Thursday, April 29. 2010
'The "nascent recovery" continues to be nascent a year later. Why? Because it's constructed on sand and hyped by smoke and mirrors. The "nascent recovery" will soon be revealed as "failed" rather than "nascent". How long can "nascent" be deployed as cover for a "recovery" constructed of propaganda, manipulated statistics and "confidence-building" spin?' (Charles Hugh Smith article).media-underground.net
Sunday, March 21. 2010
'"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."
Now, Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, echoes Diamond's warning: "Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice." Yes, America is on the edge.' (MarketWatch article). media-underground.net
Saturday, March 20. 2010
This sourced from Dangerous Minds:
'Touted in their day as the next Stooges, Death came to an abrupt end after refusing to change their name. But renewed interest in the proto-punks is ensuring their incendiary legacy lives on.
'The once-flawless credentials of Detroit's late-60s garage-rock scene took a considerable dent recently thanks to Iggy Pop's badly timed car insurance advert. And let's not forget the readiness of MC5's surviving members to exchange their manifesto of "dope, guns and fucking in the streets" for casual denimwear a few years back. However, one power trio from the city can claim 35 years without selling out - a feat made considerably easier by the fact that Death's debut album was nixed by the Man before it even made it to the pressing plant.' (Guardian article & Isohunt torrent download). media-underground.net
Monday, February 15. 2010
'It's January 2009 and David Letterman is making a public apology. The American chat show king is talking about an error of judgment he made years earlier, a mistake, he says, born out of his own feelings of insecurity. He hasn't been caught with his pants down.
'No, the person he's making an apology to is Mary Hicks, the mother of the American stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, whose final performance was controversially cut from the Letterman show, making Hicks one of the first comedy acts to be fully censored on the CBS network. It's a decision that ultimately denied the American public what would turn out to be their final opportunity to see Hicks on mainstream television. Less than six months later, on 26 February 1994, Hicks died from pancreatic cancer at the criminally young age of 32.
'To be fair to Letterman, no one outside Hicks's immediate family knew he was sick. But considering the jokes had been pre-approved several times by the network's standards and practices committee, the decision to drop the routine was devastating for the comedian, who knew what he was facing and just wanted his material to have another shot at penetrating the American mainstream that had ignored him for much of his career. "It was a hard time for all of us. I just need you to know that," Mrs Hicks later told Letterman sternly on that January 2009 show, stunning him into silence. After screening the routine - in which a painfully thin and bearded Hicks takes hilarious sideswipes at the pro-life lobby, mediocre celebrities and peculiarities of religious iconography - Letterman acknowledged how timeless the material seemed and sheepishly wondered: "What was the matter with me?"' (Scotsman article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, February 9. 2010
During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the sixth and final part of a series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.
'Financial security and widespread acclaim were things Philip K. Dick had spent his career waiting for, always on the verge. He compared himself to the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.
'“If it does come for me, will it matter?” Dick wrote in 1976. “Will it make up for 25 years of shivering with fear as to whether, when I get up in the morning, the electricity will still be turned on?”
'During those years, Dick’s health problems continued, sometimes coinciding with money woes. After a 1976 heart attack that sent him to the county hospital and left him with a $2,000 bill, he had only 40 cents to his name. He was only saved from having his utilities turned off by a royalty check from France. “Here I am,” he wrote, “after twenty-five years of professional SF writing, getting notices that they are going to turn off the water and gas and electricity if I don’t pay in three days, and I say, What has it all been for?”' (L.A. Times article). media-underground.net
Thursday, February 4. 2010
During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the fifth part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.
'Though Philip K. Dick was not, on the surface, a writer of place - he was driven more by sweeping ideas than by locations or even local cultures - his time in Southern California had a profound impact on his work, in sometimes complicated ways. Dick wrote - in a 1973 letter to Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem - “there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics - this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up.”' (L.A. Times article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, February 2. 2010
During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the forth part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.
'Of course, for all the action of Philip K. Dick’s Orange County years - the marriage, the divorce, the birth of his son Christopher, the suicide attempt, the bouts of depression, the new novels, the development of Blade Runner - the most significant is surely what the author came to call "2-3-74". Those months of 1974 were when Dick either lost his mind completely or was visited, ravishingly, by God.' (L.A. Times article). media-underground.net
Friday, January 29. 2010
During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the third part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.
'While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.” To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well.' (L.A. Times article). media-underground.net
Thursday, January 28. 2010
During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the second part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.
