Forgiveness?

I had breakfast with my Thai Sister. We don't speak when I'm there. I try, but she prefers silence, so that's when I see the occasional ad with something going on, or as in this case, I caught sight of the screen image and was right by it in no time as the shots were still ringing out. Me incredulous. He did that didn't he. This is the real thing.

Its not nice, but I've uploaded it as I think too much of the dying process is cordoned off from us. Specifically the killing that takes place to protect our lifestyles. This clip too has been sanitised with the court officials being cropped out of it leaving their deaths to the imagination. Can I level with you? This is a no nonsense, matter of fact example of how banal  a killer  can be in their conduct. 


He begins with by spray painting a circle overlapped by a larger V. As if remixing V is for Vendetta and Anarchy. Then he explains who stays, and instructs the the women to leave. One of the women returns doing Disney cartoon tiptoing behind the gunman only to fail miserably at dislodging the gun. He's not phased at all by this unexpected event. 


Then we cut to the the best efforts of the court officials pleading they need to understand his motivation for their impending death, a sense of dragging it out longer than necessary emerges, the judge who actually signed the papers that led to this incident requests that everyone else be released.

I'm aware that in all this mess of man against whatever it is that the cultural complex leaves for so many, an incongruous relationship with something biological, and which pushes those on  the margins, sometimes over the edge. 

I'm touched that this still exists in our species, and that all is not lost. Not in one go anyway. 


The shots take place matter of factly. The judges slain where they work and if I recall correctly from the uncensored TV screen version the gunman makes a hopping movement at some point as if maybe a guard has finally arrived at the scene and tried to prevent what had already been committed to history.

The sobering effects of guns are acute. When the barrel direction is on you, suddenly the realisation that its our consciousness which is beyond value and that all those remaining worldly goods are trivial and useless to barter with or to plead for our lives.

 I feel bad about this event. Maybe it's dull with the cropped corpses. If the video provokes even minor changes in some lucky peoples priority of values, its worth the sickening feel it leaves behind.

I Me Me Mine

I Me Mine is the ego problem. There are two 'I's: the little 'i' when people say 'I am this'; and the big 'I' - ie duality and ego. There is nothing that isn't part of the complete whole. When the little 'i' merges into the big 'I' then you are really smiling!

—George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology^[1]

Nature Gift Thailand

I just caught the end of this Nature Gift short ad for gifting sets and was bowled over by the rawness. OK it's a bit contrived getting there, and they've jumped through hoops to get the brand in but the empathy created still struck me as one of those little things in Thai TV advertising that is creeping in as much as possible. 

Unexpected small rule breaking flourishes. 

I wish I had a copy of the soap powder ad that sends up the entire genre by basically messing around with template creativity and saying yeah it's a crappy ad so we're not going to bore you shitless, without a wink and something a bit wacky.

Leakflood

Charles Krauthammer

I try to spend as much time as possible finding opinions that disagree with mine and that are substantive. I wouldn't want people to assume that I'm a knee jerk leftist even though I   stand totally against the corrosive effect that Fox news has on the American people. I also don't like Hannity as like O'Reilly he's an unpleasant bully. He makes it so easy to forget that when interviewing erudite company he can raise his game a little, though he's most certainly not Copernicus. Don't even get me onto CNN's toothless dog.

However here are two of my pet hates and Charles Krauthammer, who I think like Clinton and Obama are still ignoring the intellectual pre-industrial economic mammoth in the room. Robert Reich (who is demonstratively brilliant) probably thinks like I do but I totally disagree on his economic purism timing. I sense he misses the arena. Seeing Bill and Obama on his old sparring ground yesterday. This isn't surprising but it is most definitely human and forgiveable.

Though straight after this should there be some kind of disclosure that doesn't pop the system? *

 Yeah. Go for it. Tell the American people why 2 trillion in the bank lends no succour and that the Pentagon and black hole budgeting CIA are both largely pernicious anachronisms and would best be merged into some sort of post industrial think tank/incubator/global relief mechanism hired out to the U.N at fair rates.

 After all, those anonymous chaps have already run the globe ragged through domination by neo-liberal failed shock doctrine economics. It's also purely State owned so if that kind of unthinkable thinking were to happen, I'd get to call it what it really is neo-Marxism for the 21st century. That's the Kafkaesque world I'm forced to live in.

