Is Shirky Shirking The Obvious?

I think Clay Shirky handles some early questions here with elegance and intellectual panache but as soon as it comes to the schizophrenia of U.S. democracy with sham foreign policy interests he back peddles noticeably, passing one answer on to a deeply unrespected congress in a somewhat knock-kneed distancing of intellectual responsibility as to what the notion of an autocratic government is. Clue, its one that doesn't listen to its electorate. Hopeless, changeless and so on.

Clay evidently doesn't see that funding and propping up dictators such as Egypt and Tunisia and Libya (shall I go on?) is merely a variant of autocracy dramatized through repression abroad as a hyperpower strategy. 

Just because U.S. citizens are by and large pampered and misled sheep doesn't change the nature of pernicious empirical power or the impending doom that will visit them. This is only a matter of time. I'm also happy to write at length about US censorship too.

Clay, this isn't personal but the veil is over your eyes when it comes to the illusion you cling on to that the U.S is a model democracy.  By all means throw a Scandinavian country in there but not a dypsomaniac hyperpower lurching on the precipice. You need to get away from the Pasta and Chardonnay crowd.


I rarely agree with Gladwell but his tipping point is increasingly imminent.

LSD

LSD stops cluster headaches more effectively than big pharma drugs peddled on every high street around the world and yet it is illegal. The reason for that is that during the 60's the CIA et al were conducting unlicensed experiments on both US soldiers as well as waifs and strays that were kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned in rooms with two way mirrors where some of them were subjected to a number of experiences including sex that would normally have been rejected while uninfluenced. I've heard stories that some lost their mind as it's a molecule that requires a certain amount of respect. One where set and setting is crucial for people if proper consciousness exploration takes place.

This documentary is extraordinary in so much as there is an emerging desire from some people to reframe the propaganda that was pushed out about this neurotransmitter when the military learned that the most devastating effect of LSD is it dissolves the power of the State to kill our fellow men.


An idea not so well appreciated during the failed Vietnam war.


So they (the usual institutions) pushed it through a rush bill in the Senate where it was conflated with the drugs that the CIA much prefers to deal around the world thus creating  laws that give them distribution advantages for the much more profitable and addictive substances such as heroin and cocaine. Cocaine is incredibly interesting to me these days as I rarely meet a likeable person who is into it. Not that we didn't all dabble in our youth but it seems spiritually questioning people tend to grow out of it finding its narcissistic bent unappealing. If Cocaine is all about me, me, me. Then LSD could be described as us, us, us.

I don't condone or unambiguously proselytise the use of recreational pharmaceuticals. If life is  a patently beautiful experience of its own accord. If love and happiness are abundant, then there's no need to explore. However if a person does wish to explore then there is lots good information and people willing to offer constructive viewpoints at www.erowid.org that can be helpful and instructive in learning and securing the right information for a constructive exploration of the total infinity of consciousness. Remember set and setting. Here's that good documentary on the subject.

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement gets a whole lot more intellectually concrete under these circumstances. It only takes 15 minutes or so of time and left me shaking my head for a few days but it is as it is, in so far as it's impossible to ignore. Unless one is materially  distracted.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Can The United States Go Cold Turkey?

Helios

You can't go wrong tracking increased activity in the solar system at the moment. There's a lot of serious forecasting backed up by a solid evidence that star and planetary transformation is taking place. There's a bunch of conclusions of which many are quite unsettling but right now I'm only interested in asking better questions.

GovCorp

Are Sony Trashing Their Reputation?

There's a disconnect within the advertising and marketing workforce that nobody is addressing. That disconnect is between what we say and what we do. I've pointed out that Mastercard is emerging as a meme on the net for Klu Klux Klan Kredit after the Wikileaks debacle but the silence on Media Corporations blocking my entertainment just now over at Gavin's is trashing any respect in this instance for SONY. 


Is it just me that is seeing this disconnect? I couldn't sit in a meeting with SONY or Mastercard without mentioning the elephant in the room.

If either of these two are your clients is it something you'd prefer not to raise, because if it is then there's a grand deception unfolding as the light of transparency acts as a disinfectant on corporate schizophrenia.

Nick Bostrom

It feels like I only shabbily wrote this last week but I guess its longer as time is moving so fast.

"I ask lots of people the same question about time. There's a reasonably consistent linear relativism argument. Its always nice to hear articulated, because it's a conclusion I've reached too in the past. It's quite exciting to hear a prior self-determined logic conclude by forcing it's way out from another person's voice as if proof that quite complex hypotheses can emerge from separate sources. A bit like magic."

