Is Shirky Shirking The Obvious?

I think Clay Shirky handles some early questions here with elegance and intellectual panache but as soon as it comes to the schizophrenia of U.S. democracy with sham foreign policy interests he back peddles noticeably, passing one answer on to a deeply unrespected congress in a somewhat knock-kneed distancing of intellectual responsibility as to what the notion of an autocratic government is. Clue, its one that doesn't listen to its electorate. Hopeless, changeless and so on.

Clay evidently doesn't see that funding and propping up dictators such as Egypt and Tunisia and Libya (shall I go on?) is merely a variant of autocracy dramatized through repression abroad as a hyperpower strategy. 

Just because U.S. citizens are by and large pampered and misled sheep doesn't change the nature of pernicious empirical power or the impending doom that will visit them. This is only a matter of time. I'm also happy to write at length about US censorship too.

Clay, this isn't personal but the veil is over your eyes when it comes to the illusion you cling on to that the U.S is a model democracy.  By all means throw a Scandinavian country in there but not a dypsomaniac hyperpower lurching on the precipice. You need to get away from the Pasta and Chardonnay crowd.


I rarely agree with Gladwell but his tipping point is increasingly imminent.

LSD

LSD stops cluster headaches more effectively than big pharma drugs peddled on every high street around the world and yet it is illegal. The reason for that is that during the 60's the CIA et al were conducting unlicensed experiments on both US soldiers as well as waifs and strays that were kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned in rooms with two way mirrors where some of them were subjected to a number of experiences including sex that would normally have been rejected while uninfluenced. I've heard stories that some lost their mind as it's a molecule that requires a certain amount of respect. One where set and setting is crucial for people if proper consciousness exploration takes place.

This documentary is extraordinary in so much as there is an emerging desire from some people to reframe the propaganda that was pushed out about this neurotransmitter when the military learned that the most devastating effect of LSD is it dissolves the power of the State to kill our fellow men.


An idea not so well appreciated during the failed Vietnam war.


So they (the usual institutions) pushed it through a rush bill in the Senate where it was conflated with the drugs that the CIA much prefers to deal around the world thus creating  laws that give them distribution advantages for the much more profitable and addictive substances such as heroin and cocaine. Cocaine is incredibly interesting to me these days as I rarely meet a likeable person who is into it. Not that we didn't all dabble in our youth but it seems spiritually questioning people tend to grow out of it finding its narcissistic bent unappealing. If Cocaine is all about me, me, me. Then LSD could be described as us, us, us.

I don't condone or unambiguously proselytise the use of recreational pharmaceuticals. If life is  a patently beautiful experience of its own accord. If love and happiness are abundant, then there's no need to explore. However if a person does wish to explore then there is lots good information and people willing to offer constructive viewpoints at www.erowid.org that can be helpful and instructive in learning and securing the right information for a constructive exploration of the total infinity of consciousness. Remember set and setting. Here's that good documentary on the subject.

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement gets a whole lot more intellectually concrete under these circumstances. It only takes 15 minutes or so of time and left me shaking my head for a few days but it is as it is, in so far as it's impossible to ignore. Unless one is materially  distracted.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Can The United States Go Cold Turkey?

Helios

You can't go wrong tracking increased activity in the solar system at the moment. There's a lot of serious forecasting backed up by a solid evidence that star and planetary transformation is taking place. There's a bunch of conclusions of which many are quite unsettling but right now I'm only interested in asking better questions.

GovCorp

Are Sony Trashing Their Reputation?

There's a disconnect within the advertising and marketing workforce that nobody is addressing. That disconnect is between what we say and what we do. I've pointed out that Mastercard is emerging as a meme on the net for Klu Klux Klan Kredit after the Wikileaks debacle but the silence on Media Corporations blocking my entertainment just now over at Gavin's is trashing any respect in this instance for SONY. 


Is it just me that is seeing this disconnect? I couldn't sit in a meeting with SONY or Mastercard without mentioning the elephant in the room.

If either of these two are your clients is it something you'd prefer not to raise, because if it is then there's a grand deception unfolding as the light of transparency acts as a disinfectant on corporate schizophrenia.

Nick Bostrom

It feels like I only shabbily wrote this last week but I guess its longer as time is moving so fast.

"I ask lots of people the same question about time. There's a reasonably consistent linear relativism argument. Its always nice to hear articulated, because it's a conclusion I've reached too in the past. It's quite exciting to hear a prior self-determined logic conclude by forcing it's way out from another person's voice as if proof that quite complex hypotheses can emerge from separate sources. A bit like magic."

The thing is, what I think isn't that important. I've made enough mistakes to be in the fortunate position where insufficient people will take me seriously. I don't take myself all that seriously (all the time) as I'm just trying to make my way through this world and limit the amount of destruction I create. Such as being a man who has had two girlfriends try to commit suicide, and to this day still has the ability to utter words that can devastate people's lives. My social credit is actually in debit. Just ask my family.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to stumble upon the most extraordinary debate between two people I feel angry towards (but respect the hell out of) and a couple of Rabbis. Again and again, I was reeling from the fabric of intelligence between the two groups and then at one point Sam Harris grudgingly offered up an hypothesis that concludes what I suspected after reading Wittgenstein back here.

This means I can take a back seat on this line of inquiry, as a more advanced mind than I has done the spadework. 

IS Nick Bostrom thinking about things that will in our time slice through our collective consciousness like a baseball bat through Dick Cheney's skull. 

All you have to do is ask yourself "what does this mean to me?"

For me it means I can cut myself some slack. It diminishes my madness if somebody else has concluded what I silently suspected. 

Yet not though.

Update: I don't feel the same about Nick Bostrom these days. I feel his transhumanism stance is sponsored.NIck 

Chinese Digital Social Networks

More information over here. Some days despite the pollution I really miss Beijing.

Is The Mastercard Brand Fucked?

I've been using Tumblr as a tool for picking up on trends and I wondered that in light of Mastercard's capitulation to the State Department over severing Wikileaks income from Mastercard customers (customer first?) whether anybody else has noticed that the only thing more evident than Mastercards's silence on the matter are the slew of brand parodies emerging on the internet? I wonder if that is showing up in their tracking studies?

Putonghua Internet

I've been saying for a long time that in terms of volume yes its a Chinese internet. But in terms of influence it's English. History is written by the winners. Not that I see anything to embrace with respect to the Anglo Saxon trans Atlantic rewriting of history. Indeed we're weird and I think it shows.

Manikin or Model

The debate has been bubbling for a few days now even though it started in my data stream over in Japan on Sankaku Complex, but as it's hit China Smack now I think it's worth posting as it goes supernova.

Liberate

Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost

After my last post Marcus left a comment that 'people should read more' and mentioned Norman Mailer's Harlots Ghost. Now that got my attention. I was living in Germany as a 23 year old. I worked on an American military base in Giessen about an hour north of Frankfurt and bought that book either at one of the Bahnhoffs in either Giessen or Frankfurt. It was  a brilliant read and became oddly interwoven with my own real life which moved from pedestrian to flat out madness.

Turns out Marcus (we both grew up in the same city a couple of hundred meters away  though we never knew each other) was reading the same book at the same time in the same country an hour or so away from each other, and we may have even bought the book at the same shop. 

We met pretty much on the internet later on in 2006.

I remember the book had the improbably odd synchronism in my life including a mirroring of some parts of the story with among other things a remarkably unusual harlot. I think I need to go to the Amazon site and get the reviews in to brush up on things. It's got me thinking.

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For

If there's any doubt as to the veracity of the Kubler Ross model of dealing with grief there's acres of evidence in the commentary boxes of mass domestic denial at the moment that the US mainstream media regularly lies to its people with completely impunity. The denial is to be expected in much the same way as addiction to oil is evident from the most wasteful country on the planet. But after the denial comes anger and one thing I know about ordinary Americans is that while they may be easy to distract they are not cowards.

The only point to observe now is whether the string pullers will succeed in pitching groups of them against each other as divide and rule is the quintessential elite technique for maintaining their own comfort. I know this because the British taught them the trick. A new enemy is always being dreamed up by the real enemy.

We live in remarkable times and I believe there's an  emerging consciousness also at large. I've no idea how it will eventually manifest itself before the necessary changes reach consensus levels but change it will. When and how? My guess is as good as yours though the longer urgent action is delayed the more pain is inflicted on the self.

Kia Optima

I have no idea what the Kia people are trying to say but I just uncovered this ad from the Superbowl and the themes are:

Blackops Heli
Russian Criminal
Poseidon  
UFO           
Wormhole
Life on Mars
Stargate
Chitzen Itza Mayan Temple

One Cubic Milimetre

In a package that's just over one cubic millimeter, the system fits an extremely low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin-film battery, a solar cell and a wireless radio with an antenna that can transmit data to an external reader device that would be held near the eye. It's the worlds smallest computer (if we exclude those people who have previously unknown implants removed from them).

Via The Connective Net who has good work in progress for a free and open internet. Go check it out.

Lip Animals

Lip Animals Via the most excellent Tricia Wang

Ethos

Respect to Woody Harrelson for coming off the fence on what matters. This is a playlist embed so you can watch the entire thing without messing about.

Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, was part of JFK's assassination.