Category Archives: Futurism

He even tried to poach SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell.Frenemies

The recent book Amazon Unbound, by Brad Stone, details Amazon founder Jeff Bezos meteoric rise to power and business triumph, but it also includes a striking point of vulnerability: Bezos is reportedly deeply jealous of Elon Musks success with SpaceX.

Back in 2016, Bezos was already deeply concerned about how his own spaceflight company, Blue Origin, didnt seem to be progressing at nearly the same pace as SpaceX. As Ars Technica independently confirmed, Bezos even went as far as trying (and failing) to poach Gwynne Shotwell, the SpaceX COO whod been with the company since nearly the beginning, and hire her as Blue Origin CEO to try and whip the company into shape.

The story only gets worse, as the book goes on to describe how Bezos attempts to compete with SpaceX seemed to move the company in the wrong direction.

Bezos executive hires took Blue Origin in a more traditional, cautious direction than that of the industry-disrupting SpaceX, which resulted in the company making considerably fewer launches and missing out on government contracts.

Those missed contracts were a huge source of frustration for Bezos, Stone wrote. But with the same executives still in charge of the company, it seems that Bezos didnt take the added step to pivot and more aggressively compete with SpaceX made clear by the fact that Blue Origin will only be launching its first crewed flight by this July.

And Musk, for his part, seems to delight in besting Bezos at every turn even insulting the Amazon founders sexual potency in one recent post.

READ MORE: A new book, Amazon Unbound, reveals Jeff Bezos envy of SpaceX [Ars Technica]

More on Blue Origin: In Stunning Reversal, NASA Halts $2.9 Billion Contract With SpaceX

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Jeff Bezos Is Reportedly Very Jealous of Elon Musk's SpaceX - Futurism

The stakes couldn't be higher.Seven Minutes of Terror

China will attempt to land its Zhurong Mars lander some time late Friday evening, as part of its Tianwen-1 mission.

Speaking at a Thursday morning conference, Ye Peijian, China Association for Science and Technologys chief adviser of Interplanetary Exploration, revealed that the capsule will start its seven minutes of terror at around 11 pm UTC on May 14, around 7:11 pm EDT.

The landing is the culmination of decades of advances in space exploration for the country, and could mark the first time a rover that wasnt built by NASA has softly touched down on the surface of Mars.

The Tianwen-1 mission launched in July 2020, with an orbiter, lander, and rover in tow. The orbiter entered a parking orbit around the Red Planet back in February and has been circling the planet ever since, preparing for the descent of the countrys first-ever Mars lander and rover by mapping the surface below.

The rover and lander will enter the thin Martian atmosphere tucked behind a heat shield. The duo will then eject the shield and deploy a parachute to slow its descent.

Rather than using a skycrane that NASA has successfully used on a number of occasions to softly lower a its most recent Mars rovers, Chinas descent module will power thrusters to slow its descent prior to touchdown.

Zhurong is scheduled to land in the same region where NASAs Viking 2 lander touched down back in 1976, the Utopia Planitia. The region is a large plain believed to be an impact basin some 3,300 kilometers across.

Scientists believe there are massive ice deposits under its surface, making it particularly interesting for further study.

We will be closely following Chinas historic attempt, so stay tuned.

READ MORE: Chinas Tianwen-1 set to attempt Mars rover landing on Friday [CNET]

More on Tianwen-1: Chinas Mars Probe Takes Breathtaking Picture of Crescent Mars

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China Will Attempt to Land on Mars Tomorrow - Futurism

India, already in the midst of a catastrophic wave of COVID-19 infections, is now facing a dual health crisis: dangerous black fungus infections developing in recovered patients brains.

Typically, mucormycosis is an extremely rare infection caused when mold takes root in a persons brain, lungs, or sinuses, The BBC reports. A healthy persons immune system can typically fend it off the actual fungus is surprisingly common but India is now seeing a surge of infections among COVID patients and survivors and doctors are struggling to save patients from the disease and its horrifying 50 percent mortality rate.

We are already seeing two to three cases a week here, Renuka Bradoo, the head of the ear, nose, and throat wing at Mumbais Sion Hospital told the BBC. Its a nightmare inside a pandemic.

