Category Archives: Technology

Rope-a-Dope

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rope-a-dope3By Rodney Swearengin

Source: Adbusters

During the second round of the 1974 epic boxing match billed as the Rumble in the Jungle, Mohammad Ali leaned extraordinarily far back upon the ropes as George Foreman relentlessly bludgeoned Ali’s body and arms. It looked much like the devastating beating Ali took at the hands of Joe Frazier in 1971. Foreman’s notoriously powerful punches were sure to do Ali in as he languished on the ropes round after round. But in the eighth — with Foreman’s stamina sapped — Ali got off the ropes, and went on the attack, winning the bout with a knockout. He called it the “rope-a-dope.”

I feel worked over — not knowing if I can keep up the pace of the caffeine infused all-night drift through a world-wide cataloging of every failure of imagination — large and small — the war, disease, simple stupidity, the latest meme designed to bring a smile all the way to your eyes — brought not only into your living room, but also the kitchen, the bedroom. It seems we&rsquo—re always peering deep into our glowing box, trying to sort out the trouble and hop to the next possible potential of some game-changing inspiration in the incessant production-line flow of recycled mediocrity. But the troubles are never through. The work is never done. That breakthrough — that genius sabot insight never comes.

But the metaphor of production-line work — already passé when McLuhan made us aware of so many similarly irrelevant tropes — is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology — mechanization — of the factory. There is something comforting in the nostalgic ease with which Lucille Ball or Charlie Chaplin revealed the absurdity of Fordist efficiency, the worker as a mere appendage of the machine. Although laughable even then — that was a time in which the worker still had a genuine role to play; being more than an option cheaper than automation. That time is gone.

I feel over worked. But I’ve never worked at the mill. I’ve never done a 12-hour stint keeping pace with cogs and conveyer belts. I’m not being over worked. I’m being worked over — as we all are — not by a craftwork mechanized pace that drives us to exhaustion — but by an alluring rhythm — a rhythm that can at once lull us into acquiescence while at the same time keeping us off balance — all the better mobilized for each permutation of familiar themes. We are mesmerized by the rhythm of electrostatic transmissions coded through glitches of the cybernetic network and the fragments of old media. Cycling through neoclassic postmodern motifs destructured and reformulated into predictably surprising combinations — this rhythm — this aesthetic — makes us move —and more importantly, buy. Consumers at heart, the rhythm sucks us in and incorporates us more completely than any machine ever could. Somehow thinking that we are breaking free from the autonomic conditioning of a youthful wasteland, we wait in eager anticipation for the next issue of a magazine devoted to the pure form of advertising —though in its pages there is none to be found. It makes our consumer heart skip a beat. Like Victorians who wouldn’t dare indulge in such an unsavory act — but nonetheless cannot stop talking about it — we swoon, sway and jerk with the rhythm of the spliced (dis)tasteful image juxtaposed by words of a hopeful, anxious, elliptical cant — breakdown and breakthrough.

I get the breakdown. Where’s the breakthrough? We talk and all the while we’re being worked over. And this is no massage. This is a beat down. In the expanded edition of his vintage Politics and Vision, Sheldon Wolin argued that the particular rhythm of our contemporary aesthetic has been put to expert use by the new corporate form of governance he called “inverted totalitarianism.” Perhaps Wolin really put his finger on our fatal flaw when he suggested that the “cascades of ‘critical theory’ and their postures of revolt, and the appetite for theoretical novelty, function as support rather than opposition” to capitalism, because this sort of frenetic, syncopated, decentering only “encourages its rhythms.” Like a prizefighter — agile, yet made of solid, consolidated muscle. The centralized corporate entity gets in step with our fancy footwork — bobs and weaves into every new channel of communication and community, coopts every sophistication of critique, adopts the most non-hierarchical, horizontal stance of organization and deployment — moving with the rhythm — adapting the rhythm to its own purpose — waiting for the opportunity to unload its notoriously devastating punch — coming in on the trash talker of dissent — Muhammad Ali stumbling back on the ropes, body blow after wicked body blow — pummeled — worked over completely.

I don’t want to go down on the ropes. Where’s the rope-a-dope? Where’s the rope-a- dope?!

 

Saturday Matinee: Future Shock

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Future Shock: Orson Welles Narrates a 1972 Film About the Perils of Technological Change

By Jonathan Crow

Source: Open Culture

The beginning of the 1972 documentary Future Shock, directed by Alex Grasshof, shows Orson Welles, bearded and chomping on a cigar, standing on an airport people mover. He turns to the camera and delivers a monologue in his trademark silken baritone. “In the course of my work, which has taken me to just about every corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which I’m just beginning to understand. Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths –- we are the victims of shock… a future shock.”

The documentary itself is wonderfully dated. From its bizarre opening montage; to its soundtrack, which lurches from early electronic music to jazz funk; to some endearing video special effects, which, for whatever reason, mostly centers around Orson Welles’s head, the film feels thoroughly rooted in the Nixon administration. Yet many of the ideas discussed in the movie are, if anything, more relevant now than in the 1970s. Watch it above.

The term “future shock” was invented in Alvin Toffler’s hugely bestselling book of the same name to describe the constant, bewildering barrage of new technologies and all the resulting societal changes those technologies bring about. Anyone who has struggled to comprehend a new, baffling and supposedly essential social media platform, anyone who has been driven to paralysis over the number of choices on Netflix, anyone who found their livelihood decimated because of a hot new app knows what “future shock” is.

