Ewan McVicar - Abrasive Route

My first full time PAYE job was a laboratory technician producing specialist polymers for a contact lense manufacturing plant. Radio 1 was piped into most corners, and at 18 or 19 it was ok but when I look back, the DJs were self serving and indulging themselves.

 

They liked music but it always felt like they were more important than the product. Not any more though. I listen to a lot of Audio; music, podcasts, more female academics than males but the easiest smorgasbord to pick from, depending on my mood which is driven by the time of day or night, is mostly Radio 1, 1D, 1R and 1X but Radio 3 and 4 are faves too, usually R3 is for when I drive. Before BBC Sounds I was smoking it on Samurai FM, Audio Scrobbler, Last.FM and now Youtube is great for hunting down tracks heard in R!D and of course the dance edits are mind blowing.

 

The thing I love most about the Radio 1 spectrum on Sounds, is I'm sorta into pop music for the first time in decades but what makes it a canyon leap from the old days are the DJs who are of course young (except one who really needs to lay off the adrenochrome with 'make some noise', you're my age mush, make some noise about Julian Assange). Anyway, sorry about that because the focus I want to share is how unbelievably passionate about the music the presenters/producers/djs are now. 

They absolutely love love love music and that's infectious so I pick up on this or that track and we're on the same wavelength. It's great and it's also a lot more different than you think I'm trying to convey so I'll leave y'all with the quotes and if I'm lucky I'll come back in five years and point out what I was trying to say without sending people insane.

 

It's not for everyone but the future is mind blowingly different and so it should be. 

 

Gloria Steinem - Lifelong CIA Actress

Rich Siegel on Facebook has written a wonderful post on Hugh Hefner that raises troubling questions for those of us who have spent time researching lifetime actors for social engineering at the CIA and so forth. I've emailed Joseph Atwill and he agrees it's worth exploring. I've also emailed Gloria Steinem but have yet to receive a response.

My comment as follows:

Charles Edward Frith Great post Rich. Well written and certainly raises a lot of questions whatever side of the debate. Many who have researched the social engineering of the 60's by reading Weird scenes inside the Canyon by Dave McGahon or Joseph Atwill's work on Gloria Steinem/Alfred Kinsey will have reservations about any person in the limelight and not working for the culture manufacturers at the CIA or Tavistock. While this information will create dissonance to the uninformed reader, it's just a fact that nothing of huge cultural importance gets past the manufacturers. It's documented that Steinem was a CIA lifelong actor and so it goes that if Hefner survived her onslaught it stands to reason that both sides of the dialectic are managed. A pornographic society and a feminist reactionary movement. One thing your post has done for me is to prompt me to write to Joseph Atwill via email just now, and ask how he can reconcile this tension given his work on the subject. As for me, I always thought Hugh Hefner was a bit sleazy for my taste though I enjoy looking at naked women and can distinguish between vile degradation of women and celebration of the beauty of the female form. Anyway, well done for a great thought provoking post. Here's Joe on Steinem. https://youtu.be/e_BodlSnUuc

Holy Hell (2016) - Documentary HD

I'm surprised I hadn't shared this before as I watched it a year or so ago and it's excellent. The reason the subject resurfaced is I listened to the following cult follower interview with Dr Elena Michaels. I'd never heard of The Source before so I'm looking forward to drilling down into that as I have a sense that there's an element of Laurel Canyon CIA/DIA connections but I have no proof as yet. (Update: I couldn't have been more wrong. It's the first cult that gets the thumbs up from me and seems to be spook/network free)

Listen to "William Ramsey Investigates : Elena Michaels" on Spreaker.

Moby Dick, 9/11 & Deepwater Horizon

When Melville wrote Moby Dick (a book that keeps dragging me by my hair kicking and screaming back to it) New York looked like the visual above and Melville could walk from one  pier side of Manhattan to the other. This is the kind of detail that the lecturer gives in order for us to understand Melville's attachment to the sea.

I've posted and written about this lecture before but as I've picked the book up recently I'm revisiting these excellent talks and right at the end of this one Cyrus Patel points out that Melville wrote this 9/11 premonition if we recall the disputed election between Gore and Bush and which letter writers to the New York Times explain well:

To the Editor:

Re “The Ahab Parallax” (Week in Review, June 13):

By drawing the parallels between the Deepwater Horizon and the Pequod, as well as the industries and economic imperatives that caused them to be, your article reminds us that a mid-19th-century genius like Herman Melville has something to say about the events and disasters of the early 21st century because the elements of nature and the qualities of human nature that govern such activities have not changed in the intervening 150 years.

