Another Mumford Reading Excerpt: If The Sleepers Awaken

The following excerpt is the final part of Chapter Fourteen: The New Organum, with the previous excerpt being the first. If you are short of good reading material and really want to get to the root of our many interrelated crises then this is a great place to start, in fact this is probably the single-most important work I have read thus far that sufficiently explores our crisis of consciousness. In that I am nearing the end of the second volume of The Myth of the Machine this will likely be the last excerpt. 

Here are the previous excerpts from The Myth of the Machine, again as far as I know these are the only excerpts to be found on all of the web:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/07/another-mumford-reading-excerpt-new.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-mumford-reading-excerpt.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-excerpt-lewis-mumford-myth-of.html

Again, I apologize if there are errors, as I am reproducing this word for word directly from the book. 

Chapter 14: The New Organum

6: IF THE SLEEPERS AWAKEN

The stoppages and breakdowns that have occurred have a certain potential educational value, for they disclose the susceptibility of the whole system to human intervention, if only of a negative kind. Disobedience is the infant's first step toward autonomy, and even infantile destruction may temporarily awaken confidence in the individual's capacity to change his environment. But the well publicized devastations of a world war or the threat of greater nuclear catastrophes still did not shock mankind into taking sufficient steps for its own self-protection: witness the present pitiful substitute for a responsible world organization, the United Nations - purposely crippled in advance by the 'Great Powers'.

The realization that the entire system is now breaking down might have come about more swiftly if the professional bodies that should have been monitoring our technology - the engineers, the biologists, the physicians - had not so completely identified themselves with the power system's objectives. So until lately they have been criminally negligent in anticipating or even reporting what has actually been taking place - and in the case of nuclear fallout and nuclear wastes have often deliberately, in conformity to the 'national policy', minimized their dangers.

Not that occasional warning voices were absent, even at an early date: I have already cited the examples of Henry Adams and Frederick Soddy, to say nothing of H. G. Wells. But when an eminent British engineer, Sir Alfred Ewing, suggested in 1933 that there might well be a moratorium on invention, in order to assimilate and integrate the existing mass of inventions and evaluate further proposals, he was hooted as a crank, demanding a foolish and impossible sacrifice.

Few of Ewing's contemporaries realized then that a purely mechanical system whose processes can neither be retarded nor redirected nor halted, that has no internal mechanism for warning of defects or correcting them (feedback), and that can only be accelerated is, as we have all too late found out, a menace to mankind. Yet anyone familiar with the history of inventions would know that great industrial corporations have frequently bought up patents - like the early one for an automatic telephone system - in order to suppress them, or have diverted research from areas where new inventions might threaten capital investment or reduce inordinate profits. (Note the studious indifference to developing more efficient accumulators essential to the electric motor car and the use of windpower.) There was nothing unrealistic in Ewing's proposal - except the hope that it might be carried out by those still spellbound by the myth of the machine. Had Ewing's warning been generally heeded, the world would now be a healthier and safer place.

During the past three decades the involuntary failures of the power system have become increasingly lethal, and they have been occurring with a frequency and a force that corresponds to the dynamism of the individual parts. As these brownouts and blackouts and breakdowns continue to occur, with disastrous consequences to both the habitat and the human population, such a change may take place as was noted in London during the Blitz, a comparable ordeal. At that time psychiatrists observed that their anxious, neurotic patients, when confronted with a real danger they could neither evade in fantasy nor flee from, began to function as competent human beings, able at last to face up to their difficulties.

The situation that mankind now faces collectively shows a certain resemblance to that confronted by the individual in the midst of a neurosis. Before his disturbance comes into the open various events, unrecognized by the patient, have paved the way for his illness. But as long as he is able to conceal his condition from himself and perform his daily tasks without exhibiting suicidal depression or uncontrollable  hostility to those around him, he may be unwilling to consult a physician, or re-examine his life. the first step toward recognizing his state and seeking help usually begins with a visible collapse, bodily or mental, often both.

