Republican Faust: The Rise and Fall of Mike Connell - 1

Blunt Force

At about 6 p.m. on Friday December 19, 2008 a single-engine 1997 Piper Saratoga aircraft, with only the pilot aboard, crashed into a residential area in Uniontown, Ohio as it was preparing to land at Akron-Canton airport. Upon arriving to the scene, fire crews found only burning wreckage of the plane scattered between homes on Charolais Street. The pilot had been thrown upon impact and had died instantly of massive blunt force trauma, his belongings scattered in the yards.

First responders arrived on the scene immediately after the crash. Even then, irregularities began. Simon Worrall in an article The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru, writes of those first minutes:

Capt. Lorin Geisner of the Greentown Fire Department was the first person to arrive at the scene. “We received a 911 call, so we contacted the tower and asked what size plane it was and how many souls were on board,” he recalls. “But we were informed that the tower was in lockdown and that no information was available.”

This was to be the first of many abnormalities in a case that would send shock waves through the blogosphere with speculations of sabotage and foul play. In the bewildering reality-bending world of conspiracy theories, the events that surround the Connell crash belong in a class all their own.

Mind Reader

Not long ago, I posted a short lecture from TED about the use of mushrooms to replace plastics. All very interesting but this new post is really quite extraordinary  The headset shown in the lecture looks surprisingly similar to a brain-computer linking device in the 1983 film "Brainstorm." (That device was capable of connecting and recording brain to brain  sensations, thoughts and feelings.) 

It's important to remember that this invention is merely a prototype and the finished product would, no doubt, be capable of much more.  Impressive and a little scary.