Readers might be interested to know, however, that Melville’s affinity with current times was not limited to monumental sea disasters. In “Loomings,” the famous first chapter of “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael explains that he is compelled by fate to go to sea. Conceiving his whaling trip as a small interlude between major acts played out on the stage of human history, he lists “Whaling voyage by one Ishmael” between “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “Bloody Battle in Affghanistan.”

While Melville could not have known the particulars of Bush v. Gore and the current campaign in Afghanistan, he knew well the forces that shape our history.

Carl Valvo

Concord, Mass., June 13, 2010

•

To the Editor:

“The Ahab Parallax” could have mentioned a haunting line from “Moby-Dick” that fits the present even better than it did the world of whalers:

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

David Singerman

Cambridge, Mass., June 13, 2010

I include the second letter as it was the first thing I read when I picked the book up again after an interlude of a couple of years. Synchromysticism at work people.

Update: I should add this related Deepwater Horizon/Moby Dick NYT article too:

A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search ofoil, increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow in their wake. “Some fell flat on their faces,” an eyewitness reported of the stricken crew. “Through the breach, they heard the waters pour.”

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Mark Power/Magnum Photos

Related

• Times Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)

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Bettmann/Corbis

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” — “Moby-Dick”

The words could well have been spoken by a survivor of the doomed oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 men and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history. But they come instead, of course, from that wordy, wayward Manhattanite we know as Ishmael, whose own doomed vessel, the whaler Pequod, sailed only through the pages of “Moby-Dick.”

In the weeks since the rig explosion, parallels between that disaster and the proto-Modernist one imagined by Melville more than a century and a half ago have sometimes been striking — and painfully illuminating as the spill becomes a daily reminder of the limitations, even now, of man’s ability to harness nature for his needs. The novel has served over the years as a remarkably resilient metaphor for everything from atomic power to the invasion of Iraq to the decline of the white race (this from D. H. Lawrence, who helped revive Melville’s reputation). Now, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, its themes of hubris, destructiveness and relentless pursuit are as telling as ever.

The British petroleum giant BP, which leased the Deepwater Horizon to drill the well, has naturally been cast in the Ahab role, most recently on one of Al Jazeera’s blogs by Nick Spicer, who compared the whaler’s maniacal mission to the dangers of greed, “not just to a man such as Captain Ahab, but to all his crew and to the whole society that supports their round-the-world quest for oil.”

Andrew Delbanco, the director of Columbia University’s American studies program and the author of “Melville: His World and Work,” said, “It’s irresistible to make the analogy between the relentless hunt for whale oil in Melville’s day and for petroleum in ours.” Melville’s story “is certainly, among many other things, a cautionary tale about the terrible cost of exploiting nature for human wants,” he said. “It’s a story about self-destruction visited upon the destroyer — and the apocalyptic vision at the end seems eerily pertinent to today.”

Whaling was the petroleum industry of its day in the 18th and 19th centuries, with hundreds of ships plying the oceans in search of the oil that could be rendered from the world’s largest mammals. The 40-ton bodies of sperm whales could yield dozens of barrels, some derived from blubber and the rest, the most precious kind, spermaceti, from the whale’s head. The oil burned in millions of lamps, served as a machine lubricant and was processed into candles distinguished by their clear, bright flame, with little smoke or odor. In addition, whalebones could be used to stiffen corsets, skin could be cured for leather, and ambergris, the aromatic digestive substance, could be incorporated into perfumes. New England ports, the Houstons of their era, and fortunes were built with whale oil money.

At one point, the United States exported a million gallons a year to Europe, according to Philip Hoare, author of “The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea,” an obsessive disquisition on all matters cetacean, published in March. “The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner — an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth,” Mr. Hoare writes, adding the observation of the English statesman Edmund Burke to Parliament in 1775 that there was “no sea but what is vexed by” New England harpoons. While other kinds of ships sat nearly dark on the waters when the sun went down, a whaler could look like a floating Chinese lantern, the sailors luxuriating in the light produced by the fuel they carried. “He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it,” Melville wrote, rhapsodizing about an oil “as sweet as early-grass butter in April.”

But much like the modern petroleum industry — which began in the late 1850s, making it only slightly younger than Melville’s novel — whaling quickly came up against the limits of its resources. Hunting grounds near North America were wiped out by the early 19th century. And the lengths to which ships had to go to continue to find them led to the event that inspired “Moby-Dick,” the sinking in 1820 of the whaling ship Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale in the South Pacific, more than 10,000 miles from home.