The problemappears to be is that doctors are treating severe coronavirus patients with steroids, which are life-saving in the moment but weakens their immune systems after the fact. Thats especially the case among people with diabetes, who make up a large percentage of Indias mucormycosis patients.

Diabetes lowers the bodys immune defenses, coronavirus exacerbates it, and then steroids which help fight Covid-19 act like fuel to the fire, Mumbai-based eye surgeon Akshay Nair told the BBC.

Nair says he treated 40 mucormycosis patients in April alone, most of whom either died or needed urgent surgical intervention like removal of an infected eye.

Experts seem to think that the coronavirus and the ways its treated are causing blood sugar levels to go haywire, exacerbating diabetic patients underlying health conditions and making them particularly vulnerable. But not every patient is diabetic, and there were way fewer cases mucormycosis cases during Indias first wave of COVID-19, leaving doctors and experts scrambling to find answers.

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Doctors Alarmed by Outbreak of "Black Fungus" That Infects Patients' Brains - Futurism

Last month, the Senate unanimously voted to confirm former astronaut and Senator Bill Nelson as NASAs 14th administrator. He replaced acting administrator Steve Jurczyk, who had assumed the mantle when President Biden took office.

In the Senate, he was known as the go-to senator for our nations space program, reads a White House statement on Nelsons nomination in Mach. Most every piece of space and science law has had his imprint.

Nelson comes to the job with decades of experience both as a former astronaut and as a longtime politician focused on space exploration and research. Heres what you need to know about the most powerful man in space.

Nelson flew on the Space Shuttle for a six-day mission in 1986 while he was a sitting Congressperson. It was the last successful Shuttle mission prior to the Challenger accident.

Interestingly, that means Nelson is joining an extremely short list of only three other NASA administrators who have actually left the planet. There was Richard H. Truly, who flew on several missions throughout the 1970s and 80s, pilot Frederick Gregory, who became one of the first Black American astronauts in the late 1970s, and Charles Bolden, who piloted the Space Shuttles Columbia and Discovery in the 1980s and 1990s including during Nelsons mission.

That list grows smaller still when you consider that Gregory only served as acting NASA administrator for about two months while President George W. Bush found and nominated a permanent replacement for the former administrator.

But

Nelsons singular mission to space is marred by accusations that he was putting in face time for self-promotional purposes or political posturing more than he was a meaningful member of the crew, according to Ars Technica. In his book Riding Rockets, NASA astronaut Mike Mullane didnt pull any punches, even revealing that the other astronauts on the nickname went as far as nicknaming Nelson ballast.

He wanted to be a contributing crewmember and do something really important, Mullane wrote. There was just one problem. None of the principal investigators of any of the experiments manifested on the mission wanted Nelson anywhere near their equipment. They were getting one chance to fly their experiments, had been working with the astronauts for months on how to best operate the equipment, and had no desire to have a nontechnical politician step in at the last moment and screw things up.

Back in 2016, Nelson was part of the bipartisan push to secure more funding for NASAs plan to send crewmembers to Mars. However, the money did come with some strings attached: NASA was directed to get boots on the Martian soil within the next 25 years.

Fifty-five years after President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the Moon, the Senate is challenging NASA to put humans on Mars, Nelson said at the time. The priorities that weve laid out for NASA in this bill mark the beginning of a new era of American spaceflight.

Unlike his predecessor, Nelson has a history of standing in the way of private-public partnerships between NASA and contractors, preferringfor much of his career to handle things in-house before having a change of heart.

As a Senator, Nelson joined Republicans to cancel Obama-era pushes to court private companies like SpaceX and other private companies to build new rockets, a move that led to NASA beginning to work on and pouring money into the Space Launch System. He also worked to slash funding for various commercial partnerships, including the now-successful commercial crew program that recently saw SpaceX send astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

More recently, however, Nelson publicly reversed his position and enthusiastically supported NASAs commercial partnerships, even denying that he ever opposed them.

When the Long March 5B rocket that China used to launch the first module of its Tiangong-3 space station fell back to the Earth in an uncontrolled reentry code for a careening descent that could have landed almost anywhere Nelson issued an extremely stern condemnation against the countrys space program.

Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations, Nelson said in a NASA release. It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.

