The Ctizen's Power

Here's a good one for speculation,

Vermont towns vote to arrest Bush and Cheney.

From the site:

"State lawmakers have passed nonbinding resolutions to end the war in Iraq and impeach Bush and Cheney, and several towns have also passed resolutions of impeachment. None of them have caught on in Washington."

According to Amazon.ca, impeachment is speculative enough. The site lists The Impeachment Process, one in a series of guide books to US government, under Science Fiction / Fantasy. I acknowledge it doesn’t happen much but it shouldn't be relegated to myth. Democratic governments are making high level commitments without consulting their people, like with the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Citizens need to know the power they hold in resisting authoritarian decision making like this.

Over at The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy, Harry Turtledove and Bryce Zabel, are posting an ongoing novel about Kennedy's life being worse for not dyeing in Dallas, 1963. The story draws most of its inspiration from the lesser known side of the beloved Kennedy administration. The storyline from inside their alternate universe: "John Kennedy cheated death in Dallas only to face a fate that for him might have been even worse – the public revelation of his private double life. Learning the truth was just as difficult for many Americans. We loved him when we knew him less well. Being forced to face the whole picture – for Kennedy and for the nation – was something no one ultimately was prepared for..."

Changing the status-quo with open insurrection is all too common in stories these days. Do you know of any science or speculative fiction that has impeachments or other non-violent changes to government?

A wiki for you can cite.

"Truth is my best friend", Isaac Newton once said. The website SourceWatch.org is good news for anyone who just wants the facts. Wikipedia is full of information, but its only good for getting familier with a topics - learning some keywords - its unciteable. Now you frustarated academics have a quick and easy way to fill in the gaps of your research projects.

The site is monitored with a light touch, mostly by avaerage contributors but has "active participants monitor the recent changes page and make copyedits and corrections to the content, format and policy problems they see. " (Source Watch - Policy).

Discussions, portals and other tools help contributors discuss and focus their collective efforts. These are just a few of the site's features. The best function is obviously the random button. Hit it enough times and you too may find out who Pisit Charnsnoh is.

SourceWatch's sub-project, Front groups, has already triggered an inquiry of a global warming skeptics groups that ran bipartisan ads durring the 2006 Canadian Election. The group, Friends of Science, was found to be funded in part by a University of Calgary trust account. According to SourceWatch.org the major Canadian Media Company, CanWest News-Wire reported, "facing embarrassing questions raised by the online SourceWatch.org encyclopedia, the university conducted an internal audit over the past year which concluded that its trust account had been used to 'support a partisan viewpoint on climate change.'" While the university closed the trust account, it has refused to make its full audit report public. "

The Arms Trade report I am writing is going to cost me less eye-ball hours infront of academic databases because of this, me thinks. Put any projects of yours this might benefit into the comments.

YouTube Docs Show Identity Research with Lego.

A new pair of YouTube documentaries by David Gauntlett, a Professor at the University of Westminster and the author of Creative Explorations, provide a visual representation of his book's study: identity expressed with Lego pieces. From the site:

"How do you picture identity? What happens when you ask individuals to make visual representations of their own identities, influences, and relationships?"
"This leads to an innovative project in which Gauntlett asked people to build metaphorical models of their identities in Lego. This creative reflective method provides insights into how individuals present themselves, understand their own life story, and connect with the social world."

They gathered people from diverse backgrounds and familiarized them with Lego, metaphorical thinking and expressing their identities with metaphors. This is the focus in Part One: Methods. The first video also gives profiles on the study's participants and shows the free-play representative architecture they produced.

The second video looks at the book's findings: 11 conclusions on how people think about themselves, human complexity, time as an element of thought, among other observations.

Gauntlett says also that metaphorical identity models can be created with anything that lets you be expressive.

If you want to play the home version but don't have the blocks, the Lego sim on the official site will get you going.

Anyone who metaphors their life in Lego (or with a Photoshop collage, mini-comic, in crayon, etc) is welcome to post it to comments. It would be interesting to see what people end up learning about them-selves.

Metaphorical-thinking information or guides would also be much appreciated in the comments section.

The Speculative Life of Philip K. Dick.

The life of Philp K. Dick was peppered with strange events; much like his fiction. He believed he was possessed by Christian ethereals; later, communicating with V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). With his great mind for speculation, he would eventually fill tomes with his thoughts, publishing some as novels even. Dick worked to interpret them until the end of his life in 1982. An interview Dick gave where he described these miraculous events was illustrated by R.Crumb and is available on-line here:

These events would tie into the very topics he liked exploring with science fiction: "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" They gave him a lot of thought fodder, which lead to books like V.A.L.I.S., a small portion of a tome like notebook Dick filled with his speculations. The longer version, Exegesis, has been made available on-line by Dick's estate. Fans have shown much interest in uncovering the secrets of this book for years and they may get their chance. It's available at the official PKD website.


Dick's analytical quest was not a fruitless labor. When asked for a one sentence answer to "What is reality?" he famously stated, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Grant Morrison's mind-bending epic, The Invisibles, draws influence from Dick's VALIS concept. He also inspired Discordianism with his analogy of the Black Iron Prison:

"Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”

We only have the man's thoughts now, but they've already inspired and challenged the next generation of dreamers and speculative artists. To learn more about Philip K. Dick in his own words, there is speech he wrote (available here) wherein he discusses many of his thoughts and interests.