WaPo | Thiel’s secret financing
of multiple suits against Gawker was legal. But that shouldn’t erase
the squeamishness brought on by a billionaire leveraging his wealth to
obliterate a media outlet, all as part of a personal vendetta. (Thiel
did not respond to request for comment.)
But more about Gawker’s coverage may have rankled Thiel
than, as he put it, the website’s “creepy obsession with outing closeted
men.” Gawker’s tech-focused website Valleywag trained a skeptical and
often searing eye on Silicon Valley culture. It reported on what tech
titans said they were about and what they actually did.
Thiel was
a titan, so he was also a target. Thanks to the lawsuits he funded,
Gawker had to stop bothering him. If he gets his way again, any trace of
that troublesome writing may be erased. This starts to look an awful
lot like book-burning.
The good news is that ALL institutions are currently in play. Been
taking a deep dive with the youngest into questions about dopamine
hegemony and the science and engineering of money. Cryptocurrency and
cryptocurrency-speculation being all the rage at the moment among the
young, dumb, and “want something for nothing” set.
Am absolutely loving the open warfare erupting in the Impyrian
heights among the oligarchs and then licking down like lightning to
destroy errant peasants who attempt to fly too high. Ahhhh.., the petty
satisfactions of pedestrian schadenfreude.
Anyway, what we can all know and see for certain at this moment, is
that the NYC-DC establishment is going into a strong second-half push in
this destroy Trump game. Now that russiagate has failed, it’s down to
adultery and faux racism. All just window-dressing over the real game in
play – that game being control of the money pump. The Koch/Thiel/Mercer
block is not going to easily surrender to the status quo whigs, and the
whigs are fresh out of new tricks against their invigorated asymmetrical
elite political adversaries.
One of the theoretical forerunners and bases of Modern
Monetary Theory (MMT) is chartalism, an economic theory which argues
that money is a creature of the state designed to direct economic
activity. The theory has recently been popularized by David Graeber’s
book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a wide-ranging work that touches upon
issues ranging from gift economies, the linkage between quantification
and violence, and the relationship between debt and conceptions of sin.
In charting out the history of money, Graeber notes that, despite
anthropological evidence to the contrary, economists have long clung to
the myth of barter.
However, money does not emerge from barter-based economic activities,
but rather from the sovereign’s desire to organize economic activity.
The state issues currency and then imposes taxes. Because citizens are
forced to use the state’s currency to pay their taxes, they can trust
that the currency will carry value in day-to-day economic activities.
Governments with their own currency and a floating exchange rate
(sovereign currency issuers like the United States) do not have to
borrow from “bond vigilantes” to spend. They themselves first spend the
money into existence and then collect it through taxation to enforce its
usage. The state can spend unlimited amounts of money. It is only
constrained by biophysical resources, and if the state spends beyond the
availability of resources, the result is inflation, which can be
mitigated by taxation.
These simple facts carry radical policy implications. Taxes are not
being used to fund spending, but rather to control inflation and
redistribute income. Thus, we can make the case for progressive taxation
from a moral standpoint concerned with social justice:
Meanwhile, smart black folk recognizing the game of musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic - FULLY REALIZE the ruthless screwing handed down to us by the DC-NYC establishment over the past 50 years, with the replacement negroe program, mass incarceration, and systematic demonization
berkeley | Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than
800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC
Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and
created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re
connected.
“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to
account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in
response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC
Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.
Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an
island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion
between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement
and adoration,” Keltner said.
“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because
everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a
doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences
are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”
“Our hope is that our findings will help other scientists and
engineers more precisely capture the emotional states that underlie
moods, brain activity and expressive signals, leading to improved
psychiatric treatments, an understanding of the brain basis of emotion
and technology responsive to our emotional needs,” he added.
Counterpunch | The legend of Camelot has had a decidedly devastating effect on the
sober appreciation of US government institutions. The Kennedys were the
US variant of the Royal Family and even more to the point, seemed
photogenic, intellectual, glamorous.
The Kennedy family was itself the architect behind the faux
aristocratic fantasy, the fiction, if you like, of an administration
awash with shiny competence and brain heavy awareness. In truth, it was
essentially piloted by a medically challenged and heavily medicated
figure who suffered, amongst other conditions, Addison’s disease.
President Kennedy’s rocky stewardship, as Robert Dallek notes in
considerable detail, was marked by anti-anxiety agents, sleeping pill
popping, stimulants, and pain killers. The public image of a
formidable, robust Cold War warrior was itself an elaborate fantasy,
padded by its own conspiracy of deception. As if realising the
implications of his medical burrowing, Dallek had to reiterate the point
that Kennedy was still functioning and capable and was at no risk of
cocking up during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.[2]
The Kennedys were successful enough, be it through their army of
ideological acolytes and publicists (think of the unquestioning pen of
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), to create the impression of knight-like
purity, intellectual sagacity and calm. To kill, then, what is noble,
became an essential American trope: JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Behind each had to be a gargantuan conspiracy, an
establishment puppeteer.
The Kennedy files that are promised for release are hardly going to
rock the boat, alter the world, or change a single mind. Historians
will be able to bring out modestly updated versions of old texts;
official accounts might be slightly adjusted on investigations,
locations and suspects, but the conspiracy set is bound to stick with
grim determination to ideas long formed and re-enforced by assumptions
that refuse revision.
