a high cabal?

globalresearch | The control of the US, and of global politics, by the wealthiest families of the planet is exercised in a powerful, profound and clandestine manner. This control began in Europe and has a continuity that can be traced back to the time when the bankers discovered it was more profitable to give loans to governments than to needy individuals.

These banking families and their subservient beneficiaries have come to own most major businesses over the two centuries during which they have secretly and increasingly organised themselves as controllers of governhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifments worldwide and as arbiters of war and peace.

Unless we understand this we will be unable to understand the real reasons for the two world wars and the impending Third World War, a war that is almost certain to begin as a consequence of the US attempt to seize and control Central Asia. The only way out is for the US to back off – something the people of the US and the world want, but the elite does not.

The US is a country controlled through the privately owned Federal Reserve, which in turn is controlled by the handful of banking families that established it by deception in the first place.

In his interesting book The Secret Team, Col. Fletcher Prouty, briefing officer of the US President from 1955-63, narrates a remarkable incident in which Winston Churchill made a most revealing utterance during World War II: “On this particular night there had been a heavy raid on Rotterdam. He sat there, meditating, and then, as if to himself, he said, ‘Unrestricted submarine warfare, unrestricted air bombing – this is total war.’ He continued sitting there, gazing at a large map, and then said, ‘Time and the Ocean and some guiding star and High Cabal have made us what we are’.”

Prouty further states: “This was a most memorable scene and a revelation of reality that is infrequent, at best. If for the great Winston Churchill, there is a ‘High Cabal’ that has made us what we are, our definition is complete. Who could know better than Churchill himself during the darkest days of World War II, that there exists, beyond doubt, an international High Cabal? This was true then. It is true today, especially in these times of the One World Order. This all-powerful group has remained superior because it had learned the value of anonymity.” This “High Cabal” is the “One World Cabal” of today, also called the elite by various writers.

facebook's face-recognition "feature" draws privacy scrutiny

NYTimes | European Union data protection regulators said on Wednesday that they would investigate Facebook over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission, and a privacy group in the United States said that it planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the feature.

A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the European bloc’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gérard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in Britain and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social networking service.

“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Mr. Lommel. Such automatic tagging suggestions “can bear a lot of risks for users” and the European data protection officials will “clarify to Facebook that this can’t happen like this.”

Facebook said on its blog on Tuesday that “Tag Suggestions” was available in most countries after being phased in over several months. When Facebook users add photos to their pages, the feature uses facial-recognition software to suggest names of people in the photos to tag based on pictures in which they have already been identified. Before the feature was introduced, users could tag pictures manually without permission from their friends.

The feature is active by default on existing users’ accounts, and Facebook explains on its blog how people can disable the function if they don’t want their names to be automatically suggested for other people’s pictures.

“We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that’s currently done more than 100 million times a day,” Facebook, which is based in Palo Alto., Calif., said in an e-mailed statement. “Tag suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.”

In Europe, where personal privacy is protected by law more often than in the United States, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have also been pushed by data protection officials to limit the amount of time they store online users’ search records.

influence explorer

Influence Explorer | Influence Explorer now integrates with three other Sunlight projects: Party Time, Lobbying Registration Tracker and OpenCongress. Check out the updated lobbying sections, which now include links to bills lobbied on and daily updates of recent lobbying activity. The updated politician pages now include links to recent and upcoming fundraisers.

Influence Explorer also now shows data from the Project On Government Oversight indicating when federal contractors have a history of misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics and labor violations.

Inbox Influence

Your new favorite email tool since the spam filter

Inbox Influence is a new tool from the Sunlight Foundation that allows you to see the political contributions of the people and organizations that are mentioned in emails you receive. This easy-to-use tool can be used for researching influence background on corporate correspondence, adding context to newspaper headlines or discovering who is behind political fundraising solicitations.

Learn More


Checking Influence

When you shop, do you wonder where your money really goes?

