see my previous post..

..for relatively moderate predictions on the arc of the current regime.  To revisit the ideas of acceleration and erasure would be instructive, but one simply walks into the woods.  Much has changed in the past 3 years.  A catalog of these developments is needed, but I would refer readers to other commentators if asked.  Someday, a comprehensive commentary may appear here.  The situation is overwhelming to say the least.  The simultaneously violent and covert crushing of the global Occupy movement (itself a largely liberal distortion of real demands) was astonishing simply for its ease and relative bloodlessness.  The level of infiltration is beyond imagining at this point.  With an estimated 1,000,000 operatives in the public and private intelligence industry, the possibilities for management are nearly endless.  Linked with the grand jury situation in the Northwest it becomes positively frightening.  Smugly pushing far beyond the crimes of the previous regime, the people at the helm seem to be poised for another 4 years. 

Hitting the Refresh Button - Redux

The last CTA Council of Representatives meeting was held today at the Left Seat restaurant, the large windows overlooking some alternate runway of Sky Harbor Airport. As we trudged through our agenda, the only aircraft to touch down on this runway passed:



Obama was in town tonight to speak at this year's ASU Commencement ceremony. I was supposed to be there to accept my Masters Degree in Education. My professional obligations (teaching), the weather (blast furnace), and the absurd security precautions (2:30 check-in for a 7:00 Commencement) prevented me from attending. So as Air Force One rolled by, my fellow council members scrambled gleefully to get a photo through the windows, a mere football field away. I snapped the above photo with my phone. As we watched the assembled dignitaries await the emergence of the President, and spied for rooftop snipers across the tarmac, I reflected on the last 4 months or so.

A palpable political shift is taking place, but its precise parameters are highly confused. A sense of polarity is easily discerned by engaging with the "mainstream" media. The details of this left/right shell game are not necessary to go over. ("He's a socialist! No! He's a progressive!) Just think the Glenn Beck/Rachel Maddow nexus. In the so-called "progressive" media milieu (Pacifica/Democracy Now/Alternet), the approach has been slightly more nuanced. There has been a strange mix of revulsion and elation with the new administration, especially in places like Alternet. There may be one story praising Obama's approach to the health care problem, and on the same homepage, another condemning his continuance of Bush era policies on indefinite detention of prisoners. This schizophrenia might appear as evidence that this sector of the media is truly non-partisan, performing in true "watchdog" fashion, not like those "other guys" (Fox News, CNN, etc.).

The boundaries of debate are being re-established by the same internal logic that guided the system of domination and control during the Bush years. Are loyalties are simply being re-polarized for maximum pliability. Meanwhile, the Obama administration quietly, under the radar, radically extends the Panoptic gaze while professing its diminishment; the bombing of civilian targets in Afghanistan increases to grotesque levels; the so-called "black" budget is increased again for undisclosed uses; and torture is outsourced to other client states, or simply justified in public statements. The intelligence apparatus is also ramifying its approach to domestic dissent, while the continued recession propogates the ongoing class war (not the one that is discussed openly). These are not controversial facts, all of this can be found by conducting a simple search of the news media online.

After eight years of engineered popular contempt for the policies of the Bush administration, the Obama administration can now act with the same cool impunity, and in fact, can extend the horrifying effects of global capital and increased social control to the next level. The ultimate PSYOP... again, hitting the refresh button. The recent "Swine Flu" experiment was just that, as was this Somalian pirate nonsense. Just testing the waters of credibility and the current fear response. It has been remarkably effective. People actually believe that Obama wants to "redistribute" their wealth in a socialist coup, people actually believe that Obama will "solve the healthcare problem".

"But Obama has closed Guantanamo, given us a tax credit for first-time home buyers, and wants everyone to go to college! You know, he's going to give us all health care."

As for Werner Herzog:

Encounters At the End of the World. Highly recommended. Out on DVD now.

the irrational gaze

"On January 26, 2006, Phoenix was in a car accident in Hollywood on a winding canyon road that flipped his car over. The crash reportedly was caused by brake failure. Shaken and confused, Phoenix heard a tapping on his window and a voice say, "Just relax". Unable to see the man, Phoenix replied, "I'm fine. I am relaxed". The man replied, 'No, you're not'. At this point, Phoenix managed to see that the man was famed, eccentric German auteur Werner Herzog. After helping Phoenix out of the wreckage, Herzog phoned in an ambulance and vanished." - Wikipedia entry

Recall Crispin Glover's legendarily weird appearance(s) with Letterman, and his artistic and professional links with Herzog himself. Love this shit. We need more celebrities like this to gum up the works of that over-inflated, insidious myth machine.