DailyMail | The wildly popular Toy Freaks YouTube
channel featuring a single dad and his two daughters has been deleted,
amid a broader crackdown on disturbing children's content on the video
streaming platform.
Toy Freaks, founded
two years ago by landscaper Greg Chism of Granite City, Illinois, had
8.53million subscribers and was among the 100 most-viewed YouTube
channels before it was shutdown on Friday.
Though
it's unclear what exact policy the channel violated, the videos showed
the girls in unusual situations that often involved gross-out food play
and simulated vomiting. The channel invented the 'bad baby' genre, and
some videos showed the girls pretending to urinate on each other or
fishing pacifiers out of the toilet.
Another series of videos showed the younger daughter Annabelle wiggling her loose teeth out while shrieking and spitting blood.
'He is profiting off of his children's pain and suffering,' one indignant Reddit user
wrote about the channel last year. 'It's barf inducing and no mentally
stable person or child should ever have to watch it.'
A
YouTube spokesperson said in a statement: 'It's not always clear that
the uploader of the content intends to break our rules, but we may still
remove their videos to help protect viewers, uploaders and children.
We've terminated the Toy Freaks channel for violation of our policies.
medium | Here are a few things which are disturbing me:
The
first is the level of horror and violence on display. Some of the times
it’s troll-y gross-out stuff; most of the time it seems deeper, and
more unconscious than that. The internet has a way of amplifying and
enabling many of our latent desires; in fact, it’s what it seems to do
best. I spend a lot of time arguing for
this tendency, with regards to human sexual freedom, individual
identity, and other issues. Here, and overwhelmingly it sometimes feels,
that tendency is itself a violent and destructive one.
The
second is the levels of exploitation, not of children because they are
children but of children because they are powerless. Automated reward
systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way
that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who
bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be
what convinces you of its truth.
Exploitation is encoded into the
systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and
explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI
overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your
screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many
of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is
actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are
humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m
pretty worried about them too.
I’ve
written enough, too much, but I feel like I actually need to justify
all this raving about violence and abuse and automated systems with an
example that sums it up. Maybe after everything I’ve said you won’t
think it’s so bad. I don’t know what to think any more.
This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video,
contains all of the elements we’ve covered above, and takes them to
another level. Familiar characters, nursery tropes, keyword salad, full
automation, violence, and the very stuff of kids’ worst dreams. And of
course there are vast, vast numbers of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. Industrialised nightmare production.
For
the final time: There is more violent and more sexual content like this
available. I’m not going to link to it. I don’t believe in traumatising
other people, but it’s necessary to keep stressing it, and not dismiss
the psychological effect on children of things which aren’t overtly
disturbing to adults, just incredibly dark and weird.
A
friend who works in digital video described to me what it would take to
make something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe
more) making high volumes of low quality content to reap ad revenue by
tripping certain requirements of the system (length in particular seems
to be a factor). According to my friend, online kids’ content is one of
the few alternative ways of making money from 3D animation because the
aesthetic standards are lower and independent production can profit
through scale. It uses existing and easily available content (such as
character models and motion-capture libraries) and it can be repeated
and revised endlessly and mostly meaninglessly because the algorithms
don’t discriminate — and neither do the kids.
These
videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and
whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are
feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to
children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of
that are all over the place.
To
expose children to this content is abuse. We’re not talking about the
debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on
teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young
minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage
internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is
being discussed here. What we’re talking about is very young children,
effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which
will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely
vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but
about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems
and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal. Fist tap Dale.
HoustonPress | In 1969, Mary Jane Victor was an art history student at the
University of St. Thomas -- and a regular patron of the O.K. Trading
Center. She remembers being amazed to come across the scrapbooks.
At the university art department, Victor was working for art patron
Dominique de Menil, a Schlumberger heiress famous for her eye for
surrealists and the primitive art that inspired them. Victor promptly
told de Menil about her find and put her in touch with the junk dealer.
Soon after, the heiress paid Washington $1,500 for four of the earliest
notebooks.
"Dellschau for her was an eccentric," recalls Steen. "She had a
wonderful affinity for eccentrics." Half joking, she told Steen she was
especially drawn to the coded phrase "DM=X" scrawled across the top of
many drawings. She thought DM stood for "Dominique de Menil." And the
rest somehow equaled her own death.
Soon after de Menil acquired the notebooks, she exhibited some of
their leaves in "Flight," a University of St. Thomas show on the
subject. And it was there that Pete Navarro, one of the most dogged
investigators of Dellschau's mysteries, first encountered the aeros.
Navarro, a Houston commercial artist, was intrigued by UFOs,
especially by a mysterious rash of airship sightings near the turn of
the century, not long before Dellschau began his drawings. Navarro read
about the St. Thomas exhibition one morning at the breakfast table. And
when he saw Dellschau's drawings, he felt there had to be a connection
to the sightings.
Ufologists believe that between November 1896 and April 1897,
thousands of Americans in 18 states between California and Indiana saw a
curious dirigible-like flying machine floating eastward. No physical
evidence of a ship or a designer has ever surfaced, but newspapers such
as the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Daily Express
and Chicago Tribune devoted space to the sightings. In this century,
authors Daniel Cohen and William Chariton have published books on the
subject.
The mysterious craft was first spotted on November 17, 1896, by R.L.