'Philip K. Dick arrived in Orange County in 1972 by flying to LAX, where he showed up in a sport coat he’d outgrown, hauling the Jehovah’s Witness translation of the Bible and a cardboard box, doubling as a suitcase, tied closed with an extension cord. Dick - who has been described, alternately, as paranoid, hilariously funny, childish and deeply empathetic - was in some of the weirdest shape of his life.' (L.A. Times article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, January 27. 2010
During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. In this six part series, freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.
'When author Philip K. Dick called Tim Powers to ask him to come by his Fullerton apartment for a drink one evening, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he and other aspiring writers often spent with the science-fiction titan. That is, a wide-ranging bull session about religion, philosophy and the glories of Beethoven - along with some incongruous chatter about car repair - over wine and beer.' (L.A. Times article). media-underground.net
Saturday, December 26. 2009
'Here’s where we’re at folks. The end of the line.
'“The end of free-market capitalism”
'I’ve heard it called.
'“The sub-prime mortgage crisis”
'Some blame it on.
'“A global economic meltdown”
'Time for some major change.
'So, our entire way of life is exposed as a rickety, weak, hollow, card house that collapses in a heartbeat, so what do we do? We throw money at it! We actually try and prop this mangled, pathetic card house back up with the exact cause of the collapse!
'Kind of like tossing a bucket of water on a tsunami.
'Kind of like throwing a candle at a forest fire.
'Sort of the equivalent of throwing a snow ball at an avalanche.
'Bail outs? Our solution is bail-outs?!?! And regulation? But please, don’t get me wrong, the other side of the coin is just as, if not more retarded. Tax breaks and the same freewheeling market that got us here? Those are the only two “solutions” on the table. Let me give you a hint. They are both wrong.
'Here’s my solution. It’s time to re-think where we’re at and where we need to be going and what we need to do to get there. It’s time to realize that money got us to where we are, and it was helpful in doing so. The market pushed us to produce, innovate and it kept us waking up in the morning. It served a purpose at a time, but that time has long passed. And no government or bank or wall street finance expert or CEO will ever realize that. They will fight with every fiber in their being to defend the only thing they know. They will scratch and claw to keep themselves important.
'They are all irrelevant.' (Danny Mendlow article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, June 17. 2009
'In the universe as we experience it, we can directly affect only objects we can touch; thus, the world seems local.
'Quantum mechanics, however, embraces action at a distance with a property called entanglement, in which two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary; it is nonlocal. This nonlocal effect is not merely counterintuitive: it presents a serious problem to Einstein's special theory of relativity, thus shaking the foundations of physics.
'Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock - or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect - the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition - say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air) - it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.' (Scientific American article). media-underground.net
Monday, May 4. 2009
'A terrible thing, a recession. Inexorably, unemployment has climbed from 1.2 million to 3 million. Counting methods have altered, but some say joblessness is heading towards 3.4 million, others to 3.8 million. Across the country, it's carnage, misery and there is no end in sight.
'If you believe the Opposition, the government of the day has a lot to answer for. In under a year, GDP has collapsed by 3%, industrial production by 9%. The well-off have had their essential tax cuts, but still the national burden is increasing. An expansion in the tax take of fully 4.5% of the country's income is inevitable. And somehow, despite all the bold words from the politicians, public spending continues to climb.
'Grim, isn't it? Grim enough, certainly, if you still entertain hopes that there is such a thing as progress in British political life. After all, each of the statistics in the preceding flurry is drawn not from newspapers excoriating Gordon Brown, but from the history books. They are part of the record of the first Thatcher government, the one that saved Britain - it says here - from stagnation, humiliation and permanent decline.
'30 years ago, when she got to Downing Street she uttered some "awful humbug", in the words of one of her new ministers, purporting to be a prayer by St Francis of Assisi, but in fact a nineteenth-century invention. "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony," she said. Margaret Hilda Thatcher did not specify why discord might arise.' (Herald article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, March 17. 2009
'With any luck, the economy will never recover.
'In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.
'Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.' (Arthur Magazine article). media-underground.net
Friday, February 27. 2009
'Alligators basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.
'Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.
'The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.' (New Scientist article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, February 24. 2009
'It is a time of strange bedfellows and bizarre contortions and extraordinary responses to extreme situations, all overslathered with gobs of panic and dread and oh my God, I might have to sell the Range Rover. In other words, it is a time - like you don't already know - of plentiful alarmist rhetoric, resulting in weird outbursts of ingenuity and wanton ethics-loosening, all in a desperate effort to suck up some much-needed cash.
