I feel warm...
"I feel fuzzy... "
Dingy Dan from Gloomy Grayland?
I feel like a Fu?
How 'bout you?
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
The Day the Earth Died
(Washingtonsblog)
Posted on June 24, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.
And Why Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Etc., Were Silent About It
Eric Zuesse
As the civilizations that we all know, and love, and lived, slide increasingly into totalitarian misery; and the environment, which had been our lives, becomes less and less livable, there will be, in retrospect, one key day, which historians will mark, as the turning-point toward Earth’s death; and it was 23 June 2015. That’s the day when the U.S. Senate, which had previously turned down the procedural move (called “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” and discussed here) that opened the door to passing U.S. President Obama’s falsely-called ‘trade’ deals, was itself passed — it reduced the Constitutionally required two-thirds of Senators that’s needed to approve any of these treaties in order for it to become law, down to merely an unConstitutional 50% of the Senators (+ the Vice President as the tie-breaker), as if a treaty were like any merely ordinary law (which requires only 50%+1); “Fast Track” thus increased the likelihood of passing any of Obama’s world-murderous ‘trade’ treaties, from approximately 0%, to approximately 100%.
Here is how these treaties murder the Earth:
Each of these ‘trade’ deals is about lots more than merely international commerce; it is far more fundamentally about sovereignty — who rules? There is a feature in each one of them that empowers international corporations to sue any member-nation to the treaty, which tries to pass any regulation, including any environmental regulation, that is stricter than what is set in stone forever in the given ‘trade’ deal. If, for example, scientists discover that, in order for our planet not to go into an exponentially increasing temperature — basically, to go environmentally haywire, and a rapid descent into planetary death (unlivable) — then the requirements for cutting back on fossil fuels must be increased, the situation will already be one in which any member nation that would even try to increase those requirements will be sued by international oil and coal and gas corporations for trying to prevent such environmental haywire, and these lawsuits will be adjudicated by panels not of judges who are appointed by democratically elected representatives of the given nation’s public, but instead by mere panels of international ‘arbitrators’ whose careers will be dependent upon how favorably they rule for international corporations. There will be no democracy, at all, in this. The member-nations to the treaty will no longer actually be democracies. (If they ever were.) There will be a higher power, and it’s trans-national: the hundred or so individuals who collectively control all of the major international coporations.
Instead of national democracies, the member-nations of these ‘trade’ deals will have become little more than supplicants to the international corporate dictatorship, which dictatorship rules collectively over all of the national signatories to the international ‘trade’ treaty.
Now, it’s true that the international corporations will not be empowered to change any law within any one of the member-nations; but, they won’t even need to. How do you think that, in this circumstance, countries will handle their regulatory obligations, if they can be sued for increasing their national standards so as to accommodate new scientific findings, or even merely in order to change financial regulations so as to prevent crashes such as in 1929 and 2008? Any increase in any national regulation will place that nation in almost certain jeopardy of being internationally assessed to pay huge fines to the suing international corporations. That will become the great international racket: suing nations, for violating the ‘rights’ of international investors — ‘rights’ that transcend any of the rights of the citizenry in any one of those countries. (No contrary provision is afforded for nations, to sue international investors; it’s all just one-way.)
So: these ‘trade’ deals will not directly and overtly block any increase in the regulations of food-safety, the environment, drug-safety, worker-safety, workers’ wages, medical care, education, or any of the many other things that governments must regulate in order for the public to be protected, and served. Instead, this legislative blockage will be indirect, and covert. But it will be just as real, and just as effective, as if it were an outright legal prohibition. The individual nations will be forced to yield to the ‘higher’ rights (the real sovereignty) of the top international investors.
In other words: What the U.S. Senate did on 23 June 2015 was to hand America’s sovereignty over to international corporations. It gave President Obama what he had been seeking with unprecedented intensity, and which he has called his “legacy”: it’s the power to transfer lots of America’s democratic national sovereignty over to international corporations — that is, to the roughly 100 individuals on this planet who own the controlling blocks of stock in the world’s large international corporations, the people who are the real beneficiaries in all of this.
Not only will environmental regulations be frozen into place, once a given treaty is in force, and so the entire planet will become, essentially, doomed (because emerging science will be ignored if it doesn’t serve the interests of the hundred or so top billionaiures); but protections of workers’ rights will also not increase — not rise in any country — beyond what the treaty specifies. The set-in-stone standards will govern, while the planet simply boils away, and boils off. This will have been the ultimate conservative victory.
The end result of that conservative victory will be global impoverishment, and ultimate environmental collapse, while the world’s few billionaires, and especially the richest hundred of them, will become enormously richer, because their freedoms and associated power will be enormously increased, at everyone else’s expense, by what happened on 23 June 2015. And, of course, those international corporations have been lobbying and buying politicians to the tune of billions of dollars, precisely in order to achieve this outcome — their totalitarian international power.
The most curious aspect of this catastrophic outcome is that the so-called ‘charities’ and ‘non-profits,’ such billionaires’ tax-writeoffs as the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations that are already heavily beholden to international corporations and to the people who control those, have been basically silent about the planetary destruction that their sponsors have been fighting to achieve, via Obama’s ‘trade’ deals. The American public had falsely thought that only a few amendments needed to be added in order for these to be ‘good’ ‘trade’ deals for the public — amendments such as “Trade Adjustment Assistance,” which would provide token and brief transitional training to some of the millions of Americans who will be losing their jobs, as those jobs become increasingly outsourced abroad to lower-wage or more brutally anti-union countries and make ‘us’ more like ’them’ — the low-wage and desperate masses there.
The real “us,” and “them,” are instead the public, versus the aristocracy. It’s so within every country, but it’s unmentionable in the United States; and when you look at ‘non-profits’ such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc., and see that they were virtually silent while this legislative monstrosity was passing into law — a monstrosity that will make all of those organizations’ alleged ‘missions’ into mere mockery — the victory of them, over us, was as if those nominal ‘charities’ had never even existed.
We’re not all in this together. And they know it. Only the public were prevented from knowing it — until too late.
For more about this, see the article I previously linked to. It also provides the historical background, and the only remaining way forward that still might possibly be available to block Obama’s success in this (a Constitutional challenge to the “Fast Track” provision of Richard Nixon’s Trade Act of 1974).
A quixotic but cogent comment from Max Freiherr von Gerlach (??)
Eric Zuesse should read the following paragraph at least 10 times, in order to comprehend that his postings about the "unconstitutionality" of the TPP are pure incoherencies (of course, assuming that this individual is an investigative historian):
The Constitution is based on British Common Law, Vatican’s Code of Canon Law and Admiralty Law (influenced the latter by the Ordinamenta et Consuetudo Maris). As a matter of jurisprudence, this historical document adheres to the doctrine that Admiralty Law prevails over Common Law and goes in accordance with Canon Law — THE LAW OF THE SEA REGULATES ALL ASPECTS RELATED TO GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, MAKING EFFECTIVELY THE LAW OF THE LAND IRRELEVANT AND DEPENDANT ON THE ADMIRALTY, AND THESE SET OF RULES EMANATE FROM A HIGHLY AND WELL-DEFINED HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE (i.e. Supremacy Clause - Article VI, 2nd Clause).
Therefore, the recent passage of the Trade Promotion Authority is LEGAL.
End of story
V for Vendetta:
Evey: Who are you?
V. : Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.
Evey: Well I can see that.
V. : Of course you can, I’m not questioning your powers of observation, I’m merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.
Evey: Oh, right.
V. : But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the more commonplace soubriquet, to suggest the character of this dramatis persona. Voila! In view humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the “vox populi” now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, van guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.
Evey: Are you like a crazy person?
V. : I’m quite sure they will say so.
In my work as an author, I traffic in fiction, I do not traffic in lies.
Although I’ll admit that the distinction is a nice one, and perhaps not easy for the layman to make, with fiction, with art and writing, it’s important that even if you’re dealing with areas of complete outrageous fantasy, that there is an emotional resonance. It is important that a story ring true upon a human level, even if it never happened.
Born in Northampton in 1953, I started life in an area known as The Burrows, this was the oldest area of Northampton and also the poorest. It was were the rural families, who’d been drafted into the towns to man the conveyor belts of the industrial revolution ended up. It had originally been the system of moats and forts that surrounded Northampton’s castle before it was demolished, so all the streets had names like Moat place or Fort street or Dungeon Alley, or whatever. And this a quite bleak, grim monochrome area. There were a great many families, who were probably, looking back, incest families, where even the dog had the same harelip.
I found myself surrounded by a monochrome world with limited opportunities. The only window out of that restricting world was the tales of mythology that I would read, or the bright 4-coloured superhero stories. Adventures of people who had no restrictions. People who could fly over the house tops, people who could become invisible. This was a very important key, to a very important door. It opened vistas of the imagination with which I was eventually able to transcend and escape the limitations of my origins...
... Now, call me naive, but entering grammar school was the very first time that I’d actually realized that middle-class people existed. Prior to that I’d thought that there were just my family and people like them, and the Queen. I had really not been aware that there were was a whole strata of humanity in between those two positions.
When I got to grammar school I realized that I was one of the very few working class people there, because of the 11+ system and its rigours. And that a lot of the other children there had had the advantage of probably a better education than I’d been privy to. Thus from being a star pupil at my primary school, from being top of the class every year, and from being made head prefect with a little green enamel badge, I suddenly plummeted to 19th in the class, which was a tremendous blow to my already insufferably huge ego.
I don’t think I ever got quite over that.
Certainly by the next term I was 25th in the class, I think for the next couple of years I was second from bottom. I’d finally came to the realization that I was not going to cut it in the kind of academic world that was spread out in front of me. I decided, pretty typically for me, that if I couldn’t win then I wasn’t going to play...
... The same thing applied with jobs, any job that I was applying for meant that I would need a reference from the school and the references I was getting from the school were kind of the anti-matter equivalent of references. Thus the only jobs that I could get, were ones were they didn’t give a damn who they employed. So I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery at the bottom of Bedford Road in Northampton, which was probably one of the bleakest places that I’d ever encountered, where you would turn up at 07h30 in the morning and drag huge heavy dripping sheep skins out of vats of mingled blood, urine, water and excrement. That the only relief from this was the concentration camp humour of throwing chopped off testicles at each other as a break to the monotony.
And it was indeed monotonous.
I was expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the mess room, which really wasn’t improving my career curve any. The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.
Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk, it was a fool’s leap, a shot in the dark. But anything of any value in our lives whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result, are the purest actions that we shall ever take...
... After a couple of years I’d realized that I could not draw well enough or fast enough to ever make any kind of career from this and so had started to look at the possibilities of actually writing comic strips for other people to draw. This had landed me a couple of early jobs at places like 2000 AD and the British Doctor Who monthly and weekly that were published around that time.
I learned my craft doing very short stories, 3 or 4 pages each, which is an excellent way to learn writing of any sort, progressed to doing a couple of series where I’d gotten a little more say in the nature of the material and was able to take more chances, to be a bit more experimental. And these started to win awards in Britain, which impressed the Americans no end. The Americans tend to think that every award is an Oscar and didn’t realize that the comic industry awards are all voted for by 30 people in anoraks with dreadful social lives. And so as far as they were concerned, if I was an award winner then I was an English genius.
This lead to Watchmen in the middle 80s and that was one of the books that was responsible for the ridiculous blizzard of publicity that comic books or graphic novels as somebody in the marketing department had decided by then that they should be called, became popular...
...Most dystopian science fiction is not actually about the future, it s about the times in which it was written. And the script that I came up with, V for Vendetta was no exception. This was set in what at the time seemed an unreachably distant period in the future which was 1997 and Britain had been taken over by a coalition of fascist groups, with a very Romantic anarchist adventurer set in opposition against that.
To get over the idea of fascism, I needed some symbol that would convince the readers that they were looking at a fascist police state.The thing that I finally settled upon was the idea of security cameras mounted upon every street corner and watching every move...
... Watchmen also grew out of the politically shadowy landscape of the 1980s, when the cold war was at probably at its hottest in 20 or 30 years, and when nuclear destruction suddenly seemed a very real possibility. Watchmen used the cliches of the superhero format to try and discuss notions of power, and responsibility in an increasingly complex world. We treated these fairly ridiculous superhuman characters as more human than super. We were using them as symbols of different kinds of ordinary human beings, rather than as different super beings.
I think there were probably quite a few things about Watchmen that chimed well with the times, but to me perhaps the most important was the actual storytelling, where the world that was presented didn’t really hang together in terms of linear cause and effect. But was instead seen as some massively complex simultaneous event with connections made of coincidence, synchronicity and I think that it was this world-view, if anything, that resonated with an audience that had realized that their previous view of the world was not adequate for the complexities of this scary, shadowy new world that we were entering into. I think that Watchmen if it offered anything, offered new possibilities as to how we perceive the environment surrounding us and the interactions and relationships of the people within it...
... RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL, October 12th 1985: Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach.
This city is afraid of me.
I have seen it’s true face.
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.
The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us!” And I’ll look down and whisper no.
Stood in firelight, sweltering bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent.
Felt cleansed, felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in the night.
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat, and God was not there.
The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone.
This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces, it is not God who kills the children, not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs.
It’s us.
Only us...
... I realized that I was becoming a celebrity, which was nothing I’d ever expected, given that comic writer was the most obscure profession in the world when I’d actually entered the job. The thing about fame is that fame in its current sense had not really existed before the 20th century. Back in previous eras even if you were very very well known, that would perhaps be amongst a thousand people at most if you were a pope or somebody. In the 20th century however, with these massive surges in communication, suddenly a different sort of fame was possible. And I tend to think that what fame has done, it has replaced the sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people.
If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably want to run away to sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to run away and form a pop band. The difference is that in the 19th century before running away to sea, you would have at least some understanding of what the element was that you were dealing with and you would have perhaps say learned to swim.
The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with fame, so you’ll get some otherwise likeable young person who has done one good comic book, one good film, one good record, who is suddenly told that they are a genius and who believes it and who runs out sort of laughing and splashing into the billows of celebrity and whose heroine sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloid.
I’d never signed up to be a celebrity and I came to the realization that it was nothing that I was very comfortable with. I realized that celebrities are a kind of an industry, they're a kind of a crop. Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch or people who run the big networks, they need a constant stream of celebrities to fill the column space in their magazines, to fill time upon their TV shows and because celebrities tend to burn out quickly you have to constantly create new ones. And I really didn’t feel I wanted to be part of that process and so I withdrew to the relative obscurity of Northampton.
On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a mid-life crisis I decided it might actually be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself a magician.
This had been something coming for a while, it seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer and the problem is that with magic, being in many respects a science of language, you have to be very careful of what you say. Because if you suddenly declare yourself to be a magician without any knowledge of what that entails, then one day you are likely to wake up and to discover that is exactly what you are.
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up. If you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe that this is completely literal, I believe that magic is art and that art, whether that’d be writing, music, sculpture or any other form is literally magic.
Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language of magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a shaman.
I believe all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they’d be in the arts or the sciences were the province of the shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation is I think a tragedy.
At the moment the people who are using shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up their shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquillize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everybody in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic, there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny for you might have a child born with a club foot. If a bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might be survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity.
Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art, that writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being, that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment, things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour while we’re waiting to die.
It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artist. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
My career as a magician continues to evolve. Since I to a certain degree believe art and magic to be interchangeable, it’d only seemed natural that art should be the means by which I express magical ideas. This has found its way into my prose writing, in works such as Voice of the Fire and probably most visibly has found its way into the performance pieces that I’ve done at various locations over the past 8 years. Beautiful little psychedelic artefacts in their own right, which actually capture the kind of narrative journey that we’ve tried to take the readers on as part of these performances, to overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience, to tip them over into a kind of psychedelic state, where we can hopefully actually change their consciousness and direct it to different places, different levels, hopefully into new and hopefully magical spaces.
When we are doing the will of our true Self, we are inevitably doing the will of the universe. In magic these are seen as indistinguishable, that every human soul is in fact one human soul. It is the soul of the universe itself and as long as you are doing the will of the universe, then it is impossible to do anything wrong.