Anyway. Fox and reasonable analysis...Blow me.

* Personally I say pop the system but I'm more resilient than most and don't have as much baggage to weep over. However that's not a particularly fair basis when considering others, and it's a bit more complex than yay or nay.

The Comeback Kid

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the street fighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? - ZIZEK - 23 July 2009

Some of you (all two of you on a good day) by now know that my political antenna are twitching in small spastic gestures, myopically groping their way to the disconnected future, uncovering micrograms of evidence that we're living in dramatically changing times.

Looking back on my own political wakening I genuinely gulp now how little and how shallow it really was, yet how vociferously it was argued. We argued rowdy politics over calming joints in the early 90's before heading out to the student parties. Ending for me by falling in love with an East German girl only to find employment working for the US army bases in Germany. It is here I started to fully grasp the empirical might the United States.

I really lucked out later on with a political mentor who had read more than anyone I knew and threw more valuable books my way in a few short years than I've read in a decade since. I pickled myself in rum and politics on tropical beaches interspersed with Asian tiger adland bouts and occasional Euro runs.

What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that growing up politically in the Clinton years that criss crossed and spanned, living and working in the two continents of Europe and Asia is a pespective that only now do I grasp was the solid foundation for moulding my undying love for the idea of ideas. The politics of politics. The meaning of what I mean.

I've slumped countless ideological times since those Hacyonic days of living in the Clinton era to learn of how much damage the financial market liberalisation is the responsibility of the former president. How say the market liberalisation of Haitian rice farmers to choose just one small devastating example, was destroyed by the subsidies of the American rice farmers, is personally down to Bill Clinton. An example I now know extends back into deeper  'merkan history.

Yet does one ever really forget all the merits of a past love affair? Not me. I see what it is that I adored. The only regrets I have now, emerging into middle age is the the frequent bouts of bad taste I've sailed with. Taste is both something we acquire and if we're honest with the definition of taste, are occasionally forced to dispense with as we evolve.

I worry about America. The putrid silence on the part of Capitalist Baconistas. The self evident insanity of the main stream right wing. The endlessly disappointing performance of the wishy washy left and those who hailed hope and change only to strand aspirational ships on sharp rocks of granite despair.

Then I see you again. The Polymath. The Comeback Kid, who with blow-job bravado takes on the Whitehouse press corp in a manner we haven't seen since the late nineties. And I want to believe you're going to make it. To silence the reptiles in the C Suite who control the Oval. I want to believe. I want.

I watch as the self evident principles of neo-sharing mysteriously take place at the highest level of office on the planet. I want to believe again in you America. Eight years of happiness and prosperity for me were pummelled with brutal annihilation into a hazy amnesia.

Please watch this. It's not just about the man, even though it's not just what you say it's how you say it. This is about the nature of ideas. Ideas that live and breath, that change and evolve, adapt and mutate to withstand the most colossal compression of evolutionary terminating forces we're facing. 

This is our karma. This is our responsibility. We're all in it together.

No Rules

Dakine Coffee Bean

Dakine Coffee Bean

Schadenfreude

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Police State

I wasn't aware of the acuteness of London's Student Loans battles until listening to the chants of 'off with their heads' to Prince Charles over the World Service and finally till I came across these incredible pictures which Boston.com is revolutionizing photo journalism with. 

I've a couple of comments to make. First I think Marbury (who led me to the photography) underestimates much of what this is all about by attributing a narrow and unimaginative causal relationship to events, but as I like his blog, and there was that whole misunderstanding about the Ellesberg Papers I don't really want to pursue it too hard right now other than to mention my recent 1968 Awesomeness post and to point out the supportive and vocal sympathies of many people who really don't seem to have that much of a view on Student or Educational loans. But his blog is still one of the few political blogs I read for its careful analysis of restrained transatlantic political commentary as the volume from traditional media blowhards in this area is irritating and unhelpful.

