Another link dump...

...I've been too lazy to offer much opinion lately.
It is what it is.
I think we're probably fucked as a whole. Economy, environment, culture.... Individually, I'm cutting costs and becoming more self-sufficient. Not in that crazy, tax resisting, survivalist kinda way.
Living leaner and greener with a hint of Ballardian post-cultural meltdown.

• Disinformation :: CIA 'Blew Chances To Spot 9/11 Threat'
• Boing Boing: Bulletproof school backpacks for frightening children
• Archives for Dave Emory - "Anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory (spelled E-M-O-R-Y) goes into all the hidden truths and details about evil men and their trade practices."
• deviantART: where ART meets application!
• Robot Hut Museum
• How voters are susceptible to politicians who can manipulate their fear of death - Boing Boing - (More Evidence -Snag)
  
• The Cacophony Society > Start-A-Lodge Cacophony Primer
• BaD ADViCe - (Alternative Porn)
  
• Political attitudes may be all in head -- chicagotribune.com - (No wonder right wingers are afraid of science -Snag)
  
• Elderly couple abandons home, moves into Travelodge - Boing Boing
• Police Find Man's Body, Guillotine In Wooded Area - Local News Story - WDIV Detroit - (Ballardian suicide -Snag)
  

Link dump

I've been a bit occupied lately. It is Summer after all.
Here's a collection of articles and websites that have most stuck me in the past couple of weeks (In no particular order):

• NewsTrust - About this Story - China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales

• Don’t Go There: Top 20 Taboo Topics for Presidential Candidates - 10 Zen Monkeys

• Boing Boing: Court rules US air travelers can't refuse security searches at airports

• Bush adviser: Draft worth considering - U.S. Security - MSNBC.com

• Boing Boing: Guiliani: Freedom is about authority

• How parents can battle power of McBranding - Kids & Parenting - MSNBC.com

• The War as We Saw It - New York Times

• ALEX JONES - Info Wars

• Threat Level - Wired Blogs - DHS Data Mining Program Suspended After Evading Privacy Review, Audit Finds

• Disinformation :: Private Mercenary Armies: A Looming Threat To Freedom

• Science of Magic - New York Times

• Automotive addictions and general tomfoolery

Terrorists are idiots...

Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot
The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong. (Schneier on Security)

And so are oil execs...

Yes Men Strike Oil
After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to "huge global calamities" and disrupt oil supplies, Wolff told the audience "that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could "keep fuel flowing" by transforming the billions of people who die into oil," said a Yes Men press release. (Wired)

Legoland Needs Women!

Help the Chaotic Nipple in his quest to lean on the powers that be to increase the number of female characters in Legos.
I'm actually really for this. While I'm not a Legoist myself, I think it would be particularly good for child development. Legoland is a microcosm of what can be, and if boys don't see women well represented in fantastic societies and girls don't have icons and totems to play with in their toys, they'll devalue the roles of women in Gulliver's world.

• Sign the Petition

Links

I've been spending time sipping Blue Hawaiians in the tiki room and ducking all things intense for the past week or so. I have however, been collecting some interesting links.

Key 64 - For the mystical. Articles like "Developing an internal body language.", "Sizing up your magical practice", and "Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Psycho-Shamanic Journey"
I'm more of a practical application, Quantum sorcery kinda guy myself.

If you've been beset by disaster, the Red Cross has their "Safe and Well List." Folks can list themselves as "Safe and Well" and those looking for them can search. Good for the traveler.

If you think we're going to make it, there's the
.

If not, here's "Make your own biodiesel." Here in the north east we use a lot of heating oil. This is a simple process and can be done for as little as 50 cents a gallon. Tap into the oil line with a proportioning valve and you're augmenting your fuel with a cleaner burning material while reducing costs. The trick is to get the grease and actuall process it.

With I leave you with a couple of episodes of Vegas Vic's Tiki Lounge radio show.

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Ahhh.....

Link

Maybe I mentioned this site before, but I'll link to it again. Right or wrong, it's great for expanding one's Reality Tunnel.
Conspiracy Planet
THE ALTERNATIVE NEWS & HISTORY NETWORK
"Your Antidote to Media Cartel Propaganda"


Read and decide.

