Satire: About ready to destroy the world again [ONION]

There are often cases where people quote the satirical newspaper, "The Onion", by mistake, thinking The Onion is fact -- because it's so damn close to reality. With that in mind, I feel I should label this post clearly as satire.

"Financial Sector Thinks It's About Ready To Ruin World Again"

Representatives from all major banking and investment institutions cited recent increases in consumer spending, rebounding home prices, and a stabilizing unemployment rate as confirmation that the time had once again come to inflict another round of catastrophic financial losses on individuals and businesses worldwide.

“It’s been about five or six years since we last crippled every major market on the planet, so it seems like the time is right for us to get back out there and start ruining the lives of billions of people again,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

“Plus, it’ll be nice to finally wipe out the Euro once and for all this time,” Gorman added.

Multimedia -- Satire, "NSA Data Backup"

Just to lighten the tone a little, here's a brief two-minute spoof ad about the NSA and the PRISM program:



The above satire is a portion of the current episode of the "Extra-Environmentalist" podcast, a fascinating news analysis podcast focused on understanding the collapse of the current American culture from an outsider's point of view. Even though its producers and many listeners are Americans, we still think that trying to step outside of the current culture is key to understanding it.

Multimedia: Why The Distinction Between Collected And Analyzed Is Useless

To address one comment that many, including President Obama, have made about PRISM: They say that the PRISM system is not an unreasonable, widespread search and seizure of communications because it is only a computer that collects and aggregates the communications, and no NSA human employee listens to the conversations until such time as they have reason to believe the conversation is connected to terrorism.

"Nobody is listening to your phone conversations right now," the President said, in so many words.

I believe this is a distinction without a difference. No person is on your phone line tapping your conversations right now, but thirty seconds from now, somebody can order it up for whatever reason they can get past the bureaucrats. Or 10 seconds from now. Or 5 seconds from now.

Good science-fiction always attempts to address present concerns by cloaking them in a disguise about a compelling problem in some imagined future world. One thing science-fiction has taught us is, when it comes to digital surveillance, the past begins a fraction of a second ago. If you can store up complete and accurate records of the past, and call them to your ears or fingertips at any moment, that's effectively the same as if you are eavesdropping all the time. Because the "past" begins a fraction of an instant ago, as far as computers are concerned. There isn't any scenario in the real world where it makes a difference, between storing all records of the "past" starting a half a second ago and making them instantly available, versus sitting on the phone line in real time. There is no difference versus having somebody eavesdropping on your conversation right now since he could just as well be doing it a half a second from now.

That's one of the topics the following book review discusses: