Neo Scientology

This is my beloved Terence talking about Science. Ordinarily I'd feel obliged to elaborate on the thesis where we differ but on reflection only an obsessive could ever misinterpret me on what I have written thus far. And in this respect the matter is ended.

Deferred Gratification is Psychopathy

You all know the model. Leave the kid in the room with the Oreo or whatever and the ones who can defer gratification are later found to be more "successful" in life.

Bullshit (Just look at weasel beard above). That's not success. That's psychopathy.

It's industrial scale, corporate-brainwashing and nutmeg-psychology that flies in the face of of the very essence of being a human FUCKING being. 

I mentioned it back on Rob's blog a couple of days ago that the change from arboreal, fruitarian, peaceful and (ahem slightly orgiastic - yay for SEX) Homo Sapiens of an honourable and inspirational nature compared to the 21st century mendacity of homo mutatitis that hoard their grain and self implode on the metaphysics of attempting to temporarily own the perma-unobtainable, through war and coercion that leaves half the planet glued to the the carpet-embedded-sofa, cheered on by a TV & Fossil fuel Drug dependency while the other half are out in the fields on the other side of the planet,  tilling the soil for mere pennies a day while oscillating geographically and in a temporal sense from exhaustion into starvation and back into exhaustion again to grow food for "me me me" and not themselves. 


Is this the poetry of deferred gratification? 


Put off today what you can industrial-strength kill off tomorrow?

Surely the very essence of enlightenment is to live in the intelligent and harmonious moment instead of breeding a species that shit-hoards, spits on frugality, wastes 40% of it's food, crushes its global brethren and celebrates this as toxic material-science enlightenment?

Do me a favour. Eat that fucking pancake kiddo and live in the moment while we the supposed adults figure out how to take care of the urgent problems of today instead of breeding a child who becomes professionally psychopathic at ignoring and deferring the impending ecocide debt-blowback.

Embedded Reporting

Platonic Pentagon

You can be damn sure the Pentagon have put some of their best and brightest into this (note the lo-fidelity  front cover, non senior soldier-anonymity and so on).

I'd like to comment on how it potentially extrapolates thematically in terms of emotional liminality but lets face it. Nobody gives a stuff what I think of the Pentagon. Though maybe I should write one up for the Office of Homeland Security? 

Every little helps. (Via Euan)

Iconic

Dear Mr, Eisenstaedt:

Now that I'm 60 - it's fun to admit that I'm the nurse in your famous shot "of the amorous sailor celebrating V.E. Day by kissing a nurse on New York's Broadway." The article in the Los Angles Times, which described your talents, stimulated the recall of the scene on Broadway.

I had left Doctors' Hospital and wanted to be part of the celebration but the amorous sailor and a subsequent soldier motivated a retreat into the next opening of the subway. I wish I could have stored that jubilation and amour for use P.R.N.

​Mr Eisenstaedt, is it possible for me to obtain a print of that picture? I would be most appreciative.

I regret not having met you on your last trip to Beverly Hills.

Perhaps next time. If not - I'll understand because "it's not only hard to catch him - its hard to keep up with him."

Have fun.

Fondly

Edith Shain

Abracadabra - אברה כדברא

John Allegro was an Aramaic scholar who was invited to inspect the Dead Sea scrolls by the Vatican. Prior to this, his intention was to become a Methodist Priest but he changed career to Oriental studies and then during his radical translation and interpretation of the scrolls he made the mistake of releasing his findings earning the vindictive wrath of his peers who excommunicated his views and trashed his career with accusations of anti Catholicism. To this day the Vatican prevents us from knowing what other information contradicts the epistemological teachings of the present day Pope from their findings and as will one day be shown the Vatican library is chock full of ancient texts that don't support their erroneous and paternalistic business model.

There's a much more visually explanatory video of the discussion through the Pharmacratic Inquisition videos on Youtube though I think it's important to champion the Aramaic scholar first and also point out the two chaps who are interviewing him were famous 70's Dutch comedians who merely pursued their own interest in the topic of metaphorical mycology and so you need to contextualise the Citizen Smith headgear they are wearing at the end, even though a bit of silliness is very integral to this topic as you may have picked up from my Twisted post.

Update: As the years have passed I've often reflected that even if John Allegro was right, he was remarkably pompous and this might have contributed to our understanding.

Fresh Perspectives

Last night I had an epiphany. Or more accurately I watched my reality being torn apart blow by blow, minute by minute, word by word over an extraordinarily long article. It was tough. There's nothing tougher than keeping an open mind.

Do you all have heroes? Mine are mostly listed in Facebook if I think about the easiest place to find them and the most convenient way not to list them right now. 

