The Citigroup Plutonomy memos quite bluntly assess the size and power of the wealthy minority in the world economy, and how this distorts a number of economic indicators. Basically argues that companies servicing the rich will continue to do well, since they have all the money, so invest in them.

In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to invest, and who want to invest wisely.

Fascinating. Apparently these have been fairly successfully suppressed, yet are reasonably available online. The trick is to know to look for them. Particularly relevant in terms of the Occupy 1% – 99% dialogue.

Footnotes to a changing world: Brazil has overtaken Britain as the world’s sixth largest economy.

Saber rattling between Iran and USA

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

This would actually lead to war, so it will be interesting to see who backs down and how.

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A quick few interesting tech tools:

“I’m getting arrested” android app – alert lawyers and loved ones with one click when you are being arrested. Evolved from OWS/protestors needs.

Tasker. Total automation for your android. Looks real high powered, but overkill for casual users.

Okay, this looks like it has really interesting potential: if this, then that: an automation tool for online stuff. Basically lets you automate repetitive online tasks between different programs you use daily, and more.

Also looks really interesting: hypothes.is.”The Internet, peer reviewed.”

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A few kinda nerdy notes:

Some surprising uses of wolfram alpha for word-professionals.

Large Hadron Collider discovers its first new particle

This is quite fascinating, on a philosophical/thinking level:  answers to the question “what it’s like” to have an internalized sense of very advanced mathematical concepts“.

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A few tracking the nasty weird future coming soon/now:

The Future of Drone Warfare – deeply weird and fascinating extrapolation on the likely direction of drone warfare. For bonus points, introduced me to the fact of Bonjwas.

System D – the 10 trillion dollar black market global economy – Foreign Policy article by the excellent Robert Neuwirth (author of Shadow Cities).

More on the emerging warlords of our near future: Mexico’s cartels build own national radio system. (via @nils_gilman / @deviantglobal)

Tracking this stuff is pretty relevant to what things are going to look like when things fall apart more openly: empowered non-state actors doing it themselves.

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And some random shit:

How to open a padlock with a coke can

Mad monks shut down by Pope

“a renowned monastery in Rome where monks staged concerts featuring a lap-dancer-turned-nun and opened a hotel with a 24-hour limousine service has been shut down by the pope.”

Global Drug Commissioner Richard Branson (huh?) on lessons from Portugal after a decade of decriminalistation.

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And to go out on: Wax, Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

By all accounts about the most impossibly weird film ever.

Watch it free online here.

Anyhow. Here are the results of my first dedicated info trawl in a long long while, scrying the emerging future in the froth of the web… Much of the best of this comes from the already indispensable Innovation Patterns, the rest from the mutants list, and generally revisiting some of my haunts.

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Michael Ventura steps into prophet mode again. Three parts, necessary reading/analysis of what the fuck is going. (Subtitle: “The Worldwide End of Capitalism and Its Replacement by a Mode of Commerce for Which, as Yet, There Is No Ism.”) Flash Mob Dance Revolution Parts One Two & Three. Two parts analysis, third part an attempt at solution.

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fighting muppetocracy: pretty brutal and punchy look at how fucked we are, well worth reading and distressingly difficult to argue against.

This show brought to you by the international community, by government, by the NGOs, by well-intentioned individuals, by the UN, and all the rest of it. The same cast of clowns that screwed up Haiti.

Get it yet? Is it landing?

We are screwed. We don’t need to speculate on how or why, but we have an absolutely clear and rational expectation that there will be no sudden, effective, global and complete transformation in our global governance systems resulting in an effective resolution to our climate crisis.

We did not do it for poverty.

We do not do it for natural disasters.

We will not do it for climate.

Everything rests on us getting a technological fix for climate, and we’re massively, dramatically underfunding research into those breakthrough technologies in favour of continuing to subsidize oil. These are the facts.

Really worth reading the whole thing for context etc.

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kind of an antidote to that: recent interview with zen buddhist master Thich Nhat Hahn :

“Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come,” he warns. “Civilisations have been destroyed many times and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

“If you meditate on that, you will not go crazy. You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.”

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Excellent Foreign Policy article about the logical limits to China’s growth, and the rise of Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia.