The thing is, what I think isn't that important. I've made enough mistakes to be in the fortunate position where insufficient people will take me seriously. I don't take myself all that seriously (all the time) as I'm just trying to make my way through this world and limit the amount of destruction I create. Such as being a man who has had two girlfriends try to commit suicide, and to this day still has the ability to utter words that can devastate people's lives. My social credit is actually in debit. Just ask my family.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to stumble upon the most extraordinary debate between two people I feel angry towards (but respect the hell out of) and a couple of Rabbis. Again and again, I was reeling from the fabric of intelligence between the two groups and then at one point Sam Harris grudgingly offered up an hypothesis that concludes what I suspected after reading Wittgenstein back here.

This means I can take a back seat on this line of inquiry, as a more advanced mind than I has done the spadework. 

IS Nick Bostrom thinking about things that will in our time slice through our collective consciousness like a baseball bat through Dick Cheney's skull. 

All you have to do is ask yourself "what does this mean to me?"

For me it means I can cut myself some slack. It diminishes my madness if somebody else has concluded what I silently suspected. 

Yet not though.

Update: I don't feel the same about Nick Bostrom these days. I feel his transhumanism stance is sponsored.NIck 

Chinese Digital Social Networks

More information over here. Some days despite the pollution I really miss Beijing.

Is The Mastercard Brand Fucked?

I've been using Tumblr as a tool for picking up on trends and I wondered that in light of Mastercard's capitulation to the State Department over severing Wikileaks income from Mastercard customers (customer first?) whether anybody else has noticed that the only thing more evident than Mastercards's silence on the matter are the slew of brand parodies emerging on the internet? I wonder if that is showing up in their tracking studies?

Putonghua Internet

I've been saying for a long time that in terms of volume yes its a Chinese internet. But in terms of influence it's English. History is written by the winners. Not that I see anything to embrace with respect to the Anglo Saxon trans Atlantic rewriting of history. Indeed we're weird and I think it shows.

Manikin or Model

The debate has been bubbling for a few days now even though it started in my data stream over in Japan on Sankaku Complex, but as it's hit China Smack now I think it's worth posting as it goes supernova.

Liberate

Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost

After my last post Marcus left a comment that 'people should read more' and mentioned Norman Mailer's Harlots Ghost. Now that got my attention. I was living in Germany as a 23 year old. I worked on an American military base in Giessen about an hour north of Frankfurt and bought that book either at one of the Bahnhoffs in either Giessen or Frankfurt. It was  a brilliant read and became oddly interwoven with my own real life which moved from pedestrian to flat out madness.

Turns out Marcus (we both grew up in the same city a couple of hundred meters away  though we never knew each other) was reading the same book at the same time in the same country an hour or so away from each other, and we may have even bought the book at the same shop. 

We met pretty much on the internet later on in 2006.

I remember the book had the improbably odd synchronism in my life including a mirroring of some parts of the story with among other things a remarkably unusual harlot. I think I need to go to the Amazon site and get the reviews in to brush up on things. It's got me thinking.

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For

If there's any doubt as to the veracity of the Kubler Ross model of dealing with grief there's acres of evidence in the commentary boxes of mass domestic denial at the moment that the US mainstream media regularly lies to its people with completely impunity. The denial is to be expected in much the same way as addiction to oil is evident from the most wasteful country on the planet. But after the denial comes anger and one thing I know about ordinary Americans is that while they may be easy to distract they are not cowards.

The only point to observe now is whether the string pullers will succeed in pitching groups of them against each other as divide and rule is the quintessential elite technique for maintaining their own comfort. I know this because the British taught them the trick. A new enemy is always being dreamed up by the real enemy.

We live in remarkable times and I believe there's an  emerging consciousness also at large. I've no idea how it will eventually manifest itself before the necessary changes reach consensus levels but change it will. When and how? My guess is as good as yours though the longer urgent action is delayed the more pain is inflicted on the self.

Kia Optima

I have no idea what the Kia people are trying to say but I just uncovered this ad from the Superbowl and the themes are:

Blackops Heli
Russian Criminal
Poseidon  
UFO           
Wormhole
Life on Mars
Stargate
Chitzen Itza Mayan Temple

One Cubic Milimetre

In a package that's just over one cubic millimeter, the system fits an extremely low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin-film battery, a solar cell and a wireless radio with an antenna that can transmit data to an external reader device that would be held near the eye. It's the worlds smallest computer (if we exclude those people who have previously unknown implants removed from them).

Via The Connective Net who has good work in progress for a free and open internet. Go check it out.