It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities, Nelson added.

And while it makes sense to be frustrated when another countrys rocket falls out of the sky, it will be interesting to see how Nelson handles what will likely be NASAs greatest rival in space for the rest of his term.

Nelson said that he didnt want to suddenly change course once he took over at NASA, according to Insider, lest he give anyone whiplash.

But he does want to reemphasize NASAs research into climate change, which has traditionally been one of the space agencys main scientific priorities alongside its space exploration missions, but which was considerably deprioritized by President Trumpand other officials in his administration.

The space program needs constancy of purpose, Nelson said at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Nelson seems to be all in on NASAs ongoing Artemis missions, which include sending humans to the Moon for the first time in decades, establishing a long-term base of operations there, and eventually sending humans to Mars as well.

But, like his short-term predecessor Jurczyk, Nelson isnt convinced that the Trump administrations timeline for those missions is realistic.

I think you may be pleased that were gonna see that timetable try to be adhered to, Nelson said during that same Senate hearing, but recognize that, with some sobering reality, that space is hard.

Unlike Jurczyk, who mostly stayed away from Twitter, Nelsons account reveals a close connection with the media. Of the just 131 accounts that he follows, many are journalists, editors, and publications that cover space and the space industry. Many of the remaining accounts are government agencies or space contractors.

While Nelson isnt exactly a prolific tweeter his account was silent between September 2020 and May 2021,for instance his follows suggest some level of connection to the press that may suggest a greater level of public accountability than that of government officials from the previous administration.

More on Bill Nelson: Congress Names Former Astronaut as New NASA Leader

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Eight Facts About the New Head of NASA, Bill Nelson - Futurism

The Republic of Nauru, a small island nation found due northeast of Australia, announced that it has officially vaccinated every adult in the country against COVID-19.

In fact, tallying up the number of adults who received at least one jab of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, the Nauru government says its set a world record by inoculating wait for it 108 percent of its estimated population, according to Agence France-Presse.

Thats not a typo. The government says that it had enough vaccines to cover both its entire adult population and the foreigners who happened to be living or staying on the island, giving out shots to a total of 7,392 people.

The National Coronavirus Taskforce is extremely pleased with this world record result and thanks everyone on Nauru for playing their part to keep Nauru COVID free and safe, the Nauru government said in a statement provided to AFP.

Nauru was able to get its AstraZeneca vaccines through the Covax program, a World Health Organization-coordinated effort in which wealthier nations subsidize the cost of COVID vaccines for their poorer neighbors. The program has vast global support but the US, China, and Russia all opted out.

Vaccinating a few thousand people is certainly a smaller challenge than that facing other countries, but vaccine taskforce chairman Kieren Keke told AFP that the country still took measures to keep the country coronavirus-free, like maintaining a robust testing program throughout the vaccination effort.

With every arriving traveler, the risk of the coronavirus entering Nauru remains and recent events in PNG, Fiji, and India have shown how quickly the situation can change, Keke told AFP.

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Small Country Claims to Have Vaccinated 108 Percent of Population - Futurism

Who needs 'em?Body Mod

Over the course of its nearly decade-long stay on Mars, NASAs Curiosity rover team has considered making a couple of unusual modifications to the robots structure.

Driving around on Mars for that long has been pretty rough on Curiositys wheels. And as the damage worsens over the coming years, the NASA crew might decide to steer Curiosity into a sharp rock in order to rip out its own wheels, IEEE Spectrum reports. That way, theres less of a chance that the damaged pieces end up breaking Curiositys wiring or other components, bringing the whole mission to a halt.

Thankfully, IEEE Spectrum reports that even the most damaged of Curiositys wheels could survive for another decade or more before they need to be removed. Thats based on NASAs predictions for how much driving the rover will do over the coming years, coupled with a recent effort to stick to gentler terrain as much as possible.

Since other mitigations that the team has put in place are extending wheel life predicts further and further into the future, it is unlikely that we will need to perform a wheel shed maneuver, Curiosity team member Evan Graser told IEEE Spectrum. Theres always a chance of reaching the end of a wheels life during the mission, but were many years away from even needing to make the decision whether to pursue shedding further.