Counter Program

The psychology of banner ads
The research concludes that repeated exposure to a product via banner ads generates a positive feeling towards that product. (Article)

It's not just that one has to DEProgram, but with the ubiquity of one needs to actually continuously counter program. Knowing that THEIR ads make a positive subliminal impression, one has to actively develop a program to undo the input.
"What's the harm of a little positive feeling toaward THEIR product?"
It's not you making the decision is what.
Advertisements do a few things that we take for granted today, but are absolute bullshit if you think about them:

• Ads lie to you about THEIR product - Regardless of the quality of product, they will tell you theirs is the best. Even when their product is sub par and THEY know it, they will dress it with colors and catch phrases to convince you otherwise.
  
Decide based on your own experience.

• Ads lie to you about reality - Imagine your perception of the world outside of your home. Imagine success and happiness. Imagine a happy family. Does it resemble an ad? Now think of your life. Does it compare? The reality is that no one lives like they do. The reality is that we all are a little less clean, a little less smiley, a little less pure. Embrace it.
  We're all in this together.
• Ads demoralize you - THEY do not want you happy. THEY convince you that you're unhappy. But they have the solution. Buy their fabric softener and your kids will have white teeth, your body odor will smell like flowers, your spouse will be nondescriptly attractive, and every weekend you will get away with guys hunting and fishing or gals in the spa after a fantastically fun day of shopping.
  Who lives like that?!?
  
• Ads invade your mind constantly, without your consent - On the side of a bus. The top of a web page. In the background TV. Subliminal programming works best when the subject is unaware of the message. When you think you're not subject to the message, that is when you are most vulnerable. No one is immune.
  
Admit and be aware of THEIR ability to crawl into your headspace; this is the foundation of your psychic self-defense.

We wait for the signs of mind control that we've learned from the movies, but the reality is that programming is more pedestrian in nature. Image impression isn't like Alex strapped in a chair with his eyes pried open. Nor is the chemical reinforcement some super-compound concoction dreamed up at Edgewood.
No, THEY don't need to focus so intently on you. THEY can be patient. THEY can hit you when you're first looking around as an infant, seeing colors, making associations. THEY can use the chemistry of desire...fats, sugars, caffeine, phenylethylamine (PEA)...to reinforce THEIR message.
THEY tell you that "You deserve a break today" because nobody "understands" you but THEM. THEY know what you've been through and do THEY have the pick me up for you. And it's only 99 cents on the value menu. THEIR signs are all bedecked in the Reds, Yellows, and Oranges designed to stimulate the impulse reaction in the optical regions of the neural cortex. THAT familiar clown that was your friend as a child and beckons you back to that safe time and promises comfort because you're having a tough time.
And when you do the right thing...

Ron English

When you make that decision to reward your toil and troubles...
When you act as THEY knew you would...
You consume. You give over the little tickets known as money that represent life energy spent acquiring the little tickets.
Yes.
Very good.
Very good indeed.
And to make sure the cycle is completed, the chemicals are ingested. Those chemicals that stimulate the endorphins. Those chemicals that satiate the fundamental cravings for high energy food. Sure, THEIR stuff will kill you in the long run, but that doesn't matter as long as you have the brief illusion of happiness through THEIR product now. THEIR stuff doesn't actually provide long lasting energy and why should it. THEY want you back as soon as possible to consume again.
And again.
And again.
More.
Faster.
And when all is said and done...you get to consume Big Pharma's meds. Nothing that will cure, just keep you going until the next refill.

No, THEY don't have to inject you. THEY don't have to kidnap you and hook you up to machines. THEY don't have to look like aliens or men-in-black.

All THEY have to do is quietly get into your head and make you feel just a little...
bit...
unhappy...
:(

Links

• Propaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English
• Virtual Hypnotist - Write your own scripts to rewrite your internal software
• Download your own subliminal software to take the edge off

Links

Another link dump.
Compiled from my travels:

ARTIFICIAL SYNCHRONICITY, LANGUAGE MANIPULATION, KUNDALINI AND THE CORNERS OF REALITY: HOW THEY'VE TURNED YOU INTO A MENTAL SLAVE & SOME TOOLS TO HELP YOU DECONSTRUCTING THIS BRAINWASHING AND GETTING FREE FROM THIS CIRCUS

I forgot how I came across this and I haven't had time to read it through, but that's a kick ass title.

I'm sure I must have gotten this from Boing Boing. For the computer hobbyist -
[Photoshop Tutorial] Creating fake 'Miniature' environments



Here's a link to build your own, inexpensive 120,000 Volt Van De Graaff Generator

A blogger who filters what he sees through the works of Philip K Dick.
Which PKD Story Are We In Today?

