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March 3rd, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 9

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: We return to the Apocalypse, with an article by essayist nonpareil Adam Gopnick, on Elaine Pagels’ new book about Revelations. Bottom line? It was a coded screed about current events, not a prediction about the future. As opposed to BP’s report on their oil spill which was complete fantasy. But the truth is seeping out, faster than an uncapped oil-well.

* Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation Adam Gopnik The New Yorker

Perhaps what most strikes the naïve reader of the Book of Revelation is what a close-run thing the battle is. When God finally gets tired of waiting it out and decides to end things, the back-and-forth between dragons and serpents and sea monsters and Jesus is less like a scouring of the stables than like a Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. It seems that Manichaeanism—bad god vs. good god—is the natural religion of mankind and that all faiths bend toward the Devil, to make sense of God’s furious impotence. A god omniscient and omnipotent and also powerless to stop evil remains a theological perplexity, even as it becomes a prop of faith. It gives you the advantage of clarity—only one guy worth worshipping—at the loss of lucidity: if he’s so great, why is he so weak?

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

* BP Misrepresented Gulf Oil Spill NationofChange

Gulf Rescue Alliance (GRA) has just sent a briefing package to the Attorney Generals of Alabama and Louisiana which presents evidence that:

• The unmentioned existence of a 3rd Macondo well (the real source of the explosion, DWH sinking and ensuing oil spill).

The current condition of this well being such that it can never be properly capped.

The compromised condition of the seabed floor being such that there are multiple unnatural sources of gushers continuing to pour into the Gulf, with Corexit dispersant still suppressing its visibility.
That the highly publicized capped well (Well A) never occurred as reported, and in fact was an abandoned well, hence it was never the source of the millions of gallons released into the Gulf.

Feb. 3rd, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 5

Feb-03-2012 | Comments (1)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: All the followups have to do with extremes. We start with an In Focus photo spread on this week’s “Tough Guy” competition, another extreme sport many readers will not feel the need to partake of. But all readers partake in the debate on Foxconn, maker of the computers on which you read this. We link to a fine debate on Reddit: the excerpted quote is the top comment and makes a strong argument for Foxconn as a positive role in China. Many respondents don’t agree…. Continuing with our Apocalypse Soon investigation. we link to the recently web-restored Apocamon a comic adaptation of the Book of Revelations as performed by Pokemon. And following last week’s brain feature, we look at the ethics of upsizing your intelligence.

* Tough Guy 2012 In Focus – The Atlantic

Billed as “the toughest race in the world,” the Tough Guy 2012 competition took place yesterday in Perton, England. Every year, thousands of men and women tackle the course, which is described on the Tough Guy website as eight country miles filled with freezing mud and “barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones.” Gathered here are some images of the fun had by the tough competitors in this year’s event.

* Foxconn And Workers Rights Reddit comment

“In a poor country like ours, the alternative to low-paid jobs isn’t well-paid ones, it’s no jobs at all.”-Jesús Heroles, Fmr. Mexican Ambassador to the US

I’m not going to lie, Foxconn doesn’t sound like a terribly fun place to work. That being said, it’s crucial to note that Foxconn employees are not slaves. Every employee is there of their own accord and is perfectly free to leave whenever they want (in fact, Foxconn has a 30-40% turnover rate). That’s critically important to realise. It’s important because the fact that someone would choose to work at Foxconn means that it’s better than any other option they have. Remember that for the vast majority of Foxconn workers, the alternative is farming rice in a country where there’s 1 tractor for every 200 farmers. It should be axiomatic that if a person is offered a choice, they will take the option that improves their life. Unless you’re of the opinion that all people to the East of the Himalayas are stricken with some kind of mass delusion, the fact that people are wilfully choosing to work at Foxconn should be indisputable evidence that Foxconn is having a positive effect on their lives.

* Apocamon: The Final Judgement (NSFW) Written by St. John the Divine, Illustrated by Patrick Farley

Warning: Some people will find this offensive and rude; others will find it very funny. Caveat lector.

