Imperial Senescence: Depravity, Frivolity, Dissent...,

theorganicprepper |  A 40-year-old essay predicted the end of an empire and current events sure make it look like we’re watching it happen in real time.

I spend a fair bit of time scanning the news every day for my site, Preppers Daily News. And some days, I just have to shake my head as I realize that people are so desperate for…something…that they just keep going to further and further extremes to try and find that elusive thing their lives are missing.

The more I read, the more likeness I see to Sir John Glubb’s essay, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. (It’s only 24 pages and you should definitely read it – it’s brilliant.) Sir Glubb wrote this outstanding work when he was 79 years old, after a lifetime of being a soldier, traveling the world, and analyzing history. It’s well worth a read as he goes into detail about the fall of empires past.

The final stage of the end of an empire is the Age of Decadence. Some signs of this age are political dissensions (Antifa, anyone?), an influx of foreigners (Europe, anyone?), the welfare state (America, anyone?), despair (350 million people diagnosed), depravity (see below), and the rise of frivolity as people try to fill lives that have less and less meaning.

Sound familiar?

Western Elites Dominated By Filthy-Rich Moral Degenerates

bostonglobe |  While most of us were ignoring the long anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government. To put it in Gilligan’s Island terms, they have taken the Professor and repackaged him as Thurston Howell III.

That helps explain Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s expulsion this summer of hundreds of American diplomats and embassy staff from Russia. Bizarrely, the American president thanked the Russian dictator, saying these professionals aren’t needed anyway and the expulsion will save the United States money. (Wrong on both counts. Career foreign-service officers are entitled by law to reassignment.) Yet somehow Trump faced absolutely no blowback from a Republican Party that historically viewed Russia as America’s most dangerous foe. Maybe the diplomats don’t like cheeseburgers.

Of course, the establishment elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong. After all, it wasn’t just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016 campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses and 13.2 million votes. 

Still, we have reached a dangerous point when an administration whose party controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures can scapegoat thousands of highly experienced government scientists, diplomats, and intelligence specialists, tossing them all into a basket of deplored elites.

It’s time to wage a new war in defense of expertise in government. And if it’s too late to prevent the word elite from being used as a weapon, it’s time to embrace it and redefine it as something good.

Love or Mathematical Precision: Do You Know What's Real?

Guardian  |  Where most sci-fi movies quickly date, Blade Runner has improved with age. Of course, it was always a fantastic ride, superbly detailed and steeped in neo-noir atmospherics, but its deep, troubling ideas about technology, humanity and identity chimed with postmodern and cyberpunk theory, and launched a thousand PhD theses. One of the few student lectures I can remember was about the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, orders of simulacra, and how nothing is really real any more. In a down-with-the-kids gesture, the lecturer stood behind a TV monitor playing a muted video of Blade Runner. “You’ll probably get more out of watching this than you will by listening to me,” she said. She was right. Deciphering Baudrillard’s arcane prose is like wading through treacle; Blade Runner is a ride you don’t want to get off. And, against all odds, its belated follow-up, Blade Runner 2049, carries the baton brilliantly, both in terms of visual spectacle and finishing the debates the first movie began.

Between the two movies and Philip K Dick’s source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner serves as a record of how our dystopian fears have evolved over the past half-century. When Dick wrote the story, in 1968, he was thinking of the dehumanising process of nazism. His “replicants” (artificially engineered humans with a four-year lifespan) were “essentially less-than-human entities”, Dick stated. They were “deplorable because they are heartless, they are completely self-centred, they don’t care about what happens to other creatures”.

Ridley Scott’s film turned it around, somewhat. Far from being a deplorable, heartless machine, Rutger Hauer’s chief replicant, supposedly the baddie, develops empathy for the cop trying to kill him. Replicants were the superior beings. “More human than human,” as their manufacturer, Eldon Tyrell, puts it. Apart from the four-year lifespan, what was the difference? This was the part Baudrillard and co were so keen to engage with: what was “real” when the copy was better than the original? “The real is not only what can be reproduced but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper-real,” wrote Baudrillard. Human status was no longer a matter of biological or genetic fact. You couldn’t trust your memories either – they could just be implants. So how do any of us know we are human?

Hurricane Damaged Arecibo....,

NationalGeographic |  Great news! [Princeton University professor] Joe Taylor talked to Angel Vazquez, who made contact with the observatory via ham radio. Everybody there is safe and sound,” reported Arecibo deputy director Joan Schmelz. 

However, it’s not yet clear how staff who weathered the storm in town are doing, or what conditions are like for local communities. Reports suggest that the road up to the facility is covered in debris and is largely inaccessible. 