Lowery, near a brewery in Sacramento, California. According to various
newspaper reports, the craft seemed to travel eastward. In spring, it
was spotted in Texas.
At 1:16 a.m. on April 17, 1897, the Reverend J.W. Smith saw what he
thought was a shooting star in the night sky of Childress, Texas, then
decided it was really a flying machine. Eventually he recognized it as
the much-discussed cigar-shaped airship.
Four days after Smith's UFO sighting, the Houston Daily Post gave a
lengthy account of his and other spottings of the same airship, a
30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted with revolving wheels
and sails.
Jim Nelson, a farmer from Atlanta, Texas, recalled glimmers of red,
green and blue lights and "a glaring gleam of white light" that shone
directly in front of the airship. In Belton, a crowd witnessed the same
vehicle the next night. They claimed its pilots spoke loudly as they
flew overhead, but the ship's velocity was so great, their words were
lost in the wind.
According to other newspaper accounts, witnesses managed to talk
with the pilots. Sometimes townspeople even came upon the crew members,
who were apparently making repairs to their marvelous machine and were
willing to chat.
In 1972, three years after de Menil bought her four notebooks, Pete
Navarro learned that more Dellschau notebooks were collecting dust at
Washington's junk shop. Nobody wanted them, so Navarro gave the dealer
$65 for one book. Hooked by what he saw, he returned and offered $500
more for the remaining seven.
Navarro tried to sell four of the notebooks to de Menil; she chose
not to buy them -- perhaps because she liked the work in her own
notebooks better. De Menil owned some of Dellschau's earliest notebooks
and believed that they included his best work. As the artist aged, his
works grew looser, more expressionistic; de Menil seems to have
preferred his earlier precision.
But for Navarro, the notebooks weren't about artistic quality; they
were pieces of a historical puzzle. He visited Helen and Tommy Britton,
cousins of Leo Jr. Helen promised she'd try to find more books and
pictures of Dellschau that were hidden around the family's old house,
but she died before she could locate anything. Navarro also talked to
Tommy Britton, who was a preteen when Dellschau died. Now in his 80s, he
may be the last living relative who remembers Dellschau. (Britton
couldn't be reached for this story.)
After culling a vast number of such press clippings, Navarro created
an elaborate map of every Texas sighting and wrote several papers. Some
are on file at the Houston Public Library's Texas archive; others are
available on the Internet at www.keelynet.com.
In "The Mysterious Mr. Wilson and the Books of Dellschau," co-written
with UFO enthusiast Jimmy Ward, Navarro posits a connection between
Dellschau's clandestine society and a mysterious pilot named Hiram
Wilson mentioned in an article by the San Antonio Daily Express on April
26, 1897, about a local airship sighting. The article identifies the
airship's occupants as Wilson, from Goshen, New York; his father,
Willard H. Wilson, assistant master mechanic of the New York Central
Railroad; and their co-pilot C.J. Walsh, an electrical engineer from San
Francisco.
In that story, Hiram Wilson divulged to witnesses that his airship
design came from an uncle. Navarro believes that the uncle could have
been another Wilson -- the Sonora club member Tosh Wilson mentioned in
one of Dellschau's watercolors. According to Navarro, Dellschau's coded
messages say that Tosh searched seven years to rediscover suppe, the
lost fuel, and finally succeeded.
Navarro has found no trace of a Hiram Wilson residing in Goshen. But
he does offer evidence of his presence at 1897 airship sightings in
Greenville, Texas (on April 16); near Lake Charles, Louisiana (on April
19); near Beaumont, Texas (April 19); Uvalde, Texas (April 20); Lacoste,
Texas (April 24); and Eagle Pass, Texas (April 24).
On April 28, the Galveston Daily News ran the headline "Airship
Inventor Wilson." The article reported the inventor's encounter with one
Captain Akers, a customs agent from Eagle Pass. Akers told the
newspaper that Wilson "was a finely educated man about 24 years of age
and seemed to have money with which to prosecute his investigations."
Based on such reports, Navarro proposes several scenarios. Perhaps
the ship spotted near San Antonio had been flown by both Hiram and
Willard Wilson. Or perhaps each pilot was steering his own airship
across Texas. (This would explain why witnesses living a distance from
one another offered simultaneous sightings of a man who identified
himself as Wilson.) Navarro also speculates that one of these Wilsons
was the same Tosh Wilson who had once belonged to the Sonora Aero Club.
In that scenario, Tosh would have been reliving the glory days Dellschau
could only illustrate in his notebooks.
To confirm the aero club's activities, Navarro has traveled to
Sonora, talked to historians, searched the newspapers and even visited
all the cemeteries. He found nothing. At times, he says, he couldn't
help thinking that Dellschau made everything up.
Eventually, whether the Sonora club was a dream or real stopped
mattering to Navarro. One day, he remembers being absorbed by a passage
inscribed in one of the drawings: "Wonder Weaver, you will unriddle my
writings." Navarro grew convinced that he and his brother, Rudy, "were
weaving wonders." He says of Dellschau, "Maybe we had similar minds."
To crack Dellschau's 40-symbol code, Navarro enlisted the help of
his brother, Rudy, and a couple who spoke German. He says the effort
took only one month, but he won't release the key or a literal
translation.
