Counterculture

I like counterculture. The assumption we can draw from it is, as Terence McKenna asserted,   culture is not your friend. I blogged earlier about the counterculture nature of Stanford computing in the sixties though I still need to elaborate a lot more on the Mother of all demos as that's the fascinating output of the experiment, and one that remains with us today. The mouse in your hand for example.

I'm not a huge Stewart Brand disciple. Maybe it was the presentation I saw by an ex planner in San Francisco a couple of years back that was a bit too worthy. I'm also not entirely in accord with Stewart Brand's apparent submission to materialistic science. However he's a good guy and has a written an interesting piece and it's too good an opportunity to let a great Marshall McLuhan quote go by from that text.

JI: The last chapter of Whole Earth Discipline is on statecraft. You start it with the Marshall McLuhan quote: ‘After Sputnik there is no nature, only art’. What significance does that statement have in relation to the responsibilities of governance and policymaking?

SB: It’s probably the most radical comment he ever made. Sputnik was shorthand for acting at a planetary scale. We consequently bear a completely different relation to everything on Earth and can no longer treat it, meaning nature, as existing independent of our own artifice – our own purposeful intentions.

Via Preoccupations

Was Mona Lisa a Ladyboy?

Full article in The Telegraph in case you also missed yesterday's article on Thai transsexual airline cabin staff now being employed. 

Is The Telegraph becoming poly-sexual or something?

Is the Thai Prime Minister a British Subject?

American Symbology

This is an excellent (and academically authoritative) history on American symbology. I had no idea of the full extent of mystical symbolism in the setting up of the American Republic and if you can forgive the melodramatic title of the video you're in for educational treat.

Just Say Know

The Swanson Pyramid Of Greatness

The Rapture

I was having a chat on Sunday with AJay in New Delhi. Well he thinks five hours is more than a chat but later on I had yet another lovely time for a couple of hours with a good friend in Baghdad.

They were both forced to listen to my "three options for the species thinking" but only because it sounds so preposterous that I wanted some feedback, and good feedback it was. I'll be posting my "brave new capitalism post on that topic as soon as the time strikes right - I never know when that will be in advance. 

I know, I know. 

You can't wait can you? 

If it helps alleviate the anticipation then you might enjoy knowing that the meat of the idea was so disconcerting that Rob Campbell didn't want to read it when the inspiration struck and I emailed him. On reflection though, that was good of him to ignore me  because a) It would have scared him off b) It looks very bonkers as a raw idea and c) it's still just plain scary now I've applied some sandpaper to it. *winks at Rob*

OK, moving on because I know time is limited, I wanted to pick up that I was sharing some thoughts on eschatology (end of the world) language when I stumbled as I couldn't remember the exact word. 


I'd been explaining an article I read in terms of the self fulfilling biblical nature of Israeli archaeologists tunnelling away under Jerusalem's Old City Wall in close proximity to the third holiest mosque of Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque and of course the Temple Mount too which is considered the third holiest site in Judaism. If it weren't for the hostility between the faiths this is a subject I'd feel happy to study till the end of my days but it's just a bit too raw to be useful in this day and age.


It struck me that there's no better way of fulfilling prophecy than to either pick or respond to a fight over who owns what, at what time, and where or when, it's been articulated in scriptures. What makes that whole outcome really weird is that nobody knows if the future has been predicted or whether we are writing the future; to use Nike vernacular.

The word finally came to me. The Rapture. It's one of those provocative words because if we look at the nutty Christian fundamentalists in the US. Well they would LOVE shit to go down in Jerusalem because that fulfils their biblical end of the argument and to this end are quite happy to fight tooth and nail for the Israelis on any issue, at any time and at any cost. Which kind of leaves the door open for American backed hostility towards Muslims in the Holy Land and beyond.

I've added the Jungian art above because it fits nicely with my Baghdad learnings on evolutionary psychology, plus it looks kind of Holy Landy like, it is red (and thus progressive) and squeezes neatly into the end part of this post, where I thought if I waffle on enough at the beginning, the nutters will get bored and leave without misunderstanding my words about a Jungian analysis of UFO's. 

Basically I caught this rather interesting Youtube clip shortly after reading the Temple Mount piece and though 'that's kind of interesting' and 'somewhat coincidental'. I still have barely any idea what the video shows but if I use the Jungian approach then I ask myself, not 'what is it?' but instead the much more useful question 'what is its effect?'. 


Take a look for yourself what was filmed. Sure its a ball of light. But its behaviour is loaded with context.

And so I leave you with the final reason for posting this nonsense which is that I came across a second video of the same event just now, and while it doesn't capture the vertical action above, it is close enough for me to say finally and definitively. I DON"T KNOW.

Thank You.

Government Is Not Your Friend

Extraordinary footage turning up on Youtube.

Disconnect to Connect

The Thai advertising for DTAC, a local mobile network carrier (with strong Scandinavian shareholding) is making waves in China for its Disconnect to Connect brand advertising.