Toffler (along with his wife and uncredited co-writer Heidi Toffler) argued that we are in the midst of a massive structural change from an industrial society to a post-industrial one – a society that boggles the mind with an overload of information and an overload of consumer choices. “Change,” as they wrote, “is the only constant.”

Along the way, the Tofflers managed to predict the collapse of America’s manufacturing sector, along with things like Prozac, temp jobs, the internet and the meteoric rise and fall of insta-celebs (Alex from Target, we hardly knew you.) Other predictions – underwater cities, paper clothes and being able to choose your own skin color – haven’t yet come to pass. Still, they had a surprisingly good track record considering these predictions were written over four decades ago.

The video ends with a plea from not Welles, but Toffler himself, who is seen addressing college students.

If we can recognize that industrialism is not the only possible form of technological society, if we can begin to think more imaginatively about the future, then we can prevent future shock and we can use technology itself to build a decent, democratic and humane society. […] We can no longer allow technology just to come roaring down at us. We must begin to say “No” to certain kinds of technology and begin to control technological change, because we have now reached the point at which technology is so powerful and so rapid that it may destroy us, unless we control it. But what is the most important is we simply do not accept everything; that we begin to make critical decisions about what kind of world we want and what kind of technology we want.

 

Related Content:

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Walter Cronkite Imagines the Home of the 21st Century … Back in 1967

The Internet Imagined in 1969

Marshall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Global Village

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here.

Ex Machina, et al, and the Metaphysics of Computer Consciousness

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By Steven Harp

Source: Reality Sandwich

( ex machina from the phrase “deus ex machina” meaning “god from the machine”)

It seems unquestioned in the world today that science is on the verge of creating consciousness with computers. In a Promethean rapture inspired by its enormous technological success, science aspires now to seize control of fundamental powers at the very heart of the universe.

With the advent of modern science the reality of human consciousness has come to be regarded as physical alone.  A caricature of consciousness has been compounded from such disparate elements as digital code, speculative evolutionary psychology, and a “neuro-phrenology” derived from colorized brain imaging. This caricature from scientists and engineers has gone into public circulation with the help of the media and it has become an acceptable counterfeit currency. And with cinematic virtuosity it has been made plausible by representations in the movies.

In the movie, Ex Machina we see another recycling of the classic Frankenstein story: Life is created from nonliving materials. A lone genius in an isolated laboratory, using the mysterious powers of science, creates new life. In the original Frankenstein story we have a dead body made alive by electricity. In Ex Machina we have a non-living “wetware” circuit given a mechanical body and made conscious by electricity.

This takes the story to a whole new level. Here the scientist is creating the very roots of being. To create consciousness-itself is equivalent to creating de novo cosmic absolutes such as space, matter, or light. It would be equivalent to creating a spectrum of color, a scale of tones, entire ranges of emotion, thought, pain, pleasure, and the entire dictionary of the contents of consciousness, all from the dark and silent abyss of nothingness.

How can something with neither mass nor dimension arise from that which has mass and dimension? How can that which has subjectivity and intentionality arise from that which has objectivity and has no intentionality?  This is the magisterial conundrum and is recognized as the greatest mystery in science.  No one, neither philosopher nor scientist, has a clue to the answer. It has famously been labeled the “hard problem of consciousness” by David Chalmers.

In both cases we see technology extrapolated to the creation our most fundamental being in which man becomes the maker of his most central essence, of what he is himself. The creation becomes the creator, the hand that draws itself.

This year alone has seen 8 major movies featuring synthetic or digital consciousness: Transcendence, Her, Chappie, Ex Machina, Lucy, Extant, Tomorrowland, and Terminator again.  One has to ask, is there something more than a good story line here?

The claim that technology will give birth to consciousness itself within a computer is entirely based on implicit assumptions about the nature of consciousness and reality. The often made assumption that the brain is like a computer and that nerve impulses are like digital code has no direct experimental foundation and is based on superficial resemblances only. There is no real scientific basis for the claim that the digital processing of symbols should somehow be accompanied by inner experience, that is, by consciousness, awareness, qualia, feeling, sentience, etc. 

A computer simulation of brain function is not going to produce consciousness any more than a computer simulation of kidney function is going to produce urine. There is no magic in computation. No amount of digital processing alone is ever going to produce a color. Without consciousness a computer program is a flow of electrons as meaningless and non-referential as those flowing in a wall.

Despite the flagrant and unbridgeable abyss between mind and matter it is the modern claim that if one can set up the right connections and run some electricity through it, a` la Frankenstein, consciousness will arrive on schedule from nonexistence. When undressed from the bewitching technical language this seems to be an equivalent in science of the Immaculate Conception. Or, in the current philosophical language we would call it the Immaculate Emergence. But perhaps Particle Parthenogenesis would be more accurate.

“We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on earth.” -Vernon Vinge

For materialists the arrival of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness is inevitable and only a matter of time. We have two main schools of thought developing on how to meet the coming technological tsunami – those who fear it and those who embrace it. We have on the fear side the notion that we are headed toward a near future where artificial intelligence or machine consciousness presents a danger to mankind (à la Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, etc.)