Navarro will talk only about the same phrase that enchanted de
Menil: "DM=X." To Navarro, it stands for "NYMZA," an acronym for a
secret society that controlled the Sonora club's doings. Based on
Navarro's papers, some ufologists have speculated that NYMZA was
controlled by -- what else? -- aliens; Navarro doesn't buy that theory.
Navarro explains that he's saving his best stuff for his
collaborator, Dennis Crenshaw, who's writing a book called The Secrets
of Dellschau. But Steen, at the Menil, isn't convinced that Navarro
really deciphered the symbols. Steen once asked Navarro to translate the
code; Navarro would tell him the meaning of only a couple of sentences.
Navarro is clearly torn between showing off and keeping secrets.
He's compiled a voluminous scrapbook titled "Dellschau's Aeros." He
proudly showed it to me. It's full of wild code translations and weird
exegeses on the aeros and oddments that Dellschau just stuffed, unbound,
in the notebooks: cartoons, a photocopy of Dellschau's marriage
certificate, letters, maps, clippings and more clippings about all
manner of harebrained inventions. There's even a picture of Otto,
Bavaria's Mad Monarch.
theatlantic | Taboo and sacredness are among the most important words needed to
understand Charlottesville and its aftermath. Taboo refers to things
that are forbidden for religious or supernatural reasons. All
traditional societies have such prohibitions—things you must not do,
touch, or eat, not because they are bad for you directly, but because
doing so is an abomination, which may bring divine retribution. But
every society also makes some things sacred, rallying around a few
deeply revered values, people, or places, which bind all members
together and make them willing to sacrifice for the common good. The
past week brought violent conflict over symbols and values held
sacred—and saw President Trump commit an act of sacrilege by violating
one of our society’s strongest taboos.
The “Unite the Right” rally
was an effort to mobilize and energize a subset of the far-right around
its own sacred symbols—including swastikas and confederate flags—by
marching to another symbol that is its members believed was under
attack, a statue of Robert E. Lee. The psychological logic of the rally
was to bind white people together with shared hatred of Jews, African
Americans, and others, under a banner and narrative of racial victimhood
and racial purity. Marching and chanting in unison has been shown to intensify feelings of oneness and social cohesion.
The psychology of sacredness and its function in binding groups
together is essential for understanding the method and the motives of
the marchers.
Taboo violations are contagious. They render the transgressor
“polluted,” in the language of anthropology, and the moral stain rubs
off on those who physically touch the transgressor, as well as on those
who fail to distance themselves from the transgressor. When people march
with Nazis and Klansmen, even if they keep their mouths closed when
others are chanting, and even if they don’t personally carry swastika or
Klan flags, they acquire the full moral stain of Nazis and Klansmen. By
saying that some of these men were “very fine people,” the president
has taken that stain upon himself.
You can’t just apologize for
breaking a taboo, especially a taboo as deep as the one on Nazis and the
KKK. Many religions offer methods of atonement, sometimes involving
fasting, self-flagellation, and temporary separation from the community.
But even if an anthropologically sophisticated chief of staff could
devise a secular form of atonement, Trump would not undergo it. He does
not believe he has done anything wrong.
So the stain, the moral pollution, the taint, will linger on him and his administration for the rest of his term. Business leaders have quit his panels and projects; artists who were due to receive honors from the president have changed their plans.
Pollution travels most rapidly by physical touch, so be on the lookout
for numerous awkward moments in the coming months when people refuse to
shake the president’s hand or stand next to him. It is unclear how far
the contagion will spread, but it will surely make it more difficult to
attract talented people into government service for as long as Trump is
the president.
vigilantcitizen | I remember when I first watched Eyes Wide Shut, back in 1999.
Boy, did I hate it. I hated how slow everything was, I hated how Nicole
Kidman tried to sound drunk or high and I hated seeing Tom Cruise walk
around New York looking concerned. I guess I reacted the same way
critics did at the time the movie came out and thought: “This movie is
boring and there is nothing hot about it.” More than a decade later,
equipped with a little more knowledge and patience, I re-watched the
movie … and it blew my mind. In fact, like most Stanley Kubrick films,
an entire book could be written about the movie and the concepts it
addresses. Eyes Wide Shut is indeed not simply about a
relationship, it is about all of the outside forces and influences that
define that relationship. It is about the eternal back-and-forth
between the male and female principles in a confused and decadent modern
world. Also, more importantly, it is about the group that rules this
modern world – a secret elite that channels this struggle between the
male and female principles in a specific and esoteric matter. The movie
however does not spell out anything. Like all great art, messages are
communicated through subtle symbols and mysterious riddles.
Rainbows and multicolored lights appear throughout the movie, from the beginning to the end. As if to emphasize the theme of multicolored rainbows, almost every
scene in the movie contains multicolored Christmas lights, giving most
sets a hazy, dreamy glow. These lights tie together most scenes of the movie, making them part of
the same reality. There are however a few select scenes where there are
absolutely no Christmas lights. The main one is Somerton palace – the
place where the secret society ritual takes place.
In Eyes Wide Shut, there are therefore two worlds: The
Christmas lights-filled “rainbow world”, where the masses wander around,
trying to make ends meet and the other world… “where the rainbow
ends”- where the elite gathers and performs its rituals. The contrast
between the two world give a sense of an almost insurmountable divide
between them. Later, the movie will clearly show us how those from the
“rainbow world” cannot enter the other world.
