31/12/3
Not prone to effusive endorsement of portals, per se, Meme Stream is a most worthy *homepage* that brings the gamut of alter-views readily to click. Oh, do!
The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty
"But my journaling has become very sparse, in relative terms, since I've started blogging. In a way that's a good thing, as I tend to pay more attention to silly things like complete sentences, getting a point across (why are you laughing?) and having some consideration for who my audience is (I'm gonna burn in hell for even pretending this might be true) so it's, believe it or not, much more coherent than my paper journals." |
Forward, into the past - Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?, by Spider Robinson. I am nauseated that the debt U.S.A. citizens have incurred executing the preemptive wars on Iraqistan (100 billion and counting), could have gone a long way to eradicating poverty, the building of a number of new space exploration craft, AND ensured universal health care. Let's dedicate tonight's resolutions to the rational redistribution of wealth; and the courage of our collective conviction.
| "I believe with all my heart that the pendulum will return, that ignorance will become unfashionable again one day, that my junior colleagues are about to ignite a new renaissance in science fiction, and that our next 50 years will make the first 50 pale by comparison, taking us all the way to immortality and the stars themselves." |
30/12/3
How to Save the World is not a problem that Krishnamurti would have entertained, reasonably observing that the party is omni-chaotic, and so each individual omni-potent - here is One.
"So get out of yourself and of being apart
You are part of the science and part of the art
That connects all of us in the head and the heart." |
HAARP, Iran, and the mechanics of techno-conquest will be the focus for abuddhas Gaia Day 4 edition. Have a great time Dear Readers. I'll get busy compiling all the goodies; and nasties.
25/12/3
I keep thinking...
"I keep thinking about Marvin Gaye
I keep thinking about that old god
I keep thinking about Yahweh" |
Hot Type
Evan Solomon in conversation with Noam Chomsky
"President Bush said that democracy is - this is a quote - democracy is the only path to national success and dignity in the middle east.
NC: If we were reasonable our reaction to this would be to completely discount it because any leader you pick, anyone you like is going to produce this rhetoric. That comes with the job. What you do is look at the practices that lie behind it." |
What if the USA was invaded?
| "What if another country didn't like our leader and they used their superior army, navy, and air force to invade our country to remove him? What if another country invaded us because we have 1,000,000 times the stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as all the other countries in the world combined?" |
17/12/3
mousemusings looked north and snuggled into a burrow to relate The Story of Mouseland; as written by Canada's political conscience; Tommy Douglas, 1944. Let's hope that the U.S.A. can develop a truly National Democratic Party; wouldn't that be New!
| "Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do." |
The Speculist - What might be. What might not be. What might have been. Whatever. Speaking of the Future with John Smart
"Your father used a TUI (text-based user interface). You use a GUI (graphical user interface). Your kid will primarily use a LUI (voice-driven interface) to speak to the computers embedded in every technology in her environment. She'll continue to use TUIs and GUIs, but only secondarily, not for her typical, average interaction with a machine. Your grandchildren will use a NUI (neural user interface), a biologically-inspired, self-improving, very impressive set of machines.
Broadband and basic LUIs everywhere within a generation would throw gasoline on the fire of human innovation. This level of internet would link all our wisest minds, including even those elders who little use computers today, into one real-time community." |
16/12/3
They call it democracy is a piece by guitarist and tunesmith Bruce Cockburn from '85 that is a must-grok (listen too, if you can) at this time of reperceived feudalism.
"See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution" |
The Science of Shopping - neuromarketing
| "We can't actually talk about the specific names of the companies, but they are global consumer product companies…Right now, they would rather not be exposed. We have been kind of running under the radar with a lot of the breakthrough technology." |
The Word Spy gives us the definitional dope on new.roh.MAR.kuh.ting.
"When the medial prefrontal cortex fires, your brain seems to be engaging, in some manner, with what sort of person you are. If it fires when you see a particular product, Kilts argues, it's most likely to be because the product clicks with your self-image."
Clive Thompson, There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex
|
Walkin' in the Neo-con Homeland
"In the meadow we can build Camp X-ray
And execute dissenters every day.
They'll ask for a lawyer
We'll say, "No way!"
