Pakistan & Jinnah

After rewatching Gandhi I was recommended to take a look at Christopher Lee's Jinnah. I like its narrative premise of a life review, which oddly enough is a near death experience (NDE) that transcends religion and geography, the subject of the film. I think I remain unchanged from my stated position that the British left a lovely divide and rule ticking time bomb between the two countries in order that they could be subject to outside influence. 

It's called Kashmir.

Gandhi (reluctantly) and Jinnah agreed that partition would take place between India and Pakistan, and the British through Mountbatten made that process unfair given the ethnic make up of the Kashmir region. 

Divide and rule, problem reaction solution, Hegelian dialectic are all as old as the hills. The stupid monkey needs to wake up to the elite string pulling that has kept the human house divided since the Mesopotamian civilisations. I say human because the blood lines that run things are of the blue blood variety as opposed to our red. 

As Princess Diana repeated over and again before her murder.

"They're not human".

BBC's Adam Curtis - Century Of The Self

This is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly.

His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud’s theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their engineering of consent. Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the father of the public relations industry.

Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as well as Wilhelm Reich, one of the main opponents of Freud’s theories. Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

Happiness Machines. Part one documents the story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays who invented Public Relations in the 1920s, being the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses.

The Engineering of Consent. Part two explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe Freud’s underlying premise that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires.

There is a Policeman Inside All of Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed. In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas, which lead to the creation of a new political movement that sought to create new people, free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people’s minds by business and politics.

Eight People Sipping Wine In Kettering. This episode explains how politicians turned to the same techniques used by business in order to read and manipulate the inner desires of the masses. Both New Labor with Tony Blair and the Democrats led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group which had been invented by psychoanalysts in order to regain power.

Regine Debatty - We Make Money Not Art

Regine Debatty

Regine Debatty stepped onstage looking breezily stylish and was soon taking us down the path of biotechnology and art related projects. I've been meaning to check out her blog, We make money not art for some time now but within a few seconds of her presentation I'd resolved to add her RSS feed to my daily intake. Regina conveyed the importance of understanding what biotechnology really means and its impact on the human race. Examples given such as the victim less leather jacket grown from a combination of mice and human cells really got me thinking about what we define as norms and how science can make the mundane and inhumane (killing animals for their skin) appear to be more digestible than artificially growing biological organs such as skin. Regine asked us if this was the future of farming and its a good question for us to consider. Up next, Regina highlighted the potential for growing human hair from a deceased person as a way of drawing comfort from those we were close too and if that seems disjointed, as was later brought up, why would we not draw a parallel with the business of renting pets.

I thought that Regine made the point that scientists are now much more creative than the artists when it comes to biotechnology related disciplines although I'd like to double check this point as it seemed to me that the art collectives can't wait to get their hands on the laboratory test tubes and petri dishes. Other topics covered were the potential for biotechnology created armies, replacement kidney supermarkets which are already a reality and being harvested from prisoners in China for wealthy people. Coincidentally the day before the conference, China's leading kidney transplant expert in Shanghai accused of organ harvesting from the outlawed Falun Gong, committed suicide by jumping out of a hospital window. On the subject of mass harvesting take a look at this to see how mechanization of biological processes is already taking place.

Regine also covered the idea of rapid prototyping, which is a concept I'd come across before in a Poptech podcast by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT about the Fablab which uses incredible technology in ways which can dramatically change the lives of people through concepts like making perfect stuff out of imperfect stuff.

Other topics covered were Spimes, which will challenge our definition of what an object really is once it can be tracked before development and after manufacture. One amusing anecdote that Regine related was a tale of a friend whose luggage was on the wrong plane and that it was the passenger who had to disembark and follow the luggage on the wrong plane even though or possibly because it had radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging which is a technology that will intervene in our lives and is already making headway in Prada's 40 million Dollar flagship store in Manhatten. RFID is a technology that like barcodes is going to become ubiquitous due to the falling cost of technology. If you can imagine what the falling cost of processors and storage has done for computing than take some time out to imagine a world where everything ever made and those that use them can be tracked.

Benny Hill, Southampton & Censored Protests

The image above is of Benny Hill when he was a milkman in Southampton, his hometown and the place where he was buried (opposite the hospital where my mother finally died after the horrors of Chemotherapy, Brain Surgery, Steroid induced Diabetes and a mind that drifted from consciousness to unconsciousness irrespective of whether she was awake.

