Unsettled (Updated Political Position on Zionism)

Both Israel and Gaza are two places that I intend to visit as soon as I can, as I regret not taking the chance a while back. This Louis Theroux documentary is fresh out on Youtube and as per the usual format of Theroux's affable questions in the face of extremists, it makes for compelling viewing. 

I appreciate that the subjects are all characterised as Ultra Zionists but it's evident they have the full backing of the Israeli State. Even though, and this isn't too well known, the State of Israel is one of the most atheist/agnostic countries in the world and that the peaceful yet campaigning intellectual elite live in Israel unlike the AIPAC nutters in the States manipulating legislation through lobbying backed by sheer force of disposable dollars.

Perhaps unexpectedly, I am a Zionist. I might have said something different around the Balfour Declaration but as it's a done deal it's insane to suggest anything other than that Israel has a right to exist. 

Not however, at the expense of others.

I cannot in good conscience remain pro Zionist any longer. The last bombing by Israel of Gaza with F-16 jets murdering 500 people including 50 children destroyed the Zionist project. It is doomed to fail and our task now it to figure out how the Palestinians and the peace loving Israelis can find a two state solution (or one if they wish) without the psychos who currently run Israel anywhere near the levers of power. I've been patient. Maybe too patient. Not any more. Brand Israel does not deserve to be a part of the future. When the landlines have been agreed on I want a name that doesn't make me feel nauseous to  be applied. A rebranding if you like - Charles March 2013

Groupon

Even before I heard about this execution this morning, I saw a tweet in my stream from the agency Crispin Porter Bogusky congratulating the work that went into it and thought immediately that it sounded like the self congratulatory pep talk of adland that probably wouldn't reflect the quality of the ad. I was disappointingly right.

It was then followed with a flurry of tweets on Groupon's poor taste. I used to like CPB when Alex Bogusky was there as I think he understood the nature of controversial attention securing comms, though it seems since he left standards have plummeted and in many ways this whole ad is a short allegory for the wealth of the United States which is built on the exploitation and suffering of others round the world.

Things People Don't Say About Advertising

Isn't it ironic that advertising hasn't picked up on the growing satire of reckless growth advertising in social media? More over here.

Zizek on Egypt

Zizek saves his most explosive logic till the end in relation to Israel's hand wringing over Egypt. He asks that since the decline of suicide bombings in Israel over the last five years has increased the velocity of stolen land off the Palestinians, has Israel tacitly proved that terror is the only language it respects?

Heat Wave

The problem with the sun as it was once put to me is that nobody can put a meter on it and bill us. Which is why renewable energy is not about the science. It's about us and what we think is more important. Money today or survival tomorrow. There is an interesting side discussion here about the accessibility of young people to potentially shocking technology in the future but again it's less about the technology and more about why do we not trust our children with danger. Maybe it's because we let the Pentagon get first access to any scientific discoveries we make. How can we weaponize space (as is being done) and then lecture about good and evil? More on the "Death Ray" below over here.

Cult Buddhism?

Interesting photojournalism article in Foreign Policy on Wat Dhammakaya in Thailand. Worth a look for the extraordinary photography.

Open Source DNA (LSD & Francis Crick)

I had no idea how Byzantine and Machiavellian the plot for discovery of the double helix structure of DNA was. This is a must see. Regrettably for spoon-fed Nanny United States TV documentaries, the crucial 'visionary' moment of Francis Crick's use of LSD, where the structure revealed itself to him (built on Rosalind Franklin's shared contribution) is not mentioned. The important fact can only be alluded to at the end where Crick talks briefly about the mysteries of space and time, though it's well know he devoted the rest of his career to dreams.

What would make the story really incredible would be if anybody confirmed that it was Linus Pauling's son who gave them the LSD while working with Watson and Crick even though his twice awarded Nobel prize winning father was flat out competing with them on the other side of the Atlantic. That would be symmetry to the narrative that would make Rosalind's reluctant partner Maurice Wilkins at Kings College the rightful father of open source scientific discovery as it was he who believwed most in sharing information.

Just look at Linus' son in this documentary and ask yourself. Is this the kind of West Coast rebellious son of a Chemist, who in the late 50's could have dropped acid, and might have introduced it to the Cambridge genius of Crick thereby unwittingly working against his father who put him there in the first place? * Ahem. 

*(Pure speculation on my part)

Update: The original video was removed so a "related" video has been posted instead.

