Best. Concept. Development. Ever. Wired UK’s Katie Scott reports that uber-Director Ridley Scott is working up a web series called Purefold, which “will chart the period leading up to the era depicted in Blade Runner.” Quoting an MTV announcement:

“The plot will eventually carry into the film’s era, with the plot being shaped along the way based on audience feedback,” it reports.

MTV says that the series will not be “a continuation of the adventures of Rick Deckard, the doomed Rachel, Gaff, or the workings of the Tyrell Corporation” as RSA Films, the studio making the series, does not own the rights to these characters or the storyline.

Production company Ag8, run by David Bausola and Tom Himpe, has an even funkier description of the project’s inception and architecture:

Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.

With a central theme ‘What does it mean to be human?’, the franchise explores the subject of empathy – a shared theme with Ridley Scott’s most compelling Science Fiction movie, Blade Runner.

The franchise contains infinite interlinked story lines, turned into short-format episodes by Ridley Scott Associate Films’ global talent pool of directors, and informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world’s leading ‘life streaming’ technology.

Taking place in the near future, Purefold enables participating brands to take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.

Purefold content will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms unprecedented equal use rights through their participation.

Purefold is supported by commercial and academic pillars, such FriendFeed, Creative Commons, WPP, Aegis, Publicis and Naked Communications.

Incept date for the first episode, according to Wired UK, is sometime “later this summer.”

Well, no one ever accused Charles Taylor of being stable. The nutcase quixotic former President of Liberia, according to several blogs and a BBC interview with one of his wives, has now converted to Judaism. Given the way he’s kicked around the Mandingo, West Africa’s nomadic Muslims, I guess Islam wasn’t really an option, although he was always schizophrenic about dressing himself up as Everyman while picking on various minority groups (and one big majority: civilians). Whichever route he’s chosen, I’m sure there are any number of survivors of the little mischief-maker’s practices who’d like to help him along in his quest to get closer to God.

Maybe ole’ Superglue figures he needs all the help he can get. Maybe he just thought it might be hip. Maybe it’s an icky way of getting closer to pop fame via Madonna. Maybe it’s driven by some bizarro internal calculus involving amnesty, Israel, the Mossad, and a happy place with dwarves on wooden horses prancing around 1980s era video vixens in French lingerie. Or maybe he’s just a basket case fishing for an insanity defense.

In all seriousness, there hasn’t been a lot of work done to really try to explain Taylor’s psychology. He attended college in the Boston area in the late 1970s, around the same time that, according to Peter Novick, Holocaust consciousness was really beginning to flower. There are traces of the latter that show up in his speechifying in the early stages of the Liberian civil war; I always thought there was a potential correlation between the two threads that would explain some of the texture and detail of his radio broadcasts during that period. If anyone can get a look at his academic transcripts, talk to his former teachers, or look at school records for traces of his involvement in student politics, I’m sure there’ll be something in there that would help explain the thinking behind his newfound multi-denominationalism.

A few weeks ago, Dr. Randy Borum, a forensic psychologist who’s on faculty in several departments of the University of South Florida, dropped us a note to let us know about his new blog, Global Security & Criminology. Randy specializes in the psychology of terrorism, among other things, and sports some serious credentials. He described his blog to us as “focused on applications of social and behavioral science – especially criminology – research to preserve global security and to understand, prevent, and mitigate armed conflict and violent extremism.” He’s also tied his writing in to Dave Munger’s ResearchBlogging.org, which is a Web 2.0 must for anyone interested in serious blogging about peer-reviewed research. We like that a lot, and we like Randy’s work. Go read it and link to it.

No, that’s not me trying to boost ratings by pissing off adherents of two of the world’s great religions. It’s the foretitle of a piece in the May issue of Harper’s called “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade For a Christian Military.” After spending two months barricaded behind pinhole bandwidth and isolated from current print media, I’m just getting caught up on some back reading. This one stuck out, coming about the same time as allegations of proselytization at Baghram and Scripture-embellished intelligence reports in the Bush White House.

Author Jeff Scharlet describes, in this account of contact in Samarra, what happens when stupid people are entrusted with important things:

Insurgents held off Bravo Company, which was called in to rescue the men in the compound. Ammunition ran low. A helicopter tried to drop more but missed. As dusk fell, the men prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a “run and gun” to draw fire away from the compound. Humphrey headed down from the roof to get a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley’s armor, in giant red Arabic script.

“What’s it mean?” asked Humphrey.

“Jesus killed Mohammed,” one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night.

The Bradley, a tracked “tank killer” armed with a cannon and missiles—to most eyes, indistinguishable from a tank itself—rolled out. The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. The sun was setting. Humphrey heard the keen of the call to prayer, then the crackle of the bullhorn with the interpreter answering—in Arabic, then in English for the troops, insulting the prophet. Humphrey’s men loved it. “They were young guys, you know?” says Humphrey. “They were scared.” A Special Forces officer stood next to the interpreter—“a big, tall, blond, grinning type,” says Humphrey.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!”

A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say. He thought The Passion had been a sign that he would survive. The Bradley seemed to draw fire from every doorway. There couldn’t be that many insurgents in Samarra, Humphrey thought. Was this a city of terrorists? Humphrey heard Lieutenant DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening up on all doorways that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire—each Iraqi household is allowed one gun—with 25mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through the front of a house and out the back wall.

Humphrey was stunned. He’d been blown off a tower in Kosovo and seen action in the drug war, but he’d never witnessed a maneuver so fundamentally stupid.

I wish I could claim that I’ve never seen this sort of thing, but I have, and more than once. For Scharlet, episodes like this are symptomatic of a broader culture shift – maybe “not-so-quiet revolution” is a more apt descriptor – taking place within the US military. I always thought these sorts of eccentricities were driven by senior officers who either figured they’d advanced as far as they could and had nothing to lose by it, or thought they needed to distinguish themselves from the pack through some sort of display of quirky insanity in order to earn that elusive first star. Megalomania isn’t a problem limited to uniformed officers, of course. Neither is poor judgment, or hypocrisy. But messianic militancy – more, armed and institutionalized messianic militancy – is a whole ‘nother order of problem.