Lastly I think it's worth noting that similar civil unrest in Bangkok also caught by the Boston.Com photographers led to Royal Thai Army Snipers picking off white flag wavers and medical staff in the grounds of the most centrally located Buddhist Temple here in Bangkok earlier this year though one has to live in Asia to really understand that life is tragically just so much cheaper. You may find that insensitive but I assure you I'm far from callous and I'm definitely pointing a rice fed finger towards an asymmetric life valuation hierarchy that Orientals know full well is skewed by Occidental standards of living. Worth bearing in mind if sympathy is ever sought, particularly as many of the arrested are still being held and tortured in jail to this day by Royal Thai Army loyalist troops.

Tricia Wang

Digital Urbanism on the Margins: Chinese Migrants and Intensive Technology

View more presentations from triciawang.

Tricia is among other things a digital ethnographer and is heading to China for a few years to hang out with Chinese Migrants who you might remember from this blog are heavily reliant on their mobile phones for both connection to distant family and also as private space in crowded living conditions.

Her presentation here is interesting both for it's hypotheses that she puts forward and because it's a work in progress so maybe we'll get to learn something about a category that for many people in China takes a few months to save up for.

I'm pretty sure that Tricia sucks up even more bandwidth on the internet than I do and I think that's saying something.

Collapse

I had some problems embedding two videos in the same post so I've reposted the second half of the Michael Ruppert documentary here. Chronologically it's in the wrong order now, but you can find part one here. Please do let me know if these videos are later removed as I can delete or find another way. Thanks.

Leakspin

Serpico

There's a definitive Golden Period for movies in American Cinema that roughly extends from the mid to late sixties through to the mid seventies. I got thinking about this again last night as I downloaded Network on the advice of Tariq Ali and at first wasn't convinced but I stuck it out as Faye Dunaway was looking absolutely hot (even in Beige), and then when the Howard Beale (Peter Finch) started to get Messianic I realised that it was going to be some straight shooting commentary on the United States. The feedback on Twitter was very positive and it seems that it's a favourite for many of you. 

It also unveiled a contrast on the other Network movie I coincidentally caught this week which was The Social Network.  A movie I couldn't complete it was so banal, as I could see that it only worked because Facebook is worth Gazillions otherwise it would be a straight to video affair of the 'Breakdance' and 'You've got mail' genre. Generally spindly attempts by Daddy "Capital C" culture to parasitically subsume the stuff we do to break away from it. Also sometimes called 'Counter culture' and which Madison Avenue hoovers up relentlessly.

I've previously written why Culture (capital C) is most definitely not your friend, though recently I listened to the most comprehensive and devastating explanation of why culture is everything we are not, or even as humans. Sounds illogical but the enlightenment is worth a listen from one Joseph Chilton Pearce. I'm going to name check a couple of bloggers I think should listen to this stuff too so Robert and Johnnie please make time to listen to these three podcasts when/if you can: 1, 2, 3.

I really do procrastinate don't I? I haven't even mentioned Al Pacino in Serpico. The reason it's such an iconoclastic movie in Thailand is that the cops are so corrupt that when the movie was aired here in Thailand, it was an incredible success. The real life story of Frank Serpico as played by Pacino was instantly adopted as a folk hero against corruption and greed by the cops. His sticker was mass produced and paraded on pickup trucks and motorbikes because invariably they are the people that the parasitic police most penalise with petty fines, while leaving the better off problem-free for the same minor law transgressions. 

It was a counter culture "fuck you" to the police that a White Boy parachute planner in Thailand would never get to know. Particularly if they're dropping into middle class bourgeoisie planner-land that is telling them a buffalo is an insult in Thailand, when in point of fact to the majority pro red working class, it's like the "nigger" word amongst blacks. 

A point of perverse pride. 

In any case, this is all rather a dramatic build up to "Collapse" which is a documentary Lee Maschemeyer in New York brought my attention to some time back. I didn't download it because, hard to believe, I don't get off on pessimism porn as much as you might expect. But as it resurfaced in my data stream, I put off the washing up, and it's really good. The music is well arranged and poignantly appropriate for a documentary interview style , making it compelling.

Most enjoyable for me was correcting a false perception I'd had for a while now when estimating Michael Ruppert. He's an ex-cop who was hounded out of the force for blowing the whistle on CIA drug dealing (yes they deal drugs, get over it) but I always assumed he was probably not on the smart side of things, and that is why he lost his job. I know from repeated experience that most cops aren't paid because they are clever but instead are paid to be loyal. 

