New Dawn Fades

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We're proud of ourselves, in a way. But our enthusiasm is a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos – we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don't want Other Worlds. We want mirrors."

-Gibarian, Solaris (2002)

Time Enough

Cause/Effect

"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."

--Rachel Carson

The Suckers and The Mugs

"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I."

Harry Lime, The Third Man

Look At 'Em

"Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate'em."

Harry Dean Stanton

Repo Man (1984)

The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act

...The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."

From "Twelve Virtues of Rationality"

Eliezer Yudkowsky

http://yudkowsky.net/

An Army of One

“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

Don DeLillo

from "The Names"

Round and Round

"Experience is a form of paralysis" -Erik Satie

The Inside Game

"You are now breathing...virally mutated molds, nano-particulates of aluminum and Barium and cationic polymer fibers with unidentified bio-active material...Drs. Staninger and Karjoom and researcher Jan Smith have reported findings of self-replicating nano-machines and rivers of silicon running wild through the bodies...Welcome to the brave new world of toxic skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems as well as the emergence of a bizarre and frightening new plague...We must join together to stop this insane program of chemtrail spraying now."

-excerpt from a chemtrail conspiracy website

I'm a late comer to the chemtrail conspiracy. Don't ask me how, up until now, I've managed to miss it. It's exactly the sort of empty calorie, Krispie Kreme whackiness I usually can't get enough of. There are dozens upon dozens of websites devoted to the subject, most stocked to the rafters with elaborate, intricate narratives and New World Order paranoia futilely refuted by reputable experts.

All of this got me thinking about conspiracies and how drawn to them the intertwined popular and media cultures are. From Vince Foster-was-killed-by-the-Clintons, to Bush-blew-up-the-World-Trade-Center, to HIV-was-engineered-by-the-CIA, to the elaborate, shop-worn fictions of Roswell and the Kennedy assassination, and finally to the recent unhinged and deeply creepy Obama-isn't-an-American Birther movement, the coherent narrative offered by conspiracies, however dark, seem so much more attractive than the chaotic, random and incomplete realities they compete against.

Neuroscience has long described the human mind as a sophisticated pattern matching machine. While as a species we may be compelled from deep within the structure our brain stem to find comfort in organization, this hard-wired ability to tease out patterns from complex data may sometimes misfire and lead us to see connections where none exist --and at considerable cost and peril. Pattern matching it might indeed be. I'm not so certain about the sophisticated part.

"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." -Don DeLillo

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Fresh Perspective

"Defamiliarize the ordinary" Paul Rand

Realer Than Real

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

The Inhuman League

"I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer."

Noel Sharkey

Full interview here:

Why AI is a dangerous dream - opinion - 01 September 2009 - New Scientist

Don Hewitt

Don Hewitt was the creator and producer of CBS's 60 Minutes. He practically invented the the short documentary form of the television news magazine. By all accounts an irascible, hard nosed, stand-up guy, he managed to make news entertaining without making it entertainment.

"I plan to die at my desk" Don Hewitt

Know Where To Stop

"If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." Orson Welles

I'm Nothing Like This

"When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it any place"

Ava Gardner

Sometimes Reality Is Too Complex

"...in life, one can only know the present. No one's lived in the past, or will ever live in the future"

Natasha Vonbraun to Lemmy Caution

Alphaville (1965)

30 Ghosts

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living*"

Arthur C. Clarke

*or at least there were 40 or so years ago when Clarke wrote the forward to his novelization of the 2001 screenplay.

Face The Music (Volcano Sold Separately)

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

Pascal

Hang On

"You get to a certain age. Your bones ache a little. You get up in the morning and you're not as gung-ho as you thought you were going to be. You hang onto who you were because you don't know any better."

Don Hewitt

I Deny You

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment"

Marcus Aurelius