At this point the method of psychoanalysis offers a clue that may be of value in handling the present collective breakdown: this lies in the effort to trace present symptoms back to earlier mishaps or injuries, deeply buried in the psyche, difficult to uncover, which deflected the organism from its normal path of growth. By bringing such traumas into consciousness , the patient may better understand his own nature and acquire insight into the conditions under which he can, through is own efforts, make the most of the potentialities that his personal life and his culture offer him.

The unbaring of man's historic past during the last two centuries may well prove a more important contribution to man's survival than all his other scientific knowledge. This reclamation of human history will involve, as Erich Neumann has emphasized, absorbing into man's conscious existence the evils that, if unidentified and unrecognized, will otherwise continue to thwart him. Our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities.

The realization that the physical breakdowns and subjective demoralizations of Western civilization derive from the same ideological failures is now at last taking hold. But for a dynamic response to this situation, something like a universal awakening sufficient to produce an internal readiness for a profounder transformation, must take place. Such a reaction, one must honestly confess, has never yet occurred in history solely as a result of rational thinking and educational indoctrination: nor is it likely to occur in this way now - at least within the narrow time limits one must allow, if greater breakdowns and demoralizations are to be circumvented.

Half a century ago H. G. Wells observed, correctly enough, that mankind faced a race between education and catastrophe. But what he failed to recognize was that something like catastrophe has become the condition for an effective education. This might seem like a dismal and hopeless conclusion, were it not for the fact that the power system, through its own overwhelming achievements, has proved expert in creating breakdowns and catastrophes.

Today's technological breakdowns are no less ominous that the growing resistance of the personnel to performing the unrewarding labor necessary to keep the system in operation: but they may bring compensatory reactions, for the give the human personality a chance to function. This stunningly took place during the Northeast power breakdown of November 1965. Suddenly, as in E. M. Forster's fable, The Machine Stops. Millions of people, caught without either power or light, immobilized in railroad trains, subways, skyscraper elevators, moved spontaneously into action, without waiting for the system to recover or for orders to come from above. "While the city of bricks and mortar was dead", 'The New Yorker' reported, "the people were more alive than ever".

For many this stoppage proved an exhilarating experience: autos, which can function by their own power and light, kept moving: citizens supplemented policemen in directing traffic: trucks took on passengers: strangers helped one another: people found that their legs would transport them efficiently when wheels failed: one set of young men and women gaily formed a procession, carrying candles, chanting in mock solemnity, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing!" All the latent human powers that a perfect, smooth-running mechanical organization suppresses began to function again. What seemed a calamity turned into an opportunity: when the machine stopped, life recovered. The kind of self-confidence and self-reliance generated by such an experience is what is needed to cut the power complex down to human size, and bring it under control. "Let man take over!"

Admittedly the partial disasters of war, though no longer locally limited, had through the ages grown too familiar to bring about a sufficient reaction. During the last decade, fortunately, there has been a sudden, quiet unpredictable awakening to prospects of a total catastrophe. The unrestricted increase in population, the over-exploitation of megatechnical inventions, the inordinate wastages of compulsory consumption, and the consequent deterioration of the environment through wholesale pollution, poisoning, bulldozing, to say nothing of the more irremediable waste products of atomic energy, have at last begun to create the reaction needed to overcome them.

This awakening has become planet-wide. The experiences of congestion, environmental degradation, and human demoralization now fall within the compass of everyone's daily life. Even in the open country, small communities are now forced to take political action against canny enterprisers seeking to dump wastes from distant cities in rural areas that already have difficulties enough in coping with their own rubbish and sewage. The extent of the approaching catastrophe, its visible nearness, and its dire inevitability unless counter-measures are rapidly taken, have done far more than the vivid prospects of sudden nuclear extinction to bring on a sufficient psychological response. In this prospect, the swifter the degradation, the more likely effective measures against it will be sought.