So, when the models ask Bill the go “where the rainbow ends”, they
probably refer to going “where the elite gathers and performs rituals”.
It might also be about them being dissociated Beta Programming slaves.
There are several references to Monarch mind control (read this article for more information)
in the movie. Women who take part in elite rituals are often products
of Illuminati mind control. In MK Ultra vocabulary, “going over the
rainbow” means dissociating from reality and entering another persona
(more on this in the next article).
vigilantcitizen | The second part of this analysis focuses exclusively on the unnamed
secret society Bill stumbles upon and its ritual. Although nothing is
explicitly spelled out to the viewers, the symbolism, the visual clues
and even the music of Eyes Wide Shut tell reveals a side of the
occult elite that is rarely shown to the masses. Not only does the
movie depict the world’s richest and most powerful people partaking in
occult rituals, it also shows how this circle has also the power to
exploit slaves, to stalk people, and even to get away with sacrificial
murders. Even worse, mass media participates in covering their crimes.
The secret society in the movie closely resembles the infamous Hellfire
Club, where prominent political figures met up to partake in elaborate
Satanic parties. Today, the O.T.O. and similar secret societies still
partake in rituals involving physical energy as it is perceived to be a
way to attain a state of enlightenment. This concept, taken from Tantric
yoga, is at the core of modern and powerful secret societies. Although
none of this is actually mentioned in Eyes Wide Shut, the
entire movie can be interpreted as one big “magickal” journey,
characterized by a back-and-forth between opposing forces: life and
death, lust and pain, male and female, light and darkness, and so forth …
ending in one big orgasmic moment of enlightenment. This aspect of the
movie, along with other hidden details, will be analyzed in the third
and final part of this series of articles on Eyes Wide Shut.
vigilantcitizen | Stanley Kubrick’s works are never strictly about love or
relationships. The meticulous symbolism and the imagery of all of his
works often communicate another dimension of meaning–one that transcends
the personal to become a commentary on our epoch and civilization. And,
in this transitional period between the end of 20th century and the
beginning of the 21th century, Kubrick told the story of a confused man
who wanders around, desperately looking for a way to satisfy his primal
urges. Kubrick told the story of a society that is completely debased
and corrupted by hidden forces, where humanity’s most primal
urge–procreation–has been cheapened, fetishized, perverted, and
exploited to a point that it has lost all of its beauty. At the top of
this world is a secret society that revels in this context, and thrives
on it. Kubrick’s outlook on the issue was definitely not idealistic nor
very optimistic.
His grim tale focuses on a single man, Bill, who is looking for an
undefined something. Even if he appears to have everything, there is
something missing in his life. Something visceral and fundamental that
is never put into words, but that is quite palpable. Bill cannot be
complete if he is not at peace with the opposite of him: the feminine
principle. Bill’s quest, therefore, follows the esoteric principle of
uniting two opposite forces into one. As suggested by the last lines of
the movie, Bill will ultimately “be one” and get physical with his wife.
After that, the alchemical process and the Tantric ritual would be
complete. However, as Kubrick somehow communicates in the final scene,
even if these two extremely self-absorbed, egoistical and superficial
people believe they’ve reached a some kind of epiphany, what does it
really change? Our civilization as a whole still has its eyes wide shut …
and those were Kubrick’s last cinematographic words.
theantimedia | Already, the Department of Defense has created the Sentient World Simulation, a real-time “synthetic
mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with
respect to current real-world information, such as major events, opinion
polls, demographic statistics, economic reports, and shifts in trends,” according to a working paper on the system.
In recent years, other scientists have conducted research and even
experimentation in attempts to show actual evidence of the Simulation.
Heads turned last year when theoretical physicist S. James Gate
announced he had found strange computer code in
his String Theory research. Bound inside the equations we use to
describe our universe, he says, is peculiar self-dual linear binary
error-correcting block code.
A team of German physicists has
also set out to show that the numerical constraints we see in our
universe are consistent with the kinds of limitations we would see in a
simulated universe. These physicists have invoked a non-perturbative
approach known as lattice quantum chromodynamics to try to discover whether there is an underlying grid to the space/time continuum.
So far their efforts have recreated a minuscule region of the known
universe, a sliver of a corner that is but a few femtometers across. But
this corner simulates the hypothetical lattice of the universal grid,
and their search for a corresponding physical restraint turned up a
theoretical upper limit on high-energy particles known as the
Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin, or GZK cut off. In other words, there are aspects of our universe that look and behave as a simulation might.
With news that there are two anonymous tech billionaires working on a secret project to
break us out of the Matrix, it’s hard to know whether we should laugh
or scream in horror. Simulation talk is great epistemological fun and
metaphysical amusement of the highest order, but it may speak to an
underlying anxiety regarding the merging of our reality with machines,
or an underlying existential loneliness. It’s even been posited as a
solution to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven’t we met aliens? Well, because we live inside a world they built.
monoskop | This is the first volume of this study of the fantasies of some of the men centrally involved in the rise of Nazism. The author develops his account by focusing on the representation of masculinity and homosexuality and their relation to the preparations for and conduct of war. He offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the role of warfare as a search for sensation without desire or pleasure, leading to an image of the body which emphasizes hardness, self-discipline and, ultimately, violence.