The Essex had headed there to hunt at a whale-rich site discovered only a year earlier. It was called the Offshore Ground, a name suggestive of the highly productive oil site known as Mississippi Canyon, where the Deepwater Horizon was at work when it exploded. Underwater fields like it have made the Gulf of Mexico into the fastest-growing source of oil in the United States, accounting for a third of domestic supplies.

Related

• Times Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)

But in the same way whalers had to sail farther and farther for their prey, oil companies are drilling deeper and deeper to tap the gulf’s oil, to levels made possible only by the most advanced technology, operating near its limits. The Coast Guard has warned that this technology has outpaced not only government oversight but — as events have shown — the means of correcting catastrophic failures. An admonition from Nietzsche that Mr. Hoare cites in reference to “Moby-Dick” seems just as pertinent to the spill: “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Mr. Delbanco cautions, however, against the tendency to read environmentalist moralizing into “Moby-Dick,” as often happens when it is applied to contemporary disasters. Melville did, memorably, wonder whether the whale “must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe.” But one gets the sense that he would have considered the loss a greater one to literature than to the ecosystem. “Even as he recoiled from their blindness and brutality,” Mr. Delbanco said, “Melville celebrated the heroism of the hunters who would stop at nothing to get what human civilization demanded.”

And, indeed, the analogies between the whale and petroleum industries have often been used by conservative economists as an argument against regulation. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, Phil Gramm, later to be a Republican United States senator but then an economics professor at Texas A&M University, made a name for himself by writing about the demise of the whale oil industry, done in by the supply shortage and the interruption of the Civil War, leading to the first energy crisis. The rising price of whale oil, he wrote, created an incentive to find an alternative. It arrived in 1859 when Edwin Drake drilled America’s first oil well, in Pennsylvania, and a process to make kerosene from it was discovered. The unfettered market followed its natural course toward the new fuel, and the crisis ended.

Of course, the spill has now rewritten the script for the debate about how the oil industry should be able to operate and scrambled the political calculus behind President Obama’s plans, announced in March, to open vast new areas to offshore drilling so as to reduce dependence on imports and win backing for climate legislation. The spill, looming as the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history, might in itself be incentive to push the United States more quickly toward new energy sources in the way it once turned to petroleum.

But maybe not. When the leak is finally stanched and the cleanup begins to fade from the news, one wonders whether Melville won’t be there again in his long whiskers and topcoat, offering up his gloomy wisdom.

One of the great underlying themes of “Moby-Dick,” Mr. Delbanco observed, “is that people ashore don’t want to know about the ugly things that go on at sea.”

“We want our comforts but we don’t want to know too much about where they come from or what makes them possible.” He added: “The oil spill in the gulf is a horror, but how many Americans are ready to pay more for oil or for making the public investment required to develop alternative energy? I suspect it’s a question that Melville would be asking of us now.”

Air Brushed Jesus Came From The Zadokites - The Al-Qaeda Of The Day

Nobody has brought the mythical figure of Jesus to life for me more vividly than John Lash. There was a time many years ago when I learned of the historical figure of Jesus (more likely known as Yeshua) described as a freedom fighter, and that resonated with me much more than the white skinned, slightly effeminate hand-lotion and baby talcum powder figure that the Roman (Army) Catholic church has in part fashioned over the centuries. (I hear he was big nosed, swarthy skinned and reeked of garlic but don't ask my sources).

However after listening to and understanding better John Allegro's translation work of the dead sea scrolls with it's description of Jesus as entheogenic mushroom (psilocybin) cult , it is this metaphorical narrative which is just as valid as any other historical account. So we have three templates worthy of closer analysis here. Real life figure (freedom fighter to terrorist), historical revisionist tool of Roman rule portrayed as sacred bleeding heart with Unilever/Proctor&Gamble skin-whitening corporate sponsorship and then finally underground entheogenic mushroom cult allegory. Frankly all three are real in some sense, but paradoxically the latter is the best documented metaphorical narrative as those familiar with the work of Aramaic scholar John Allegro's seminal and Vatican-infuriating work in translating the dead sea scrolls.