Still, according to the National Science Foundation, which funds the majority of the telescope’s operations, the observatory is well stocked with food, well water, and fuel for generators. As of Thursday night, there are enough supplies for the staff hunkered down there to survive for at least a week, although Vazquez reports that it’s not clear how long the generators will be working.

“As soon as the roads are physically passable, a team will try to get up to the observatory,” the NSF statement says.

Because of its deep water well and generator, the observatory has been a place for those in nearby towns to gather, shower, and cook after past hurricanes. It also has an on-site helicopter landing pad, so making sure the facility is safe in general is not just of scientific importance, but is also relevant for local relief efforts.

Built in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory has become a cultural icon, known both for its size and for its science. For most of its 54-year existence, Arecibo was the largest radio telescope in the world, but in 2016, a Chinese telescope called FAST—with a dish measuring 1,600 feet across—surpassed Arecibo in size, although it’s not yet fully operational.

The observatory was originally designed for national defense during the Cold War, when the U.S. wanted to see if it could detect Soviet satellites (and maybe missiles and bombs) based on how they alter the portion of Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. Later, the telescope became instrumental in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) programs and in other aspects of radio astronomy.

Artificial Intelligence is Lesbian

thenewyorker |  “The face is an observable proxy for a wide range of factors, like your life history, your development factors, whether you’re healthy,” Michal Kosinski, an organizational psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the Guardian earlier this week. The photo of Kosinski accompanying the interview showed the face of a man beleaguered. Several days earlier, Kosinski and a colleague, Yilun Wang, had reported the results of a study, to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggesting that facial-recognition software could correctly identify an individual’s sexuality with uncanny accuracy. The researchers culled tens of thousands of photos from an online-dating site, then used an off-the-shelf computer model to extract users’ facial characteristics—both transient ones, like eye makeup and hair color, and more fixed ones, like jaw shape. Then they fed the data into their own model, which classified users by their apparent sexuality. When shown two photos, one of a gay man and one of a straight man, Kosinski and Wang’s model could distinguish between them eighty-one per cent of the time; for women, its accuracy dropped slightly, to seventy-one per cent. Human viewers fared substantially worse. They correctly picked the gay man sixty-one per cent of the time and the gay woman fifty-four per cent of the time. “Gaydar,” it appeared, was little better than a random guess.

The study immediately drew fire from two leading L.G.B.T.Q. groups, the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, for “wrongfully suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect sexual orientation.” They offered a list of complaints, which the researchers rebutted point by point. Yes, the study was in fact peer-reviewed. No, contrary to criticism, the study did not assume that there was no difference between a person’s sexual orientation and his or her sexual identity; some people might indeed identify as straight but act on same-sex attraction. “We assumed that there was a correlation . . . in that people who said they were looking for partners of the same gender were homosexual,” Kosinski and Wang wrote. True, the study consisted entirely of white faces, but only because the dating site had served up too few faces of color to provide for meaningful analysis. And that didn’t diminish the point they were making—that existing, easily obtainable technology could effectively out a sizable portion of society. To the extent that Kosinski and Wang had an agenda, it appeared to be on the side of their critics. As they wrote in the paper’s abstract, “Given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.”

I Don't Trust Vice Or Anonymous But This Seems Worth Pursuing

motherboard.vice |  It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel civic ecosystem.

What is the proper role, then, for the citizen who takes citizenship seriously, and counts it a duty to defend the rights not just of Americans but of those populations abroad who ultimately bear the brunt of our civic failings? For many, the answer is to continue the hard work of engaging within the system—voting, working for better candidates, donating time and money to the organizations that do what they can to prevent things from deteriorating even further. This is entirely appropriate. But even the reformers are likely to recognize, now, that this may not be sufficient in the face of the political conditions we face—and that the consequences of a morally failed American republic, continuing on its present course for even just another decade, would be irreparable. No competent observer of our current trajectory can today disregard this scenario, or others far worse.

That this problem is now widely recognized is the first of two reasons why a solution is now in reach.

Here we have the second reason why a solution is now within reach. The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now collaborate with any other individual on the planet. This has happened with extraordinary suddenness, in historical terms; by the same accounting, it has also happened quite recently, and so remains largely unexplored. We cannot hope to know what this means as of yet, then, any more than someone who observed the advent of the printing press or gunpowder could have predicted, respectively, the Reformation or Europe's eventual seizure of much of the world. Nonetheless, the implications are becoming clearer as the years proceed; the internet itself has quickened the pace of our history, even as it makes the future more unpredictable.

pursuanceproject |  For the first time in history, any individual may now collaborate with any other individual. One may get a sense of the implications of this by considering how different human history would have been had early man possessed some psychic ability to find and communicate with anyone else across the world. We now have something very similar, and in some ways more powerful. 

