Dancing in the Minefield

The Fox Walk

2008-03-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

Now this is just fascinating, one of those things that once you come across it, makes a hell of a lot of sense.

“Our walk is devastating, not natural. Little babies have shoes like cement boots. Our feet are ruined from the first step we take in shoes.” Walking barefoot, most of us naturally adopt a very different step: the knees are bent, rather than locked; the outside ball of the foot touches the ground to test it first, before applying any weight; then, if it’s safe, we roll the rest of the ball in and flatten the heel; only then does the weight come down. This is what Tom Brown and his students called “fox walking.”

The author makes pretty big claims for the benefits of walking barefoot: increased health and wellness, thanks both to a more natural posture and a synaesthetic connection to the natural world.

I think I'll try this....

But not at work.

Where Does Oil Come From?

2008-03-09T04:26:00.000-07:00

Ever stop and ask yourself what the experimental evidence is for the fossil fuel theory? I did, a few years back, and so I did the logical thing and did some poking about online. I soon found that the Russians had asked themselves that same question, many decades ago, and they had found the fossil fuel theory to be about as scientific as phlogiston. They developed an abiotic (ie non-biological) theory of oil's origins, one in which oil is produced from naturally occurring chemicals deep in the earth, under high pressures and temperatures, and then carried up to the crust. The vast Russian oil industry is the practical application of the abiotic theory.

We're lied to about so much in this sick society - about everything from JFK to global warming - that it's easy to forget things ... even things as vital as the truth about oil, and about how much we have left:

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

The geopolitical consequences of this deliberate deception about the truth of oil? Huge.

Benjamin Fulford: The Reason America Was Bankrupted

2008-03-08T22:30:00.000-08:00

First posted 06 March 08

Why is America being smashed, and the world changed? That's a question I get a lot.

However in actuality America isn't being smashed; it's just bankrupt for the moment, and this is a chance to change the American state. America has 4% of the world's population, over 20% of it's GDP, and accounts for 50% of the world's military expenditures. That army is controlled by evil powers, powers that no matter what want to provoke WWIII.

If America is temporarily bankrupted, they'll be but in the place of having no choice but to listen to what the rest of the world has to say. In the 20th century the powers that occupy America murdered 200 million people. This is our chance to ensure even more people aren't slaughtered.

On the occasion of America's reorganization following its bankruptcy, we can offer them capital to maintain their crumbling national infrastructure ... and then, that's our chance to organize the UN security council to match the organization of all mankind. The Pentagon can then be organized to counter poverty and environmental destruction.

Benjamin Fulford: Does America Have Nanotech Weapons?

2008-03-08T22:17:00.001-08:00

First posted 07 Mar 08

I was contacted by a personage believed to have a relationship with the CIA, and heard that America has top secret nanotech weapons. He didn't give me anything detailed, but the intention conveyed to me, and my own speculation, is that he wanted this to be passed on to China, essentially to threaten other countries.

I don't think such a weapon could be practically put to use. Most likely this is an attempt, in the midst of national bankruptcy, to strengthen their negotiating power while trying to create a new world order. There should be a concrete discussion, rather than violence.

Benjamin Fulford: About the Personal Affairs Troubles of the Bank of Japan President

2008-03-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

First posted 08 Mar 08

On the underside of the Bank of Japan President problem is a fight over Japan's future.

The fight is between two factions: on the one side there's the Mitsubishi UFJ Bank - whose logo is a a Freemasonic symbol - a faction that wants to hand over Japan's money to shadowy foreign powers; on the other, those that want to use Japan's money to revive Japan.

Somehow or other the likes of Mr M. and Mr W., working for powers that are plotting to murder 4 billion people around the world, have to be stopped. Japan's money should be used to realize a mature world, one where there is no poverty or environmental destruction.

Benjamin Fulford: Rumors of the Owner of Rolls Royce Naniwa No. 4444

2008-03-03T06:26:00.000-08:00

First posted 03 Mar 08

A few days ago after I finished a TV show in Osaka, a black Rolls Royce with Naniwa Number 4444 appeared in front of my taxi, twice. According to an acquaintance's information, this appeared to be the property of the Yamaguchi Gang.

Also last week, when the show was over I head to a coffee shop I always use for business, two guys who looked like they were from an underground organization were sitting diagonally across from me. I could clearly see what looked to be a pistol in the jacket pocket of one of them, so I pretended to have forgotten something and promptly left the shop.

I do not remember, nor do I plan on, ever causing offense to the Yamaguchi Gang. Rather, I've been suggesting to the Japanese government that that Yamaguchi Gang could make ten times as much as they are now by engaging in first class, superior enterprises. If the Yamaguchi Gang wants to kill me, I'd like for them to tell me the reason first. If I agree I'll commit seppuku myself.

If this is a request from shadowy foreign powers to have me slaughtered, I'd like them to think twice. Foreign underworld powers are sucking money out of Japan, impoverishing the country. They're plotting to murder 4 billion people. Japan will lose 70 million people, and the plan for the rest of us is to treat us like livestock. I'd like for those powers to consider the morality of the work they've undertaken.

Update:

First Posted 05 Mar 2008

Sorry About the Blog Post the Other Day

The other day I posted "Rumors of the Owner of Rolls Royce Naniwa No. 4444", and then I suddenly removed it. Sorry about that. I decided to pull the post after talking with an authorized individual. The consequence of the talk is that I'm no longer worried my life is being aimed at. I can't say in detail but a settlement was reached through discussion. This is a backroom deal, with no exceptions. For removing the post with no explanation, and causing such a fuss, I offer my deepest apologies.

Blog Fiction: Installments 2 and 3 of The Extinction War

2008-03-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

Extinction War 1.2: Keep Out and 1.3: Signs and Portents are up. Go check 'em out.

The media was already out in force, a dense swarm of chipped dragonflies buzzing around the battlefield, relaying all they saw to the world’s hundreds of millions of hungry eyes. Doctrine was not to bother fighting them; media swarms could prove troublesome from an operational secrecy standpoint, but the military could devise no better way of gathering information. Before long the swarm would exhaust the site of all immediate interest, and disperse, some fanning out across the jungle in search of whatever they might find, others departing for nearby battles (of which there were several ongoing at any given moment, at this stage in the campaign.) Only a few stragglers, the platoon’s fan-base and self-appointed civilian scout force, would remain.

Clear Channel vs Napster: What's the Real Reason For the Copyright War?

2008-03-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

I remember two formative events, spaced a couple of years apart, that have forever since colored my feelings about music.

The first was when I was 16 or 17, a school-day like any other which started with me getting on the school bus. Now, we had a cool bus driver, who let the kids choose the radio station we listened to as we all got carted off to the local indoctrination facility. There was none of this nonsense about making the kids listen to crappy country and western music, like the heartless sadists that chauffeured some of my friends. Bill was not like them. He was good people.

There was never any question of what we wanted to listen to. This was out in the sticks, and there weren't many radio stations. There was only one, in fact, that played the kind of music that we wanted to hear, a station broadcasting from across the border called Z-Rock that put out a lineup of all the great alternative music out there in the 90s: Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, White Zombie, the Stone Temple Pilots; this was the character of the sound track that accompanied us on the way to the lockup.

That fateful day, I got on that bus and found myself listening to Britney Spears. Surely, I felt, this must be some sort of mistake. This saccharine pop was the kind of 'music' that clueless 13 year old girls listened to, not the socially aware hard rock that stirred the hearts of post-pubescent teens. "What the hell is this?" I said. "Change it back to 106.7"

"This is 106.7", the bus driver said, apologetically. "But it's not Z-Rock."

That was my first encounter with Clear Channel Communications, though it was not for years afterwards that I found out it was they who had eaten the only live link I had to new music. Sure, there was still the classic rock station coming down from the north, and they played some good stuff. But it wasn't the same.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Now I'm 19, in university, with a computer, an internet connection, and thus - a couple of months into my first year - Napster. After so long without a ready way of discovering and listening to new music, I jumped like a starved pig into a bathtub filled with lasagna; I damn near filled my hard-drive within a month or two, grabbing every track I could. Napster was like some glorious gift from the internet gods, a way to discover and listen to music without having to either pay for it, or wait for it to be served up to you. It combined everything that was great about radio with everything that was great about a store.

A year later, when it was torn down due to copyright violations, I vented to all around me my towering rage against the short-sighted and petty stupidity of the RIAA. It echoes on to this day ... though I'm no longer sure that stupidity is the whole reason Napster was taken down. Oh, stupidity plays a part, of that there can be no doubt; entrenched interests of every industry have historically been jealous of their perceived rights, and fail to perceive the obvious society-level benefits of new technologies that threaten their small domains. This time around, there is no doubt a great deal of the blame for the past several years of legal battles and bad legislation can be laid at the feet of record company executives caught blinking and unprepared in the harsh headlights of the approaching singularity.

Well, it explains a great deal - enough that out of disgust I've long since vowed never to buy CDs, unless it's at the show and directly from the artist - but it doesn't explain it all the way.

Think on this, those of you who used Napster (a lot, I expect). The crackdown on the network was justified due to the 'theft' of songs by stars like Metallica and Madonna, high-performing market-saturating money whores to the record industry. But how often did you, yourself, bother downloading tracks by them? You likely already owned them, anyways, and even if you didn't all you had to do to hear them was turn on the radio. Songs like that were everywhere. No, I'm willing to bet you used the network to find the long-tail stuff: DJ mix tapes, jam band recordings, grateful dead bootlegs, live recordings of obscure Scandinavian death metal bands doing the sort of heinous things on stage they have become the stuff of terrible eldritch myth. The things you couldn't find anywhere else, save by accessing a network where you could trade music with tens of millions of others. Stuff you couldn't buy if you wanted to, because stores didn't carry it.

Music like that likely accounted for a majority of the traffic on the network. To be honest I don't know for sure, but an informal and very unscientific poll of my friends and acquaintances has so far revealed no one who mostly, or even really at all, searched for big label music. So I don't think monetary losses due to copyright infringement are the whole reason Napster was attacked.

No, it was realized that corporate control over music was threatened, and steps were taken to deal with that threat.

By the time Napster came along, the music industry was dominated by a handful of companies: marketing was handled by MTV and Clear Channel, distribution by the major labels, access to live shows by Ticketmaster. You notice what happened as Clear Channel sewed up the radio market? Suddenly you couldn't hear decent music anywhere. Where once the airwaves had been full of wild rock music and sullen gangsta rap, music that spoke (and often screamed) from the heart about problems in society that cried out for solution ... now, there was the candy-land fantasy of pop music, where no problems were more pressing than being jilted in love or unable to find anything to watch on your expensive big-screen TV. Were we suddenly to believe that the musical tastes of a whole nation had changed as though overnight, that a country full of individualists had suddenly decided they preferred sugary pop tunes to real music?

Well, hell, that's what I thought. That's what almost everyone seemed to think, and joke about in a bitchy sort of way. Funny thing, though. As popular as pop music apparently was, I almost never encountered anyone who liked it. Quite the opposite: most anyone I met, regardless of whether we liked the same music, loathed pop.

So Clear Channel takes over the radio stations, and suddenly it's all pop, all the time. People hate it, but it's what's on the radio or on the TV, so a lot of them grit their teeth and listen to it. The marketing psychology boys no doubt predicted that, with total control over radio and TV, the tastes of an entire nation could be very effectively molded: if all they hear is pop music, then before long they'll be humming it to themselves without realizing it, and eventually deciding they rather like it, and buying it and listening to it all the time. This has other benefits beyond simply profits: if the majority of the population is listening to canned, manufactured music, their mental states can be very effectively manipulated.

Music isn't just a commodity that you buy. It's an art that shapes the subconscious background of your life, exerting a subtle but powerful influence over your mental state. Anyone who loves music knows this, because that power is why you love it. It hijacks your auditory cortex and reprograms your brain, and that can be a lot of fun. Or it can be a powerful tool for altering your consciousness: calming you, consoling you, pumping you up, helping you work things out.

Or, if someone gains total control over the music you listen to, a powerful lever of control. The music, after all, carries a message, one that bypasses reason and speaks directly to the emotions. They - the They that comes with a capital (because They have so much capital) - came very close to gaining control over that weapon. If it hadn't been for Napster (and the fragmented offspring that sprung up in it's shadow), They would have succeeded. They would have convinced an entire nation that the music it liked best - and by extension the mental state they most often occupied - was as superficial as a mannequin, devoid of emotional or intellectual depth, devoted only to the maintenance of a smiling and unthinking optimism. Musical prozac for the depressed national soul; you can't help but wonder whether it'd be as toxic as the real thing.

They've tried anyways, and met with limited success. The labels converted into producing as much pop as they could, and the product was pushed aggressively on the airwaves. Much of the population, rarely venturing beyond the noob sea of the internet that is MSN and Yahoo and AOL, never got the hang of the whole file sharing thing, were admonished that it was illegal and dangerous, and were thus kept as a captive audience to seduce (those who didn't simply turn off the radio altogether and just stick to their CD collections).

Peer-to-peer distribution networks, however, have done much to undermine the corporate control of the musical landscape. Virtually no one under 30 pays much attention at all to what's on the radio. We find new music with MySpace and HypeMachine and Google, and we acquire virtually all of it over file-trading networks. We're barely aware of the soundtrack that's been written for our lives, and as a result we're not marching in neat ranks like we should be. Instead we're dancing in the streets, grinning like fools, and cheerfully flipping them off whenever they glower at us. Frankly, it is both unseemly and unsettling to Them, and so is it any wonder that They will not hear reason on the subject?

The success of file-sharing has been up until now a largely victorious front in the on-going shadow war against Them, undermining a small but significant part of their plan. The damage it inflicts isn't just monetary - though that alone makes it a powerful weapon of resistance - it's also psychological, even spiritual. It attacks Their very reason for being, for it shows that with the internet, we can make Them as unnecessary and irrelevant as They plan to make us.

2008-03-02T04:12:00.000-08:00

This is from Galaxy Dynamics, who have a very cool DVD out with supercomputer animations of galaxy collisions and cosmic evolution set to music. The one below is the formation of a supercluster. Enjoy.

Benjamin Fulford: I've Got a Newly Published Book For Sale

2008-03-02T03:11:00.000-08:00

First posted 02 March 08

On sale next week! A new book by Benjamin Fulford,

The Dismantling of Japan (Seishun Shinsho: Intelligence)

"The widening gulf between rich and poor, the pension problem, and regions left to neglect,"who is weakening this country?

Benjaming Fulford: I Think Japan Should Emply Hollywood

2008-03-01T03:19:00.000-08:00

First posted 01 March 08

For a long time, a great number of Hollywood screenwriters went on strike. In the end the strike reached an impasse when funds ran out, but as to the true feelings of the screenwriters, I have a feeling they have heretofore sealed stories and information they'd like to share with us.

I think it would be good for Japan to use it's untouched foreign reserves and employ those screenwriters in the work of telling the truth to all mankind. This would lead to an enhancement of Japan's economy, it would also become a development of mankind.

At present 5 percent of Hollywood's budget comes from the Pentagon. Movies are being made that provoke war and murder people. In actuality, most Hollywood movies contain scenes in which guns are used to murder people in the name of justice.

Hollywood is bedridden. However, I expect that Asia's abundant traditional cultures can give birth to as many stories as you want. How about if instead, they protected nature and peace, and gave us movies that reminded us that all humankind lives on the same planet.

Benjamin Fulford: The Truth of the Livedoor Incident

2008-03-01T02:57:00.000-08:00

First posted 28 Feb 2008

I met the former administration of Livedoor. I talked with them, and I believe what came out to be the truth of the situation.

The Yakuza were investing a lot of money in Livedoor, buying various enterprises. One element within the Yakuza had connections with the Illuminati. Their ultimate aim was to purchase the Fuji Sankei Group, with the goal of enabling the brainwashing of the Japanese people. However, through the protection the patriots of the Asian secret society gave to Japan, the threat was driven off. I support that society.

This is pretty interesting if true. Interesting, but not surprising. Livedoor was a huge scandal, kind of like a Japanese Enron, in which a lot of people lost a lot of money. Stock market scams like that are amongst the Them's favorite tactics for undermining a country's economy.

The Extinction War

2008-02-29T01:11:00.001-08:00

I've got a new fiction project, The Extinction War, which I'm putting up for free (naturally). I'll be posting a new part every day or so.

Without giving too much away, it's a coming of age story set in the near future, the tale of a handful of extraordinary youths finding their way in the midst of the last war mankind shall ever fight, a war in which rapidly evolving technologies vie with apocalypse; regardless of which force wins, what emerges when the dust clears will not be human.

Here's a taste:

Steve killed for the first time the day after he joined the army.

There had been no delay for training, or even to be outfitted and shipped off to a far foreign country. That was the beauty of the Telepresence Cavalry: the Pentagon could cherry-pick their recruits from the nation’s top gamers, already as well-trained and combat ready as they’d ever be thanks to years of pretend violence. The robots they’d be riding herd on, meanwhile, were already in the battlespace, packed up tight inside ground effect carriers floating off the coast, just a short flight from deployment.

Benjamin Fulford: Ways to Breathe New Life Into Japan

2008-02-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

You can send Ben Fulford money by PayPal now. I take it if you email him he'll tell you how to proceed:

benjaminoffice88@gmail.com

Oh, and he's going to be selling his books online.

Now to the news:

First posted 27 Feb 2008

In present-day Japan, with a single group of winners excluded, their are a lot of people whose livelihood is in trouble. The current government doesn't have any ways to help them. However, I don't think helping them is all that difficult of a problem.

Japan, as a nation, lacks an overall goal. If first of all a goal is created, and people are inspired towards that goal, every problem would be settled.

As for one proposal, it would be a good thing for Japan to be the world's top country in every field. Japan's $6 trillion of foreign currency reserves, currently pickling in salt, could be put to use employing capable minds from around the world to find ways of giving Japan it's genki* back.

For instance, I think it would be great to make Japan the number one country in the world for harmony with nature. The Japanese cedars that occupy 5 percent of Japan's soil - and choke the life from the forests - should all be logged and sold as lumber to China. After logging the cedar animals would be able to return to a hospitable natural ecosystem. Then the concrete that buries the rivers of the metropolises could be broken, and those rivers turned into flowing gardens full of fish and small animals.

Up until now, Japan has been sacrificing nature to development. As to the goal of Japan from here on out, if Japan could work as much as possible towards augmenting life on Earth, that would be wonderful. On top of that, it would also be good to aim for a prosperous life.

* Genki is a Japanese word that's hard to translate directly into English. Pep, energy, spirit, vitality, those sorts of meanings to it, but the word's even used in greetings.

Thoughts on A New World Order

2008-02-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

We all know that nightmare, right? A One World Government with the world divided up into semi-autonomous economic zones, controlled by a single central bank with single currency for all, with everyone under constant surveillance and ... well, like I said, you all know the nightmare.

So, here's the thing: what if it doesn't have to be a nightmare? Allow me to play devil's advocate (hey, it's what I do).

You know, a single world government is probably inevitable, at some point. Instant communications and high-speed transportation can't help but weave the world more closely together, and that sort of process only leads in one direction. But what if the government that emerged on the other side was a democratic republic, one that gave every citizen a voice and inalienable rights? The dream (well, my dream) would be a parliamentary population, an ongoing global senate in which every citizen is a senator, able to vote not just for people but for treaties, for laws, for regulations. People often sneer at the idea of individual people being given the same say in legislative matters as are elected officials (though not so often as they used to, I've noticed....) The fact is, that if the people could decide the law for themselves, most of the problems that plague society would vanish rapidly.

The War in Iraq? Over, and years ago. Ditto Afghanistan. The War on Terror as well. The War on Drugs would in all likelihood have been history a decade ago, and would certainly be over today. The tax code would be marvelously simplified, as there is no question but that a series of arcane tomes longer than most encyclopedias is universally despised and feared more than any text since the Necronomicon.

