Burning Man Photo Galleries 2012

Stolen from the Baltimore Sun

So tonight I decided to surf around on the web a bit and pull together a bunch of galleries from this year’s burn, enjoy:

First up Patrick Roddie,(150+) he shoots primarily faces and body parts and does a wonderful job, the link is to his set of galleries from each year and btw, in the 2012 gallery 12_57 is one the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.    http://webbery.com/galleries/burningman/index.html

Rolling Stone magazine’s Burning Man photo gallery (11), on the cover Loadie Camp’s Shark Car  http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/pictures/more-photos-from-burning-man-2012-20120911/the-shark-car-0699596

11 photos by Eric Brown, the first pic is really special flaming Octopus car  http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/379903/20120902/burning-man-2012-pictures-photos-nevada.htm#page0

From Yahoo News starting with full flaming Burn Wall Street, some good photos (50) here but some repeats from other galleries  http://news.yahoo.com/photos/burning-man-festival-2012-slideshow/

Photos by Neil Girling (7)  http://laughingsquid.com/photos-of-burning-man-2012-fertility-2-0-by-the-blights-neil-girling/

Huffington Posts’ annual shameless grab for free content (210) photos  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/04/burning-man-photos_n_1853436.html

2012 BMORG Gallery  (a lot) http://galleries.burningman.com/browse?b=true&text=&year=2012&category=&mediatype=photo

6 great photos  http://www.stuckincustoms.com/category/travel/nevada/burning-man/

A set of really good photos (108) by someone named Christopher http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/sets/72157631376410550/with/7919047112/

Galleries from Tumblr with the Burning Man 2012 tag  http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/burning-man-2012

About 20 but some unique and really good shots  http://fuckyeahburningman.tumblr.com/

All Pinterest images with a Burning Man 2012 tag  http://pinterest.com/search/?q=burning+man+2012

Great photo blog from the SF Chronicle, huge gallery and these aren’t professional photos but a really great perspective  http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/09/04/burning-man-2012/#7170101-70

30 great instagram pics a little warning site is pretty slow  http://pulse.sfstation.com/2012/09/04/thirty-awesome-burning-man-instagram-photos/

David LeClair’s fairly comprehensive set of installation shots  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100659820541159.2601994.1804170&type=3

And finally the largest damn gallery I’ve ever seen from one person (1000) Dustin Kerschtein  https://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.10151200998012139.496010.577187138&type=1

Sick of TV lies

Sure we could go to the political bullshit that flies through the air on a daily basis from Fox News and MSNBC but I’d rather talk about the less obvious but still ubiquitous lies that fly around.  There is of course the second level of political bullshit that is put out by groups like Americaspower.org the front name for the coal industry’s marketing arm.  You know these are the folks who try to convince us daily that coal is pretty much innocuous to the environment and accuses the Environment Protection Agency of being against the best interest of America by trying to keep them from polluting the hell out of us.  I’m not sure whether it’s the coal or oil industry’s ads that make me want to vomit more.

The reason they run these type of ads is simple, they think we are all stupid, we saw it on TV, it must be true!  I wish that their premise was more incorrect than it is.

However, I think the most annoying ad ever is the current Citi London Olympics commercial you see this commercial starting airing weeks ago, it shows a town in rural America pitching together and using their Citi credit card points to set up a big town square festival and viewing of the London 2012 Olympics and then shows them cheering on American athletes.  There is only one small problem with this commercial THE LONDON OLYMPICS DO NOT START UNTIL JULY 27TH!!!!

It seems that truth doesn’t mean anything anymore on TV, during the time I was writing this post I’ve seen commercials for two different movies both claiming to be the best reviewed movie of the Summer, geesh.

New York Times shows off its snobbery on the issue of Doomsday Preppers

New York Times shows off its snobbery on the issue of Doomsday Preppers

I saw a piece today in the New York Times on the TV show Doomsday Preppers.  Now I get that some of the folks they feature on the show are more than a bit out there.  There are folks who are fully prepping for something they are sure is imminent which in fact is very, very unlikely.  Ok, but not all preppers are living in fear of the Yellowstone Volcano erupting or a massive coronal mass from the sun wiping out life as we know it.  The thing is there is typically at least a little science behind what these people fear.  Someday there will be another eruption of the Yellowstone Volcano and solar storms can be problematic and in rare cases could actually cause significant disruptions to the electronic grid.  So yes I get that the people featured might be pushing the edge of the rainbow a bit, but hell, really rational folks don’t make for great TV, if they did the Kardashians, well, you wouldn’t know who they are.

The second thing the author of the piece really harped on and I think completely unfairly, was that basically all preppers are a bunch of gun nuts that can’t wait for the apocalypse so they can start shooting people.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet the author has never met anyone in the prepper community.  Like all communities preppers come in all shapes and sizes and philosophical bents.  The fact is, having weapons for defense is a really good idea if society melts down, regardless of the cause for the meltdown.  Of course the show takes an opportunity to show the people they feature shooting their guns and playing a little Rambo for the cameras, it’s TV, they need the ratings.  Apparently the good folks at the New York Times think that watching folks assemble first-aid kits, canning fruit and making pemmican would make for enthralling television.

Being someone who talks about the apocalypse and people’s response to it quite a bit I’ve discovered something.  There are two basic types of people, those who don’t want to survive doomsday and those who do.  The NY Times author admitted to being someone who wouldn’t want to survive the dissolution of society because he couldn’t imagine living in the world shown in McCarthy’s book, The Road.  I think that shows he has a limited imagination and that’s fine, and it’s even fine that he’s wants to die in the apocalypse, but some of us would like to live as long and as full a life as possible regardless of what happens in the world.  The author unfortunately talks down to the rest of us and writes us all off as gun-toting maniacs with homicidal tendencies just for not sharing his beliefs, that’s a bit snobbish to me.