It's easy to underestimate the significance of this in part because it's also easy to overestimate it and, worse, to romanticize it. The advent of the internet was immediately followed by triumphalist manifestos setting out the great and positive changes that were now afoot. That much of what was predicted didn't immediately come to pass has led some to challenge the entire premise of the internet as a potentially revolutionary force for good. 

Certainly the utopian predictions of the early ‘90s were off the mark; indeed the clearest picture we have today contains seeds of actual dystopia. Meanwhile, the trivial uses to which the internet is commonly put can make it difficult to take seriously as a transcendental factor in our civilization. But then gunpowder was originally used to make fireworks. And a technology that may be used to oppress may also be used to liberate. Again, gunpowder comes to mind. 

The way in which events have proceeded in our society since the advent of the internet tells us less about the internet than it does about our society. There are a few lessons we can glean, though. In the large, we know that mass connectivity does not automatically lead to mass enlightenment. We know that states will sometimes seek to use the internet to further their control over information, and that they will sometimes be successful in this. We know many things of this sort. But none of this tells us what the internet will ultimately mean for human civilization. That will be determined on the ground, in the years to follow.

Racism is an Integral, Permanent, and Indestructible Component of America

aljazeera | The distinguished novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Tony Morrison has keenly observed: "All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness."

But the question is not fealty to any "native country". The question is rather the systematic subordination of all immigrants, regardless of how they have been colour-coded, to the myth of the "white people" and the violent fantasies of their civilizing missions. No brown, black, or any other thus coloured person can ever be completely "white". But their trying to pass as white is a mechanism of humiliation and denigration they willingly play to presume they are part of the power structure and a more "normal" human being. 

In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (1998), Karen Brodkin has put forward one line of argument as to how since World War II American Jews began to pose and perform themselves as "white". The practice is not peculiar to American Jews, of course. Upon their arrivals and one generation into a successful economic status, other recent immigrants, Muslims and Hindus alike, have also sought to posit and pass themselves as (almost) white.

Becoming white has always been the most potent way for racialised "minorities" to overcome their violently alienated personhood in order to become something they could (and should) never be. 

By replicating and reenacting the racial politics of their European origin and now their US benefactors upon Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, the Zionists are the living testimonials as to how racial hatred is manufactured and sustained as means of political domination. The term "Israeli Arab" invented by Zionists for Palestinians in their own homeland is the epitome of European racism carried to its most obscene colonial conclusions. 

Struggle for racial justice must commence and continue with the full knowledge of how racial divides were socially manufactured and politically sustained before we can learn how to overcome them. The full acknowledgment of the murderous history of racism in the US and Europe is the first step towards dismantling it. No postmodern or poststructuralist dismantling of race can disregard the sustained history of racism as coterminous with capitalist modernity. It must acknowledge, sublate, in order to overcome it.

I've Got To Be A Colored Funny Man, Not A Funny Colored Man...,

WaPo |  Mr. Gregory ran for mayor against Daley in 1967 and for U.S. president in 1968 as a write-in candidate with the left-wing Freedom and Peace Party, campaigning against what he saw as rampant political corruption in the two major parties. 

Mr. Gregory said he was appalled that the Democratic Party would host its national convention that year in Chicago, a city where black demonstrators were regularly brutalized by the police. The convention drew a large contingent of white anti-Vietnam protesters, and the outbreak of violence that ensued prompted Mr. Gregory to take mordant glee in the melee. 

“I was at home watching it on TV, and I fell on the floor and laughed,” he told GQ magazine in 2008. “My wife said, ‘What’s funny?’ And I said, ‘The whole world is gonna change. White folks are gonna see white folks beating white folks.’ ”

Increasingly inclined to believe conspiracy theories, he was once arrested for attempting to wrap yellow “crime scene” tape across the front gates of the CIA, for what he alleged was the spy agency’s involvement in distributing crack cocaine in inner cities.

Like Muhammad Ali, “who always thought of himself as more than a boxer, Greg always considered himself more than a comic,” New York Times sports columnist and Gregory biographer Robert Lipsyte told the London Independent in 2004. “Both men suffered enormously for their political convictions. But unlike Ali, Greg was conscious of his role from the beginning. He knew that his presence at Southern demonstrations would save lives, even if it killed his career.”

He caught a break in 1961 when Hugh Hefner requested that the comedian perform one night at Chicago’s Playboy Club to substitute for Irwin Corey, who had canceled at the last minute. 

As Mr. Gregory told it, when he arrived at the club that night, he was stopped by the manager. The man feared an especially hostile audience — a convention of white Southern frozen-foods executives.

Mr. Gregory strode onto the stage anyway and grabbed the microphone. A heckler quickly stood up and threw out a racial epithet.

The comic was ready. He calmly explained that he had an arrangement with the club that he received a $50 bonus each time someone used that word and invited the audience to keep on saying it.