"The Bill of Rights was cancelled yesterday!" |
A couple of years ago the Infectious Diseases Society of America released a report by the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, Johns Hopkins University detailing an exercise (that) was intended to increase awareness of the scope and character of the threat posed by biological weapons among senior national security experts and to bring about actions that would improve prevention and response strategies. Shining Light on "Dark Winter"
| "Leaders are unfamiliar with the character of bioterrorist attacks, available policy options, and their consequences." |
15/12/3
Convenience, coincidence, serendipity. We can expect these miraculous events to occur fairly often, if unexpectedly, in our personal lives. A number of factors figure into this; we exist within reasonably small social circles, our expectations tend to lend meaning to random occurances, and more than anything, perhaps, there is an unconscious trend to put ourselves 'in the way' of opportunities for coincidental circumstances.
If these seredipitous, coincidently timed, and ever-so-conveniently perfect events were happening all the time, however, we would start to get paranoid; and rightly so. We have an innate feel for probabilities, and when they are wackily wild the alarm of logic defied starts to ring.
With the apparently animate disinterment of Iraq's former leader at the perfect time to provide distraction from domestic pressures which were threatening to boil over (not to mention the Christmas Media Hole, upcoming primaries, etc.), the Bush Cabal has hit yet another trifecta: Paul Wellstone dead leading to control of all three branches of government, legislation passed that severely limits the rights of U.S.American as well as all other country's citizens, and now the capture of the figurehead of personified evil.
Not only am I paranoid, I am sure that beyond any kind of conspiracy theorisms that the U.S.A. is an openly orchestrated oligarchy whose tendrils of control are, and will increasingly be, probing our every orifice.
Noam Chomsky explained in a speech about one month after the 11/9 mystery, How to Easily Reduce Terrorism by More Than 90 Percent.
| "There is one extremely easy way for the US government to do that - and that way is, the US government could stop participating in terror, and stop supporting it when others do it! That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously - as I said, over 90 percent world-wide.
You do the math: draw up a table, putting in one column the number of people affected by US terror directly or indirectly, and in the other, the number of people affected by terror against the US and its allies. If the US stops participating in and supporting terror, the level of terror world-wide would become a tiny fraction of what it is today." |
13/12/3
whisky river provides an inexhaustible resevoir of deep thoughts, including this counter-intuitive observation from a very longanimous person. Now, let's quietly absorb the Bush Administration's administrations and grok the intention.
"The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang, it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck around your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets, and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun does."
Elspeth Huxley |
At a more prosaic level, if You Live Your Life As If It's Real you might like to know, with a modicum of exactitude, What Are the Odds of Dying? - assuming of course that you are mean-ly average.
| "The odds given below are statistical averages over the whole U.S. population and do not necessarily reflect the chances of death for a particular person from a particular external cause. Any individual's odds of dying from various external causes are affected by the activities in which they participate, where they live and drive, what kind of work they do, and other factors." |
The Obvious? took me within the vortex of his mind and when I came too (sic) I was injesting classic Ming the Mechanic and sharing an orgasmi-Gaian vision.
"Released from the idea of earning a living, I was able to address problems in the biggest way. I decided to commit myself to the invention and development of physical artifacts to reform the environment. I decided that a plurality of such artifacts had the potential to evoke humanity's most intelligent, interconsiderate qualities. It became obvious that if I worked always and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective. I'd be doing what nature wanted me to do, and nature would literally support me."
Buckminster Fuller |
12/12/3
Politics and the English Language is an essay that needs to be reprised, re-read, and re-dug until we can reverse engineer what we hear, read, and see. This must become a natural, virtually instinctive part of our communications skill-set. Did I break any rules yet?
"1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article." |
For a short, coffee break synopsis there's always Orwellian Logic 101 -- A Few Simple Lessons
"Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip."
George Orwell |
There's bad news all around concerning the War on ourSelves. In the case of Steve Kubby, I am ashamed that Canada's Refugee Board has perhaps sentenced him to death. Medical pot refugee loses deportation case
| "The physician that they (italics mine) selected testified under oath that if I was denied cannabis for more than 48 hours I would suffer a heart attack or a stroke and I would probably lose my life." |
All American citizens should be highly alarmed as U.S. House of Reps. Approves Bill to Censor American Citizens from Voicing Opposition to U.S. War on Drugs.
| "A little-known provision buried within the omnibus federal spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives approved yesterday would take away federal grants from local and state transportation authorities that allow citizens to run advertising on buses, trains, or subways in support of reforming our nation's drug laws. If enacted, the provision could effectively silence community groups around the country that are using advertising to educate Americans about medical marijuana and other drug policy reforms. Meanwhile, this same bill gives the White House $145 million in taxpayer money to run anti-marijuana ads next year." |
9/12/3
Collapsing credibility
Bush's disinformation policy threatens the nation
"Given free rein, President Bush has launched America on a radical, uncivilized, "preemptive strike" policy and we are now widely viewed as the most dangerous rogue nation on Earth. It is criminal that our actions were based on a foundation of lies, but it is even more tragic that our young men and women are dying every day in foreign lands for absolutely nothing.
