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MonthJuly 2008

Indian Snake-Worship Cult Takes On World Bank

July 16, 2008 /

A strange new war has broken out in the remote Himalayan statelet of Nagapur, pitting ancient Serpent Deities against the global bureaucrats of the World Bank.

Not to be confused with Nagaland, Nagapur is a small ‘princely state’ in the Himalayan foothills between Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. Its highest peaks get winter snow, its lowest plains join the heatchoked tiger-and-orchid jungles of the Terai, but all within a hundred-odd square miles.

Nagapur was mentioned in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata as one of the ‘cities’ of the Nagas or semi-divine were-snakes. Nagapur is still noted for its tantrik snake temples, some of them decorated in medieval Nepalese style with ‘obscene’ carved wood sculpture. The former ruling family claimed descent from an ancestral cobra, the Sheesh Nang. […]

In the past few years however one clan of the family has achieved some degree of notoriety thanks to its connections with an emerging ‘Fourth World’ resistance movement in Nagapur. Poor peasants and ‘tribals’ who depend in part on the forest for economic sustenance have struggled against various ‘Green Revolution’ agricultural policies, dams, and development projects, some launched by the Indian Government and others by Global institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. […]

In 1997 a great-grandson of the Begum was born and named Nagarjuna, and proclaimed Crown Prince. The infant’s horoscope was said to be unusually auspicious, and rumors began to spread amongst the adherents of the Naga Goddess. As Hindu-Moslem syncretists they came to believe that the young prince was both the Kalki Avatar (the savior incarnation of Vishnu) and the Mahdi or Hidden Imam revered by Nagapur’s Shiites and sufi mystics.

Full Story: Hungry Ghost

Very interesting. Worth reading the whole thing.

(Thanks Nova!)

Superstruct: a futurist ARG for building the future

July 15, 2008 /

This fall, The Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future-it’s about inventing the future. Everyone is welcome to join the game. Watch for the opening volley of threats and survival stories, September 2008.

[…]

This is a game of survival, and we need you to survive.

Super-threats are massively disrupting global society as we know it. There’s an entire generation of homeless people worldwide, as the number of climate refugees tops 250 million. Entrepreneurial chaos and ‘the axis of biofuel’ wreak havoc in the alternative fuel industry. Carbon quotas plummet as food shortages mount. The existing structures of human civilization-from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures-just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.

You can help. Tell us your story. Strategize out loud. Superstruct now.

It’s your legacy to the human race.

Full Story: Institute for the Future

(via Grinding)

Self-Assembling Tissues

July 15, 2008 /

self-assembling tissue

Tissue engineers are ambitious. If they had their way, a dialysis patient could receive a new kidney made in the lab from his own cells, instead of waiting for a donor organ that his immune system might reject. Likewise, a diabetic could, with grafts of lab-made pancreatic tissue, be given the ability to make insulin again. But tissue engineering has stalled in part because bioengineers haven’t been able to replicate the structural complexity of human tissues. Now researchers have taken an important first step toward building complex tissues from the bottom up by creating what they call living Legos. These building blocks, biofriendly gels of various shapes studded with cells, can self-assemble into complex structures resembling those found in tissues.

Full Story: Technology Review

(via Kurzweil)

Susan Blackmore on lucid dreaming

July 15, 2008 /

Lucid dreams used to be a topic within psychical research and parapsychology. Perhaps their incomprehensibility made them good candidates for being thought paranormal. More recently, however, they have begun to appear in psychology journals and have dropped out of parapsychology-a good example of how the field of parapsychology shrinks when any of its subject matter is actually explained.

Lucidity has also become something of a New Age fad. There are machines and gadgets you can buy and special clubs you can join to learn how to induce lucid dreams. But this commercialization should not let us lose sight of the very real fascination of lucid dreaming. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness, deliberate control over our actions, and the nature of imaginary worlds.

Full Story: Susan Blackmore

(via Bruce Eisner)

Racist Rejection Letter Stirs Controversy in SF Community

July 15, 2008 /

In the aftermath of the Violet Blue episode and in the midst of the PZ Myers controversy, racism reared it’s ugly head in the SF community. Aspiring SF writer Luke Jackson published a rejection letter written by an editor for Helix, William Sanders, in which was said :

“I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people – at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can – and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities. {…] the narrator seems to be saying that it was this incident which caused him to take up the jihad, but he’s being mendacious (like all his kind, he’s incapable of honesty). […] most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads’

Unfortunately the letter was deleted in fear of a lawsuit threatened by Sanders. Putting the ethics about publicly posting a rejection letter aside, this is one that needed to be seen. Author Tobias Buckell has a great post on his blog summing it up. In an interesting development writer Yoon Ha Lee got a taste of Helix editor Sanders professionalism after asking to remove her story:

“Sanders flounced off in a huff, stating that the story ‘never did make any sense’ and that he only accepted it to ‘please those who admire your work’-what altruism!-‘and also because (notorious bigot that I am) I was trying to get more work by non-Caucasian writers.’ If I were a writer currently submitting to Helix, I would kind of worry about that bit-all things considered, if a story really does suck, I’d rather have it rejected so I can fix it.