The policeman is Nephilim sized so I'm quite sure there's a bit more to the image than what it appears to be.

The average consumer and/or direct or indirect corporate fluffer will have no idea of the number of demonstrations held in London against the lockdown, forced vaccinations and so forth, including one that according to respectable estimates was between half a million to a million (four miles long, of 30 people width marching). The media don't mention it, so you don't know unless your bus got caught in it.

As ever, it's the activists with a sense of humour that cut through the preposterous nature of what is easily approaching Nazi-population blindness-to-the-truth.

It's not the facts that colour their mindset, it's the moral cowardice to call it out for what it is. A clear cut case of violation of the Hippocratic Oath, Nuremburg Code (1947), Human Rights Act (2000), UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Twitter Not Human

 

If only I did get that email in the screen grab above, but I've been looping round that circuit for too long now and nothing gets resolved.

I'll put a hundred pounds into a charity of any reader's choosing if anyone can get a human being from twitter to contact me. The auto response isn't sophisticated enough to handle a stolen account with the default email reset. Only a human can solve the problem, but it's been nearly ten days now that I've been locked out.

It's not the account that feels cheated from me.. It's a free service and I can live without it as I do use Plurk and Jaiku and a bunch of others. It's the 800 or so people who wont know that it's not me Tweeting at some point about the ladyboy incident that Sam  had in Bangkok on his visit here, and which I have pledged not to ever mention again. 

OK well that's categorically not true but you get my drift. (Sam was the most popular person I've ever witnessed pay a visit to the City of Angels and I'm still getting broken heart phone calls  on the spare SIM from the fan club he whipped up on his visit. Quite remarkable it was to witness. Made me feel old too)

Sorry folks for any DM's that seem to be ignored  on my Twitter account, but I don't get them sent to me since the default email has been changed. It's out of my hands. Many of you have tried to help and I appreciate that very much. Really I do.

Update: Coincidentally I see Ian has posted about the need for humans  on websites over at his blog.

I'm hoping that today is going to be the day when a long overdue tattoo is put in place. More on that later I hope.

The Tao Of Humanity

I didn't get permission to republish this but it stood out so poignantly at the end of a paid subscription forecast report by its author, a humble and wise pie maker, that it   deserves to be shared. I hope he wont mind.

Update: His website is over here

Very few humans consider their place in, and interaction with, the 'grander scheme of manifesting reality'. Oh, priests and other organized predator mind controllers will blather on about “god's plan”, like they really had a clue, but they don't. And they actually can't...but that is another conclusion for another future...

Some humans do ponder themselves not as individuals, but as vital (life) interacting with universe (energy). Gandhi (of liberation of hindoo peoples from illuminati oppression fame), also known as Mahatma (great one), spent time considering this duality of human, and universe. And he came to a life lifting conclusion that while each of our acts are totally insignificant to universe, they are also totally necessary to it. Even though insignificant to a degree that mind cannot comprehend, it is absolutely necessary to universe as a whole that the act be done. And so it is to us. If not done by you, the act will nonetheless be completed to the satisfaction of universe. And you will have missed an opportunity to be positively changed by that act. Now note, one cannot, in this universe, avoid their responsibility to act, and even choosing to not actively act, is nonetheless, an act, so we each participate, even by avoidance. What we miss though is the opportunity for positively changing ourselves through harmonizing with opportunities presented by universe.

How often are we presented with opportunities clear enough to make meaningful choices within the broader waves of change that sweep through our local segment of universe? Said another way, how often, as adults, are we presented with opportunities to act heroically? Well, up until recently, not so often. However, as all the readers of this report may come to feel personally (if they have not already), the times, they are a'changing. These days are different, and according to our data, universe is about to slap you upside the head with that realization.

For many, the emergence of the tao into humanity's collective perception will be lost in the tumult and upheaval of worlds that is now occurring. That the multitudes will NOT awake to the touch of the tao is apparently necessary to universe, as it is. Since it is, it must be a necessary component of universe that some not be awakened, both for their own karmic needs, and to allow those who are awake to thus distinguish themselves.

And just as the rivers of time constantly shift the grains of sand (us humans in case you missed that poetic nod) laying on the river's bed, it is necessary for universe that shifts happen. These shifts are appearing now, not only to our data weary eyes, but also manifesting in the great changes flowing through our collective experience that we label humanity.

