27/8
Fear, Bad Subjects #50
"...what we should
really fear is our political and economic system: it is a system that steals the
individual hopes of those at the margins and offers them only organized brutality
and cruelty in return." |
Report # 2000/08, Anti-Globalization - A Spreading Phenomenon is an anal-ytical production of our beloved CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service), staunch advocates for the status political quo and the capital economic ism.
| "Nonetheless, it has been established that antiglobalists are organizing against a
number of international meetings in Canada, including the April 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Given the virulent anti-globalization rhetoric directed against the Organization of American States (OAS), the threat of Summit-associated violence in Quebec City cannot be ruled out. " |
The Commercial Sex Information Service provides relief for sore acronyms.
| "CSIS is a clearinghouse of information about
laws, sexual health, commerce and culture as
these topics relate to sex work." |
Rethinking Schools invites us to Imagine a chronically sick child suffering from a host of problems including severe asthma, debilitating skin allergies, and bouts of fever from a recurring virus. Imagine the head of a hospital telling that child, "You're going to have to try
much, much harder to get better". Please, No More Magic Bullets!
| "New York state has become the latest to legitimize the savage inequalities that
are a hallmark of America's schools. It was announced in early May that all
schools would be required to give the state's Regent's exams. Those schools
doing well will be rewarded and those performing poorly will be punished." |
26/8
Gender and Planetary Healing: A New Approach by Will Keepin, Ph.D.
| "Healing humanity's relationship
with the Earth will require healing humanity's relationship with
itself. What men and women do to the planet, we do to each
other, and to ourselves." |
Assuming that you have javascript enabled and an interest in alternate date systems, Fourmilab's calendar converter provides historical context alongside the chronologized calculation. Today is 12.19.7.8.19 - 2 Mol - 1 Cauac by the Mayan Long Count.
Craig Reinarman and Peter Cohen ask Is Dutch drug policy the Devil?
| "Prohibitionists fear decriminalization because they assume that
availability will increase use. The most recent national survey of The Netherlands, where marijuana
has long been legally available, found that 15.6% of the population had tried it. In the U.S., where
nearly 700,000 arrests were made last year for marijuana offenses, the government's latest National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 32.9% of the population had tried it." |
Ok, so you've made up with your sweetie, know the date of your choice, have had an after dinner hoot and are ready for a mystery adventure. MessiahGate, A Tale of Murder and Deception
| "I knew it was going to be a tough case when the dame walked into my office." |
Examining Ethics, Benefits and Perils of Tours to Mexico: The Unusual Effects of Seeking Huichol Shamans
| "(Carlos) Castaneda's
book (The Teachings of don Juan) gave millions of young Americans the impression that if only they could find a shaman, such as don Juan (who would give them peyote) then they too would probably become shamans." |
25/8
Noam Chomsky's formidable observations are given a canvas in this interview by
David Barsamian for Z Magazine. Expanding the Floor of the Cage begins by
drawing attention to the American National Obsession with warehousing humans in
jails and schools, and covers a gamut of other issues.
| "Most people think the government has a responsibility to ensure reasonable
standards, minimal standards for poor people. On the other hand most people
are against welfare, which does exactly that. That's a propaganda achievement
that you have to admire." |
I do feel like Alice of looking-glass, the mirror image being the common consensus
but neither common nor sensible. Ah, the psychic release of finding Celia Green's
witty and insightful The Human Evasion, and knowing that I'm in-sane after all.
| "Sane people are bad at psychology. This is not surprising because in order to
keep yourself and everyone else in a state of unrealism, you have to have
certain techniques for not noticing things." |
Stuart Hameroff takes a pry bar to the nature of Funda-Mentality asking
Is the Conscious Mind Subtly Linked to a Basic Level of the Universe? Roger
Penrose had significant influence on this important paper.
| "Which biological structures could function as both classical and quantum
computers, avoid environmental decoherence and couple to neural-level
activities? Microtubules are the logical candidates." |
Is mathematics essentially about seeing "differences in similarity, similarity in
difference"? How about "mathematics makes the invisible visible"? Do you
feel a virus coming on? Just Cut the Knot.