Lastly, a blog that pulls together a lot of stuff that interests this blog and does it more consistently - futurismic

Lorentz Gun

I'm still working on that wall.

Here' something that I find amusing. Not practical, but it looks like a lot of fun.
The Lorentz Gun (formerly the Taser Cannon until Taser forced them to change the name) from a member of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL).

Interesting group...

I haven't read in great detail about these folks, but well before Dan Brown I've always had a curiosity about the Masons, Templars, and the like.

• The Rosicrucian Order AMORC
  
• Wikipedia entry

I'm taking it easy today. Tore down and re-framed two walls in my house. My hands are mincemeat.

Real world

Blank Maxine and I are tearing down, rebuilding, and remodeling a wall in the house I live. It's quite fortunate that we own the house in which we're doing all this work, because a landlord would probably take notice and we'd lose our security deposit.
Because of this, the may be a few less dispatches over the next week or so.
I have added some reading material on the left in the form of RSS feeds that I check everyday. They are several "social barometer" sites for me.

Repent!
The major social - political - economic - environmental transition is nigh!

Links - Under The Hood

One quick one, but I think it might be informative/useful.
TechOnline's Under The Hood which features teardowns of various pieces of everyday tech. I think it's an absolute must for everyone if not to know how to bend the technology, at least gaze at its guts and see that inside all that THEY had made sleek, beautiful, and inaccessible externally, often has very mortal and primitive internals that any of us can master.

• TechOnline - Under The Hood

“Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs...

...the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.”
— The Drowned World, J.G Ballard, Millennium 1999, p 41.

I had read that we can expect a three to nine meter rise in sea level due to global warming.
Here's a nifty link to flood your neighborhood - Flood Maps
Flood Maps takes Googles maps and floods them to your chosen rise in sea level...from a subtle one meter to "hells-a-popping so grow gills granny!" fourteen meters.
As I said before, I'm getting boat to tie up to my new beach front property.

Before















After 9m - /It looks like MIT's gonna do ok.

Skills

I'm not a survivalist per se. I don't think there is an army of blue helmeted U.N. troops under the Rockies waiting to spring and take over the country. What I do believe is that there are skills that everyone should know to keep in touch with the earth, and therefore, reality. One thing that I truly appreciate from my time in service were the various Rangers and Special Forces that I had the privilege to work with. I learned a lot. After a several years in, I had considered going into Special Forces myself an Ops/Intel Sergeant, but I just couldn't commit to the amount of time it takes to train.

With that, here's a nifty link:

Rick F. Tscherne's Ranger Digest
From the website:
A Site Dedicated To Teaching Soldiers, Campers, Hikers, & Other Outdoor Enthusiasts "How to Survive & Thrive in the Outdoors."

As a former US Army Ranger, Drill Instructor, and an advisor/trainer to the Bosnia & Herzegovina Army (1996-97) under the US State Department approved "Train & Equip Program." I have always enjoyed sharing with soldiers my personal experiences and tips on how to survive in a military outdoor environment through field expedient know-how.

Articles, survival manuals written by Tscherne (complete with a pre-order warning about course language), and gear.

Links

I'd like to be more paranoid. But alas, the sad reality is that conspiracies are usually not that well organized, agendized, or competent. The flip side to that is that while no group of people are necessarily out to get you, the systems they create might.

27B Stroke 6
The title is taken from one of my favorite movies, Brazil. This Wired Magazine blog deals with tech security and civil liberty issues.


Intelligence Meditation
Intel people I think are creative people at their core. I am. I'm also a big picture, concept kinda guy. I like finding the truth. I like the little surprises that can come along with the truth. I don't like policy people. They tend to be bureaucrats and have no sense of personal power, so they tend to bully. Most intel folks I think would recognize that most shit doesn't need to be secret, and a highly paranoid and power hungry admin/ops tends to slow the intel cycle by making information way too compartmentalized. By the time it gets disseminated, the product's gone cold or at least luke warm.