It is necessary to universe that many (perhaps most) humans experience these changing times blindly oblivious to the larger waves creating a new world/solar system around them. They, the unaware, the sheeple, will look up at the great changes that will be soon sending their people-herds into panic and mindless stampedes without understanding their place, part, or role in anything larger than the flow of the immediate now. This, the tao, as it manifests around and through them, will consume all their time, generate all their thoughts, and create their reality as they experience it, totally oblivious to it.

It must be so that universe may exist and express change. Change must occur, in spite of all human efforts to oppose change, deflect change, or control change, it must occur. And will so occur. As universe directs. Not us. Including the 'aware' amongst the sheeple. Those humans whose karmic burden is such that they need suffer awareness now, in these days, will not 'awaken the masses'. They will not, 'spark the revolution', nor 'incite the herd to turn'. They may not so understand now the 'why' of it all, especially those awakening minds in the early stages where it is ever-so-important to meet the emotionally driven need to go out and slap all your soon-to-be-ex friends among the sheeple herd to wake them up. They, we, do not understand, until later, that it won't work and will just annoy the crap out of the sheeple who are being slapped in the face. But, somehow, and for some 'why', it is necessary that a great many sheeple be slapped. It is necessary for universe to force massive social changes at planet wide scale through humanity at this time, and is also necessary, for you, at a personal level, to experience these changes in some greater state of awareness than the general sheeple herd. That is your challenge. That awareness alone, marks you as being offered the opportunity of service by universe. This is rare, as you well know. Not that many humans out there who are really thinking beings, most are operating under deep mind control, and are blinded by false perception of reality.

Not you, nor anyone, ever need accept the karmic burden of service to universe. Nor is this some kind of submission to the will of some other being. It does not work that way. Many humans will (necessarily) confuse the opportunity provided by awakening to reality with 'service' as it is dictated by the religious control freaks (who really are freaks... disturbing, twisted, freakish minds capable of killing and even consuming the flesh of humans for their twisted understanding of reality). The archetype for this 'captured service' is the personality sold as Mother Teresa. Even she, on her death bed, acknowledged that her 'awakening' was captured, and the whole 'faith' religion thing was a waste of a life. Took her long enough to realize it...but such is the nature of karmic burdens and the filters that they place on our perception. For its own reasons which are not particularly pertinent to humanity which must live through it, universe is in the process of transitioning, in a more dramatic than in the past fashion, to a new operating state. That humans have been favored by universe in the past offers some potential that we will also be well received in this emerging future state. But no guarantees exist in universe, other than the guarantee of opportunity to experience change. And if lucky, or personally karmically well situated, to not only experience change, but to be changed by so experiencing it. It helps to be an artist. That is to say, those who can self identify as artists are able to more readily integrate the internal changes that the art itself forces on its creator. Probably why universe is an artist, and we are (some) of its works. As out, so in.

It helps in integrating change as a part of life to be an artist. As those who have made and sailed their own boats, baked and eaten their own pies, sewn and worn their own clothes, hewn and built with their own lumber, washed and served their fellow human, cared for and assisted the dying, trained for personal change (meditation) will tell you, the art changes the artist as much if not more that the artist will change the materials of their art. This is the point of art. Any and all arts. Even those arts not yet discovered by humanity. And even those arts ignored as art (only from the outside is the householder thought consumed by his chores). Art can and does change us even before we encounter it. And the point of the exhibitions of others arts? Well, duh, to inspire some other human to self-select as a change candidate in universe, and to begin the process that is the art of living, which is to say, the art of the discovery of one's self as artist.

All artists are in service to universe, though many are as oblivious of this as the sheeple are to their mind control. It is through art that service in the form of change is rendered to universe. And, universe apparently appreciates this as it gives the mass of humans some small percentage of artists, enough it would seem, the karmic joy of expressing their art as pie bakers. And thus we, the rest of us, are 'repaid' for our service here on earth.

We will all need to pie-up as universe moves a very large art project forward. Our service to universe as artists is about to challenged greatly as we assist universe in this transition to a new expression of its art (life). Our data has clear statements that [service] to universe will be offering new opportunities to those artists capable of perceiving and acting upon them. As with all offers, they can be refused. But acknowledge now that refusal is also a choice, and even it does not prevent failure. Remembering, however, that failure is the process of art working itself out through the internal obstacles of the artist, and that change is art, pie up now, as your art is about to be challenged. Your service to universe is even now in a period where [opportunities to change/expand] will be presented in the form of very large [holes in common consensus reality] that will draw you in, artist tools at the ready, too excited *not* to change your relationship to your service to universe as it draws the tao right out of you, exposing you to yourself, and the opportunities for new service to humanity, as universe expresses the tao of it all...in our pies, and in front of our eyes.