But it's John Lash's impartial (non denominational) and scholarly yet human analysis of Jesus the Zadokite or 'of the Zadokim' that I find most healthy for it's challenge to the illusory hijacking by the Roman Catholic church. This action finalises more concretely through a religious codification artfully outlined by Lash with a candid account of Christianity as locked in a victim/perpetrator head-lock complex at a Congregational/sheep/flock level but as a much more aggressive and persecuting entity when proselytizing as a religious body capable of burning and torturing it's way across Europe (and later the New World) in order to snuff out any competing belief systems. In this manner the feminine Pagan and Gnostic traditions contrasted with the pernicious and virus like salvationism ideology of Christianity and was brutally stamped out by Rome despite these peaceful groups' ability  and desire to live with tolerance alongside differing beliefs.

It is the emergence of the Christian/Roman Catholic mint machine that is most incapable of living within it's proselytized gospel of love thy neighbour. If there's one recurring Christian theme since the beginning it is the Grand Canyon reality check between what Christians say and what Christians do. In this way we have the final measure of Rome.

But it is the Zadokim cult where we drill down into the seeds that sprouted into, and were fashioned by, a Roman Catholic Christianity. Their profile is described in the dead sea scrolls and is concisely articulated by John Lash as follows:

 1. A small and intense cult of extremist Jews who formulated their doctrines from King Saul and King Solomon and thus marinated in eight or nine hundred years of exceptionalism gestation before the birth of Jesus. More Branch Dravidian than Heavens Gate in contemporary terms.

2. A belief that they were the most righteous people on Earth (Tzadik/Zadik/צדיק in Hebrew means righteous)

3. A belief they had a contract with God and a mandate to rule over their chosen land and live a life that was so righteous and pure, that they were to be an example before the nations of the Earth.

4. They were xenophobic and had an attitude of retribution and violence towards anybody who did not recognise them in their self-appointed mission.

Sound familiar? 

To me it's the DNA of the Abrahamic faiths from the intolerance of Islam, exceptionalism of Judaism and the righteous warring of globalised Christianity.

All of these definitions were extracted from the dead sea scrolls by among others Robert Eisenman's (or Professor Robert H. Eisenman's) translation of those records along with his New Testament Code work.

I see more of this interpreation in the veneer of the redeemer complex that Christianity proselytizes  abroad alongside the victim/perpetrator legitimization it preaches at home. It's a brilliant memeplex for controlling a planet long after people have stopped attending church or reading the mickey mouse bible. Such is the power of ideas. I mean look at how the white man speaks and look at how he behaves. Surely this psychosis is less coherent than the rantings and actions of the Islamic fundamentalists? 

Our insanity is empathize through punctuated New York Times hand wringing at home while disconnecting from the carnage abroad. The psychotic wing of our preaching classes with their sermons of forgiveness and silence over drone slaughter is a manifestation of our remote controlled sickness.

This post is purely to encourage a listen to the John Lash podcast above. It is there where the cauldron is bubbling up nicely with a tasty soup on the go. The Gnostics or Teleste have got it going on like no other story around. 

It's the best story that wins.

Skinput

Clay Parker Jones brought my attention to this after an impoverished skim the first time it hit my life stream a couple of weeks ago. It made first draft and so I'm finishing it off before it starts to rot in my draft folder although I suspect the high resolution art directed shots like the one above contributed towards its renaissance. 

User interface on your skin developed by Chris Harrisson

So anyway, I was listening to another McKenna podcast a while back that conveyed some of his anomalous thinking on the big picture stuff that I find refreshing against what I'm labelling random theory; which is the prevailing explanation for anything prior to a low entropic state.

I'm also re-reading Taleb's Black Swan as part of a process of disposing of anything extraneous including books. I may have lost a lot of important stuff last year but I'm focused on not acquiring replacements and furthermore want to go completely minimal. Too much has been lost over the years, and in various countries to take possessions seriously any more, though I notice The KLEIN would be like having a few fingers amputated should that go missing or need to be jettisoned.

This rationalisation process means my wardrobe is a little less hip than when I was carrying the first division threads in a suitcase carrying way too many other important things, but I can't justify not being resourceful, when I have more 2nd Division T Shirts than I could get through in a lifetime. You realise this isn't just aesthetics, though that in itself is a radical departure from my life until now. It's also an alignment with how I want to live the remainder, which offhand can't be that much than four or five hundred months if I take an unhealthy interest in actuarial norms. Which I don't.

Back to McKenna. he was riffing on as he does so well, about nature being in principle a conservative and conserving force, and about how its frugality driven if that makes sense at all within the context of an abundance machine that we plunder without precedence.