The big question is whether NASAs newest Mars rover, Perseverance, will face the same risks. Graser told IEEE Spectrum that NASA was well aware of the damage to Curiositys wheels before Perseverance left Earth, so engineers were able to build far more resilient wheels that should last a lot longer.

But maybe, someday, if Perseverance happens to last for years and years as well, we may someday see it scooting along the Martian landscape with some shredded up wheels left behind in its dust.

READ MORE: If Necessary, Mars Rover Curiosity Could Rip Its Own Wheels Off to Stay Mobile [IEEE Spectrum]

More on Mars rovers: NASAs Perseverance Rover Just Turned Martian CO2 Into Oxygen

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NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Is Designed to Tear Off Its Own Wheels - Futurism

Although Legaspi remains overdue for a widespread revival, Owens did write a book about his underappreciated hero. The gorgeous, lushly illustrated, coffee-table hardcover, titled Legaspi: Larry Legaspi, the 70s, and the Future of Fashion, was published in 2019, and its the closest thing to a biography of the designer that exists. It includes Legaspis own written account of his early life. He describes growing up in New Jersey, where he says his hard-drinking stepfather regularly beat his mother and molested him. After years of abuse and trauma, he left home for New York, where he opened a boutique called Moonstone and began designing garments. I am self-taught, he told the fashion journalist Andr Leon Talley in 1979. I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology for a few semesters of basic trainings, but what you see is mostly my dreams. In his own words, he was a gay hippie upon arriving in New York, but he soon gravitated toward the angular, intergalactic sparkle of glam rock. Incorporating elements such as arched collars and reflective materials into his designs, he also drew from the pastnamely from the science fiction he had devoured as a kid.

Read: How Pierre Cardins futuristic fashion infiltrated everyday life

New York in the early 70s was hardly what you would call restrained. But when Legaspi wore his own outfits on city sidewalks, his Flash GordononFire Island style drew catcalls of Moon man! from passersby. I never could bear to look like everyone else, he told Us Magazine in 1980. Moonstone struggled to attract clientele at first, but that changed when Legaspi got a job on Broadway as a dresser for the original run of Jesus Christ Superstar. Soon, he was noticed by Labelle. The trio of Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash was transitioning from a sweet vocal groupone that Legaspi had loved as a childto a fierce and forward-thinking funk powerhouse. Legaspi began designing their stage costumes, stitching together shimmering metallics, white leather capes, and ludicrous plumage straight out of some hallucination of alien ornithology. Hendryx, also a lifelong sci-fi fan, had urged Legaspi, Make me a spacesuit. Labelles striking new look, the music magazine Melody Maker observed in 1974, was like a soul version of UFO.

Legaspi dubbed his new line of costumes Primal Space, a term that played on both his adoration of sci-fi imagery and his connection to the earthy pulse of funk and rock. His name began circulating, and as his Labelle creations made waves, other musicians took notice. Before long, the members of an unknown rock group playing small clubs in New York asked Legaspi to help them realize their own bizarre ideas for stagewearcostumes that were extravagant, gleaming, superhuman, and just a little bit scary. Legaspi obliged, unaware that Kiss would become one of the biggest bands of all time. Our manager Bill Aucoin introduced us to Larry. He had a storefront in the far West Village, the Kiss guitarist Paul Stanley recalls in Owenss book. He was doing costumes for Labelle. In fact, Kiss stole Legaspi away from Labelle, whisking him up in a rise to fame that, ironically, did little to help the designers brand recognition. He loved applying his aesthetic to the world of popular music, and the money didnt hurt. He wanted nothing more, though, than to be seen as a high-fashion creator.

But Legaspi wound up stuck in a strange place: too bold to go mainstream and too weird to be embraced by the fashion industry. With seemingly nowhere else to turn, Legaspi continued making costumes for his friends in the New York art scene, including the operatic singer Klaus Nomi, whose retro-futurism meshed with Legaspis. And after becoming close friends with Divine, he supplied the gay icon with designs that accentuated camp, drama, and subversive sexuality. Grace Jones, as she was moving from modeling to music in the late 70s, tapped Legaspi as well. But of all the people he dressed, no pairing was more perfect than Legaspi plus P-Funk. I know the theater well, Clinton told Vogue in 2018. I watched a lot of these plays, and when we first did the Mothership Connection album in 1975, I knew that I had to get the costuming from Larry Legaspi.

