Adam Curtis On Chuck Norris & Scripted Anti-Intellectualism

Adam Curtis writes in his latest post on the relationship between Hollywood and Chuck Norris's views on the manufactured war on terror. It's a bit disappointing that Curtis appears  to be uninformed over the Pentagon's direct say in the scripts of movies that use war hardware from the department of rabid dog tax-parasi.... I mean defence. The observant will have picked up that the demonizing of Muslims commenced promptly after the Berlin Wall came down as the end of Communism was disastrous for the war business. Adam Curtis is being semi flippant on Norris commentary, but I'm serious. War is contrived and enemies are conjured up to justify the human sacrifice of conflict. The elite don't spill their blood. There's no need to when they paint the reality needed to motivate the poorly educated young men who invariably join the military. It's genius really.....if it wasn't psychopathy.

Adam Curtis Writes

I love the section about the making of Delta Force where Chuck Norris in an interview explains how the film tries to show what America's response to Arab terrorism should be in the future:

"I think terrorism is going to get greater all over the world, and I think it's time we started doing something about it right now rather than waiting till it gets a lot worse."

The aim of the film, Norris says, is to show America how to do this retaliation - through what he calls "positive violence". As opposed to "negative violence" - which is what the terrorists do.

Along with George Walker's use of film and celebrity to fake profits in order to do takeover deals, you begin to wonder whether the whole of the subsequent economic and foreign policy of Britain and the United States wasn't created by the rubbish movies of the 1980s.

NB: There's no point holding Chuck Norris accountable. It's evident he's a tragic tool in the strictest as well as most liberal senses of the word.

Time Is Speeding Up

One of the reasons I treat Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero hypothesis respectfully is I recognise his assertion that that time is speeding up. At this rate I will be sixty in a flash and eighty even faster. It's a tricky subject to pin down as the neurology for the subject i.e. more new things happen when we're we're younger then when we're older doesn't match with the traditional perception that time speeds up anyway as we become older (despite less new things happening). I've been investigating this a bit and asking as many young and old people as I can how they feel. Most regurgitate a bit of the neurology or traditional consensus but I can't help sensing a little nervousness over the subject. A sense that something is happening. People never say 'no'. They say 'no' and then explain why time 'appears' to be speeding up. My question is leading, and their answer is invariably unscientific because there is no science of what time is.

Last Saturday I met with a friend and we talked about a lot of subjects but one response stood out for the first time I've heard it. He said his sixteen year old girl could sense time was speeding up. That's a first.

Rupert Sheldrake's Google Talk - The Extended Mind

I find the Google Talks held at Mountain View are more generous than the TED talks in terms of depth as they permitted to go on for longer. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots. 

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor and Academic Director of the Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. 

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:

A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)

The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)

Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions) 

Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)

The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna: 

Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)

The Evolutionary Mind (1998) 

With Matthew Fox: 

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)

The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996)