Regardless of what your philosophical beliefs might be about where society is headed, disasters happen and it is only prudent to be prepared.  Having three days worth of food and water on-hand, a good first-aid kit and a basic survival plan for your family is just plain smart.  So if a show like Doomsday Preppers does anything beyond entertain you, hopefully it will make you think about having a basic preparedness plan and the appropriate resources available.

 

 

Burningman ticket lottery Blog Roll part 2

Burningman ticket lottery Blog Roll part 2

There is a lot out there, some serious, some very funny, some very thought-provoking, figured I’d put it all in one place for an easy read, feel free to add anything I missed in the comments section, the first link has  a bunch of pieces including the Hitler video linked to it, enjoy.

 

Burningman ticket lottery Blog Roll part 1

Burningman anywhere a beautiful post

Capitol Radio in Sacramento, Insights with Maid Marian on the ticket debacle

This is an amazing piece on PR and how Burningman should have handled things

Interesting and thorough discussion

And the shroom doesn’t disappoint

The Reno paper is involved 

Post using the 10 principles to discuss the lottery debacle

 

 

Debunk: End times prophecy of increasing earthquakes

Debunk: End times prophecy of increasing earthquakes

According to the nut jobs who claim there is significant evidence for the end times being now there has been an increase in the number of major earthquakes.  Dr. David R. Reagan claims there is a greater instability in nature; the end times online selectively pulls the frequency of earthquakes for a high activity period leaving out key data; and the prophecy fellowship makes a list of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 as if by just listing them it makes them more important than the actual data.

Unlike most of those sites who create their own graphs and data, here is an actual graph and link to data on global earthquakes:

 

You’ll see from the graph that we’ve definitely been in an active period but the overall trend in the amount of energy released from earthquakes has been decreasing since 1900.  When you look at the numbers of global and US earthquakes you will see there are half as many quakes overall as well as in the 7.0 and above range, here is the link to the data:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/other/quake1.html

So our first debunk piece of the year to try to counterbalance the nut jobs who are claiming it’s all over in 2012 because of all of the overwhelming evidence of the end times.

The Monsters are due on Maple Street in 2012

The Monsters are due on Maple Street in 2012

So, the holidays are over, everyone had time to visit with friends and family.  We all ate too much and got nice presents and watched little kids go nuts and rip open packages, get new toys only in half of the instances to end up playing with the box all day.  Most of us did a lot of Christmas shopping this year, retailers had a bigger year than last year but one particular retail sector set records, gun stores.

 That’s right record gun sales in December, eclipsing the previous record set way back in November of that’s right, 2011.  Why are so many people in the United States arming themselves?  One of my favorite episodes from the original Twilight Zone series is called the Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  It’s a typical neighborhood in 1950’s America on a Summer night, washing cars, barbecues and kids playing in the street.  Then something streaks across the sky and a kid tells a story about alien invasion and ordinary people begin to turn on each other to find the monsters among them.  In nuclear paranoid America there was always an undercurrent of fear and paranoia that the big one would fall.  Take that tension and add just the right pressure and boom, neighbor against neighbor.  Of course it’s the Twilight Zone so at the end of the episode the camera pulls back and two aliens talk about how this is exactly how they’ll do the invasion, the kid was right.

Well, a lot of the conditions that made Maple Street ripe for chaos are present today in America once again.  We are in a world where the people of Arab nations are taking to the streets to free themselves from oppressive leaders.  Iran and North Korea are less stable than they have been in quite some time.  Occupy protestors are in the streets right here in the United States, and for good reason, our political system is broken, the current GOP Presidential race is more like reality TV than a process designed to possibly pick the next leader of the free world (whatever that is), our economy is dragging along on life support fearing the default of Italy or Spain, or Iran causing oil prices to spike.  The income gap in the United States is larger than ever and unemployment still flies well above 8% and a whole lot of kids are going to graduate with college degrees this May and not find work.

Now we no longer live under the fear of imminent nuclear war, although Putin is doing a dandy job of raising the nerves of Washington establishment.  However there is a lovely irrational fear that has permeated our culture, the Apocalypse.  That’s right the end of the Mayan Calendar has had a perceptible impact on the psyche of Americans.

Now do I think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012 of course not, I mean really, just because Zippy the Mayan Calendar Maker stopped his calendar at the end of a cycle a thousand years in the future doesn’t mean he had some mystical insight into the future.  Now I personally think ancient peoples get vastly under estimated for their level of intelligence and ability, but being psychic or having worked out the intricacies of plate tectonics, solar cycles, calculate universal gravitational constants and the rotation of planets imperceptible to modern man?  I don’t think so.

 The real risk from all of this Mayan silliness is the underlying pressure that it creates.  The impact it has on all of those new gun owners and new breed survivalists.  You see I don’t worry about the folks who have been building bunkers for years and setting up remote bug out locations.  The people I fear are the ones who are scared and semi-prepared or not prepared at all.  You see it’s that group of people who lose it for little or no reason.   Take the real tensions in our world, add in the irrational tensions of doomsday and then throw a combination of unexpected events and you have a recipe for disaster.  So say a heat wave this Summer triggers a power outage that crashes the grid for a couple of days, does a major metropolitan city meltdown under that scenario?  What if that power outage happens on December 21^st, how many of those new gun owners start shooting at their neighbors who want to come to their house to stay warm.  To me what this says is that Maple Street is ready for the monsters and as Rod Serling said in the epilogue to that famous Twilight Zone episode, “the monsters are us.”