Though it remains somewhat secretive, many of Britain’s major financial institutions have begun employing astrologers to help navigate the currently rife-with-peril financial markets. Maybe the US should start giving that shit a try:

Christeen is one of a growing, albeit secretive, network of astrologers who work for seemingly conservative British institutions such as high street banks, City investment funds and retailers. Desperate to avoid financial meltdown in the ongoing ‘credit crunch’ and to spot fashions and consumer trends before they start, these institutions have turned to the stars to divine the future.

“Most academics distrust astrology and regard it as mumbo-jumbo,” she says. “The thing is, it works. Nobody’s sure how it works but it does. Most of my clients are businesspeople who are very canny. If it didn’t work for them, then why would they use it?”

The story goes on to recount the astrological affinities of Hitler, Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin among others and ends with, of course, the speculation that all planetary signs are pointing towards….wait for it…2012! as being a time of immense upheaval:

“In 2012 we’ll be entering the precession of the equinoxes, which is the most important thing that’s happened in the last 26,000 years. That suggests that something mega is going to happen. There will be a huge change in the world’s psychology caused by a huge natural disaster or a massive change in spiritual beliefs. We have an interesting four years ahead of us.”

A useful meme indeed!

With the annual Earth Day celebrations set for next week, environmental consciousness seems to be all the rage . Personally though, there are few things that provoke such utter ambivalence in me than environmentalism and its status as a growing force in the global zeitgeist. It’s not that I don’t agree that something needs to be done. I think anyone with any shred of common sense realizes that the current model of “modern living” does not pencil out in the long run when you factor in the finite nature of not just our resources but also with the space in which we are working. However, acknowledging that “inconvenient truth” is one thing, but actually coming up with a solution, not to mention implementing it, is entirely another. Some people say the solution is to start “living green,” which is definitely a nice little slogan. And at face value, it has some merit. But in practice, it’s basically become nothing more than another way to do the same shit and feel better about it. It’s sort of like Christianity: It was founded upon a noble enough principle, but once the idea started to become the institution, shit started to get all fucked up. I mean, how many years did it take after Jesus supposedly taught everyone to love everyone else before dudes were killing people in his name? How many years has it been since the idea of “living green” came about before Wal-Mart changed their logo from blue to green, or Clorox started making Organic Bleach?
Another trait common amongst organized religions definitely shared by the Church of Green is the penchant for those who “believe” to merely select the parts of the church doctrine that they can most easily adhere to and blatantly ignore the rest, all while maintaining an air of piousness. It’s like the militant bike rider, railing against SUVs and cars as greenhouse gas-belching pollution machines, who doesn’t bat an eye about flying home three times a year to see the folks, spewing pollution directly into the upper atmosphere. Or how about the eco-conscious housewife, who makes sure to turn off the lights when she leaves a room to conserve energy and bought herself a Civic hybrid to cut back on emissions, but then serves her family burgers for dinner, the production of which released more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than three hours of driving, and used up more energy than leaving a light on for 20 straight days, not to mention that disproportional amount of localized pollution created by large-scale meat farms and the role of overuse of antibiotics in the beef industry in creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I guess it’s the thought that counts, right?
I guess the moral of the story is, however popular the green meme has become, its actual utility is questionable at best. For now, living green will continue to be something you can buy at the store, use in your marketing campaign or learn as a college internship: an ideal. Carbon neutrality will continue to be something you buy on a Web site, like a Christian indulgence. It’s gonna take a lot more to kick mankind’s addiction to consumption than a few melted ice caps, killer hurricanes and deadly droughts. We need to hit rock bottom, man. I’m talking Old Testament style shit. People are too lazy and stupid to do what they actually know is right until they literally have no other choice. We’ll just keep building malls and damming rivers and jacking up our pickup trucks until our eyes are melting out of our fucking skulls and even then, we’ll just invent some better sunglasses, made from 25 percent post-consumer recycled plastic!

What will it be????????!! If you don’t know why this matters, you need to learn more about 4chan, the place where it seems anything good on the internet - memes, noodz of scene girls, and ignorant bullshit - originates, at least for people too lazy to find it for themselves.

