:00

WTF?

The Real Life Superhero Files: Mutinous Angel

By Lauren Smiley Tue., Dec. 13 2011 at 5:10 PM

Categories: WTF?

Mutinous climbed a wall on our photo shoot. For real.

In this week's cover story, we presented The Ray, a Target employee from Antioch who was arrested in the General Strike in Oakland last month while acting as a Real Life Superhero. The Ray is far from the only civilian-turned-comic book hero fighting crime and helping the needy around the Bay Area.

There are more. Many more.

Here's Mutinous Angel, a brooding vigilante who turned to fighting crime after his ex-girlfriend broke his heart. He's part of The Ray's superhero crime-fighting squad, the Northern California Protectorate.

Handle: Mutinous Angel. "I chose it because I follow God. I'm a Christian. I know I make mistakes, that I'm not going to be perfect. So I came up with mutinous. It's kind of like an oxymoron."

Age: 29

Costume: Purple and black spandex, groin protector, titanium gloves, and face mask.

His Ride: The Mutinous Mobile, a black Mitsubishi Eclipse with glowing purple lights underneath

Weapon: A AR-15 semi-automatic rifle locked in a case in the back seat of the Mutinous Mobile. He's a NRA member, too.

Origin: Six years ago, Mutinous was dating a Muslim girl, who was "kidnapped" by her

family and made to marry within her faith. "I don't want to be with anybody else, so men who are single on their own really want to do something extreme I guess. Kind of like a soldier, or get into law enforcement, careers like that are perfect for us." Mutinous first joined the Marines, but says he was dishonorably discharged after headbutting a drill sergeant. "It's not something I'm really proud of." He then became a superhero.

Crimes stopped: While in the Mutinous Mobile, Mutinous saw a man stealing car stereos. Mutinous stopped, the suspect pulled a gun and walked back slowly, then darted out of the neighborhood. Another time, Mutinous chased down a hit-and-run perp in the Mutinous Mobile, and gave the license plate number to the cops.

On why he doesn't like to wear his costume: "The only thing I'm worried about is people seeing me as some sort of weirdo."

On why he wears his costume anyway: "If I got out there without gear and something happens, I can walk or drive away. But if I'm there in gear, there's no walking away."

Even superheroes have problems: In high school "I grew up looking a bit too feminine so people, even teachers, used to mistake me for a girl. So when they see someone like that they're going to try to pick on him or fight him .... I used to get suspended a lot." Mutinous lives with his mom in Tracy after their home was foreclosed upon in Hayward. He's currently unemployed.

How he'd like to be seen by society: "Something close to Batman. Like a vigilante -- not really liked, but getting the job done."

Out on patrol with The Ray, right, and Motor Mouth, center

Photos by Joseph Schell
Follow us on Twitter at @SFWeekly and @TheSnitchSF

Tags:

Mutinous Angel, Real Life Superheroes

Shameless ScreenGrab courtesy of SF Weekly

It takes quite a lot to have a progressive newspaper, in San Francisco no less, ask WTF?, but real life superheroes, are that level of screwhead. The different mental patients that ride the lion statues outside the museums wearing bedsheet capes, and have been doing so for years? No one even questions them. They're part of the "color" - harmless. But superheroes? They're too strange and dangerous. Even Lionriders are more normal.

-Lord Malignance