Daily Archives: 17 Dec 07

Paris Hilton Rendered to Offshore Blackshop

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May 5, 2016: “”Rendition,” an emerging practice among high-end retailers and luxury goods companies, involves the abduction of wealthy, high-profile customers who are reportedly detained at baroque, unidentified duty-free camps, often indefinitely and without access to courts, attorneys, or financial advisers. “There are no clear numbers on how many have been taken in this way,” explains Brett Horgaus, an ACLU attorney and head of the organization’s human trafficking task force. “We estimate that as many as 2-3 thousand ultra-wealthy consumers are being held a half-dozen secret sites worldwide. The stigma of these abductions, and the secrecy among the families of those who are targets, lead us to suspect that this estimate may be low.”

…[A] recent account from a purported former detainee includes tales of being forced to shop in stress positions, dancing to exhaustion in clubs playing music at high volumes, and being incessantly coddled by teams of ominous, hooded figures. “For more than 6 months all I heard was ‘spend, spend, spend,'” explains Frank Fetch, the son of a wealthy Minneapolis publishing family. “They wouldn’t let me sleep. I’d start to nod off, and there’d be another handler with an exclusive Manolo Blahnik sneaker or a tray of cashmere Q-Tips. It was exhausting, mentally draining.”” (futurefeedforward)

Modern times causing human evolution to accelerate

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“Human evolution is speeding up. Around 40,000 years ago our genes began to evolve much faster. By 5000 years ago they were evolving 30 to 40 times faster than ever before and it seems highly likely that we continue to evolve at this super speed today.

Our population explosion and rapidly changing lifestyles seem to be the drivers of this acceleration, the discovery of which contradicts the widely held notion that our technological and medical advances have removed most of the selection pressures acting upon us.” (New Scientist)

Terry Pratchett Embuggered

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Sad news for the fantasist and his fans: “Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early
onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom ‘stroke’.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I
expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet :o)

— Terry Pratchett

PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘Is there anything I can do’, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”