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Poppy Z. Brite: Iron Chef
"If anything, when Liquor began being shopped to U.S. publishers, it ran into problems that were the opposite of Exquisite Corpse--that is, it wasn't extreme enough. It's not at all like my previous work, and publishers hate that--once you've had some success in a particular genre, they want to keep you there forever. I ended up changing literary agents, because my previous agent, while very good, was also very dedicated to genre fiction and thus uncomfortable with the direction my work is taking. My new agent has been able to get the book in front of editors who didn't have so many preconceived ideas about my work, and consequently understood it on its own merits rather than expecting it to turn into a psychosexual horror story halfway through."
Oklahoma City Bombing: Startling Evidence Proves Government Cover-up
"We have affidavits in our report from paramedics and other rescuers at the scene who say they heard law enforcement people stating there were other bombs found in the building. And then you had bomb experts who had time to drive to a TV station, and sit there, and talk about the un-detonated bombs they had, bombs that were found in the building. You know, it's just too much competent information that can't be reasoned away as mistakes."
Dotcom Deathwatch
"Although there were early tremors, the NASDAQ crash of 14 April 2000 even caught Bill Gates and George Soros by surprise (Cassidy, 2002: 285, 287, 289). Gates had spent most of the late 1990s fighting a protracted antitrust lawsuit (Auletta, 2001; Bank, 2001) and fighting "the dance of blind reflex" caused when Microsoft's internal management became "burdened by unmanageable complexity." (Bank, 2001: 98). Soros promoted his "reflexivity" model of why financial markets oscillate between extremes (Cassidy, 2002: 249) before his Quantum Fund was 'burned' and he refocused his attention on philanthropic activities. Many other dotcom analysts and employees were to endure 'course corrections.' Merrill Lynch reached a public settlement of $100 million on Henry Blodget's forecasts. Both he and Mary Meeker faced lawsuits from angry investors (Cassidy, 2002: 310). A 'mini-cycle' of dotcom schadenfreude became popular (Kaplan, 2002). Dotcom requiems were sudden: when "Silicon Alley servers went dark, the companies quickly faded, and so did all of the creative content they once housed." (Kaitt and Weiss, xii). Failing Webzines warned of the demise of original content (Honan, 2002a; Honan, 2002b; McKinnon, 2001; Morton, 2002), despite the growing popularity of personal blogs.
The first explanations of its demise focused on the 'New Economy' as a contemporary mass hysteria. This explanation is too trite for a $5 trillion economic loss, too prosaic for thousands of ruined lives. It would be more realistic to describe it as a form of 'consensus reality' (Tart, 1986: 86, 90-105) akin to group autohypnosis, a period that promised individual growth whilst paradoxically being an obstacle to it. Individual variances in perceiving the environment had converged to group expectations. (Sherif, 1966: 138, 128). Even so, the NASDAQ crash was a future Wild Card that should have been considered and prepared for (Petersen, 1995; Petersen, 1999). Some forward-looking individuals made it through the gate in time (Rushkoff, 2001)."
Constructive Dissent (Slouching Towards Apocalypse)
"In 1986, a former nuclear technician in an Israeli plutonium processing plant had a tough choice: Mordechai Vanunu could stay quiet and keep his
comfortable life, or risk it all by exposing the truth about Israel's nuclear program. Vanunu chose the latter and proved that, contrary to repeated denials, Israel was a fully nuclear state possessing hundreds of thermonuclear bombs, with accelerated clandestine manufacturing of further nuclear weapons. Vanunu's reward? A conviction of treason in an Israeli court, 12 years in solitary confinement, and a prison sentence that continues to this day."
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