Murder is something which is intricately connected with society in a number of ways. And with From Hell, what we wanted to do was not so much to create a whodunit,” as to create something which asked “what happened” where we could trace all of these complex threads from the heart of the murder and see what kind of areas they let us into. Areas of history, occultism, mythology, architecture, social considerations. All of these played a part upon shaping the world that the crimes happened in and it seemed to me to be important to investigate all of those possibilities, to try and create a map of this event that included all of those strange foreign areas that aren’t generally included when one considers a murder. I was not concerned with “whodunit,” I was concerned with what happened, I was concerned with the “whydunit” aspects of the thing.
The one place in which Gods and demons inarguably exist is in the human mind where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity. Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S. This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold that alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing that we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The inner dynamo of us if you like.
Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves.
This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually posses such a thing as a Soul, such a precious thing, what if you break it, what if you lose it.
Might it not be best to anaesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure.I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it...
... My thoughts upon pornography tend to revolve around the fact that while few of us are zombies, detectives, cowboys or spacemen, there are an infinite number of books that are recounting the stories of those lifestyles. However, all of us have some sort of feelings or opinions about sex. And yet the only art form which in any way is able to discuss sex or depict sex is this grubby despised under-the-counter art form which has absolutely no standards. This was what Lost Girls was intended as a remedy for. That there is no reason why a horny piece of literature that is purely about sex could not be as beautiful, as meaningful and have as absorbing characters as any other piece of fiction.
I’ve been looking at the kind of the history of magical thinking and where it starts to go wrong. And for my money where it starts to go wrong is monotheism. I mean if you look at the history of magic, you’ve got it’s origins in the caves. You’ve got it’s origins in shamanism, in animism, in a belief that everything around you, every tree, every rock, every animal was inhabited by some sort of essence, some sort of spirit that could perhaps be communicated with.
You would have had some central shaman or visionary who would’ve been responsible for channelling ideas that were useful to survival. By the time you reach the classical civilizations you can see that this has formalized to a degree. The shaman was acting purely as an intermediary between the spirits and people. He was in his position in the village or community I should imagine very much like a spiritual plumber. You know, that people in the group would have had their own roles...
... The person who was best at hunting would’ve been a hunter, the person who was best at talking to the spirits, perhaps because he or she was a bit crazy, a bit detached from our normal material world, then they would’ve been the shaman. And they would not have been masters of a secret craft, they would’ve simply been dispensing their information throughout the community, because it was believed to be helpful to the community.
When you get the actual classical cultures emerging, this has been formalized so that you’ve now got pantheons of gods. And each of those gods will have a priest cast that will act to certain degree as intermediaries who will instruct you in the worship of that god. So the relationship between humans and their gods, which could be seen as the relationship between humans and their highest selves, that was still a very direct one.
When Christianity comes in, when monotheism comes in, then all of a sudden you’ve got a priest cast moving in between the worshipper and the object of worship. You’ve got a priest cast becoming a kind of spiritual middle-management between humanity and the divine within itself that it is seeking. You no longer have a direct relationship with the godhead. The priests don’t really necessarily have a relationship with the godhead...
... The alchemists had two components to their philosophy. These were the principles of Solve et Coagula. Solve was basically the equivalent of analysis, it was taking things apart to see how they worked. Coagula was basically synthesis, it was trying to put the disassembled pieces back together, so that they worked more efficiently. These are two very important principles which can be applied to almost anything in culture. There has recently in literature for example been a wave of post-modernism, deconstructionism. This is Solve. Perhaps it is time in the arts for a little more Coagula. Having deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together.
Spiritualism was the natural state of human thinking up until the Renaissance and the subsequent age of reason that grew out of it. Our original way of seeing the world was as a place entirely inhabited by spirits, where everything had its indwelling essence, where everything was in some sense sacred, including ourselves.
The age of reason changed all that.
While it’s inarguable that Reason brought many great benefits and was a necessary stage of our development, unfortunately this lead to materialism, where the physical material world was seen as the be-all and end-all of existence, where inevitably we were seen as creature that had no spiritual dimensions, that had no souls, living in a soulless universe of dead matter...