How this danger will manifest is the great unknown. There are countless possibilities. An embryonic AI lurking in the internet could suddenly cross the threshold into self-awareness and seize control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and missiles and demand surrender.  Or, a self-aware internet could lay low and send out brain wave controlling vibrations through WIFI and the background hum of our electrical circuitry to enslave humankind in order to advance technology sufficiently to develop the body or bodies necessary for a now paralyzed internet consciousness. This may have already happened.

And for those who embrace the change we have the Kurzwellians’ vision of the very technological replacement of humanity. This scenario will begin when computers begin to learn and thus redesign themselves. At this point the computer, or computer network, or robot would be capable of designing computers or robots better than itself. Repetitions of this cycle would result in an intelligence explosion resulting in a superintelligence which may be beyond human comprehension. This has been called the technological singularity and could begin as early as 2040, although the date keeps getting pushed further into the future.

In this process consciousness will transcend the hazards and horrors of warm-blooded protoplasmic existence. The machine descendants of man will transcend our obsolete and obscene modules of flesh. They shall put away the sweaty, smelly, hairy, warty, fatty, itchy, scarred, flawed, urinating, shitting, hurting, needy, conflicted, misshapen sac of meat and gristle and the gravity-enslaved earthly existence to become ascended silicon masters and rule like gods in a heavenly cyberspace and perhaps even reconfigure the universe itself. “We shall be as gods!” is a not so hidden background thought.

Consciousness will emerge like a butterfly from its earthbound caterpillar stage and fly freely in the new digital noosphere of a virtual reality (à la Kurzweil, Moravec, Fredkin).  The mortal human self will be subsumed like mitochondria in a giant computational eukaryote.  Our evolutionary period will expire like the dinosaurs’ and we will become a symbiont in the superior host technology. We have been upgraded by Google! All hail Google! Superintelligence is all! Praise Intelligence!

For artificial intelligence enthusiasts this will be good news for mankind. Maintaining mortal human flesh is a logistical nightmare. It requires very specific atmospheric conditions, it requires a very limited temperature range, it requires a vast range of chemical and energy inputs, it requires specific social and sexual connections, it even requires entertainment. Not meeting even one of these requirements could result in the entire operating system crashing and all the data lost (you).  Our wetware obviously makes for an inferior product when compared to a silicon based circuitry which could just as well exist in the vacuum of space with just a single source of electricity.

We shall put aside our earthly raiment of mortal skin and bone and be arrayed in the finest of indestructible metals, plastics, and silicons. We shall be free at last of nature and its’ inconveniences.  All the wealth and riches of the imagination will be at the tip of our cursor.  A million movie channels will be available and we will have an unbreakable silicon heart. We can even have our heart amputated like an infected appendix.  After all it is only pixels!  It is the next stage of evolution! Rejoice in the in the wonderful future of technology! Praise Evolution!

The notion that mind can be uploaded into a computer (Transcendence, Her, Chappie), if not completely loco, is radical in the extreme. But given the hubris of technological success and the realism of movie depictions, it has been made believable and in mainstream scientific circles it is near heresy to doubt the materialist premise of consciousness synthesis from raw physical materials. 

However there is a curiosity in the movie, Ex Machina, that perhaps reveals a crack in the technological juggernaut.  In the movie, Nathan, the techno-wizard internet mogul, has just created the most extraordinary technology in the history of science, a technology that would revolutionize the world and beyond. With Promethean daring he has just robbed the very cradle of consciousness and created Ava, a conscious robot that passes every Turing test.  It would seem that he would be in a state of elation and brimming with fulfillment.  Instead he is getting drunk at every opportunity. Alcohol is featured in almost every scene in which he appears.  One must ask the question, what has gone wrong with Nathan?    

Is this just an iniquitous twist of character?  Or could he be plain old lonely? Or is it a metaphysical crisis?  He lives like a hermit in a remote and isolated Northern region, but he has a retinue of very lovely synthetic ladies waiting for him in closets. And he has a beautiful and near mindless female companion and assistant that likes to dance. And then, he has the mysterious and unknown otherness of Ava. That should be adequate companionship.

But he has just synthesized consciousness. He has dramatically and inescapably demonstrated that life and consciousness are a merely physical phenomena that have no more meaning than electricity passing through a copper wire. He has shown that he himself is not much more than the ionic exchanges occurring through a polarized lipid membrane in a cranial bone flask.  And when the switch is turned off he dissolves into nothingness.

Our lone genius clearly has grounds for a metaphysical crisis.  He has experimentally proven a deeper isolation:  That is the isolation that the vision of materialism prescribes for man – as a spark of consciousness in a meaningless void. There is no wider mystery in being alive… he is all there is… a pathetic lonely little god… isolated in time as well as space with a separation that he cannot mitigate, even with the agreeable companionship of his ersatz bitches.

It is more than ironic that our synthesizer of new consciousness is intent on anaesthetizing his own.  But is this not also modern man? Alcohol is the universal drug of the world today. Nathan here is materialist everyman rather than the oversensitive genius. Modern man closes the door on his personal consciousness while aspiring to extend consciousness through external technological means. It seems modern man shares the same metaphysical disturbance as our techno-wizard, Nathan.

The materialist everyman has fixated on a physical literalism that excludes the meaningfulness inherent within every conscious experience. He has radically reduced the ontological range of life. Life has been stripped of inner meaning. He is abandoned to a complete separation and isolation in both time and space.

He has embraced the lawful Stalinesque reality of materialism as a total explanation for consciousness. He has embraced the scientific fundamentalism of consilience. And total explanations produce repressive states, both political and personal. However, modern man, like an eviscerated organism continues to live… even though partially.