Checking Influence shows you how companies you do business with every day are wielding political influence. By securely analyzing your online bank or credit card statement, Checking Influence shows your own spending alongside corporate spending on lobbying activities and campaign contributions, helping you be a more informed consumer and citizen.


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Poligraft

Dig up political influence


Feed in a news article, blog post or press release, and Poligraft will present you with an enhanced view of the people, organizations and relationships described in the piece. Poligraft allows you to connect the dots between money and politics in Congress and state offices.


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state seeks compensation for nevada test site contamination

LATimes | The Nevada Legislature wants the U.S. government to contain and mitigate about 300 million curies of radioactive contamination left in the soil and water of the former nuclear weapons testing site.

The Nevada Legislature has taken the first step in demanding that the federal government make amends for massive radioactive contamination left by decades of nuclear weapons testing on a swath of desert the size of Rhode Island.

In a joint resolution, the state's Senate and House are asking the federal government to contain and mitigate about 300 million curies of contamination left in the soil and water of the former Nevada Test Site, about 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Energy Department detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground before testing ended in 1992. An estimated 1.6 trillion gallons of water in aquifers under the site are radioactively contaminated with the byproducts of the bomb tests.

The resolution will open the way for Nevada to demand compensation for the loss of its water resources, said Assemblyman Ed Goedhart, the resolution's lead sponsor. He said the resolution stemmed from a detailed examination of the radioactive legacy of testing that was published by The Times in November 2009.

"It is one of the largest contamination zones in the U.S., if not the world," Goedhart said. "If we are prevented from using our water resources, it is a taking and we should be compensated."

The Energy Department has said the contaminated water is moving very slowly downhill toward Death Valley National Park, but it could take thousands of years to reach any affected community.

Until then, it would be technically and economically impossible to purify the water, some of which is 5,000 feet below the land surface, Energy Department scientists have asserted.

"The test site has been declared a sacrifice zone," said , Joseph Strolin, acting director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects. "The federal officials are basically taking the approach that this can never be cleaned up and will be monitored in perpetuity." Fist tap Big Don.

the devil's experiment

Guardian | Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: "Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary."

Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles.

They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. "I did what I was told," she recalls.

Today the nine-year-old girl is a rheumy-eyed 74-year-old great-grandmother, but the anguish of that moment endures. It was how it all began: the pain, the humiliation, the mystery.

It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.

The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.

"They never told me what they were doing, never gave me a chance to say no," Orellana said this week, seated in her ramshackle Guatemala City home. "I've lived almost my whole life without knowing the truth. May God forgive them."

The US government admitted to the experiment in October when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a joint statement apologising for "such reprehensible research" under the guise of public health. Barack Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too.

Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the US, uncovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.

The Guatemalan study went further by deliberately infecting its subjects. Not only did it violate the hippocratic oath to do no harm but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials.

The victims remained largely unknown but the Guardian has interviewed the families of the three survivors identified so far by Guatemala. They chronicled lives blighted by illness, neglect and unanswered questions.

"My father didn't know how to read and they treated him like an animal," said Benjamin Ramos, 57, the son of Federico, 87, a former soldier. "This was the devil's experiment."

Mateo Gudiel, 57, said his father, Manuel, 87, another ex-conscript, has syphilis-linked infections, dementia and headaches. "Some of this has been passed on to me, my siblings and our children." Children can inherit congenital syphilis.

More than half of the subjects were low-ranking soldiers delivered by their superiors to US physicians working from a military base in the capital. The Americans initially arranged for infected prostitutes to have sex with prisoners before discovering it was more "efficient" to inject soldiers, psychiatric patients and orphans with the bacterium.

Guatemala's official inquiry, headed by its vice-president, is due to publish its report in June. "What impacted me the most was how little value was given to these human lives. They were seen as things to be experimented on," said Carlos Mejia, a member of the inquiry and head of the Guatemalan College of Physicians.

The US scientists treated 87% of those infected with syphilis and lost track of the other 13%. Of those treated about a tenth suffered recurrences.

dr. cornelius p. rhoads

Wikipedia | Cornelius P. Rhoads (1898–1959) was an American doctor and pathologist who became infamous for allegedly performing deadly experiments on human beings.[1]

It has been claimed than in 1931, while working for the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), Rhoads deliberately infected several Puerto Ricans patients with cancer cells. Accusations against him are based on a letter he wrote, which states in part:[2]

The Porto Ricans (sic) are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere... I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more... All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.[3]

He would, however, later state that the writing was done in a moment of anger - his car had been vandalized - and did not reflect anything he had actually done. In 1932, Rhoads was accused by Puerto Rican Nationalist leader, Pedro Albizu Campos of carrying out these experiments.

According to San Juan doctor Hector Pesquera, "At least 13 people died as a result of these experiments." [4] and Science Magazine reported that “13 patients…died during Rhoads's tenure” According to Susan E. Lederer, chair of the Medical History and Bio-ethics department of the University of Wisconsin , however, “Careful review of patient records at the Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Rhoads had performed his research revealed that no patients in the young pathologist's care had died under suspicious circumstances.” [5] The project Rhoads worked for "was studying hookworm-caused anemia and tropical sprue anemia” [6] and "Puerto Ricans who had hookworm infestation and anemia" had "high mortality" [7]. Rhoads was subject to separate investigations ordered by the governor of Puerto Rico and the Rockefeller Institute, “neither…was able to uncover any evidence that Dr. Rhoads had exterminated any Puerto Ricans.” [8]

According to his critics he was later placed in charge of two chemical warfare projects in the 1940s establishing U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama.[9] After World War II Rhoads served as director of the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an adviser to the United States Atomic Energy Commission regarding nuclear medicine [10]. He was also awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit by the government for his research.[11]

In 2002, controversy over the letter and the alleged experiments arose once again when University of Puerto Rico biology professor Edwin Vazquez contacted the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). In 2003 the AACR announced that the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award would be renamed, after an investigation commissioned by them and led by bioethicist Jay Katz "concluded that although there was no evidence of Dr. Rhoads' killing patients or transplanting cancer cells, the letter itself was reprehensible enough to remove his name from the award."[12]

altered consciousness is a many splendored thing

Video - Charles Tart discusses altered states of consciousness.

Journal of Cosmology | A discussion of altered states of consciousness (ASC), like one on politics or religion, invites strong emotional reactions. In this paper I question some assumptions about the accuracy and benevolence of the typical ordinary state of consciousness (OSC) while discussing some of the main functions of ASC. Three of the main arguments against ASC are that they: 1) go against what is normal and rational, 2) wreak havoc at personal and social levels, and 3) produce a delusional account of reality, as compared with the (OSC). Because we live in a monophasic (rather than polyphasic, see Laughlin, McManus, & d'Aquili, 1992; Whitehead, in press) society that primarily values our ordinary state of consciousness to the detriment of other states, these assumptions are rarely questioned.

1. Ordinary and altered states of consciousness

Regarding the first argument, we are immediately confronted by the relativity of what is "normal" and "rational." As various anthropologists have pointed out, what we consider "normal" in post-industrial, Western societies differs markedly from the experiences of other groups. Turnbull (1993, p. 74) gives a lucid example of how he could not even begin to understand the Mbuti of Congo until he transformed his consciousness to fully participate in their world:

"But the more it happened the more other things happened. Not only did seemingly incontrovertible oppositions disappear, such as joy and grief, noise and quietness… somehow the differentiation between my senses seemed to disappear and I began touching moonlight, smelling the sound of the songs, hearing the scent of the various kinds of woods blazing away... and seeing the truth, even if I could not understand what I saw."

As to rationality, Richard Shweder (1986) has cogently discussed how holding such ideas as reincarnation, which may at first blush strike the reader as irrational, may be based on a rational consideration of empirical evidence, although parting from different metaphysical axioms than those held by many in the secular West who hold different ones (and by definition axioms are not the result of rational consideration but a-priori assumptions).

