Naarak Mak Mak

Undoctored photo of a Thai girl. Guiness book of records no less.

Screamadelica

Many moons ago in a different galaxy I was driving in my brown Austin Allegro (given to me by my mates dad called Austin Brown) with my East German girlfriend in Southampton just before we moved to Germany. 

We weren't talking much, just listening to Primal Scream's Screamadelica when I drew up to some red traffic lights heading north towards Swaythling very late at night or even in the wee hours. It was very quiet. We were the only car at the crossroads. 

At the lights my girlfriend turned to me and said "the music is so weird, it's like a soundtrack to what is going on outside".

Just at that moment the police siren part of the album was playing and a police car drove by with blue lights flashing and either the sirens screaming inside and outside the car were synchronised or there was no siren but just flashing lights on the police car as it sped across our intended path. 

It was an important moment in my life of synchronicity because usually I'm completely alone and nobody understands quite why it seems important. Ulrike my girlfriend was slack jawed from the experience.

The video above is interesting if only because it raises a particularly tough question for me given that 911 is clearly not entirely to do with a man in a cave conspiring to bring the U.S. down (otherwise it's a conspiracy theory that is working out extraordinarily well given the plummeting fortunes of the U.S.)

It's difficult enough dealing with people who haven't done sufficient homework and still believe the official fairy tale about 911 without having to concede that there's an awful lot of symbolism, ritual and coincidence connected to the entire affair. Well I can do but then I'm into some hard to articulate fractally recursive models of time as the exception to an interdimensional understanding of the multiverse. I may as well just make it up it's so hard to explain what I know I don't know. So instead of doing that I'll just remind you of the Symbolism of the U.S. that I blogged about a while back and leave you with what just happened as I was writing this. I took a phone call half way through for a small business related matter from a woman who half way through the conversation I realised sounded like someone I have been trying to hook with for years. I asked her if we both knew mutual friends and it turned out it was her. No small coincidence given I've failed to keep her contact details whenever we meet and she didn't know who she was calling.

Just saying people. Just saying.

Shrooming

I love the way he challenges that a woman will never visit his studio again. And so the BBC journalist films there next.

Blasphemy

Somebody uploaded some Terence McKenna on Youtube without the usual trance graphics which is something I kinda appreciate. This particular talk is interesting because of its sobriety as Terence was often much more playful. However it is introduced by Timothy Leary and in some ways it's that crossover point where, like Bertrand Russell to Wittgenstein, the master hands over the baton to the student.

It's called blasphemy because of the Moby Dick reference. If you're not paying attention then I no longer feel obliged to point out the obvious. I'm doing my  best by airing the finest.

Army Brat

I'm grateful I've always had a sense of history. Growing up British with a father in the Army, I was often surrounded not only by WWII veterans but also WWI vets. Germans and British depending on the country we were stationed in. 

Near one of my father's homes in Netley Abbey is a park where the largest building in the world once was. A hospital from the Crimean war where Florence Nightingale toiled and where later on American Jeeps drove down the central hall it was so long and wide. We'd head down to a pier (pictured under) now no longer, where injured soldiers arrived in all the major wars, and where I learned to do my first somersaults into the gravelly and pebbled beach below. Where the now absent struts had once supported the dying and the wounded as they were fetched into the Royal Victoria Hospital. 

My best friend and I would sneak out late at night to visit the prettiest but darkest of cemeteries with multinational graves of Canadians, Germans, Australians and more. Regiments with names like The Black Watch that I yearned to know the history of before the internet and smartphones. Names from far flung places of empires that no longer exist.

Later on as an adult I worked with the US military in Giessen just after the first Gulf War where i was selected in part because of resiliant psychographic profiling though they never knew that I merely used my wits and gave the answers I felt they needed (I later graphed the real answers and there were similarities of wave from but often with symmetries from the ones they wanted). I watched and observed the American Military machine from up close.

And so all my life I've been blessed with an unusual sense of luck at getting bogged down in a war no more bloody than the Cold War, and that even more so I'd skipped the horrific brutality of The Great War. Trench warfare in WWI was a first taste of mechanized killing through propaganda and manipulation by the string pullers. The second World War an extension of the first. And if the current slew of string pullers could have their way they'd pitch us against each other in an over populated planet's heartbeat. Of this I've no doubt. 

But maybe we're finally catching on. Realising it takes a higher type of consciousness to solve the problems that created it in the first place. Who knows.

What I do know is my idea of hell is trench warfare at the Sommes. Of being ordered to "go over" and slug it out in the poison gas and stench of rotting bodies, the cries and the senseless slaughter. I thank my lucky stardust I didn't have to see it, or if I did, I don't remember it. That so many unwittingly sacrificed all they had, stirred on by new found forms of mass media manipulation that subsequently went on to become the marketing industry through the efforts of Edward Bernays in New York, a nephew of Sigmund Freud exploiting the new found thinking in psychology and mass manipulation.

I'm blessed to have lived through the most extraordinary century ever and in terms of unwitting awareness of how it all was held together but now I know the Kali Yuga and whatever the new point of change will be, I welcome it irrespective of what my own fate is. It's nothing compared to the lives of millions sacrificed in the age of Iron and bullets.

This piece is in memory of Frank Buckles, WWI's last veteran who passed away after an extraordinary stretch of time spanning two centuries of the bloodiest years I've had the good luck ever to have missed.

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.