This is what is coming.

This is what you are feeling.

The tao of humanity is discovering itself.....through you.

Excitingly scary....yes?

PSFK Conference - Niku Banaie

Niku Banaie, Managing Partner of Naked Communications did a heartwarming presentation that explored some of the more pressing humanist dimensions of digital life today. Niku's grandfather was one of the early entrepreneurs of arcade and pinball games in the UK and the lesson learned by him that a fundamental human characteristic of playfulness is a key driver of all activity was not lost. Niku outlined a guideline of five universal needs for successful understanding on interaction that apply not just to life but cascade down into winning people over in general social intercourse.

• Need for love
• Need to learn
• Need to give back
• Need for simplicity
• Need for play

Niku talked about the sense of loneliness on the net and how face to face interplay is still a hard wired necessity. He talked about how The Guardian, the worlds leading liberal voice, makes most of its revenue from Guardian soulmates by putting like minded individuals together. The irony of this massively connected world is the absence of love and how so many people are facing increasing levels of loneliness. Its remarkable how important it is for science to put a tactile face on its output and yet so often the results are engineered for efficacy rather than satisfaction. On learning Niku discussed the availability of MIT open course ware, a revolutionary sharing approach to putting the best lectures and learning materials in the world on the net. Self education with the aid of an internet connection really does open up the potential for people to explore and fulfill our learning instinct. When quality content and flat distribution are coupled, the potential for unlikely people to enable themselves is nothing short of magic.

The need to give back was best exemplified by an example of the Patagonia company I talked about in an earlier post and which if you listen to the podcast gives a number of heart lifting examples on how giving back supports a virtuous circle other than just profit. Niku talked about how the founder allows all his staff to get involved with environmental activism with the company paying for a get out of jail free card that will honour any amount of bail that is set for for related civil disobedience. Yep, Patagonia encourage their employees to break the law and put their money where their mouth is. Yvon Chouinard also discusses in that podcast how the company provides day care facilities for mothers and has a retention rate for his employees that exceeds anywhere else, thus limiting the expense of having to replace valuable human resources that other companies factor-in massive amounts of dollars to keep. Patagonia's problem he jests is letting people go even after they hit retirement age. Stability is a wonderful foundation block if companies begin the process by giving back to their employees.

Kiva was the next great example of giving back. They are a web interface that allows people to sponsor entrepreneurs in developing companies with loans that save lives. By putting people in touch with specific entrepreneurs a direct connection is made, cutting through the bureaucratic and less rewarding transaction of just giving to charity. If you take a look at the link you can see how Meas Sokheang of Phnom Penh is only $150 dollars short of raising the $1000 dollars needed to buy a motorbike and pigs to take to the market. We can chip in with a minimum of 25 bucks but its a loan and not just a donation. Its repaid back with interest but the satisfaction of knowing that a real vetted loan candidate is going to be given a fishing rod with which to fish and not just the food to see her through the day. When I first went to Cambodia many years ago nobody can be unshaken by the genocide that took place there and the barbaric torture that took place in Tuol Sleng. But one thing that lifts the soul each time I return is the kids who increasingly look less grubby and frankly don't have any recollection of the Khmer Rouge years that wiped out a generation and left a stain on a par with Nazism or the Hutu Tutsi conflict of Rwanda. Here's a chance to change and observe the process by giving back and you can also meet a bunch of other people (all from the U.S.) who are putting Meas Sokheang back on her feet with a loan that she will pay back over 21 months. This site is awesome and puts facebook social networking to shame. The world really is flat in this instance. As I write this post I see that Meas has raised the money needed but that Victoria Terko from Ghana is just 25 Bucks short of her crafts business she dreams of.

On simplicity Niku Banaie highlighted how massively successful interfaces such as Google and Craigslist have become by streamlining the information we are exposed to and the number of linked options they can provide. He talked about the Sugar graphical user interface for the 100 dollar laptop that is set to launch in developing economies and how it is built around real life groups and communities, around the projects they work on the interaction between those groups. An intuitive dramatisation of first life communications on a screen if you like. The uncomfortable truth is as Asi has pointed out that our lives have become unmanageably full and we have too much to deal with. Niku talked about John Maeda's laws of simplicity: Shrink, Hide and Embody. A great example was the Wi Fi connected umbrella that alerts us to potential rain before leaving the house although the umbrella that can wail out when I've left it again would suit me. My record for losing one is five minutes after buying it. I hadn't even used it.