As to the second issue, undoubtedly the search for and consequences of ASC can be destructive, as in the personal and social costs of drug addiction, which is why various traditional societies provide training on and ritualize the use of psychoactive drugs, which then cause no harm, in contrast with what occurs in our midst (Dobkin de Rios, 1984). Let me be clear that despite my cheery title it is not my contention that ASC are necessarily beneficent. Although evidence has accumulated that just having unusual experiences and ASC is not per se a sign of dysfunction (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Moreira-Almeida & Cardeña, in press), this does not deny that hellish ASC are also encountered in the ravines of a schizophrenic or otherwise seriously disordered mind (Cardeña, in press), or that ritually-induced ASC to form in-group cohesion may not be used for horrible purposes as in the Nazi Nuremberg rallies. The other side of the coin, however, is that the vast majority of atrocities have been planned while in an OSC, from decisions to wage unnecessary wars and genocides to the socially accepted mistreatment of non-human sentient beings to save some money.

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Video - Impressive 3-D lightshow on administration building Kharkiv, Ukraine

simple harmonic (and non-harmonic) motion

Video - Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion.

Harvard | What it shows: Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion. One might call this kinetic art and the choreography of the dance of the pendulums is stunning! Aliasing and quantum revival can also be shown.

How it works: The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.

Setting it up: The pendulum waves are best viewed from above or down the length of the apparatus. Video projection is a must for a large lecture hall audience. You can play the video below to see the apparatus in action. One instance of interest to note is at 30 seconds (halfway through the cycle), when half of the pendulums are at one amplitude maximum and the other half are at the opposite amplitude maximum.

Comments: Our apparatus was built from a design published by Richard Berg 1 at the University of Maryland. He claims their version is copied from one at Moscow State University and they claim to have seen it first in the US, so we don't know who made one first. The apparatus we have was designed and built by Nils Sorensen.

James Flaten and Kevin Parendo2 have mathematically modeled the collective motions of the pendula with a continuous function. The function does not cycle in time and they show that the various patterns arise from aliasing of this function—the patterns are a manifestation of spatial aliasing (as opposed to temporal). Indeed, if you've ever used a digital scope to observe a sinusoidal signal, you have probably seen some of these patterns on the screen when the time scale was not set appropriately.

Here at Harvard, Prof Eric Heller has suggested that the demonstration could be used to simulate quantum revival. So here you have quantum revival versus classical periodicity!

have you discovered the beginning that you seek after the end?

Wikipedia | The tree of life (Heb. עץ החיים Etz haChayim) in the Book of Genesis is a tree planted by God in midst of the Garden of Eden (Paradise), whose fruit gives everlasting life, i.e. immortality. Together with the tree of life, God planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9). According to some scholars, however, these are in fact two names for the same tree.[1] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, both are forms of the world tree.[2]

The Biblical account states that Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden of Eden after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to prevent them from eating from the tree of life:
“ And the Lord God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." (Genesis 3:22)[3] ”

By questioning God's word and authority, the serpent, who is regarded as Satan in Christianity but not in Judaism, initially tempted Eve into eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, an act explicitly forbidden by God. The serpent tempted Eve by suggesting that eating the fruit would cause her to become as wise as God, having knowledge of good and evil. Eve ate the fruit, against God's command to Adam and later so did Adam, despite God's warning that "in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17). As a consequence of their transgression, the land, the Serpent, Adam, and Eve were each cursed by God. To prevent them access to the tree of life God separated them from the tree of life, casting them out of the Garden. The banishment from the Garden of Eden is balanced in the New Testament by the planting of the tree of life on mankind's side of the divide.[citation needed]

In the Book of Revelation, a Koine Greek phrase xylon zoës (ξύλον ζωής) is mentioned 3 times. This phrase, which literally means "wood of life" is translated in nearly every English Bible version as "tree of life", see Revelation 2:7, 22:2, and 22:19.