They tend to be a bit more of the heretics turned prophet types. I've no interest in the main stream, all the progress and action is on the edge. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the awesomeness of just being. That specific feeling can occur walking down a street, entering a lift or traversing a hotel lobby if I'm mindful about what is going on. A quality I've yet to develop so it's more integral to my temporal appreciation of living in the moment.

However the act of seeing an idol broken irreversibly has suddenly opened new vistas on what means to be me, or even more importantly what it means to ask 'who am I?', or even for you to be thou through my eyes. 


As tough as it was I hope to be continually achieving this dynamic of reinvention and reappraisal for the rest of my life as there really is nothing more interesting than seeing the world anew. Life is massively interesting already but a fresh perspective rewires the possibilities. The potential if you will.

Next Generation

Next Generation Media Quarterly By Aegis. Nice little useful presso with sticky numbers that should help the plannerati. By Dan Calladine

Post-Materialist Science

I had a feisty old day today engaging with a materialist-science Twitterer. Well at least until it became clear that outside of a propensity for calumny there wasn't even a cursory grasp of 21st century historical reality.

As with most of my digital stalker detractors, it invariably becomes evident they are more obsessed with me than I am of them. 

Asymmetric love if I'm being kind. 

I only have two or three names of adversaries in my head that are worthy of a sliding tackle when the time arrives. The rest aren't up to standard. Sorry about that. I hope it stays that way too. If it gets to four or five names, a gentleman should ask himself if the problem is closer to home. 

However I didn't get a chance to demolish the 'Quantum Physics belongs to us' school of nonsense who I asset, understand no more than you or I about this fascinating life but demonstrably think they have a superior claim to intellectual ownership of life through old scientific thinking. 

I encourage you all to put a bit of Quantum real time search term feeds in your life because the point of it is not to understand. Which is brilliant really.

Not understanding is the foundation for true learning and is the start of a humble yet rewarding learning journey.

I counsel the less confident among you to reject those haughty bores and that you can spot the fundamentalist science frauds by their indignant shrillness that "normal" people don't get it. 

Neither do they none of us really do, but it's our willingness to admit it which makes a human being and not the atomic bean counters as outlined in today's New Scientist which is all you need to know. Do read it. It's double chocolate chip deliciousness.

Physicists don't, by and large, want to trouble themselves with philosophy. Questions over what, exactly, constitutes a measurement, or why it might induce a change in the fabric of reality, can be ignored in favour of simply getting a useful answer from quantum theory.

Unquestioning use of the Copenhagen interpretation is sometimes known as the "shut up and calculate" interpretation. "Given that most physicists just want to do calculations and apply their results, the majority of them are in the shut up and calculate group," Vedral says.

This approach has a couple of downsides, though. First, it is never going to teach us anything about the fundamental nature of reality. That requires a willingness to look for places where quantum theory might fail, rather than where it succeeds (New Scientist, 26 June 2010, p 34). "If there is going to be some new theory, I don't think it's going to come from solid state physics, where the majority of physicists work,"

Second, working in a self-imposed box also means that new applications of quantum theory are unlikely to emerge. The many perspectives we can take on quantum mechanics can be the catalyst for new ideas. "If you're solving different problems, it's useful to be able to think in terms of different interpretations"

Apocalypse Moby

Free .pdf book and recommended by Bruce Sterling.

Twisted - Art, Schizophrenia & Drugs

This is a portrayal of schizophrenic degradation over a period of years by a patient drawing cats; I think in the late 1920's. I don't want to get into the why a lot of mental disease is exacerbated by 20th century problem/pill solutions but I think it's a useful benchmark for codifying drifting reality.

I quite like the fire god pussy at the end. Frankly it looks splendid and if that's what cats look like, then I want some of that. Well, rather that, than the cheeky catwalk turn and that exposed-in-my face feline arsehole they serve up currently.

And so I also want to introduce to you something I came across from my subscription to dope nation the other day that I've been holding back for you while I get over  Wittgenstein's mesmerizing come down. Truly he is the peak.

In a way it's good coincidence, as I specifically want to talk about the effects of morphine because when I've been screaming so loud at an entire hospital complex, to put me out my pain that they've jacked me up on 200mg of Pethadine AND 200 mg of morphine (eight times the hourly dose they prefer to administer) that it's only when I saw this picture that I realised what went on through the blinding pain. 

That actually, even though it's the most cathartic transfer of schmerz to no pain in my life, I previously had no idea that beneath the sea of doped up tranquility, that what was really going on in the hospital bed festooned with pipes and wires and drips and gastric pipes up my nose was a lotta lotta sedated neurological activity.