• Intel-Dump
• Counterterrorism Blog
  
• Ranger Against War

Prank the Monkey

Never trust a man in a suit
by Justin Becker
Issue 9.9
Wed, February 28, 2007

If you’ve ever wanted to punk Ashton Kutcher, receive handcrafted gift boxes from Charles Manson, or pay for highway tolls with oranges, there’s a way to do it, and it’s easier than you think: Just wear a suit.
When you wear a suit, everybody trusts you right away. ‘Why would some freeloader be wearing a suit? He must be trustworthy,’ ” says Sir John Hargrave. “That’s how these corporate criminals get away with it. They’re wearing suits.”
(more at Boston's Weekly Dig)

• A link to Hargrave's site ZUG - The World's Only Comedy Site

And I own a pretty damn good suit.
(Blank Snag @ work)

Links - Nerdcore v. Hardcore

It seems there's a little fashion of music lately called Nerdcore. What is it? The few samples I've heard sound like oddball techno, with some scratching and rapping on top. Nothing "Core" about it. Core is derivative of Hardcore with core being inseparable from the meaning. While core represents something fundamental, it always implied the "hard." Even if one is to say "core" it suggests the Hard part and any music utilizing the term would thus be a derivative of Hardcore. Nerdcore for all its charm, isn't.
I'm not offended by the name. It's just coming across as basing your street cred on the work of others and that isn't too cool. I spent a lot of years as a kid literally fighting for the sake of alternative/sub-culture. You couldn't walk down the street with some clown giving you grief and wanting to do harm. Then maybe we'd fight. Provocation was the point. Now that it's safe, everybody's doing it. Safe isn't core nuthin'.
And for Rap, Hip Hop, whatever...just like today's RnR is corporatized yet packaged to look indi, same goes for most of the urban crap I hear out there. You want some Hardcore Rap/HipHop? Here ya go!
But I wax angrily. No fucking wonder I got an ulcer.

Hardcore came from the 1980's with my rough estimation of it's death to be around DRI's Crossover album in 1987 and the release of Kurt Cobain's Teen Spirit which placed a premium on bands signed to indi labels that THEY bought them all up and regurgitated something called Grunge.
Here's a sample of the Hardcore bands I listened to growing up:
The Exploited
M.D.C
Flipper
The Cramps
G.B.H.
D.O.A.
Dead Kennedy's
Reagan Youth
Decry
Descendants
Bad Brains
Circle Jerks
The Meatmen (Man, I can't think of them and not hear Tesco Vee going "We're the Meatmen and you suck!")
Angry Samoans
Suicidal Tendencies
Black Flag
Agnostic Front
Stiff Little Fingers
Fear
Peter and the Test Tube Babies

And what's up with this emo shit? I haven't heard it that I know of, but it doesn't sound promising.

I'm going to find my records....

A fairly accurate listing of Hardcore at Wikipedia.

A place to buy a lot of the old and new stuff. No recommendations implied by its listing here. Just a link.

Angels Wings

A long time reader of my ramblings commented on the post You've come a long way, baby! and I want to reprint the comment and promote her daughter's website concerning Anorexia Nervosa & Bulimia Nervosa.

Middle Child said...

Have a look at my daughter's small website http://www.angelswings.com.au/

and read her story "anna and the bull " and mine "The Mother's story" and others some of us know exactly the tragedy of this subject you have raised...its effect is as bad as heroin etc etc...


luckily she has recovered fully but not without a lot of heartache.

Friday, February 23, 2007 3:06:00 AM EST

• Angels Wings

Thanks Middle Child

Links

From their about:
HazardFactory is an industrial Arts studio that serves as a collaborative platform for high risk, interdisciplinary, and emerging artforms.

I love these guys:

Survival Research Labs
Producing the most dangerous shows on earth


I've only listened to episode #1, but there's some interesting work at Cyberpunk Radio with discussions of the anxiety future. 72 episodes are available.
Cyberpunk Radio

Links

Hacked...
On my never ending journey to becoming an overall hacker here's some links I've come across.

The "largest underground hacking event in the world."
I couldn't be called an electronics hacker necessarily, but if taken at its conceptual meaning, then I could be a hacker of the mind, body, combustion engines, vintage automotive sheetmetal, and so on.

"We are not a "cracking" site, we are hackers. Our inquisitive nature leads us to find ways of making technology work for us."

Mind Hacks
I've been reading this book in bits and pieces lately as it's neatly partitioned and broken down in a few page description of specific functions. From the title, I guess I expected more direct action applications, but I found it to be more of a description of many different process in the mind rather than modifications to actually make. Mind Hacks is good for core knowledge and understanding of mental mechanics and systems, from which an operator can then go and find applications for.
There's also an accompanying blog.





WARNING! You have been exposed to marketing! While the source of the previous advertisements in no way means to condition your behavior, your previous experiences with ubiquitous marketing may have made you susceptible to participating in the consumer culture not entirely of free will. As with all marketing, take a moment and think about your exposure levels before proceeding.