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DARPA trying to hack the neurobiology of narrative in order to bring in a whole new generation of propaganda control.

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.” In other words, the tools will be used to detect who’s been controlled by subversive ideologies, better allowing the military to drown out that message and win people onto their side.

“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?” said the researcher familiar with the project.

Um. WTF? Disturbing as fuck anyway.

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The Case Against the Spirit World Model of Psychedelic Action

Pretty fascinating/challenging read for entheogenic enthusiasts.

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Cyborg future news: A team at at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen says it’s built the foundation for devices to communicate directly with the human brain.

The researchers’ new graphene-based transistor array is compatible with living biological cells and can, for the first time, record the electrical signals they generate.

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Have you missed these posts? Or are you happier not knowing?

(Hell, for that matter, have I missed making these posts, and am I happier not knowing?)

A couple of interesting articles about our interactions with technology that I don’t have time to do justice to:

first, one about how how online personalization services begin to skew our access to information:

I found this bit telling:

If you want to test your own views on personalization, you could try a party trick Mr. Pariser demonstrated earlier this year during a talk at the TED conference: ask some friends to simultaneously search Google for a controversial term like gun control or abortion. Then compare results.

“It’s totally creepy if you think about it,” said Tze Chun, a filmmaker who agreed to participate in a similar experiment at a recent dinner party we both attended in Brooklyn. Five of us used our phones to search for “Is Osama really dead?,” a phrase Mr. Chun suggested.

Although our top 10 results included the same link — to Yahoo Canada answers — in first place, two of us also received a link to a post on jewishjournal.com, a newspaper site. Meanwhile, Mr. Chun and two other filmmakers had links to more conspiratorial sites like deadbodies.info.

For Mr. Chun, who visits a variety of true-crime Web sites as part of his screenplay research but tends to favor sites that sell vintage T-shirts in his private life, the personalization felt a little too, well, personal.

“You are used to looking at the Internet voyeuristically,” he said. “It’s weird to have the Internet looking back at you and saying, ‘Yeah, I remember things about what you have done’ and gearing the searches to those sites.”

I had noticed that my google results were odd at times…

Second, social influences kill the wisdom of the crowd. Essentially, collectively we know stuff, but when we get feedback about what others think (eg through social networks), conformity effects make us dumber.

(Oh, and unrelatedly, for those of you who have houses, Jez talks about earthquake-learnings from Chch for your house, which I had been meaning to point at)

I have had the privilege of reading widely and in depth during a prolonged period of self-education. This is a rare thing, and I am very grateful for it.

So: here is a list of the non-fiction books that are most highly recommended by the moose.

This is a really hard list to make. I want to get a sense of what has most influenced me, and what would be most useful for others to read. The real challenge is what amazing mind-blowing stuff to leave off; what entire disciplines don’t even get a mention.

I could rant at length about each of the books listed, and someday mean to, but for now the list and a brief precis will suffice.

Over time I have found the one of the most important laws of scholarship to be “always read the original”. Reading these volumes will repay truly great dividends. In some cases I am picking authors rather than books, as it is difficult to fit many thinkers into one volume.

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Robert Anton Wilson: Quantum Psychology.

Wilson is like the Irish Buddha. Compassionate, funny and wise, with an uncanny ability to explain complex things in ways that make you feel much smarter than you are, as he teaches you how to think for yourself. His books are wide ranging and profound, and totally unique.

QP deals with quantum physics, language, the mind, and how we make ourselves a reality tunnel to live in; it is gentle and funny and unspeakably brilliant, and will free up your view of things by stealth with its mix of theory and practice.

Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger Vol 1, are the other two must reads of his non-fiction. They are both also pretty indescribable, but totally worthwhile. (Also recommended is the audio set Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, particularly the 2nd and 3rd lectures.)

His humour, and staggering originality and clarity of communication, make him the best entry point into the world of ideas that interests me.

David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Thought as a System.

Quantum physicist and philosopher whose thought touches on the most fundamental questions of existence. Bohm is much more than a physicist. In my eyes he is quite possibly the most important philosopher of the late 20th century.

WATIO is about his take on quantum physics, and relativity, and their implications for everything else. There is one long chapter with many equations that will be over most people’s heads (sure was over mine), but it is interesting to read along the development of the logic. Also discusses language and philosophy, putting forward fascinating and brilliant stuff as he grapples with the deepest issues of meaning and existence.