OF COURSE NOW I SEE. The mind was merely being deceived. And I think you can see that in these pictures below which frankly are the most dangerous artistic and neurological experiment I have come across to date that the morphine tricked me into thinking the pain had gone away. Here is a portrait that portrays otherwise.

And so I claim that the Psilocybin (magic mushroom) below, is ostensibly cheekier, funnier, more dramatic and a little bit bucking bizarre. But as I've done both I'm allowed to shoot my mouth off about that. 

There's a lot more of the artist Bryan Lewis Saunders doing drugs for us all; that is him, you and I over here. 

Update: I can't find the exact post but Clif High talked about using snow to diminish burnt toes and the pain duration lasting infinitely longer than just dealing with it sans snow.

Put The Kettle On

Lovely. Via Rob

Ctrl Alt Del - Wittgenstein

I've been telling people for a couple of years that my attention is shredded. Back in 2006 Google released a cloud based RSS reader and my datastream which was heavy anyway went up by let's say, around 10 times as much in volume. To compensate for this I naturally read faster, ditched stuff quicker, learned to scan read and get to the point where I can pick out the interesting sentences, the bits that fire off more endorphins with 2 or 3 screen swipes by my eyeballs per page scroll.

I don't advocate becoming so data intensive as there's always a quid pro quo and what I made up for in breadth was mugged by the reality of depth, though the complex caveat of that is I also covered a lot more breadth-of-depth. 

So that's all clear then isn't it? 

No? Whatever. It's complex but the road traffic accident victim (did you see this yesterday on Vimeo?) was my attention span for traditional deep reading. A sort of brain death if you can make it to the end of that video.

I used to inhale literature and then that waned to non fiction with post WWII U.S politics and then that distilled to just pure digital fact hunting; scanning at the speed of light ( though with admittedly low clock cycle CNS CPU) on the internet and suddenly I started to fail at reading books I'd have stuck it out with before. 

I failed on War on Peace and succeeded with Hamas. I stumbled on Don Quixote and lucked out on good manners, I tired over and over again with Moby Dick but uncovered it's roots in all three Abrahamic religions (it takes a wilful effort of dismissing the obvious on that point as I learned recently from experience. It will probably only linger for a few seconds at most, or if you're lucky you'll figure out why all three religions tell variations on the same stories). 

The list goes on and on, choose a topic, put my name next to it and see what the Google turns up. I've written more bollocks on other people's blogs than I have on my own and that's saying something.

But it's consistent bollocks. I know this even though I'm completely inconsistent in real life because when I comment it's coming from my heart and I get a chance to discretely retract a few unchoice words unlike in real life, like yesterday when I wanted to delete my mouth when I realised the business card I requested at the Emporiums "It's happened to be a closet" (sic) was denied because the poor girl thought I was asking for her personal business card. And so when I secured it off someone more senior I lost my temper...only to regret my aggression that pointedly articulated 'of course there's a business card for the establishment' in a voice a little louder than a gentleman uses. I wish I could have deleted the tonality of my words. They were bullying and unfair.

So no books of importance for so long. Well of course I still read, but most books look like shitty shinola compared to the outstanding contexutality and accessibility of the webz. 

But how adorable is analogue paper? It's a real chick puller these days to carry a book. Sometimes I take a walk with one just to look the part against you arseholes with your noses stroking your iPads and  your greasy fingers in your iPhones. Books are very sexy. They always will be and let's face it; tech just hit a design wall. Rectangles are the new black till we figure out 3D multi-colour morphing fractals and shape shifting tech devices. And then who knows? We might even be able to burp it up as language as well. True Visual language.

A little bit like this early monochromatic attempt:

And then out of nowhere. Like a bat out of fucking Honda....

....I was off the grid for a few days and rereading some of Taleb's Black Swan in between emailing him, as he's a bit of a gent in real life unlike his haughty character that comes leaping of the page. 


Then I hit solid fucking Gold. I pulled out my Ray Monk's Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius and inhaled 600 pages in three sittings. I could FEEL my brain saying. "YES MY SON"..."You're still tasty" "Dammit you're so fucking hot" "This is FUN". "You are SO back". 


This is where it all started. Reading books. God I had such an amazing time those three days of utter undisturbed silence.


So much so that when I leaned back after the final page and realised the scope of Ludwig's attempt to reconcile his intellect with his life (a failure that he would be first to admit), as I pondered the maths and the logic needed to define it all as the illusion it really is. The abstraction and sheer effort required to line up all the ducks in one go and press a big banging button. I shed tears for the sacrifice involved in the venture we call history. I didn't undertand it all of course, many times I could only smell the scent of the effort around the edges. 