I wrongly assumed Michael was one of those kind of cops, but instead I learned earlier that like Serpico he was one of the finest and bravest cops that the LAPD ever had in their ranks. His academic credentials are excellent, his story telling is blunt and rivetting and even though I don't know any more than you as to precisely what the future holds for us, I do know that if you refuse to see that the times they are 'a changing, then it's highly likely you're planning ability is flawed. Particuarly if you're a planner defending the Corporate Ancien Regime on the flimsy basis that it pays the bills.

Here's the first part. Inform yourself.  Because You're Worth it.

I've had to post the second part seperately for html embed ju jitsu reasons that you don't need to know about. So look above or look to 'newer posts' if you're coming back from the future so to speak.

Operation Payback

For the first time since 2003 I've been back on mIRC in a proper manner, mixing with the evil geniuses I used to spend a lot of time with. I've dropped in now and again in the last few years, to see what's going on there but as Twitter have been a complete pussy and banned user "Operation Payback" who are coordinating the DDOS attacks against the financial institutions I had no way of knowing what was going on. I do now, and I can tell you it's hopping on their channel.

Gavin has provided a list of the financial institutions being targeted along with a fine cyber manifesto that is believe it or not an extraordinary and prescient piece of noble digital thinking from the 90's and which I think I will later on, repost in full here. 

If you feel inclined to dabble in the dark arts then I 'hear' that all one needs to do is follow the instructions over here. Rumour has it that Anna Ardin who boasted on her blog how to stitch men up legally on her blog entitled "Seven Steps to Legal Revenge" is no longer cooperating with the Swedish police and has left the country, but that's not official, though I do believe Paypal have reversed their decision to freeze donations to Wikileaks.

Between you and I, it's probably a decision based on pure capitalism. So that's not one I can comment on given I prefer principles to profit. It's just business after all chaps.

Inside North Korea - Everything Is Connected

Transparency at the underhand and manipulative state department is just as important as the transparency emerging from North Korea on cell phone videos. Actually there are cables regarding North Korea which directly impact on this shockingly malnourished girls life. 

The responsibilities of globalisation are such that it's no longer a moral option to disconnect from the actions of one's government. 

The girl above is in her early twenties. Watch it and grok it.

These Things Happen

I heard about this from my official UK ticker tape on twitter who keeps me up to date on things I no longer follow but should know enough about to be polite, such as the recent cricket win.

This clip is even way better than I imagined it from the twitterstream. It lurches from vulgarity to pious correction then ill suppressed laughter with an hilarity that is hard to appreciate for those that may not have ever included the slightly august BBC Today show over breakfast with politics. Awesomeness on a cunt.

Information Warfare

I think I first mentioned information warfare on this blog in January 2008 though if you scout around a bit I've been talking about it quite a bit longer than that. I was first alerted to the idea of it by Marshal McLuhan and subsequently learned that Churchill also predicted the third world war would be an information war too from his learnings about the Engima code cracking at Bletchey Park.

Talking with a friend of mine in Hong Kong last year she believed it had already commenced, and of course it makes perfect sense within the context of information war that nobody actually declares it. They just get on with it. That's quite an important point now that information is so easy to discredit. Judge people on what they do and not on what they say.

It's for this reason that as soon as America starts to talk about absolutely anything being against its interests, then by and large I assume it's in my interest to take a contrarian stance. I've long given up the assumption that the nation state is going to take care of our generation in any meaningful way when they prosecute illegal wars, manipulate mainstream media and generally mortgage off to the future, any value that can be extracted today. 


I see that smaller countries all over the world genuflect subserviently when asked to carry out the wishes of the auto aspyxiating American Empire. That includes Australia, "Special Needs" UK and now Spineless Sweden. Only the New Bolivarian Latin Americans  have drawn a line in the sand to IMF and World Bank cripple-loans coupled with Shock Doctrine  economic restructuring that pays for the subsidies on all aspects of our Northern Hemisphere consumption lifestyles. It's for this reason the parasitic adjective is by no means melodramatic, though of course you could enlighten yourself and listen to Susan George on this subject if your courage hasn't still utterly failed you.