There was also something said about nature's answers being fundamentally elegant solutions, and about that being a good indicator of how to think when trying to solve problems usually belonging within the remit of the natural sciences. Which brings me back to the topic of this post.

Skinput strikes me as a great use of existing human biological real estate. I just made that line up but bear with me because I really think Skinput is clever and resourceful. It's low on atoms and somehow for me begins to change the way we think about the stuff we're hell bent on possessing; principally that will be possessions, or am I over egging with alliterations now? Sorry if it's annoying.

Sure we're always going to be attached to social objects and badges of modernity, sentimentality, nostalgia and utility. However, as it becomes increasingly unnecessary (through possession convergence) to require a watch, a notebook, a phone, a portable music device or even spend time teasing apart the UX debate on the demise of QWERTY keyboards as Apple's iPad has instigated, I can see an evolutionary change in our relationship to stuff which changes quite a lot of what we assume our BIOS will be like in the future. I hope it's not the same. I can't see why it would remain the same if I look at other fundamentals that have shifted as culture does.

In any case, there's a video  about Skinput that I have embedded here for a lot less atomic space than was possible before the emergence of digital delivery. It's a bit dry but worth a look (Though I'd like it if Youtube allowed users to review videos at a faster speed than is conventional. Double and quadruple. That sort of thing.

Anyway, my only niggle is that the line Skinput have used is:

Appropriating the body as an input surface.

It is that already isn't it?

It's also a genius output surface and a lot lot more.

I guess it's the implied subservience of nature to science that annoys me with their endline. Mainly because I feel that nature is often most fiercely legislated around when it comes to sports of all things. Even the EPA hasn't earned the same gravitas and respect for nature that sports do. Whole forests and canyon, whole elements still in the ground don't get the same reverence for nature that sports does when considering the notion of purity and artificial helpers.

Sad, but over the years, I've never met anyone who supported my view (apart from a sports ethics philosophy professor who  I listened to on The Forum) that we should allow sports participants the choice of pharmaceutically enhancing themselves. I think the enhanced Olympics would be more special than the Special Olympics were that to be the case, well it would be ace and well worth watching.

I'm not quite making my point clear. I see glimpses of neurological rewiring from Skinput, in much the same way that Google's anschluss of my neo cortex coupled with stealth tech creep of real simple syndication (RSS) has changed the way I digest data. Not just the way I think but my self awareness (not to be confused with self consciousness as I learned last week)

 I like what Google did, no question they raised my IQ if we're flexible about the definition of intelligence, but I had no idea it would or that there's a quid pro quo. 

So now's a good time I guess to think Skinput through. Spontaneous prodding is OK on Facebook but I can't imagine I'd like my skin to be less than mine if say a Blackberry Skin were to come on the market.

Update: The bioethicist I was looking for is Julian Savelescu

The soil will be much richer for the ashes.....

ULTIMATE GREEN SHOPPER

Take a good look around you. The operating system you’re using, the age of your computer, the furnishings, the cell phone you’re using, the clothes you’re wearing, even the watch strapped to your wrist or the cup of “four bucks” frappe/latte/cino number you’ve ordered in the coffee shop. Soak in all the little details of 21st century living and try and hold that image, because quite frankly I don’t think things are ever going to be the same again you see, because the ultimate green shopper is an oxymoron. The ultimate green shopper doesn't shop. That's the sick end of marketing.

We’ll probably never have as much new stuff around us as we are looking at now. It’s easy to become conditioned by new stuff, even easier to be dissatisfied with it all, wanting ever newer and more complex gadgets.

The financial meltdown that I first talked about over here hasn’t even really properly kicked off. As I understand it from the huge amount of reading I’ve been doing, it took four whole years for the depression to reach it’s full depth. I doubt if this one will take so long but let’s assume it’s three times as fast for the sake of arbitrary guessing because that is after all what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to guess what and when. I think I’ll get the times more wrong than the what.

My first attempts at trying to visualise the near future ended up with a sort of feeling that the developed world such as the United States and the E.U. would take more of a hit than the developing world, and that stands to reason doesn’t it? The lower the per capita GDP, the less the potential fall in the standard of living.

The bigger they are the harder they fall so to speak.

But having spent some time looking at the China figures, there’s a whole world of pain there too, that takes on a different dimension because of the sheer scale of the numbers. 20 million migrant workers already back on the farms and changing the demographics probably forever. It really is a hell of a mess whatever way we cut the figures.