This is not just about George W. Bush's presidency, however, which will end sooner or later. For the sake of our country's future, we can only hope it's sooner, but the damage done to our democracy and international image will long outlast the political lifespan of the greatest scoundrel ever to blemish the White House." |
Was GWB an addict, "cured" by "finding" Jebus? What Addiction Is and Is Not - The Impact of Mistaken Notions of Addiction; a la Stanton Peele.
| "In other sciences, that leading figures would as a group misunderstand an anchor concept in their field would be considered shocking. My prediction about this event: it will change nothing not only in the field, but about the thinking of the individuals involved. They will continue to posit separate categories of dependence and reify physical dependence/addiction as an ironclad biological reaction due to drug use and unaffected by situation, culture, and belief. They could not do otherwise; they are blinkered forever by cultural assumptions into which they were born." |
Hungry for The Next Fix - Behind the relentless, misguided search for a medical cure for addiction
| "Since Gordis spoke for the U.S. alcohol treatment establishment, his rigidity condemned American alcoholics to limp along, most continuing to drink, with little chance of finding assistance in limiting their drinking or reducing its negative consequences. We will never eliminate drinking and drug use. But we might be able to reduce the harm they sometimes cause if we could eliminate the pseudoscientific moralism dispensed by the likes of Leshner and Gordis." |
How we confuse symbols and things
| "It is no accident that modern education doesn't teach the distinction between symbol and thing -- if it did, education as we know it would fall apart. After that, after education reshaped itself to provide actual knowledge instead of the symbolic representation of knowledge, the society around us would be transformed." |
"I intend this brief history of the mind to itself be a vista from a crossroads, looking back at simpler versions of mental life, taking stock of what we have now, and then speculating about mind's future. For we are at a crossroads in another sense, that of a frontier where the rules are about to change, where mind shifts gears again.
That's my brief history... Instead of starting with a big bang, I lead up to one - and then look beyond, to contemplate mind's next advances." |
8/12/3
Eternal (erk) gratitude to also not found in nature for leading me to the inimitable Spider Robinson's short story Melancholy Elephants - does this presage the forthcoming regime change? Part of his full story collection, By Any Other Name, is also available.
| "Her very worst secret fear was realized. He had already taken money from the other side. The one thing any politician must do, no matter how powerful, is stay bought. It was all over." |
Self-Locating Belief in Big Worlds: Cosmology's Missing Link to Observation is a challenging and neurally satifying essay by Nick Bostrom.
"Space is big. It is very, very big. On the currently most favored cosmological theories, we are living in an infinite world, a world that contains an infinite number of planets, stars, galaxies, and black holes. This is an implication of most "multiverse theories", according to which our universe is just one in a vast ensemble of physically real universes. But it is also a consequence of the standard Big Bang cosmology, if combined with the assumption that our universe is open or flat, as recent evidence suggests it is.
How can vast-world cosmologies have any observational consequences at all?" |
Who Was Wenceslas?
Christmas Myth-Making Have you ever wondered what it is that trees, holly, and mistletoe have to do with the birth of Jesus or the Jewish Festival of Lights? This brief synopsis on the origins of Christmas customs will shed light on some of the more obscure references.
| "One of the most misinterpreted words in the Christmas vocabulary is "Xmas." Many Christians contend that using "X" in place of "Christ" is the way that evil atheists take the "Christ out of Christmas." In fact, the opposite is true. The X has been used by theologians for hundreds of years to denote chi, the first letter in the Greek spelling of the word "Christ." It is meant to represent Christ and remind the reader of the cross upon which he was hung." |
Chance and Choice - a Compendium of Ancient and Modern Wisdom Revealing the Meaning and Significance of the Myth of Science Myth is not used in a derogatory sense, but in its original meaning as a true belief system which gives meaning to life, and links with the great belief systems of the past.
| "This book represents the life's work and study of Professor Keyserling following the Path of Wisdom as understood, explained and supplemented by his student since 1971, Ralph Losey. It integrates many fields of modern Science and world Religious Philosophies. The result is a vast, yet coherent array of important and useful information to all those striving to make sense of their lives for themselves." |
The Pineal Gland, LSD and Serotonin
"Om Hail! the Light of the Ages
Coming in From above like the
Righteous Thunderbolt!!!"