Yet even granting that, in the first shock of realizing mankind's plight, hitherto unthinkable political measures may be proposed, the question remains whether the massive human participation needed will actually occur. Any program sufficient to reverse the destructive success of technological affluence will demand not merely drastic restrictions; it will demand economic and social changes directed toward producing goods and services, modes of work and education and recreation, profoundly different from those offered by the power complex.

Reformers who would treat the campaign against environmental and human degradation solely in terms of improved technological facilities, like the reduction of gasoline exhaust in motor cars, see only a small part of the problem. Nothing less that a profound re-orientation of our vaunted technological 'way of life' will save this planet from becoming a lifeless desert. And without such a wide-ranging preliminary alteration of personal desires, habits, and ideals the necessary physical measures for mankind's protection - to say nothing of its further development - cannot conceivable be carried out.

On this matter, one dare not become over-optimistic even though the first stir of a human awakening seems actually to be taking place. The unwillingness of millions of cigarette smokers to free themselves from their addiction to cigarettes despite the incontestable evidence of the probable consequences in lung cancer, gives a hint of the difficulties we shall face in redeeming the planet - and ourselves - for life. Our present addiction to private motor transportation alone may prove equally hard to break until every traffic artery is permanently clogged and every city is ruined.

For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers. This order of change is as hard for most people to conceive as was the change from the classic power complex of Imperial Rome to that of Christianity, or, later, from supernatural medieval Christianity to the machine-modeled ideology of the seventeenth century. But such changes have repeatedly occurred all through history; and under catastrophic pressure they may occur again. Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

Developmental Fluoride Neurotoxicity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Source: http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.1104912

Background: Although fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in animal models and acute fluoride poisoning causes neurotoxicity in adults, very little is known of its effects on children’s neurodevelopment.

Objective: We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies to investigate the effects of increased fluoride exposure and delayed neurobehavioral development.

Methods: We searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, Water Resources Abstracts, and TOXNET databases through 2011 for eligible studies. We also searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, as many studies on fluoride neurotoxicity have been published in Chinese journals only. In total, we identified 27 eligible epidemiological studies with high and reference exposures, endpoints of IQ scores or related cognitive function measures with means and variances for the two exposure groups. We estimated the standardized mean difference (SMD) between exposed and reference groups across all studies using random effects models. We conducted sensitivity analyses restricted to studies using the same outcome assessment and having drinking water fluoride as the only exposure. Cochran test for heterogeneity between studies, Begg’s funnel plot and Egger test to assess publication bias were performed. Meta-regressions to explore sources of variation in mean differences among the studies were conducted.

Results: The standardized weighted mean difference in IQ score between exposed and reference populations was -0.45 (95% CI -0.56 to -0.35) using a random-effects model. Thus, children in high fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low fluoride areas. Subgroup and sensitivity analyses also indicated inverse associations, although the substantial heterogeneity did not appear to decrease.

Conclusions: The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment. Future research should include detailed individual-level information on prenatal exposure, neurobehavioral performance, and covariates for adjustment.

Massacres, Droughts, and a Society Unraveling

Source: http://collapsenet.com/free-resources/collapsenet-public-access/item/8673-massacres-droughts-and-a-society-unraveling

By Carolyn Baker

Asking the proper question is the central act of transformation.

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes~

This has not been a good year for Colorado. My home state, like so many others in America, has been besieged by drought and scorching heat, culminating last month in the High Park fire west of Ft. Collins which burned well over 200 square miles and this month, the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs which destroyed well over 350 homes in an area of 5 square miles. From the perspective of other states, Colorado had burned up, and needless to say, its tourism industry took a huge, perhaps fatal, body blow. Throughout the state one can still sense an aura of terror that one’s town or neighborhood might be next, and many people have preventively packed their cars with valuables just in case a fire might break out and they would be forced to evacuate. And as Coloradans were choking on residual smoke from the fires, Governor John Hickenlooper came forth to reassure the nation and the state that only a small portion of the state had been affected by the fires and that Colorado was still a beautiful vacation venue.

