Entheogen

This documentary on Entheogens is quite uplifting. I recommend bookmarking it for one of those times when being cheered up isn't going to work or help, but taking your mind off things will or if you just want to skip to the Stanford and MIT geek-mafia talking about the inseparable relationship of computing and LSD when pitching the hippies against the pocket protector brigade for creative output (no contest). It's at 50 minutes 30 seconds. 


In case you know of any good documentaries, talks and so forth, I'm in the process of hoovering up as much of the internet's video content on quantum mechanics, relativity, entropy, and of course big bucking bang as well as mysticism including all the deisms. so please do let me know of any gems.

The Internet's Mid-Life Crisis

Tim Wu is the guy who coined the phrase net neutrality. I've blogged about him before as his grasp of the internet, media and commerce is well thought out, as exemplified by his ability to identify and reconcile the dangers of corporate narrow interests along with the need for Stalinist self interest in the face of egregious competition. Uncomfortable business thinking indeed.

In this video he elegantly entangles the dynamics of censorship, vertical integration, technology suppression and the emergence of Apple as a record label/TV Station or even old school film studio. He makes great use of historical but little known precedents to support his claims.

Steve Fuller

I rate Steve Fuller in this. He has  dazzling verbiage skills  and at least talks from his heart though I still say he's unwilling to pay homage to the nicompoop(s) deer-in-the-headlights reverence on the right. 

Anybody else feel that way or is it a bit too boring and grown up?

Update: I got Steve Buller mixed up with Simon Conway when originally posting this so I've amended the title and post. Sorry about that.

Dark Matter

One

This is the best I've seen yet (you generally know something is good on Youtube if it's under 50000 views and preferably under 5000). Sean Carroll is brilliantly lucid and engaging in this presentation.

Intel

Cocks (Look Mum This Colour's Perfect)

There's always Charlie Brookers 10 Biggest cocks (and she-cocks) in advertising if you wish to pursue the theme.

Oh go on. Do some more.

Less Is More

Junk Science?

This dramatic European Space Agency image shows all the satellites and human-made debris now orbiting space. What are your views? From the Holistic Quantum Relativity Initiative.

Minimalism

Less is more (over here)

London Adland

Via iboy

Is This The Voice Of Consumerism?

Asymmetric Follow

Twitter is a hyper contextual communicaton tool.

The number of different types of user experience is infinite (a big claim that I am prepared to stand by)

This means for example that the user experience of a person with 100 followers is not the same as 200 followers.

The next obvious context is the users preference for follow-back which is in itself a ratio.

Then there is the intent or purpose of use. Al Jazeera, Financial Times, BBC Podcasts are all monologue, but there are also power users that choose to mainly hold a monologue.

Which leads to the content of the 140 character limit. That in itself is almost impossible to describe.

So while this is a terrific post about the asymmetrical twitter experience the point is, that how people experience the service is really up to them. So get stuck in and define how you like to use it. It’s a remarkable evolutionary development in human communication on a par with the telegraph wire.

More over here

Evolvify

Sure. He's a human and takes a shit like all of us on this painfully extraordinary planet but equally it's hilarious listening to Sam Harris trip over his snooty superiority and resort to ad homs on non locality plus I can't ignore that funniest for me so far (and thank you so much for putting this my way) is Michael Shermer answering the question of whether it's him or his x squllion neurons firing off when he's thinking and he replies it's his neurons. 

Chopra calls him a Zombie. The Scientist snookered on logic and the mystic hurling epithets? This is what Youtube was made for. 

Maddeningly frustrating is the inability not to join in and take both sides on as I have my own point of view which is deeper and darker heresy ;)

More over here

Aflockalypse

More Karmageddon over here.

7 Billion Reasons 2 Think Twice

Swift

I Hated You, I Loved You Too.

Written at the age of 18 years old and performed here at the age of 19. It's a remarkable song if only for the way Kate Bush squeezes the lyrics and syntax to achieve something different for "so cold, let me in your window" with emphasis on the second syllable of the last word not the first syllable as would be expected. 