By now we all know that Julian Assange is under arrest for the Wikileaks of State Department cables detailing; nothing of danger to human life, exposing cyber security issues within the United States and most importantly telling the truth that is largely a story of deception by our so called enlightened and liberal governments. A truth that has me shaking my head when I see otherwise grown up people applaud being treated like a child by the nanny state.


In principal the people who are most diligent about secrecy have the most to hide. I've no problem with the individuals right to privacy but the transparency being imposed on the State Department is a good thing. Particularly in light of a century of exploitation in countries I've noticed the same finger wagging people are bottom-line clueless on. People who demand and are unwavering on privacy yet don't mind using the courts to drag a man's privacy through the mud. Where's your gestalt? Is this how you define your weltanschuung? On CIA inspired charges of trivial post coital rape?

I'm disgusted that my instinct about Julia Gillard was bang on the money revealing her to be a drawling mutt of an Aussie woman with clear as daylight ugly ambitions. I'd like to think Kevin Rudd was different but I've watched as he lead the way for restricted internet freedoms in Australia as the Canary in the Western world digital coal mine. No he's just as transparent and superficial. A lightweight leader deservingly slapped into place by a woman with greedier power ambition than he. Serves him right..... No worries as they say in Australia.

However if you insist, then of course the due course of law must be pursued through normal channel,s though I claim that the persecution of Julian Assange is for false allegations of rape. The timing is odd, the filing of the case and the speed with which it has been processed is highly unusual and then there's the abnormality of the girl who claims to be exploiting this post coital rape legislation that is unique to Sweden on her blog when the matter is ostensibly an ambiguous (and private argument) of prophylactic use. 


I don't mind if the domestic law dramatises its international servility by following it's masters wishes for pursuing proxy revenge instead of justice, but the silence on the part of people about any other (and there are many) important political issues currently framing our complex and morally challenging daily lives is deafening (and insulting). It points towards a triviality and ignorance that is missing from the even handedness that righteous justice demands. So let's have our Kangaroo court case. 

And be done with it.

Extra Dimensional Advertising

In my mind, I'm obliged to write about the stark contrasts between video learning and the traditional education model. But as you don't know that I've been experimenting on my learning behaviour I can cut to the chase and come back to some really interesting revelations on learning modalities that I'm in the middle of.

OK so now you do know but let's stay on topic because I wrote this before my Quantum post and as I watched Inception two nights ago it's horrifying to me if people think I'm lifting ideas from movies, so now my policy is to get these posts out in a linear narrative fashion and as quickly possible.

Allow me to be a bit circumspect as it should, if I pull it off, cover my rear with the straights in the house, connect with the enlightened and curious, and also be generous for those in between. I will now adumbrate the connections between Aldous Huxley and Breakfast Cereal advertising.

Many people recognise that Special K is on the one hand banal and on the other deeply subversive. I'm going to exploit that subversive route by explaining that the dimensions  normally talked about in Special K are about an imaginary product with imaginary benefits that do more than watch your waistline. 

Imagine for example nobody informs you in your sleep that suddenly your right arm is two metres long and your left was the usual specifications. Imagine again, like me you're sprawled out on your bed, face down and both arms are touching the linen. You got that? Good, OK then the imaginary question is that if one were blind, there's no way of knowing through tactile sensory ability that the arm lengths are suddenly different. That is if you couldn't see your arms or were just waking up and alerted to their spatial pressure needed to push ourselves up you wouldn't know the difference. If the bed had mystically extended easily, then the feeling of having asymmetric arm lengths, wouldn't reveal itself. There would be no procrustean dissonance right? Ignore that link. I'm just pimping for Nicholas Talebs new book.

The point I'm trying to make is that tactile sensory experience doesn't involve or weigh largely on change of arm lengths.

That's the Special K breakfast experience messing with your head isn't it? That's one of the ways that Special K fools around with 4 dimensions while pretending to tackle the dimension it's advertising to do. Your girth for instance.

I've been thinking about how to explain this for a long time. But there's no way of making extra dimension references without being meaningless. That's because without the felt presence of immediate experience it's just abstract vocabulary.

So recently I've been trying to understand quantum physics' extra dimensions. The three dimensions are known to us quite well. The fourth is sometimes called time but not in the example below. As an aside I'd caution that time is the least understood. beginning, middle and end make a lot of sense to us but there's tonnes of evidence to suggest that it's the exception not the rule.