Another in the crowd asked Mr. Gregory if he’d consider performing in Mobile, Ala. He replied: “Mobile? I won’t even work the south of this room.”

He won over the audience, and an ensuing profile in Time magazine led to invitations to appear on Paar’s TV show and other career-building stops. As he rose in the national consciousness, he also relished playing the provocateur. He often said he titled his 1964 memoir “Nigger: An Autobiography” — a book co-written with Lipsyte — so that every time the slur was spoken, it would serve as advertising for the book. It quickly became a bestseller.

A Kind of Thin-ness - Just Right for the Alzheimers Demographic....,

radiolab |  We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.

Ain't Tribulation Grand? Enjoy your Trump Steaks....,

fusion |  Being the head sucker of the party of suckers is in some sense an appropriate fate for a veteran purveyor of substandard garbage like Donald Trump. Slapping his name on shoddy products marketed to people who—like Trump himself!—buy into the myth of Trump as a man of class, intelligence, and distinction kept him afloat after real estate and casinos nearly ruined him. Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Wine, “Trump”-branded developments he had no part in building or managing; Trump sold bullshit for so long that he seemed to begin to believe in the bullshit himself. And once the product was literally him, how could he not believe in it?

As always, the people who’ll truly be burned are the ones who bought into the sales pitch, from voters in opioid-ravaged post-industrial shitholes (Chris Christie’s on the way!) to Trump-supporting right-wingers in Congress, who will find their president mostly uninterested in their agenda (and unable to help them implement it even if he did care). The operators will still get something out of it, because they usually do. Paul Ryan won’t get to completely dismantle the welfare state, but he’ll still probably get a friendly Supreme Court justice or two out of him.

Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus both probably think they can “manage” Trump, the same way a coterie of movement conservatives “managed” the elderly and checked-out Reagan, putting him out in front of the cameras to deliver his patter while they went about the business of running the country. You can see this in how apparently warring factions within the White House are attempting to control what intelligence Trump sees and who is responsible for analyzing it before it reaches his desk. But no matter what his handlers put in his briefing book, the president is getting his actual briefings from “Fox & Friends”—as if Reagan had listened only to Paul Harvey to determine his agenda and strategy.

There’s plenty Trump’s minders can accomplish despite how distractible and unmanageable he is. They’ve already planted right-wing shock troops in all the federal agencies. They’ll fill the judiciary with extremists. They can do a lot of damage simply because the boss doesn’t care about the actual details and responsibilities of his gig. But on the major legacy-building (or other side’s legacy-destroying) stuff, really anything involving Congress or extensive public debate, there’s no coherent path toward anything that looks like victory. If the bullshit-peddlers who attached themselves to Trump truly want to remake the nation—beyond making it meaner in the areas in which it is already pretty persistently mean, or beyond simply raining death down upon foreigners with even less regard for casualties or consequences than evinced by prior administrations—they’re screwed. They’re screwed because they and their predecessors engineered a perpetual misinformation machine, and then a bunch of people addicted to their product took over the government.

Now, and for the foreseeable future, the grifter-in-chief sits alone in the White House residence every night, watching cable news tell him comforting lies—that he’s a hugely popular president, that responsibility for his myriad setbacks and failures lies with the many powerful enemies aligned against him a grand conspiracy—in between the ads for reverse mortgages and “all-natural male enhancement.” There’s an image of America in the age of the complete triumph of bullshit. You spend a few years selling lousy steaks to suckers, then one morning you wake up and you’re the sucker—and the steak.

H+

newatlas | The looming specter of eugenics hovers over a great deal of transhumanist thought. In the first half of the 20th century the term became disturbingly, but not unreasonably, associated with Nazi Germany. Sterilizing or euthanizing those who displayed characteristics that were deemed to be imperfect was ultimately outlawed as a form of genocide. But as the genome revolution struck later in the century a resurgence in the philosophical ideals of eugenics began to arise.

Transhumanist thought often parallels the ideals of eugenics, although most self-identifying transhumanists separate themselves from that stigmatized field, preferring terms like reprogenetics and germinal choice. The difference between the negative outcomes of eugenics and the more positive, transhumanist notion of reprogenetics seems to be one of consent. In a 21st century world of selective genetic modification, all is good as long as all parents equally have the choice to genetically modify their child, and are not forced by governments who are trying to forcefully manage the genetic pool.

Some of the more valid concerns about the dawning transhumanist future are the socioeconomic repercussions of such a speedy technological evolution. As the chasm between rich and poor grows in our current culture, one can't help but be concerned that future advancements could become disproportionately limited to those with the financial resources to afford them. If life extension technologies start to become feasible, and they are only available to the billionaire class, then we enter a scenario where the rich get richer and live longer, while the poor get poorer and die sooner.

Without exceptionally strong political reform maintaining democratic access to human enhancement technologies, it's easy to foresee the rise of a disturbing genetic class divide. As environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben writes: "If we can't afford the fifty cents a person it would take to buy bed nets to protect most of Africa from malaria, it is unlikely we will extend to anyone but the top tax bracket these latest forms of genetic technology."

Life Changing Adjustment..., (REDUX Originally Posted 1/21/16)

BAMB |  People with proper body control do, in fact, carry themselves in such a way that no preliminary adjustment or movement is necessary to pass from standing to walking or from walking to running. They can also reverse any undertaken movement at any time more easily than other people. All directions are acces!ible to their inspection while in locomotion without an intermediate preliminary adjustment. 

These requirements for proper carriage are justified by the anatomy and mechanics of the body and they are valid for translation as well as rotation of the body.

The terms and form of our analysis may be novel; not so the substance. The culture of the hip joints and posture of the pelvis have always been the central point of all esoteric teachings concerned with increasing potency, sexual and otherwise.

In all oriental languages, reduction of the exaggerated lumbar. hyperextension is synonymous with manhood. "Gird up your loins" is the Biblical expression for "get ready for a manly effort." "Sprung from one's loins" denotes fatherhood. The Yogi, the Japanese wrestler, and in fact all Orientals have always ascribed power and potency to the lumbar·sacral region.

The dependence of proper breathing on the correct holding of the pelvis was also recognised by the Yogi long ago. Many of the prescriptions for correct Asanas, when stripped of the cloud of vague and mystic symbolism surrounding them, are basically sounder than many modern schools of physical education, misusing relaxation, tonus and posture. Even keener understanding ofthe functions of the body is shown by Judo experts in teaching the Jigotai or defensive states and the Shizentai or the balanced upright state, synonymous with mental and physical potency.

Unfortunately, only the example of the masters can convey the proper instruction, for their theory is based on and shrouded in a cloud of mystic symbolism as is all the knowledge of the Orient.

The Shizentai is essentially the potent state we have described. The graceful, precise and efficient movements executed effortlessly and without delay in any position and at any instant are made possible by maintaining the centre of gravity at the highest potential energy level possible.

The higher exponents of Judo show such great skill and perfection in the control of the head and especially the hips and lower abdomen (Saika- Tanden) that their performances seem to defy all laws of gravity.

Unless the pelvis and the head are carried properly, no athletic perfection can be achieved with ease, and some performances are quite impossible without these two requisites; a fact well known to all specialists and yet generally little appreciated.

All people with well matured mind and body functions carry themselves in the potent state. Marked deviations are found together with marked immaturity of other functions. The all-round matured individual is recognisable by his outstanding capacity for recovery from unexpected shocks or disturbances, mental, emotional or mechanical. Faulty recovery is never found on one of these planes of activity alone. This is a very important point to which we will return.

Outwardly, the potent state is observable by certain features common to all acts performed by the person. They are simple and direct. No effort is apparent no matter how difficult the exertion, nor how great the work may be. All the faculties and previous experience are smoothly co-ordinated to bear on the present circumstance, no matter how unexpected and violent the demand may be. When the emergency is over, deliberate reflection only corroborates the adequacy of the spontaneous response. The musculature shows no useless contraction in any part of the body.

All the articulations participate in every act. None is held rigidly in any particular configuration not dictated by the immediate task being performed. In motion, none of the articulations retains any useless, habitually preferred configuration. In short, the whole system is integrated on the present circumstance with perfection and poise, preparing the body and mind for future acts. The instances where the frame is carried on by inertia are as short as possible and any performance can be reversed, or stopped, if the circumstance demands. Such an ideal behaviour is within the capacity of every frame in which all functions have full maturity, an extremely rare circumstance.

Perfect maturity of the antigravity function is recognisable by the narrowness of gait. The traces left by the feet when advancing fit between two parallel lines, about two-thirds of the width of both feet, apart. The two heels never touch the ground simultaneously.

Prints of the bare feet on the ground would be so spaced that following points would be on one straight line the middle of each heel and the edge of the second toe facing the big toe. The legs move simply, i.e., they do not do anything else but the movement strictly necessary for the purpose. So does the whole body. The trajectories described by each part in motion are therefore smooth curves. There are no jerky, angular movements whatsoever, except in sharp accidental righting.

The following chapters deal with the reasons of failure to achieve the perfection which should, ideally, be the average normal for all anatomically intact persons. Means whereby reeducation of faulty response may be efficiently achieved are also suggested. To understand the reason and judge the soundness of these suggestions it is necessary to inquire into the relation of the vestibular apparatus and spatial representation and particularly into an antigravity attitude and its connection with anxiety.