As soon as I understood what she did just now here, I realised it was as pure as art gets in a singer, song writing (not forgetting interperative dance) and then I thought of the parallels (lines) with Debbie Harry's lyrical contortions and Mezzo Soprano vocal transitions in Heart of Glass that made the song worth posting too. They both sing of the love/hate dynamic often found between lovers, which I have to say I'm not a fan of in real life, but recognise as productive and useful in many relationships I've observed.

Whatever you think of these two songs I've yet to hear someone sing them so that they are indistinguishable from the original. If you do let me know.

MyCrAsian (Crazy + Asian) Mother

Consistently brilliant. Human, Insightful. More over here.

Second Coming

Paul has written a very useful gem over at Forbes: Chonqing Express. You heard it here first.

Woah This Is Trippy

The multiverse as outlined in M-Theory is, as most bleeding edge science is, both mathematically supportable and at the same time as mystical as say the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's well outlined in an entertaining manner in this Family Guy episode.

All the best for 2011.

Personal Responsibility

This one is for the Department of Homeland Security: Y'all come back again any time you feel need.

A Darwinian Theory of Beauty

Editor of compulsory internet culture site, Arts & Letters Daily Dennis Dutton died recently and so I'm posting his last TED talk on Darwinian theories of beauty. For me it fits just beautifully into that point of evolutionary biology where, for reasons nobody can yet say certainly, the lights were switched on both at the point where art began to be made around 100 000 years ago and then again later when speech emerged from our mouths around 30-40 000 years ago. There's also a great EDGE video of Dennis rapping about his favourite subject of art within and of our species.

Whom were you talking to?

2010 Facebook Global Social Graph - Via Tony

Surreal

More on the Angry Birds over here

Unleash Your Inner Psychopath

No raping of women or disemboweling of children yet. It's your duty.

4am Materialism

Attachment is suffering.

Reality Check

Hipski

Quantum Science & Aristotelian Logic

It was Andrew who pointed out recently that I have a flair for pointing out the intellectual brilliance of someone and thus immodestly declaring my own brilliance. It's a fair (and funny criticism) because one of the things about branching out into evolutionary biology and quantum physics this year (along with Gnosticism and Hermeticism et al) is that the more I learn the more I realised how diminished is the full extent of my knowledge. 


And I haven't even mentioned my capacity for plain mistake making and errors that like to go large with me.

One of the benefits of trying to be as intellectually diverse as I can handle without lurking to long on the Alien Abduction scene (very interesting from a Jungian Analysis perspective) is how gorgeous and deeply orcestral is the range and tightly interlocking depth of Universal symmetry. 

Its Oneness if you will. 

I don't mind science as an approach, though the gadget-fetishists appear in my eyes to be ethically stunted. In my estimation we're measurably into morally diminishing returns when it comes to the latest technology, though it's clear they work extraordinarily well from the perspective of distraction. 

Sorry did you say something?

I find science fundamentalism ball-achingly lacking in imagination. This is why I think the mysteries of quantum physics point the way towards the limits of repeatable experiments and are thus a robust case for a cosmic deity as supra-scientist.

One of the most disappointing observations from watching the theists and atheists slug it out is the crudely empirical nature in how they both forward their arguments. This morning I came across somebody who frames these questions and thoughts in ways that are much closer to me than say Hitchens' and Blair's recent pedestrian effort.

OK, OK, so it was Einstein, but please read it if you get a chance.

A period of silence on my part would be most appreciated right? 

Well..... Robert Anton Wilson in the background?

Radovan Karadzic

I just realised I got it wrong in that post the other day. It wasn't Slobodan Milosovich (who of course was an oaf) that wrote the poetry about staring at the sun like the BMW retina burning advertisement. Of course it was Radovan Karadzic. He was also a psychiatrist. Worth remembering in a world where people are all to easily persuaded of handing over the consciousness or limits of consciousness to the state. Here's the poem. I first heard it quoted by Slavoj Zizek:

Convert to my new faith crowd

I offer you what no one has had before

I offer you inclemency and wine

The one who won’t have bread will be fed by the light of my sun

People nothing is forbidden in my faith

There is loving and drinking

And looking at the Sun for as long as you want

And this godhead forbids you nothing

Oh obey my call brethren people crowd

可愛さ (Kawaii)

I have a theory about the Japanese and technology. I believe that as they were (and still are the only people to be) on the receiving end of atomic/nuclear technological warfare, that they shed their Samurai traditions and embraced technology with a fervour that is drenched in Kawaii cuteness but is ostensibly, an all out potential pursuit of revenge. Well it's either that or they're just really 'into it', though I urge you to read a little into the history of Astro Boy before you dismiss my thinking on the subject.