TAAS is much easier going, taking the form of a weekend long dialogue he led, and covers analagous material in a completely non-technical fashion. Both are very brilliant.

(I often feel much of my own work is covering ground that Wilson and Bohm covered better.)

PD Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous; Tertium Organum.

Russian philosopher from the early 20th century. Genius in his own right, while perhaps best known as a disciple of Gurdjieff.

ISOTM introduced me to the best, most lucid, most grounded and practical model of human psychology and spirituality I have encountered; a genuinely life-changing experience.

The first ten pages of TO are still probably the most comprehensively mindshattering thing I have ever read; in fact, in many ways that is where my journey began, and the return was being able to say what had already been said, but from myself, in my own words.

Buckminster Fuller: Critical Path

Visionary genius, design scientist, humanist; original thinker par excellence; world-system thinking at its finest; one of the most optimistic paradigm shifting thinkers of all time.

Want to save the world? Start here. Not easy reading, but off-the-charts brilliant. Written the year before he died; a summation of his life’s work. Almost impossible to communicate just how powerful, joyous, and uplifting this work, and Fuller’s vision, is. (Actually, we wrote a – frankly awesome – song about Bucky in Idle Faction: right click to download Go Bucky Go, which maybe captures some of how rocking this stuff really is )

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Those four, in particular, are giants whom I am standing sheepishly on the shoulders of, feeling out of place.

Now two which are just things any intelligent person in the West should have read, or the equivalent thereof, in answer to the basic questions of where did we come from, and how our current world and ideas about the world came about:

Richard Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind

The best one volume history of western thought I have encountered. A truly incredible performance, weaving together the many strands of thought into one amazing narrative.

(An excellent Eastern complement to this is Heinrich Zimmer’s “Philosophies of India”.)

Arnold Toynbee: Mankind and Mother Earth

The best one volume history of the world I have encountered. Written the year before he died, and after his mammoth 12 volume history of the world, here Toynbee brings it all together, revealing the patterns of things across time.

History, in general, is vital for any understanding of what we are. Though also a highly problematic, impressionistic art. A discipline I wish I was better read in.

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While I could go on and on listing many great books, with vital insights, I am also aware they form part of my process, and may or may not be essential to anyone else.

Honestly, the above would keep most people going for quite a while, and would gird you well to take on the world; the first four in particular feel essential, and have done a lot to shape my thinking and experience.

Essentially it is asking the question: given the nature of consciousness and reality and how they interact, what is the best approach we should take to engaging with it on a practical individual level?

There is a small group interested in such matters that is the obvious audience, but what I am wondering is if there would be wider audience, and I should look at making it a semi-public sort of thing.

So yeah. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, comment or contact me.

Almost worth it just for Howard Bloom explaining why country music exists, around 28 mins.

The topic is consciousness and reality, the nature of story, and bad SF movies. It is kind of amusing and maybe a touch mindblowing. It is about 25 minutes long and structured in a way that you would have to watch the whole thing to follow it.

It doesn’t have the Q&A afterwards, which is a shame as that seemed interesting at the time.

(The slideshow itself is at http://prezi.com/xvws90nq7rt-

if you find yourself curious about any illegibility.)

God’s noblest work? Man. Who found it out? Man.

- Mark Twain

Life’s noblest work? Science. Who found it out? Scientists.

- me

- Joseph Glanvill

(Just one of those random samples from a Suns of Arqa track that has been bothering me for years that I have been meaning to look up. The guy who reads it (and more) has an amazing voice. Apparently Glanvill was “the leading propagandist for the English natural philosophers of the late 17th Century”. A longer version of the quote appears at the start of Edgar Allan Poe’s story Ligeia.)

Today’s post brought to you by sleep deprivation and old tapes in the car.

This time via providing this treasure from Ubuweb, a documentary about Buckminster Fuller..

“This film by Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Snyder, like his other documentaries on “the greats” (Michelangelo, Henry Miller, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Casals, among others), transports the viewer into Fuller’s mind and soul. Told entirely in his own words, the film is an intimate, personal and inspiring message from Fuller to our fragile world.”