The Indispensable Moving Meditation

tomikiaikido |  Walking Kata Points

This was taken from a Tai Chi website. I think it applies to the Tomiki Lineage Unsoku and Tegatana practice of the Walking Kata. Besides this applying to the walk, it of course applies to technique and application of principle. Remember no martial art has a monopoly on truth. Efficient motion is the goal!

1.Straightening the head.
Stand straight, relax your neck and suspend the head naturally erect from the crown point without strain or tension. The image to model is "hanging by a string from the top of one's head" such that the head and neck align by the force of gravity alone.

2. Correct position of chest and back.
The chest is kept slightly depressed inward which helps enables one's breath to sink to the lower belly. The upper back is slightly bowed outward while the pelvis is tucked under.

3. Remain relaxed with no tension.
Relax and loosen all the joints, particularly the shoulders and elbows, and sink them so that they are flexible, connected and are able to integrate into proper structure. Relaxed does not mean limp. Proper structure is held with a minimum of muscular exertion with gravity providing the downward stacking, providing power from the root into the ground. Tai Chi transfers energy in the form of a vibration much like a whip which has no tension. When the musculature and joints are relaxed, aligned, and connected the wave or pulse of the movement is conducted through them with no retained tension.

4. All movement comes from the center.
The waist is the "ruler." All movement comes from the waist, whether it is a hand movement or a step. Make the waist cause each movement . The waist as the "ruler" must be relaxed, initiating, controlling, guiding and distributing the direction and amount of energy transmitted.

5. Harmonize the upper and lower parts of the body.
The vibration of any Tai Chi movement roots at the feet, releases from the legs, is controlled by the waist, moving eventually through the back and arms and finally is expressed by the fingers. To achieve this coordinated path first requires that the feet are at all times firmly attached to the ground like big roots of a tree. The knees must remain slightly flexed. Finally, the upper and lower body must move harmoniously so that all parts of the body are strung together without the slightest break.

6. The entire body moves as a single unit.
The entire body should move as one complete unit, not just a hand, leg or arm. Once one part of your body moves, every other part of your body should also be in motion; when you are still, everything should be in stillness. "Be still as a mountain...move like a great river."

7. All movements are performed in a smooth manner, with no unevenness, and continuous, allowing no interruptions.
All Tai Chi movements are performed smoothly and evenly. This means that the movements in training never speed up and then slow down. There is never a detectable start and finish from one form to the next. A common image used is that of reeling silk thread from a cocoon. Reeling too fast or suddenly will break the silk while reeling too slow or in the wrong direction may tangle it.

8. Maintain the clear distinction between substantial and insubstantial.
Agility is the result of non-double weighting. This means that one's weight is never maintained equally over both legs. One leg is always heavy and one leg is light. By only maintaining one point of substantial contact with the ground you gain the ability to move quickly, much like a ball which moves easily across the ground because it only has one point of contact with it.

9. Breath deeply from your lower belly and in harmony with the movements.
The breath is deep and full, filling oneself from Tan tien (2-3 inches below your navel.) Each movement is linked precisely with the breath, so that as one expands the body, there is an exhale, and when one contracts the body, there is a inhale. Since the breath is linked to very slow movements, your breathing will also be very slow.

10. The mind leads the body.
In Tai Chi, one focuses the attention on the mind, instead of on force. Therefore, use your mind to direct your movements, and let the body follow. Keep the mind fully conscious, aware, and with intent along each and every tiny point along the path of the movement and each point of the body. The mind and breath are king and queen and the bones and muscles are the court

Shizentai - Correct Carriage of the Pelvis and Head

kendo-guide |   Shizentai means "natural posture". However, it is not your ordinary posture.

You must learn the natural posture in order to stand naturally. Yes. Very complicated but you will get used to the posture.

The key point are;

to straighten the back of your neck, to pull your chin in, to tighten the butt cheeks.

It does not sound like a natural posture. Very uncomfortable for the first time you try.

Probably you know there is a difference between being relaxing and being lazy.

We do not want to be lazy. We need an effort to keep your posture but you can be relax.

That is what we want. Ok, this is how we create this natural posture.

You Have to Move Forward Out of Where You Are

swans |  I recall a Buddhist parable involving a stick that appears from a distance to be a snake, causing fear to rise in the perceiver. As the perception shifts upon closer examination, the fear subsides and the relieved hiker continues down the path. Understanding and awareness have a lot to do with how we feel and how we act. As hosts to the dominant cultural mindset (our collective understanding of who we are in the universe), our minds play a critical part in both perpetuating our dominant way of life and also in shifting away from it. And so it's just possible that I have performed no greater service in my three decades of activism than to simply challenge myself and others to consider the possibility that the social systems that support us and we sustain are inherently incapable of meeting basic human needs and that we must make a fresh start, in a sense, if we are to survive this century and prosper thereafter. 