JOY IS BMW

Slavoj Zizek talks about the necessity for the poetry that the Serbian Slobodan Milosevich wrote and used to stir the emotions of his countrymen to carry out war crimes against the Croats and other members of the Balkan states back in the 90's. I can't remember the exact wording though he quotes it in some of his online speeches. Roughly speaking it goes something along the lines of 'come with me, dont worry about the rules, today you can stare at the sun, you can play and do as you feel, free and unblinking from everyday life'.

Is one man's ethnic cleansing another man's (BMW's) brand experience? I'll find the exact words to the poetry and post it below when it turns up. Incidentally, Zizek says at the beginning of the video I link to at the start of this post exactly the same thing regarding images, as was quoted in the Wittgenstein fascist advertising complex post I did the other day. I'm quite sure they're unconnected other than perhaps mutual nods towards Baudrillard's gulf war simulacra or Guy de Bord's Society of the Spectacle.

I'm mildly amused that people at the screening of this thought it was cool. This is not unexpected from BMW customers.


Update

Joyeux Noel

I don't celebrate Christmas. It's been a long time since I wasn't turned off by the commercialisation of what is after all meant to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, a figure who by any metric began a story which in the age of horse travel was beating at the gates of power in Rome within half a century or so.

Are Vogue doing this for commercial reasons? I don't know but I can imagine some curled lips at both this and the mention Jesus' gets in the post. More over here.

Are Harleys For Pussies?

Quite possibly the quintessential freedom-brand has nothing to say about freedom of the press, freedom of the individual, freedom of the State to pursue an individual facing fishy rape charges and so we're left wondering if the whole Brand image is an illusion that lives in an abstract and hermetically sealed world that bears no relation to the one ordinary people live in. Ordinary, as in people who don't wear shiny leathers, have long hair and sit on the fence usually reserved for gay moped owners?

What do Harley think about Julian Assange and those fishy rape charges? Are they even thinking? Or is it a thoughtless, no-trousers brand?

Forgiveness?

I had breakfast with my Thai Sister. We don't speak when I'm there. I try, but she prefers silence, so that's when I see the occasional ad with something going on, or as in this case, I caught sight of the screen image and was right by it in no time as the shots were still ringing out. Me incredulous. He did that didn't he. This is the real thing.

Its not nice, but I've uploaded it as I think too much of the dying process is cordoned off from us. Specifically the killing that takes place to protect our lifestyles. This clip too has been sanitised with the court officials being cropped out of it leaving their deaths to the imagination. Can I level with you? This is a no nonsense, matter of fact example of how banal  a killer  can be in their conduct. 


He begins with by spray painting a circle overlapped by a larger V. As if remixing V is for Vendetta and Anarchy. Then he explains who stays, and instructs the the women to leave. One of the women returns doing Disney cartoon tiptoing behind the gunman only to fail miserably at dislodging the gun. He's not phased at all by this unexpected event. 


Then we cut to the the best efforts of the court officials pleading they need to understand his motivation for their impending death, a sense of dragging it out longer than necessary emerges, the judge who actually signed the papers that led to this incident requests that everyone else be released.

I'm aware that in all this mess of man against whatever it is that the cultural complex leaves for so many, an incongruous relationship with something biological, and which pushes those on  the margins, sometimes over the edge. 

I'm touched that this still exists in our species, and that all is not lost. Not in one go anyway. 


The shots take place matter of factly. The judges slain where they work and if I recall correctly from the uncensored TV screen version the gunman makes a hopping movement at some point as if maybe a guard has finally arrived at the scene and tried to prevent what had already been committed to history.