5/12/3
The New Politics of Consumption - Why Americans want so much more than they need, is an essay by Juliet Schor that entreats us all, above all, to go beyond it all.
| "Americans did not suddenly become greedy. The aspirational gap has been created by structural changes - such as the decline of community and social connection, the intensification of inequality, the growing role of mass media, and heightened penalties for failing in the labor market. Upscaling is mainly defensive, and has both psychological and practical dimensions." |
FMH sanely brought me to Out of Their Right Mind - Conservatism is Crazy, but Psychiatry is Here to Help
| "Above all, though, this stands as a powerful example of the misuse of science and the arrogance of expertise. More than a denigration of conservatism, these studies reveal an utter derision of genuine political life altogether. They display a kind of psychiatry-as-zoology, with a knowledgeable expert standing well above the fray, measuring his subjects by standards altogether foreign to the character of their activity." |
James Madison - His Legacy
| "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." |
4/12/3
A pedantic pondering by John Derbyshire, What happened to Aldous Huxley, does shed occasional light but in general misses Auldous' point entirely. I agree that metaphysics formed the basis of Huxley's whole-within (It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic.), and I also agree that pragmatism has drastically eroded the mountain of understanding that metaphysics offers as the steepest of human climes. This is no time for living as we do in such an un-metaphysical age, since without vision we will run into The Wall.
| "Huxley had, in fact, a well-developed sense of the absurd...that the universe is radically weird. Comments to this effect turn up again and again in Huxley's writing: "the astonishingness of the most obvious things," "the unutterably odd facts of human experience," etc. He was much tickled to find, when typing one day, that his left hand had slipped from "c" to "v," giving him the phrase: "the human vomedy."" |
My focus today is on warnings, code red, that we have ignored in the decades since their first iteration. The odds, which for the bookie in us all I'll peg at sixteen million to one, of being in personal danger due to terrorism from "others" is many orders of magnitude less than that of being terrorized by the domestic milieu.
Whether by onerous laws dictating drug use, bizarre "three strikes" polices, a prison system that is equivalent in self-propagation ability to that of the defence industry, a police and social work system almost entirely reliant on all of the above dis-eased conditions (each nominally decent employee of which is merely, often barely, desperately, maintaining their middle class status quo and ego), or by the violence implied and all too often actual in almost every home, and the narccisism implied and made actual by the consumerist propaganda sci-arts, we are in dire peril right here; now.
The probability of being affected to some degree by one or more of the above internal difficulties (ie: the risks within U.S. America of incarceration and its wide family effect, health issues etc., seemingly ad infinitum) is close to one hundred percent. Distraction is the first tool of the accomplished psycon, so we are fed faux terror and faux need. As the memetically hunted we must develop a prey's attention to the detail of the trees and a god's attention to the health of the forest.
Rachel Carson and the Awakening of Environmental Consciousness is a wonderful six part guide.
| "The more clearly we can focus our attention on
the wonders and realities of the universe about us,
the less taste we shall have for destruction." |
Proemium is from Jonathan Ott's Pharmacotheon in which he presents a comprehensive and readable treatise on drug policy reform.
| "It is my sincere wish that this book contribute to an objective reappraisal of entheogenic drugs and their place in the modern world. I have dedicated it to my late teacher Gordon Wasson, who more than anyone catalyzed the contemporary revival of ecstatic, shamanic religion, and who wrote beautifully about the "bemushroomed" state. At the outset I reiterated Wasson's rhetorical question, whether, with all our modern knowledge, we needed the divine entheogens any longer. I would answer with Wasson, that precisely because of our modern knowledge we need them more than ever." |
Rachel Carson and Jonathon Ott are intimately intertwined (don't you love philosex) in their competence to help us to make informed decisions based on science and prescience. These abilities are diametrically opposed to the befuddled judgments made by those of belief, faith, fear and greed. As Thomas Jefferson observed: If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny. The Sacred Cow Syndrome and Gaia principles
| "The American mind is one of the most creative minds in the world, and it is being confined, compromised, and sold down the river by people who can't think of anything better to do with the world than fabricate it into stupid products and sell it at twice its natural worth." |
The Assembly of the Church of the Universe
| "So far we have pointed out the social and ceremonial aspects of marijuana smoking. Earlier we designated one additional factor that is crucial to defining a state of ritual. We mentioned that the activity must serve as a basis for linking the individual up with a higher moral order. Another way of stating the same thing is that the ceremony must serve to kindle positive and optimistic forces in the individual." |
3/12/3
Without any immediate reaction to this news, and gratitude to Orwell Today for pointing me - Some facts about Canada's boreal forest and efforts to preserve it:
Area: About 5.3 million square kilometres, roughly 53 per cent of Canada's land mass, 90 per cent of its remaining intact large forests, from Newfoundland to Yukon.