psychoanalyze-aktuell.de | The book grew out of the spring lecture "The laughter of the perpetrators", which was held on 10 and 11 March 2014 Cultural Minoriten in Graz and as an event of the Graz Academy in cooperation with the Cultural Minoriten PRESS held.The blurb of the book can read that the number UNRUHE RETAIN to a "present tendency (the responses), which is more and more uncomfortable.The progress of modernity inherent in an wear unrest during the past increasingly devalued and the future of their substance is robbed. "
The origin of the material for this lecture and for the design of the book is named at the end of the book by Klaus Theweleit: "This book is made largely of newspaper;written along current newspaper reports on the in and contexts perpetrated murders of recent years and decades between and ;between the killers of IS in northern Iraq and Syria, the genocide of the Tutsi population in Rwanda in the 90s and the murders of the German NSU in the first decade of the 21st century.But older murders are included in the text: the mass murder of Communists in Indonesia of the 60s, the torture of the indigenous population in Guatemala in the '80s, back to the deeds German World War soldiers, provided they under the common viewpoint :the laughter of the perpetratorswere (and fall).For many of these events is true: <Everything we know, we know from journalists.>"(P.245)
The collected quotes serve to prove the thesis of the book, which is subtitled "psychogram killing lust".In the journalistic representation of atrocities caused by their rows citation objectivity and compression that makes any displacement impossible and the reader pulls into a voyeuristic close so that in a second, this time the body's defense procedure in the form of nausea and vomiting, the defense against any form is amplified by pleasure through (identificatory) participation in the atrocities.Again, this could be interpreted as evidence of the existence of killing desire, albeit in the form of defense against, understand.This physical reaction makes the book but also a disgrace.
The journalist quotes are indeed consistently taken from current affairs, but it goes Klaus Theweleit but also to the continuation of his thesis of the "male fantasies" that two-volume work of 1977, in which he Fascist masculinity and violent fantasies of soldiers of 2 . WK had analyzed.He describes a certain dominant type of man who is trying to enforce its rule without regard to others with violence and killing.In an interview with the FAZ he says of his latest book itself: "Yes, true, in a way it is also a kind, male fantasies revisited".But this is not so much about this almost universally observable male fantasies of tyranny and killing desire, but also the conditions under which from fantasies action records, with the result that "psyche and physique .... completely absorbed by the act" are (S. 15).
It seems therefore to go to both topics in the book, about the conditions that lead to the emergence of these male fantasies and the conditions which make acts of fantasies.But this does not happen as in a scientific paper, but in the process invented by Klaus Theweleit style that already use found in the "male fantasies".The FAZ (01.09.2016) describes in a comment: "He did this with a completely new method and science sound, in a mixture of literature and psychoanalysis, autobiographical narrative, books, maps and political commentary".30 years after the publication of the "male fantasies" commented Sven Reichart (University of Konstanz) this style with the words: "In fact, from a stringent structure of the two-volume out of the question.Between numerous books and paintings can be found on 1147 printed pages long source quotes that are sometimes whimsically-associative, sometimes not interpreted.Then there is again the passages in which produced a close relation to the theories and interpretations of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to Melanie Klein and Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guarttari and the material will be indicated accordingly.The book is anything but linear or written from a single source.Scroll forward or back are appreciated and factored in this permeable written network.Theweleit gave in an interview the advice: .Reichart comes with Benjamin Ziemann to the judgment that "male fantasies" today could apply as well as a book.
This description can also be applied to the new book, "The laughter of the perpetrators, Breivik among other things".It gives the impression that the author finds an empathic access to the inner world of the perpetrators and also the description of contextual factors of the outside world seem like plausible explanations and let hunches of contexts and reasons arise, but as in a collage (eg Kurt Schwitters and others), in where the overall vision and the individual elements continuously alternate.The temptation is then great to look at the individual elements in their details and about losing the overall picture in mind.But what Klaus Theweleit wants to tell us with this book?He speaks of himself, he speaks of us and he speaks of our present.
HuffPo | Here's a brief, non-exhaustive list of things that a new poll says Americans don't have much faith in: the government, businesses, the economy, the power of their vote and the future of the United States.
The overall mood of the country is one of "anxiety, nostalgia and mistrust," according to the 2015 American Values Survey, which was released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.
"Fear is not an emotion that you see often in public opinion polls, but it was clearly there in the fall of 2008 and early 2009" after the economic collapse, said Karlyn Bowman, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, during a Tuesday panel discussion of the survey. "Americans aren't confident that we've fixed what went wrong."
Many, in fact, see the country as on the decline. The poll found that 53 percent of Americans say the nation's culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s. Forty-nine percent now say America's best days are behind it, up from 38 percent who said the same in 2012. Democrats remain more bullish, while Republicans and tea party members are the most pessimistic.
A sense of nostalgia isn't unique to the present day: Back in 1939, most Americansthought "the horse-and-buggy" days were happierthan their era. (Granted, those people had just lived through the Great Depression and were heading into World War II.)
But Americans today are deeply worried about their economic prospects. Nearly three-quarters believe the country is still in a recession, unchanged since last year. An increasing majority -- now nearly 80 percent -- say the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, with even more agreeing that corporations do not share enough of their success with their employees. A rising number also say they're troubled that not everyone in the U.S. gets an equal chance in life.