'Translation: Money's tight, baby. City's in trouble. State's deep in the hole. Nation's broke. Solution? Upend the system. Think differently. Get creative. Demolish Ye Olde Ways. And maybe get a really nice buzz on while you're at it.' (SFGate article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, January 27. 2009
'The RAF has tried to shoot down suspected UFOs as part of a Government directive, it has been claimed.
'Pilots have apparently fired upon the unidentified objects without success since the 1980s, according to Nick Pope, who used to run the Ministry of Defence's UFO project.
'Mr Pope claimed that the RAF only attempted to engage when the mysterious objects were perceived to be a threat.' (Telegraph article & video stream). media-underground.net
Saturday, January 17. 2009
'Driving through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
'For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
'For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.' (New Scientist article). media-underground.net
Friday, December 19. 2008
'It is futile to take it upon oneself to rouse a sleeping population, to attempt to rally the spiritually undead. Trying to connect unprepared minds to paradigm-cracking information is a vain indulgence. Those who prefer not to reflect upon their existence, who feel their needs, motivations and cultural references are fully served by the matrix, should be left alone. Leave them to their TV, evening news, shopping and sport. Drifting in the comfortable oblivion of the consensus trance. One day, they may eventually see through it and take their own first steps on the inner path. Maybe in a future lifetime.' (The Cleaver article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, November 19. 2008
'The driver was taking me from Melbourne airport into the city. As we chatted, it came out that he was deeply worried. He had a wife and child, and a new baby on the way - but what was the use of living, he cried, if the world would end in 2012 as predicted by the Mayan prophecies, when his new baby would be just four years old.
'Prophecies about the end of the world (or at the very least, civilisation as we know it) have been around forever. There was a flurry of them around 2000 AD, and another bunch for 5 May 2005, when all the planets were supposed to line up (by the way, they didn't line up and yep, we're still here).
'The Mayan civilisation covered the skinny bit of the Americas between North and South America, reaching from the southern states of Mexico down to western Honduras. Its Classic Period was from 250 to 900 AD, so their best years were behind them by the time of the Spanish invasion.' (ABC Science article). media-underground.net
Thursday, November 13. 2008
'Fully realizing that the George W. Bush Presidential administration would eventually create public outcry, could elites have sought to recruit an apparently unifying political figure, to manipulate the masses? In history, such figures though apparently populist messages, have sought to inspire “cults of personality”
'Through the engineering of cults of personality, in the name of the need to “make sacrifices“ for the “greater good“, and a “better tomorrow“, elites can seek to exploit times of economic crisis or societal stress, by talking about “change“. The mounting "sacrifices" eventually morph into an authoritarian regime, totalitarian control, necessitated for the creation of a "warrior society", that primarily exists to "vanquish its enemies".
'Any aspiring President, who suggests that they support progressive "change" in America, while embracing the apparent industry of lies associated with the "War on Terror", is an apparent impostor champion of progressive change. Americans could prevent a further worsening economic meltdown with international reach, by taking back their society from war mongering myth-makers, who commercially profit from a state of war; and the manufacture of redundant atomic and other weapons of mass destruction, that could destroy the world several times over. That state of war would make trillions of dollars available for critical civilian domestic areas, which include high education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and other areas.' (The Canadian article). media-underground.net
'Students of consciousness know that fear is a disconnecting frequency; it separates and diminishes with cold efficiency. Fear restrains consciousness by contracting it and binding it to the 3D, effectively isolating the individual from higher awareness. So it is that in these days of shifting paradigms, as the old hierarchies scramble to contain the effects of polarizing consciousness and wider galactic alignments, it is wise to be mindful of those who deal primarily in fear.' (The Cleaver article). media-underground.net
Thursday, October 23. 2008
The graphs climbing across these pages are a stark reminder of the crisis facing our planet. Consumption of resources is rising rapidly, biodiversity is plummeting and just about every measure shows humans affecting Earth on a vast scale. Most of us accept the need for a more sustainable way to live, by reducing carbon emissions, developing renewable technology and increasing energy efficiency.
'But are these efforts to save the planet doomed? A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy.