The Eadwine Psalter, Circa 1150 AD

Alfonso Vel Magnanimo and Ancient Crown of Aragon

Basilica de Nossa Senhora da Conceicao da Praia

St. Michael's Church, Hildesheim Germany 1192 AD

america (TM)

Video - Behold the birth of the first Avenger.

EnergyBulletin | “Though shaken, the United States remains the world’s sole superpower and its largest consumer and polluter. For global civilization to get through peak oil and fight climate change, the US must stop obstructing international efforts to power down from fossil fuels and to cut greenhouse pollution.

But our nation will never abandon its suicidal consumerism and profligate use of energy until citizens overthrow what Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn has called America(TM).

Less a country than an ad campaign, America(TM) is a lifestyle where “cool” as defined by Nike, Apple and Calvin Klein is the ultimate value. You become cool by buying stuff you don’t need and replacing it as soon as you can with the new and improved model.
Standing as it does for conspicuous consumption and criminal excess, America(TM) is destroying our ecology while it poisons its own people with toxins physical and mental.
The spread of America(TM) around the world means that China builds a new coal plant every day and that Indians can buy a $3,000 car.

If America(TM) is not stopped, global ecological overshoot and resource depletion will soon reach catastrophic tipping points.

We need a Second American Revolution to take the (TM) out of America. And not from today’s travesty Tea Party, which is nothing more than a front group for corporate welfare. The original Tea Party was the opposite, as much a revolt against the oligarchy of the East India Company and other corporations of the day as against British rule. In this spirit, today’s revolutionaries must revolt against the capture of the organs of the state by plutocrats from Big Oil to Wall Street, who will never forgo their profits even it means the end of our nation.

To recognize the oligarchs, citizens must free themselves from the consumerism that has become the true opiate of the masses.

We must take back our minds and our wallets from corporate cool. Only then can we take back our country and help our humanity to have a future.”

anti-branding - subverting advertising

CIFS | The struggle to win the attention and sympathy of the consumers is tougher than ever before. But where management gurus and marketing chiefs speak in pleasant terms about "conquering mind space" through the use of branding, the Canadian activist Kalle Lasn is more brutally frank: "I call it mindfucking".

Kalle Lasn speaks in headlines and images like an advertising executive. That is no coincidence. The Estonian born Canadian worked as the director of a Japanese advertising agency during the sixties, but he got fed up with the trade's ethical neutrality and switched sides. Kalle Lasn is no longer creating ad campaigns for the business community. Today he - along with other so-called Culture Jammers - is creating campaigns against the big companies and their brands.

He is primarily known as the author of the book Culture Jam and the editor of Adbusters Magazine. See also the box below. These are publications that, along with Naomi Klein's widely renowned book, No Logo, have contributed to giving voice to a new generation of anti-business activists.

The movement really achieved visibility towards the end of the nineties. It happened, among other things, in connection with critical media campaigns against multinational companies that were accused of a lack of ethics, and with the violent demonstrations in 1999 in the streets of Seattle during the World Trade Organisation's summit meeting.

According to Kalle Lasn, this was just a foretaste of the cultural struggle of a new age, a struggle that will play out on the market between activists and the business community. The Culture Jammers' goal is to reduce the great symbolic power that the companies have in today's society - partly due to their massive marketing programs and use of branding aimed at the consumers.

subvertising

Subvertise | Subvertising is the Art of Cultural resistance. It is the "writing on the wall," the sticker on the lamppost, the corrected rewording of billboards, the spoof T-shirt; but it is also the mass act of defiance of a street party. The key process involves redefining or even reclaiming our environment from the corporate beast.

Does Subvertising Really Work?

While the motivation behind subvertising is clear, the impact this advertising (of sorts) has on the consumer is a little less obvious. While a consumer may see the ways in which they have been duped, what does this bring into the conversation about consumerism? It seems that just the presence of subvertising is enough to create a stir and to begin a conversation about capitalism and its effects on the world.