These systems are the largely invisible, cyclical patterns of interaction among and within society's individuals, institutions, and principalities. They include small town school systems all the way out to our globalized economic system and to the mother of them all, our globalized monoculture. You need to perceive the stick as a stick before you can confidently move on, and this consideration is a critical step in transforming the way we live. When an alcoholic decides to sober up, he needs to understand, as AA puts it, that he is powerless to the substance. This understanding is a necessary condition for recovery. Likewise, about 6 billion humans living on our planet are powerless to make our global systems support equitable, sustainable, enjoyable living. Further, we are powerless to use the tools of these systems to prevent our world from crashing down on itself. 

In a few critical ways, our global monoculture dates back to the Mesopotamian settlements our history texts associate with the Agricultural Revolution. Over the millennia, this rapidly expanding cultural system, under the guise of various imperial masks, has come to produce predictable results, terrible and also quite marvelous. The terrible includes unrelieved poverty for the majority of the world's population, widespread unhappiness and spiritual alienation, even (especially?) among the wealthy 10 percent of the world's population, and the unsustainable use of natural resources. This last result seals our present day ultimatum -- our culture and our survival as a species have become incompatible. As if possessing a will and mind of its own, the culture has a voracious appetite for assimilating all cultures into itself and then separating every thing under its umbrella from every other thing into the smallest possible units, mainly to compete with each other. Its compulsion is to consume and waste, grow and expand, dominate, control and compete at a speed and intensity that is destroying the societies we assume it has evolved to serve.

The Octave is a Repetition of an Already Experienced Quality on a New Level

Transforming Food - First being Food

So, my boy, this totality of cosmic substances named 'exioëhary,' resulting from the evolution of the first being-food in these beings-apparatuses, corresponds in its vibrations to the last stopinder of the being-Heptaparaparshinokh and, according to the particularity of this stopinder, it enters the 'higher intentionally actualizing mdnel-in' of the law of Heptaparaparshinokh. And in order to complete its transformation into new higher substances and acquire vibrations corresponding to the next higher degree of vivifyingness, that is, corresponding to the fifth stopinder of the fundamental process of the sacred Heptaparaparshinokh, it indispensably requires just that outside help which can be obtained in the presence of three-brained beings only through those factors mentioned by me more than once, and which are manifested in 'being-partkdolgduty', in other words, those factors which our Common Father Creator Endlessness consented to designate as the means by which certain tetartocosmoses — as a final result of their service to the purposes of the common-cosmic Iraniranumange— could become helpers in the administration of the enlarging world. And as for these factors, which are the sole possible means for the assimilation of the cosmic substances required for the coating and perfecting of the higher being-bodies, today we call them 'conscious labor' and 'intentional suffering'. (15)

Transforming Air - Second Being Food

Gurdjieff was very circumspect about breathing exercises which altered the natural rhythm of breathing. Some of the Movements naturally demand certain altered patterns of breathing. Beyond that, Gurdjieff encouraged the simple practice of conscious attention to the breath. "This signified that the passengers of the ship Karnak were summoned to the "Djamdjampal," that is, that "refectory" of the ship in which all the passengers together periodically fed on the second and first being-foods." 

"After the process of taking in the second being-food, Beelzebub did not immediately return from the "Djameechoonatra"" (14) "This whole attention of mine, I now intentionally divide into two equal parts. The first half I consciously direct to the uninterrupted constatation and continuous sensing of the process proceeding in me of my breathing."

Transforming Impressions - Third Being Food

In the book GURDJIEFF: ESSAYS AND REFLECTIONS ON THE MAN AND HIS TEACHING, there was a chapter on Questions and Responses, which contains transcripts from meetings from the 1940s in which Gurdjieff replies to a question by a pupil (p274-275) : 

Dr. B.: I would like to ask a question about the relationship between work and fatigue. It seems to me there is a difference between work efforts and automatic efforts. Outer work takes energy. Inner work is the opposite— it should accumulate energy. It should even be restful if it is done correctly. But for me it is the opposite. At the moment of making an effort something believes that the gates through which energy escapes will close autornatically. But it’s the opposite. I become very tired. I lose my energy.

GURDJIEFF: On the other hand, you keep it. Consciously. we eat the electricity that is in the body and transform it. This establishes in us a force. . . . In ordinary life you automatically lose this. But here it’s not the same thing; it’s not the same kind of fatigue. This other fatigue has a future. It’s tiring but it brings you a substantial result. It refills your accumulators. If you continue, a certain substance will refill your accumulator. Today the more you tire yourself, the more your organism will produce this substance.

DR. B.: Is fatigue favorable or unfavorable to the effort of concentration?