* The Ethics Of Brain Boosting Oxford University

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

TDCS uses electrodes placed on the outside of the head to pass tiny currents across regions of the brain for 20 minutes or so. The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. It is thought that this enhances the making and strengthening of connections involved in learning and memory. The technique is painless, all indications at the moment are that it is safe, and the effects can last over the long term.

Jan. 27th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 4

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: A fine quartet of pieces that arrived too late for last week. We start with a superb War Tard column on just why the US wants to attack Iran, and it’s not about nuclear bombs, but oil. The first piece in a long while that’s made sense of the oncoming war. As always, War Tard does a fine job of looking at strategies. A quick and powerful graph shows the congressional support for PIPA/SOPA the day before and the day after the Internet blackout. Meet the Preppers! A subculture with the slogan, “Armegeddon ready: are you?” And music! The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, and the Thai Elephant Orchestra produce sounds the like of which you’ve never heard. Click on.

* Why The Us Wants To Attack Iran War Tard

Iran is sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and has huge reserves of natural gas and that’s a sweet energy prize by any account. It’s kind of like Inca gold and the Spanish Main in the 16th century… everybody wants a piece of the action. …

The interesting player here in all this is China. Though a long way from being a military superpower, its economic power is rising fast, so fast that the US and Europe fear the loss of traditional Western dominance of the global economy. The gaping weakness of the Chinese rise is energy supply. And without a credible naval fleet to protect the flow of spice, the weakness of China gets exposed… Chinese dependence on sea borne oil delivery and their susceptibility to a blockade sometime in our proxy resource war future. What the West really fears here in the global energy game of Risk, is Iran having unfettered control of its own huge energy reserves, selling those reserves outside the dollar to geopolitical rivals (China) and facilitating the rise of a pan Pacific hegemon that could contest Western dominance at some point later this century.

That’s why Iran is in the cross hairs. Their whole nuke program is symbolic of their determination not to play nice in the petro dollar chess game and the question remains, will they get Tomahawked this year because of it?

* How The Internet Blackout Affected Congressional Support For Pipa/Sopa Boing Boing

* Subculture of Americans prepares for civilization’s collapse Reuters

When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon. “In an instant, anything can happen,” she told Reuters. “And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared.” Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

…Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a “survival center,” complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon. “I think this economy is about to fall apart,” she said.

* New Music Futility Closet

The 10-member Vienna Vegetable Orchestra plays instruments created entirely from fresh vegetables, including the carrot recorder, the pumpkin tympanum, the zucchini trumpet, and the bean maraca. These must be fashioned anew before each concert, because the old instruments are made into soup.

The Thai Elephant Orchestra, created by American expatriate Richard Lair and Columbia neurologist David Sulzer, improvise on drums, gongs, harmonicas, and sawmill blades. To date they’ve released three CDs.

8. This is the Way the World Ends

Jan-20-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: There are a lot of – not to be overly kind about it – lunatic websites bemoaning the end of the world in 2012 (here’s one that starts with “Buying asteroid-proof bunkers, killing their pets and planning mass suicide, the families convinced this ancient calendar predicts the world will end in 2012” and moves quickly to “Deep inside a secret room buried for eons within an ancient stone temple in Mexico, something dark and terrible has finally stirred.”) We look at 25 theories, from Campling to entropy, from the Messiah to the Rapture, and who claims each. National Geographic debunks a half dozen, and a four millennia old Assyrian tablet gives you some perspective. (Here’s this section’s mandatory soundtrack.)

* Top 25 Theories On How The World Will End Infographic: Nostradamus Predictions

* 2012: Six End-of-the-World Myths Debunked National Geographic Magazine

At least one aspect of the 2012, end-of-the-world hype is, for some people, all too real: the fear. NASA’s Ask an Astrobiologist Web site, for example, has received thousands of questions regarding the 2012 doomsday predictions—some of them disturbing, according to David Morrison, senior scientist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

“A lot of [the submitters] are people who are genuinely frightened,” Morrison said. “I’ve had two teenagers who were considering killing themselves, because they didn’t want to be around when the world ends,” he said. “Two women in the last two weeks said they were contemplating killing their children and themselves so they wouldn’t have to suffer through the end of the world.”

* World End Approaching Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BC

“The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.”

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March 3rd, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 9

8. This is the Way the World Ends

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