The nasty pill to swallow is the potential for the food chain to break down. We’ve already seen an institution like Woolworths hit the floor and yet that’s just a taste of where it’s heading. Woolworths was always like the sick puppy on the edge of the pack that failed to make money in the good times when money was abundant, and thus is first to go as money liquidity tightens. Who is next? National Express coaches? Debenhams? 3 mobile phone network? Which business entity (which brand) has been running on vapours during the good years? Those are the people who are likely to bow out first. But it’s worse than that isn’t it? Because if someone who moves or distributes food about takes a hit from liquidity problems then that’s the end of very specific foodstuffs in our supermarkets. Some are talking about the need for growing local food again; turning gardens into allotments - which is ironic given the sweet spot thing I talked about and how local foods are the least carbon intensive. So who is the weakest supermarket in the UK these days? Is it Safeway? Does Safeway even still exist? It’s been some years since I looked at UK supermarkets but the point is still the same. Who is the weakest in the pack? Local food folks. Read or listen to Rushkoff or Paterson if it’s a smarter mind than mine you seek.

Anyway there is the worst of it, those links are some of the really smart people out there (Rushkoff is my new Daddy!) who are capable of making the meta leap over the information that I would take an age to digest and the suggestion that they conclude upon is the likelihood of a loss of confidence in traditional paper money, and a potential return of local currencies (barter is always good too, barter is very good). They also suggest the end of retail or put another way the end of abundance.

I think that seems a fair suggestion to make.

I always had a few problems with the ‘free’ economy, and that was mainly because it could only be accessed by the wealthy participants. It’s not really FREE is it if only we can access it and a vast amount of people in the world who live on a dollar a day have no access to it at all? That’s not free, that’s called privileged isn’t it? I am, and so are you if you’re reading this. We're privileged and don't you forget it.

I guess the 'free economy' or model is starting to look a bit like irrational exuberance when all is said and done. Nothing is for free isn't it? Not even if those transistors that are infinitely able to make themselves faster or smaller. The point is you can’t eat transistors. Just a thought folks. Try living off Moore’s law if you’re hungry.

So if we’re moving from the age of abundance to an age of scarcity what impact does that have on marketing communications? Well given the paucity of marketing communications on Red Square in Moscow during the 80’s, or on Tiananmen Square in Beijing today (out of courtesy) or across the entire length of North Korea I’d say that in an age of scarcity not abundance the need for marketing communications is drastically reduced. I don’t know how much is left. I do know that whatever is left will be fought for, and highly competitive. It will probably be damm good too. I just don’t know how much of the pie is left after the party is over and all that is left is an almost immeasurable canyon of debt. For that is all there is left it seems. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan will be OK. They did well out of the last great depression didn’t they?

As far as I can figure out the only ‘rewire our economies’ ideas that those at the Treasury and at the Fed are capable of coming up with work along the lines of consumption will get us out of this mess. Can you believe that? Do you really believe that?

This is gross intellectual fraud isn’t it? Didn’t excess consumption put us in this mess in the first place? I keep going back to a comment I read on Naked Capitalism; that the soil will be much richer for the ashes and yet it seems that the stateside Wall Street and Whitehouse folk are hell bent on denial that we’re even on fire, all the while fueling the flames with more and more borrowed money to put off the impending collapse of the financial system. Yet isn’t that the logical conclusion. Shouldn’t the system collapse before new shoots of growth emerge? The soil will be much richer for the ashes.....remember that.

Probably a lot of you are thinking this is unnecessarily gloomy, yet I’m not unhappy. I’m more optimistic about the future than at any other time in my life, in a perverse kind of way.

I know that all those with businesses and mortgages or negative equity in property or worthless shares or credit card bills up to their eyeballs will be very reluctant to read a post of this nature, and truthfully I’m no seer or a prophet. But what I am able to do that most it seems are really really reluctant to engage with, is play with the notion that things really aren’t good at all this time and to take those arguments to the logical conclusion. Most it seems would prefer not to ‘go there’. I’m able to, for reasons of planning, foresight and an ounce of luck.

I think we just saw the end of the renaissance that began in the middle ages. I think it finally is coming to an end. I think we have a new renaissance around the corner and just like the last we’re also emerging from the drudgery of a black death or plague that has inflicted and is yet to inflict more misery everywhere. A selfish age at the end wasn’t it?

I don’t think advertising is that important to me at the moment. I want to see the carnage before I go into how socialist media is likely to be part of the solution. We’re all in it together after all.