Fortunately, earlier this month,Colorado experienced nearly three days of substantial rains, which despite the mudslides and erosion they produced, were a welcome respite from the crackling vegetation and brutal heat.

Then in the wee hours of Friday, July 20, James Holmes of Denver allegedly walked into a movie theater in Aurora and opened fire on the audience—a mass execution that to date has left 12 dead and 71 people wounded. Many of the wounded are in critical condition, thus increasing the possibility that the death toll may rise.  Once again, Governor Hickenlooper came forth to do damage control and declare that Aurora is a safe city and that it will “come back stronger than ever.”

Meanwhile, CNN and what suddenly became 24-hour local news reports repeatedly mentioned the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 and the Tucson massacre of 2011 in which Gerald Loughner opened fire at a shopping mall where Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords was speaking, killing 6 people and injuring 14. Immediately, such conversations deteriorated into debates about gun control—as if gun control were the core issue of this madness. As a nation with massive unemployment and underemployment, its citizens battered by drought, foreclosures, bankruptcies, lack of health insurance, rotting infrastructure, and ghastly student loan debt looks on, we sense that the conversation will not venture into deeper waters anytime soon.

Coloradois in profound trauma, and so is a nation unraveling. In such a milieu, people rarely ask the proper questions, but as my fellow-Coloradan, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes reminds us, “Asking the proper question is the central act of transformation.”

The Proper Question(s)

Perhaps the most obvious one is: What is causing people, particularly young males of college age, who are or have been students, to pick up guns and perform mass executions of people they don’t even know? I do not pretend to hold all of the answers to this question, but a few issues cry out for our attention.

The most fundamental reality pertaining to youth in their twenties in this nation is that they have virtually no future. Some are already asking if the Aurora massacre is related to the youth unemployment crisis. My generation and those before mine have handed the millennials an enormous load of garbage. Even if they are fortunate enough to have no student loan debt, the perennial maxim of their parents’ generation, “If you don’t get a college degree, you’ll end up flipping burgers” rings in their ears—as they stand there, with or without college degrees, yes, flipping burgers. Or in the case of the many homeless college students in this country, flipping burgers could seem like a dramatic advance in the direction of upward mobility.

But certainly, young people in their twenties are not the only ones enraged. The entire culture is enraged, but impetuous, troubled young men are often driven to act out their rage in ways that the masses quietly bury or medicate.

Yet a more accurate and penetrating question must be asked:  What in the paradigm of industrial civilization causes not only such grizzly violence of epic and epidemic proportions, but what in that paradigm causes us to so blatantly and blithely ignore the global warming-generated drought that is shriveling at least one third of this country? Are the two issues related?

To begin to address these questions, we must notice a few very basic assumptions inherent in the paradigm. Some of these are:

• We are separated from the earth and each other.
• Humans are superior to the earth community.
• The earth is here for our use and exploitation.
• There’s not enough of earth’s resources, so we must wage war for them.
• Because we are superior to all other beings on earth, we can always perfect a new technology that will assure the infinite growth model and the perpetuation of our profligate lifestyle.

I invite the reader to contemplate each of these, along with their ramifications. What happens when humans live by these maxims? What is the ultimate outcome? Who do they become, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?

An Indigenous Perspective 

In the cosmology of the Dagara Tribe of West Africa, the element of fire is one of five essential elements which allow the continuation of life on earth. Both people and cultures can be characterized by fire which is an element that connects with the ancestors. Experienced in proper proportion with the other elements, water, nature, earth, and mineral, fire can be a gentle flame that keeps the community warmly aware of its relationship with the ancestors. However, when fire dominates a person or a culture, both can become warlike. Fire propels people and cultures into action, but too much fire makes for frantic, impatient, behavior and people obsessed with progress and moving forward. In fact, too much fire can catapult people and cultures headlong into destruction.

