Seriously worth reading. Then watch this five minute banned TED talk explaining that job creation comes from consumer demand, not the rich.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Collection of rare Robert Anton Wilson essays.

Borders: weird hour long Robert Anton Wilson TV thing from 1989, starring a young Steve Buscemi, with lots of interesting people cropping up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

* 48 psychological facts about yourself worth knowing

definitely worth the read. far from the usual sort of guff.

* Chris23 summarises the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2011.

well worth reading. short clear but excellent summary of where shit is at, current pressure points in the world system, etc.

* Reality as failed state

interesting analysis of the disconnect between different actors in the world

* old maps online

the largest collection of old maps online

* a downloadable archive of all of the amazing Grey Lodge online magazine

Grey Lodge was one of the first and greatest sources of underground, avant garde, occult culture. some absolute gems in their collection.

* future of publishing news: freemium, a fascinating funding model for writing from China

basically serialised online fiction. free at first. as it gets more popular, you have to pay. seems to be working for some people.

* BBC reports that implanted wireless devices are hackable by McAfee… ie if you have an insulin pump, it can be turned off, or made to release all its contents at once, by external signals…

And, as a follow-up to the last post on economics, here is a nugget from the awesome Nils Gilman:

Stat of the day: Sustaining a 2.3% growth rate to the year 3500 would require us by then to be capturing the entire energy output of the Sun

Capitalism cannot work.

(lots of todays stuff came from catching up on technoccult and URBEINGRECORDED for the first time in ages)

anyway. here is some stuff.

* America under Obama still galloping towards fascism:

President Obama signs Executive Order allowing for control over all US resources.

On March 16th, President Obama signed a new Executive Order which expands upon a prior order issued in 1950 for Disaster Preparedness, and gives the office of the President complete control over all the resources in the United States in times of war or emergency.

The National Defense Resources Preparedness order gives the Executive Branch the power to control and allocate energy, production, transportation, food, and even water resources by decree under the auspices of national defense and national security.  The order is not limited to wartime implementation, as one of the order’s functions includes the command and control of resources in peacetime determination.

Between that and the NDAA stuff (By signing into law the NDAA, the president has awarded the military extraordinary powers to detain US citizens without trial.) there’s not much left. They can lock you up and take anything they want and tell you to do whatever they want, and it is all legal.

It is a sadly tired comparison, but seriously, that is a definition of totalitarian dictatorship.

(Seriously, the fact that these two have gone through under Obama – this most recent as an executive order – really overshadows anything positive he may have achieved.)

Bye, America.

(By the way, is this news to you?)

* Amazing article about the importance of libraries. Actually, it is a really long comment on a post. But it is exceptional.

* Fascinating guess at how China will develop: along Nordic socialist lines.

* The heart has consciousness. Mostly posting as a reminder to myself to read that.

* Cool post-apocalyptic short film: concept ruin

First, quite a bit of webby stuff:

An opensource decentralised darknet p2p is here, now: retroshare. This is probably important.

Who is tracking you online? Collusion for Mozilla shows you.

Found in this long but interesting article about advertising and privacy online.

the top 25 viral news sources on twitter and facebook.

Thinky stuff:

Six animations teaching logical thinking to kids. And adults.

free ebook: the future we deserve. 100 essays on the future.

Obama, explained. Epic article analysing Obama’s performance and psyche.

Other stuff:

New evidence suggests climate change wiped out the neanderthals, not conflict with humans.

Wade Davis continues to be jaw-droppingly awesome. (photo of his writing work-space)

Anonymous, for what it is worth, declared war on the US government.. One of those things that seems like I should have heard of it already, even if it is just rhetoric.

The aftermath of moving, and The Hobbit, have eaten my life for the past few weeks. I haven’t really been info-trawling. Here are a handful of things that have popped up.

* Really fascinating interview about the creation of the computer by the same folks that created the nuclear bomb, and the biology of our machine future.

Besides obvious ones like computer viruses, we have large, slow-moving megafauna like operating systems and now millions of fast-moving apps, almost like microbes. Recently we’ve seen enormous conglomerations of code creeping up on us, these giant, multicellular, metazoan-level code-organisms like Facebook or Amazon. All these species form a digital universe.

