There is hope, robots!

The human frontal cortex, together with the differentiated ego-consciousness which it permits, renders the human being more free of the archetypal programme than any other animal. We can be much more flexible about which aspects of the programme we live out in reality. Archetypal imperatives are not absolute: experience transforms them into modes compatible with the living circumstances of the individual. …The crucial thing is that [we] consciously embrace the realities of [our] situation and actively make use of whatever archetypal opportunities there are. This includes embracing modes of life previously regarded as perverse.

….. Dr. Anthony Stevens, Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self.

Filed under: Psychoanalyses, not strictly Myspace related, note to self

Ancient Astronauts, Lost Civilizations…

A “Mayan rocket” (according to Erich von Daniken). This illustration actually depicts the Mayan ruler Pacal within a composition of standard Mayan iconography, including a bird, a god, and a cross.

A couple of years ago I gave a presentation on my book Secret Origins of the Bible at a convention in the Sacramento area. During the subsequent dinner we were treated to a lecture given by a scientist on the extraterrestrial origin of pre-biotic molecules in asteroids and comets. After the dinner, one of the attendees approached me and said that after hearing my presentation about the mythic origins of the Bible and that of the dinner speaker about life’s extraterrestrial origins, he was sure the book he was reading had to be true. He held up a book about ancient astronauts written by Rael, the founder of the Raelian movement that promotes cloning and believes humans were cloned by extraterrestrials.

…Let us look at some of the disparate parts that have been woven together into this grand New Age myth. Then let us consider the myth as a whole and try to understand what need it fills in its adherents.

[finish reading: "A New Mythology: Ancient Astronauts, Lost Civilizations & the New Age Paradigm," by Tim Callahan.]

Filed under: fringe fringe, not strictly Myspace related

Pittsburgh shuts down Warfare Robotics Facility

My youtube videos of the action at CMU’s Killer Robots Institute…

blurb: On Friday, March 2, Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG) and supporters set out to shut down the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), a largely Pentagon-funded venture of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that has become a world leader in warfare robotics. The action succeeded beyond the organizers’ expectations.

more from Pittsburgh Organizing Group:
http://organizepittsburgh.org/m2/

video shot by Neil Bhaerman:
http://www.current.tv/community/people/NeilDB

this video edited by Blastfurnace Radio and TV:
http://www.notowar.com/

part one:

part two:

part three:

Filed under: muy importante, not strictly Myspace related

Go, Bill, Go!

Filed under: not strictly Myspace related

The ascendence of the stupid class.

Well, it’s finally happened… my generation has assumed the mantle of adultivity.  I decided this after learning that there is a whole genre of videos on Youtube with people’s children dancing around, singing Dead Milkmen songs.

Am I being bitter here, or is the essence of self-absorbed posting video of your three year old singing “RC’s Mom” (“gonna beat my wife/gonna smack her with a lead pipe/gonna hit her with a two-by-four/run her over with a brick truck”) while dancing around the carpeted rec room, watching it all in the reflection of the forty-inch television?

I will let you search for it yourself… but if you’d rather, you can watch the video for “Big Time Operator” from the Bucky Fellini LP.

Filed under: not strictly Myspace related

Psychopath?? I wish!!!

the Original “White Negro.”

I have been staring at this blank screen for two days, and this is all I have come up with:

In his oft-cited essay of the same name, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer — several years before he tried to bite off Rip Torn’s ear — characterized the psychopath as someone who is “trying to create a new nervous system” for his or herself.

Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu…. It is … not only the ‘dead weight of the institutions of the past’ but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities.

(from “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1957))

Filed under: Reading Is FUN-damental!, cool Jews, not strictly Myspace related, superficial reflections

I may be the most important writer of our generation.

No, I didn’t say that I was the most important writer of our generation, I said that I might be.

And it is a possibility that we ought to start taking seriously.

Filed under: muy importante, not strictly Myspace related, superficial reflections

Stop The War!

Caitlin speaks out…

Filed under: not strictly Myspace related

Beyond The Wall Of Sleep…

Here we go, kids, for halloween… my most requested article! about insanity, H. P. Lovecraft and my visit to Danvers Asylum in Western Massachussets…

Beyond The Wall Of Sleep…
Nightmares in Danvers Asylum.
from Cosmic Shame, Fall 2003.
(All quotations taken from “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” by H.P. Lovecraft (1919).

Filed under: I'm a ghoul, not strictly Myspace related

I got a new book!

 

Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
by William T. Vollmann:

As he notes in a beautifully composed introduction, Vollman assumes political violence to be a human constant and thus addresses his attention to finding out when people use violence for political ends, how they justify it and on what scales they undertake it…

Filed under: Reading Is FUN-damental!, not strictly Myspace related