The Wizard Of Oz

The whole story is a satire of the corruption in the businesses and corporations of America in the late 1800's. The Scarecrow represents the western farmers with no brains, the tin man represents the eastern industrial workers who worked in the factories with no heart, and the lions represent the congressmen with no courage to stand up against the corporations. The yellow brick road represents the gold standard, and the munchkins are the average citizen.

They used to let this scene be embedded but now no longer which is interesting as I have a hunch that a great unveiling is imminent. I cut and paste the above comment as it's better than anything I could have written.

Don't Give Up On The Humans

If it wasn't for Doug Rushkoff I wouldn't have heard a podcast where Terrence McKenna talked about Marshall McCluhan. That odyssey hasn't abated since. I think he's one of the most important thinkers alive and here he articulates once again the case for the importance of emancipating people by harnessing their ability to create tools instead of just use tools. In other words program or be programmed. Here he is at Google with another important talk. It's about choice and alternatives. About unleashing potential.

You May Need To Sit Down

So It Wasn't A Balloon?

Osho - Emotions Blind Us

Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?

Update: Marina Abramovic has inspired Lady Gaga to explore performance art.

Advice

We've seen how morally bankrupt the British political system is on all sides. Blair sells the Libyans arms that are then used against their own people and then later Cameron bombs them from the air to keep a tight reign on the oil so you can nip down to the corner shop and pick up your newspaper which you can read while checking to see what channel the war is on.

It's highly unlikely I will die in the UK so this isn't about my well being. It is about advice to my British friends. Tariq Ali is the nearest thing the Brits have to a natural born leader with the wisdom and track record to do the right thing. 

Should the diaphanous mirage of left and right politics evaporate to reveal a singular entity pulling both left and right levers I put it to you my British friends that you have no better  strategy than to ally yourself closely with the repressed peoples of Pakistan. Should that ever make sense there could be no better guide than Tariq Ali who I suspect can navigate the delicate and precarious framework of doing the right thing without antagonising India. Both countries immigrants are crucial to keeping the the United Kingdom out of war. 

Though of course you might want to watch Tariq's latest talk in Australia and draw your own conclusion.

279 Shopping Days To Christmas

Earlier for the second or third time I tried to explain over the phone why the distinctive leitmotifs of time are changing. Why the linear model is increasingly looking like a fractally recursive and more chronologically compressed model of time than the one that existed say 30 years ago. Three people have just written what I've attempted to say in the last couple of hours and appeared in my feed almost sequentially so it seems right to share them right here and right now:

1. We Must Know
2. Neil Perkin
3. John Smallman

If you're feeling time starved and looking for inspiration then those three posts are a good start. Remember. You can't save time. Only spend it.

Is Advertising Immoral or Unethical?

The short answer you know anyway but that wont change anything. A blog post is unlikely to prompt a vendor of materialism into questioning their value set.

Let me start with an apology. At one point a couple of years ago I was flying between Shanghai and Hong Kong as the Global Account Planning Director on a piece of Coca-cola business. I was in the air so much that one week I ate more airline food than terrestrial meals. The hard work paid off. The creative was all over the show at the first meeting, and as everyone else was too busy I managed to rewire the creative script/animation and of course presented with unusual pride and conviction and sold the ad to the client. She's now head of Coca Cola marketing and is Rob's client. Lucky for him she's no-nonsense solid Gold and a bit of thinker too. We both held similar radical Maoist ideas that I don't hold today but was shocked to hear my client echo. 

I did not come up with the idea. I only rewired it to make sense. That ad went on to increase the RTD beverage sales of that drink 73% year on year. No small volume in the fastest growing and largest market in the world. That's a fuck load of sugared water. That's a lot of apologies to Chinese kids.

Was I responsible for that? I doubt it. The idea was cute, my timing was great, resources were thin and I had total licence to make it how I thought it should be made. It was Chinese New Year (but then it was Year on Year sales) and things came together.

But I can't claim to be innocent in the entire enterprise. If I'm honest with myself it was my presentation skills that nailed a quick sign off. The lovely account manager who handed me the reigns was actually cute enough to say I was "fantastic" when we presented. I wasn't, but then it would look OKish from someone who had a ton more experience around the world at a global level, and so I was happy to do it. She was happy not to get bogged down in endless back and forth which is a serious problem with Asian clients and junior Asian account handlers. She also tipped me off that my mediocre Japanese boss was losing face around me and that I wasn't to trust him. That advice alone put 10 000 bucks in my pocket when he eventually fired me. I spent it on a watch that was subsequently stolen in that taxi back in Hong Kong. So that's Karma for you. Easy come easy go.

So I'm just as guilty as you but I have given great consideration to how brands can be part of our future. 

The answer to whether it's immoral or unethical? 

Mostly immoral and largely unethical always (as with anything) contextual. Generally speaking for a planet that is groaning at the seams ecologically it's no different than selling arms to Libya before bombing them.