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Larry Legaspis Outlandish Glam Legacy - The Atlantic

The process is known as "spaghettification."Spaghettified

For the first time ever, astronomers have spotted evidence of a distant star that has wrapped itself around a supermassive black hole, Space.com reports a grim process known as spaghettification.

For a while now, astronomers have seen bursts of electromagnetic radiation emanating from black holes. Their theory: those bursts are from stars being torn apart.

But until now, they havent been able to directly observe the shape of these leftover bits of stars.

In a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team of scientists say they were able to observe evidence of the actual strands of a spaghettified star.

As stars enter their final stages of life, they tend to either cool down or explode in a supernova, obliterating everything around them. Stars closer to the centers of their galaxy face a different danger, though: they are under the threat of being torn into long strips.

Thats thanks to the galaxys central black hole astronomers have long observed massive black holes at the centers of most galaxies tugging at one side of the star far more than on the other, a process known as spaghettification or as a tidal disruption event.

These spaghetti-like strands of former star-stuff then eventually get slurped up by the black hole, causing epic bursts of radiation.

While we have seen evidence of these bursts, astronomers were only now able to see the outlines of the actual strands themselves while looking at one of the poles of a black hole.

Their observations suggest that long strands of star remains wrapped themselves around the black hole several times like a spaghetti coiled around a fork.

READ MORE: Spaghettified star wrapped around a black hole spotted for the first time[Space.com]

More on black holes: Scientists Just Released the First-Ever Image of a Black Hole

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Scientist Spot Star That's Been Stretched Out and Wrapped Around a Black Hole - Futurism

"It's the right thing to do."Going Lab Grown

This week, the worlds biggest jeweler Pandora announced it will cease to sell all mined diamonds, and switch exclusively to selling lab-made diamonds, as the BBC reports.

Mining diamonds is an incredibly environmentally taxing practice that also has a track record of greatly contributing to war and human rights abuses across the African continent.

Pandora CEO Alexander Lacik told the BBC that ditching mined diamonds is the right thing to do.

Its also conveniently far more economical. We can essentially create the same outcome as nature has created, but at a very, very different price, he added, pointing out costs are only about a third compared to mined diamonds.

The production of mined diamonds fell last year after peaking in 2017. According to the BBC, the pandemic had catastrophic effects on the diamond market, causing production to fall some 18 percent.

Pandoras lab diamonds start at $350 and are being produced in the UK. The company is hoping to expand its market beyond engagements and weddings thanks to the lowered price.

Were trying to open up this playing field and say, you know, with the type of value equation that we offer, you can use this everyday if you want, Lacik told the BBC.

Reducing the burden mining diamonds has had on humanity and our environment, it only makes sense for companies to move away from the practice. The lower costs are just the cherry on top.

READ MORE: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever [BBC]

More on diamonds: More on Scientists Create Diamonds at Room Temperature

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Worlds Biggest Jeweler Will Only Sell Lab-Grown Diamonds - Futurism

The following is part four of a series of interviews with key figures inJean-Michel Basquiats downtown New York circle in the 1980s. The interviews were conducted in February by Museum of Fine Arts Boston curator Liz Munsell and writer and musicianGreg Tate, who together curated the exhibition Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, on view at the MFA through July 25.ARTnews has published all four interviews from the series this week.

In 1985 I was working as editor/creative director on a magazine project called B.Culture for Linda Bryants Just Above Midtown (JAM) Gallery. By that time Rammellzee and I had become well-acquainted after I wrote the Village Voice review of Beat Bop, his now legendary 1983 rap music collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, K-Rob and Al Diaz. Having just a few years earlier read the epic transcription writer Edit DeAk did with Ramm for Artforum, I knew his monologues about graf as interdimensional warfare were an apex of modern performance art and Black esthetic theory.