... The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that is in control. The truth is far more frightening, nobody is in control. The world s rudderless. The substance that has most effect upon our culture and upon our lives is completely invisible. We can only see its effects. This substance is information.
Science started out as an off-shoot of magic. The two became completely divorced from each other and bitter enemies. Although I tend to think that at the present moment the two are growing back together again. I was reading recently that people at the cutting edge of quantum physics believe that information is a “super weird substance” to quote the actual phraseology, which underlies everything in the universe, which is more fundamental than gravity or electro-magnetism or the two nuclear forces.
This would tend to suggest that our entire physical universe is the secondary by-product of a primal information. Or to put it in more magical acceptable terms: “In the beginning, there was the word”...
... As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled.
As it turns out, after the first 50,000 year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up, between 1960 and 1970 human information doubled.
As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point somewhere around 2015 when human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world.
At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam...
...Originally, there was only one science of existence. Our entire world view was magical. Everything we did, everything that happened in the world had a kind of shamanic, magical significance. If you look at the very earliest cultures, some of them are still extent upon the planet, the aboriginal cultures, most of their languages only have one tense. Everything is subsumed within the present...
... I believe that Hawking talks about space-time as a kind of a gigantic, starry football, a rugby ball if you like. And at one end of it you have the Big Bang and at the other end of it everything comes together again in a big crunch. But, that the whole football exists all the time. That there is this gigantic hyper moment in which everything is occurring.
That would mean that it was only our conscious minds that were ordering things into past, present and future. The idea of solid flying saucers from Alpha Centauri, coming and visiting us now or any time in the past. This is not a rational idea...
... This is an example of the limitations of Western thought, that we believe that we understand the entire cosmos. But, actually we understand the insides of our heads. And even then only very poorly.
Was it Niels Bohr, the physicist, who in his Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, said that when we talk about or describe, remote events, whether that be in the furthest stars, or in the smallest and most remote quanta, that all we can ever truly be doing is talking about ourselves and our own processes. That all we see is our perceptions, we mistake that for reality. And consequently we tend to be chauvinistic about our picture of reality as if that were the only one.
Then the only way that we can look at other cultures is to imagine that they are deluded or primitive or just haven’t got it yet. That is a way in which we in terms of information we isolate ourselves terribly. It’s our culture, kind of insisting upon its own values, blinds itself to what might actually be very useful concepts and ideas, belonging to other more deeply rooted cultures. They offered perhaps richer readings of the world than cold behaviourist science does. Science cannot talk about consciousness because science is a thing that deals entirely with empirical evidence...
... With things that can be repeated in a laboratory and thoughts do not come into this category Therefore science generally tends to try to disprove the existence of consciousness. They will say that consciousness is some accident of biology, which is itself based upon chemistry, which is itself based upon physics and wholly explicable within a normal rational scientific framework.
Rupert Sheldrake, who is a kind of heretical scientist who put forward the theory of a morphogenetic field in order to try and understand some of the spookier effects of consciousness. I’m probably simplifying it horribly here, but I think that the basic concept was that once a form has occurred, whether that be a physical form or an idea form, then it is much more likely and possible for it to occur again.
Now Sheldrake says that this is because there is a kind of what he calls a morpho-genetic field, linking everything. And that once the idea existed then it somehow existed in this morpho-genetic field. It struck me that this might explain a lot of things, about the way the human mind works...
... An idea space which is perhaps universal. Our individual consciousnesses have access to this vast universal space. Just as we have individual houses, but the street outside the front door belongs to everybody. It’s almost as if ideas are pre-existing forms within this space.
As human beings we inhabit two distinct and separate worlds, two landscapes. We inhabit the physical world, but at the same time since we can only ever truly experience our perception of that world, then it would seem that we more truly inhabit a world purely of consciousness and ideas...
... If you want truly unique ideas, if you’re an artist or an inventor or somebody who deals in unique and fresh ideas then you will have to plunge right into the undergrowth, into the depths of idea space in order to find those ideas that have never been spotted before. If we assume that idea space or something like it exists, then we may decide that we wish to explore that space. Whether for artistic reasons, perhaps for scientific reasons or perhaps as magicians, as occultists. Now if we’re going to venture into this hypothetical and more or less entirely unknown territory, it would seem to only make sense that we should try and track down route maps that may have been made by previous explorers.