Patrick Joseph McGoohan - 19 March 1928 - 13 January 2009

About a week late on this. Nevertheless...


"I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself… I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly...there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used. We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed...

We all live in a little Village. Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners."


—Patrick McGoohan, 1977

Lycia, live in Scottsdale

Below is my short review of last Saturday's Lycia show that was recently published on the Alterati webpage. Thanks to Wes Unruh :

The legendary darkwave/ethereal act Lycia played their first show in ten years Saturday night in Scottsdale, Arizona. There is an extensive history of the band on their wikipedia entry. They are absolutely essential listening in some circles, but totally obscure to most. They have been cited as an influence by numerous bands, most notably in my memory by Type O Negative during the October Rust era. Type O had toured at the time with Lycia as an opener, and Lycia’s influence permeates October Rust.



The crowd was varied, but the goth-industrial crowd seemed to be most fully represented, as expected. My contact with and knowledge of this subculture these days is severely lacking. To be frank, I never really “got it” in the first place. While in high school in the mid-nineties, my little group of metalheads and musicians was separated by one or two degrees from those hip enough to be part of the “industrial” crowd. As a Projekt records act, Lycia was lumped in with a crop of goth/darkwave bands popular with that crowd, but Lycia was different in that their music seemed to defy categorization, and avoided the “slit-your-wrists” lyrical content of other bands. Even the artwork was ambiguous, creating an ethereal atmosphere all on its own. And they were extraordinarily weird. Their music almost did not make sense, seeming to exist in a world apart. As Aaron Turner said of the psychotically bizarre doom band Burning Witch, “when I first heard Burning Witch I laughed…and then I did not”.

Also on the Scottsdale bill were Hotel Hotel, whom I missed, and local acts Bella Lune and Audra. I arrived just in time for Bella Lune, a Phoenix-based darkwave group. Their brand of lush, electronics-laden darkwave has always been too danceable for me. The “shoegaze” style Lycia exemplifies makes much more sense to my ears. Nevertheless, their melodic sense is brilliant, and singer Fuchsia has a slightly nasal vocal delivery that is actually quite amazing. It may help that she is stunningly beautiful. The interplay of harmony and melody on the last song they played was brilliant, and I will probably purchase their debut album for it alone.

Audra is another local band that plays a fairly indistinct style of post-punk influenced rock. They seem to be hugely popular locally, but they just didn’t do it for me, although a fair assessment of the band would require a show without anxious anticipation of an act I had waited 13 years to see.

After Audra, the crowd thinned a bit, and by the time Lycia took the stage, a good portion of the crowd had either left or settled to the back of the bar, as there was considerable crowd noise coming from the rear. There were probably 30-40 people huddled close to the stage as the sound-man played “Summerhead” from the Cocteau Twins 1993 album Four Calendar Café. As the last track played before Lycia came out, this seemed of particular significance to me, as I have always heard an odd parallel between Lycia and the Cocteau Twins. In fact, it was Peter Steele who mentioned both bands in a 1996 interview for the now defunct Guitar magazine.



The Lycia lineup consisted only of Mike VanPortfleet and Tara Vanflower. Mike explained before the show that in the absence of a full band situation, their set list would consist mostly of their synth-based output from the Estrella album. In the nineties, the press dubbed virtuoso Eric Johnson’s guitar tone the “violin tone”. Mike Vanportfleet’s incredible guitar sound could be described the same way, but more like a synthesized violin section playing delicate washes.



Due to feedback problems, Mike could not sing the songs he intended to, instead playing his songs without vocals. While disappointing (Mike’s semi-whispered singing voice is every bit as evocative as Tara’s), watching him play three instrumental tracks reminded me how much of Lycia’s sound was Mike’s vision from the beginning. You can hear this going back to their album Wake, a collection of early demos from the 80’s. The soundscapes he creates are like nothing else. It is hard to tell how many layers of synth are piled in there sometimes, but they never muddy, and are perfectly rounded out by the delicate guitar lines. Tara’s vocals on the other songs were beautiful, though most lacked lyrical content. Her voice is truly distinctive and beautiful, and fully realized in a live setting where she can just belt out the wordless cries of much of the Estrella material. Getting the live sound right is important for music like this, and I went in not knowing what to expect, but what they do translates incredibly well live. It is a shame that Mike’s voice produces so much feedback.