Niku finished up with the human need for play and gave us a bunch of examples that highlighted this important ability for positive reciprocity that all humans have and can leverage. Examples given were the climbing centre in Japan that 'reframed' the idea of simulacra rock environments and used old household objects such as picture frames and bric-a-brac to enable climbers to scale walls and a Danish school environment that had been designed around the understanding that different modes of learning included play, activity, reflection and collaboration but crucially in a manner conducive to knowledge absorption unlike that from didactic monologue.

I need also at this point, to highlight that while looking for some photos for these posts on the PSFK conference I came into contact with Lynette Webb who is also a user of Google docs & spreadsheets which allows us to share and edit in an open source manner on the PSFK conference for example. You can find the link to her notes here and I hope to be doing a post about online collaborative working with Lynette using the tools that are available to everyone. Check out Lynettes blog interesting snippets in the mean time.

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.”

Enlarge This Image

Mark Power/Magnum Photos

Related

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

Enlarge This Image

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.”

Politics & War as Entertainment - Butler Shaffer

There's no doubt that the above video makes a mockery of most of what I've said about 9/11 on this blog, but it is what it is. 

I've no problem in admitting mistakes because I don't have the military industrial complex or government handcuffs to sit Dick Cheney in a room and pull his pacemaker our with pliers till he speaks. 

I have to rely on the best information I can get my hands on at the time.

I've been reviewing this 911 HollyWeird information for a week or so on James Fetzer's audio blog, but it all started off with the Jay Weidner interview I posted over here though you can see a lot of controversy has been created here in the comments or over here too. 

However you need to sit down and do the work to figure out why it opens up a new dimension, not a million miles away from Sophie Smallstorm's Sandy Hook deconstruction.

I've no real interest in the World Trade Centre towers military grade demolition on 9/11, because it's the million or so Iraqis and Afghanis that are the victims, not the Israelis, British, French or Americans who actually orchestrated most of it. You know. The perpetrators.

However, I hope you were watching your freedoms get pick-pocketed by the war entertainment complex since then.

Here's Butler Shaffer's views on the matter. It's erudite thinking and you really must read it to appreciate a mind ahead of its time.

If I were to offer a seminar on the nature of war, I believe that the first class session would include a showing of the film Wag the Dog. Those who wish to justify the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of total strangers in the name of "good" versus "evil," or "national honour," will likely find the movie discomforting. As the governments of India and Pakistan self-righteously, and in the name of "God," threaten one another with a nuclear war that could instantly kill anywhere from ten to twenty million people, it is time for decent, intelligent people to put down their flags and begin to see war for what the late General Smedley Butler rightly termed it: "a racket." This film offers a quick reality fix.

Randolph Bourne's observation "war is the health of the state" is familiar to most critics of militarism, but few have delved into why this is so. Statism is dependent upon mass thinking which, in turn, is essential to the creation of a collective, herd-oriented society. Such pack-like behaviour is reflected in the intellectual and spiritual passivity of people whose mindsets are wrapped up more in images and appearances than in concrete reality.

Such a collapse of the mind produces a society dominated by entertainment — which places little burden on thinking — rather than critical inquiry, which helps to explain why there has long been a symbiotic relationship between the entertainment industry and political systems. Entertainment fosters a passive consciousness, a willingness to "suspend our disbelief." Its purpose is to generate amusement, a word that is synonymous with "diversion," meaning "to distract the attention of." The common reference to movies as a form of "escape" from reality, reflects this function. Government officials know what every magician knows, namely, that to carry out their illusions, they must divert the audience's attention from their hidden purposes.

Michel Foucault has shown how the state's efforts to regulate sexual behaviour — whether through repressive or "liberating" legislation — serves as such a distraction, making it easier for the state to extend its control over our lives. It is instructive that, in the months preceding the World Trade Centre attacks which, in turn, ushered in the greatest expansion of police powers in America since the Civil War, the news stories that dominated the media had to do with allegations of adulterous affairs by a sitting president and a congressman. It is not coincidence that both the entertainment industry and the government school systems have helped to foster preoccupations with sex.

The authority of the state is grounded in consensus-based definitions of reality, whose content the state insists on controlling. This is why so-called "public opinion polls," rather than factual analysis and reason, have become the modern epistemological standard, and why imagery — which the entertainment industry helps to foster — now takes priority over the substance of things.