There's also a growing antipathy toward people perceived as outsiders. In the survey, which was taken well before the Paris terror attacks, 56 percent say that the values of Islam are at odds with American values, up 9 points in the past four years. Forty-eight percent say they're bothered when encountering immigrants who speak little or no English, up 8 points since 2012.
And many Americans feel personally disenfranchised. Nearly two-thirds say their vote doesn't matter because of the influence that wealthy individuals and big corporations have. Fifty-seven percent say the federal government doesn't really look out for people like them.
The pessimism, though, isn't equally shared across demographic lines.
tandfonline | In portraiture,
subjects are mostly depicted with a greater portion of the left side of
their face (left hemiface) facing the viewer. This bias may be induced
by the right hemisphere's dominance for emotional expression and agency.
Since negative emotions are particularly portrayed by the left
hemiface, and since asymmetrical hemispheric activation may induce
alterations of spatial attention and action-intention, we posited that
paintings of the painful and cruel crucifixion of Jesus would be more
likely to show his left hemiface than observed in portraits of other
people. By analyzing depictions of Jesus's crucifixion from book and art
gallery sources, we determined a significantly greater percent of these
crucifixion pictures showed the left hemiface of Jesus facing the
viewer than found in other portraits. In addition to the facial
expression and hemispatial attention-intention hypotheses, there are
other biblical explanations that may account for this strong bias, and
these alternatives will have to be explored in future research.
In
portraits, most subjects are depicted with their head rotated
rightward, with more of the left than right side of the subject's face
being shown. For example, in the largest study of facial portraiture,
McManus and Humphrey (1973)
studied 1474 portraits and found a 60% bias to portray a greater
portion of the subjects’ left than right hemiface. Nicholls, Clode,
Wood, and Wood (1999) found the same left hemiface bias even when accounting for the handedness of the painter.
Multiple
theories have been proposed in an attempt to explain the genesis of
this left hemiface bias in portraits. One hypothesis is that the right
hemisphere is dominant for mediating facial emotional expressions. In an
initial study, Buck and Duffy (1980)
reported that patients with right hemisphere damage were less capable
of facially expressing emotions than those with left hemisphere damage
when viewing slides of familiar people, unpleasant scenes, and unusual
pictures. These right-left hemispheric differences in facial
expressiveness have been replicated in studies involving the spontaneous
and voluntary expression of emotions in stroke patients with focal
lesions (Borod, Kent, Koff, Martin, & Alpert, 1988; Borod, Koff, Lorch, & Nicholas, 1985; Borod, Koff, Perlman Lorch, & Nicholas, 1986; Richardson, Bowers, Bauer, Heilman, & Leonard, 2000).
Hemispheric
asymmetries are even reported in more “naturalistic” settings outside
the laboratory. For example, Blonder, Burns, Bowers, Moore, and Heilman (1993)
videotaped interviews with patients and spouses in their homes and
found that patients with right hemisphere damage were rated as less
facially expressive than left hemisphere-damaged patients and normal
control patients. These lesion studies suggest that the right hemisphere
has a dominant role in mediating emotional facial expressions. Whereas
corticobulbar fibers that innervate the forehead are bilateral, the
contralateral hemisphere primarily controls the lower face. Thus, these
lesion studies suggest that the left hemiface below the forehead, which
is innervated by the right hemisphere, may be more emotionally
expressive.
This right hemisphere-left
hemiface dominance postulate has been further supported by studies of
normal subjects portraying emotional facial expressions. For example,
Borod et al. (1988)
asked subjects to portray emotions, either by verbal command or visual
imitation. The judges who rated these facial expressions ranked the left
face as expressing stronger emotions. Sackeim and Gur (1978)
showed normal subjects photographs of normal people facially expressing
their emotions and asked participants to rate the intensity of the
emotion being expressed. However, before showing these pictures of
people making emotional faces, Sackeim and Gur altered the photographs.
They either paired the left hemiface with a mirror image of this
photograph's left hemiface to form a full face made up of two left
hemifaces or formed full faces from right hemifaces. Normal participants
found that the composite photographs of the left hemiface were more
emotionally expressive than the right hemiface. Triggs, Ghacibeh,
Springer, and Bowers (2005)
administered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the motor
cortex of 50 subjects during contraction of bilateral orbicularis oris
muscles and analyzed motor evoked potentials (MEPs). They found that the
MEPs elicited in the left lower face were larger than the right face,
and thus the left face might appear to be more emotionally expressive
because it is more richly innervated.
Another
reason portraits often have the subjects rotated to the right may be
related to the organization of the viewer's brain. Both lesion studies
(e.g., Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1996; Bowers, Bauer, Coslett, & Heilman, 1985; DeKosky, Heilman, Bowers, & Valenstein, 1980) and physiological and functional imaging studies (e.g., Davidson & Fox, 1982; Puce, Allison, Asgari, Gore, & McCarthy, 1996; Sergent, Ohta, & Macdonald, 1992)
have revealed that the right hemisphere is dominant for the recognition
of emotional facial expressions and the recognition of previously
viewed faces (Hilliard, 1973; Jones, 1979).
In addition, studies of facial recognition and the recognition of
facial emotional expressions have demonstrated that facial pictures
shown in the left visual field and left hemispace are better recognized
than those viewed on the right (Conesa, Brunold-Conesa, & Miron, 1995).
