As you watch the conversation in Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0, it might help to know about one of the sources that was helpful to me in formulating the agenda, assembling the cast of characters, and setting the tone for the meeting. I quoted this passage from Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover (who directs the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London):
“Now we tend to see the Enlightenment view of human psychology as thin and mechanical, and Enlightenment hopes of social progress through the spread of humanitarianism and the scientific outlook as na?ve…One of this book’s aims is to replace the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality…another aim of the book is to defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and humane, the hope that by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery. I have qualified optimism that this hope is well founded…”
I say Amen to that. If Enlightenment 1.0 took a thin and mechanical view of human nature and psychology, I think Enlightenment 2.0 can offer a much ‘thicker’ and cognitively richer account – less na?ve and also, perhaps, less hubristic. If there’s one thing we’ve learned – particularly from cognitive neuroscience – it is that we need to have some strategic humility about the hobby horses we are inclined to ride.
-Roger Bingham
Director, The Science Network
(Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0)
“Outside the Disney Store on Fifth Avenue 35 bellicose elves were chanting, “Silent night, we’re on strike: no outsourced toys for little tykes”, while a red-robed choir sang, “Stop, stop shopping”. In the midst of this chaos stood a white tuxedoed preacher bellowing into a bullhorn: a “shopocalypse” was coming, the Reverend Billy warned baffled shoppers – “the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!”
In recent years the Church of Stop Shopping – a secular street-theatre group led by Bill Talen, a 57-year-old playwright and actor – has mounted other similar performances, but this year, with the release of What Would Jesus Buy? , a documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock, director and star of Super Size Me , the protest is going nationwide. The film follows the Rev Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir as they tour the US exhorting Americans to think about the real meaning of Christmas. Chief among a number ofconfrontations-cum-provocations is the occasion when Rev Billy attempts to exorcise Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Arkansas.”
(via The Financial Times)
Excellent article on the attempts of superhero comics to deal to critique American politics, and how they fail:
The Superhero Registration Act is a straightforward analogue of the USA PATRIOT Act; the rhetoric of its opponents could have been cribbed from an ACLU brief. But under scrutiny, their civil libertarian arguments turn out to hold very little water in the fictional context. The “liberty” the act infringes is the right of well-meaning masked vigilantes, many wielding incredible destructive power, to operate unaccountably, outside the law — a right no sane society recognizes. In one uneasy scene, an anti-registration hero points out that the law would subject heroes to lawsuits filed by those they apprehend. In another, registered hero Wonder Man is forced to wait several whole minutes for approval before barging into a warehouse full of armed spies from Atlantis. Protests about the law’s threat to privacy ring a bit hollow coming from heroes accustomed to breaking into buildings, reading minds, or peering through walls without bothering to obtain search warrants. Captain America bristles at the thought of “Washington … telling us who the supervillains are,” but his insistence that heroes must be “above” politics amounts to the claim that messy democratic deliberation can only hamper the good guys’ efforts to protect America. The putative dissident suddenly sounds suspiciously like Director of National Intelligence Mitch McConnell defending warrantless spying.
I haven’t read Ellis’s Black Summer yet (I have issue 0, just need to find the time), but I suspect it falls into the same trap: Horus’s murder of the president is little different from the US’s invasion of Iraq.
Full Story: American Prospect).
(via American Samizdat).
“Fears of an alien invasion created greater alarm in the US than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack, writes Philippe Mora.
In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish denials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon: “CIA Papers Detail UFO Surveillance” screamed the headline. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff: “Are we in UFOs?” The answer was yes – since the late 1940s, apparently. But exactly how, what, when, why and who remained layered in mystery, leaving grist for the conspiracy mill.
But this year a raft of newly unclassified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack.”
via The Sydney Morning Herald
Read Part 1 of The US as Police State.
In part 1, I took a very brief look at the history of the United States from 1787 to around 1980 and found a history of government repression of citizens at varying levels of government: restrictions on voting, vote fraud, and slavery. Not to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hands of the US military.
So now I turn my attention to Ronald Reagan and the point where the “War on Drugs” actually became a war, and not mere prohibition. The drug war is meant to stamp out the “drug problem” in America. A problem that the government helped engineer in t he first place. As detailed in Gary Webb’s series of “Dark Alliance” articles for the San Jose Mercury News, and later a book by the same name, the C.I.A, with the explicit knowledge of the Reagan administration, supported Nicaraguan contras in their sale of cocaine to drug dealers in Los Angles starting around 1981. For more information, see Webb’s 1998 article for the Orange County Weekly, The Crack-Up.”
Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee things that, had a government official said them in the days, weeks, or months following 9/11. would have sparked public outrage-and may have significantly blunted the push for greater police and surveillance powers like the PATRIOT Act.
McConnell told lawmakers that “9/11 should have and could have been prevented.”
Full Story: Reason Magazine.
See also this piece by the same author:
It is now clear that senior FBI officials, Maltbie and Frasca, did know about Moussaoui’s arrest. They knew the case so well that they denied Samit’s request to seek a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to search Moussaoui’s computer and belongings. Because Samit never made the explicit link to Afghan terror camps, the FBI could not claim a ‘foreign power’ was directing Moussaoui, the test for an intelligence warrant from the court. But had the bureau taken Samit’s fears of mayhem seriously, it could have sought a plain vanilla criminal warrant on Moussaoui based on probable cause. Samit was told that pressing too hard to obtain a warrant would hurt his career.
This decision not to seek a warrant gave rise to the myth that the ‘wall’ between overseas intelligence and criminal investigations made the PATRIOT Act necessary. This myth is cherished among right-wing radio talkers and has now morphed into a clumsy justification for the White House’s warrantless wiretaps. It is pure fantasy. Samit cited ‘obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism’ by top FBI officials-not domestic spying restrictions-as the factors that stopped his investigation.