Scale

Crimes Against Humanity

Chomsky On Egypt

Don't Make Me Over

"When Dionne Warwick played the Olympia in Paris in '66 the house orchestra felt Burt Bacharach's music was too complicated for them. So Warwick who had studied to become a music teacher before she became a star taught the orchestra the songs. Here the orchestra at one point is losing it but Dionne doesn't skip a beat. One of the greatest song stylists of all time."

"I've seen Dionne a couple dozen times through the years and wether it was at Carnegie Hall or Radio City Music Hall, at certain points she would deliberately put the microphone down below her waist and then hit some spellbinding note and the folks in the back row could still hear it. She's not doing much of that any more but if you were lucky enough to have been there when she did it was something to behold. Great musician and greatest vocalist."

Singaporean Advertising

From & Via

Idioms, apophasis, paralypsis, proslipsis and ceasuras

I will never be of this calibre. Though as a card carrying, smile plagiarising 'Ye Olde Generalist' I notice he inadvertently invokes Wittgenstein's private language argument at 5.03. You can now enjoy that specific interpretation nicely transcribed via Youtube within this lecture. 

It's unusual that it's been transcribed given the length and youthful vintage of these lectures. In my experience, it's not a feature that world renowned quantum physicists can secure with their online Youtube presence; even with a hundred fold more views than the Prof has secured thus far. 

Maybe somebody realises he's contributing an historical analysis of history. That it's worthwhile to do this task promptly, as time is such a ruthless shredder of comprehension, context and nuance, when say scholarly Egyptology is peddling us informed opinion, in the early part of the 21st century. That's just one example.

Possibly it's just a great way (by his students?) to try and commit to memory the sheer scale and density of what this remarkable professor is able to linguistically retrieve, on-the-fly while loquaciously expounding on massively subtle different points. This is a talent I very much keep an eye open for given  the elegance that my (podcast) listening ear demands of me.

Go on. Listen to the first few minutes. Then get back to your copywriting or blogging or whatever. He's rather good. 

Neo Scientology

This is my beloved Terence talking about Science. Ordinarily I'd feel obliged to elaborate on the thesis where we differ but on reflection only an obsessive could ever misinterpret me on what I have written thus far. And in this respect the matter is ended.

Deferred Gratification is Psychopathy

You all know the model. Leave the kid in the room with the Oreo or whatever and the ones who can defer gratification are later found to be more "successful" in life.

Bullshit (Just look at weasel beard above). That's not success. That's psychopathy.

It's industrial scale, corporate-brainwashing and nutmeg-psychology that flies in the face of of the very essence of being a human FUCKING being. 

I mentioned it back on Rob's blog a couple of days ago that the change from arboreal, fruitarian, peaceful and (ahem slightly orgiastic - yay for SEX) Homo Sapiens of an honourable and inspirational nature compared to the 21st century mendacity of homo mutatitis that hoard their grain and self implode on the metaphysics of attempting to temporarily own the perma-unobtainable, through war and coercion that leaves half the planet glued to the the carpet-embedded-sofa, cheered on by a TV & Fossil fuel Drug dependency while the other half are out in the fields on the other side of the planet,  tilling the soil for mere pennies a day while oscillating geographically and in a temporal sense from exhaustion into starvation and back into exhaustion again to grow food for "me me me" and not themselves. 


Is this the poetry of deferred gratification? 


Put off today what you can industrial-strength kill off tomorrow?

Surely the very essence of enlightenment is to live in the intelligent and harmonious moment instead of breeding a species that shit-hoards, spits on frugality, wastes 40% of it's food, crushes its global brethren and celebrates this as toxic material-science enlightenment?

Do me a favour. Eat that fucking pancake kiddo and live in the moment while we the supposed adults figure out how to take care of the urgent problems of today instead of breeding a child who becomes professionally psychopathic at ignoring and deferring the impending ecocide debt-blowback.

Embedded Reporting

Platonic Pentagon

You can be damn sure the Pentagon have put some of their best and brightest into this (note the lo-fidelity  front cover, non senior soldier-anonymity and so on).

I'd like to comment on how it potentially extrapolates thematically in terms of emotional liminality but lets face it. Nobody gives a stuff what I think of the Pentagon. Though maybe I should write one up for the Office of Homeland Security? 

Every little helps. (Via Euan)

Iconic

Dear Mr, Eisenstaedt:

Now that I'm 60 - it's fun to admit that I'm the nurse in your famous shot "of the amorous sailor celebrating V.E. Day by kissing a nurse on New York's Broadway." The article in the Los Angles Times, which described your talents, stimulated the recall of the scene on Broadway.

I had left Doctors' Hospital and wanted to be part of the celebration but the amorous sailor and a subsequent soldier motivated a retreat into the next opening of the subway. I wish I could have stored that jubilation and amour for use P.R.N.

​Mr Eisenstaedt, is it possible for me to obtain a print of that picture? I would be most appreciative.

I regret not having met you on your last trip to Beverly Hills.

Perhaps next time. If not - I'll understand because "it's not only hard to catch him - its hard to keep up with him."

Have fun.

Fondly

Edith Shain