* How your cat is making you crazy: Bizarre but brilliant read on a bacterial organism secreted by cats which has demonstrable (and surprisingly large) effects on humans; an interesting parallel to this old post about mind altering parasites.

* Meanwhile: 5 Kinds of Fungus Discovered to be Capable of Farming Animals!

* One of those things that should get more eyeballs on it. “The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis” So many juicy quotes.

“At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

* This summary of US/general contempt for NZ’s geopolitical importance from the Stratfor leaks is pretty funny. Sort of.

When it comes to geopolitical importance it doesn’t get much fucking lower than New Zealand

Yup. May find the time to read online a little more this week.

This week the theme really seems to be content worth spreading; some serious high grade amazing coming below. Take the time to explore it.

First, we catch up with some best-of collections of last year, with a focus on things that should be more widely known.

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- Project Censored’s top 25 under-reported news stories of 2011 and 2012. Always worth catching up with.

- Global Voices 20 most read stories of 2011.

(For those who aren’t familiar with them:

Global Voices is a community of more than 500 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.)

- Huffington Posts lists the 18 best TED talks of 2011. Some interesting stuff in there.

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Now three really interesting and inspiring ones:

Building sustainable community – literally:

The Open Source Ecology project applies open source principles to creating tools capable of building sustainable communities using recycled and scrap materials.

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) would lower entry into farming, building and manufacturing.

It’s perhaps best explained as Lego-like construction tools, which can be used to create entire economies. This sort of technology can be used in urban redevelopment or in the developing world.

The technology is a inexpensive, DIY, high-performance platform that enables the creation of 50 different industrial machines it would take to build a small, sustainable civilisation with modern comforts.

This seriously sounds six shades of awesome.

Here is a 2011 TED talk by the founder.

This is the free contents of their DVD explaining what they are on.

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Fascinating Guardian opinion piece linking personal debt, national debt, and banks creating money out of nothing: Yes, defaulting on debts is an option.

What really got me was this bit:

After a bit of research, I realised the debt collectors buy debts for less than 10p in the pound, after the bank writes the debt off. I also found out that under the Bills of Exchange Act 1882, the debt collector is actually paying off our debt when they buy it. I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed.

Now, this is from England, so the same may not apply here, but that is still really interesting.

The guy’s site is Getoutofdebtfree.org. Definitely seems content worth spreading. Spreading memes along the lines that “money created out of nothing really doesn’t exist, so why pay it back with real money?” gets us closer to the actual state of things: “money only exists since we believe in it.” Which is probably still too drastic for most people to face up to.

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Introducting Yoxi:

At Yoxi, we search for amazing people who work hard to change the world, and we connect them to new opportunities by telling their stories in the most creative, compelling ways. We call these people Social Innovation Rockstars (SIRs) because they are original thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and fearless leaders who care about creating lasting social value. The world needs them to have more visibility and influence, so we do our part by helping them reach a mainstream audience. When a movement for social innovation becomes part of pop culture, we can make a real difference.

Basically, they want to hack culture and make it about awesome stuff instead of braindead stuff. (If this seems pie-in-the-sky, Yoxi’s founder brought you American Idol.)

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And a couple to make you think about the nature of reality a touch.

Technoccult interview with Douglas Rushkoff. Most interesting to me was him talking about balancing engaging with magic as a path with real world concerns (house, wife, kid). Fascinating as a metaphor in general for anyone getting older.

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Another entry in the Jodorowsky is so cool stakes: Alejandro Jodorowsky leads group of 3000 in Psychomagic ritual for casualties of the War on Drugs in Mexico. Yup.

The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to “heal” the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls.

(Context on Mexican drug violence: Mexico Violence Threatens All Sectors of Civil Society)

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?)

It has arrived in the form of bitcoin.

If you can begin to grasp the implications of an untraceable, untaxable, global, uncontrollable-by-governments currency, you ought to know about this.
Moreso if you can’t.