According to Quantum physics there are 11 dimensions. It's tough getting past the fifth dimension because the idea of meeting ourselves in folded dimensions is a bit heavy if not impossible. Unless Special K has done a scary on you at some point.

So while I was trawling through various explanations of extra dimensional space time (and neuro short circuiting too) I chanced across the most cheesy 70's style, but brilliant explanation of a way to observe that asymetric arm action outside of Special K space and time. 


I know it's Carl Sagan, don't be science snobby. I too was sniffy about indulging him at first, but this is bonkers clever at explaining extra dimensional understanding. He explains the Tesseract which is a four dimensional analog of a cube. I'll try to be creative here. It's like a 3D cube with it's insides sucked inside out to make sense in 4D.

The Tesseract is a shape impossible to illuminate fully in 3D. At best we could only glimpse it like those who believe in ghosts might envision spirits are lo fidelity spectrums in 3D. Here's Carl explaning it better than anyone.

Carl brilliantly uses the shadow of a perspex abstract of a Tesseract to explain how it would look in real life.

We clear?

Is this a good time to mention crop circles? I thought not. But let's face it. If the Tea Party can get away with racism, if the United States of America can get away with torture, if flying is still as cool as being a pimp then I'm damn sure I can go down this short cul de sac.

I don't really worry too much about individual definitions of crop circles. I'm inclined towards a Jungian analysis of what is the effect rather than the cause. So like y'all do on the quiet I've been tracking crop circles for the last two years. Mainly because the frequency is increasing year by year. The intensity of crop circles is only matched by the complete absence of farmer rage for people destroying their incomes.

2010 is no exception.

I've deliberately chosen this video for two reasons. I think it includes contributions from The Circle Makers who also go on to talk about some of the strange experiences they have had while recreating crop circles in England. It's because scepticism is almost preprogrammed into the crop circle phenomena that I've no interest in sharing my thoughts that are coalescing on this topic which if you've got this far, even if it's just one and half people (extra dimensional gag) then I'm doing well. The second reason for the video is the cutaway shot of a crop stalk with a bubble on it. Scientists have measured and recorded this in most crop circles. It's caused by heat swelling up the water on the joints of crop stalks. You should know this little discussed observation as it opens up possibilities a bit.

This isn't the time to go into crop circle trends but I'm disappointed so many planners aren't even curious about contemporary conundrums. Her Majesty's British government no less, legislated against dancing in fields through the 2004 anti rave legislation act, and yet to this day has no official line on trampling crops for geometric semioticians to get off on. I claim that to ignore this is to to be leading an unexamined life. Absence of theory is absence of creativity at the very least.

I should wrap up on this last one of the Tesseract because that's really the point of the post. A shape not possible in real life is now appearing in crop fields of England. What ever happened to a simple 'nonsense woz 'ere'? It's all very interesting.

1968 Awesomeness

One of the remarkable things about that fluffy bunch of overpaid and creatively cauterized group of advertising sheep is they're obession with bleating "awesomeness" (a value neutral contribution) at any opportunity. Could it be they've neglected to see how the world is changing before our eyes?

I was staggered some years back to read that planners (or that increasingly bloated class of notionally-superficial-intellect planning-charlatans) admit they didn't see the relevance of the internet when it emerged in the early 90's, for our business. This is beyond words for a category with the privilege of being able to think things through and when to my mind any sentient being could see it was the most cataclysmic disruption and challenge to the mainstream broadcast media business ever. As time progresses I put it to you that a normalization of human interaction is taking place such that if there is tipping point against monologue messaging, it will be irreversible. We've utterly blown any trust or credibility we may have had a chance to retain or even earn back.

Furthermore knowing the advertising group-think dynamics quite intimately, I confidently predict they will do an ideological about turn because their relationship with the truth is largely defined by a pampered and paunchy lifestyle expensed at the celebration of vacuous and immorally wasteful consumption, and as Arthur Schopenhauer elaborated:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident

I put it to you that the privileged and influential (information) classes will clamber over the bleeding bodies of the violently opposed, to claim that truth as if it were their own all along. That's how awesome advertising people are, by and large.