Fail Whale

Via failwhale

Is This A Meme?

Answers over at ....

Marko Rodin - Vortex Mathmatics (Toroidal Power)

I thought about this for two days before posting it. I was just looking for a logical explanation why sacred geometry seems to be so compelling. I'm a person who takes an interest in Mandelbrot Sets and those Mandalas I was referring to earlier; Marko Rodin explained in the first few minutes of this four hour presentation. A lot of you might feel uncomfortable with the anti materialist science rhetoric which if that's the case then just stick to the math, that he confidently delivers upon. 

However for a discovery that he refuses to commercialise and wishes to be an open source gift for sustainable energy development I think that anti materialist science stance is an act of nobility and truth. Give it a couple of minutes if you can. What I could understand the first time round watching this blew my temporal lobe. 

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist was much more useful for me the second time round than the first. It compelled me to drill down into topics I don't really have enough time for till cloning is on the table but the result of that work was happily fruitful and in some ways releases some spare tick over capacity I'd probably cordoned off subconsciously when asking that really boring question. Who am I?

I still ask of course but some of the chronology has been taken off my shoulders.

I learned that the producer of Zeitgeist relented to the inquisition for his full name and gave the interview above. He's got two things going for him. He's young and he's rapaciously clever. I only know that because I was getting hammered and laid in bars at his age. I'm a late bloomer. He works in advertising sometimes so I thought that was interesting. 

His name is Peter.

Sean Dorrance Kelly & The Sacred

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Dorrance Kelly
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

Sean is a philosphy professor at Harvard. He's cut from fresher cloth than the usual backwash though his sporting analogies are distinctly U.S thematic and about to be as evolutionarily crucial as the appendix. That doesn't mean they don't matter. It just means it doesn't count. Still worth viewing for asking a great question.

What Did My Dimethyltryptamine Experience Look Like

My first instinct when looking at this graphic was 'holy shit' is that a Harmaline graphic? It looks more molecular and without the geometric lines of the Mandala (see below) through a 5-MeO-dimethyltryptamine or Dimethyltryptamine entheogen concave lens (I don't fully know the difference, but I've read up on it enough to attempt to at least theorize).

But no it's not quite the Mandala above. It's more the Wired article about a 3D nano X-Ray of a virus protein.... Which isn't totally out of the game, though what caught my eye was the line by Stanford University Physicist Martin Seibert:  “Growing one of these crystals can be worth a Nobel”. Here's the DMT Molecule.

The intellectual model of my DMT experience during the short duration that lasted minutes not hours is not easy to condense. It was so extraordinary it took me three days to remember the bare essentials and six months to assimilate the shreds of information I could recollect. Above is a tiny hint of the colour and geometric palette I don't mind using as a speck of suggestion.  It doesn't come close to the intensity of colour experienced or the suspension of time and dare I say it, non three dimensional space. It's an entheogenic experience and not to be taken lightly. 

I've not had the courage to try it again after over a year since my one and only experiment. The journey was transdimensional but coming back to the reality on this level took ten minutes or so. It was brutal, coming round and back to 3 dimensionality. I thought I'd gone insane. Cognitively it was like living in a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards. Emotionally it was as psychology battering as I imagine say male on male rape to be. Couple that with the paranoia of a SWAT team of psychic entities swooping in to arrest me and frankly I was OK to take the strait jacket and be carted off to the comfort and security of a padded cell.

However, I came back with a saucer full of secrets that changed everything. I was shown things. I don't know who was doing the showing.

I would do things differently if I go back. Set and setting. Lower dose. Meditation beforehand. I would pray to the Universe 'please be gentle on me'.

I'll write up the actual experience shortly. I've been wanting to do it for a long time. All I've talked about here is colour and geometry. There's a lot of depth and breadth across many subjects in the 20 or so minutes I was dimensionally elsewhere. A long time according to the DMT testimonies on the net but still incredibly short compared to Ayahuasca or Psilocybin.

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

Abracadabra - אברה כדברא

John Allegro was an Aramaic scholar who was invited to inspect the Dead Sea scrolls by the Vatican. Prior to this, his intention was to become a Methodist Priest but he changed career to Oriental studies and then during his radical translation and interpretation of the scrolls he made the mistake of releasing his findings earning the vindictive wrath of his peers who excommunicated his views and trashed his career with accusations of anti Catholicism. To this day the Vatican prevents us from knowing what other information contradicts the epistemological teachings of the present day Pope from their findings and as will one day be shown the Vatican library is chock full of ancient texts that don't support their erroneous and paternalistic business model.