It was best described a few months ago in that video where the voice says: Nobody knows what the universe is for, but all agree that it is extremely expensive. 


I hope those cocks at CERN know EXACTLY what they are doing as they tamper with space and time.That they aren't taking risks without OUR permission or consultation. It's us who pay the price for science. NOT the team players on the Manhattan Project who all wrung their hands  in post war angst at the enormity of what they unleashed on the world.

So yeah. I nailed a book I'd loved once in the past and actually it sent me spiralling into space at times as I realised the conversion of Vicky (as he was privately known in one Swansea household) from that which can be articulated to that which merely exists. The word to the verb. The idea to the act. The doing of it all...the doing.


Thank you Ray Monk for bringing one of the most complex people alive. A man whose presence scared his closest friends into moderating how much time they could tolerate with his intellectual fierceness. Russell, Keynes, GE Moore. He broke all their backs and yet, was it really Feyerabend who finally had the courage to challenge him in a way that he appreciated. The same Feyerabend who briefly taught McKenna at Berkeley? Small world baby. Small fucking world.

I'll leave you with Wittgenstein on Science and to which I direct the researchers at CERN to consult the rest of the monkeys on the planet, if a hint of risk is present. You don't know  ANY more than we do. You're just monkeys in cotton underpants tinkering with dark matter.


Wittgenstein:

'The truly apocalyptic view of the world' he wrote, 'is that things do not repeat themselves.' 

that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves.......

Quantum Entanglement

When is empirical science going to wake up from it's measurable stupor to grasp the obtuseness of subject object delineation. That empirical science is intellectually asphyxiated. That dare we utter it.... all is indeed one and thus the end and the beginning are contiguous. 

That the temporal experience we enjoy as monkeys sitting around the planet, in our cotton underpants, arguing over who owns what, is an extraordinarily unique blessing not to be wasted.

We're making daily headway into the nature of our unique space time dimension. We haven't even scratched the surface.

Some deviant arsehole wrote that in the comments of the Quantum Entanglement article over on Wired. Anybody notice Graham Hancocks new book (his first work of fiction) is called Entangled? The word is popping up everywhere for me.


Update comment from a very knowledgable person:



When these scientists learn that there are seven dimensions that precede space-time, and time is the eighth dimension, then the source of entanglement occurs in the realm of rules, data, and patterns before ever projecting into space-time. Thereby, what is entangled are the patterns in those seven hidden dimensions that give rise to the "things" within space-time. Consequently, all entanglement by its very nature stretches through time before manifesting in space. Thereby, the definition of entanglement must include time for the concept to be accurate.


Just like an object-oriented programming language reuses code and objects, the universe reuses patterns within those seven dimensions. Learn to manipulate those patterns and you can cause effects anywhere in space-time, at will. The downside is that the consequences for error are far greater and idiot-humans would merely destroy themselves before having the chance to understand what went wrong.


Clean up your acts, and I'll teach you more. Try to use this now and you won't ever get the chance.


Here is Wisdom...

Rural Telecom - India

View more presentations from Futurescape.

My friend Syamant has written a nice ready reckoner on the India rural telecoms landscape. A part of the world that culturally and geographically I'm fascinated by primarily because there's so much unspoiled strangeness and mysticism (unlike China's uber-rational homogeneity) which I think makes for a fascinating ethnographic topography as it collides with the 21st century. 

There are many who bemoan India's irrational  contradictions and yet deep down I view those same frustrations as a much more meaningful organic flowering of humanity for the future. 


I've no evidence for this and I also am probably guilty of varnishing some tough realities such as poverty and health indices with some sort of Caucasion cultural posturing though I mean it with the best of intent.

Andrew Hurd - Bangkok

The last time Andrew Hurd made a claim about me I asked to meet him and he bottled out even though he claimed in his Twitter profile to be a truth seeker (oh dear). 

So once again Andrew. I challenge you to a public recorded debate on the 9/11 commission findings. 

Let's do this. It'll be a pleasure for me. 

Heart 2 Heart

Via Brain Pickings

Birkenstock

Our long international nightmare is over. Rob is back in Birkenstocks.

The Military Industrial Complex

Is an absolute sweetie sometimes. There are simply no absolutes are there?

Werner Herzog's - Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I'd love to see this 3D documentary by Werner Herzong. Coincidentally, I've been spending a bit of time  over the last few weeks listening to descriptions of the caves in Lascaux in Southern France where Picasso emerged and said 'we've learned nothing' after seeing the intense visionary drawings which in this instance also adorn the caves at Chauvet Pont d'Arc. However both locations (and others) liberally portray therianthropes for no explicable rational reason.

Anybody else learned of the similarities between these caves and the features of cathedrals such as Chartres?