The setlist was short (they only played seven songs), and as Tara explains in a blog entry on her Myspace page, the technical problems they experienced cast a shadow over the show for them. Nevertheless, it was great to finally see such an important band live. Hopefully more live appearances are forthcoming.

There has been a predictable media outpouring over the death of Solzhenitsyn. I did not know this until today, but he lived in exile from Russia in Cavendish, Vermont from 1976-1994. Cavendish is a beautiful little town just up the road from Ludlow, where I lived and worked for six months.

I have been fixated on rereading Edward Abbey since my recent trip through Utah and Colorado. About ten minutes ago, I was flipping randomly through Edward Abbey's essay collection One Life at a Time, Please, and landed here:

Perhaps my hero Solzhenitsyn would scorn my saying so but I am tempted to believe that the systematic cruelty inflicted upon animals trapped in our food and research apparatus is comparable - for who can measure the aggregates of pain, the sum of suffering? - to the agony that contemporary despotisms have exacted from human beings caught in their archipelagos of tyranny. Not merely comparable but analagous. Not merely analagous but causally connected. Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.

Please see Derrick Jensen

"Chomsky hash"

Thanks Alterati:

"Literature departments are still influenced by the legacy of Romantic poets and their latter-day heirs, the Beats, who used drugs to imagine alternatives to mainstream society.

Similarly, an offshoot discipline, cultural studies, is pervaded by neo-Romantics. For example, after his televised debate with Noam Chomsky in 1971, Michel Foucault was partially paid in hashish. For weeks afterward, his friends in Paris referred to it as the "Chomsky hash." Should we be surprised by that anecdote, related by Foucault biographer James Miller? Let's be honest here: No one could have written History of Madness or Discipline and Punish while sober."

Anthropologists will be in disagreement as to this tribe's "uncontacted" status. Some have already said they may be the remnants of an earlier encounter that fled deeper into the jungle. Here is a link to the original article : "Uncontacted" Tribe Seen in Amazon (Nat'l Geo.), and the NY Times treatment: Isolated in Amazon, Visible From the Air. My concern is the photos themselves. They just seem wrong. The colors appear to be exaggerated.

McCain's Tin Foil Hat

"My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East. That will then...that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East" - John McCain (at a campaign stop in Denver)

Thanks Qlipoth

"Cleaning Up" Ufology?

Albert Hofmann has passed away. He was 102 years old.


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in lighter news...

"and then he [George Noory] went to bed, and all the dye came out onto his pillow" - Jeremy Vaeni at the X-Conference

Fucking priceless. The sorry state of this "field" has now become the proverbial dead horse. It's systemic problems are a microcosm of the larger cultural malaise in which we are embedded. Vaeni and Biedny, keeping up the fight. Apparently Binnall is sick of it. I Love it, but am sorry to say that despite my deep interest in the topic, even this angle has become entertainment. Rarely do podcasts have me truly gut laughing out loud, in my classroom, at 7:30 in the morning, pre-coffee. So until we are post-disclosure, cradling beautiful alien babies in our arms, all I have to say is..."NO PENIIIISSS"!!

(Culture of Contact/the Paracast tear up the X-Conference)

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE (December 16 1917 - March 19 2008)

"Savage and Holy Light"

"Is this at last the locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring - the leafy god, the desert's liquid eye - but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name." - Edward Abbey

ObZen

the wholly other:



To be released here in the US on March 11th.





I have cautiously high hopes for this "Cloverfield" thing. I will probably be at the theater if it is not revealed before January 18th. Incredible marketing.