Problems of political corruption would be greatly ameliorated as well. Bribing a few congressmen is one thing; bribing the entire population, quite another. Even a bribe that amounted to just a few hundred dollars a head would quickly run into the hundreds of billions. Should any group come to feel that such a bribe is necessary, the bribing would at least have the virtue of being a very public thing, rather than the furtive scrambling that takes place now.

Oh, yes, and one other (and very important) thing: participatory democracy would be very resistant against the psychopathic personality types that currently dominate the legislative houses of the world (not to mention the governments of almost every previous society). Psychopaths are, after all, only 1% of the population, and in a direct democracy they would be greatly outnumbered.

A virtual democracy might seem an impossible dream, but achieving it would be surprisingly easy. All it would take would be a repudiation of the serving government (on the grounds of numerous actions voiding the constitutional contract), and the signing of an alternate constitution that at first will apply to a sort of virtual state. New, virtual laws, existing in parallel to the existing legal structures but not yet in force, are then created in a wiki-congress composed of anyone who signs the contract. As the body of virtual law grows, attention will naturally be drawn to it, at first as a curiosity if nothing else. The evident sanity of the virtual law, in comparison with the rampant contradictions, injustices, and outright abuses of the existing code will become apparent to many, and implicit in that sanity the wisdom of direct democracy will impress itself into the minds that see it.

Now, the great thing about a virtual democracy is the scalability of it, it's almost fractal nature. The challenge to the current system doesn't have to be direct, not at first. Start by applying the philosophy at small scales - neighborhood associations, unions, clubs, and corporations. Think of this as planting seeds in the polity's connective tissue. Once participatory governance has begun to pervade the background of life, a push could be made to bring urban governments under a similar system of governance, in effect chewing giant political holes in the organs of the state. From there, it's a smooth (though possibly more abrupt than expected) progression towards a global democracy that hollows out the pre-existing control grid until the brittle shell finally cracks and what I like to call the demosphere is born.

Until time travel is invented, I won't be able to go back to the Cretaceous and hunt dinosaurs, and none of you will be able to turn back the clock to the constitutional order of 1776. That contract was publicly broken and discarded by the elites back in 2000, and what lip service it's received since has been increasingly strained. Of late, it's grown perfunctory and often downright sarcastic. So, it's gone and done with; best it be laid aside as a memory cherished by all who love freedom, for a memory it has become. Memories can be learned from, but they cannot inspire, for inspiration requires vision ... and a vision that inspires the masses to take their destinies into their own hands might spur change faster than any of us imagine possible.

Benjamin Fulford: Is American Debt Waste Paper?

2008-02-26T07:18:00.000-08:00

First Posted 25 Feb 2008

Recently information's been reaching my ears from various places that America might be thinking of declaring Force Majeure.

Regarding it's present debt which has climbed to roughly 1.2 trillion dollars, were it to be announced that it could not be physically repaid, the countries of Asia and the Near and Middle East might be given to understand that they aren't going to get paid.

But if such a reckless thing was done the country will call America would collapse in an instant. The natural thing would be for an international meeting to be held, at which the system in place ever since 1945 would be yanked, and the debt forgiven ... but before that could be done, America would have to make a promise to never again wage aggressive war, and to eternally bend all efforts towards removing poverty, environmental destruction, and war from the Earth. Following that, with the new capital that would enter the country, the Pentagon would have to restructure in order to develop countermeasures against poverty and environmental destruction.

Benjamin Fulford: Special Discussion at the World Forum Lecture

2008-02-26T07:04:00.000-08:00

First posted 25 Feb 2008

The World Forum Lecture to be held on February 29 is to feature Yumi Kikuchi (a Japanese blogger), along with the daughter - and private secretary - of the Democratic Party's Yukihisa Fujita (ed: he's the guy who gave the 9/11 presentation in the Diet). Oh, yes, and I'll be there too.

As Mr. Yukuhisa is on business overseas, his daughter has been entrusted with a message and is coming in his stead. He's planning on letting us know the real intentions behind the questions that raised misgivings about 9/11 in the Diet.

See you there!

Kikuchi Yumi http://kikuchiyumi.blogspot.com/
World Forum Lecture http://www.worldforum.jp/information/2008/02.html

Benjamin Fulford: Exposing 9/11 With the Cooperation of European Politicians

2008-02-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

First posted 23 Feb 2008

Japan's politicians are gradually beginning to realize the truth about 9/11.

Through Yukuhisa Fujita's presentation in the Diet, recognition of what America did on 9/11 is spreading through other Diet members. From here on the Democratic Party (ed: the Japanese Democratic Party, or Minshuto) would like to advance a cooperative plan: in concert with Europe, to demand of America that those factions that were related to 9/11 are eliminated.

By the way, the Diet members are focusing on the criminals of 9/11, the defense contractors and oil interests. Most of the diligent American military was tricked by the Pentagon, and has no relation to the matter.

Benjamin Fulford Bleg

2008-02-25T06:17:00.001-08:00

Daaaamn! A few days of no internet/not being home so much has me behind a bit. It doesn't help that Fulford's been busier than usual these past few days.

Oh, and by the way, Fulford wrote a long post asking for money. I didn't have the energy to translate it at the time (4 days ago) and I don't feel like translating it now, given as there are six newsy posts to get through. At any rate, if anyone reads this and feels like tossing Fulford a few bucks - gathering information like he does costs money, after all, and most of the books he wrote over the past year were panned by critics and bounced by bookstores (a few not even published), so of he's been tight for cash recently - given all that, if you want to help him out a bit here are the relevant details:

Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi-UFJ, Koenji Branch
Account Number 0724149

Dude really should get a tip-jar.

update: The readers responded fast....

Benjamin Fulford: The Self Defense Force's Careless Manner

2008-02-21T21:48:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted 20 Dec 2008

The case of the Aegis cruiser hitting a fishing boat is just a bit too much for a massive lack of common sense. Approaching within 20 km - visible range of Tokyo Bay - in a spot where there are all sorts of small fishing boats, whatever were the watchers doing?

Questions are being asked about what the Self Defense Force itself should be. Due to things like this, there's extreme worry in this time that the organization can protect the country from invasions.

On top of this, it took over 90 minutes - far too slow - for the information about this incident to reach the Prime Minister, raising questions about SDF morals as well. Memories of last year's missile procurement scandal are still new but, in practicality it's not just North Korean missiles, but little fishing boats that can't be stopped.

http://benjaminfulford.typepad.com/benjaminfulford/2007/12/post-17.html

"Aegis Cruiser Missile Ambush": What's on the Other Side of Reports of Success?

First posted 20 Dec 2007

A few days ago reports came in that a Naval Self Defense Force Aegis cruiser successfully ambushed a missile.

http://www.bnn-s.com/news/07/12/071219154245.html

The circumstances would have been completely different if this was, indeed, an experiment. In the case of a test, time and place would have been accurately communicated, and this was not in fact the case.

In the first place America is using North Korea as an accomplice. Taepodongs are being launched in order to palm off some missiles on Japan. It'd be nice to know how much of that one trillion yen [about 10 billion dollars] is bribe money in the pocket of the officials (ed: I'm guessing there. He said sensei-tachi, but I'm pretty sure he's not talking about Ms. Sumiko who teachers 3rd graders.)

Benjamin Fulford: Questions for Governor Sonomanma Higashi

2008-02-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

Originally posted 21 Feb 2008 10:25 pm

Tomorrow I'm going to gather information on Prefectural Governor Sonomanma Higashi, 東国原英夫知事 (ed: Japanese name kanji are at best difficult to translate, due to the radically non-standard pronunciations, so I'm guessing a bit with the name. At any rate, he's the Governor of Miyazaki Prefecture.) A few days ago I received a request from the readers: to place his name on the list of those who are thought to be prominent traitors to the country*. And so, on what points should we consider him to be a traitor? I'd like some concrete things to ask. I'm going to check directly with the man himself.

I'm also taking any questions anyone might have for the Governor.

* The Japanese for this is quite colorful. It translates as 'country-selling slave'.

Vote by Not Voting, And Do It At the Top of Your Lungs

2008-02-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

Let's face it: Ron Paul's done his bit. He got in front of the camera, he energized a movement, and he did some educating. And now he's back in Texas licking his wounds, and what did you expect? That the first assault we sent up against the fortress, the forlorn hope we sent charging towards it's front gates in full view of it's cannons and kill-zones, was going to prevail?

This brilliant, bitchy rant by Carolyn Baker over at The People's Voice really brings the current electoral situation into sharp and painful focus. Who's she going to vote for? The same person her cousin is:

"Me vote?" she replied.

"No, not when my only choices are between Satan and the devil."

That about sums it up, no? There really is no point in voting. No matter who who vote for, they're just another employee of the corporatocracy, with no more independence or power to change things than a fry cook at your local McDonalds (and considerably less desire to, to boot.)

There's no use in just a few people sitting at home grumbling about the pointlessness of casting a ballot that will be ignored anyway. Where's the fun in that? No, what's needed is a voter strike, millions of people in the streets loudly and angrily refusing to vote. If the 2008 election is notable primarily for a nationwide protest too big to ignore, against everything the system stands for, everything it has done, is doing and is planning to do, and if along with that voter participation is driven down into the range of 20%, it won't matter who wins. Whatever squats in the Oval Office will not be able to claim a mandate from the voters, not with any sort of seriousness.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, it matters what you vote for; and if you want to vote against the system, the only way to do it is by not voting.

crossposted to social.infowars.com

Benjamin Fulford: The Infowar is an Urgent Subject

2008-02-19T06:32:00.000-08:00

First Posted at benjaminfulford.typepad.com 19 Feb 2008 11:30 AM
Cross-posted to social.infowars.com

At the beginning of the Age of Asia the Infowar is becoming a pressing subject. The world's mass media (particularly that of Japan and the Anglosphere) are insulting Asia with their discharge of bullshit information.

In recent years, real journalists in the Anglosphere have been fired, and what's left over is mostly nothing but people brainwashed by the CIA. That the mass media is under the control of five old men who caused 9/11 is something that the rest of the world has to be informed of, and quickly, so they can be given warning of the crackdown to come.

At the same time in order to support the remaining real journalists, it's necessary to boycott the mass media; this would really get the opposition groaning, and it would focus advertising revenue into the few real real outlets.

Ed: I posted the following as a comment at his site, but this is my blog so I get to include it as part of the main piece here Probably a bit more eloquently than it will appear on his site, too, as I'm writing in my mother tongue here....

It's not just the mass media's news that should be boycotted, it's their entertainment, their movies and their television and even their music. It's a massive revenue stream for them, and taking it away would be a serious kick in the nuts financially. Now I'm not necessarily saying that you have to stop consuming it all together, just stop paying for it. Christ, man, that's what bittorrent's for!

But you know, even if you can get it for free you should stop using it anyways. Most of it contains messages in the story or the lyrics designed to brainwash you, and as the police state begins to clamp down it'll get steadily more dangerous (hell, their files are probably already good enough that if they wished to use it as a pretext, they could round up vast numbers of people for violating copyright.) And anyways, open source software and creative commons licenses are manufacturing more content than can be consumed in any given day, and more and more of it as time goes on. The mass media's entertainments are already unnecessary!

Benjamin Fulford: The Problem of Asian Regional Conflicts

2008-02-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

Original post 13:17 18 Feb 2008
Loosely Translated 03:00 19 Feb 2008
Crossposted to social.infowars.com

A lot of the regional wars that splinter Asia are manufactured by Western secret societies. In order to see the birth of a New Asian Age, I'd like to see a lot of these problems resolved.

First of all between North and South Korea, where the plan for unity is to remove Golden Justice Sun (ed: his name was written in kanji, and Korean names have non-standard pronunciations which forced me to dig a bit to find out that this is, apparently, what Kim Jong Il's name means in Korean) from power and dress him up as a symbolic king. As to Taiwan and China, America can't continue protecting Taiwan militarily, so while Taiwan still has power I'd like to see them start negotiations with China. On the Chinese side, powers close to independence could be granted, and experiments with networked democracy could be begun. With Tibet, the Dalai Lama is a powerful symbol of peace; a conversation with him is necessary in order to take that symbol back and really get along well.

There's also the problem of Japan's northern territories, eternally contested with Russia; it would be good, I think, if a Japanese-Russian free trade zone or casino were to be established, a position for trade and pleasure.

At any rate if the various regional conflicts can be resolved, Asia will be a more unified place.

The American Autogenocide and the Depopulation of the World

2008-02-17T03:24:00.000-08:00

Most bloggers throw out their thoughts in short, rapid-fire bursts, with posts that are a few sentences or a few paragraphs long. Which makes sense, because the attention of your bog-standard web-surfer begins to wander after their brain's processed the first few phonemes. This doesn't allow much space for complex thought inside a single post, so bloggers who want to communicate something more nuanced usually rely on lots of short posts that, over time, will give the reader who keeps coming back for more a clear idea of what the blogger wants to say.

Someone evidently failed to get the message out to Martha Rose Crow, who in her own words is

a feminist, socialist, poet and writer living in the Netherlands. A social economist and cultural scientist, she holds four university degrees in Marketing, Management, Communication and Information Media (master’s degree).

In addition to the above impressive resume, Ms. Crow maintains (to use the term loosely) a blog by the title of American Autogenocide. There are precisely two posts at American Autogenocide, but each of those posts is very, very long; just reading the first 'The Nine Stages of American Autogenocide' (I haven't had the energy for the second, 'De-Population of the World Is Real') took me about an hour, an eternity in web-time. The very fact that I actually bothered to spend that hour tells you that this might be worth your time to read, though.

Crow details a process of silent - and, she feels, deliberate - extermination of America's poor and disenfranchised minorities; essentially, genocide not with gas chambers and mass graves, but with mass poverty and destructive social programs, designed with the purpose of thinning out the herd so there will be fewer 'useless eaters' around (useless because the dumb labor, all the elite feels them to be good for, is all being automated away.)

Benjamin Fulford: Project Camelot

2008-02-17T02:44:00.000-08:00

Originally posted 16 Feb 2008
Loosely translated from the original Japanese 17 Feb 2008
Crossposted to social.infowars.com

The other day I was visited by a couple who came all the way from America to meet me. They were there to interview me for Project Camelot, a peace activism group.

They also claimed to messengers from the secret government. I talked about the problem of suppressed energy technologies, how clean energy technologies have already allowed the construction of bases on the moon (ed: that might be a mistranslation), and then started discussing matters related to space. If we've got that much money, then we should already have dealt with the world's problems, one way or another. When people are starving to death, that's no time to be thinking about space.

http://www.projectcamelot.org/benjamin_fulford.html

Benjamin Fulford: For the Arrival of the Age of Peace

2008-02-17T02:19:00.000-08:00

Loosely translated from the original Japanese 17 Feb 2008
Crossposted to social.infowars.com

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon has changed its fundamental strategy. From now on, it appears that they're putting increased importance on soft power, using their power for such things as economic support and nation building. Maybe they've finally figured out that the world's problems will never be solved by the old ways.

The Pentagon's also created a new African headquarters. It looks like China is probably going to start aiding Africa as well; the sense of an impending crisis is shared by all, it seems.

Meanwhile China's created a new Energy Ministry. I'd like to think that this means they're throwing their weight behind the effort to create an economy that doesn't need oil. The Japanese government has also been irresponsibly neglectful when it comes to hydrogen energy, magnets (ed: closest I could come, not sure what he's talking about there) and other such energy technologies that have been sealed away; all of these should be opened up. It's crazy to seal the development of mankind for the purpose of preserving political power and influence.

Chomsky: An Agent of the CIA?

2008-02-14T07:06:00.001-08:00

It's hard to know what to believe sometimes. Not too long ago I read an article that raised the question of whether or not Timothy Leary was a CIA agent (when I say 'raised the question', I'm not being facetious: the author himself wasn't sure what to believe, and the result is an article that really makes you think. Definitely recommended.)

And now, through a link posted by a friend on the Infowars SNS, comes this damning denunciation of Noam Chomsky: Controlled Asset of the New World Order.

Now, accusations like this fly at almost everyone. Even Ron Paul and Alex Jones have been accused of being part of the New World Order, though the evidence is usually pretty shaky, based more on paranoia than on any solid factual basis. It's inevitable, in a world where secret societies - intelligence agencies, crime syndicates, fraternal brotherhoods, and other sub-species - wield so much behind-the-scenes power. In the end, though, the only test that can be relied upon is an evaluation of actions and words, and Chomsky fails that test. From the article:

Since 9-11, he has steadfastly refused to discuss the evidence of government complicity and prior knowledge. Furthermore he claims that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg Committee, and Trilateral Commission are "nothing organizations." When critiquing poverty, he never mentions the Federal Reserve and their role in manipulating the cycle of debt.

Similarly, he claims the CIA was never a rogue organization and is an innocent scapegoat; that JFK was killed by the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; that the obvious vote fraud in 2004 did not occur; and that peak oil is real and good for humanity.

What he does advocate is population control, gun control, support for U.N.E.S.C.O., and the end of national sovereignty in favor of a one-world government under the UN. In other words, the major goals of the New World Order.

Chomsky's role in propaganda paradigm is much like that of Karl Marx: to present a false liberation ideology which actually supports the desired solutions of the elite. Marx pointed out the inequalities and brutality of capitalism and then advocated a one world bank, army, and government with the abolition of private property and religion; in other words, the major goals known of the New World Order.

Leveraging Social Networks for Liberation

2008-02-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

Alex Jones is one smart cookie. The man understands the internet better than a good number of journalists; just witness the way he gives away all (that's all, as in all 18) of his movies away for free on google video, and winks at copies being traded over bittorrent. He knows the corporate media will never, ever promote his work, because every person who encounters it is smacked awake like a hungover frat boy who's sleeping in on an exam day. Sure, he sells his wares through his various websites, but once again he understands that what you're really paying for isn't the information per se, it's the quality with which it's presented and the speed with which it's available.

And now, he's launched a new website that's built along social networks, social.infowars.com. It's got all the bells and whistles, with groups and friends lists and blogs and messaging, a veritable petri dish for the revolution. Go on over, sign yourself up, and stop just reading shit and pounding at your keyboard with tears of frustration stinging your eyes: put that anger to use and get involved! I'm already there, of course (taking my own advice, naturally) and I'll be cross-posting much (not all, but a lot) of what I post here at my new infowars blog.

Benjamin Fulford: Open the Door on Sealed Alternative Energy

2008-02-14T06:14:00.000-08:00

14 Feb 2008

The other day I was talking with a researcher who works with solar batteries. When I asked him why it was that solar batteries weren't more widely distributed, the reason he gave me was, "Because silicon's expensive." But the raw material for silicon is nothing but sand! However you think of it, pressure is being applied to pull the competition down.

The steep jump in the price of oil, a monopolized energy source, isn't going to stop. This year the price finally exceeded USD100/bl. Compared to the USD10/bl basis of just ten years ago, the price has jumped up by a factor of ten.

If the oil industry isn't made, one way or another to give some concession, the advancement of mankind is bound to slow down.

Benjamin Fulford, 13 Feb 2008

2008-02-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

On the American Presidential Election

There's a massive difference between public opinion polls and the results of the presidential primaries. American democracy has been mutilated by electronic voting machines.

At the same time in California, in whichever district you look at the Republican candidates are exactly the same. In farming districts as well as wealthy areas, in districts dominated by completely different racial groups, the results have been too unnatural to believe.

If electronic voting machines are introduced to Japan as well, it'll lead to a bad, dangerous situation.

In America it looks like the battling candidates are following a script that's been written for them. And something unusual seems to have happened to Ron Paul, the candidate who received such tremendous support from the internet. Up until recently he was persistently claiming, "We need a new investigation into 9/11," however, recently he abruptly began to declare on television that "I don't think the government caused 9/11." This change in his speech is extremely unnatural, so much so that it looks like nothing so much as that he's being made to say this. He's also more or less pulled out of the race. He's probably either had under serious pressure or threat, nothing else really makes sense.

100th Post

2008-02-13T17:25:00.000-08:00

What a long strange trip it's been. I've been blogging for years now, in fits and starts ... you can see links to everything I've ever written in the sidebar, and man, have I ever come a long way, mentally. Almost every opinion I've ever held has changed, drastically, especially over the past few months. People who know me well have been nothing less than shocked by the transformation that's taken place inside my head.

I don't really know why I keep coming back to it. For the most part it's toiling in obscurity ... but I've never really written anything with the explicit aim of being read. Even when I was a kid, I had the writing bug. I used to spend hours, every day, writing science fiction stories on the family computer, and with no internet the only people who read them were my parents (who were generally baffled by them), my teachers (when I wrote the stories for English class, and they were likewise baffled), and sometimes my friends (who liked them, but then I only showed them the good ones.) At any rate, I suppose being read by a few people a day is better than being read by none.

I've been writing for years, off and on, and I expect I'll be writing for years to come. I'll probably be writing when I'm on my deathbed. And maybe by then I'll have figured out why I do it....

Benjamin Fulford, 12 Feb 2008

2008-02-12T05:51:00.000-08:00

Guide to the New World Order

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has hastily offered support to the idea of Japan, India, Brazil and Africa becoming standing members of the UN Security Council.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3221860.ece

[Once again I'm giving a different link from what was in the original post. Fulford linked to this article at the Mainichi Shinbun, which is of course in Japanese.]

Now why is it that only now is this offer, postponed for 6 decades, being made?

As expected, Westerners cannot help but accept that their exclusive control of the world has come to an end. And maybe there's just a little impatience as well, due to the collapse of the American dollar.

I've got a different plan. I think it would be best to divide the world into seven regions. 1) China, 2) Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, etc 3) India, 4) the Islamic World, 5) Europe, 6) Africa, and 7) North and South America.

These seven regions would have the right to veto within their own regions, decided by majority. If there are any problems they can be decided in the International Court. Also, a single central bank for all seven regions would be established. If this were done various global problems could be deftly addressed.

At any rate, due to the collapsing dollar, and the rise of the Age of Asia, the way the world moves is changing.

Benjamin Fulford, 11 Feb 2008

2008-02-10T17:58:00.001-08:00

G7 Draws to a Close, and It's All Complete Nonsense

The Tokyo G7 conference a few days ago regarding the global economy was, I think, complete nonsense.

In the first place, without China or Russia participating, it just doesn't have the clout it used to. The functionality of the G7 structure itself is impaired.

If the G7 is the 'place to discuss real intentions', their talk should be more pragmatic. For instance, "The reason the country called 'America' is collapsing is because the should have saved and exported more", or "A substitute for oil should be quickly liberalized."

Also, "The American dollar's function as the reserve currency is dying", is something I'd also like them to accept. A unified world currency is necessary. However, how that currency is made is important, as is ensuring that it's distribution is open and transparent. The currency system we have now, through which powerful people manage the world in secrecy, is a cancer upon the Earth.

Benjamin Fulford, 09 Feb 2008

2008-02-09T04:16:00.000-08:00

What the Hell Are the Americans Scheming, Cutting Those Undersea Cables?

The news is saying that nine undersea internet cables [ed: link added by me, not part of the original post] have been cut in the area of Asia and the Near and Middle East.

The official explanation is that a ship's anchor is the source of the problem, but with nine cables in separate places being cut almost simultaneously, it's strange now matter how you think of it.

I've got to say this looks like the American's are scheming to do something, don't you think? Iran is going to be opening up an oil bourse selling in non-US dollars pretty soon, which Saudi Arabia might use too, and maybe there's a relationship with this.

With the American dollar losing it's status as the world's pivotal currency, a cornered America is playing a childish prank. This is the kind of thing countries occupied by the criminal American organization understand all too well.

The Damaged Cables

2008-02-09T04:04:00.000-08:00

Cryptogon generously provides us with this map of the five damaged cables.

Yep, definitely done by an anchor. No question.

Oh, and apropos of nothing, I've got some farmland on Baffin Island for you, if you're interested.

Snowing in Tokyo

2008-02-09T03:59:00.001-08:00

It is now snowing for the 4th time in the last two weeks, and man is it ever coming down. This is not normal weather for Tokyo, not at this time of year.

The next time someone mentions 'global warming' to me, I may punch them.

Gloating

2008-02-08T06:11:00.000-08:00

As someone who smokes more than is good for him - and enjoys the filthy habit more or less unapologetically - please permit me a moment of malicious retributive glee.

Restaurants in Mississippi may start banning fat people.

After enduring the smoking ban, that forced me out into the cold in order to have a smoke - a ban enforced by overzealous health fascists who even banned tarp-covered, gas-lamp-heated patios as being 'indoor' areas (de facto smoking areas that anyone from Toronto will dimly recall sprouting like mushrooms in the winter following the smoking ban, only to be culled by control freak health inspectors enraged that the spirit of the law was being skillfully evaded) - along with the po-faced hand-waving of non-smokers whenever they had the misfortune to walk by me on the street ... well, let me just say this:

I have for some time been of the opinion that if you don't want to pay for my emphysema? Hell, that's cool. I don't want to pay for your adult-onset diabetes. Moreover, if my smoke offends your sensitive nostrils, well, lard-bottom, your cellulite offends my delicate eyes, and there's no inherent reason why your aesthetics should prevail over mine. And as we're seeing, the health nazis seem to agree.

Not so great now that they're are after you, now is it? Worse, really. All I have to endure is an hour or so of mild discomfort and accompanying irritability, between parking my ass at the table and stepping out for a smoke. You won't even be allowed to eat in public. Enjoy your smoke-free TV dinners, butterball; I know I'll enjoy not having to look at your fat ass (I could not look, true, but let's face it: not looking is as hard as pulling one's eyes away from a train wreck.)

Oh, I know shouldn't gloat. What's being done to you fatasses is no more ethical than what's been done to us smokers. In truth, I'd much rather we could live and let live, but in the meantime, I really just can't help but laugh at your ass. Because you know what's more embarrassing than lighting up and being told that it's a no-smoking zone? Walking into the Denny's with your wife and kids, and having the manager step forward with an apologetic look on his face and a tape measure in his hand.

Benjamin Fulford, 07 Feb 2008

2008-02-08T05:55:00.000-08:00

Akiro Ootani's Goodbye Party

At the end of last year the famous media producer Akiro Ootani died; recently, I attended his goodbye party.

He was responsible for many famous TV shows, and after retirement he made various plays about the Meiji Restoration in order to encourage politicians. The actors concentrated on members of the Liberal Democratic Party, and every time I was given a role, too.

Right up until the last moment he used every bit of his life force and his money for the sake of all.

They're saying the cause of death was suicide, but numerous riddles remain.

People like him, who devote themselves to their fellow man, are, I think, treasures of all mankind.

British Army Training the Taliban

2008-02-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

Good god. The British were planning to build a training camp for the Taliban. You'll have to scroll down a bit ... for some silly reason the top of the page is crowded with links.

And Then There Were Five....

2008-02-06T08:42:00.000-08:00

I won't add to the growing storm of speculation over what, exactly, is going on with those undersea cables, or why they're being cut. I'll just say this: five cables makes it pretty goddamn obvious that this is intentional.

Smoking Mirrors

2008-02-06T06:35:00.000-08:00

I usually link to individual posts, but ever once in a while I find someone so outstanding that I just have to say, go read everything you can. This guy (or gal, but the authorial voice is very male) writes like an righteously enraged Kung Fu master of the English language, a blind swordsman who's drifted into a corrupt town, had a look around, and is now taking names and kicking ass out of pure disgust with the gangsters who control the weak, frightened, and pathetic creatures that scurry out of the way every time the capo and his goons go on their rounds.

I present to you Les Visibles, the nom de guerre of the mind behind Smoking Mirrors.

Now git over there. Nothing I write here can be half so interesting.

Benjamin Fulford, 05 Feb 2008

2008-02-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

Is America Going to Attack Japan with an Earthquake Weapon?

According to information from the Inagawa Gang's leadership [ed: that's a massive gang operating in Tokyo, with a membership of 5100. Link to Wikipedia page.], America is threatening to hit Kanagawa with an earthquake around the end of the month. After that, in March or April, it seems they're saying the attack will escalate to hit Chiba and other areas around Tokyo.

In the event that this is carried out, although I've urged restraint up until now, I'll call upon the Asian secret society to execute their plan to assassinate members of the Illuminati.

Somehow, for the sake of everyone on Earth, the murderer's in the American military must be stopped as soon as possible.

Earthquake weapons might sound a little crazy, but there have been rumors of something called a scalar weapon, originally developed by Nikola Tesla, which can trigger seismic activity. A search turns up lots of interesting links.

Fractal Africa

2008-02-05T08:40:00.000-08:00

Wow. I really should keep up with those TEDtalks videos.

This one is just fascinating: Ron Eglash, an 'ethno-mathematician', spent a year traveling Africa, where he discovered that almost every African village is constructed, quite consciously, according to precise fractal algorithms, repeating all the way from the village as a whole down to the arrangement of pots in a room. And it's not just their villages: their art and even their divination practices use fractal patterning.

I remember when I was in uni, I was arguing with one of the foreign development kids, and insisting that Africa (well, sub-Saharan Africa) never had a 'civilization', exactly. I was really just trying to push her buttons, but man, what a thick-skulled idiot I can be.

The Funky Guerrilla War Being Fought By Paris' Army of Hard Truth Soldiers

2008-02-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows anything about me knows I've never been much into hiphop. Oh, it's not that I dislike it - maturity has brought me a long way from my teenage hatred of anything that wasn't played on electric guitars - it's just that I never really got into it. White boys listening to hiphop always struck me as kind of silly, especially when they got right into it and started dressing up like gangstas and tryin' to front like they was from the hood, know wha' I'm sayin'? Metal, punk, trance, drum 'n' bass ... things like that have always been more to my taste. The closest I ever got to rap was Rage Against the Machine.

I could respect hiphop though, at least the older stuff, Public Enemy and Tupac and Biggy; the world play is right up there with Tennyson and Walt Whitman, and you could tell, when you listened to it, that it was real, music that came straight from the heart. The more modern stuff, the kind that came to dominate over the past ten years or so, is an emaciated shadow of what was being made in the 90s, real artists replaced by interchangeable pod people rapping hollowly about getting high, getting rich and fucking ... soulless muzak, corrupted by money and subverted to serve corporate interests. I could see that even without being much of a fan of the form; the same thing happened to every genre since the first vinyl record was printed, in a cycle that's grown as familiar and predictable as the passage of the seasons: raw and fresh from the streets and the clubs, a bloom in popularity, maturity, and a dwindling into artistic irrelevance as the profit motive sucks out the soul of the movement and leaves nothing but the empty shell of appearance and recycled melodies.

Well, ~~that could be changing~~ that's changed. A few days ago I was listening to the Alex Jones show and he played What Would You Do by Paris, of Guerilla Funk. Now this guy is hardly a newcomer - he's been making records since '91 - but if guessing you've probably never heard of him. It's not because he's untalented; it's because he refused to sell his soul to a label, trading truth for money. As you might guess from his presence on the Alex Jones show, this guy understands the New World Order, and for well over a decade now he's been using his talent to fight it the only way it can be fought, by bringing truth to the people.

9/11 reinvigorated him and has him, in his own words, "Spittin' cyanide from each and every verse." And not just him; he's got a whole crew now, on his Guerilla Funk label, mostly new faces (well, so far as I can tell), but counting in their ranks Public Enemy. More soldiers in the information insurgency, a movement that's burgeoning now, beginning to take on the look of something truly historical, truly momentous. Musicians, artists, writers, bloggers, academics, political activists, youtubers ... the rョVOLution is boiling up from every node of the world's wide Web, and it cannot be stopped any more than a volcano can be plugged or an earthquake stilled.

So do yourself a favor. Go to the Pirate Bay and download yourself the Guerilla Funk collection. If you like it, buy the CD. Even if you don't, give it a listen. It's some inspiring shit.

Mass March in Bogota

2008-02-04T19:19:00.000-08:00

This is a mass march in Bogota, organized using facebook and other social networking tools.

I have no idea why specifically they were marching, but this is the kind of thing that brings a nasty smile to my face.

The internet hates tyranny. I hope this picture gives the pathocracy nightmares.

Benjamin Fulford, 04 Feb 2008

2008-02-04T07:42:00.000-08:00

You've probably never heard of this guy, right? Here's the Cole's Notes: dude's been living in Japan since the early 80s, long enough that he speaks the language like a native. For the last half of the 90s he capitalized that by becoming the national bureau chief for Forbes magazine, a position he left when he was told he couldn't publish a story connecting government corruption to the yakuza. He continued pursuing the story on his own, eventually getting enough material for a book, and then - just before he could publish it - was clued in to what was really going on by a member of the Japanese Imperial family. The story expands in scope when, in the aftermath of confronting the former Japanese finance minister over his selling out of the Japanese banking system to the Rockefellers, he's contacted by someone who claims to be a ninja (!!!) and offered either a) a position in the New World Order or b) death. Right on the heels of that, he's contacted by a representative of a Chinese secret society that dates back to the Mongol invasion, who offers him their protection if he agrees to act as their go-between, ambassador as it were between the amusingly misnamed New World Order of the West and the Newer World Order of the East. This secret society, a sort of more-ethical Eastern counterpart to the Illuminati, had a fire lit under their pants after SARS, which they interpreted as either a test run, or a failed deployment of, an ethnic-specific bioweapon. Okay, so it's a pretty incredible story, yeah. But you know, the guy got an interview with David Rockefeller not too long ago, and he doesn't hand those out like candy. If you're interested in the rest of the story, everything else you want to know (or, well, can know) is archived here. All of this serves as a preview to a project I'm going to try and hold myself to for, well, as long as I can: English translations of Fulford's blog posts (which are in Japanese). I do this with no permission, so I hope he doesn't mind (and if I translate anything wrong, well, please, correct me in the comments. I'm not proud). Anyhow, here goes nothing:

About Those Chinese Gyoza

Those Chinese gyoza are probably the CIA's underhanded dealings.

One thing the West fears above all else is Japan and China becoming good buddies. In this case the use of agricultural chemicals at the Chinese gyoza factory can't be confirmed. It's clear that in order to worsen Sino-Japanese relations, there was some dirty business involving overseas authorities.

Now, of course there are some questions of hygiene management on the Chinese side, but the way this is being covered on TV is overt propaganda. In practice there are all sorts of pretty serious problems with American agricultural products too - agricultural chemicals, BSE, etc - but the coverage in the mass media is completely different.

Also, there's been information that there's been an extremely high number of chemtrails in Southern Japan, and this is probably related to weather modifications aimed at China that have been partly responsible for the heavy snowfall there. That's a just a guess, but I can't help but make it.

The American and European secret societies are getting desperate to obstruct Asia's rise, set to begin on the 8th of August.

On the Governer of Tougoku

He's definitely an individualistic guy, and it looks like he's got a variety of things in his past, but he's not your normal politician who's been brainwashed by his educational background. He thinks things through using common sense. Hence he seems to lack common sense, by the standards of the current organization.

Present day Japan is divided into Tokyo and everywhere else. It angers the rest of the country when Tokyo is given too much attention. Giving some thought to the rest of the country, the economic foundations of Japan should be fundamentally changed.

I've met a lot of politicians in the course of my data gathering, and this guy feels different.

On the Composite Photograph from the Skies of Okinawa

Thanks for all that information rushing in at once, after I posted on that strange photograph from Okinawa the other day!

The picture was sent to me from a politician, and as soon as I saw it I saw right through it, figuring it was probably a fake, but I decided to get your opinions. What I mean is, I wanted to see the Net's 'photo investigation power' at work. Everyone pooled their resources, and the photo was immediately revealed for the utter bullshit it was. Actually it wasn't from Okinawa or recent, just bullshit. Sorry for the confusion. Nevertheless and meeting my expectations, not one of you took it for the 'Hand of God'.

From now on I will of course be very careful in verifying the source and credibility of any information I receive, but whenever I get anything wrong please correct me immediately. At that time I want to pass along the most accurate information I can, so I'll be using this method.

The picture he's talking about is this one:

I think it looks rather like God giving mankind a goatse.

Life After People

2008-02-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

I don't have a TV, and haven't for several months now. To be honest, it's not something I miss: most of what's on is crap, and on the odd occasion when there's something I actually want to watch, well, that's what bittorrent is for, right?

So a couple of days ago I downloaded the History Channel's 'Life After People', and last night, with some time to kill after work, I watched it. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth, the kind you get after you click one of those 'don't click these link' posts that leads to Tub Girl getting shat on by Goatse.

It starts out by magicking six and a half billion people off the planet. What happened to us is not explained; everyone just sort of disappears. Who knows, maybe we all transcended into hyperdimensional demigods, maybe Jesus decided we were all born-agains at heart and raptured us all up to the Kingdom of Heaven, maybe everyone just underwent spontaneous combustion. In the real world, of course, something more mundane would cause our mass disappearance, like cometary bombardment, nuclear armageddon, or the ultimate war plague.

Everything that follows in the History Channel's sick little giga-snuff flick is irredeemably tainted by this sweeping of the mass extinction of mankind under the rug. If the extinction was due to a nuclear spasm, then the every urban environment would be well fried, making the subsequent hour and a half of lovingly detailed exposition on the gradual decay of man-made structures somewhat pointless, as those structures would be, for the most part, gone at the same time we are.

If the species succumbed to biowarfare, the faults aren't quite so egregious, but one part - fairly early on - sticks out, in which the fate of mankind's pets is discussed (again, if it's nuclear war, the pets, like the buildings, are gone along with us.) It's mentioned that the dogs would have to scrounge for food in the city, though what, exactly, it is that they'll be eating is left unsaid. Well, to start with at least, the answer to that is obvious: they'll be eating human cadavers.

Most of the movie, like I said, comes down to an extended meditation on the decay of our buildings, our bridges, our monuments, and our cities, as the elements and the biosphere conspire over centuries to swallow everything every built by humans. The main point seems to be that nothing is permanent, and that should we disappear, every trace of our presence on this planet would be utterly erased in a geological eyeblink even shorter than the one that we called written history (except for Mount Rushmore, which David Brin points out may well last hundreds of thousands of years, carved as it is into solid granite. Then again, hundreds of thousands of years is still pretty short measured against billennia....) You might think that's rather obvious - ashes to ashes, and all that - but the producers didn't seem to think so. Indeed, the documentary seemed to positively exult in the way that nature would reclaim our cities.

One creepy moment near the end really sticks with me. One of the contributors, a cadaverous white-haired geriatric with the bright eyes of a mad scientist, his hands fluttering about like some sort of overstimulated British poof, enthusing about his vision of vines creeping over the Manhattan's skyscrapers as the forest eats the city. After that I had to ask, was this just a documentary? Or was it really extinctionist propaganda?

Hell, don't take my word for it. You've got an internet connection, and too much time on your hands (or you wouldn't be reading this). Watch it yourself.

Privatopia

2008-01-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

About a week ago John Robb at Global Guerillas posted a truly frightening little essay called Privatopia, in which he considers what the US might look like under a fully privatized, corporate regime. Robb's not known for his optimism, and he's true to form here: the vision he presents is one in which the entire US government (along with every government around the world) has been sold off at fire-sale prices to multinational corporate interests, with what's left behind mainly functioning to service the national debt. At one point, he mentions that the privatization is popularly but 'incorrectly' termed "The Great Theft".

He goes on to paint a picture in which most of the country is continuously paralyzed by riots and civil disobedience, controlled by a mixture of surveillance technology and mercenary security forces meting out summary justice to criminals (empowered to do so by automated court systems that give their verdicts in seconds, based on evidence collected from the surveillance network.)

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would've positively lusted for a future like this: grim, dangerous, gritty, straight out of the cyberpunk novels I feasted on as a teenager. Now, older and, if not wiser, at least more jaded, the prospect of the future John Robb sees is just deeply, viscerally terrifying. Give it a read, though, because he shows exactly what the New World Order has in store for all of us.

Ron Paul's Bright Future As a Martyr

2008-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Assassinating Ron Paul would be a really bad idea.

I can see why the elites might find the idea attractive, and - according to Daniel Estulin - are giving it serious consideration. The man wants to dismantle the IRS and the Federal Reserve, the two main pillars of banker control in the US. Loosing those bonds would remove America from New World Order influence as effectively as Ghandi freed India from the British. Beyond that, he'd pull the US back from it's pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would effectively defuse the Third World War they'd been planning in order to consolidate their control over the globe. Ron Paul in the Oval Office would be an unmitigated disaster for their interests ... one from which they might never recover, given various trajectories in technology and the economic and social trends that are being driven by those developing technologies.

But you know what? As bad as Ron Paul might be for them, his assassination would be worse. Over the past several months, a networked political movement has grown around Paul as though a seed crystal were dropped in a prepared solution. The network's composed of an incredible diversity of groups, splinter movements and fringe elements and perhaps most strikingly, a generous helping of previously apathetic non-voting independents, people who have nothing in common save a disgust with traditional politics and entrenched policies. What they want isn't Ron Paul, it's to decisively squelch the fascist puppet government being put in place, before it's too late. Ron Paul is only a focal point for this movement because he's the only politician who wants to do this.

So let's say they go ahead and give the green light, and by bullet, bomb, or 'accident' Paul is shuffled off the political stage. Well, the movement would be thrown into chaos immediately after. But that movement is a creature of the internet, a social network that can coalesce around anything, be it a political candidate or an ideological martyr ... and can do so with blinding speed.

Paul is a great man. That someone as apparently morally pure and benevolent can even exist in this sad and twisted age is an astounding thing, one that is hard to believe until one looks, and sees, a man who is as without sin as any saint of old. Men like Paul are as rare as Ghandi. Alive, he would be a competent administrator and a popular reformer, one who would go down in the history books as one of the greatest presidents the American republic has ever enjoyed. Dead, and the social network that's chosen him as an anchoring point might turn him into a figure of religious adoration. The freedom movement would then become a religion, one as toxic to the roots of the global order as Christianity was to the Roman Empire.

Can they look that far ahead? I suspect they can, for I can, and I'm but one man. That killing Paul would turn him into a martyr is surely a possibility that has occurred to them, and with any luck the risk of that happening is enough to stay their hand. But you know? I don't think it will be. I have very little confidence that Paul will ever sit in the Oval Office; as he approaches the goal, as the movement around him swells, so will panic at the top spread. They will only be able to take so much before the pressure grows intolerable, and, not knowing what to do, they have Paul killed.

That might buy them a year or three, but in the long run it will seal their fates more permanently than a Paul presidency ever could.

A WikiConstitution

2008-01-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

Ah, a long silence there. This time I have a good excuse, though: I was wandering about in Cambodia for a week.

So, I've been thinking more about the idea of applying a wiki spirit to the creation of law. This is unlikely to happen soon, not down at the level of criminal law or anything else directly enforceable. But that doesn't mean the electorate of the planet can't start to get some practice in, and starting right now. What I'm thinking of is an open project to enumerate a sort of meta-constitution, a document that could be used as a model for constitutions all over the planet.

Now, the probability of some form of world government coming about sometime in the next century, and sooner rather than later, is hard to ignore. Multinational corporations, NGOs, and the UN have almost completed their coalescence into a meta-government of which nation-states are reduced to the status of less-than-sovereign duchies. This need not be a bad thing, and indeed is historically inevitable one way or another: once civilization started happening, the tendency was for larger and larger regions synergetic regions (cities, states, kingdoms and empires) to assert themselves. To predict that eventually one would rise to encompass the entire world is a very straightforward extrapolation of the historical record.

Of course, the first form of global government is likely to be a very bad thing indeed. The thing that is currently emerging is fascist, exploitative, wildly unequal and undemocratic, more like the Assyrian Empire than the United States of America that it will be superseding. It will be as disastrous for America as it is for everyone else subjected to it.

But it needn't stay that way. One possibility is that the internal contradictions of the first global empire will cause it to fall; if the fall is not too bad (economic collapse, rather than a nuclear spasm) something new, and hopefully better, might rise to replace it. Another possibility is that the citizens will reformat it themselves, demanding the imposition of true global democracy to accompany global corporations, global armies, and global bureaucracies.

A global democracy - a demosphere - would need a constitution, or at least a meta-constitution, something that would provide a limiting framework for the sorts of constitutions member-states are allowed to form. Something to enumerate the rights - and the duties - of people and organizations everywhere on the planet. And who better to write that meta-constitution than the people who will live under it? Throw open the doors for a year, a decade, or better yet, forever; allow anyone who wants to add or edit any passage they wish, with the officially adopted portion being that which consists of passages receiving the highest percentage of 'yes' votes.

Now, contrast this with the closest existing thing to a global meta-constitution, the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights. It's filled with a lot of very nice language about freedoms to this and freedom of that, all rather pleasing if dull to read. There is nothing there to immediately excite distress, though buried at the bottom is an item that allows any and all of those human rights to be revoked if they conflicted in any way with the UN ... an unsurprising condition, given that the document was composed by a small group of thinkers acting at the behest of powerful men, entirely without the consultation of the people it was meant (symbolically, at least) to apply to.

Now, just creating such a thing wouldn't, in and of itself, guarantee it's enforcement. Not directly, at least, and not at first. For a very long time - years, perhaps, but more likely decades - it would be nothing but some pages on the web. But the project could grow, perhaps to the point of millions around the world actively collaborating on the project, with billions more aware of it (and free to jump in whenever and wherever they felt.) The mere act of participating would raise consciousness about our rights in responsibilities in a global state, and that would in turn lend the project a moral weight that would eventually make it impossible to ignore, a global constitutionalist movement that one way or another would need to be confronted. Eventually, it could become the central text of an ideology of freedom and rule of law that pervades the world.

The Right to Keep and Bear Recording Devices

2007-12-23T00:57:00.000-08:00

Throughout history, there have been technologies that are so fundamental to power relationships within a society that their possession and use has been an inevitable bone of contention. The most well-known example of that is firearms. Being in many ways the ultimate personal weapon, a great equalizer that nullifies any advantages of physical size or strength, gun rights are argued endlessly. Some feel that the possession of guns by private individuals is too dangerous, as it raises the lethality of interpersonal conflict, and thus argue for gun use to be restricted to the police and the military; others argue that widespread firearms ownership is the best protection against criminal behaviour and state oppression. In some countries, with weak central governments (or none, as in Somalia), everyone is allowed to possess a weapon more or less by default. In contrast, some countries with strong central governments (Japan, England), have banned them outright. The US has a right to keep and bear arms written into it's constitution (though that right has been steadily eroded, as the central government became more powerful.)

This is not a new battle; pre-gunpowder societies saw similar argument and diversity regarding the use and ownership of all manner of weapons. In some places, everyone was allowed to walk about openly armed; in others, the possession of a weapon was strictly limited to professional warrior castes and nobility. And once again, in general, the strength of central government was a good predictor of the degree to which weapons were restricted.

In terms of the effects of personal combat systems on society, firearms have likely come about as far as they ever will. Great improvements in accuracy might well be made (smart rounds, for instance); completely different propulsion systems used which increase muzzle velocity (say, electromagnetically instead of chemically); but the overall principle of a handheld weapon that makes one human more or less equal to another in combat potential, regardless of physical size or strength, is unlikely to change.

Personal recording devices, on the other hand, are just beginning to make their presence really felt. From their first appearance in the 20th century - expensive, delicate, their use restricted more or less to professionals and hobbyists - they have no proliferated to the point where practically everyone has a digital camera, often built into their phone. Technologies such as the eyeFi are allowing pictures to be instantly uploaded to the web, viewable by anyone. We are entering the age of the participatory panopticon, where everyone is watched by everyone.

Some see this as a dangerous attack on liberty, as they believe the constant surveillance will be exploited by states and corporations in order to build a perfect tyranny where everything - and everybody - is watched, tracked, tagged and thus controlled. They are not wrong to fear this; it is almost a certainty that such surveillance systems are being prepared right now. In some parts of the world, tyranny will be a very real possibility ... especially if the citizenry are not in possession of their own recording devices.

The reasoning is simple. If the people are watching, recording, and sharing information as much or more than the government, it becomes very difficult for the government to engage in criminal behaviour (which surely any attempt to tyrannize, anywhere, should rightly be considered.) Just as a citizen breaking a law will be instantly caught, so an official violating someone's human rights will be instantly known. Tyrannies can't survive such openness, relying as they do on the complicit ignorance of their victim populations.

The conflict over use of personal recording devices has already began. If you doubt this, just try walking around and airport taking lots of pictures. I have no doubt that it will intensify greatly, as more and larger areas become designated 'no-photography' zones. Watch for the signs to proliferate over the next few years, like no-smoking signs did through the 80s and 90s.

(You know, sometimes I wonder if an empty no sign might not be the most apt symbol for the corporate fascism that seems to be the prevailing form of governance at the outset of the 21st century. Someone should make an internet map of number of no-X signs per city block. I'll bet you could correlate that to fascism pretty nicely.)

Conversely, areas where freedom prevails will be those in which sousevailling citizens vigilantly watch their masters from below, immediately punishing even the slightest infraction against human rights, and thus maintaining a healthy balance between rule of law and protection of rights and freedoms. Just as America preserved its famous freedom through two hundred years by enshrining the right to keep and bear arms in its constitution, an inalienable right to record and disseminate whatever one pleases will be an invaluable protection in the future. Freedom of speech, yes, but also freedom of sight.

The dichotomy between freedom and tyranny is closely bound to secrecy and transparency, which are respectively anathema to the one and a necessity to the other. If you want to keep freedom alive in the twentieth century, you're going to have to fight for your right to point a camera at the ones who want to take it away.

WikiLaw

2007-12-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

I've thought a lot about how democracy can be improved by utilizing the internet, and one of the main ideas that's always guided me is that in a modern, educated society, citizens should vote, not for people, but for ideas. In other words, citizens should decide the law directly, rather than delegating representatives to do it for them ... those representatives, being human (and moreover, that particular type of human who is attracted to power like a moth towards a flame) will inevitably represent their own interests rather than those of their constituents.

So when I saw this article, the light bulb floating above my head starting blinking like mad:

MOB JURISPRUDENCE When the New Zealand police force said they were open to suggestions about how to rewrite national policing laws, they meant it. In September, they posted the 1958 Police Act online and invited Kiwis and non-Kiwis alike to visit the site and type in their own revisions to the law — extending the concept of “Wiki”-style collaborative writing from encyclopedias to democracy.

This is a brilliant idea, and I'm convinced it could be taken much further than simply culling an advisory document, as the Kiwis used it. A wiki is the ultimate democratic forum: not only can you say whatever you want, you can edit what other people say, expunging their contributions entirely. Now, this is very similar to how bills are created inside legislatures: elected representatives and their staffs add and remove clauses and subclauses until a workable compromise is found, at which point it's put to a vote. The wiki platform could allow this process to be expanded to include the entirety of the citizenry, and in so doing, lead to much better laws. As the saying goes, with enough eyes all bugs are shallow; were the creation of laws to be open-sourced, the final products would be more acceptable to the people who will have to live with them.

Downloading and Resistance

2007-11-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

The corporatocracy relies on its propaganda organs to fight this part of the counterinsurgency operation, but the web of lies they attempt to weave in their subjects' heads wither with just a single exposure to truth. That is so elementary a principle that it almost qualifies as a natural law: truth cancels lies, but lies cannot cancel truth. Still, once you've woken up, and realized with growing horror the depth of the deception in which you've been buried, there's the question of, "Well, what the hell should I actually do, now that I know all of this?"

In truth, all sorts of things: spreading the word to friends and family is a start, as is going out in public and distributing flyers, leaflets, handbills, DVDs. You can start a blog, get a youtube channel, start podcasting or do whatever you can to get in on the production end of the infowar. Anything is good, because the infowar - the process by which people are woken up to the fact that the free world has been occupied by stealth by a consortium of banks and corporations - is half the battle.

But only half. It wasn't long before those under Soviet domination ceased to believe a damn thing their authorities told them, but by the time they woke up it hardly mattered, so total was the control matrix that had been built around them.

Well, then, what to do? Political activism is a possibility, but in the end marches and protests don't accomplish much: the media ignores them, so the public ignores them, which means the corporations can ignore them, and thus nothing changes. The only exception being if there's a riot, in which case they're all over it like flies on corpses: it make the protesters look bad, the violence obscuring whatever point the protesters were trying to make, and it lets the media show images of imperial stormtroopers restoring order with tear gas and rubber bullets, which reminds the populace of who's in charge.

Armed insurgency is an attractive option for some, but it's a futile path, even worse than rioting. Inevitably branded as terrorism, it only serves to drive the public further into the arms of the state, justifying greater revocation of liberty and centralization of power. This, combined with the fact that there's basically no way in hell a ragtag band of insurgents can best the perfection of technology and technique of the military-industrial complex, makes any attempt to resort to violence utterly wrongheaded.

Kevin at Cryptogon has a fascinating essay where he takes up just this subject, and suggests a meaningful way in which war can be waged against the corporatocracy: militant IP piracy.

Who know that downloading music, movies, and software without actually paying for it could be a revolutionary act? Obvious in retrospect, really, but still. I'm going to enjoy expanding my media library even more from here on.

Kevin applies the idea primarily to media and software piracy, but I think it can be taken much further than that. The primary basis of corporacratic power is economic: by controlling the money supply, the control almost everything. To fight against the corporate state, it's economic basis must be undermined. Nothing else can possibly work.

Now here, there are all sorts of angles of attack. Currency is the one: if underground currencies could be spread (for instance, plastic tokens with flakes of gold embedded in them, so that they had actual value in and of themselves), the power of banks would be undercut. A similar angle is to use peer-to-peer banking systems like Prosper for lending and borrowing money, cutting banks out of the transactions entirely and thus helping to starve them. I can well imagine a synergy between peer-to-peer banking and private currencies contributing greatly to undermining the power of banks.

But the economic structure of the corporatocracy is not merely financial; it is also industrial. The means of production now involve massive global supply chains, with a dozen countries involved in the manufacture of virtually every product. On the one hand, this system harnesses division of labor to drive prices lower than ever before in history. On the other hand only huge corporations (guarded by massive navies) can efficiently manage these supply chains. And on the gripping hand*, differences in currency valuations can be used to artificially concentrate industry in one district whilst denuding another entirely.

The tactic Ghandi used to help free India from the British Empire are instructive here: stop buying clothing from the British, sit down at a loom, and make your own. When that practice was widely adopted, one of the principle instruments of economic control over the subcontinent was broken. It wasn't long at all before India was its own country again.

Similarly, rapid prototyping technology is ever-improving. The Fab Lab at MIT is exploring the best ways to learn and interact with a technology that can build anything; the reprap project is concentrating on a rapid prototyper that can print out a copy of itself. It won't be long, no more than a few years and maybe less, before fabbing technology begins to take off, and once it does the industrial wherewithal to rapidly make anything one wants (so long as one has the designs for it) will be available to anyone who wants it.

It's hard to imagine the corporatocracy being able to survive conditions in which they are utterly deprived of the lions share of media, fiscal, and ultimately manufacturing revenues. If you're searching for a reason for why things are accelerating politically like never before, look no further: the technocratic elite that entrenched itself over the past few years is comprised of smart people, and they can see what's coming as well as, hell better than, anyone else. They know that if they don't act soon to lock down the entire planet, they're prospects even ten years from now are grim indeed.

So the next time you want to watch a TV show, listen to an album, go to a movie, or use some software, do freedom a favor and download it. Starve the beast just a little bit, and keep the networks alive and strong for the day when you can download a car instead of Gran Turisumo.

*Kudos to anyone who got that obscure sci-fi reference.

Endgame

2007-10-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

Last week Alex Jones' new movie Endgame came out. I suggest you go watch it right now. It may be the most important movie you ever see.

What's it about? Look at the tags attached to this post. Need to know more? Well, here's some reviews: one at the the Daily Llama, one at Smoker's Corner (that's one snazzy background he's got, gotta get me one of those....), and a final pair of reviews by a pair of (formerly) 'good' Bush-voting Republicans. Read those first if you want. Then watch the goddamn movie.

If you don't walk away from this movie without at the very least a cold, paralyzing dread clenching in the pit of your stomach, well, there's probably no hope for you. Preferably, you should finish it filled with a deep and abiding anger, an outrage that burns like an emotional Chernobyl, and a righteous passion to do everything you can to stop the crime against all of humanity whose final stages are being laid right fucking now. You need to see this movie because you need to wake the fuck up, because this really is one of the last warning's you'll get.

Why the hell are you still reading this? Whatever you're doing, or whatever you think you should be doing, it is almost impossible that it is more important than seeing this movie. I don't care if you're getting ready for a job interview or sitting in your cubicle, if you're studying for an exam or about to leave for one, whatever it is, drop it, and go watch the movie.

Stop-Loss and Regime Change

2007-10-20T04:22:00.001-07:00

You know, even in Vietnam the troops only had to do one six-month tour. That on its own was enough to fuck a lot of them up pretty badly.

Stop-loss means a lot of soldiers stay quite a bit longer than six months. Not surprisingly, the surge has led to an increase in soldiers detained in Iraq. Some of these guys are going to end up spending years in the middle of a warzone, and when they get back they're going to have trouble adjusting.

Well, there's always Blackwater, if civilian life just doesn't work out for them. Or organized crime (assuming there's any difference). Historically, the lineage of organized crime groups always has it's roots in the end of a large war. The longer the war, the worse the banditry afterwards (and let's not forget, the corporatocracy is promising us a hundred year war.)

And let's not forget, Caeser kept his legions in Gaul for 10 years ... and when he came back, he used them to conquer Rome.

Widgetry

2007-10-20T03:24:00.000-07:00

If you look at the bottom of this (and every other) post you'll see that I just installed the Sphere widget. On the off chance you haven't heard of Sphere, it's a search engine that specializes in drawing connections between blogs. If something I write should tickle your fancy, just click on the Sphere link and you'll see posts by other bloggers writing (at least tangentially) related posts.

Drills Within Drills

2007-10-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

Via Truth News, the massive terrorist exercise in Oregon this week (which I wrote about in my previous post), apparently turned - almost - into a real drill when drug-sniffing dogs detected explosive residue:

Portland police cordoned off several blocks around the Lloyd Center, marking off the area with thousands of feet of yellow tape blowing in the afternoon wind. They also shut down MAX trains through the area, and alerted people inside the hotel and surrounding buildings. Some in those buildings chose to evacuate, while others remained in place.

This almost looks like some kind of meta-drill. In the middle of a drill (which everyone knows is just a drill), throw in a situation that abruptly makes it look as though the real thing might actually be happening. The origin of the false alarm is, in this view, not very surprising:

Authorities initially focused on one vehicle, which turned out to be owned by a participant in the Topoff exercise. The car’s owner was quickly located and cooperated, and police later expanded the search to other vehicles on the first floor of the garage. It was windy, Schmautz said, so it’s possible the dogs picked up smells from any of several vehicles in the area.

Do something like this often enough, and eventually your emergency services - and your citizenry - are never sure if something is a drill, a false alarm, or the real thing. In any given situation, they'll either under-react (thinking, in the case of the real thing, that it's just a drill), or over-react (mistaking drills and false alarms for the real thing and throwing their all into it.) Just like confused immune-systems going into overdrive in response to pollen, the societal effects of confused emergency services can be likened to a kind of autoimmune disease.

The bomb scare might have been a false alarm, but it was not an accident.

Drilling for Martial Law

2007-10-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

There's a massive terror drill going on in Portland this week, with 6000 responders and 9000 volunteer 'victims'.

From BBC Channel 4 News:

Three fictional "dirty bombs" are to be the trigger for the biggest terror drill in US history.

More than 15,000 people will take part in the 25 million dollar TopOff 4 exercise which will simulate a series of terror attacks across America.

The Department of Homeland Security said the aim was to "address policy and strategic issues that mobilise prevention and response systems".

An article at Katu goes into a little more detail:

PORTLAND, Ore. - It's the largest terror drill in U.S. history, and the nation will have its eyes on Portland.

This week, the city becomes ground zero as a fake dirty bomb goes off on a set resembling the Steel Bridge, covering the city in "make believe" radiation.

Beyond a terror attack, it's also a test for any catastrophic disaster - to prevent the fatal mistakes the nation witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

System-wide failures left thousands in jeopardy as emergency officials at all levels misjudged, mis-communicated and underestimated the storm.

In Portland, new communication plans, equipment and people will be put to the test.

"I'd rather much see if there are things we need to do to improve through this exercise than waiting till a real-life event came," Mayor Tom Potter said.

The mayor will be among 6,000 responders and volunteer victims working on the drill at Portland International Raceway and at local hospitals, where triage stations are ready to evaluate the wounded.

The drill scenario goes like this: terrorists who have been planning attacks in Oregon, Arizona and the U.S. Territory of Guam are able to bring radioactive material into the U.S. The first of three coordinated attacks occurs in Guam with the detonation of a dirty bomb and widespread contamination in a populous area near a power plant. Similar attacks then occur in Portland and Phoenix.

Despite the size of the drill, don't expect to see any real-life disruptions on the roads, highways, bridges or hospitals. Most of the action will be behind the fence at Portland International Raceway and out of sight. The only thing you might see is emergency vehicles racing around town.

If you notice anything unusual and wonder if it is a part of the training exercise, you can call 211. The phone number will be activated on Tuesday.

So they managed to find 9,000 volunteer victims, to be serviced by 6,000 responders (military, police, medical, fire, and environmental.) I'm not sure if that's a realistic ratio of responders to victims in the event of a ~~real~~ actual terrorist strike, but putting that aside, I can't help but wonder if this isn't really drilling for martial law. It wouldn't be the first time. Remember 7/7? From globalresearch.ca: "A fictional "scenario" of multiple bomb attacks on London's underground took place at exactly the same time as the bomb attack on July 7, 2005 ... The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring." The article includes the transcript of a radio interview with Peter Power, Managing Director of a consulting firm that was contracting with the London Metropolitan Police:

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

This is what the enemy does. They carry out terrorist attacks themselves, in order to frighten the population and enact even stricter control. In order to cover the preparations for the strike massive exercises are staged, during which the terrorists, if discovered, can be explained away as part of the drill. Then, when the drill becomes real, the emergency services are already on their toes, ready to respond and limit the damage. Everyone involved promptly forgets that they were just drilling for the exact thing that happened, and fails to take a moment to examine the odds against that happening ... especially when it happens over and over again. If you have a couple of hours to kill, here, go watch Terrorstorm (after you finish reading this, of course.)

Will something very bad happen in Oregon, Phoenix, and Guam this week? Who knows? Not me. Just like most terrorist attacks are real, so are most drills. Then again, history is full of examples of nations using the excuse of military drills to launch an attack on their enemies. Or at the very least, intimidate them. The modern practice of concealing real terrorist attacks on one's own citizenry within fake-but-real drills is simply the latest and most perverse twist in the history of this venerable tactic.

There's a presidential election coming up. Whether the game plan is to ~~temporarily~~ suspend that election in favor of an extended period of martial law, or merely to scare the populace into the Ice Queen's waiting arms - and who knows? Perhaps both outcomes are on the table, in a plan A/Plan B, heads I win tails you lose kind of way - I have no doubt that another scripted terror attack will strike the US sometime between now and a year this November. Even if the terror drill scheduled for this week remains nothing more than a drill, there will be something similar before long.

You know, that terror attack will be scheduled for right around the time that the US dollar inflates away to airy nothing, and it's economy with it. It might even be intended as the final nudge that pushes it over the abyss into national bankruptcy. People are going to be sitting in the middle of massive heaps of stuff, most of it owned by someone else, repossesed by the banks in the wake of an epidemic of unpayable credit-card debt (expect Congress, assuming it still operates, to rule all debt invalid, but only when everyone but the rich is utterly bankrupt) ... all that stuff, and unable to get together enough money for food.

I present to you my vision of a future America:

Some cities, contaminated by radiation or infection (or, hey, why not both?), get evacuated, and it's citizens put in refugee camps ... no doubt soon to become labor camps, as Halliburton comes along and offers to 'pay' them to rebuild, well, whatever it decides should be rebuilt. Even in cities (yet) unassaulted by terror, the security apparatus has everything locked up tight as a prison, and defending freedom from terror has become a sick joke. With the economy on the skids, jobs scarce, and wealth massively concentrated in the hands of a small elite, crime has spiked due to sheer desperation (in the sense of true crime, such as theft or violence, rather than violations of the myriad of inane regulations that the criminal code has become); those caught, and not simply killed, are charged with terrorism and added to the labor camps. At some point simple vagrancy might become an offense punishable by conscription. And expect lots of black people to fill the camps in the beginning. After all, they're already the poorest demographic, and the most prone to crime. So it'll look a lot like slavery, though everyone will be too polite to call it that. And hey, this time around it'll be slightly more colorblind: there will be whites in the camps, and latinos, and asians. Slavery might not manage to be morally correct, but politically correct? No problem.

Then there's the possibility of an already ongoing multi-front war in the Middle East having expanded to include against Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, so that it's now requiring millions of soldiers in order to fight (hello, conscription!) instead of the mere hundreds of thousands it currently involves. The conflict might even proceed well for while, at least if the Chinese come in and throw their industrial weight (idle for lack of rich Americans to sell to) behind their manpower (playing America's role from the last two world wars during the current one: building stuff for the combatants for a while, letting them wear each other down, and then picking a side and going in for the kill.) America's toast if that happens. Then again, China might well continue to support America, as part of a mutual agreement to carve up the world. If that happens, the Empire might well totter on for decades after the final death of the Republic.

The Solar Power Satellite Gets a Good Second Look

2007-10-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here's the executive summary of the National Space Society report on space-based solar power (SBSP.)

I've been in favor for a long time: SBSP would be environmentally friendly (or at any rate, friendlier than burning fossil fuels), and it would provide such a vast amount of power that raising the entire world to western standards of living would be enormously easier.

But sadly, it's a sign of the times that the penultimate paragraph also plays to the usefulness it would have for empire-building:

For the DoD specifically, beamed energy from space in quantities greater than 5 MWe has the potential to be a disruptive game changer on the battlefield. SBSP and its enabling wireless power transmission technology could facilitate extremely flexible “energy on demand” for combat units and installations across an entire theater, while significantly reducing dependence on vulnerable over-land fuel deliveries. SBSP could also enable entirely new force structures and capabilities such as ultra long-endurance airborne or terrestrial surveillance or combat systems to include the individual soldier himself. More routinely, SBSP could provide the ability to deliver rapid and sustainable humanitarian energy to a disaster area or to a local population undergoing nation-building activities. SBSP could also facilitate base “islanding” such that each installation has the ability to operate independent of vulnerable ground-based energy delivery infrastructures. In addition to helping American and allied defense establishments remain relevant over the entire 21st Century through more secure supply lines, perhaps the greatest military benefit of SBSP is to lessen the chances of conflict due to energy scarcity by providing access to a strategically secure energy supply.

One thing the report doesn't mention - and something I hadn't given much thought to until recently - was that beamed power offers a great method of control, one that is in fact very similar to the water economies of ancient kingdoms. Basically, in a heavily irrigated agricultural system, where there is little rainfall and most water comes from a single source, he who controls that source is the absolute ruler of all. If there's a rebellion in province A, but provinces B and C are loyal, guess who gets cut off when there's a 'drought'? Regions with such a geographic curse inevitably turned into mass dictatorships, with small elites lording it over hordes of ant-like subjects who were little better than slaves. In contrast, areas with rainfall, where farmers could make their living more or less where they pleased and not have to worry about water, slave-states had a harder time getting a foothold. Political evolution was slower, but when it came it was forced to accommodate more local and personal autonomy, and in the end that led to more effective societies.

For all of the other flows on which our lives depend - those of money, information, food, and water - the flow of energy is the most crucial. Cut it off, and every other flow is interrupted; before long life becomes impossible. It's our civilization's equivalent to the water of the ancient world. Now, if the main source of energy for most of the planet is a giant swarm of SBSP satellites beaming power down to the world, whoever controls that power controls the world. Like the kings of old, people or cities or countries could be shut off at will. On top of that, there's the weapons systems this will make possible (orbiting fortresses that can project force anywhere on the Earth in a matter of seconds, and of course, never need to come down). It's easy to see how an empire would rapidly build itself around control of an SBSP.

An empire isn't a foregone conclusion. For one, actually building an SBSP is likely to be a multidecade project (with a large part of the progress being towards the end, perhaps in the midst of a stock-market bomb and the consequent spike in infrastructure construction.) The number of participating organizations, at least initially, is likely to consist of a large number of small private companies. So long as ownership of the swarm does not at some point devolve into the hands of a monopoly, the possibility of an empire is much reduced. Unfortunately, current economic practices tend to produce monopolies - or cooperating oligopolies - across a wide range of corporate endeavor, with market share and capitalization tending to concentrate as an industry matures.

Another factor is that, just because there's a massive SBSP swarm beaming down cheap power, it doesn't mean other sources of power generation disappear. Much of the infrastructure might: all the old coal-fired and nuclear plants would likely be phased out. But nothing would prevent people from setting up their own, ground-based renewable energy systems (rolling out a tarp of solar collectors, deploying a wind turbine kite), or storing energy up against the possibility of the beamed power being interrupted. Still, the limits on the growth of beamed power are pretty forgiving (see: Dyson Sphere) so relying on whatever one can gather on Earth's surface will, over the long run, be an emergency measure upon which economies cannot

Of course, geosynchronous orbit or a Lagrange point - and the Earth's surface - aren't the only place to collect solar power. You can start building collectors on the moon, for instance. Or, if you were really ambitious, Mercury, where there's a nice big, low-gravity source of great building material, and a solar energy flux of 9.13 kW/m^2, which compares nicely to Earth's 1.37 kW/m^2 (and that's in orbit, not the piddling .68 on surface, during the day, when it isn't raining.) If we ever get into space, I guarantee a war will be fought over Mercury ... though that will be a war fought by machines, the beings that will ultimately colonize the world. It's utterly unfit for human habitation (I'm not so pessimistic about the rest of the solar system. My main beef with Mercury is it's complete lack of the volatiles needed to sustain complex organic chemistry.) At any rate, a rush to colonize Mercury - and the rest of the solar system - would be an effective counteragent against empire ... assuming, of course, it were allowed to happen. Earth would become a single state, but it would be just one of many.

2007-10-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

You know, given that the best time to carry out false-flag operations is during exercises specifically resembling the situation that actually happens, I really and sincerely hope that Exercise Vigilant Shield '08 doesn't, you know, happen to coincide with anything ... real.

“North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command along with U.S. Pacific Command, the Department of Homeland Security as well as local, state and other federal responders will exercise their response abilities against a variety of potential threats during Exercise Vigilant Shield ‘08, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-designated, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM)-sponsored, and U.S. Joint Forces Command[JFCOM]-supported Department of Defense exercise for homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities missions.

Cooperation from NORAD on down to local authorities?

That's sounds a lot like martial law.

Money as Stock

2007-10-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to play with the idea of money. An idea, after all, is primarily what it is: no matter what it's form, whether it's gold or paper or ones and zeroes, money primarily represents a bargain between buyer and seller that it can be exchanged later, with another human being, for something of value. It used to be that this was accomplished by using things that were naturally rare - precious metals, for instance - not because they were of much intrinsic use, but because they were, well, pretty to look at, hard to get lots of, and thus valued as a status symbol. Kings wore what their subjects spent.

Now, we've moved off the gold standard, for the first time in, well, not in history - as some claim - but at least, in the last few thousand years. Instead we use paper tokens. A lot of people call this a fiat currency, though it isn't quite: ultimately, the value of the dollar is linked to oil (the US having made a deal with the Saudis to that effect shortly after Nixon abandoned Bretton-Woods.) Every other currency around the world, equally unsupported by any hard resource, balances off the dollar in an elaborate currency trading system.

It might not be exactly the same thing as a pure fiat system, but it still shares some of the same vulnerabilities, the main one being that the value is subject to fluctuation. Central banks can still print so much money that the value is completely undermined, essentially destroying the currency and, in the process, wrecking the country that used it.

Well, that's money as it currently stands. I've talked before about different kinds of money - having money represent a share of the established public infrastructure, rather than debt - and I'd like to give another one: why not combine money, wages, and shares into the same thing?

Essentially, every time someone receives a dollar (or some number of dollars) from a corporation in wages, they are simultaneously issued one share, which can be used for voting and collecting dividends. The longer someone worked for a company, the more voting power they would accumulate, and the greater their independent financial clout. Of course, if the company were to go bankrupt the stock is worth nothing, so it would behoove said employee to do what he could to ensure the company prospered.

The same principle could also be applied in reverse: every time a company is paid a dollar (or some number of dollars) by a customer, the customer is granted a voting, dividend-paying share. Regular customers would thus gain a say in how businesses are run, and be rewarded for loyal business by reduced prices (their equivalent of dividends.)

I'm not sure how I feel about this idea, to be honest. On the one hand, it would go a long way towards making corporations more democratic, in effect making stakeholder capitalism the economy's default mode of operation. On the other, it could easily lead to a culture where power and wealth accrues to those who with the fiercest loyalty to their corporations, lifetime employees who respend as much of their money as they can in the corporations that employ them, thus doubling their stock.

Bringing Democracy to the Corporatocracy

2007-10-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

Watching John Perkins - author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman - giving a speech from about a year ago, he starts talking about changing corporations to make them open, transparent, and democratic. The reason for this is simple: modern governments around the world and especially in the United States are little more than puppets of large corporations, a form of government he calls the corporatocracy. This corporatocracy serves as the true government of the planet, and so long as corporations remain organizationally identical to, say, the Roman Army or feudal Europe, real freedom and democracy are impossible.

Democratic corporations. That's an interesting idea. I remember coming across it for the first time in Bruce Sterling's 1998 cybperpunk novel Islands in the Net, a volume I read many times as a teenager. The main character is a member of just such a democratic corporation, as are most people around the world - except for a few small rogue zones, the islands referred to in the title. Corporations in the novel did not specialize. Each was basically a massive economic cooperative, in which members assigned executive power during open elections, had rights as well as responsibilities, and the freedom to choose what kind of work they would do for the company rather than simply a set of assigned tasks. Of course, they weren't guaranteed to get what they asked for; a large part of the management's job was to review proposals made by those lower in the hierarchy, and decide whether or not to grant them. The longer and better one's record, the more resources one could muster for a given task. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a lot better for the people involved than what they'd had before.

The management class and their pet economists will claim that corporate democracy would be a business liability (which it will, to a degree: the rich will not be quite so rich). The reasons for why it's bad will vary. One claim might be that management talent will be lured away from any company that adopts the principles (then again, employees would probably be attracted to such companies, and employee talent can be far more important than management.) Some might claim that it would lead to bad decision making (but, why they should expect closed management hierarchies to be immune to the problems that plague closed societies?) My own feeling is that a truly democratic corporation would be a much leaner, much more efficient economic machine than anything built on the current model, generating far more wealth for far more people, and distributing that wealth with a much more even hand.

Initiatives like this are what give me hope for the future. A global revolution in favor of corporate democracy would be a wonderful thing.

More Truther Bullshit

2007-10-14T05:23:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of really rotten labels out there. Think of the genres minted in the nineties. Alternative? What they hell sort of information does that give you about what the music's going to sound like? And 'emo'? Huh? Ah, so the music should be ... er ... emotional? Like, you know, all music is?All indy tells you is that it's music made by people who aren't signed to labels (which would be, er, most musicians, at least when they're smalll.) And hip-hop ... what does that even mean? (yes, I more or less know what hip-hop sounds like, what I'm saying is, the label tells you nothing.)

Labels with no real meaning are a curse; whatever is labeled by them exists in a sort of void, and the end result is a sort of nullity. But labels that do have meanings can in themselves have an effect on the movement they describe. Take 'bolshevik', which meant 'majority' in Russian, even though they weren't remotely a majority the communist party when the formed ... though they soon became one. Meaningul labels are good labels, labels with power. A label is an idea, after all; every time it's used, it associates itself with certain others inside the brain. Choose your own label, and choose it well, and every time your opponents use it they implicitly agree to a piece of your own meta-context, see the world - however briefly - from something like the opposing view.

I'd say 'truther' is one of those really great labels. The movement's most vociferous opponents, after all (self-identified neo-cons, and there's a nicely tautological label that perfectly cancels itself out, setting the movement up for the doublethink on which it thrives), are reduced to spitting the word 'truth' with an unthinking contempt, an act whose psychological effects almost can't help but be toxic. Either one undermines one's own disbelief in the truthers' claims (by consistently associating 'truth' with 'belief that the US government perpetrated 9/11'), and eventually converts; or one's ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is progressively hampered by constant psychological denigration of the very concept of 'truth'.

The effect on the general, undecided public - those who don't really pay too much attention to the debate - will be just as dramatic. With the term 'truther' being constantly hurled as an epithet by one side and happily used by the other, the idea almost inevitably settles in the mass consciousness that 9/11 was an inside job.

So yeah, keep on using 'truther'. Use it with a sneer on your face, or with a smile, or a shrug. But use it, because every time you do, the truth comes a little closer to winning.

Hijacking the Singularity

2007-10-12T01:53:00.000-07:00

Death is an engineering problem, and some time over the next few decades it's one we're going to lick. This is something I've believed for a long time - since I was a teenager, I'd say - and I haven't seen anything to dissuade me. If anything, medical technology's progress has been even better than I expected.

Ah, but what of our would-be masters in the New World Order? They're smart people, after all. They wouldn't be where they are if they weren't. They know what the future is bringing as well as I do, as well as anyone does. And there can be no doubt at all that they'll be right at the front of the line to receive the new immortality treatments (well, maybe they'll wait until they've been taken for a test-drive on the bodies of African clinical testing subjects.)

Now, one of the primary drives of any dictator or oligarch is to extend and hold onto their power. They know how they acquired it - by climbing over the backs of the less ambitious, stabbing them in the back when required, making temporary alliances when they had to - and they know how to keep it (stamping on the toes of anyone trying to climb the same ladder they did.) But in ages past, the most any of them could really hope for, long term, was to pass on power to an heir, because do what they might they would eventually be enfeebled, then killed, by the aging process. The argument could be made that this has been a great leveling influence in human history. Dynasties rarely last more than a few generations: being born into wealth and power tends to lead to degenerates on the throne, while at the same time the natural instinct of the nobility to spread their DNA far and wide by screwing every barmaid, servant girl, and prostitute they come close to means that there's a large pool of tough, ambitious people with royal blood coursing through their commoner veins.

Immortality changes that equation, and does so drastically. Suddenly the guys at the top have the prospect of staying at the top, not for a few decades, but for a few millenia. That's got to be one powerful motivator, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining why the new world order's plans seem to have been kicking into high gear these past couple of decades, especially so since the turn of the millenium.

You see, immortality offers the elite the chance to be the elite forever, but only if they can suppress the normal turmoil that ensures a turning over of the social order once every generation or three. The prospect of living forever on top is a pretty sweet one, but the prospect of being the lord of creation one century, only to find oneself just one of the masses the next, must be a frightening one. In a world of eight billion immortals, all wealthy as Midas by our standards (thanks to robots, AI, and nanotech), and all wise as Socrates (thanks to intelligence augmentation and the internet), staying at the top of the heap forever would be pretty much impossible.

There's only one way around that: get rid of the other people. Step one is to substitute mechanical labor for human labor, automating everything with AIs and robots. Once you've pulled that trick - one that we're only a few decades away from - ordinary working folk are pretty well superfluous. Now, we might naturally expect that this would allow the species to cast off the shackles of labor and live in a golden age post-scarcity economy. Those of us within the transhumanist movement have been singing that chorus ever since the 90s.

The elites don't see it that way. They already have all the wealth they could possibly want; they already lead lives unmarred by labor. Robotics, AI, and nanotech have very little to offer them along those lines ... but they could be deeply dangerous to their place at the top of the period. So, once the technology exists to fully automate the economy, they will try and wipe us out. I'm guessing it'll be through some kind of supervirus, or possibly a succession of them. Neutron bombs might see use too. Anything that will remove the human components of the economy without damaging the physical infrastructure.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as much in favor of technology as I've always been. It has the potential to turn our world into a paradise, a heavenly kingdom on earth where mankind lives free of disease, poverty, war, ignorance, famine, and even death ... where every day is the best day of your life, and stretching ahead of you are as many of those days as you want. But living in our midst, controlling our governments and our banks and our churches and damn near every other institution of any real power or influence, are psychopaths whose selfishness has reached an intensity never before seen in human history, men and women who see everything I see ... and want to keep it all for themselves. They plan to hijack the Singularity, and right now, everything is going according to their plan.

More on the ADS

2007-10-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

If you scroll down on this page, there's embedded video of the pain ray in action. The article's worth reading, too ... seems that if they ray's being used, it's advisable to take off contact lenses or glasses (to avoid eye damage), and remove any metal objects from your pockets (to keep hot spots from being created). That could mean that my idea for using a space-blanket could actually be, well, quite dangerous. It also appears that the less-than-lethal 'non-damaging' weapon has higher power settings which can make it, well, damaging.

Oh, how the riot cops are going to love this.

Countermeasures: RFID

2007-10-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags are certain to be a central component of the security state apparatus. If you haven't heard of this technology yet, they are, briefly, very small chips consisting of a capacitor, an antennae, and an integrated circuit. They can be embedded more or less invisibly in almost anything, and once there provide the ability to track the location of the object more or less at will. While this could be incredibly useful (you'll never lose anything ever again), it can also be quite dangerous (everything you have becomes a tracking device.)

Googling 'disabling RFID tags' found me this page, the results of a German Chaos Computer Club workshop, where a bunch of techies got together and figured out how to turn a single-use camera into an RFID zapper. Here's another tutorial page from the same project, this one with pictures. Basically, the device acts as a miniature EMP, frying the RFID's capacitor but without damaging the article the object is embedded in (you can get a similar effect by nuking it in the microwave, but this is likely to start a fire which will damage the tagged object.)

Of course, the RFID zapper can't be used on electronics without frying them, which actually renders it pretty much useless for surveillance countermeasures, unless you're willing to leave home without your cellphone, PDA, laptop, camera, iPod, and other sundry electronic accompaniments of modern life. And you can be damn sure that electronics will be tagged with RFIDs along with everything else.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of three ways around the system, but none of them are perfect. One is to simply take the device apart, extract the RFID tag, and dispose of it. The main drawback is that unless you have an exhaustive knowledge of electronics and maybe access to the device's blueprints, identifying which chip is the RFID is likely to be quite difficult. Maybe even impossible, if the tag is built directly into the device's integrated circuitry. Another possibility is to ignore the RFID tag and hack into the tracking network's database, deleting the relevant serial numbers, switching the objects they refer to, or otherwise rendering the database unreliable. This is probably even more difficult than taking apart the device and looking for the RFID tag. The last solution is to keep your electronics inside a faraday cage (basically, a metal box), which will block the radio signals that trigger the RFID tag, thus hiding it from the surveillance network. This has the great virtue of being the easiest of the three, but it has the serious drawbacks that a) it stops working as soon as you want to actually use the tagged object, and b) it makes a cellphone pretty much useless as in addition to blocking the radio waves that trigger the RFID tag, it blocks the cell's reception (of course, cell phones are a tracking device - and a listening device - unto themselves, but that's an entirely separate problem.)

Countermeasures

2007-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Did you know you can use a cloth soaked in lemon juice to neutralize the effects of tear gas? That, some decent goggles, and lots of padding make you immune to the current crowd-control arsenal (ie, tear gas and rubber bullets.)

Crowd control's going to get a lot more hightech, though. The ADS - Active Denial System - uses microwaves to boil the water directly underneath the skin, giving the device it's moniker, the 'pain ray'. Basically, if you get hit by it, your one and only instinct is to get away as fast as you physically can.

There's lots of other devices coming down the pike, ranging from the darkly humorous (super-slippery 'black ice' that make movement impossible, focused infrasonic beams that make you shit your pants) to the creepy (all sorts of nasty psychotropics that, awesome as they might be in a club environment, would probably suck and suck hard if you're trying to protest against, oh, say, a criminal regime that's usurped power in what used to be a free country.)

And then there's the current favorite, the taser, great against college students asking difficult questions or unarmed women who don't ask 'how high?' when the police say 'jump'.

Now, the justification for the development of virtually all of these devices is to help out with peacekeeping efforts in benighted foreign countries, but basically, these are all riot control weapons. And they're going to make rioting - hell, peaceful protesting - a whole hell of a lot hairier.

Not impossible, though. Countermeasures can always be developed. Take the ADS, the crown jewel in the new crop of crowd control technology. All you'd have to do to block the microwaves is carry a metal shield of some sort (say, a trash can lid); wear thick clothing; or wrap yourself in a foil emergency blanket. If you felt like getting really fancy, you could sew the emergency blanket into your clothing as an additional layer. The tinfoil hat brigade could take on a whole new meaning.

Actually, the emergency blanket technique might well work against tasers, too. Emergency blankets consist of a layer a plastic sandwiched between two very thin sheets of aluminum; the taser's leads would certainly come into contact with the aluminum upon breaking the through the clothing, at which point I'd expect that they'd short out, leaving one very confused cop holding in his hand one very useless little plastic box. Well, he'd probably just commence to beat the shit out of you with his maglite but hey, at least it's something.

The police state being built by the new world order is going to rely on the highest of technologies. That's an arena that the people can't compete in, largely because it's just too expensive. But if you can't do cutting edge, then you go the other way, and fight high tech with low. Bandannas soaked with lemon juice; swimming goggles; and clothing lined with space blankets. There are always countermeasures.

Today in the News

2007-10-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like the iFly is moving along just about right on schedule, albeit in a somewhat creepier way than expected: Robobugs spotted at anti-war protests in Washington. Personally I can think of much better ways to use this technology, but then again, I'm not a modern-day stasi.

The Turks are claiming NATO's been helping the PKK launch terror attacks. Anything to keep people afraid. The Turks aren't taking it lying down though: Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has announced plans to launch raids into Iraqi Kurdistan. That's bound to piss of the Americans.

Vicente Fox openly claims that the long-range plan is for the creation of an 'Amero', an Americas-wide currency union. This is pretty obvious when you think about it; after all, the EU evolved from the European Coal and Steel Community to an entity one step short of an actual nation in just under fifty years. Still, there's a big difference between integrating European countries which, however different the cultures might be, at least share common values on human rights and such ... and jamming together the US and Canada (open societies that place a high value on the rule of law and individual freedom) with Mexico (one of the world's worst slave states.)

On the political front, Ron Paul - the only non-plastic candidate in the current presidential race - is warning that the US dollar could well collapse essentially to zero, a scenario that's hold-your-forehead-and-groan it's so bloody obvious to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of economics (which is almost no one.)

This could well be nothing but signaling (as Tom Barnett would no doubt argue), or it could be very ominous (which is what the Taiwanese would say): China promotes military officers experienced in Taiwan affairs. By affairs, of course, the headline means "planning for war with Taiwan."

Vaccine-linked polio hits Nigeria. That's happening a lot these days. The natives are learning to run when white men show up with the meds. Think maybe they know something we don't?

Rice to meet Russian human rights activists. Helps to get to know the enemy, no?

Private security convoys strike fear in Baghdad. You know it's bad when they're more scared of Blackwater than they are of either al Qaeda or the marines.

A Conservative Wakes Up to 9/11 Lies

2007-10-09T11:56:00.001-07:00

This guy comes from a completely different background from me. Him: conservative, pro-life, anti-gay, gun-loving family man. Me: libertarian transhumanist, pro-life-but-not-in-the-way-he-means-it, gay-anything-apathetic, gun-loving (okay, I don't own any, but I'll just say this: you've never lived 'til you've shot a 50 cal.) bachelor.

You know what?

We reacted exactly the same way when we found out what's really going on.

You know what else? He's exactly fucking right. It doesn't matter what your pet political issues are. We as a civilization are in the fight of our goddamn lives against an organized crime group that is playing for keeps. It is time to put aside differences that just don't matter, stand shoulder to shoulder and fight.

Return of the Roman Legions

2007-10-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

Or should that be the Caesarian Legions? As after all, the Legions - originally a professional army loyal to Rome - were perverted by Caeser into what amounted to a mercenary army beholden only to him ... or any other Emperor (or would-be Emperor) that came after.

(As a side-note, most people consider the days of the Roman Empire to start around 25 BC, when Caeser crossed the Rubicon and put the Republic to the sword. Well, yeah, the Empire started then. But Roman civilization had been around for centuries before, and had amassed most of its power, and conquered most of its territory, during the republican period. The beginning of the imperial system marked the decline and fall of Rome, not its greatest height.)

Anyhow, in his most recent post in his ongoing series laying out the Bush regimes crimes against the US military (link to Part 1), David Brin points out the similarities between what happened to the Roman legions, and what's happening to the American military right now, with the professional army being undermined while Blackwater, the largest mercenary force in the world, is steadily built up. Scary shit.

Today in the News

2007-10-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd try something a bit different today and round up some headlines that caught me eye. In no particular order, here they are:

Anti-war protesters entered in criminal database, prevented from crossing the US/Canada border. Because dissent is treason, and treason is a crime.

Britain 'on-board' for US strikes on Iran. Gordon Brown shows he really is no different from Tony Blair (as though there were any doubt. Democracy has been very effectively short-circuited.) They're not even bothering to keep up the pretense of taking out the nuclear facilities anymore - Iran being ten years away from a nuke - so the justification now is (what else?) terrorism.

Supporters fear Ed Brown is being tortured. In case you don't know (I'm guessing you don't) Ed Brown is a guy who refused to pay income tax, fortified himself in his house, and spent six months taunting the Feds and sounding off about how the income tax is an unconstitutional tool of oppression. Which it is. So the Feds lied their way into his house, pretending to be supporters (there were a lot of supporters), arrested him and his wife, and they haven't been heard from since. That was a few days ago. They should be in the hands of prison authorities by now, but for some reason, they're not. There's precedent for this, by the way. Ever heard of Congressman Hansen? Nasty buggers, those IRS guys.

In related news, a blogger who'd been covering the Ed Brown case had the Feds pay him a visit, on the pretense that he'd been advocating violence against a judge involved in the case. Only problem? He never did. Which they could have told by reading his blog. Unless of course dealing with threats was just a pretext to make a few of their own....

Keeping on the theme of torture, a freelance reporter in Afghanistan claims to have been tortured by US forces. That's the danger of criticizing while Muslim, I suppose....

It looks like the Democrats are - and here's a surprise - going to roll over on wiretapping like they have on everything else. Not that the Bush regime gives a flying fuck about congressional approval of it's unconstitutional actions, but still, this should serve as a reminder that both parties are corrupt to the very core. There is no succor to be found in Washington.

Not that the Russians have it much better. Gary Kasparov has decided that as computers have caught up with and surpassed human abilities in chess, he'll compete in politics instead. He was on 60 minutes recently, talking about his plans to take on ex-KGB overlord Vladimir Putin.

A Sheriff's Deputy in Milwaukee goes off the deep end when his girlfriend, and others, call him a 'worthless pig'. Since he had an assault rifle, six people died in the resulting argument (the seventh and final person at the ill-fated party is still in the hospital.)

A German citizen gets a CIA sponsored tour of black interrogation sites, and now that he wants some of his own back the Supreme Court is telling him to take a hike. Guess they figure he should be grateful they didn't accidentally kill him, and just leave it at that.

The Iraqi government wants US$136 million in blood money from Blackwater, US$8 million for each Iraqi citizen shot by its thugs, er, security guards. That's a lot of money for an Iraqi life, but hey, we're talking a company with hundreds of billions in no-bid contracts.

A Death in Afghanistan

2007-10-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

This made the top page on Digg today: Soldier Once Warned Family: Investigate if I Die. Basically, a finance officer in Afghanistan found something she shouldn't have and ended up with a bullet in the head. This has special relevance to me: my mom was a finance officer in the Canadian reserve infantry.

What did she find? Who knows? Whatever it was, it was bad, and she paid the price because she said something. Foolish, that. She shouldn't have said shit on base. She should have published it on the 'net. She'd still have gotten murdered, but at least she would have gotten the word out.
.

The Red Pill's Bitter Aftertaste

2007-10-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

Back in June, I flew for the first time, back to Canada. Made a transfer in Atlanta, where I was greeted, as soon as I got off the plane, with a giant banner saying 'Welcome to America, Land of Freedom!' or some shit like that, all in gold letters with a photo-quality American flag fluttering in the background. Later, while I was waiting to take off my shoes and have my bag pawed through by a surly, ill-educated trailer-park spawn, I couldn't help but think of this website (while, admittedly, listening to the album it's associated with, but then again, Year Zero was appropriate. Regarding the website, you might have to wait a bit for it to load. Once it does, just click and move your mouse around. You'll see.) At one point I made eye contact with a random traveller from the Middle East, inevitably getting far more thorough treatment than the petty humiliations of security theatre I and every other traveller was forced to endure. Nevertheless I felt an instant empathy with the plight of this man; a part of my brain that hadn't really sparked in years sputtered for life, however pathetically and briefly.

I think that was the moment, for me, when the shell that had been built up around my brain finally began to crack. It didn't spread very quickly, not at first. This was back in June, after all, and I can't honestly claim to have woken up any earlier than, well, last week. But then that is the way of crumbling dams: at first a small crack, which spreads, slowly ... until all at once, the flood.

Watch this. Over a million other people have. It was the cold shower that woke my ass up, and maybe it'll do the same for you.

Waking up is a funny thing. I was walking through Shinjuku station on my way to work, and all at once I felt tears in my eyes, because for the first time in years it really hit me that this time it was my people - the Anglo culture of which I am deeply proud, the culture that has given so much of freedom and science and technology and wealth to the world, that has taken civilization to the greatest heights it has yet achieved - this time, it was my people who housed the evil. That we were the bad guys, and that the Muslims, bless their bewildered, confused, hateful little hearts, were right to fight against us with every ounce of their strength.

I remember when 9/11 first happened (well, yeah, we all do.) At the time I'd never really considered that the government could be behind it, but still, a few days later, after the networks had been full of nothing but collapsing towers and broken five-sided geometry, I had enough savvy to tell my girlfriend at the time "Whatever happens, don't let me fall for the propaganda. Don't let me do anything stupid." Well, I didn't join the army or become a weapons scientist, so I have my ex to thank for that much at least (hell, if I hadn't dated her I'd've still been in the militia when the towers went down), but I still bought the propaganda, drinking deep of the kool-aid, letting the fever take over my brain. Then again, we broke up a couple of years after that, and it wasn't until later that I really started to buy into it, to really believe the lies and the halftruths and the misdirections and the perverted logic that's been shoveled so liberally into our mouths over the past several years. Hell, I remember getting into an argument with David Brin on his blog, where the guy tried his best to convince me with logical argument that the current pack of criminals was far worse than the muslims or the crazier elements of the left ... I couldn't defeat the logic, so I just left. Still, the propaganda kept it's hold on my brain.

It's not that I'm stupid. I am, if not a genius, certainly well above the herd. But intelligence can be as great a curse as stupidity when it comes to well-crafted webs of lies, because once the lies start to settle in and make themselves at home as part of one's self-image, an intelligent mind is much more adept at the doublethink required to keep it all in place.

I'll give this to the evil shits responsible for this nightmare: they are masters of memetic engineering, on a par with Mohammed and Marx. They know just how to get past all the mental defenses, how to manipulate human psychology with inter-related (and contradictory) complexes of memes. Hell, they've been setting memeplexes up against each other. 'Left' and 'Right' are just arbitrary camps full of manufactured ideas designed to be mutually antagonistic (thus keeping the politically motivated parts of the population at daggers drawn) while being supportive of the overall engenda (tax, control, and eventually, enslave.)

Basically, it works like this. The Left believes Bush and his court of grand viziers and sycophants are a bunch of evil fucks, and their war a complete sham. They think the real threat is environmental degradation generally, and global warming specifically. The Right, on the other hand, thinks global warming is a crock of steaming bullshit, and that terrorism generally, and the rise of an Islamic caliphate specifically, is the most dire threat facing Western civilization. Thus the Left is led to believe that those on the Right are criminals against the environment and duped supporters of an evil war, while those on the Right see the Left as either blind or traitorous when it comes to the war, along with being brainwashed victims of the new Gaianist religion with it's apocalyptic fairy tales of climate change.

Let me set you straight, in case you hadn't already figured it out. Terrorism is bullshit. So is global warming. Both are there to keep you scared (The terrorists might nuke us! The ice caps might melt!). Not only does this make it easier to control you - hysterical people instinctively look to authority figures - it also makes it easier to bleed you dry of resources. Carbon taxes limiting how big your house can be, how much electricity you can use, how big and fast a car you can have and how far you can go in it, how much you're allowed to fly ... all of these come directly out of global warming. It keeps you immobile, keeps you poor, and lets the government soak you like never before (income tax might be a tax on your label, but carbon tax? That's a tax on your existence. Because your very existence is a threat to the entire biosphere, awful, filthy human creature that you are.)

Terrorism keeps you scared of other people around the world, and keeps those people scared of you, which if you're trying to build a global empire is a very useful trick as it acts as a firewall against the formation of a global resistance. It justifies wars, and - more to the point - serves as an excuse for a steady ratcheting increase in 'security' regulations at home (security, not to protect us from terrorists, but to protect our would-be masters from us.)

For the last several years I came down on the right: global warming bullshit, Islamic terrorism dangerous! That's embarrassing, a little. But no more shameful than falling for the global warming line. Left and Right are more psychological predispositions than well-thought-out political positions, and the twin lies that have been endlessly repeated by the media are designed to appeal to one or the other (environmental catastrophe for the caring nurturer type, shadowy foreign threat for the watchful protector type.) Damn near everyone fell for one or the other and sometimes even both; few have been those who fell for neither, but then wisdom is precious because it is rare.

The wannabe emperors that are settling into power now, in this the time when the culmination of their scheme approaches, forgot to take one thing into account. Fear can be used to control us, yes, but only for a while. At first we look to our leaders; that is our instinct, as social animals evolved for life in a complex hierarchy. But alone among the social mammals, we have the ability to think; we look for leadership not just to our governments but to our thinkers, not just to the powerful but to the wise. And as time goes on, it is the wise that have the greatest influence, for even the most foolish of men - so long as he retains a soul - knows the truth when it is properly explained to him, and the finding and teaching of truth are the great strengths of the wise.

The nearer their plan comes to fruition, the more obvious it will be, and the more the truth will start to take hold. Those on the Right will realize that terrorism is a sick practical joke of awesome proportions, perpetrated by their own government against them; those on the Left will come to see that global warming is nothing more than a willful misrepresentation of science. They'll get to talking together, and together, they'll tear down the edifice of lies like the Berlin Wall.

Make no mistake, we are not out of the woods yet. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better. I'm talking biowarfare (my guess: smallpox, say in Oregon.) Martial law. Maybe a nuclear exchange or two (not a planet-buster, just turning a country or two into wasteland.) Disappearances, concentration camps, secret police, conscription, the whole nine yards of the classic militarized fascist police state, updated for the 21st century, scarier than anything that's come before, like something out of the Book of Revelations. This particular generation of homo demonicus is playing for all the marbles this time, and as always they mean to win.

Hell, I'm not sure if I'm going to survive this. I'm not sure if you will. I'm deeply frightened for the future of my family, and my friends. I look at the faces of the children in my kids' classes, and I wonder.

One thing I am sure about. The people will wake up, and when they do there will be a revolution. Much blood will be spilled leading up to it, and rivers will flow by the end. But when the dust settles, it will be the heads of the would-be neo-aristocracy that are impaled on pikes and set on display as an eternal monument to the greatest depths of evil yet plumbed by the human soul, as an eternal reminder to any who might plot to follow their path into darkness, and seduce others into following them down it.

Old Stuff

2007-10-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

As in back to November 2005.

I've added links in the sidebar to all of my previous blogs. strangerAttractor was my first effort at blogging, and while there's a lot of stuff in there I'm ashamed to have written, I won't apologize for any of it, but will simply say: I was young and stupid, and my eyes are open now.

I took a break from blogging for a few months after that, principally because I didn't have regular internet access (the stranegAttractor period was while I was working as a low level data entry minion, and had an average of four hours a day to surf the net). This was because I'd moved to Japan, my apartment didn't have internet (the guy who lived there had no computer, and I, speaking not a word of Japanese beyond ninja, did not have the wherewithal to get it installed.) When finally I began blogging again, it was 1 + White = 100, in which I chronicle a good part of my first year in Japan.

Eventually, Japan ceased being so alien that it was interesting to blog about all the time, and I started writing at Cracks in the Sanitarium. Not everything I wrote here was complete bullshit (I stand by everything about Extinctionism), but a lot of it reflects the fact that this was the period during which the fever of the infowar's propaganda was raging at its worst inside my head.

So anyhow, in case you want to read anything else I've written ... here it all is. Enjoy (or not, your call.)

My Dilemma

2007-09-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

What is divided must unite; what is united, must divide

Chinese proverb
(I think)

My homeland is slouching towards fascism, and there's nothing I can do about it except write these words on a blog nobody reads.

Oh sure, you can quibble that I'm a Canadian if you want, and everyone knows it's really America that's getting buggered by history. But while Canada might be America's kinder, gentler and slightly dull kid brother, the sad fact is that we also follow the American lead in more or less all things. Legislation that gets tried out in the states is introduced in Canada within a decade. The sad fact is that the only reason Canada's been a free country throughout the 20th century, is that America has too. If America loses it's freedom, Canada will too. You can take that to the bank.

I'm not going to belabor the North American descent into tyranny. Naomi Wolfe does it much better here, in Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps, and Carolyn Baker does an excellent job as well in her article Speaking Truth to Power. Go there, read those articles, and if they - and the events of the last several years, which sadly I'm only just now really waking up to - don't scare your bowels empty you're not paying attention. Or you're working for the fascists, and the various incidents they detail make you all warm and tight down in your unmentionable areas (if you are, and you're reading this post, I'll just say this to you: you and the cockroaches you work with might just succeed in hollowing out the greatest nation on the planet. Good for you! But you know, eventually, we'll hang you from a lamp-post.)

I'm seriously conflicted. You see, right now I live in Japan, making my humble living teaching the fine people here how to speak my language. It's undemanding and reasonably well-compensated, one of the better compensations being that I get to live in Tokyo. But it's been a few years, and I'm getting the itch to return home, to rejoin my kith and kin, and start something approaching a real career.

But is that so wise? North America's on the brink of a precipice, and the only thing keeping the entire continent from a rapid fall into tyranny is just one more big terrorist attack ... and if 9/11 really was a false flag operation (I'm not %100 certain on that, but the doubt is there, and the doubt is enough), that terrorist attack could come at whatever time is convenient to the state. Like, say, shortly before a presidential election.

Going back right before that would be a really bad move. I'm a very loud person, with a tendency to sound off if someone's annoying me. At the very least, any career I started would be very short-lived; at the worst, I might be 'detained', or simply executed.

At the same time, this is my homeland these execrable fucks are ruining. Not fighting the bastards smacks of cowardice, but fighting them is basically suicide.

So that's the question I'm looking at. Stay in Japan - or at any rate Asia - and continue plying a trade I fell into more or less accidentally. Or return home, very likely jumping down the rabbit hole with the rest of my country, deep into Orwell's darkest nightmares, and hope to God it all blows over quickly.

Although I know it won't. If America loses itself, it'll be a century before it's people wake up and remember who they used to be. If I go back, I'm not just fucking myself ... I'm risking any kids I might have, too.

History's a bitch, isn't it?

2007-09-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

Progress towards the iFly continues apace. Meet the German microdrone.

English Needs the Chinese Alphabet

2007-09-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

Ohhh, my poor synapses. It's at times like this I'm reminded why I swore off certain psychoactive amphetamine derivatives years and years ago. Six hours of awesome fun, six days of sub-par mental performance. Still, expensive as it all was, a rave up in the Japanese Alps is an experience I won't soon forget (though the memories might be a little fuzzy at times :-p )

Anyhow. The preceding is not the point of the post, but merely a weak excuse for the recent lack of posting (as I've spent myself into poverty until the next paycheck, I expect I'll be posting quite a bit more frequently in the future.)

You think you know a country. You've been there a few years, can speak the language, and have talked to enough people and had enough strange experiences that you get to thinking that there's nothing more that can really surprise you. And then out of nowhere something pops out that smacks you right upside the head and forcefully reminds you of how alien a place you're in.

Japanese people can read a novel in three hours. That's average. A fast reader can do it in under an hour; a slow reader takes maybe eight or nine. Now, I'm a fairly fast reader. I've been literate since about the age of three or four (thanks, Mom!), and I've spent an excessive fraction of my life with my nose stuck in a book. If I'm really going, not pausing to digest what I'm reading but just flying through it as fast as possible, I can get finish a three hundred page, hundred-thousand word novel in maybe eight hours. At that rate I read maybe two books a week (lately significantly less than that, as I've been immersing myself in Japanese media the last few months as part of an effort to master the language in time for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December, which I'll probably fail anyway.)

I've dreamed about being able to read faster for years. Most of those dreams involve some sort of cyborg prosthesis that reduces cover-to-cover elapsed time to a matter of seconds. So you can understand why, when I found out that the average Japanese reading speed is over twice as fast as that of a Westerner, I felt just a twinge (well, maybe more of a stab) of jealousy, heightened by the knowledge that it's far too late for me to ever be able to read Japanese at native-level speeds (maybe if I'd started at three or four....)

Westerners are often baffled by the Chinese alphabet (the Japanese use a modified version of the Chinese alphabet, which is why from here on I'm going to talk about Chinese rather than Japanese characters.) It seems ridiculous to us - at least it certainly did to me - that their alphabet is isomorphic to their dictionary, with thousands of characters that have to be laboriously memorized. The roman alphabet seems intuitively more practical: fifty-two characters, combined with some fairly simple phonetic rules, are perfectly sufficient for recording all the words of our or any other language.

Then again, so is binary.

Think about what happens when you read. In order to understand a printed word, your eyes have to scan it from beginning to end, picking out the letters, putting them into syllables, and eventually forming it all into a coherent word. This is an entirely different process from that involved in reading Chinese characters. The characters contain no clues as to how to pronounce them (although in Japanese - which actually has three alphabets, two of them phonetic - have a way around that, by writing tiny furigana above the kanji. This is a Japanese thing, though; the Chinese do quite well without it.) Reading Chinese characters is all about pattern recognition: your eyes settle on the character and it's meaning flashes instantly into your brain (assuming you know the character, that is; if you don't, it's just a disturbing blank spot.) You still have to scan in order to get the high level grammatical structures, of course, but the individual words are much more quickly available.

I first noticed this a while ago, actually, maybe a month or two after I started studying Japanese. As I mentioned above, Japanese has three alphabets: kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana (phonetic characters), and katakana (phonetic characters used in a roughly analogous way to italics, ie for emphasis or rendering foreign words.) TV shows over here often have subtitles (not just western shows; the Japanese ones too. Not sure why), so when watching TV I'd also try and read the subtitles. I noticed that any kanji I happened to know I would recognize instantly, but for the kana I'd have to stop and sound them out, a much more laborious process.

It wasn't until a week or so back, though, that I really put two and two together, and started asking my students how long it takes them to read a book. Three hours, ladies and gentlemen, was the resounding answer. And this is for a language that, truth be told, uses phonetic alphabets very extensively. I can only imagine how much faster the Chinese must be, with a written language that dispenses entirely with phonics.

Hence the title of this post. English would be, I think, enormously improved if it started adopting Chinese characters. There's a tradeoff, of course. Mastering the Chinese alphabet is no small task; Asians generally aren't fully literate until they graduate high school (though considering the number of semi-literate college grads back home, this isn't such a big difference ... and indeed, I have to wonder what the hell their excuse is. It's not like the roman alphabet is hard to learn. But I digress....) That investment in time, however, pays off later with the ability to take in information at over twice the speed possible with a phonetic alphabet.

I'm not suggesting a complete abandonment of the roman alphabet, here, but more of a marriage. The Japanese example is instructive: they do their nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs with kanji, but put most of the grammatical structures together with kana. Here's an example of what this hybrid written language might look like:

I went to the store and bought some running shoes.
I 行t to the 店 and 買t some 走靴.

The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution banning arms sales to Venezuela.
The 国連安全保障理事会判決d a 決意禁止ing 兵器販売s to Venezuela.

Those are just examples, in which I just substituted the Japanese compound kanji directly. A fully anglicized Chinese alphabet could well be even more compact.

It sounds crazy, I know, but English has become the language of the world, and that world includes well over a billion people who use kanji as a matter of course. It wouldn't be at all unheard of for some kind of hybrid language to emerge, and I for one am all for it. Both styles of writing have their advantages, and putting them together could well create the ultimate written language.

Yound Bodies and Old Spirits

2007-09-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

A month back Michael Anissimov wrote about the connection between immortalism and existential risks. After all, if aging can be reversed and all disease prevented, our lifespans might stretch out into thousands of years ... unless, of course, something like a meteor (or a nuclear war, or a plague of killer nano-machines, or a superintelligent AI that happens to take a disliking to us) happens. In which case, everyone dies at the same time, and your shiny new immortality just isn't so great anymore.

Anissimov thinks people should take this kind of thing more seriously, and you know, I think they will, very quickly and likely in the bare nick of time. Once medicine progresses to the point that it's obvious to everyone that aging and disease are a thing of the past (two things that could happen very rapidly, possibly even near-simultaneously), the parts of their brains that assess risk will be left with little but the existential ones. After flailing about for a while, and finding that none of the old risks are really around any more (because any breakdown in the body up to and probably including death are eminently fixable), they'll settle on the existential risks as being, well, pretty well the only game in town.

And what a terrible game it is, because we're talking here about things that can kill everyone - perhaps even everything - and in a very short time. The effect this will have on society will be interesting to see. It will be a massive - perhaps even the dominant - influence on mass consciousness. Universal fear will be universally shared.

I sometimes wonder if perhaps progress won't come to a slow crawl at some point. A planet full of immortals who are desperately afraid of being killed by something they can't control is likely to be a conservative place indeed. With thousands of years ahead, there's no need to rush, and every reason to take every additional step into the unknown as cautiously as possible. Earth's people will all have the bodies of twenty-year olds, but it will be a culture of old women at heart. Nanomachines can't keep your soul from getting old.

Life, and it's Intrusions on Blogging

2007-09-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

How careless of me. It's been a week since my last post, and really, I am trying to get at least a few out per week (preferably a few day, but hey, I do have a day job.) I have no really good excuses, really I've just been partying for a week, ie drinking beer with my friends and clubbing instead of relaxing with a beer in my six tatami mat room (that's small, in case you didn't know) with my iPod plugged into the speakers, while I sit at my computer and blog. Okay, it wasn't all clubs and parties. In fact, clubbing was only Saturday - went to Womb, best goddamn club in Tokyo - and I spent both Friday and Sunday using my computer to watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig instead of type (highly recommended, by the way, but then I'm a huge fan of koukaku kidoutai, or攻殻機動隊 as they say in Japanese.)

Long weekend, you see.

The nightcap of the binge was my first visit to a hostess club. It was expensive (though I did manage to escape before paying for the talk-time, which I honestly didn't know I was supposed to do. In my defence, the only reason I was there was that the guy I was with completely lied about where he was taking me, and I still dropped a wad of cash on drinks for me, two hostesses, and that same guy.) I'll admit it was ... interesting attending an establishment where you pay money to talk to pretty girls, a cleaner though deeply weird take on strip clubs that so far as I know is unique to Japan. Prostitution of the soul instead of prostitution of the body (both forms of which exist here, I can assure you). I can understand how the taste developed; there's something to be said for a place where you can talk to beautiful women who seem genuinely interested in your conversation, especially if the wife isn't looking so pretty these days and is starting to hate your guts to boot. It's quite pleasant, and the strict prohibition on physical contact avoids pushing most (though not quite all) of the sexual prurience buttons inside the cultural psyche.

Anyhow, sorry for the lack of posts. Can't promise it won't happen again, but next time I'll at least try to give a 'slow post' warning.

Greening The Deserts

2007-09-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

Global Seawater, Inc. plans to make forests grow with nothing more than seawater, sand, and sun.

The plan is to combine mangroves and salcornia - two plants that grow in seawater, and can be used for both food and biodiesel production - with shrimp living in artificial ponds fed by canals to the ocean. The shrimp provide food, their effluent feeds back into the mangroves, the mangroves (which enrich the soil very quickly, by trapping lots of carbon ... great for stopping global warming) allow the growth of salicornia, and the end result very quickly transforms a wasteland into a forest.

Link to Accelerating Future's Singularity Summit liveblogging (it's a big and growing post, so you have to scroll down a bit. The rest is just as interesting, though.)

Link to youtube video, Greening Eritrea.

Combined with vertical farming, technologies like this might make famines a thing of the past for the entire species.

The ZPrinter 450

2007-09-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Wow, now this is just amazing. Can't believe I'm just hearing about it now.

The ZPrinter 450, probably the most user-friendly rapid prototyper to date. It's still a long way from real desktop manufacturing. It can't print off its own parts and, worse, can work only with very specialized feedstock, thus limiting it to making non-functional models and toys rather than actual technology.

Still, it's a step in the right direction. My prediction for this company, though, is that they'll do well enough but not for too long ... they're so early in the game, their product still such a comparatively primitive piece of technology, that they'll get sidelined by some later competitor, like a working reprap.

Once that's out, it won't take long at all for today's ZPrinter to evolve (literally) into tomorrow's nanofactory.

The eX-Prize

2007-09-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

It seems that the X-Prize foundation - if you've never heard of them, they're the ones who enabled this - is going to be endowing a prize for education. Via the Speculist, who overheard it at the Singularity Summit,

Over Lunch, we saw a presentation from Michael Lindsay of the X Prize Foundation. The Foundation is considering doing a prize for education. They're looking at starting out by measuring Algebra, Reading Comprehension, and Second Language acquisition. Lindsay's intent was to gather feedback from the Singularity Summit crowd. There was a good deal of push-back, particularly concerning the fact that the Foundation plans to use standardized tests to measure the results. It will be interesting to see whether an X-Prize for education ever materializes.

This is an interesting direction for engineering contests to take. Spaceships and cars that drive themselves are one thing, but trying to redesign how kids are taught ... that could be revolutionary. I have no doubt that we already possess the tools to turn every school into a genius factory by turn of the century standards; the problem is, the tools are still so new we're still floundering around trying to find a way to use them. An educational X-Prize could be just thing to focus people's minds.

Strategic Implications of Robots

2007-09-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

This paper, Theoretical, Legal and Ethical Impact of Robots on Warfare, makes the point that warfare may well become much more common as a direct result of the widespread of use of robots.

Killer Robots

2007-09-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

Let's consider for a moment the implications of a military armed with robots. Lots of robots.

If you want to be pedantic, you could argue that this had already begun with the use of cruise missiles. Certainly the introduction of the Predator in Afghanistan, and it's rapid conversion to a missile-platform, marked a milestone. The development of the SWORDS, though, is something you sort of have to sit up and take notice of. Read this Defense Review article for the details on that, if you haven't already heard of it.

Now, this year's models are rather clunky, with their tracks and their hydraulics; a supplement but certainly not a replacement for actual boots on the ground. The technology is only going to advance, though, and it will do so quite rapidly. It could easily progress to the point where the robots are agile enough and smart enough that they can wage war with very minimal human supervision, perhaps nothing more than a token authorization to kill. At the same time, as the cost of manufacturing robots decreases, it could eventually get cheaper to manufacture ten robots and send them in the place of a single human.

(As a side-note, while soldiers could very well be replaced by mechanical killing machines, I very much doubt aid workers could be, at least not as easily. Post-conflict reconstruction ops are likely to be the very last service to be mechanized.)

The US could simply build up stockpiles of robots to be deployed at a moment's notice, to make war on anyone within strike range. Admittedly, this is a capability they already have, but robots would allow them to concentrate military force as never before; support units (mechanics, mostly) who never leave the base would be able to support ten times as much destructive potential, all the scarier for the fact that it can be wielded with a precision unthinkable in any previous war.

Territory could be defended the same way, and of course if the US can build lots of cheap killer robots, well, so can any other country. Which they will, and which development will undoubtedly lead to the odd spectacle of wars in which only machines are destroyed, with nary a drop of human blood shed in the process (I can't help but mention the explanation for warfare at the end of 1984, that it served primarily to burn off wealth and prevent the people from becoming rich.)

That bit about blood not being spilt doesn't necessarily follow, and indeed I expect a long time will pass before any war is truly free of bloodshed. Nevertheless I expect robotic warfare to make war gentler on humans than it has ever been. The men pulling the trigger are no longer, after all, in life-or-death situations; they're sitting at an easy-chair, somewhere in a control building (or maybe their apartment) back in the home country. People will naturally assume that a certain coolness should accompany that absence of risk; soldiers (if indeed they are still referred to as such) will be expected to behave more as judges do. Incidents such as gang rapes will disappear as a matter of course (given that the troops are no longer within sexual range of any potential victims); accidental killings will not be tolerated; and massacres will simply not happen. The operator of a remote killing machine will be held to a standard higher than that required of a chivalrous knight, and he will be held to it more strictly.

A lot of people get nervous at the idea of killer robots, and I don't blame them. The idea of an autonomous mechanical killing machine is pretty scary, especially if they go fully autonomous and start killing everyone a la Terminator. I think it will be a positive development. Wars might ultimately become a mixture of law enforcement and public spectacle along the lines of a sporting event.

But just to keep you from thinking I'm too rosy on this, I'll leave you with this:

It is well that war is so terrible - we should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee

Knowledge Webs and What Schools Should Be

2007-09-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

Via Al Fin, a post about virtual schools.

Reading the Wired article he linked to, this part jumped out at me:

Struggling students such as Kelsey-Anne, who suffers from attention deficit disorder, can take more time to finish courses while those who are gifted can go at a faster speed.

Casey Hutcheson, 17, finished English and geometry online in the time it would have taken to complete just one of those courses at his regular high school in Tallahassee.

"I like working by myself because of no distractions, and I can go at my own pace rather than going at the teacher's pace," he said.

I wish dearly a system like this had been in place when I was Casey Hutcheson's age, or better yet an eight-year-old. The slow pace at which new things were taught to us from kindergarten on onwards was a constant source of frustration to me, become particularly acute in high-school but present throughout. This irritation led me to take a long, deep look at modern education, and into the philosophy and aims that spawned it (most of the structure has it's aims in a social engineering project designed to raise good factory workers.) If our aim is for kids to learn as much as they can, as fast as they can, well hell we can do a lot better.

My own private vision of the school of the future is that the formal learning would migrate mostly online, with the network replacing both the textbooks and testing. Read this Edge.org essay by W. Daniel Hillis, Aristotle: The Knowledge Web to get some idea of what I'm talking about.

The gains in efficiency from really learning to use networks as education tools are pretty staggering. Right now, the situation is that slow learners struggle along, never really gaining mastery over anything because there simply isn't time to let them catch up; while fast learners are held back from acquiring the full range and depth of knowledge open to them. Of course, in the real world there aren't three different types of people (subnormal, mediocre, and exceptional), there are six billion, spread out over a bell curve of ability levels. So in truth, everyone's under-served by the old model.

Of course, there are always critics, and the Wired article finds one of them, trotting out the same old argument that "There is something to be said for having kids in a social situation learning how to interact in society," said state Rep. Shelley Vana. "I don't think you get that if you're at home." Well, yeah, I have to agree with that. Homeschooled kids might learn faster and better, but yeah, the ones I've met have been odd people. In my case - growing up in deep cottage country, surrounded by trees and old people - school was the only opportunity I really got to socialize at all.

The thing I see schools evolving into is basically a place for teenagers to hang out, under adult supervision, and not so much learn stuff as participate in various collaborative projects. Adult staff won't be there to teach them, exactly. The teaching will be done by an educational network, one that knows exactly what every one of its users has mastered (dispensing with old-fashioned metrics like As and Bs and courses passed: instead of a transcript a university or employer could see a map of a student's acquired knowledge that much more accurately delineates what they do and do not know), and exactly how each user learns best (be it watching, reading, listening, or doing.) The job of teachers in this environment isn't to lecture, but rather to provide support to student projects; to advise, to help, and to keep discipline. Basically, their job will be one part guidance councilor and one part after-school club-leader.

Classrooms as they're now understood (ranks of desks facing a chalkboard where a teacher talks to them for an hour) can also be dispensed with. In their place would be a mixture of general-use areas - where students can withdraw to converse or study or whatever else they want to do - and spaces dedicated to single uses, such as sports, laboratories, and fabs. Instead of joining classes, students could simply reserve time in the dedicated areas when needed, either individually or as part of a group, spending the rest of their time where they please.

Of course, there would be no point in enforcing attendance at such a school. Since the formal learning is entirely web-based, students could either learn at home (if they're the shy sort), or small groups could meet at places of their own choosing and educate themselves there. Schools would have to attract students' voluntary attendance, by offering services and facilities - computational, industrial, and above-all recreational - that students could not find elsewhere. Essentially, schools would be forced to become cool places to hang out, instead of prisons in which society locks you eight hours a day.

It's possible concepts like 'graduation' might cease to exist, as well. If a person's acquired knowledge can be mapped out in enough detail, accreditation can take place both gradually and instantly. One danger is hyper-specialization; a 15-year-old student might, for instance, master what would today be a grad-school level of knowledge about history, but only an elementary school level of math. But an upshot is that it would no longer be necessary for there to be a strict dividing line between school and the outside world; elementary school would blend seamlessly into highschool, university, graduate school and the workforce, with people returning to educational institutions whenever they wanted - for an afternoon or a decade - to pursue whatever educational goals they have.

Singularity Summit 2007

2007-09-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

Michael Anissimov is liveblogging. So far he's seen Rodney Brooks, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and a few others. Interesting stuff.

So is Considering the Universe. The Speculist is there too.

Immigration in America

2007-09-08T10:38:00.001-07:00

I am in awe. Orson Scott Card - the man who wrote Ender's Game - types a polemic against the anti-immigration movement that is simply stunning in it's power.

Seriously, go read it. You'll never take border fences seriously again.

Brains and Wings

2007-09-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

Fascinating article at Developing Intelligence pointing out that for all the similarities between brains and computers, there are some serious differences as well.

My take: guy knows a lot about brains and a lot about computers, no question. But I'm not so sure you should draw the conclusion that AI is more difficult than it is already perceived to be.

"These airplanes, sure they can fly but they're completely different from birds' wings or bugs' wings. They don't move, for one. They're not self-repairing (within limits.) The surface of an animal's wing is almost infinitely more complex than that of a an airplane's, fantastically ordered on a scale an artificial wing can't possibly but match."

All true. But when you get down to brass tacks, wings are made for flying whether they're attached to a hummingbird or a helicopter, and brains and computers are both designed for processing information. Tell me again which wing it is that breaks the sound barrier?

One Last Post

2007-09-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

It's late and there's a typhoon raging outside my window so I'm getting sleepy. I'll just post these three articles from 10 Zen Monkeys without comment, suggest y'all read them, and then go to bed.

Without further comment, I present to you:

The Scientific Laws of Romance

The Male Scale: 10 Archetypes

and

Don't Go There: Top 20 Taboo Topics for Presidential Candidates

Funny shit, and all very true.

More Pretty Pictures

2007-09-06T08:57:00.001-07:00

You know, two things sort of pop out at me from this: first, the temperature seems to do a lot of quickly darting up and then easing it's way back down into a nice long ice age.

That, and if you lean in and sort of squint, it looks like the rise in temperature leads the rise in CO2 by, oh, eight hundred years or so.

(Image found at New Scientist.)

Your Odds of Dying

2007-09-06T08:11:00.001-07:00

In light of the recent posts about afterlives and immortality, I sort of felt this was appropriate:

Ultimately, something's gonna getcha. Neal Asher - a man whose books I've never not loved - gives the appropriate math-based rant over at The Skinner.

The Bomb and The Bug

2007-09-06T06:37:00.000-07:00

Let's say for a second the false flag theory of 9/11 is true. I'm not going to discuss this in the article (or bother debating it in the comments, if anyone's so inclined), as there are much better places for that.

It would imply the reason there's been no terrorist attack on American soil in the past six years is nothing to do with better security and everything to do with the fact that the government sees no need for another. The anger/fear reaction elicited by 9/11 were sufficient to get the war they wanted, and if we're lucky they're happy with that.

If their ambitions go deeper, though....

9/11 worked once. There's no reason another, similar attack couldn't work just as well. Just knocking down a building with a plane or a bomb wouldn't be sufficient, though; there are security measures already in place against that (so maniacally and rigidly focused on preventing that kind of attack, so useless for preventing any other.) And besides, now that the war's going it'll probably keep going forever, or at least as long as it keep paying for itself (see this post by John Robb at Global Guerrillas, Unleashing the Dogs of War.)

Maybe the ultimate plan is to complete the short-circuiting of democracy in America. Of course, for that you'd need something much scarier than a plane flying into a building. If you want to get something like, say, nation-wide martial law you'd need a really serious emergency or a really massive shock. I see two ways to go about this: either a Bomb or a Bug. Lets take a closer look at these two scenarios.

1. The Bomb, or "Shit, what happened to Springfield?"

If Americans woke up one day to hear that a city had been nuked out of existence, that tens of thousands of people were dead, with hundreds of thousands more on the way due to the radiation, their first reaction would be that someone, somewhere would pay.

There's an easy way, I think, to tell if the nuke is planted by the government or by al Qaeda. If the latter, they'll pick a target like LA or New York, one that'll maximize the economic damage, and kill the largest number of people. If the former, a smaller city will be picked, one that the US will be able to live without, wounded and angry. Let's call the city Springfield, an everytown that can be plucked out of existence without the economy noticing.

Where did the nuke come from? Oh, that's simple enough. Iran, Pakistan, the Soviet Union. If it's one of the first two there will be nuclear retaliation, and everything east of Iraq and west of India will be radioactive waste. If the latter - a plausible source for the device, as their poor security and corrupt officialdom of the 90s (not that they're so much better now) means that any number of their nukes might have leaked out onto the market - then while terrorists will be blamed for detonating it their countries might possibly escape total culpability in the eyes of the American people, and thus be spared a nuclear revenge that would be history's greatest genocide.

They would not, however, be spared bloodshed. The conventional war would most likely escalate greatly (aided by a large expansion in the robotics industry), with the aim not so much of conquering the Middle East, but of militarizing US society as thoroughly as possible. A militarized society, after all - especially one still in shock - is more accepting of public regimentation, and of the steady erosion and eventually total loss of their freedom.

2. The Bug

The outbreak hits a major city somewhere, and is suppressed with only a few thousand people dying (conversely, it wipes out a Springfield). Almost as soon as it hits the entire city is put under quarantine: anyone not involved in medical or security services is advised to remain at home, until further notice. Quickly suppressed outbreaks occur in a few other cities, claiming several hundred more lives, and other outbreaks occur in a few other countries around the world (likely claiming many more.)

The Quarantine would have to last for a few weeks to be effective, and in that time martial law could be slipped into place. All manner of restrictions on travel could be justified afterwards, in order to prevent any further outbreaks from taking place.

I could see the Quarantine become something very extreme. Restrictions on travel could mean that most office jobs converted to telecommuting, just to avoid the hassle of checkpoints. The fear of getting sick would motivate people to spend a lot of time at home, and the technology industry would be thrilled to play the enabler. In the long run, people could buy robots so they didn't actually have to leave their houses to perform errands.

There's a great advantage to that kind of situation for a tyranny. If you always know where everyone is, it's much easier to keep very close track of what they're doing. They could have all the free speech they wanted and it wouldn't mean a damn, for they'd all be under voluntary house arrest.

Which method is used is largely irrelevant. Both could be accomplished with relatively small teams; both would make fear pervasive to a degree we can't imagine today; both would thus, in short order, lead to autocracy of one kind or another. The forms need not be changed. There would still be a President, a Congress, Supreme Courts and a Constitution that they all pretended to love while ignoring utterly. But their grip on power would be absolute, insulated utterly from the will of the people they purport to serve and in fact rule with an iron fist.

Another thing they have in common is the Springfield factor. A real attack, either nuclear or biological, would claim not tens but hundreds of thousands of lives. It would target a large, dense city, and the economic damage would bring America to it's knees, wiping it out as a dominant world power. I'm betting that any cabal that merely wants to solidify their power over America also wants to preserve America's power as much as possible, and will thus avoid anything that causes real structural harm.

But hey, I could be wrong about that, in which case we're really in shit.

Linkathon

2007-09-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

Welcome, Speculist readers! Come for the iFly and the Baby Universes, stay for the ... ummm ... whatever else strikes my fancy (and hopefully yours.)

Thanks to the linkathon, my numbers have jumped up higher than they've ever been on this blog (that would be about thirty. Ah, obscurity ;)

Dreams Come True

2007-09-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

Humans have always dreamt of an afterlife. It's something we had to create, if only in our minds, once we made the conscious realization that try as we might to survive we would inevitably one day die. This must have come as a terrible shock to our ancestors in deep prehistory (for it was surely many hundreds of thousands of years ago that the realization was made); centuries, even millennia might have passed between the realization of death and the invention of an afterlife, and the interim must have been a melancholy period indeed. One can only imagine the neuroses that plagued the period during that time.

Belief in an afterlife is one of the only memes that nearly every religion seems to share. It doesn't need to be an endlessly delightful heaven: reincarnation, ancestor spirits, the empty gray afterworld of the Greeks, or even the endless torment of hell are all preferable to simple nothingness. Dreams of something after the grave are universal in our species.

It's in the human character, though, that we try to make our dreams real. Whether we're dreaming of breakfast or bridges, we make our dreams manifest, if we dream them long enough, and hard enough, and enough of us share it. There are a lot of us now, and we've been dreaming of an afterlife for a long time. You might say it's become the survival imperative apotheosized at the species level. With a dream that big, at some point the universe has to give.

That point will come soon.

Our dreams become more sophisticated with time. Once we dreamed of crossing small streams, and we cut down some trees; now, we dream of connecting islands to continents, and lay down strips of steel and concrete. Our dreams of an afterlife have grown the same way, accreting complexity as our numbers swelled and our records grew longer. Tales told around the campfire became towering religions, though remaining fantasies for all that. Fantasies are are still all we have, but for the first time those fantasies are starting to resemble technical blueprints rather than stories. We're learning what makes us us, deep inside our brains: neuroscience is mapping it in every relevant detail, cognitive science is figuring out how the parts all fit together, and information science is starting to put together working models.

Before many more decades are out, we'll be able to lift a persons soul out of their mind and put it in a computer. In all likelihood people won't even have to die first; some distant successor of an MRI might be able to read a person's soul in a matter of minutes, at which point you can either use it to back yourself up (in case of death, regrow a body and imprint the soul on it), or animate it, inhabiting either a simulation or a robot body (or another you, if you have extra bodies kicking around.) It's the latter options that I find really interesting; a backup is useful if all you want is immortality, but being able to inhabit multiple bodies simultaneously, now that has some interesting applications. Imagine being able to run a million you's in parallel, having a million times the experience you could have on your own (a million at least; that's assuming the sims aren't running much faster than you). Having bodies distributed around the world would lend people some interesting new capabilities as well, especially as robots - unlike people - are well-suited to survival beyond the Earth's biosphere. A person would live a life of ease at the center of a network of millions of their own personalities, spread through microchips and robots, that do all of their work for them.

You might question what need the network would have of that crusty old lump of meat sitting at its center, directing it's actions. Certainly there's no need for a template; once the first copy has been made, copies of that copy can be made with near-perfect fidelity a near infinite number of times (in practice, every copy could be so copied.) David Brin's idea in Kiln People - a novel that explores the nature of a world where people live in parallel - was to give the dittoes a maximum lifespan of days, and to make ditto-to-ditto copying impossible. In practice I don't see that as a likely technical limitation, although you never know. Still, I like to think humans as such would be kept around over the long run, if only as ornaments, much the same way many countries retain their politically non-functional monarchs.

In the world I see, that is exactly the place I see humanity as occupying. Every man a king of a country of himself, his soul become an eternal thing that survives beyond any one body, for it occupies many.

How Likely is Life to Get Laid?

2007-09-04T12:22:00.000-07:00

Via Considering the Universe, this fascinating 1998 essay from Robin Hanson, in which he applies the probability theory of hard steps to the Great Filter, the idea that the reason the universe is not already teeming with life is that there is at least one and very likely far more hard steps between dead matter and a wave of colonizing life moving out at the speed of light:

To support optimism regarding our future, we must find especially improbable past evolutionary steps. And in fact we can find a number of plausible candidates for groups of hard trial-and-error biological steps: life, complexity, sex, society, cradle and language. Presuming there are about nine hard steps total here, the Great Filter could be explained if the expected time for each of these steps averaged (logarithmically) to about thirty billion years, if only one percent of stars could support such steps, and if we have only about a one percent chance of not destroying ourselves soon (or permanently banning colonization).

It's a little technical but nothing the educated reader can't handle. It's certainly something to think about, and a little comforting to think that the explanation isn't that intelligent life always manages to wipe itself out when it hits the Singularity.

Also, this excellent essay from George Dvorsky over at BetterHumans, in which he brings everyone up to date on the latest developments in science pertaining to the Great Silence.

Year Zero

2007-09-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Year Zero is the best album Trent Reznor has ever done. A concept album whose plot is an alternate reality game is a really great idea, one that lends the album an intellectual and emotional depth that's simply not available otherwise. Here's the wiki if you're already interested.

For those who haven't heard about it, the idea is that the album is a warning from the near future - around the year 2020, as best as people have been able to tell - sent back in time along with a number of cached webpages through some quickly squelched development in quantum computing. The world that is revealed by this information is one in which the sinister cabal that currently controls the US government has metastasized. Democracy has been completely destroyed in all but name, a feat accomplished by scaring the shit out of the population through repeated and ever worse false flag operations, first a nuke and then a bioweapon. The latter gave them the excuse to start dumping a drug into the water supply that was purported to defend against the pathogen, but in reality is simply a drug designed to stupefy the population. The government is using it's newfound power to savage every part of the world with which it has contact: organ-farming the population in Guatemala, mass drug testing in Africa, and of course a continued war in the Mid-East - Iran's been nuked - which has long since ceasing making any sense save as a way of keeping the population distracted (it was those damn terrorists who nuked us and released the virus!)

That's the setup. What happens is that aliens, or God, or the entities that are running our simulated universe - my favored hypothesis, but really it's moot - appear and give humans an unmistakable warning. Either we change our ways right quick, or we get wiped out. They've been watching the species very closely, for a very long time, without interfering in our development, but things have reached a crisis point and they've revealed themselves.

In the end, of course, we get wiped out, deleted utterly from the universe. That's why the warning gets sent back.

This makes a kind of sense to me. We're approaching a time when a single state will be able to control the entire world, and once it's in place it will be stable for a very long time, having subsumed all other competitors. The initial form of that state will thus be of enormous importance to the future evolution of humanity, and more to the point, post-humanity: what spreads out from the Earth will either bless the universe around it or taint it with a horrible blight.

The aliens were hoping for something good. That's why they watched us so long, let us develop and grow. It's probably something they've done many times in the past, on millions or billions of other worlds (or in billions of other computer simulations): patiently watching a world for hundreds of millions of years, waiting for it's life to develop intelligence, and then closely watching the civilization as it advances through the inevitable technological stages. Eventually, the Singularity approaches, and it's at that point, one way or another, that the watchers reveal themselves. If the growing seed looks like it will grow into a benign coinhabitant of the cosmic civilization, it's inducted; if it's become something malign, it's terminated, quickly and without ceremony.

Neither permanent dystopias, which the state in Year Zero would have developed into, nor god-like aliens - the only creatures that could put an end to the malignancy - are exactly new ideas. Nevertheless Reznor has managed (uncharacteristically enough for a musician, though not so surprisingly given the obviously collaborative nature of the project) to combine them into a superlative and thought-provoking work of SF, one that is both deeply thoughtful and creepily plausible. It's not really a warning from the future, but it most certainly is a warning, sincere and frightening, one that all of us should take the time to think over.

By Any Means Necessary

2007-08-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

I gotta say, I'm not all that surprised that the person publicly advocating a military coups in the US is from the left side of the political spectrum. Counterintuitive - most people would expect it to be a rightwinger - but the left is the side that generally prefers to use the courts, rather than the voting booth, to get what they want.

It's saddening when people begin to lose faith in democracy, but, again, not surprising. If this view becomes widespread a coups is probably inevitable, given enough time.

Hat tip: Wretchard at the Belmont Club.

The Risk Of Being A Simulation

2007-08-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Lifeboat Foundation has a post, Risks Not Worth Worrying About (crossposted at Life, the Universe, and Everything), that's rather thought provoking.

I like Phil Bowermeister's take on the simulation argument, that if our world really is a simulation, the point of the simulation is to raise new civilizations up to the point that they can be released into the universe (whatever the real universe is, and assuming we survive, of course.)

Lego: Not Just For Kids Anymore

2007-08-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

Building a robot is one thing, but a factory? Now that's impressive.