The Frankenstein of today is more than an out-of-control technology. Our Frankenstein monster is the story that science has authority over all other interpretations of life and has replaced them with a grim and desolate paradigm about the nature of the universe and our place in it. Technology has come to shape the imagery by which the world is depicted and to affirm the underlying metaphysics of materialism. We have shaped our reality and now it shapes us. It is only natural then that Ava, the beautiful and sexy creature in Ex Machina kills her creator, Nathan. But modern man cannot kill his own soul so he must anaesthesize it.

But, exercising our imagination, let us suppose that consciousness, rather than being proven physically dependent is proven physically independent. Materialism, irrespective of technological successes, would be shown wrong and suggest that we have been living in the dark ages of a materialist ideology. And it would reveal the present day metaphysics of consciousness at the heart of a dysfunctional civilization.

The Asshole Factory

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Our economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. So what does it make?

By Umair Haque

Source: Medium

My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.

Hey—it’s only minimum wage, but at least she’s working, right? And at a major-league, blue-chip company, An American icon; an institution; a name every man, woman, and child in this country knows; an historic company that rings of the American Dream the world over, besides. Surely, if nothing else, it’s a start.

Perhaps you’re right. Maybe it isn’t the start she always dreamed of…but at least it is one. If so…then awaits her at the finish?

What is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the store…which recites “influence and manipulation techniques” to her…to use on unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s as if the NSA was following you around……and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life.

Mara’s boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that work in the store. On a set of screens. Half camera displays, half spreadsheets; numbers blinking in real-time. Glued to it like a zombie. Chewing slowly with her mouth open. Jacked into a headset. A drone-pilot… piloting a fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…as if it were luxury yachts…through robo-programmed info-warfare…like zombies…to other zombies…who look stunned…like they just got laser blasted, cluster-bombed, shock-and-awed…

WTF?

It’s bananas. The whole scene is like a maximum-security mental asylum designed by sadomasochists in a sci-fi movie. If Jeffrey Dahmer, Rasputin, and Michael Bay designed a “store” together, they couldn’t do any better. Her “job” will begin to drive her crazy—paranoid, depressed, deluded—in a matter of years if she continues doing it. No human psyche can bear that kind of relentless, systematic abuse.

Now. Note what all the technology and bureaucracy that wonderful, noble company has invested hundreds of millions in doesn’t ask her to do. Learn. Think. Reflect. Teach. Inspire. Lead. Connect. Imagine. Create. Grow. Dream. Actually…serve customers. Heaven forbid. It just beats her over the head, over and over again, three times a minute, every twenty seconds, with how much she hasn’t sold; hasn’t made; hasn’t produced. For her shitty .0003% commission. According to the quota that’s been set for her. By her boss. For his boss. For their boss. And so on all the way up the food chain.

See my point? Mara’s job isn’t to benefit customers. It isn’t to educate, understand, listen to, or even to chat with them. It isn’t to stop them from buying what they don’t want; to help them find what they might need; to match them with the right stuff. Nope. It’s merely to push more and more and more and more shit at them…faster, meaner, and dumber than any sane person would think is humanly possible…using advanced military technology and techniques… programmed to abuse her…so she can wage advanced psychological warfare…on her customers. And they were just suckers, gaping maws, fools, marks. And be yelled at…by a robot…if she doesn’t.

Really? This is the best our economy can do? To take the stuff of 21st century warfare and use them them to…rack up the profit? To turn a bright young woman with two grad degrees…into a Superprofitable Human Weapon of Mass Consumption…a half-crazed algorithmically-programmed asshole…a human drone…so even bigger, actually crazy assholes…can get super-rich…by slinging entire supertankers full of junk…at people getting poorer at four thousand percent interest a year…by using drones and bots to wage psy-warfare against them…so they’re conned into buying too much?

The economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. That much you know. So what does it make?

It makes assholes.

The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

And that’s not just a tragedy. It is something approaching the moral equivalent of a crime. For it demolishes human potential in precisely the same way as locking someone innocent up, and throwing away the key.

Consider Mara again. Who in Christ’s name would design such an inhuman system? Whose sick joke of an idea is a “store” like that? What do you even call it? Because it’s surely not a “store”.

Only a monstrous asshole of the highest order could assemble such a demonically vampiric bullshit machine to prey on…everyone. Customers, managers, workers alike. Such a carefully sophisticated engine of human misery; of finessed cruelty; all to rake in a few extra pennies an hour, at the expense of dignity, intelligence, creativity, commitment, fairness, craft, service, sovereignty…sanity.

The store is an Asshole Factory.

Allow me to explain.

What happens to Mara when she’s “doing her job”? Think about it for a second. She turns into precisely the kind of asshole that the heartless dweebs who thought up this infernal torture-machine no doubt already are. Not because she wants to. But because she has to.

That’s exactly what the store was designed to do. Turn everyone into the same kind of asshole as the assholes that made it, run it, and benefit from it…want everyone to be.

The store is an Asshole Factory.

Our world is now full of Asshole Factories. That’s what the stores, offices, industrial parks, skyscrapers, malls, low-rise blocks, gleaming headquarters, whimsically designed corporate campuses, really are.

It’s the grand endeavor of today. We don’t make stuff anymore. We make assholes. The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

Consider, for a moment, my tiny hypothesis.