Beneath the French village of Crozet, the biggest, badass particle accelerator ever built, The Large Hadron Collider, is nearing completion:

Its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things. Starting sometime in the coming months, two beams of particles will race in opposite directions around the tunnel, which forms an underground ring 17 miles in circumference. The particles will be guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages. At four locations the beams will converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.

What scientists hope “comes out” is evidence of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle:

Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the “force.” The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics—but no one’s ever found it.

However, a splinter group of internet scientists are rallying against the completion of the Large Hadron Deathstar, claiming that when it is fully operational, it will create a blackhole, and the end of the world will ensue:

This has of course, introduced the LHC, as it is abbreviated in the collective internet conscious as something of an upstart meme. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that Hadron is just one letter-switch away from Hard on, at which point lulz were guaranteed:

Who needs science when you have /b/?

Despite being one of the foremost recent repopularizers of the idea that the year 2012, which marks the end of the 13th cycle of the Mayan Longcount Calendar, will bring about some sort of apocalyptic event, author Daniel Pinchbeck doesn’t seem so sure in a recent article posted to his Reality Sandwich website in which he calls 2012 a “useful meme:”

My view is that “2012″ is useful as a meme if it helps us to catalyze a shift in global culture and consciousness. Rather than fretting about what may or may not happen on that date, we should concentrate on the work that needs to be done now, on an inner as well as outer level.

Oh well. I wasn’t really looking forward to that kind of crazy shit anyway. Bird gods and all that.

In the midst of what is quickly becoming Puppygate 2008, it is interesting (to me at least) to note that, many of the same internet-dwellers that believe 9/11 was an engineered event meant to shift the will of the general population in favor of a certain socio-political viewpoint, are so quick to vouch for the authenticity of a grainy, unsourced YouTube clip. I’m not saying its NOT real, however, I’m definitely not gonna say it is. As the above video points out, remember not so long ago the whole “bird shitting in the reporters mouth” clip that was a supposed outtake of real news footage? Well it turned out to be fake, after of course, getting a few million views on YouTube and getting linked by Huffington Post along with every other blog, most of whom are probably posting this puppy video as we speak. Like I said, maybe this video is real. Maybe I’m totally off base. But I’d rather be the guy who was wrong about it being some engineered viral meme, than the guy that’s wrong but can’t go back and unpost a United State’s Marine’s mother’s home address, or worse yet, threats of physical violence.

And even if it is real, Who are we to decry the senseless death of one animal, when everyday in every single city in our entire country, who legions of animals are routinely slaughtered, for food, because they’re “pests”, or because they happen to walk onto our roads? Or how about the 3-4 million dogs and cats euthanized each year at United States animal shelters. Where’s the outcry over that? How many hundreds of thousands of puppies do you think that includes? Why is no one storming the gates of these humane societies and demanding justice?

If we want to punish someone for purposely mistreating animals why don’t we start with the people we can at least prove are doing it? Such as the factory farms that produce the majority of America’s meat? Pigs, which are known to be as intelligent, if not more so than dogs are just one of the animals that suffer unimaginable deaths every single day on their way to our sandwiches, tacos, etc:

Pigs are very clean animals who take to the mud primarily to cool off and evade flies. They are just as friendly and gregarious as dogs, and according to Professor Donald Broom at the Cambridge University Veterinary School, “They have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly three-year-olds.” Mother pigs in factory farms in the U.S. live most of their lives in individual crates that are 7 feet long and 2 feet wide. They display signs of extreme boredom and stress, such as biting the bars of their cages and gnashing their teeth. Their piglets are taken away three weeks after birth and packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Like chickens and turkeys, pigs are genetically manipulated and pumped full of drugs, and many become crippled under their own weight. Although pigs are naturally affable and social animals, the confinement of these crowded pens causes neurotic behaviors such as cannibalism and tail-biting, so farmers use pliers to break off the ends of piglets’ teeth and cut off their tails without any painkillers.

Makes being thrown off a cliff sound pretty humane.