Maybe you think I'm overstating the case? Well I always like to invoke the observation that out of all the ethnographic studies, hanging out with cool peeps, endless focus groups and datanormous quantitative research that advertising does, it's the last to highlight when and where the revolutions or real change are emerging. An example?

Here in Bangkok a hundred were mown down by army snipers earlier this year and yet not one research company could point out that there existed a modicum of dissatisfaction with the existing regime? What an own goal. We spend endless amounts trying to connect with customers on a meaningful level yet why is that we neither ask the right questions or listen to the right answers?

The reason for this is that it's not in a remedial planners short-term best interest to point out that large cultural shifts are taking place. No, advertising is largely a sycophantic extension of the wealth creation machine for the wealthy. And for those who have studied their Marx the ability for the latest, fastest and most powerful version of Capitalism to emerge out of Singapore and take root in China is Authoritarian Capitalism. An unexpected strain that is not only more effective than the neo-liberal version championed in the West but and most sobering for anyone thinking things through right now, is largely disconnected from democratic representation. Below is just another sign of the times. A police officer who cowered in his car for three hours as the mobs outside clamoured for his blood. This isn't something I expect to see in the United States any time soon as the bread and circus distractions are way too awesome to connect the corn syrup classes with their own highly diminished and globally parasitic existence.

I put it to you that the crime isn't about joining in with the awesomeness group chant, in the hope it paints a picture of you as a warm and cuddly. But if there's no edge to anything else you've got to say, you're just another bloated corpse on the advertising gravy train. Part of the problem and blocking the solution. Time will tell. It always does.

DMT - The Spirit Molecule

DMT is as natural as (and similar in a molecular sense to) Seratonin and Melatonin. It is found organically in our neuro-chemistry as well as other mammals and plants around the world. The blood brain barrier is quite picky about what it lets through so the assumption is that there's a purpose for this molecule though quite what that purpose is , nobody seems to know for sure. 

After the Americans shut down all psychedelic research in the late 60's, possibly because of the connection to war protests, it became career suicide to even express an interest in the subject worldwide, but some time in the mid 90's Dr. Rick Strassman began clinical trials to observe the effects of DMT from a standard psycho-pharmacological model to about 60 people over about five years.

A documentary was made about it this year and released only last month. I managed to see it a couple of nights ago and I think it's worth having an opinion on. The interviewees are all intelligent and mature people who try to explain the experiences they had which they  most often categorise as trans-dimensional and thus largely ineffable. 

The interviews are on Youtube but if the chance avails itself you can find out more about screenings at the Spirit Molecule website.

Shitty Semiotics

Above is an Anglo Saxon toilet bowl most readers of this blog should be familiar with. It's very centred isn't it?

Next is the French loo with it's rearward mechanic situated most closely to the flush pipe.

And finally above is the German toilet design, with a completely opposite forward-emphasis arrangement in comparison to the French version.

The visuals are the support material for the clip below. The first time I listened to Zizek deconstructing European toilets, I loved it and wanted to write it up as a post, but as somebody has generously uploaded a clip of his toilet-architecture rap I can include post it instead. It's hard to find any fault between his analysis of the Teutonic, French and Anglo Saxon toilet designs, and for those who haven't embarked on a tranhumanism voyage yet is fucking funny.

Geek-Group-Think & Digital Determinism

Anand Giriharadas of the New York Times, touches on some very valuable points in this talk about developing a digital philosophy. I particularly recognise his view that among geeks (and I consider myself on the geeky side) the propensity for group-think is such that it overtakes religion in its ability to stifle questions such as; is more technology always better, is it always the solution, and where it hasn't yet gone must it always go? These are important issues worth having a view about.

Time Theory Part II

80's Music from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

This is kind of weird but when I mentioned to Marcus that I really liked what he said, I got an email pointing towards this video he made about it when he was going through his rubber gloves period. It's a fun way of reducing my self indulgently long and pseudo intellectual post about drugs and quantum physics. Marcus has a nice little body of social media work if you go into his video channel over here.

We also grew up about 200 metres away from each other in Southampton, hung out in the same parks yet never knew each other. Which is a good thing because I would have probably not appreciated him so much and I know my record of keeping contact with people from my youth is not strong. This is the quid pro quo of an international jet set gypsy lifestyle. There's always a quid pro quo.