'This, of course, is economic heresy. Growth to most economists is as essential as the air we breathe: it is, they claim, the only force capable of lifting the poor out of poverty, feeding the world's growing population, meeting the costs of rising public spending and stimulating technological development - not to mention funding increasingly expensive lifestyles. They see no limits to that growth, ever.' (New Scientist article). media-underground.net
Friday, October 17. 2008
'In making Inside The Teenage Brain, we seemed to hit a nerve - a parental one - when we began looking into the world of teenagers and how they sleep. The patterns that young teens seemed to be experiencing - an inability to go to sleep at night, followed by profound drowsiness on waking - seemed so pervasive that it should come as no a surprise that what parents were seeing at home had already been corroborated in university sleep labs at Stanford and Brown.' (PBS article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, October 7. 2008
'The fractal spiral is the evolutionary movement of consciousness through the universe. Each iterative resolution of the fractal is encoded with the whole, meaning that every element and compound, from a hydrogen molecule to a Beethoven symphony, unfolds from the same elegant rule set and is capable of connecting to, or becoming, anything else in the universe. Every holographic fragment contains the big picture. It is the frequency of one’s own channel of consciousness that determines how deeply we can go.' (The Cleaver article). media-underground.net
Monday, October 6. 2008
'Current plans to cut ITV’s obligations as a public service broadcaster would mean it’d have no need to fill the cracks in its open-the-box, come-on-down schedules every night with regional news programmes.
'That would be excellent. I loathe regional news programmes. They’re always full of fat women wearing “Save our school” T-shirts that they’ve hurriedly pulled on over their normal clothes for the cameras, and pointless vox pops, and puffed-up councillors and green issues and plans for incinerators and recycled press releases, delivered with a solemn voice by a woman in an ethnic headscarf, in a bid to give them credence and weight.
'However, while the demise of Grantham Today is a cause for celebration, I do believe this is yet another rivet removed from the aeroplane wings of civilisation, and soon you’ll turn on Newsnight to find Jeremy Paxman in clown shoes urging parties from either side of the political divide to settle their differences in a bout of mud wrestling.' (Times Online article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, October 1. 2008
'We know we have taxed you to death via the IRS and inflation of the money supply, we know we have manipulated all the markets and engaged in rampant insider-trading and loan fraud, thus stealing trillions of dollars of your hard-earned cash from you, we know we created Ponzi-scheme bubbles in dot.com stocks and real estate, we know we gave mortgages to people who could not afford homes in the first place, we know that we falsely rated stocks, bonds and derivatives and "cooked our books" to get you and our international friends to pay top dollar for crap, we know we lied to you about every economic statistic on the face of the planet, but, hey, we're all in this together now, and you have no alternative other than to accept our bailout plan (oh, let's call it a "rescue plan" instead) so that you can pay for all the economic carnage resulting from our debauchery.' (International Forcaster article). media-underground.net
Sunday, September 28. 2008
'As Colin Wilson explains in The Occult, Aleister Crowley was hardly the first occultist to proclaim the dawning of a new epoch in the early years of the twentieth century; August Strindberg, the radical playwright and painter, was just one in a long line of prophets of dissent whose voice and preoccupations Crowley (and his Guardian Angel) unconsciously reflected. But rarely, if ever, can the perennial philosophy have been communicated as forcefully, and with such delirium, as in The Book of the Law - 'transcribed' over three days in April 1904: a communication which, for Thelemites, marks the beginning of the (new) Aeon of Horus. In keeping with the approximate duration of a Precessional Year- the time it takes for the sun to complete a circuit around the full circumference of the sky, as measured by the changing astronomical conditions behind its rising point on the equinox - the end of the Aeon was not expected for around 2,160 years.' (Ben Fairhall article). media-underground.net
Saturday, August 30. 2008
'The controversy over the Georgian surprise military attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia on 8.8.08 makes a closer look at the controversial Georgian President and his puppet masters important. An examination shows 41-year-old Mikheil Saakashvili to be a ruthless and corrupt totalitarian who is tied to not only the US NATO establishment, but also to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.
'The famous ‘Rose Revolution of November 2003 that forced the ageing Edouard Shevardnadze from power and swept the then 36-year-old US university graduate into power was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community.' (Online Journal article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, August 26. 2008
'Quality, depth and truth are rarely, if ever, found in the mainstream. Whether in art, music, literature, science, history or knowledge itself, the good stuff always emanates from the outside.
'The mainstream edifice lies at the heart of every industrialized society. It is presented to the populace as a guidebook of how to live: what to do, what to consume, what to think. It erases any sense of the divine and sovereign nature of being, deconstructing the individual as soon as possible to achieve a smoother level of compliance. By dissuading personal reflection or metaphysical contemplations through the amplification of stress and urgency, the mainstream succeeds in sucking everyone into the consensus median where all things are pre-defined, undemanding and officially approved. No thinking required.' (The Cleaver article). media-underground.net
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