The sobering effects of guns are acute. When the barrel direction is on you, suddenly the realisation that its our consciousness which is beyond value and that all those remaining worldly goods are trivial and useless to barter with or to plead for our lives.

 I feel bad about this event. Maybe it's dull with the cropped corpses. If the video provokes even minor changes in some lucky peoples priority of values, its worth the sickening feel it leaves behind.

I Me Me Mine

I Me Mine is the ego problem. There are two 'I's: the little 'i' when people say 'I am this'; and the big 'I' - ie duality and ego. There is nothing that isn't part of the complete whole. When the little 'i' merges into the big 'I' then you are really smiling!

—George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology^[1]

Nature Gift Thailand

I just caught the end of this Nature Gift short ad for gifting sets and was bowled over by the rawness. OK it's a bit contrived getting there, and they've jumped through hoops to get the brand in but the empathy created still struck me as one of those little things in Thai TV advertising that is creeping in as much as possible. 

Unexpected small rule breaking flourishes. 

I wish I had a copy of the soap powder ad that sends up the entire genre by basically messing around with template creativity and saying yeah it's a crappy ad so we're not going to bore you shitless, without a wink and something a bit wacky.

Leakflood

Charles Krauthammer

I try to spend as much time as possible finding opinions that disagree with mine and that are substantive. I wouldn't want people to assume that I'm a knee jerk leftist even though I   stand totally against the corrosive effect that Fox news has on the American people. I also don't like Hannity as like O'Reilly he's an unpleasant bully. He makes it so easy to forget that when interviewing erudite company he can raise his game a little, though he's most certainly not Copernicus. Don't even get me onto CNN's toothless dog.

However here are two of my pet hates and Charles Krauthammer, who I think like Clinton and Obama are still ignoring the intellectual pre-industrial economic mammoth in the room. Robert Reich (who is demonstratively brilliant) probably thinks like I do but I totally disagree on his economic purism timing. I sense he misses the arena. Seeing Bill and Obama on his old sparring ground yesterday. This isn't surprising but it is most definitely human and forgiveable.

Though straight after this should there be some kind of disclosure that doesn't pop the system? *

 Yeah. Go for it. Tell the American people why 2 trillion in the bank lends no succour and that the Pentagon and black hole budgeting CIA are both largely pernicious anachronisms and would best be merged into some sort of post industrial think tank/incubator/global relief mechanism hired out to the U.N at fair rates.

 After all, those anonymous chaps have already run the globe ragged through domination by neo-liberal failed shock doctrine economics. It's also purely State owned so if that kind of unthinkable thinking were to happen, I'd get to call it what it really is neo-Marxism for the 21st century. That's the Kafkaesque world I'm forced to live in.

Anyway. Fox and reasonable analysis...Blow me.

* Personally I say pop the system but I'm more resilient than most and don't have as much baggage to weep over. However that's not a particularly fair basis when considering others, and it's a bit more complex than yay or nay.

The Comeback Kid

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the street fighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? - ZIZEK - 23 July 2009

Some of you (all two of you on a good day) by now know that my political antenna are twitching in small spastic gestures, myopically groping their way to the disconnected future, uncovering micrograms of evidence that we're living in dramatically changing times.

Looking back on my own political wakening I genuinely gulp now how little and how shallow it really was, yet how vociferously it was argued. We argued rowdy politics over calming joints in the early 90's before heading out to the student parties. Ending for me by falling in love with an East German girl only to find employment working for the US army bases in Germany. It is here I started to fully grasp the empirical might the United States.

I really lucked out later on with a political mentor who had read more than anyone I knew and threw more valuable books my way in a few short years than I've read in a decade since. I pickled myself in rum and politics on tropical beaches interspersed with Asian tiger adland bouts and occasional Euro runs.

What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that growing up politically in the Clinton years that criss crossed and spanned, living and working in the two continents of Europe and Asia is a pespective that only now do I grasp was the solid foundation for moulding my undying love for the idea of ideas. The politics of politics. The meaning of what I mean.