By way of evacuate & flush, I have returned to now.
| "Our global crisis is, at its root, a crisis of
consciousness; and until we tend to the root
of our problems the crises around us will
continue to proliferate and deepen." |
24/8
The Third Eye, LSD, and Serotonin, subtitled LSD is a drug that has mystified neurology and American society, is a concise look at the history of this research (including a great table listing the somatic, psychological, cognitive and perceptual effects of d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25) and the implications of some findings.
| "LSD has inspired, spooked, challenged and changed the American psyche." |
T Wolfe, The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening
| "Where the Third Great Awakening will lead who can presume to say? One only knows
that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor
acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest,
holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . Me . . . Me . . ." |
I haven't seen a cleaner example than A Chronology of Psychoactive Substance Use as a record of our historical NCA requirements; though there are obvious(ly) omissions.
| "The Ming emperor decrees any person trafficking in tobacco will be decapitated (1638), the decree proves ineffectual as smoking spreads within the court." |
LSD, Faith and Blind Faith
| "How many lightbulbs does it take to screw in a religious scientist?" |
The Failure of the Human Potential Movement: from Self-Actualization to Experientialism by Geoffrey Hill drives the requisite stake firmly into the heart of the psychic vampirism of the self(please let me)-help movement
| "This essay is one chapter in a book Hill is writing about the rampant disease of selfishness and immaturity within Western culture." |
23/8
Here in the north of america we could perhaps stake claim on being the champions of bureaucracy. Henry Mintzberg explains the advantages of Managing Quietly.
| "Such is the practice of management as a craft -- low key, involved, warm, focused, perhaps quintessentially Canadian. It may not make the headlines, but it seems to work." |
Opting for a slightly different approach to understanding management is Shamanism - Working With Animal Spirits.
" Cougar/Mountain Lion/Puma's Wisdom Includes:
- Using leadership power wisely and without ego
- Balancing power, intention, strength
- Gaining self-confidence
- Freedom from guilt
- Cunning " |
Science Without Bounds: A
Synthesis of Science, Religion and Mysticism may help to put it all in perspective, and bring us back to quietly managing.
"Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and
I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to
remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the
whole fun of it - just what he wanted to do. He doesn't
want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil
the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me
to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not
to be himself."
Alan Watts |
22/8
Terrorvision: Panopticism in the Age of Totally Hidden Video
"Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance,"
Michel Foucault. |
Pynchon's Prophecies of Cyberspace
| "How can cybernauts and cyberpunks have the nerve to claim Pynchon as a literary ancestor, when the implied author of Gravity's Rainbow so clearly thinks of the digital domain as fodder for fascism and as hospitable only to the forces of dehumanization?" |
Keys to the Conspiracy Conspiracy
| "Evil, then, in this profound context,
arises as a reflection of one's own
denied, subconscious reality, the
unerring, benevolent process of the one
mind consciously bringing all existence
to ultimate truth and resolution." |
How Your Tax Dollars Support the Boy Scouts of America
| "Many who are familiar with the scouts may be surprised to learn that it claims to be a religious
organization. " |
Signs of Consciousness: Speculations on the Psychology of Paleolithic Graphics
21/8
The Father's Right to Custody Homepage has a huge supply of available wisdom to recommend it, but leaves me feeling even worse for needing to research such dis-content.
A. S. Neill's Summerhill School is where my educational heart was beating while my neurons were being acculturated within the Skinnerian factory-schools I actually attended. Our children are in deep trouble, Dear Readers; and the only hope is to imagine.
To put where we are now into historical context here is The Evolution of Childhood, which is chapter one of Foundations of Psychohistory by Lloyd DeMause. I too cannot believe our ignore-ance, and a deep chill sets in with the thought of a fully corporatized puerility.
| "In a paper given in 1968 before the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis, I outlined an
evolutionary theory of historical change in parent-child relations, and proposed that since historians had not as yet begun the job of writing childhood history, the Association should sponsor a team of historians who would dig back into the sources to un-cover the major stages of child-rearing in the West since antiquity. This essay is the outcome of that project." |
I am so tired....let's give the Learned Lloyd the last word for now, as he deconstructs some of our myths surrounding parenting. (and allows me to partly subsume my feelings in intellectual pursuits) On Writing Childhood History
| "If childhood history - and psychohistory - mean anything, they mean reversing most of the causal arrows used by historians to date." |
20/8
Chris E. Stout projects a future of transphilosophic exploration within the looking glass: Emmortality: The Project of a Lifetime
| "Tipler postulates that 10^15 bits processed at a speed of 10 teraFLOPS is a brain. This (the current industry trend) bodes well for the Strong AI Postulate and development of an
exosomatic brain emulator." |
In need of a holiday, but faced with a moving experience, I'm thinking of the ultimate bedroom community... Now that my clothes are back on perhaps I'll ask The Talossan Ministry for Immigration whether I could clamber aboard their ship of state of mind.