Now when you’re talking about the territory of the mind and perhaps the spirit, the only route maps available are magic systems from antiquity. You’re talking about systems like the Quabalah, with its map of every conceivable human state. You’re talking about systems like Tarot, a pantheon of archetypal images that provide the cartography for a map of the human condition.
Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don’t think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet.
I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we’ve erected, THAT is what would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon.
It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist.
History is a heat, it's the heat of accumulated information and accumulated complexity. As our culture progresses, we find that we gather more and more information and that we slowly start to move almost from a fluid to a vaporous state, as we approach the ultimate complexity of a social boiling point.
I believe that our culture is turning to steam.
Darkness darkness
Darkness, Darkness" is a song written by Jesse Colin Young[1] in 1969 which has been covered by many artists. It initially appeared on The Youngbloods album Elephant Mountain. During the Vietnam War it was considered an "anthem" to the soldiers for it described what they felt while in the jungles.[citation needed]...
Darkness, darkness
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
Darkness, darkness, hide my yearning
For the things I cannot be
Keep my mind from constant turning
Toward the things I cannot see now
Things I cannot see
Darkness, darkness, long and lonesome
Ease the day that brings me pain
I have felt the edge of sadness
I have known the depth of fear
Darkness, darkness, be my blanket
Cover me with the endless night
Take away, take away the pain of knowing
Fill the emptiness of right now
Emptiness of right now, now, now
Emptiness of right now
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my hand and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence, the silence of your deep
Darkness, darkness, be my blanket
Cover me with the endless night
Take away, take away the pain of knowing
Fill the emptiness of right now
Emptiness of right now, now, now
Emptiness of right
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Emptiness, emptiness
Oh yeah
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
Darkness, darkness, hide the yearning
For the things that cannot be
Keep my mind from constant turning
Toward the things I cannot see now
Toward the things I cannot see
Darkness, darkness, long and lonesome
T'is the day that brings me here
I have felt the edge of silence
I have known the depth of fear
Darkness, darkness, be my blanket
Cover me with endless night
Take away, take away the pain of lonely
Fill the emptiness of right now
Fill the emptiness of right
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
Darkness, darkness, hide the yearning
For the things I cannot be
Keep my mind from constant turning
Toward the things I cannot see now
Toward the things I cannot see
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head and let me sleep
In the calmness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
Darkness, darkness, hide my yearning
For the things I cannot be
Free my mind from constant turning
Toward the things I cannot see now
Toward the things I cannot see
Darkness, darkness, long and lonesome
T'is the day that brings my heaven
I have passed the edge of damn-ness
Now I have the depth of fear
Darkness, darkness, be my blanket
Cover me with the endless night
Take away the pain of knowing
Fill the emptiness inside
Fill the emptiness inside
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my hand and let me sleep
In the colors of your shadow
In the silence of the deep
Darkness, darkness, hide the yearning
For the things that cannot be
Free my mind from constant yearning
Toward the things I cannot see
Toward the things I cannot see
Toward the things I cannot see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/888_%28number%29
888 (number)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the year 888 AD, see 888.
888 is a natural number with both mathematical and symbolic meaning.
Contents
1 In mathematics
2 Symbology and numerology
3 See also
4 References
In mathematics
888 is a repdigit (a number all of whose digits are equal),[1] and a strobogrammatic number (one that reads the same upside-down on a seven-segment calculator display).[2] 8883 = 700227072 is the smallest cube in which each digit occurs exactly three times,[3] and the only cube in which three distinct digits each occur three times.[4] 888 (is) the smallest multiple of 24 whose digit sum is 24,[5] and as well as being divisible by its digit sum it is divisible by all of its digits.[6]
888 is a practical number, meaning that every positive integer up to 888 itself may be represented as a sum of distinct divisors of 888.[7]
There are exactly 888 trees with four unlabeled and three labeled nodes,[8] exactly 888 seven-node undirected graphs without isolated vertices,[9] and exactly 888 non-alternating knots whose crossing number is 12.[10]
Symbology and numerology
In Christian numerology, the number 888 represents Jesus, or sometimes more specifically Christ the Redeemer. This representation may be justified either through gematria, by counting the letter values of the Greek transliteration of Jesus' name,[11] or as an opposing value to 666, the number of the beast.[12]
In Chinese numerology, 888 has a different meaning, triple fortune, a strengthening of the meaning of the digit 8.[13] For this reason, addresses and phone numbers containing the digit sequence 888 are considered particularly lucky, and may command a premium because of it.[14]
See also
888 (disambiguation)...