Makeup: Pine, spruce, aspen, poplar, larch trees; 30 per cent of the area is covered by wetlands, including 1.5 million lakes.
Importance: Breeding ground for more than 30 per cent of North American birds. Includes some of the world's largest remaining populations of woodland caribou, wolves, bears. Home to 600 First Nation communities and 25 per cent of world's remaining frontier forests. It's a crucial part of the water-filtering system and a carbon-dioxide sink.
Economy: Provides work for about 400,000 people in 7,000 forest-related companies and is the source of half of Canada's annual wood harvest. It means $400 million in annual revenue to governments.
Initiative: To preserve at least 50 per cent of the boreal forest in a network of large, interconnected protected areas; to support sustainable communities; to implement eco-system-based resource management practices and state-of-the-art stewardship.
Partners: Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc., Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Deh Cho First Nations (NWT), Domtar Inc., Ducks Unlimited Canada, Forest Ethics, Innu Nation (Labrador), Poplar River First Nation (Manitoba), Suncor Energy Inc., Tembec Inc., World Wildlife Fund. |
shabby dee in the place to be took my hand through the maze of memory loss and brought me to the entire text of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Seminal.
"I was dumbstruck. There, in a few pages, I read a startlingly concise summary of everything I'd seen in twenty-one years as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, and columnist for my newspaper. The idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That engineering remains second-rate without aesthetics. That natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce. That corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact possible with the people on the outside."
Thomas Petzinger, Jr. |
December 1st, Year 3
As so well pointed out by a most Dear Reader, Democracy is the last thing coming to the U.S.A. Already a pseudo-feudal State with a solid bent toward being Royally screwed, the mass of the deluded will welcome a Celebrated coup. Richness replaces quality, grandiosity usurps purpose, consumption trumps conservation, Right squashes the egalitian nature, and Nature is All Ways Used.
To add insult to this general, Hu-man, fall from grace there is No Way Out. Are any of us willing to set aside our western gluttonous use of Gaian resourses and re-cognize our responsibility to the planetship? Individually, yes. En mass, never.The Probability of Doom - Critiquing the Doomsday Argument - and of course the master himself, Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy
| "Anthropic Bias is a synthesis of some of the most interesting and important ideas to emerge from discussion of cosmic fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the Doomsday Argument. It deserves a place on the shelves of epistemologists and philosophers of science, as well as specialists interested in the topics just mentioned." |
It would behoove any with more than a passing interest in viruses of the mind to pay vital attention to Susan Blackmore's trans-infectious, septic, eruditions. Imitation and the definition of a meme does for our understanding of our condition what Catholicism did for perdition. Oh, hell, I'll fall into the pit for that analogy!
"My argument has been that the definition of the meme depends on, and should depend on, the concept of imitation. Therefore, only those things that can be passed on by imitation should count as memes.
This means we can immediately exclude many things that a few authors have confusingly included as memes, such as perceptions, emotional states, cognitive maps, experiences in general, or "anything that can be the subject of an instant of experience". Furthermore we can build on the long history of research in animal behaviour to distinguish imitation from contagion, and from individual and social learning, and so to eliminate from memetics the catching of yawns or all the many things we each learn for ourselves, by ourselves." |
Current research suggests we are a profoundly behavioral ape. Cultural Transmission and the Capacity to Approve or Disapprove of Offspring's Behaviour
| "The approval or disapproval of offspring's behaviour is a new mode of cultural transmission that increases the accuracy of the process of meme imitation, or in Blackmore's (1999) words, the process of 'copy-the-product'. Thus, cultural transmission becomes a system of inheritance and cumulative cultural transmission become possible." |
Cosmic Ancestry
Life comes from space because life comes from life.
"I always thought the most significant thing we found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it."
Pete Conrad" |
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