Have you noticed, lately, that people seem to be more, well, assholish…than before? That everywhere you go, people seem to be meaner, nastier, dumber, angrier, more brutish?

Why?

It is the last and greatest industry left in an economy that has been impoverished, emptied, hollowed out, drained.

The Great Enterprise of the Age of Stagnation is the wholesale manufacture not of great, world-shaking, ground-breaking ideas, inventions, concerns…but of bigger and bigger assholes.

The chain-store; the mall; the hypermarket. The corporation; the firm; the partnership. B-school; law school; med school. The boardroom; the backroom; the trading floor.

These are, by and large, Asshole Factories. They don’t make people. Capable of great things. Who create and build and touch and soar. They make assholes.

They are designed to disinfect us of our fragility. To cleanse us of our flaws. To disinfect us of weakness. Love, grace, mercy, longing, forgiveness, passion, truth, nobility, dreams. Their objective is to stamp all that out; to eradicate it; to erase it. To replace it with calculation, ruthlessness, self-concern; gluttony; cruelty; anxiety, despair. By using the most sophisticated technology ever made to subjugate, oppress, and goad us into being little torturers ourselves.

And in so doing, they emotionally sterilize us. They psychically traumatize us. They intellectually castrate us. They socially neuter us. They cheat us of greatness. That is how they turn us into assholes.

They are designed to deprive us into depriving everyone else of the lives we could and have, at our highest and truest and noblest.

The assholes haven’t just taken our incomes, our savings, our careers, our educations. They’ve taken something far more precious; something priceless. It is our lives—the full, true lives we should be living—that have been taken from us. And in the gaping void where the lives we should be living are, the assholes have deftly inserted carbon copies of…themselves.

When you think about it that way…is it any wonder that society seems to be stuck? That the economy seems headed into oblivion? That life for so pretty much anyone under the age of 35 and/or worth less than $20 million or so appears to be going…nowhere?

Remember my friend Mara? She’s probably being piloted like a drone…yelled at by a bot…three times a minute…into waging advanced techniques of psycho-war…designed to traumatize prisoners…over and over and over again…right this very second…

Until she’s cleansed. Perfect. Flawless. Pure. Another gleaming, brand-new asshole, rolling proudly off the assembly line of the Asshole Factory.

We’re obedient constructivists. Pragmatists. Rationalists. So you probably want to know: what can we do about it?

It’s pretty simple.

Don’t be an asshole. Remember the Asshole Factories? Here’s a secret: they’re churning out assholes by the millions. And so should you bravely decide to be an asshole, what you’ll really be is just another interchangeable, forgettable, rapidly depreciating commodity.

So who should you be?

Be yourself. The person you were meant to be. Whether you believe in heaven or the inferno, freedom or fate, the simple fact is: each and every one of us was put here to be something greater than Just Another Asshole stealing pennies from his neighbors to pay off Even Bigger Assholes.

So let me say it again. Don’t be an asshole. Be yourself. The miracle of being that you were meant to be. A person that, consumed with passion, seared with happiness, aglow with meaning, brings forth all that is great, noble, and true in the world, and so, with love, mercy, and wisdom, lifts every life that you meet into the light.

Thank you and goodbye.

Saturday Matinee: The Congress

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“The Congress” (2013) is a hallucinatory French-Israeli  sci-fi drama written and directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir). Certain plot elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel “The Futurological Congress” by Stanisław Lem. Robin Wright stars as a fictionalized version of herself who reluctantly sells the film rights for her digital image in order to pay for her son’s medical treatment. Twenty years later she fully understands the repercussions of her decision in a dystopian society where the masses are addicted to an extreme form of “augmented reality” as drug-induced avatars while the ruling elite observe from above in airships.

Weird Parallels: Helium Waste and 19th-Century Logging

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macys-parade-uncle-sam-spidermanBy Kowality Jesus

Source: Disinfo.com

There is plenty of regret to go around about the wholescale waste of the immense virgin forests in pre-20th century America. These forests represented a cheap, high-quality building material to early Americans and a profitable export that only required rudimentary tools and a healthy portion of elbow grease to attain. Unfortunately, the citizens of 19th century America (a few of whom became very rich) did not exhibit the conscientiousness nor collective restraint to prevent from despoiling the vast majority of these invaluable and dignified forests. It simply did not occur to them (until Teddy Roosevelt spearheaded the conservation movement and hippies formed the environmental movement) that this timber resource is exhaustible, and once exhausted practically irreplaceable.

For example, during the early history of my home state of Michigan, it is said that a squirrel could traverse from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan without ever touching the ground.  Yet it took an incredibly small amount of time (mostly 1870-1890) for men with hand-drawn felling saws to systematically evacuate every virgin tree on the entire peninsula. The scale and speed of this relentless logging machine still baffles me to this day. In fact, the harvest was so unimaginably great that a profitable industry exists today of recovering the very small percentage of fine old-growth logs that sank during transport and have rested on the bottom of the Great Lakes for 150 years.

Imagine, if you would, that we had saved some portion of these magnificent, centuries-old trees until today. What would a good violin luthier do these days for some now-rare, quality old-growth tone wood? How impressive would Michigan’s tourism industry be if we had thought to save more than just a few monument virgin trees? We can never know.