Lip Animals

Lip Animals Via the most excellent Tricia Wang

Ethos

Respect to Woody Harrelson for coming off the fence on what matters. This is a playlist embed so you can watch the entire thing without messing about.

Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, was part of JFK's assassination.

Twitter In Real Life

Via

DMT Just Went Prime Time

And while I'm at it, I came across this staggering Youtube viewer count for Charlie The Unicorn at 22.5 million views so I thought I'd check it out. It's so psychedelic (and funny) its off the scale. Which is making me curious about children's cartoons. 

Is Lara Logan The New Jessica Lynch

The details of the story are beginning to look fishy, and in the absence of independent media verification and neutrally-sourced supporting scientific evidence, coupled with this eyewitness foreign journalist account. It's now clear that the known facts sit uncomfortably with the spin emerging from the U.S. 

It looks eerily similar to elements of the Jessica Lynch story from Iraq. Most of you know that I participate in online conversations and I've learned to spot the smothering of dissent from tell tale clues in comment style.

In this instance the anonymity and feeble defense from those comments prompted me to post this. Manipulating the population in the States is well documented and the outrage of a fair maiden being ravaged by savage locals is the quintessential knee jerk response of a corn syrup nation reared to respond to anything but it's own vacuous morality, and in desperate need to distract attention from the Billions of dollars that the US provided to prop up the Egyptian dictator they had funded for decades. Money that went straight back into the Pentagon coffers with arm sales. 

It's a military affair after all.

What Planet Are They On?

The seven original Mercury astronauts participate in U.S. Air Force survival school at Stead Air Force Base in Nevada. Picture from left to right are L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., M. Scott Carpenter, John H. Glenn, Jr., Alan Shepard, Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., and Donald K. Slayton. Portions of their clothing have been fashioned from parachute material, and all have grown beards from their time in the wilderness. The purpose of this training was to prepare astronauts in the event of an emergency or faulty landing in a remote area. (NASA) More over here.

A Revolt Isn't The Same As A Revolution

Johan Galtung is widely known as the pioneering founder of the academic discipline of peace studies. He has served as a professor for peace studies and peace research at the universities of Oslo, Berlin, Belgrad, Paris and Hawaii, just to name a few, and has mediated in about 50 conflicts between states and nations since 1957. 

Clif High & Webbot

I'm amused yet totally unsurprised that social media research hasn't come even close to Clif High's Web Bot. We can see in emerging quantum theory that the future bleeds back into the past to change the present. From that premise (not the the one I prefer as my understanding of the Universe is fundamentally non material and non temporal much like Clif but I'm trying to make it easy for you) I'll lead you to a brief description of Clif's genius.

The Web Bot Project, developed in the late 1990's, was created to assist in making stock market predictions.

The technology uses a system of spiders to crawl the Internet and search for keywords, much like a search engine does. When a keyword is located, the bot program takes a snapshot of the text preceding and following the keyword. This snapshot of text is sent to a central location where it is then filtered to define meaning.

The projects concept is aimed at tapping into the "collective unconscious" of the universe and it's inhabitants. As well, there is an interesting time concept involved and an unusual concept of a "tipping point" regarding the past, current, and future times. It goes a bit deeper than viewing what those of us on the Internet are saying.

I'll just add to that what I've learned from listening to Clif which is that we have set patterns of language in normal use and our antenna to the future bleeds back (much like a Freudian slip) to give us atypical word usage that the Web Bot can spot and build hypotheses from. In an ideal world it would need a couple of hundred years to build 'form' and hammer out the idiosyncrasies of what is very much a craft instead of a science. However Clif's software picked up and predicted 911 before anyone else and so now the CIA have realised they'd made a mistake rejecting his business proposal to them which may explain the possible wire tapping because a lot of his broadcast telephone calls to radio station interviews go suspiciously weird at points which is why I'm going to throw my shoulder to his brilliance. Don't believe me? Listen for yourself. I listen to hundreds of hours of this kind of stuff and it's unusual.

It's alway the linguistic thinkers who appeal to me. First Chomsky, then Wittgenstein and after many hours of listening to Clif I learned he too is a trained linguist. Even if you find his thinking overwhelming on many subjects, anybody can see he's a polymath of extraordinary pattern recognition. He's got a good sense of humour, a disciplined code of conduct and if as I believe he's on to something is possibly one of the most important and interesting people alive. Which is why his work is way above the commercial world even though it's a small team and very much a work in progress. Listen to him on his channel over here. I'll paste one episode below but it's best to listen as a playlist if this doesn't automatically roll over into the second part. He's a smartbomb genius.

Sweet

The Solowheel. I'm gobsmacked how negative the press is for this.