When told I was going to interview Ramm, my good friend, Warrington Hudlin, filmmaker-producer (House Party) and director of the Black Filmmakers Foundation, asked to accompany me. Our encounter with Ramm took place in his loft studio/shrine, known as The Battle Station on Laight Street in Tribeca. I cant recall if either of us posed an actual question to Ramm, but without much prompting he gave us a whirlwind two hour exegetic tour of his minds (and mouths) capacity to conjure complex theorems that blurred the lines between subway art, race and culture wars, diseased language, the illuminated calligraphy of 14th-century monks, and sculptural high-tech sonic weaponry.

Ramm changed the terms of engagement with respect to the conversation about graf or subway art by dismissing those terms and saying what we were looking at on the trains was symbolic warfare and in his forecasting art historical language was Ikonoklast Panzerism and Gothic Futurism. Ikonoklast means symbol destroyer and Panzer derived from the tanks the Nazis invented, which were crucial to their success in invading Poland and France.

Gothic Futurism also provocatively harkened back to the Futurists of early 20th-century modernity, an art movement identified with fascistic and militaristic inclinations. As Ramms thinking makes clear, he viewedsubway art and hiphop as a total movement representing a multidisciplinary and racialized and working-classmilitary campaign against capitalism, Western Civ 101, and white supremacy.

Ramm saw wildstyle train writing as reclaiming, through extreme abstraction, the integrity of the alphabetmathematical symbols related to architecture and not literary toolsfrom the biologically diseased culture and language manipulation of Western civilization. Gothic Futurism connected the work done by b-boys and b-girls in the darkness of the train yards to the calligraphy of the 14th-century monks who wrote illuminated manuscripts for the Catholic Churchcalligraphy that distorted the alphabet to the point of indecipherability.

Ramm believed the monks knowledge had been fast forwarded through space-time to his generation of Gothic Futurists who weaponized the trains by grafting their paintings onto them. Later, once his years on the trains were done, Ramm continued the war of hiphop generated symbol versus Western language symbol though performance in his technologically enhanced battle suits. Greg Tate

RAMMELLZEE, as told to Gregory Tate and Warrington Hudlin:

I started doing trains when I was nine years old. I was part of United Graffiti Artists, along with everybody else. I was known as Stimulation Assassination: Tagmaster Killer. I owned the entire 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 lines. The letters, music notes and weather notes that were done down there reached a point where you didnt need to kill a person. The piece became a weapon, the letter itself. So fame was the most interesting to take out. How do you know George Washington? You know him through a name. You shoot the letter on the train at the other letter and it takes out that name. So, therefore, homeboy has no identity. Why should I kill him? Let him live: Hell just be dead anyway, because nobody will know who he is. Hell just be a walking zombie. Dont let him be dead. Thats the only way to do it. Because thats what they want to do to you.

They sell your art, they sell your music and exploit it, and then all you have left is exploitation. So why dont you at least have your own name? Give that to them and what do you have after that?

Im still at war. Im still busting them out. Ive still got my originals. What they have is called a Recision Hyper. I cut open a statement of graffiti, put in my word Ikonoklast Panzerism and sew it right back up. Ive still got my art.

Ive got nine different markets for Ikonoklast Panzerism: The Music Note, the Atomic Note, Weather Notes, Sign Overtures, Beat Boys, Badge of Steel, mathematics and the knowledge of the square ratio envelopes with pictures of what I look like onstage and what we do on the trains. Nine different markets and they cant touch em. I overstructured them.

Jean-Michel is the one they told, you must draw it this way and call it black-man folk art, when it was really white-man folk art he was doing. Thats what he draws . . . white-man folk art. He does not draw black-man folk art, because they told him what to draw. He may sell enough to live well until he dies, but what they did was label him off as a product and now hes their product. So hes being prostituted constantly. And now they dont like his work anymore because its folk art and folk art is dead. They are going back to the tradition of oil painting. They are finished with the Picasso extensions which is what Jean-Michels work is.

They called us graffiti but they wouldnt call him graffiti. And he gets as close to it as the word means-scribble-scrabble. Unreadable. Crosses out words, doesnt spell them right, doesnt even write the damn thing right. He doesnt even paint well. And to paint inaccurately is scribble scrabble. You dont draw a building so that it will fall down, and thats what he draws, broken-down imagery.