And what is the antidote to fire? Naturally, water. Fire people and cultures must be tempered by the waters of grief. Water calms and slows things down. A culture obsessed with infinite growth is propelled by fire and needs to decrease its velocity, bathe in its own tears, and gain perspective about what really matters. Water opens the heart and allows emotion to come forth and be honored.

Thus, in these tragic collective scenarios of terrorism and mass execution, the most helpful intervention is not endless rhetoric about how the community will “come back stronger than ever” or how it will “put this behind us” and “get back to normal.” Rather, there must be a profound recognition of the horror and a willingness to stop “dead in one’s tracks” as the saying goes, and forsake the pretence that such carnage can ever be put behind anyone or that there is a normal to return to. In addition to the myriad prayer meetings being conducted at the crime scene in Aurora, endless memorials should be created and people encouraged to weep, wail, and mourn for hours and days upon end. Bring in the drums, the flutes, the musicians and mystics who will support people in grieving until the last tear in their bodies has been shed. Myriad rituals could be conducted not only in the place where 71 people were brutally shot, but throughout the charred forests where fires have ravaged the landscape.

The Dagara people might tell us that we have too much fire in our culture and that staggering droughts, blazing infernos, and eruptions of terrifying massacres are cries for help from ecosystems aching for the water of our tears.

Of “Dark Knights” And Shadows 

Has anyone really noticed the title of the movie in which the carnage occurred—“The Dark Knight Rises”? Fellow Coloradan, David Sirota, noted in his July 18 Salon article, “Batman Hates The 99 Percent,” that “The Dark Night” demonizes the Occupy movement.  Director Christopher Nolan adamantly denies this theory, but for me, the significance of the “Dark Knight (or night)” motif feels even more primal. As a culture, we seem to be drawn to darkness, yet cannot discern it all around us. Medicating our way through the darkness of a culture unraveling—soothing ourselves with shopping and mind-altering substances and behaviors, we name the darkness “light” and allow ourselves to be victimized by the arch-villain, The Joker, with whom the alleged Aurora shooter identified.

In a culture of “white, bright, and light,” we are commanded to avoid the darkness like the plague, and when it engulfs us as it did the victims of Aurora’s “darkest night,” we can’t wait to “put it behind us” and “get back to normal.” Yet something in us gravitates to darkness because darkness is one-half of who we are. We gestated in darkness for nine months, and at the end of our days, to darkness we will return, no matter how many white lights we encounter in our journey off this planet. Darkness is a place of rest, but also a place of very challenging psycho-spiritual work. In the darkness is where we encounter the deeper Self, the sacred, the mystery. In the darkness live the ghosts of our wounding as human beings living in a culture that is killing the planet and each of us. And residing next to each wound is a gift—a possibility, a talent, a skill, a potential that awaits our discovery. Yet in order to access it, we must, as individuals and as a culture, be willing to confront the Shadow—all those villainous qualities we insist are not us because “we are good and decent human beings,” and “this is the greatest country in the world.”

Denial And The Next Chapter 

In the latest from John Michael Greer in his piece “The Far Side Of Denial,” at the Archdruid Report, he notes Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief which are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Greer applies this model to one’s awakening to peak oil and the collapse of industrial civilization, and of course, it can certainly be applied in traumatic events such as the Aurora, Colorado massacre. The only issue I would take with Greer’s piece is that he believes civilization is just now collectively entering the stage of denial. I believe civilization has been in this stage since its inception, its denial exacerbating with every passing day in current time.

Greer concludes his blogpost with:

The pundits and corporate flacks who have, for all practical purposes, gone barking mad about the world’s energy supply—I really don’t think any less forceful phrasing reflects the nature of these strident claims that scraping the bottom of the barrel, via fracking or otherwise, ought to be treated as proof that the barrel’s still full—are by and large associated with the two economic sectors, finance and petroleum, that are going to be clobbered first and hardest as the reality of peak oil sets in. The elephant’s in their living rooms; that’s why their shrill denials that elephants exist can be heard so clearly all through the neighborhood.  As the elephant roams a little more widely, I suspect that the same frantic tone will travel with it, until finally we find ourselves on the far side of denial and the next phase starts.

