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.