I've slumped countless ideological times since those Hacyonic days of living in the Clinton era to learn of how much damage the financial market liberalisation is the responsibility of the former president. How say the market liberalisation of Haitian rice farmers to choose just one small devastating example, was destroyed by the subsidies of the American rice farmers, is personally down to Bill Clinton. An example I now know extends back into deeper  'merkan history.

Yet does one ever really forget all the merits of a past love affair? Not me. I see what it is that I adored. The only regrets I have now, emerging into middle age is the the frequent bouts of bad taste I've sailed with. Taste is both something we acquire and if we're honest with the definition of taste, are occasionally forced to dispense with as we evolve.

I worry about America. The putrid silence on the part of Capitalist Baconistas. The self evident insanity of the main stream right wing. The endlessly disappointing performance of the wishy washy left and those who hailed hope and change only to strand aspirational ships on sharp rocks of granite despair.

Then I see you again. The Polymath. The Comeback Kid, who with blow-job bravado takes on the Whitehouse press corp in a manner we haven't seen since the late nineties. And I want to believe you're going to make it. To silence the reptiles in the C Suite who control the Oval. I want to believe. I want.

I watch as the self evident principles of neo-sharing mysteriously take place at the highest level of office on the planet. I want to believe again in you America. Eight years of happiness and prosperity for me were pummelled with brutal annihilation into a hazy amnesia.

Please watch this. It's not just about the man, even though it's not just what you say it's how you say it. This is about the nature of ideas. Ideas that live and breath, that change and evolve, adapt and mutate to withstand the most colossal compression of evolutionary terminating forces we're facing. 

This is our karma. This is our responsibility. We're all in it together.

No Rules

Dakine Coffee Bean

Dakine Coffee Bean

Schadenfreude

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Big Bank Theory
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Hello World. We Are Anonymous

Police State

I wasn't aware of the acuteness of London's Student Loans battles until listening to the chants of 'off with their heads' to Prince Charles over the World Service and finally till I came across these incredible pictures which Boston.com is revolutionizing photo journalism with. 

I've a couple of comments to make. First I think Marbury (who led me to the photography) underestimates much of what this is all about by attributing a narrow and unimaginative causal relationship to events, but as I like his blog, and there was that whole misunderstanding about the Ellesberg Papers I don't really want to pursue it too hard right now other than to mention my recent 1968 Awesomeness post and to point out the supportive and vocal sympathies of many people who really don't seem to have that much of a view on Student or Educational loans. But his blog is still one of the few political blogs I read for its careful analysis of restrained transatlantic political commentary as the volume from traditional media blowhards in this area is irritating and unhelpful.

Lastly I think it's worth noting that similar civil unrest in Bangkok also caught by the Boston.Com photographers led to Royal Thai Army Snipers picking off white flag wavers and medical staff in the grounds of the most centrally located Buddhist Temple here in Bangkok earlier this year though one has to live in Asia to really understand that life is tragically just so much cheaper. You may find that insensitive but I assure you I'm far from callous and I'm definitely pointing a rice fed finger towards an asymmetric life valuation hierarchy that Orientals know full well is skewed by Occidental standards of living. Worth bearing in mind if sympathy is ever sought, particularly as many of the arrested are still being held and tortured in jail to this day by Royal Thai Army loyalist troops.

Tricia Wang

Digital Urbanism on the Margins: Chinese Migrants and Intensive Technology

View more presentations from triciawang.

Tricia is among other things a digital ethnographer and is heading to China for a few years to hang out with Chinese Migrants who you might remember from this blog are heavily reliant on their mobile phones for both connection to distant family and also as private space in crowded living conditions.

Her presentation here is interesting both for it's hypotheses that she puts forward and because it's a work in progress so maybe we'll get to learn something about a category that for many people in China takes a few months to save up for.

I'm pretty sure that Tricia sucks up even more bandwidth on the internet than I do and I think that's saying something.

Collapse

I had some problems embedding two videos in the same post so I've reposted the second half of the Michael Ruppert documentary here. Chronologically it's in the wrong order now, but you can find part one here. Please do let me know if these videos are later removed as I can delete or find another way. Thanks.

Leakspin