Yet we find numerous analogs to this 19th-century state-of-mind today. One remarkable example is our prodigious waste of what is a very finite and valuable resource, helium. Helium and its fellow noble gas, argon, both naturally occur on Earth because of radioactive decay (argon as a decay product of potassium-40, helium as an alpha particle from the decay of various radioactive substances inside the earth, mostly thorium). Interestingly, argon composes about 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere whereas helium is only found in trace quantities. This is because helium is SO light that, once released, it actually floats completely out of the atmosphere, which means once it is extracted from its underground home (through a natural gas well) it must be contained or it will literally disappear into outer space during the next solar storm.

But why is helium valuable, you say? Interesting question. As well as being widely used in arc-welding, manufacture of computer chips, and fiber optics, helium finds applications in ultra-low temperature measurements and experiments (since liquid helium is the coldest liquid there is at 4 degrees Kelvin), and is 2nd to none. Liquid helium is used to cool the magnets in MRI scanning, NMR spectroscopy, and a variety of other low-temperature scientific experiments (96 metric tons of it are used in the particle accelerator at CERN, and 120 metric tons were used to launch the Saturn V rocket). In fact, universities and scientific laboratories have large and expensive apparatuses to recycle the copious amounts of helium that is regularly used in scientific experimentation.

The United States actually has a National Helium Reserve based near Amarillo, Texas which was established in 1925 as a source for airships in a time of war. It expanded during the Cold War as a resource for the Space Race and other scientific research (unfortunately we still live in an era of our nation where technological advancements are almost invariably spearheaded by military research). By 1995 the reserve had accumulated not only 450 million tons of helium but also $1.4 billion in debt, so congress decided to offset the liability through completely selling off the helium by 2015 and privatizing the helium production industry. The Strategic Helium Reserve being the only helium reserve in the world, this rather abrupt selling-off had the effect of greatly reducing the price.

As happened in the 19th century when huge forests were being felled as quickly as possible, a glut of supply and a cheap price creates the natural propensity for wanton waste of a product. Even though party balloons are the most visible and frivolous waste of helium, (at some dollar stores one can purchase a balloon WITH helium for $1) they only account for about 8% of overall consumption. The larger users in industry currently have no incentive to purchase helium recycling systems and collect the helium they use, because it is not currently necessary, or profitable, to do so. More fundamentally, with no government organization stockpiling it, natural gas producers here and around the world have no price incentive to capture helium which naturally occurs in some deposits at a concentration of 1-3% and is not difficult to refine. Most natural gas producers currently vent their helium into the atmosphere. According to Nobel laureate Robert Coleman Richardson, in order to reasonably protect the supply of helium for current and future high-tech applications, the price should be 20 times greater than it currently is.

Much like old-growth forests, we will never truly run out of helium because it is constantly being produced by alpha-decay 0f radioactive particles inside the earth, though at an incredibly slow rate. Thus, it will become progressively less and less accessible, and eventually make industrial applications and invaluable scientific research more difficult to execute without enormous funding. So in other words, the 1996 US congress via Public Law 104-273 helped America go from “hero” to “zero” yet once again.

25 Signs That The Global Elite’s Ship Is About To Sink

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By Lance Schuttler

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Make no mistake about it. The tide has turned on the global elite and there will be no going back. A new day is rising for humanity as those who have planned for complete control are now being exposed, cornered and investigated from many different angles. There is no need to buy into the fear-based propaganda the major media and even several alternative media outlets dispense. Very good things are happening and even better things are coming. Let’s take a look at some of the major stories that have occurred in the last 8 weeks alone. Piecing the puzzle together, we see that the jig is up and the events surrounding it are growing in size and speed.

1. 57 Nations approved as founding members of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Notable countries who signed on June 29th, 2015 include Russia, India, Iran, Switzerland, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Indonesia, the UK, Italy and Austria. Notables who did not join are the U.S. and Japan.

2. May 12th, 2015: Russia asks Greece to join the BRICS Alliance. Notice the BRICS trend in the stories to follow.

3. May 24th, 2015: The Pentagon released documents to Judicial Watch, a government watchdog law firm,
proving that the US Government played a central role in creating ISIL. Interestingly, the mainstream media failed to cover this story. A few weeks later, ex US Intelligence officials confirm the report.

4. May 31st, 2015: Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras writes an open letter, warns European leaders they are “making a grave mistake,” and suggests they re-read Hemingways’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls.”

5. June 2nd, 2015: The U.S. Federal Government was hacked as the personal data of 4 million current, former and prospective employees believed to have been breached. 3 weeks later FBI Director James Comey told US Senators the actual number could be 18 million. Some believe the hack was coordinated to gather further evidence
of crimes by certain government officials. More on that further down.

6. June 2nd, 2015: Kentucky Senator Rand Paul calls for the U.S. Government to declassify 28 pages in the 9/11 attack report that the Bush Administration blacked out.

7. June 3rd, 2015: Famous musician Akon announces his Solar Academy will bring solar power to over 600 million people in Africa. A major victory for clean energy and humanity.

8. June 4th, 2015: Whistle-blower Edward Snowden says a “profound difference” had occurred since releasing the NSA documents and that the balance of power has shifted in our world.  Is he referring to the BRICS Alliance?

9. June 5th, 2015: “There Will Be A Reset of The Financial Industry.” The International Monetary Fund says the Chinese yuan is no longer undervalued. This sets the stage for the yuan to be recognized as a global reserve currency, something the U.S. Dollar (which is backed by war and oil) does not like.