If it wasnt for structure youd fall apart. Things are falling apart now. Thats why the Gothic era has returned itself. We have jumped back three years as a culture now. The music just went back three years, the painting just went back three years. If you want to do that, why not go back 300 years and youll find peoples entire outlook is 300 years old. Were advanced in terms of science and technology but the attitude of the population and the control of the population is still Gothic. We still do not know what were doing. We still do not know how to leave this planet the right way. Well bring religion out in space and itll be stopped. Because in the 1400s the word religion was restriction on a legion.

Gothic is the architecture of the letter that was lost back in the 14th century. Supersonic jets were supposed to be made back in the 14th century. But we wanted to be human and base everything on human nature so we designed from the bird, when we could have designed off the triangle. With quantum physics you can use the triangle to get into the bird. They just dropped the nose down on the jet. Instead of doing that they could have had Delta wings, which is what they had 2000 years ago Delta fighters. But nobody believes that anymore, do they?

You can have four alternatives to human naturegenocide, plain old socialism like bees and ants have, love and dictatorship which is what we have now, or you can have a lot of high-powered, mega-structured knowledge where everything becomes not a socialistic bee-type state but a militant state with megastructures. Like what theyre doing to the World Trade Center now. In about 10 or 15 years it can be expanded to extend all the way uptown. Thats what it should bemass thinking, mass brain power as one unit.

Beat Boys is extremely like an opera. It can only be collaborative if you do it as a war affair. The music behind Beat Boys is extremely violent. I have a drawing of a robot launching two turntables. When you hear the sound go vamp, thats the laser disc shooting out. It becomes sunfire.

The dancing is dodging of missiles or rockets or anything like that. If you do it right, it becomes a dance. We didnt bring it as far as a martial art because we were fighting as a style, and not as an embellishment of personality. We could have brought it to a martial art but they brought us up out of the subways and said dont make it so violent please. So, they stopped it, backed it up, sent it back to being a love thing again. A thing which it never should have been. Word. B-Boy culture says the rough music starts first and then you go into love. No, its the other way around. We leave the girls and then we go and fight just like in any regular army.

Since I was five years old I have been doing works of war. And when you do works of war you have to know about textile science. Thats because its chemical warfare which is the last war youll see before they have Sound Wars.

Ultrasonic sound wars is what theyre going to have very soon. Ill probably be the first one to do it.

Theres a tank I just finished building in Italy that shoots ultrasonic sound. And this joint is $400,000 worth of weaponry. Its called a Weather Note. Its a Metropostasizer. It controls the atmosphere. It also acts like a sundial, points out the cloud projections, then shoots the cloud. Disintegration of clouds comes from radioactivity. Microwave that shit and it puts out a sound burst thats too thick for the atmosphere. Depending on whether or not its an iodine cloud, you just reverse the polarity of that shit. Ultrasonics, instead of going at a high frequency, goes at a high hum. And it gets trapped by heat and auto emissions. Its similar to making a tornado. The faster you get and the more the ratio level goes up and everything starts gathering, the more you get a cloud that makes a sound. Not the wind being pushed around it, but the wind being pushed from within makes its own sound. Like the opposite is the eye of the hurricane. It makes no sound and everything around it does. Its a clear day in that eye but hell all around.

People say Im drawing sexual images as missiles. I say please. I can build this thing. If Im shooting scum I want you to understand itll blow your house down. Thats a powerful type dick.

All my art and all my teachings are about Gothic Futurism, and the knowledge of how a letter aerodynamically changes into a tank. I tell people phonetic value does not apply to any letters structure because the sound is made by the bone structure of the human species which has nothing to do with the integer structure quality, nothing at all. The letter is an integer.

Chinese letters are carbonetic; but ours are siliconic. Arabic symbols are disease cultural chemical symbols. They cannot be armored. They cannot be Ikonoklast. They cannot be made into a vehicle in motion. I am the person who builds the weapons inside the war. Futura 2000 is a mapper further out in space looking down upon the war, writing the history as a map. Phase Two has the Carbon side of the war. I have the Silicon, and Futura is above magnifying that.

Silicon-based symbols can be moved forward and have no phonetic value. What theyre saying in Arabic equals the structure of the symbol. What were saying does not equal structure but the difference in values between silicon and carbon. The letter appeared from the first dimension. We didnt put it in the first dimension. The first dimension has total power over everything because it is total electromagnetic energy. That is an integer by itself. No one controls the alpha-beta. If you drop the a it becomes alphabet. Thats what they did but is that total control or is that foolish control? Bigotry and the rest of that bullshit?