There's a much more visually explanatory video of the discussion through the Pharmacratic Inquisition videos on Youtube though I think it's important to champion the Aramaic scholar first and also point out the two chaps who are interviewing him were famous 70's Dutch comedians who merely pursued their own interest in the topic of metaphorical mycology and so you need to contextualise the Citizen Smith headgear they are wearing at the end, even though a bit of silliness is very integral to this topic as you may have picked up from my Twisted post.

Update: As the years have passed I've often reflected that even if John Allegro was right, he was remarkably pompous and this might have contributed to our understanding.

Fresh Perspectives

Last night I had an epiphany. Or more accurately I watched my reality being torn apart blow by blow, minute by minute, word by word over an extraordinarily long article. It was tough. There's nothing tougher than keeping an open mind.

Do you all have heroes? Mine are mostly listed in Facebook if I think about the easiest place to find them and the most convenient way not to list them right now. 

They tend to be a bit more of the heretics turned prophet types. I've no interest in the main stream, all the progress and action is on the edge. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the awesomeness of just being. That specific feeling can occur walking down a street, entering a lift or traversing a hotel lobby if I'm mindful about what is going on. A quality I've yet to develop so it's more integral to my temporal appreciation of living in the moment.

However the act of seeing an idol broken irreversibly has suddenly opened new vistas on what means to be me, or even more importantly what it means to ask 'who am I?', or even for you to be thou through my eyes. 


As tough as it was I hope to be continually achieving this dynamic of reinvention and reappraisal for the rest of my life as there really is nothing more interesting than seeing the world anew. Life is massively interesting already but a fresh perspective rewires the possibilities. The potential if you will.

Next Generation

Next Generation Media Quarterly By Aegis. Nice little useful presso with sticky numbers that should help the plannerati. By Dan Calladine

Post-Materialist Science

I had a feisty old day today engaging with a materialist-science Twitterer. Well at least until it became clear that outside of a propensity for calumny there wasn't even a cursory grasp of 21st century historical reality.

As with most of my digital stalker detractors, it invariably becomes evident they are more obsessed with me than I am of them. 

Asymmetric love if I'm being kind. 

I only have two or three names of adversaries in my head that are worthy of a sliding tackle when the time arrives. The rest aren't up to standard. Sorry about that. I hope it stays that way too. If it gets to four or five names, a gentleman should ask himself if the problem is closer to home. 

However I didn't get a chance to demolish the 'Quantum Physics belongs to us' school of nonsense who I asset, understand no more than you or I about this fascinating life but demonstrably think they have a superior claim to intellectual ownership of life through old scientific thinking. 

I encourage you all to put a bit of Quantum real time search term feeds in your life because the point of it is not to understand. Which is brilliant really.

Not understanding is the foundation for true learning and is the start of a humble yet rewarding learning journey.

I counsel the less confident among you to reject those haughty bores and that you can spot the fundamentalist science frauds by their indignant shrillness that "normal" people don't get it. 

Neither do they none of us really do, but it's our willingness to admit it which makes a human being and not the atomic bean counters as outlined in today's New Scientist which is all you need to know. Do read it. It's double chocolate chip deliciousness.

Physicists don't, by and large, want to trouble themselves with philosophy. Questions over what, exactly, constitutes a measurement, or why it might induce a change in the fabric of reality, can be ignored in favour of simply getting a useful answer from quantum theory.

Unquestioning use of the Copenhagen interpretation is sometimes known as the "shut up and calculate" interpretation. "Given that most physicists just want to do calculations and apply their results, the majority of them are in the shut up and calculate group," Vedral says.

This approach has a couple of downsides, though. First, it is never going to teach us anything about the fundamental nature of reality. That requires a willingness to look for places where quantum theory might fail, rather than where it succeeds (New Scientist, 26 June 2010, p 34). "If there is going to be some new theory, I don't think it's going to come from solid state physics, where the majority of physicists work,"

Second, working in a self-imposed box also means that new applications of quantum theory are unlikely to emerge. The many perspectives we can take on quantum mechanics can be the catalyst for new ideas. "If you're solving different problems, it's useful to be able to think in terms of different interpretations"

Apocalypse Moby

Free .pdf book and recommended by Bruce Sterling.