Look At Me

After just 30 seconds of watching television the brain begins to produce alpha waves which indicates torpid (almost comatose) rates of activity. When you watch TV, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. In fact, experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman showed that while viewers are watching television, the right hemisphere is twice as active as the left, a neurological anomaly. The crossover from left to right releases a surge of the body's natural opiates: endorphins, which include beta-endorphins and enkephalins. Endorphins are structurally identical to opium and its derivatives (morphine, codeine, heroin, etc.). Activities that release endorphins (also called opioid peptides) are usually habit-forming (we rarely call them addictive). These include cracking knuckles, strenuous exercise, and orgasm. 

External opiates act on the same receptor sites (opioid receptors) as endorphins, so there is little difference between the two.In addition to its devastating neurological effects, television can be harmful to your sense of self-worth, your perception of your environment , and your physical health. Recent surveys have shown that 75% of American women think they are overweight, likely the result of watching chronically thin actresses and models four hours a day.

Television has also spawned a "culture of fear" in the U.S. and beyond, with its focus on the limbic brain-friendly sensationalism of violent programming. Studies have shown that people of all generations greatly overestimate the threat of violence in real life. This is no shock because their brains cannot discern reality from fiction while watching TV. Television is bad for your body as well. Obesity, sleep deprivation, and stunted sensory development are all common among television addicts.

The nearest analogy to the addictive power of television and the transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy user is probably heroin.~ Terence McKenna

It Aint Disney

I've never seen a more brutal American cartoon. It's so English. Both funny and revealing of the shift in American reality or at least a shift at a certain level. More important than Wisconsin in my opinion. Correct me in the comments in case I've missed out on a mainstream media cartoonist that works like this. It was in the LA Times

Foreigners In China

Dark Side of the Moon

I had one of the best weekends I've had for ages. Nothing too specific as I'm philosophically happy with much of  life at the moment, but it just seemed that everything was in harmony. I did a lot of jobs that I'd put off for far too long, got rid of more stuff that I don't need, met some terrific people who are comfortable talking about the kind of things I find interesting without choking over the pasta and chardonnay, and I even got some exercise in and watched a couple of great movies.

But the real leap I've been waiting close to 40 years for. I've been looking at the moon all my life and have always felt there is something provocative yet also uber tranquil about it. There was always a sort of mild taunt in its presence which I couldn't articulate. Well, while I may not have secured the answer to the question I realised this weekend that there is a question I must know the answer to. 

That might not seem all that exciting but knowing there is a question is significant progress and so I've added a Lunar Widget to the blog to celebrate the event on the right of this post. With elegant symmetry of timing, a comprehensive post has also been written in the last few hours that covers most of the questions that helped me get to mine.  Don't read it if keeping an open mind is too disruptive and paradigm challenges are too upsetting. 

There are questions raised that I've spent many more hours than most and which I can't secure a conclusion on. Then there's my question to answer now which will probably take another 40 years if the past is any indicator of the future.

By chance while studying solar system moons I learned that Iapetus is uncannily like George Lucas' death star. Which chimes oddly with my synchronicity post from way back.

And If You Tolerate This. Then Your Children Will Be Next

So young, so articulate. So unscripted. Millennial copywriting?


Via Tim

Jaeger - London Fashion Week

Jaeger's colours and proportional straight line cuts at London Fashion week are working for me. I've always enjoyed the quality of this business but this latest show is most elegant. almost worth reconsidering the value of cold weather.

John Carpenter's 'They Live' & Banksy

I'm watching the Banksy documentary which is well worth downloading from www.nikflix.com (somebody should buy that domain). I'm struck how politically it closely ties in with the movie 'They Live'. It's practically a palimpsest.

Update: ODD has produced an excellent analysis of They Live.

The Disney scene in the Banksy movie is extraordinary. It morphs from family fun to plain clothes Guantanamo Mickey Mouse security on Robocop pathology. To quote The Beatles I was playing earlier, "It wont be long, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah".

It's a very provocative and entertaining movie and possibly the most self referential piece of art I've come across for some time. Part postmodern, part self fulfilling prophecy. Watch it if you can. Maybe I should come back to the John Carpenter movie They Live some time because of Freeman's slick sick synchronicity spiel on it. Mind blowing stuff.

With Thanksy to Banksy

As Above So Below

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

Go Google

Love the way mainstream media in the US portrays democracy in Egypt as a bad thing. Bad bad Google. God bless America and its dream.

American Hero

I guess by now it's evident that I no longer view the United States as a leader power. It's not about the raw power. No country has invested more money in aggression and future aggressiveness than the United States. I think that will be born out in the future when the full extent of how much militarization of space is under way. 