Politics and entertainment each feed upon — and help to foster — public appetites for illusions and fantastic thinking. The success of such undertakings, in turn, depends upon unfocused and enervated minds, which helps to explain why motion picture and television performers, popular musicians, and athletes — whose efforts require little participation on the part of the viewer — have become the dominant voices in our politicized culture. It also helps to account for the attraction of so many entertainers throughout the world to visionary schemes such as state socialism, as well as the increasing significance of entertainment industry gossip and box-office revenues as major news stories.

The entertainment industry helps shape the content of our consciousness by generating institutionally desired moods, fears, and reactions, a role played throughout human history. Ancient Greek history is tied up in myths, fables, and other fictions, passed on by the entertainers of their day, the minstrels. We need to ask ourselves about the extent to which our understanding of American history and other human behaviour has been fashioned by motion pictures, novels, and television drama. Through carefully scripted fictions and fantasies, others direct our experiences, channel our emotions, and shape our views of reality. The fantasies depicted are more often of conflict, not cooperation; of violence, not peace; of death, not the importance of life.

Nowhere is the interdependency of the political and entertainment worlds better demonstrated than in the war system, which speaks of "theatres" of operation, "acts" of war with battle "scenes," "staging" areas, and "dress rehearsals" for invasions. The pomp and circumstance of war is reflected in military uniforms that mimic stage costumes, all to the accompaniment of martial music that rivals grand opera. A Broadway play can become either a "bomb" or a "hit;" troops are "billeted" (a word derived from the French meaning of a "ticket"); while the premier of a movie is often accompanied, like a World War II bombing raid, by searchlights that scan the skies. Even the Cold War was framed by an "iron curtain." Is it only coincidence, devoid of any symbolic meaning, that at the end of the American Civil War - one of the bloodiest wars in human history - its chief protagonist was shot while attending the theatre, and that his killer was an actor who, upon completing his deed, descended to the stage and exited?

Adolf Hitler understood, quite well, the interplay between political power and theatre, a truth that continues to reveal itself in entertainers involving themselves so heavily in political campaigns, some even managing to get themselves elected to Congress or the presidency! Nor was it surprising that one of the first acts of the Bush Administration, following the announced "War on Terrorism," was to send a group of presidential advisers to Hollywood to enlist the entertainment industry's efforts to portray the war as desired by Washington! As with earlier wars, the "military/entertainment complex" will continue to write the scripts and define the characters that are required to assure the support of passive minds in the conduct of war.

Furthermore, because entertainment is often conducted in crowded settings (e.g., theatres, stadiums, auditoriums) there is a dynamic conducive to the generation of mass-mindedness. One need only recall the powerful harangues of Adolf Hitler that coalesced tens of thousands of individuals into a controllable mob, to understand the symbiotic relationship between entertainment and politics.

Entertainment is a part of what we call "recreation," which means to "re-create," in this case to give interpretations to events that are most favorable to one's national identity and critical of an opponent. In this connection, entertainers help to manipulate the "dark side" of our being which, once mobilized, can help to generate the most destructive and inhumane consequences. World War II movies portrayed Japanese kamikaze pilots who crashed their planes into Navy ships as "crazed zealots," while American pilots who did the same thing to Japanese ships or trains were represented as "heroes" willing to die to save their comrades. German and Japanese soldiers were presented as sneering sadists who delighted in the torture of the innocents, while the American soldiers only wanted to get the war over with so they could get back home to mom and her apple pie! How many of us, today, think of 19^th century U.S. cavalrymen — as portrayed by the likes of John Wayne and Randolph Scott — as brave soldiers, while Indian warriors were "savages" for having forcibly resisted their own annihilation?

All of this leads me to ask whether the entertainment industry is an extension of the war system, or whether war is simply an extension of our need for entertainment? What should be clear to us is that entertainment is one of the principal means by which our thinking can be taken over and directed by others once we have chosen to make our minds passive, which we do when we are asked — whether by actors or politicians — to suspend our judgement about the reality of events we are witnessing. When we are content to be amused (i.e. to have our attention diverted from reality to fantasy), and to have our emotions exploited by those skilled in triggering unconscious forces, we set ourselves up to be manipulated by those producing the show. 

Politics differs from traditional theatre in one important respect, however: in the political arena, we do not call for the "author" at the end of a war! Most of us prefer not to know, for to discover the identities of those who have scripted such events might call into question our own gullibility