http://numerologysecrets.net/numerology-888-meaning/
Numerology 888 Meaning: Secrets Of Angel Number 888
Numerology does a great job at uncovering some of life’s mysteries in relation to your personality, your odds at being successful, your choice of spouse as well as how other people see you. The triple number 888 is one that’s seen as positive and progressive. If you’ve been seeing this number a lot lately, prepare for a world of abundance and opportunities coming your way in a short while.
The number 888 is all about positive changes. This is especially true if you’ve been hit by misfortune after misfortune over the last couple weeks, months or year. The universe and your angel guides are conspiring to change the status quo and give you a chance at succeeding in your endeavors for once.
The Number of Completion and Infinity
In addition, the triple number 888 is seen as the number set of completion and infinity. Upon closer inspection, one can see that the number 8 is actually two zeros stacked up against each other to form a number that can turn in on itself. It also closely resembles the Chinese symbol of Yin and Yang which essentially looks at the world as well as the universe as something that has a dual and eternal side to it. This number set basically is giving you a clue into how the world works; it does this by announcing to you that you should take the good and the bad and make everything work in your favor.
When you see the number 888, try as much as possible to prepare for change in your life. You can do this by doing a bit of spring cleaning, changing the way you dress or even using a different route on your way to work. It’s not enough that you’ve seen this tripe digit number showing up in your life; you must actively change your energy and habits in order to be in alignment with whatever’s coming your way.
The number 888 is also a sign that you should do everything in your power to make sure that your finances are in check. This is because coming into a small fortune as a result of seeing this number set may cause you to act in a reckless manner which may end up in you losing the windfall that the universe just sent you. Make sure to double check all your transactions to make sure that there aren’t any missing zeros or misused funds.
Conclusion
888 reveals itself when your thoughts and vision for your life are in alignment. It serves as a reminder that whatever you’re doing is right and that you should keep at it until you get your break. In addition, you might want to consider starting new relationships, signing contracts and agreements once you see this number set since you’re more likely to be successful going forward thanks to the backing that you are about to receive from your angel guides and the universe in general. When 888 appears in places such as your birthdate, endeavor to life your life with a purpose since you’ve already been given a loving push by the universe by default.
http://news.yahoo.com/broncos-fans-tipp ... 05498.html
Broncos Fan Tipped Over A Porta-Potty With A Patriots Fan Inside
By Pete Blackburn
Jaunary 26, 2016 10:40 AM
I am absolutely terrified of porta-potties. Some people may call it an irrational fear, but it’s not irrational. You step inside a literal sh*t house — typically located at events where large amount of people drink heavily — and you’re putting your faith in complete strangers not to be drunk idiots and tip it over. I’ve lived long enough to not trust people that much. Every time I step inside a porta-potty, my body goes into complete panic mode until the second I leave.
Unfortunately, some poor Patriots fan at this weekend’s AFC Championship in Denver had to live out my worst nightmare when the porta-potty they were using was apparently completely tipped over by Broncos fans. The video above doesn’t capture the actual tipping, but it does contain the aftermath, which includes some hearty laughs from Denver fans.
Now, there’s no scenario where being inside a tipped porta-potty isn’t horrific, but — for the sake of the Pats fan — we can only hope that this was one of the “lesser utilized” structures at Sports Authority Field on Sunday. Also, let’s just hope whoever was inside has better luck for 2016, because watching your favorite team lose an AFC Championship heartbreaker and then promptly being covered in literal human waste is certainly a sh*tty start.
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