18/8
The Voice of the Earth by Theodore Roszak, Reviewed by Ralph Metzner
| "Roszak and I agree that "eco-psychology" should not become a
sub-discipline within psychology, like "developmental
psychology". Rather, eco-psychology is a newly vitalized context
for psychological thinking (as it can be for other disciplines as
well, for example philosophy, economics, sociology, etc),
that will be absolutely essential if we are to survive the next
century with a halfway decent biosphere left, as well as some
capabilities for sane human life-styles." |
The Anxiety of Clearings by Paul Carter is a prose poem that elevates observation to a whole new level, weaving archetypal insight with Homo Ethical exsight; and the process wreaks recognition of divine loss.
| "A true scientist, not driven by the purblindness of economic greed, is also a seer, a dreamer, drifting between the visible and the invisible, the without and the within." |
This excerpt from When The Dream Becomes Real: The Inner Apocalypse in Mythology, Madness, and the Future by Michael O'Callaghan contains an interview with John Weir Perry M.D., who examines Mental Breakdowns as a Healing Process.
| "The results were amazing: full-blown "schizophrenics" were able to go through what turned out to be only a temporary non-ordinary state of consciousness, and emerge on the far side of madness, as Perry put it, "weller than well."" |
Jonas Beckman directed me to a Feed article by Eric Davis, who invites us to Take the Red Pill, or p'raps the blue one. As an aside, I have yet to find an answer as to whether the U.S. President of the Present or Potential Presidents-Erect are functioning with physician-assisted self-adjusted neurochemistry such as an SSRI, and what implications...
| "Once I have the option to chemically
alter the feelings that disturb me, then my decision not to
medicate, to keep slogging on through, becomes an equally
"artificial" choice: I am simply opting for another pill." |
! Dr. Menlo !
17/8
With the moniker The Impossible, Accomplished at Last taken to heart, I guess my work is done...when I finish Salvation Science: Science Religion Reconciled.
| "But what the two operations of Completion and Correction
will do, in effect, is to take science as the standard of truth, and then search among all
the world's religious doctrines, rejecting those that do not fit in with science and
selecting those that do, and assembling them into a single "world religion", perfectly
consistent within itself as well as with science." |
Ya gotta love studies like this one by the British Transport Research Laboratory that expose the truth: Cannabis may make you a safer driver.
| "Regular smokers were used because previous tests in America
using first- timers resulted in the volunteers falling over and
feeling ill." |
The Transtopian Principles propose an arch-anarchy in which even the laws of nature are mutable.
"General goal: infinite existence under the best possible conditions.
Primary means to achieve this: reason, science and technology.
Motivation: enlightened self-interest." |
A Course in Memetics (erk) is to be had at Thought Contagion Science - The Science of Self-Spreading Beliefs.
| "Every science has a pseudoscience tagging alongside, and memetics is no exception--so reader
beware!" |
16/8
Aug. 15, 2000--The world's most advanced
quantum computer has been developed at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
Scientists then used it to show that such devices can solve problems that
are impossibly hard for conventional computers. Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang wrote a SciAm article way back in '98 describing their research that provides a great backgrounder to this momentous achievement. Quantum Computing with Molecules
| "All along, ordinary molecules have known how to do a
remarkable kind of computation. People were just not asking them the
right questions." |
The Secret History of Lead details how this potent neurotoxin sleazed it's way into our lives, and how it will be an insideously damaging legacy for generations to come.
| "...one can
conservatively estimate that a total of about 68 million young (American) children had toxic
exposures to lead from gasoline from 1927 to 1987." |
Vancouver Institute Lecture, March 25, 2000 is a speech of extraordinary value. Unfortunately this page sits at the 'end of the internet', and is uncredited. No, I have no idea how I got there and upon further introspection (and a brain adjustment from my wife Mary Jane) have decided not to persue the matter; these words stand alone.
| "Survival demands a revolution in the way we live, which in turn requires a revolution in the way we think. When there were only a few of us, we could afford to be stupid. Today, when our numbers and our ingenuity have made us a force of nature in our own right, our stupidity has lethal consequences." |
Miracle Device - Feed's Document on Ted Nelson's Literary Machines
| "For this Document, we've selected
four elements of his design that have yet to be explored, places where
Nelson built windows before there was a house." |
|
