I’m not to psyched on the organ harvesting stories. They are horrific but elements could come to play in The Gatecrashers. Here’s a scary one.

The Xinjiang Procedure

Then the Districts arm themselves against the police. Then they take over the Gates. Then they secede from the local governance. Palomar City is born. The 99% rise up.

Via B92.net from Monocle Magazine

Brankica Stankovic presents Serbia’s hard-hitting investigative TV show Insajder (Insider). In Serbia, where political corruption has gone unpunished and the media shies away from controversy, she represents a fresh voice. But at a cost…

Outside the B92 office, a dreary four-storey building set back from a four-lane highway in downtown Belgrade, two armed policemen stand guard. Four men – tall, stocky, military haircuts – lean against an unmarked car, staring at everyone who passes. Inside the lobby, two more police officers sit on a sofa, drinking Coke from plastic cups.

And behind them, on a wall that shows large publicity photos of the independent TV and radio station’s grinning news anchors, is a picture of the woman they are paid to protect. Brankica Stankovic is the only person on the wall not smiling and, fittingly, her face is half obscured. For the past seven years, Stankovic has fronted Insajder, an unrelenting investigative series that tackles organised crime, drug smuggling and political corruption, which has become B92’s best-rated programme.

It’s a show watched avidly by the police too – arrests tend to follow the morning after. There’s been no shortage of stories for Stankovic and her team to investigate. More than a decade after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia remains a country struggling to find its way. The country’s prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated in 2003, while Milosevic’s general, Ratko Mladic, who was responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, remains at large and is believed to be protected by senior officials within the security forces.

Read the full story here: B92.net

This one in via @greatdismal thanks Bill.

A similar story by New York Times.

The seeds of elective body modification are born every day. These out of a tragic accident, but a truly inspiring story via Fresh Air on NPR.

“My biological body will degrade in time due to normal, age-related degeneration. But the artificial part of my body improves in time because I can upgrade. … So I predict that when I’m 80 years old, I’ll be able to walk with less energy than is required of a person who has biological legs, I’ll be more stable, and I’ll probably be able to run faster. … The artificial part of my body is, in some sense, immortal.”

Photo: Len Rubenstein/Crown Business

Here’s a true foundation for bio-electric body mod controls. This one came from io9.com

[This technology] provides a huge conceptual advance in wedding the biological world to the cyber world in a manner that is very natural. In some sense, the boundary between the electronics world and the biological world is becoming increasingly amorphous. The ramifications of this are mind-blowing, to say the least.

Thanks for the tip [Geek].

This one just in from our friends at Supermarché. It’s a beautiful little documentary about the kinetic sculpture of a future city by artist Chris Burden.

via indieWire

This video of networked robots speaks for itself.

Thanks for the share Adam.

A major world defining event in Palomar City is the Culture Clashes. These aren’t simply religious or ethnic clashes, they are attacks on lifestyle, social position and more often than not the rioters are bound more by a common enemy than a common understanding. This year we’ve seen the Arab Spring, we are on year 10 of the US occupation of many cities around the globe and the London Riots.

These are all the foundation on which the Culture Clashes are born. Here’s a great op-ed piece from the New York Times by RICHARD SENNETT and SASKIA SASSEN.

“The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda. “

[update 08.13.11]

And then the counterpoint in this article on Spiked by Brendan O’Neill.

“The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity. What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it.”