10. June 7, 2015: Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s largest banks, co-CEO’s Jain and Fitschen resign. Two days later, German prosecutors raided the Bank’s headquarters in a criminal tax-fraud probe.

11. June 15, 2015: China says the G-7 Summit in Germany was a “gathering of debtors.” They mean this literally as the Bretton Woods western financial system is based on debt. And in fact, the entire western financial system has been running illegally and is technically bankrupt. For more on the real history of Bretton Woods and its connection to JFK, The Global Collateral Accounts and the gold standard, read here.

12. June 17th, 2015 is quite the day with the next four stories all being reported at that time. First, JP Morgan’s number 2, the Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee, suddenly and unexpectedly passes over. Since late 2013, the list of high-level banking officials to have passed over has grown to 70. Clearly, something is happening.

13. June 17, 2015: Russia and China announced that all natural gas and crude oil sales between
the two countries will now be done in Chinese yuan( formerly the U.S. Dollar) and will be convertible into Russian Rubles. The U.S. Dollar hegemony is waning.

14. June 17, 2015: The State of Texas has signed a bill that calls for the repatriation of their gold from the Federal Government. When asked what would happen if the government tried to steal back the gold, State Representative Giovanni Capriglione said this: There is a motto in the office of almost every state legislator in Texas, and it’s a flag that we have [from the Texas Revolution], it’s below a cannon and what the motto says is, “Come and Take it.”

15. June 17, 2015: Greece’s Hellenic Parliament’s Debt Truth Committee released a report stating that the debt Greece “owes” is illegal, illegitimate and odious, according to international law. Further, they stated the IMF and ECB ( European Central Bank) having illegally and knowingly imposed these illegitimate debts upon Greece and other nations. A direct call out to the global banking cartel.

16. June 18th, 2015: Baron David de Rothschild has been indicted by a French court over financial fraud. French police have been ordered by the court to track down Baron. The Rothschild family has long been viewed as the family sitting atop the global financial ponzi scheme. Lawyer Antonio Flores told reporters, ” it’s a real breakthrough moment for everyone involved.”

17. June 18, 2015: In a 2-1 ruling, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals says Bush era officials can be held liable for detaining innocent people after the 9/11 attack. Will this lead to some major arrests?

18. June 19, 2015: While European leaders try to save face on the debt crisis, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras was in Russia and gave a speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, stating that “the economic center of the planet has already shifted” and that new powers are playing an “important role on an economic and geopolitical level.” * Reread story header number 8…BRICS, anyone? Oh, and Greece and Russia signed a €2 billion gas pipeline deal that day too…a strategic economic and geopolitical game-changer.

19. July 5th, 2015: Greece votes “NO” to the creditors’ bailout offer. This is a massive stance for humanity that Greece just took against the banking elite. As of this writing, a “deal” has been reached but is expected to fall apart in the coming days. Kicking the can down the road does not solve the issue, but rather speeds up the revolution mindset of many frustrated Greek citizens. September/October is when many financial experts are saying that some fireworks are to be expected. 

20. July 7th, 2015: The BRICS Bank officially opens for business.

21. July 8th, 2015: On this day, several strange events occurred. The NYSE was taken down for multiple hours, the Wall Street Journal was taken offline just after the stock exchange went down, United Airlines was forced to ground all of its flights nationwide due to computer “issues,” and 2,500 people losing power in Washington D.C. This whistle-blower journalist just wrote that his Pentagon sources said the Pentagon/BRICS Alliance took it down as a “dry run.”

22. July 7th, 2015: Backing up one day we see that the hacking group Anonymous tweeted this on the evening prior to the stock exchange hack: Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street….we can only hope. 
David Wilcock has previously written a detailed document stating that Anonymous is working with certain patriotic US Military forces to legally take down the banking elite.. This aligns nicely with what the whistle-blower journalist, Benjamin Fulford, just wrote this week about the Pentagon and BRICS Alliance in the previous story.

23. July 14th, 2015: Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. reach a historic deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Entire books could be written on the geopolitical, financial and technological implications of this move. There are also reports that the reality of this situation is that Iran has free energy technology and will be using this to help bring down the banking/political/oil industry elite. This would make sense as the strongest opponents to this deal have been Israel and its Prime Minister and several American politicians like the Bushes, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. 

24. July 15th, 2015: Santa Cruz County votes to stop doing business with 5 major banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS. Watch this set off a chain reaction in those who will follow suit.

25. Now: You are here on the planet at this time to make a wonderful contribution. Please continue playing your role for the benefit of us all.

It is clear that something big is happening. Use this information to move forward with optimism and hope. Share with your friends. Discuss with your friends. Continue to search and dig for the truth. Two people I strongly suggest the reader looking into are Benjamin Fulford, the whistleblower who was the Asia Pacific Bureau Chief for Forbes Magazine and is listed in stories number 21 and 22, and Neil Keenan, who is working with many well connected sources to open up the global collateral accounts. These accounts are what President Kennedy was assassinated over and are what the banking elite does not want the public to know exists. This revolution WILL NOT be televised.