How much of the "noise" is injected? Power so unstable (see previous post) would pump further vibration or instability into the system. At this point, the connection between "Mike Hagan, Occult of Personality, Red Ice, K-Punk, Black Metal, Psychedelic Salon, Paul Laffoley, Greylodge, Alterati, the reappearance of Tracy Twyman, the Esozone, etc." would seem to be simply that, "noise". Instability actively promoted in multiple forms, and with varying levels of sincerity, depending on the network of linkages assembled and relied upon. There are many on the web discussing this notion. In an informative universe (the internet's underbelly, you know where to look. If not, ask me) so rife with disinformation of the most insidiously convincing kind, where does the almost Discordian layering end, and serviceable threads begin?Red Ice and Paul Laffolley seem particularly questionable. My admittedly skeptical post on Laffolley seems embarrasingly forgiving after 5 months of further digging. Or am I being told where to dig?
Red Ice, ,Mike Hagan and other outlets are even more suspect in that they accept the claims of their various interviewees as legitimate "research", stroking them throughout, without question or challenge.

beyond the norm/transgression

For [Lewis] Call, following Baudrillard, power is less stable than indicated by Foucault’s rendering. Power exists through signs and symbols and is thus open to reinterpretation and quick reversals. All the prisons, gulags, and monitoring of citizens could not prevent the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Call notes that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which seemed as if it only took a few minutes, demonstrates what Baudrillard says about the unstable nature of power. “Baudrillard is attempting to unmask the state’s deepest, most closely guarded secret: that its power is unreal, that the state exists only as simulation.” Call quotes Baudrillard here: “The spectacle of those regimes imploding with such ease ought to make Western governments—or what is left of them—tremble, for they have barely any more existence than the Eastern ones.” If anarchists could cultivate practices that move beyond the norm/transgression dichotomy, so that they circulated as common currency throughout society, there is the potential that one day Western governments will disappear as quickly as their counterparts did in the East despite “Total Information Awareness.” - Michael Glavin

What about the twinkie?

Two posts back, I wrote :

Mike Hagan, Occult of Personality, Red Ice, K-Punk, Black Metal, Psychedelic Salon, Paul Laffoley, Greylodge, Alterati, the reappearance of Tracy Twyman, the Esozone, etc. It is difficult to place, but in some way, all of these threads seem to be tying together somehow. The recent highbrow treatment of "true" black metal is only one of the many zones of confluence. Southern Lord's recently elevated Wolves in The Throne Room is a perfect example. This, in connection with numerous occult podcasts running in all directions, with the same names appearing over and over, is revealing "the thumbprint of the editors" in Terence's bardic description of experiential textuality. Lengthy lists, links, and connections to follow when I have time. By then this will all slip away.

Tangles have turned to knots. I should have been surprised when Erik Davis weighed in on Wolves in The Throne Room in Slate magazine. Somehow, it makes perfect sense. The treatment is superb. During my recent experience at the Mogollon Rim, I was listening to Davis' talk on Gnosticism and the Archons in front of a wood fire next to an absolutely ancient Ponderosa. Deep Eco Metal indeed.



Also highly recommended along these lines, the Viking Youth Power Hour. Start with episodes 79, 67, 58, 44, and dont forget 37 for the Holidays.

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In other news:

(CBS/AP) A United Nations committee said Friday that use of Taser weapons can be a form of torture, in violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Use of the electronic stun devices by police has been marked with a sudden rise in deaths - including four men in the United States and two in Canada within the last week. Canadian authorities are taking a second look at them, and in the United States, there is a wave of demands to BAN them. The U.N. Committee Against Torture referred Friday to the use of TaserX26 weapons which Portuguese police has acquired. An expert had testified to the committee that use of the weapons had "proven risks of harm or death." "The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use," the committee said in a statement. Tasers have become increasingly controversial in the United States, particularly after several notorious cases where their use by police to disable suspects was questioned as being excessive. Especially disturbing is the fact that six adults died after being tased by police in the span of a week. Last Sunday, in Frederick, Md., a sheriff's deputy trying to break up a late-night brawl tased 20-year-old Jarrel Grey. He died on the spot. The death came just weeks after Frederick police used a Taser to subdue a high school student. The NAACP says it appears the sheriff's office is using Tasers routinely, rather than as a weapon of last resort. Also this week, in Jacksonville, Fla., in two separate cases two men died after being stunned. One suspect, who fled a car crash and tried to break into a nearby home, struggled with a policeman, prompting the officer to tase him three times. The man continued to fight, and tried to bite the officer, while he was being tased. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Another man died Tuesday after a Jacksonville officer pulled over his car. When the officer approached it, the man took off running. When the officer caught up with him, during a struggle, authorities say the officer used his Taser to subdue the suspect. After being placed in the back of the police car the suspect became unresponsive. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. Last Sunday, in New Mexico, 20-year-old Jesse Saenz died after Raton police used a Taser to subdue him. Police say Saenz was struggling and fighting with them as they attempted to take him into custody. Saenz died after being transported to a county jail. In Nova Scotia, a 45-year-old man who was jailed on assault charges jumped a counter and ran for the door as he was being booked. He died yesterday, about 30 hours after being shocked. And in Vancouver, where Royal Candian Mounted Police have been criticized for their use of a Taser against an irate airline passenger at Vancouver Airport last month, 36-year-old Robert Knipstrom died in a hospital four days after police used a Taser, pepper spray and batons to subdue him. More than a dozen people have died in Canada after being hit by Tasers in the last four years. ...in British Columbia, a tourist's video camera recorded the death of a man tased twice while in custody at the Vancouver Airport last month. That horrifying video shows Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man who spoke no English, become increasingly agitated. He was shocked twice, and then died. ...in Utah, a patrol car's dashboard camera caught an officer tasing a driver who refused to sign a speeding ticket. The officer is now under investigation, accused of being too quick on the draw. Amid a growing outcry, civil rights groups are urging police to put down their Tasers until more research is done. "The danger of Tasers is that they seem safe, they seem easy and therefore I think it's natural that police will be inclined to use them much more quickly than they would ever use a gun,"Amnesty International USA Executive Director Larry Cox told Chen.