(Emphasis mine).
The Museum of Hoaxes provides an excerpt from the book Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments:
Warren Thomas, Director of the City Zoo, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko the Elephant’s rump. With Thomas were two scientific colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.
297 milligrams is a lot of LSD – about 3000 times the level of a typical human dose. In fact, it remains the largest dose of LSD ever given to a living creature. The researchers figured that, if they were going to give an elephant LSD, they better not give him too little.
Full Story: Museum of Hoaxes.
(via Boing Boing).
According to MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld, the digital revolution is over, and the good guys won. The next big change will be about manufacturing. Anyone with a PC will be able to build anything just by hitting ‘print.’
(Fortune Magazine) — Imagine a machine with the ability to manufacture anything. Now imagine that machine in your living room. What would you build first? Would you start a business? Would you ever buy anything retail again? According to MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld, it’s not too early to think about these questions, because that machine, which he calls a personal fabricator, is not so far off – or so far-fetched – as you might think.
Gershenfeld is director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), an interdisciplinary outfit studying the intersection between information theory and industrial design. He also teaches a course called How to Make (Almost) Anything.
Five years ago the National Science Foundation awarded the CBA $14 million to build a manufacturing lab full of futuristic hardware. That includes a nanobeam writer that can etch microscopic patterns on metal, and a supersonic waterjet cutter that generates 60,000 pounds of water pressure, enough to shear through almost any material. The CBA factory can churn out anything, from the tiniest semiconductor to an entire building.
continue reading via money.cnn.com
“Co-host Diana Brown talks with Director Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, Bad Santa) and graphic novelist Daniel Clowes (Eightball) about their fab new film, Art School Confidential.”
MP3 on The R.U. Sirius Show.
Last night I finished watching the director’s cut of Until the End of the World. Even at 4 and a half hours, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I wanted more.
After all, Wender’s first cut was actually over 8 hours. This is barely over half the material. What I would really like, though, is to get my hands on a screenplay. The movie was originally going to conclude in the Congo. The ending to the movie is fine, but it doesn’t quite seem right. I would very much like to read the original ending.
Remember a while back when I was raving about Wen Wenders’ Until the End of the World and about how you could finally buy an import of the Director’s Cut? Well, the director’s cut was also released in Germany last year, and the whole thing’s available for torrenting. It’s in English, and the French parts are subtitled in English. It’s also got some deleted scenes.
2.27 GB Torrent.
OMG! The director’s cut of Until the End of the World is finally available, as an Italian DVD. It’s three DVDs and requires a region-free DVD player (anyone know a good region free DVD player for Windows?). UTEOTW is an amazing film, but the video version is pretty confusing since it was basically half as long as it was supposed to be. I’m so stoked to see the full version.
Link (via Until the End of the World: Director’s Cut news).
See also: Video Savant compares Until the End of the World and Deathwatch
AN idea which could turn out to be the biggest breakthrough in genetics in 50 years was announced yesterday by Brisbane and American scientists…
“Essentially what we found was several hundred DNA sequences more than 200 bases long which were exactly the same in humans, mice and rats,” Institute for Molecular Bioscience director John Mattick said yesterday…
Professor Mattick said he believed the RNA made by the sequences were master regulators, switching on or switching off genes which made the proteins comprising most bodies.
via fark of all places… here comes the science:
As I noted last week, commercial applications of brain imaging open up whole new vistas of manipulation via visual cortex…
Using M.R.I.’s to See Politics on the Brain
(excerpt) “This research can show how a candidate is unfairly targeting the weaknesses and foibles of voters, and that can be empowering,” said Professor Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Of course, political consultants could also use this technology to create more manipulative commercials, though Mr. Freedman and Mr. Knapp say they do not hope for partisan advantage from their research.
“We just want to start exploring this new frontier,” Mr. Knapp said….
on Die Puny Humans I saw this particular link
Science’s mind games | Brain scans can now tell whether you’re lying or racist.
The University of Sydney’s Brain Dynamics Centre at Westmead Hospital was first to identify the brain networks that lie behind our emotional responses, by monitoring physical reactions to experiences at the same time as imaging their brains.
The centre’s director, Lea Williams, says we appear to have evolved a special brain network to store memories of emotional states that are critical to our survival – physical and social. This network involves the body, a primitive part of our brain known as the amygdala, and a frontal area involved in rational thinking.
Events can unconsciously trigger recall of the stored emotions, and working out what happens in the healthy “emotional brain”, and how this differs with gender or age, will help improve treatments for severe emotional disorders such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress and borderline personalities, she says.
the commercial applications of this kind of research are substantial (maybe it’s time Rushkoff wrote Coercion II?) and the ethical use of this information is certainly up for debate, but what interested me most isn’t that television has been recognized as a sensory apparatus and we’re finally getting to the science, but instead the implications this has for personal identity and emotional intelligence in a post-human society.
Disinfo is running a piece compiling evidence from mainstream news sources indicating that the govenment knew in advance “…that a devastating attack was in the works, that it would involve hijacked airplanes, and that it would occur inside the United States.”
1. Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft in July 2001 2. The FAA refused to let author Salman Rushdie fly in North America starting the week before 9/11 3. Four days before the attacks, Florida Governor Jeb Bush activated the National Guard, citing ?acts of terrorism? 4. On September 10, 2001, high-ranking Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans for the morning of September 11. 5. On September 10, 2001, San Francisco?s mayor was warned against flying to New York the next morning. 6. CIA Director George Tenet warned Congressmen of ?an imminent attack on the United States of this nature.?
Link.
To me this stuff only indicates that multiple agencies knew something involving commercial planes was going to happen sometime. And let’s not forget this one: one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.
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