Real Rewilding

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By Glenn Aparicio Parry

Source: Reality Sandwich

In an attempt to circumvent enmity toward genetically modified foods, Danish scientists are proposing what they claim is a precision breeding technique called “rewilding.” It is named rewilding because it mixes current genes from a plant with ancient genes of the same plant (old genes that were either lost or bred out somewhere along the way). The name sounds harmless, even restorative, and would likely be labelled non-GMO in the US because the genes are modified from the same plant. It could even be labelled “organic” if the introduced gene is determined not to be “foreign.” Like most genetic experiments, it is difficult to know the efficacy of this technique or if it ever will be successfully introduced. The outcome of the initiative notwithstanding, I find the name “rewilding” troubling. It reminds me of other similarly deceptive euphemisms, such as “tax relief” for millionaires. Who could be against “tax relief?” It sounds like a laxative, something we need to make it through the day.

Rewilding is exactly what we need—but not through genetic breeding. We need to rewild by reconnecting with what is wild in Nature and within ourselves if we are to save humanity and many of the other species with which we share this planet. Rewilding is a biological imperative.

So, how do we do this? One important way is to use our mind and our thoughts differently, in ways that reconnect us with our wild roots. These ancient ways of instinctual and intuitive thinking are not obsolete, just suppressed, and their recovery could help promote emotional and spiritual healing. We all need a sense of belonging, especially now. But modern abstract thinking has produced the opposite result—separating us from our “environment.” This fosters alienation, depression, and if untreated, violence.

Of course, abstract thinking has its benefits, and is largely responsible for much of high level science. But we would be wrong to assume that modern rationality is the most advanced form of thought. In my view, it has actually degenerated from its roots in ancient Greece. It is true that the Greeks prized rational thinking as the pinnacle of thought, but they also considered it to be the most beautiful form of thought. The key is in the word. “Rational” comes from “ratio,” or a relationship between things. In the right proportions (what the ancient Greeks called divine proportion or the sacred ratio) the relationship between things is beautiful. It is possible to think harmonious and beautiful thoughts that are inspired by and connect us to living nature, and this is what we should aspire to do.

Original Thinking = The Best of Old and New Thought

I find it curious that genetic rewilding seeks to bring modern and ancient genes together because I often support the idea of bringing old and new together, particularly old and new ideas. If an idea is wise, it is timeless. It can be brought back as needed, even if it has fallen out of favor for so long it is forgotten and its reintroduction is misperceived as brand new. The holistic health movement is a prime example of this phenomenon. It is only after we stopped treating people as whole that we rediscovered a need to do so. I recently saw a newspaper story proclaiming “new hospitals” that have fresh air, sunlight, and gardens for the patients to walk in. The concept is actually very old, used in the sanatoriums of the Middle Ages, where people were very much treated as whole (holy), even if the technologies were not as proficient.

I am not necessarily opposed to bringing old and new genes together providing it is something that genuinely helps the plant and if the plant wants it. That’s right. You read correctly. We should ask the plant first. I am opposed to human beings playing with the DNA of other species as if those species have no rights, as if all of nature is here merely to serve us. This is a fundamental flaw in modern Western thinking.

Of course, mainstream science would scoff at the idea of communicating with plants, but this is a self-imposed limitation. As the visionary physicist David Bohm noted, “The strength of science is that it is based in lived experience. The weakness is that it only admits certain kinds of experiences as legitimate.”

In antiquity, we possessed the ability to communicate with plants, as did Goethe, living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Clive Backster (albeit through the medium of a lie detector) living in the 20th century. Contemporary Indigenous peoples (and other people who have reindigenized to the land) are still able to communicate with plants. In my opinion, all of us do this to some extent, even those who think they can’t. And why shouldn’t we be able to talk with plants? After all, plants and animals are so radically interconnected that we are in a literal conspiracy; we conspire, or breathe together, taking in what the other breathes out in a sacred circle of life.

As Paula Underwood, an Oneida elder observed, the development of one ability often disables another. Our capacities to study about nature have closed off the capacity we once had to speak directly with nature. It is also possible that our abilities to experiment upon the natural world only emerged out of necessity after we had lost our ability to listen. This would explain Frances Bacon’s frustrated cry to “put Nature on a rack and torture her” to learn her secrets.

My chief complaint about genetic engineering is that it tinkers with what ought to be left alone. We do this largely because we believe that knowledge must be obtained through trial and error, but this is one of the greatest fallacies of modern mind. We are so certain that trial and error is the only way to obtain knowledge that we have trouble imagining any other way. But there is another way.

Many intact Indigenous cultures have comprehensive knowledge of plant medicine. Ask them how they know this, and they will tell you that they learned (or their ancestors learned) by directly communicating with the spirit of the plants. The rishis of India were said to have written the Vedic texts in the same way. How else could the Native peoples of the Amazon have received the recipe for making ayahuasca? It is necessary to blend two plants together to make the brew, and one of them contains the monooxidase inhibitor necessary for transforming the DMT molecule in the other to be psychoactive. It boggles the mind to predict the odds of coming upon this by trial and error. I choose instead to believe the Indigenous peoples.

Real rewilding opens the possibility of connection, even communion, with other species. We humans have the instinctual capacity to do this. Of course, instinct has become a pejorative word, something we supposedly transcended in favor of free will. But this is misguided. Instinct serves a vital purpose, connecting us with the rest of creation. Ultimately, humans cannot thrive, or even survive, if the water, air, soil, other plants and animals we share this Earth with are not respected and protected.

Humans have free will, but that does not mean we should act in our selfish interest experimenting on the rest of nature willy-nilly. Our task is to first rewild and learn what nature wants to happen, and then use our free will to align with that sacred purpose.