34°25'56" N 111°16'16" W

Driving South through the blackness on my way back down to Payson, I recalled the oft-stated truth that human beings are increasingly encroaching upon the territory of other large predators. This results in a predictable rise in encounters, sometimes disastrous for both parties. Despite my lingering fear, I felt for the animal.

The State Loves a Parade

"What has been the response? We have petition campaigns, we have marches, we have rallies. We read alot of books...and some of us scribble quite alot and publish more. Make sure the word is out there...defy logic by announcing that we're speaking truth to power as if power didn't know what it was doing somehow. We might wish to consider perhaps speaking to people once in a while. But to what purpose? Well, apparently so diets can be changed. Ok we can have more bicycle paths, we can have no smoking signs on every flat surface in California. We can bear moral witness and feel better about ourselves because we're enlightened and aware when we go home from a rally which did absolutely nothing to change anything tangible in terms of the functioning of power." - Ward Churchill

I continue my long absence, but leave these for examination:


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"Untrue" will be released on November 6th. I will leave commentary to others, at least until I have a copy in my hands. For now, a Kode 9 mix of the new material is available here (right click and "save as" to download mp3). Originally aired on Mary Anne Hobbs' BBC RadioOne show, the mix is of decent quality, and requires the listener to ignore hyperbolic ass-licking by the hostess.

________________________________________________

I discovered the vbs.tv series on Gorgoroth's singer Gaahl about a month ago, and now echo the more recent sentiments of Erik Davis , urging all readers to view the series (click on "True Norwegian Black Metal"), or at the very least the final installment.
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Subtopia blog post, Peripheral Milit_Urb 20. An absolute must see.
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A friend of mine saw the world-famous boomerang last week floating above Sun Devils Stadium during a football game, and just five minutes before I showed up after not seeing him for a few months. This is the same guy I observed several craft with in the skies above Tucson last Fall. Upon this realization, we speculated that one or both of us must be Black Ops agents, or simple extra-terrestrials.

___________________________________________________

Mike Hagan, Occult of Personality, Red Ice, K-Punk, Black Metal, Psychedelic Salon, Paul Laffoley, Greylodge, Alterati, the reappearance of Tracy Twyman, the Esozone, etc. It is difficult to place, but in some way, all of these threads seem to be tying together somehow. The recent highbrow treatment of "true" black metal is only one of the many zones of confluence. Southern Lord's recently elevated Wolves in The Throne Room is a perfect example. This, in connection with numerous occult podcasts running in all directions, with the same names appearing over and over, is revealing "the thumbprint of the editors" in Terence's bardic description of experiential textuality. Lengthy lists, links, and connections to follow when I have time. By then this will all slip away.

July 24, 2001

Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Gloria Tristani

Re: Transfer of Control of Broadcast Licenses Held by Subsidiaries of Chris-Craft Industries, Inc., to Fox Television Stations, Inc.