GURDJIEFF: If it’s ordinary fatigue, it’s not worth trying to make the effort; with that you can’t even do the ordinary things of life. You lose the last of your strength. Work depends on another accumulator. There is a law for this other kind of fatigue: the more you give, the more you receive.

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The energy which triggers a sensory nerve never actually gets into the brain, it simply trips a switch, so to speak, which releases pre-existing energy in the nerve to initiate an ionic chain reaction and its accompanying electromagnetic field and transmit an 'electrical impulse' to the brain. The higher brain centers are receiving 'information' about a change of state of our internal electromagnetic environment, not any new energy from the outside world, like the food and air octaves. 

The information is represented by different shapes and sizes of electrical impulses. The interesting thing about information is that it can be represented by almost any kind of medium. For example, these words appear on your computer screen by illuminated phosphors, they may then be printed on a piece of paper with ink. They have been transmitted to you with binary digits of 0 and 1's represented by pulses of electromagnetic energy. I could scratch these words in the sand with a stick or spell them out with stones. In other words, information exists on a different level of reality than the matter/energy used to represent it.

We 'eat' the information from impressions by moving electrical impulses that represent the information around the brain to certain places where that information is stored in another form of medium, possibly various combinations of proteins. Memory is a mental accumulator of information. The more attention we pay to our incoming information, the more of it gets stored in our accumulator.

Behold the Man

So here we are - caught up in a maelstrom of economic and political discontents - so many untethered from that which gave their lives structure and purpose. Accelerating changes in the planetary ecology, coupled with even faster changes in hive-ape technology - have imperiled millions who lack the knowledge, skill, ability, or drive - to keep up - or even survive. 

The ordinary man is-as-he-is - because of his failure to actualize Effort - Intentional Suffering

- Self-Observation - Conscious Labor. Even if he wishes and chooses to do - it may not be possible for him to do. The ordinary man is like a man lying on the ground with a broken leg. We call him ordinary in exactly the same way we might say the man on the ground is suffering a "failure to walk". 

 

Without help, is it possible for him to simply stand up and be on his way?

 

 

What To Do, What To Do....?

Effort: Awakening results from consistent, prolonged effort. Such efforts can be made as an act of will after one is already exhausted.

Intentional suffering:  The act of struggling against automatism such as daydreaming, idle pleasure, food (eating for reasons other than real hunger), etc... "the greatest 'intentional suffering' can be obtained by compelling ourselves to endure the displeasing manifestations of others toward ourselves" 

Self-Observation: This is to strive to observe in oneself behavior and habits usually only observed in others.  Observe thoughts, feelings, movements, and sensations without judging or analyzing what is observed.

Conscious Labor: is an action where the person who is performing the act is present to what he is doing; not absentminded. At the same time he is striving to perform the act more efficiently. 

Application of the above principles is the indispensable prerequisite for possible human development.

Everything else is merely conversation....,

Ecce Homo

wikipedia |   Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (German: Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist) is the last original book written by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche before his final years of insanity that lasted until his death in 1900. It was written in 1888 and was not published until 1908.

According to one of Nietzsche's most prominent English translators, Walter Kaufmann, the book offers "Nietzsche's own interpretation of his development, his works, and his significance."^[1] The book contains several chapters with ironic self-laudatory titles, such as "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Good Books" and "Why I Am a Destiny". Walter Kaufmann, in his biography Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist noticed the internal parallels, in form and language, to Plato's Apology which documented the Trial of Socrates. In effect, Nietzsche was putting himself on trial with this work, and his sardonic judgments and chapter headings are mordant, mocking, self-deprecating, sly, and they turn this trial against his future accusers, distorters, and superficial judges

Within this work, Nietzsche is self-consciously striving to present a new image of the philosopher and of himself, for example, a philosopher "who is not an Alexandrian academic nor an Apollonian sage, but Dionysian."[2] On these grounds, Kaufmann considers Ecce Homo a literary work comparable in its artistry to Vincent van Gogh's paintings. Just as Socrates was presented in Plato's Apology as the wisest of men precisely because he freely admitted to his own ignorance, Nietzsche argues that he himself is a great philosopher because of his withering assessment of the pious fraud of the entirety of Philosophy which he considered as a retreat from honesty when most necessary, and a cowardly failure to pursue its stated aim to its reasonable end. Nietzsche insists that his suffering is not noble but the expected result of hard inquiry into the deepest recesses of human self-deception, and that by overcoming one's agonies a person achieves more than any relaxation or accommodation to intellectual difficulties or literal threats. He proclaims the ultimate value of everything that has happened to him (including his father's early death and his near-blindness – an example of love of Fate or amor fati). In this regard, the wording of his title was not meant to draw parallels with Jesus, but suggest a contrast, that Nietzsche truly is "a man." Nietzsche's point is that to be "a man" alone is to be more than "a Christ".

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