He then played psychic and claimed that I only asked for the story to be withdrawn ‘because, let’s get real here, you feel the need to distance yourself from someone who is in disfavor with the kind of babbling PC waterheads whose good opinion is so important to you, and whom you seem to be trying to impress with this little grandstand play.’ He closed with: ‘There was a suggestion I was going to make, but it is probably not physically practicable.’

After that he pulled the story and replaced it with these professional words: “Story deleted at author’s pantiwadulous request.”

Sanders is now demanding anyone who wants their stories removed from Helix to pay forty bucks!

(See also: Tobias Buckell: “Asimov’s Forum Ickiness”, Buckell: “Keeps Digging”, K. Tempest Bradford: “William Sanders, Senior Bigot, Helix”)

Interview With Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

July 15, 2008 /

“Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi mystic and lineage successor in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order. He is an extensive lecturer and author of several books about Sufism, mysticism, dreamwork and Jungian spirituality. Vaughan-Lee was born in London in the year 1953. He began following the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi path since the age of 19, after meeting Irina Tweedie, author of Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi master. He eventually become Tweedie’s successor and a Sheikh in the Naqshbandiyya Sufi Order. In 1991 He moved to Northern California and opened the Golden Sufi Center to help make available the teachings of his Sufi Lineage.”

(via Elephant Journal)

Freeman to appear on Alex Jones show July 16th

July 14, 2008 /

Freeman writes:

It was bound to happen and the time has come. I have been invited to be a guest in the studio with Alex Jones. The show airs at 1pm CST (check infowars.com for local listing) Wednesday July 16th. This will be a show you do not want to miss. This is when the occult agenda meets the political. I hope to show the Patriot movement another side of the plot. Had Alex Jones and I met before 9/11 we would have had the entire story years before it occurred. I hope to share my understanding of the brotherhood’s rituals. The illuminati’s agenda is beyond mere military strategy; it is wrapped up in the occult forces of secret societies. This is a spiritual battle. I intend to prove this to Alex’s listeners. We will break through to the new paradigm; a truer understanding of the overall picture. We will try to set a course for a whole new world, free from brotherhood fascism and open to our true life’s purpose as stewards of life on Earth.

Listen at Infowars

Freeman Perspective

The Cassette Tape Skeleton

July 14, 2008 /

“Cassette tapes are near extinction, considering CDs, DVDs, Blue Ray and other innovative disk coming along. And the following skeleton is one wacky creation for this statement. The creation belongs to Brian Dettmer, I guy famous for altering common media such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes and transforming them into works of art. The following skeleton is currently on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science.”

(via Wacky Archives)

Musicology

July 14, 2008 /

“Over the last two months, Nature has published a series of essays about the latest scientific research into music, and now that the series is complete, it has been made available as a free PDF.

Among the authors of the essays are Aniruddh D. Patel, a theoretical neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, who discusses the brain’s response to different varieties of music, and Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, who explains the neural basis of music perception. Nature also has a special podcast featuring a discussion between science writer Philip Ball and music psychologist John Sloboda, both of whom contribute essays to the series.”

(via Neurophilosophy)

Secondhand Wonderland: The World of the Used Book

July 14, 2008 /

‘I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading pages someone long gone has called my attention to.’ So wrote Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road, the definitive novel about the lure and grip of used books. Hanff knew the power of the musty book smell, the red-pen underlines, the bent-down pages that meant someone, somewhere marked that spot as the phone rang, the baby cried, or the clock ticked well past bedtime.

The secondhand book is more than merely a bargain for the book lover. It’s a cross-cultural, inter-generational link between readers. A torch-race, of sorts, with batons passed in all directions, from the collector to the student, the casual reader to the obsessive.

[..] In this PopMatters special feature section, eight writers-each their own unique breed of book-lover-step inside the world of secondhand books and demonstrate the diversity of the experiences it contains. Kirby Fields describes the small town store that went from temporary linger-spot to provider of his childhood education. Erika Nanes explains the careful process of date selection based on a man’s handling of his used texts. Diane Leach praises those flyleaf inscriptions, Deanne Sole dissects the world of the St. Vincent de Paul charity store, Justin Dimos reveres the famed Caveat Emptor, while Rob Horning, David Pullar, and Ian Mathers take business-like approaches to the subject, breaking down the secondhand bookstore’s fiscal concerns (among other things).”

(via Pop Matters)

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