I dissent from today’s decision to permit Fox to acquire ten television stations from Chris-Craft. The transfer of these television station licenses violates the Communications Act and raises seriousconcerns regarding the ongoing concentration in the ownership of television stations and other media. Thisdecision also shows the lengths the Commission will go to avoid standing in the way of media mergers...

In the context of license transfers, the Commission has required merger applicants to pass a four-part test.91In the application before us, however, the Commission discusses only two of those four factors,the facts of which are not in dispute:(a) Does the transaction violate the Communications Act? Answer: Yes, it allows a single company to own television stations that will reach more than 35% of the national audience, inviolation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. (b) Does the transaction violate the Commission’s rules? Answer: Yes, in three ways. Thetransaction violates the FCC’s newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership proscription, the nationaltelevision ownership cap, and the local television ownership limits. Even using the Order’s own incomplete version of the public interest test, the transaction clearly should notbe approved. The decision finds that the newly-merged Fox/Chris-Craft will violate the CommunicationsAct and the FCC’s rules, and the decision identifies no offsetting benefits. Yet the majority deems this transaction to be in the public interest and proceeds to grant waivers of our most significant televisionownership rules so that Fox can close its transaction. - FCC : WT Docket No. 99-168

By now most have heard about NewsCorps' acquisition of The Wall Street Journal, unless the latest infrastructure disaster has cast too long a shadow on the news cycle. Goal: to fully realize the centralized management of information itself. Media consolidation is the real issue, but is swept aside by the "liberal vs. conservative bias" debate, a red herring for accelerating processes of noetic singularization. In 2001, NewsCorps acquired Chris-Craft Industries, and the FCC waived rules that would have forced Murdoch to sell one of his other New York media holdings. Just days before, NewsCorps sold Fox Family Worldwide to the Walt Disney Company, another giant worthy of annihilation:

Disney will buy the cable network for $3 billion, plus the assumption of $2.3 billion worth of debts.The network reaches nearly 81 million cable and satellite subscribers in the U.S. Disney CEO Michael Eisner told reporters the purchase would increase the reach of Disney's family-oriented programming. "These assets are a perfect fit for our company," he said. "We paid appropriately for a rare asset." The network will be renamed ABC Family after the Disney-owned broadcast network. - Media Watch

Someone interviewed on today's Democracy Now report raised the question: "what's next"?

New developments in PSYOP technology. The following article appeared in the Register on June 23rd. Honesty in red:

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale
By Mark Baard

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.

Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.

SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.

Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.

The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.

Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens. [the standard media treatment: the only barrier for the public being the vague issue of "privacy".]

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland.

The Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM-J9) in April began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces over "Noble Resolve 07", a homeland defense experiment.

In August, the agencies will shift their crises scenarios from the East Coast to the Pacific theatre.

JFCOM-J9 completed another test of SEAS last year. Called Urban Resolve, the experiment projected warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015, eight years from now.

JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.

Military and intel officials can introduce fictitious agents into the simulations (such as a spike in unemployment, for example) to gauge their destabilising effects on a population.

Officials can also "inject an earthquake or a tsunami and observe their impacts (on a society)", Chaturvedi added.

Jim Blank, modelling and simulation division chief at JFCOM-J9, declined to discuss the specific routines military commanders are running in the Iraq and Afghanistan computer models. He did say SEAS might help officers determine where to position snipers in a city square, or to envision scenarios that might emerge from widespread civil unrest.

SEAS helps commanders consider the multitude of variables and outcomes possible in urban warfare, said Blank.

"Future wars will be asymetric in nature. They will be more non-kinetic, with the center of gravity being a population." [In other words, future wars will be urban campaigns against recalcitrancy.]

The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.

The other SEAS models are far less detailed, encompassing only a few thousand nodes altogether, Blank said.

Feeding a whole-Earth simulation will be a colossal challenge.

"(SWS) is a hungry beast," Blank said. "A lot of data will be required to make this thing even credible."

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

Qlipoth, in some recent posts, has responded to further attacks on so-called "conspiracy theory" over at Lenin's Tomb. A good question is raised: why does Lenin continue with this line? Is it really necessary at this point? Most useful is the quotation (which I repeat here) of Jamey Hecht on the topic:

THE TERM ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’

This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category.