Since the right hemisphere is dominant for facial recognition and the
perception of facial emotions when viewing faces, the normal viewer of
portraits may attend more to the left than right visual hemispace and
hemifield. When the head of a portrait is turned to the right and the
observer focuses on the middle of the face (midsagittal plane), more of
the subject's face would fall in the viewer's left visual hemispace and
thus be more likely to project to the right hemisphere.
Agency
is another concept that may influence the direction of facial deviation
in portraiture. Chatterjee, Maher, Gonzalez Rothi, and Heilman (1995)
demonstrated that when right-handed individuals view a scene with more
than one figure, they are more likely to see the left figure as being
the active agent and the right figure as being the recipient of action
or the patient. From this perspective the artist is the agent, and
perhaps he or she is more likely to paint the left hemiface of the
subject, which from the artist's perspective is more to the right, the
position of the patient. Support for this agency hypothesis comes from
studies in which individuals rated traits of left- versus right-profiled
patients, and found that those with the right cheek exposed were
considered more “active” (Chatterjee, 2002).
Taking
this background information into account and applying it to depictions
of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ highlights the various influences on
profile painting in portraiture. Specifically, we confirm the
predilection to display the left hemiface in portraiture and predict the
same in portraits of Jesus’ crucifixion.
The
strongest artistic portrayals of a patient being subject to cruel and
painful agents are images of the crucifixion of Jesus. The earliest
depiction of Christ on the cross dates back to around 420 AD. As
Christianity existed for several centuries before that, this seems to be
a late onset for this type of art. Because of the strong focus on
Christ's resurrection and the disgrace of his agony and death, art
historians postulate that there was a hesitation for early followers to
show Christ on the cross. The legalization of Christianity also may have
lifted the stigma. Based on the artwork still in existence from that
period, Jesus was often pictured alive during the crucifixion scene.
Several centuries later, from the end of the seventh century to the
beginning of the eighth century, Christ is more often shown dead on the
cross (Harries, 2005).
princeton | This study tested the possible relationship between reported visual
awareness (“I see a visual stimulus in front of me”) and
the social attribution of awareness to
someone else (“That person is aware of an object next to him”). Subjects
were tested
in two steps. First, in an fMRI
experiment, subjects were asked to attribute states of awareness to a
cartoon face. Activity
associated with this task was found
bilaterally within the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) among other areas.
Second, the TPJ
was transiently disrupted using
single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). When the TMS was
targeted to the same
cortical sites that had become active
during the social attribution task, the subjects showed symptoms of
visual neglect in
that their detection of visual stimuli was
significantly affected. In control trials, when TMS was targeted to
nearby cortical
sites that had not become active during
the social attribution task, no significant effect on visual detection
was found.
These results suggest that there may be at
least some partial overlap in brain mechanisms that participate in the
social attribution
of sensory awareness to other people and
in attributing sensory awareness to oneself.
Significance: What is the relationship between your own private awareness of events
and the awareness that you intuitively attribute to
the people around you? In this study, a
region of the human cerebral cortex was active when people attributed
sensory awareness
to someone else. Furthermore, when that
region of cortex was temporarily disrupted, the person’s own sensory
awareness was
disrupted. The findings suggest a
fundamental connection between private awareness and social cognition.
wikipedia |Betty Boop is an animatedcartooncharacter created by Max Fleischer, with help from animators including Grim Natwick.[1][2][3][4][5][6] She originally appeared in the Talkartoon and Betty Boop film series, which were produced by Fleischer Studios and released by Paramount Pictures.
She has also been featured in comic strips and mass merchandising.
Despite having been toned down in the mid-1930s as a result of the Hays Code to appear more demure, she became one of the best-known and popular cartoon characters in the world.
theatlantic | Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by
emotional intelligence. When Martin Luther King, Jr. presented his
dream, he chose language that would stir the hearts of his audience.
“Instead of honoring this sacred obligation” to liberty, King thundered,
“American has given the Negro people a bad check.” He promised that a
land “sweltering with the heat of oppression” could be “transformed into
an oasis of freedom and justice,” and envisioned a future in which “on
the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former
slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of
brotherhood.”
Delivering this electrifying message required emotional
intelligence—the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions.
Dr. King demonstrated remarkable skill in managing his own emotions and
in sparking emotions that moved his audience to action. As his
speechwriter Clarence Jones reflected,
King delivered “a perfectly balanced outcry of reason and emotion, of
anger and hope. His tone of pained indignation matched that note for
note.”
Recognizing the power of emotions, another one of the most
influential leaders of the 20th century spent years studying the
emotional effects of his body language. Practicing his hand gestures and
analyzing images of his movements allowed him to become “an absolutely
spellbinding public speaker,” says the historian Roger Moorhouse—“it was something he worked very hard on.” His name was Adolf Hitler.
Since the 1995 publication of Daniel Goleman’s bestseller,
emotional intelligence has been touted by leaders, policymakers, and
educators as the solution to a wide range of social problems. If we can
teach our children to manage emotions, the argument goes, we’ll have
less bullying and more cooperation. If we can cultivate emotional
intelligence among leaders and doctors, we’ll have more caring
workplaces and more compassionate healthcare. As a result, emotional
intelligence is now taught widely in secondary schools, business
schools, and medical schools.
Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled
enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people
hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others.
When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise
your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug
at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best
interests.
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
-
When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that
arose in...
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...