It’s true that many may see subvertising as an anarchistic way of attacking marketing and advertising, but in another way, it does bring up some good points. Why are consumers so drawn to the idea of images and to an emotional connection with the things we buy? Why can’t we simply buy things because we need them, rather than buying things because we feel we should, because we feel like they will make us better people?

Advertising plays on the most basic emotion of wanting to feel like a part of a group. But once we begin to dismiss this idea, we can begin to see that advertising today is nothing more than a trick. While slick marketing campaigns may not go away, they can certainly be questioned, mocked, and presented as pieces to be criticized instead of immediately accepted.

Ways to Create a Subvertising Campaign

Many people find that creating their own subvertising campaign will not only get them noticed, but it can begin to create a conversation about marketing and consumerism. There are a number of ways in which to start a campaign to subvertise: banners, cheap signs, license plates, political signs, real estate signs, and other street signs. Find a marketing campaign that is already popular in the market, then change it slightly to promote the message you want to promote.

You don’t have to be an artist to accomplish a strong subvertising campaign. With computer picture manipulation tools, you can adjust any image to create a new form of an old design.

By creating a sign that emulates a popular advertisement, it will not only get noticed, but it will begin to create the realization that maybe we are too dependent on marketing to tell us what to think. Try adding a few yard signs and vinyl banners to your community in order to see what happens. While subvertising may be subtle in its design, its impact is not.

silk road

Wired | Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.

About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark’s door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. “If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t have even noticed,” Mark told us in a phone interview.

Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit “check out.” He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins — untraceable digital currency — worth around $150. Four days later, the drugs (sent from Canada) arrived at his house.

“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said.

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics — and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8 ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 gram tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it.

The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the United States and Canada.

But even Silk Road has limits: You won’t find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of “anything who’s purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.”

faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister history

Video - Adam Curtis All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - How the idea of the ecosystem was invented.

Guardian | At the end of March this year there was a wonderful moment of television interviewing on Newsnight. It was just after student protesters had invaded Fortnums and other shops in Oxford Street during the TUC march against the cuts. Emily Maitlis asked Lucy Annson from UK Uncut whether, as a spokesperson for the direct-action group, she condemned the violence.

Annson swiftly opened the door that leads to the nightmare interview, saying: "We are a network of people who self-organise. We don't have a position on things. It's about empowering the individual to go out there and be creative."

"But is it wrong for individuals to attack buildings?" asked Maitlis.

"You'd have to ask that particular individual," replied Annson.

"But you are a spokesperson for UK Uncut," insisted Maitlis. And Annson came out with a wonderful line: "No. I'm a spokesperson for myself."

What you were seeing in that interchange was the expression of a very powerful ideology of our time. It is the idea of the "self-organising network". It says that human beings can organise themselves into systems where they are linked, but where there is no hierarchy, no leaders and no control. It is not the old form of collective action that the left once believed in, where people subsumed themselves into the greater force of the movement. Instead all the individuals in the self-organising network can do whatever they want as creative, autonomous, self-expressive entities, yet somehow, through feedback between all the individuals in the system, a kind of order emerges.

At its heart it says that you can organise human beings without the exercise of power by leaders.

As a political position it is obviously very irritating for TV interviewers, which may or may not be a good thing. And it doesn't necessarily mean it isn't a valid way for organising protests – and possibly even human society. But I thought I would tell the brief and rather peculiar history of the rise of the idea of the "self-organising network".

Of course some of the ideas come out of anarchist thought. But the idea is also deeply rooted in a strange fantasy vision of nature that emerged in the 1920s and 30s as the British Empire began to decline. It was a vision of nature and – ultimately – the whole world as a giant system that could stabilise itself. And it rose up to grip the imagination of those in power – and is still central in our culture.

But we have long forgotten where it came from. To discover this you have to go back to a ferocious battle between two driven men in the 1920s. One was a botanist and Fabian socialist called Arthur Tansley. The other was one of the most powerful and ruthless rulers of the British Empire, Field Marshal Jan Smuts.

man vs machine

Video - a terracotta army equipped with modern weapons.