On the Chinese dime. 

It's the loss of moral leadership that is most visible outside of the media cocoon that many US communities live within. However that's not to say I'm not a great admirer of the citizens who turn away from the malignancy of the system and in that respect Michael Reynolds the architect who creates sustainable living in New Mexico is exactly the kind of American I admire hugely for that big bold vision thing that trickles down into the lives of people and changes them for the better. This is both a great story and an informative pointer about why bureaucracy is first and foremost self preserving. Lots of good construction ideas in this. Free thinking, and rule breaking creativity. Not the prettiest of constructions but very much in harmony with the environment and the people who come together to build them.

Athenian Democracy

Our illusory democracy bears very little resemblance to the original. I think this documentary I just watched is thin on a couple of points about atomic prescience and totally passes on the Eleusian mysteries. That's just too much dynamite for the academics to handle, but apart from that it's an excellent dip into the period and the resolution is high. Also the chick presenter (Bettany Hughes) is erudite and yummy eye candy.

Radiohead

It's not often I post music but this did make my body hair (cute & fluffy as it is) stand on end. I've no idea why British music has been so fecund in the 20th and 21st century. Love the dancing moves. We should all dance more and talk less.

Princesses

I make no apologies for using this photo. I once had a girlfriend and her mother was stabbed to death. A photo of the dumped body was on the front page of Thailand's best selling newspaper Thai Rath. (Update this photo is disinformations. Princess Diana not only survived the crash but her Glasgow Coma Scale ensured that she must have been murdered in the ambulance.)

I have their logo tattooed on my heart. You can see it below with the still granulated blood from a photo that a young man from Taiwan kindly took for me on flight between Bangkok and London. I wrote about here. I also describe more about the event here.

I believe, the knife victims photo was pulled from Thai Rath, as soon as the body was identified. She was a 'society woman' of sorts, a well known writer. However, the practice still continues today with among others the death of David Carradine making the front page a while back.

The case attracted a lot of attention because anybody who knows Thailand questions the shoelace tied from his neck to his penis which isn't classic autoaspyxiation technique plus his hands were tied above him. My guess is he was killed in as humiliating a manner as possible. The post autopsy photo was published too. Strange that we both have heart tattoos.

I was a witness to unhealed lifelong traumas that photos like this published in the media can cause. Indeed, I'm still paying for it to this day. I recall many occasions of heartfelt cries of "missing Mom' with tears so many years after an event I had no part in. 


However I reject the sanitization of death if there is social merit. This is the case in the U.S and UK where dead soldiers are unable to be seen returning from the battlefield, but gratuitous and endless dying is ignored in hyper real gaming environments.

I apologise to anybody upset by this post so far. Today it's necessary. It's because I never bought a tabloid (or cared for irrelevant details) about other peoples private lives. It's  not without integrity as I deeply loathed the prurient obsession of the world with Princess Diana. I knew very little about the woman other than the barest of details that her marriage and divorce were desperately unhappy. 


I admired her worthy deeds such as campaigning against British arms industries selling land mines and caring for HIV victims. I understand she was also about to lend support to the Palestinian people who suffer so much even to this day. I've written many times that the same people who threw flowers on her funeral train went back to life the day after seemingly without self conscience bought the same tabloids that pursued her to death. After all it's not her grief the superficial society mourned. It was theirs.

I awoke the morning of her death in 1997 where I was living in Camden London, and as was my custom the radio had been on all night. I learned the sombre announcement of her death in Paris during the night. Inexplicably and for the first time in my life I started crying for someone I'd never really thought too much about. Only days before, her relationship with a Muslim man had been the latest of her personal and private affairs to hit the headlines and now my internal body alarm was tugging at me to say that all was not right. I guess I'm saying official autopsies were not going to make me any wiser. Many felt the same.

But the programming takes over doesn't it? The same conditioning which works to wonderful effect in repetitive messaging as in much of the fast moving consumable goods world of advertising, conditions us to the point where we doubt our intuition. To the point where we really believe that nature is doing just fine. 


I'm on record as saying anybody who believes the official narrative of 911 hasn't done their homework. But Princess Diana I reserved silence on till today. Just earlier I watched an MI5 officer share, an opinion that finally shifts mine to believe the Princess was murdered. And if the Crocodiles can murder a Princess....then surely you and I are no more important than battery hens?

If the real credit goes to the man in the arena, then in this case it's a woman and her name is Annie Machon. What a truly remarkable woman. I salute you. Sorry I took my time.