Theres a point where people will steal the idea of the ratio envelope, the number and the letter, and combine it together and say, since we own this, we own you. Numbers were stolen from India, brought up to the Arabic countries and they sabotaged it then. Zero was stolen from the Mayan Indians. We have this government that doesnt want you to remember alpha-beta. They want you to remember alphabet.

Were not going to speak their bullshit anymore. We want our own sound for the letter now. We want you to take the letter, put it in the computer, and find out the sound that emanates from that integer which is called the aura of the letter. Do that and you get ultrasonics. Then you wont have no alpha-beta to speak. Then you have to find a letter that makes you work for it instead of the letter working for us because thats tricknowledgy. The phonetic value is tricknowledgy because how you write double U over here and write two Vs as an integer, while in Europe you write two Us and youre writing double V? Thats total tricknowledgy. And its just because of segregation. They want to keep people in their place.

Society took us all out of the subways and told us to do canvases their phonetic value, their tradition. After doing all of that work in the subways for eight or nine years you really dont want to work for these people so they can just have everything and say we got it all so goodbye. Whatre you gonna do, think youre an artist? Then they want you to go back to school so you can learn how to paint the same old goddamn way? Go back to school? I am a school. I aint going back to that shit. No bet. Im not going to go through their definition of pain and painting.

I got excluded from the Area club because they got the juice and they dont need us anymore. They did it in the music just like in the art. So, what happens now is suffering and Gothic. Not knowing whats going on and walking through the bushes.

I continue to call myself a Gothic Futurist. Gothic is the primitive architecture and futurism means mechanism. At least thats what I read when I did read. Because I was always known for saying things before I read them and I cried later because I saw them. At a very young age I pulled words out that made me cry. Words that I thought I made up and then saw in a book. You are not supposed to come into an English class at an early age and the teacher sits you down and says you so bad, you teach. And you teach. Ive given many a lecture that way. Rocked the entire English dictionary.

I said the letter Sigma would change after being bombarded by the aerodynamic structures of 10,000 of us in the subways over a ten-year period. That letter changed into tank because we bombarded it with a certain amount of aerodynamic knowledge in the dark. It changed into a Sigma where before it was an E. In the dark that letter moved aerodynamically and turned into a Greek letter again. Where did E go? It went into S except now thats Summation Operator. Now summate the operation of convenience. Thats economics. Word. You listen to that and you think about it. Might make sense, might be total bullshit. Youll find out, wont you? But if its working out, dont tell me. Might hurt my feelings. Might mean something to too many people and they might want to beat the shit out of me. They fucked Einsteins ass up when they made that bomb. You cant help it if science is that good and the damn fools want to make a weapon out of it.

Einstein played the Wizards Game of Fool. Its called Planet Collision. Extreme cosmic clash. His dice was math. He liked to roll numbers. He said you can do anything you want with the word around the letter. I said, very good sir, I didIkonoklast Panzerism. I made something you cant speak anymore because it didnt have a phonetic value in the first place. And you, Einstein, should have remembered that.

You know Japanese robots unfold and become trucks? Well, this was done on the trains. We know the Japanese got this from themselves, but we did it in the subways in the dark so Id consider us to be more original than them.

I may be curating the outside of a museum wall in Tokyo. Itll be two towers of Panzerism with lasers that shoot and go completely around this five-block building. Ill have two or three tanks floating like a mobile about 20 feet of the wall. I asked for about a $15,000 budget. They were turning down people who were asking for millions. Compared to that, Im cheap and Ill probably do better work anyway. Because I know what theyd do. Put some sticks or some other bullshit up, charge $1,500 just for materials. Then say they want a million dollars. I say, you want to go for that when you could have this and have a good time. Because Id stand up there, boy, dressed in one of the crazy-ass costumes and do one of the def-est muh-fuckin Gregorian chant. China-Japanese down. I call it insect music because they call me an insect. When Im onstage they say I look like a hornet, because I have two doo-rags, swords and Im very exo-skeletal looking. It sounds like the beating of wings.

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