As well as this:

Australia admits oil motive in Iraq Which is really no revelation at all. This is well known.
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Paul Laffoley recently offered up some information in Radiorbit that could explain it all away. In two interviews with Mike Hagan (there had to be a second, almost identical interview due to overwhelming listener interest in the 9/11 topic, which they only briefly touched), Laffoley recounted his brief time as a designer at the construction of the World Trade Center. He claims that explosive charges were actually built in to the very structure of the towers, but that the general public, for obvious reasons, would never have known about it. He was approached by members of a Saudi firm brought in during construction, and asked where the best place for explosive charges would be. When he pressed them as to why they would want to know this, they told him something akin to "thats the way it is done nowadays". He later found out that this practice was commonplace. His theory is that these charges were built into the structure, and that the system was triggered by the planes. The electrical system that controlled the charges was for the entire complex, explaining the collapse of building 7 as well. Taking it further, the Saudi firm in question was linked to, or part of the Bin Laden family, which would explain the choice of targets as well.

I would love to believe this explanation. It seems very neat and clean, but there are of course some holes and inconsistencies. It does not matter in any case. The layers of mutually exclusive information and speculation have again increased. Mike Hagan is amazed that nobody has picked up this story. Why has Lafolley's claim not come into the mainstream? There are many possible reasons. It threatens the 9/11 Truth industry for one, or at the very least its claims on a massive government murder coverup. Is it disinformation designed for a very small crowd? I do not buy the story, but download it here, and listen for yourself.

Subtopia

Today I stumbled upon Subtopia, another one of those pop architecture blogs. Normal fare, akin to BLDGBLOG, but clicking through the archives, I found periodic posts on military technologies, systems of control and surveillance, urban architectures, and other assorted paranoia. Most of these developments are not news to me, but it is nice to see them periodically compiled somewhere. Here are some things I discovered:

RFID chips in passports

Red Cross fearmongering billboards

Talking CCTV cameras in England (very creepy)

Pentagon spying on social networking sites such as Myspace and Friendster

Total Information Awareness program lives on

The most recent military post on Subtopia details BAE Systems' press release on the completion of HAARP. It is linked to an article on Wired, as well as the original announcement. Great work.

"We must reform the current immigration laws so we can secure our borders, implement a mandatory biometrically enabled, tamper proof documentation and employment verification system, and increase legal immigration into America."

- from the campaign website for Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate.


There is not much to say on this. There was the case of the Malaysian car thieves who cut of their victims finger for easier access to his Mercedes S-class. A minor concern, I think. Most popular opposition to biometrics involves concerns over "privacy". The bad news is that privacy no longer exists in any real sense. We are all data-mined. Such considerations are a mask for something far deeper. Is anybody else simply creeped out?

"Controlling physical access to buildings is one of biometric’s more popular uses, with one estimate predicting a market of $389 million by 2004. That’s just a fraction of the total market for biometrics, predicted to grow from $116 million in 2000, to $2 billion in 2006, to $5 billion in 2010. After all, if you can sell biometrics to measure schoolchildren, you can push it in the workplace too. Currently less than 1 percent of North American companies use biometrics to secure their computer systems. Bentham’s ghost would be proud to know that number is soon to rise.

Funny, even if the technology were available to those of us in the outer ring of the Panopticon, we don’t see how using high technology to 'authenticate a person’s claimed identity from his/her previously enrolled pattern,' will do anything for us. We already have our own technologies for doing this: they’re called eyes, ears, memory, discernment, and a process called 'getting to know a person.' We can see, however, how mechanical (and thus far less sophisticated) technologies would be useful for those running a massive prison. " - Derrick Jensen

HDB004 : Burial - Ghost Hardware 12"

This guy is a genius. While many of us, particularly in the states, are still trying to integrate the self-titled debut, this slab of deep space drops. The mp3 release can be purchased here. Unreal.



Will k(er)-p(l)unk weigh in?

the ecstacy of disintegration

Tonight, the local news here in Phoenix ran a segment in which they interviewed Arizonians about their dissatisfaction with the continuous coverage of this absurd spectacle.



"The problem raised by history is not that it might have come to an end, as Fukuyama says, but rather that it will have no end - and hence no longer any finality, any purpose" - J.B.

"livermore lab and u.c., tuition part of the daisy chain"

Middian : at The Sets (Tempe) 5/29/07

"that was then, this is now" - Mike Scheidt, in response to repeated requests for YOB classics.