It's not like I'm suggesting I'm any better than you. I'm not. But I don't mind talking about it. So how exactly do you feel?

LSD

The Channel you forgot about?

Supermoon

How Alien Are We?

How Alien are we?

Nibiru, Planet X, Hercolobus & The Heliosphere

I've been tracking the heliosphere and saw this as soon as it came out, but didn't think it would be helpful posting a silent video of a super massive body approaching the Sun. Now that this gentleman has added a voiceover (and some tasteful chillout tech), it's worth putting up here. Much of NASA and all of mainstream media are unwilling to engage in questions about this information, as keeping you in the dark is what pays their bills. I hope it's not removed from Youtube as that often happens with passionate amateurs who spot cosmic anomalies and post them on Youtube.

Do your own homework, but in case you're curious I'm relaxed about this as I've been hanging out with some extraordinary peeps on the on the internet. Have a nice weekend.

Rise Of China

Martin Jacques the prominent (former) Marxist intellectual of the UK did a talk about China at TED. I like Martin Jacques so perhaps I'm splitting hairs over his mispronunciation of LENOVO in the talk but there is one point he makes about ignorance which is worth the the full 25 minutes. 

If you're reading this from the West and are more engaged with the goggle box for sports and know more about team members sex lives than any facts you care to choose about China then you may well be in for a surprise when the winds of cultural change unravel and blossom as quickly as they can.

Arbeit Macht Frei

Religions don't' spiritualise

Schools don't educate

Health is a business

Business is unhealthy

Politics enslaves

Mass media manipulates

Food is poison

Freedom is loathed

Individuality is scorned

Markets are rigged

Governments are not your friend

Choose wisely

Mercury Rising

Full playlist.

Detroit Grand Pubahs: Autotragik

Chomsky On Libya

The West never gets involved in these affairs unless there's money in it. We watched a million plus slaughter in the Congo that still goes on today but because Libya is an oil economy  the media is prurient enough to try and batter our opinions into considering that humanitarian aid and no fly zones and all the other two faced shit we spout about values an democracy and justice are important.

But really it's the SUV and pampered Western lifestyles we are trying to prop up so that we can be friends with the next tyrant we install and cut a nice deal for arms and oil, like did and like we will always try to do. 

Well I'm sick of it and though I reserve the right to change a contextual mind as events change, it's a bad idea of the West to go in when there are neighbours who can do a better long term job in Libya.

We only have a handful of acivist scholars with integrity who can articulate the nuance to intellectual media dwarfs like Paxman who fails pathetically to rise to the occasion and provide a level of clarity that Chomsky has. Paxman doesn't get it. Which is why his questions are low grade media fodder keeping him in front of the cameras that pay his salary predicated on disaster. 


Unlike the Professor who is forced to articulate two or three times why Libya is different. Part two is here

Via Mr Wonkish

Tick Tock Tick Tock

I've been blogging a bit about John Titor since I discovered his story last week, because it punched a hole through my space time continuum and buggered up the rough narrative I've been piecemeal assembling in answer to the question 'who am I?'.

Then I did a bit more research. I thought I'd throw it out there to avoid surprises if the story ever fleshed out a bit and erm...it has. Titor claimed that the time travel mission he was doing emerged from 2036 where super collider physics using counter rotating black holes, had initiated the development of early time machines. It's all very complicated without blagging a bit of M Theory, but for the geeks out there, the Grandfather Paradox isn't a problem and can be accommodated. In fact all paradoxes can be accommodated in a multi dimensional universe which is a bit of a scary thought until the unlimited possibilities are considered. The good ones that is.

Right on schedule the lab monkeys at CERN, who are tinkering with this stuff have published an early paper on time travel using similar maths theory behind twin counter rotating black hole gizmos for time-travel field-creation are surfacing, and so now we're creeping up to the edge of the rabbit hole. An interesting comment that John Titor mentions from 2036 is that a lot of people couldn't deal with the idea then either, and preferred to live as if it didn't quite exist. Which ironically suggests that only people who believe in it will ever notice or be effected by it. Which is not that far from that God thing right? 

So here's the link if you wish to go read about it from the 'Source'. I for one wont be telling the scientists where the time machine schematics that Titor posted are because the U.S. civil war thing he averted didn't happen (but is that a good thing?) and I don't think we should dick around with Time when we're too stupid a monkey to magic away the nuclear power we're dependant on. Which we can do if the rumours are true. Time will tell.

John if on some slim chance you're still around, I have a bunch of philosophical questions for you and I'm not really interested in predictions. Worth a try.

Jack Parsons, Science & Occultism

This is a bit good. I get a bit lost when people give coordinates in degrees on planets I've never been to or even seen, but the rest of the evidence is compelling. Richard Hoagland, who used to be a science advisor to Walter Cronkite (at ABC?) paints vivid connections within connections. They seem fabulous and possibly too convoluted to be deliberate in all cases, which begs the question; is it accidental or are many coincidences orchestrated at some hyper dimensional or subconscious level? The full playlist link is here.