Greer then finishes with this gut-punching statement:

That phase, for those who haven’t kept track, is anger. It’s once that stage arrives in force that the explosion will follow.

Again, I must argue that we have been in the anger phase for quite some time, and nothing confirms this more than the carnage of Virginia Tech,Tucson, and Aurora.

Debates about gun control are, pardon the pun, band aids for bullet wounds. In the first place, just as the powers that be will never legalize drugs and forsake the dizzying profits involved in drug trafficking, they will certainly not curtail a very lucrative firearms industry which is a necessary underpinning of international drug trafficking. Moreover, even if all firearms vanished overnight, enraged and deranged humans would still find ways to destroy one another.

Training In Trauma Management

In the anger phase of societal unraveling, we must not only be aware of its perils but prepare ourselves with great intention to navigate it. One of the first issues we must grapple with is the reality of trauma. Increasing dissolution of the fabric of the culture is by definition traumatic for those who rely on it for basic necessities, identity, lifestyle, distraction, and sense of well being. As those of us who have been writing about the collapse of industrial civilization for some time have repeatedly asserted, the less aware of impending collapse individuals are, the more traumatic it will be for them.  Denial is wearing very thin in many parts of this nation, and when the veneer cracks, we must be prepared for outbreaks of violence.

The issue then is: How will we manage our own trauma and the trauma of those with whom we may experience unwanted encounters?

I recommend three of many options for training in trauma management:

• Somatic Experiencing, a modality designed by psychologist, Peter Levine
• Trauma First Aide, which educates and trains individuals, groups and communities in order to reduce and prevent the long term effects of acute traumatic stress reactions.
• Trauma Resource Institute, which seeks to create resiliency-informed and trauma-informed individuals and communities.

In addition, I suggest checking out the work of Michael Meade of Mosaic Voices. Meade works closely with at-risk youth and returning combat veterans, using drumming, storytelling, poetry, and ritual to facilitate healing from trauma and access to the inner gifts that bring a stable, meaningful life.

The “heat” is on in this long, hot summer of fire. We can expect skyrocketing food prices as a result of droughts, and we can expect more eruptions of rage in a culture unraveling from the inside out. While many wise and aware individuals and communities are planting gardens, taking Permaculture classes, moving off the grid, working to redesign their cities and local venues, creating alternative currencies, investing in local food and local economies, home schooling their kids, raising chickens and reskilling themselves superbly, it would be tragically naïve to believe that we will somehow “tiptoe through the tulips” of seamless and painless transition to a new paradigm and a new milieu.

Now is the time to ask the proper questions. Now is the time to mourn, to allow the waters of grief to flow from our eyes and hearts and water the scorched earth. Now is the time to be taught by the trauma that will not go away. May we become more resilient because of it and be re-made by it. May we know, as Peter Levine states that:  “Trauma can be hell on earth; transformed, it is a divine gift.”

Or in the words of the contemporary female mystic, Rashani:

There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken,

A shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy.

And a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space, too vast for words through which

We pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are

Sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges

Cut the heart as we break open to the place inside that is

Unbreakable and whole,

While learning to sing.

VA Must Disclose Documents to MK-ULTRA Victims

Source: http://cryptogon.com/

July 24th, 2012

Via: Courthouse News Service:

Veterans won another court order requiring the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to hand over more documents about its Cold War-era drug experiments on thousands of Vietnam veterans.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in Oakland, Calif., said the documents requested were “squarely relevant” to the claim that the government failed to adequately notify veterans of the chemicals they were exposed to and what that exposure might do to their health.

The Army and the CIA, with the help of Nazi scientists, used at least 7,800 veterans as human guinea pigs for testing the effects of up to 400 types of drugs and chemicals, including mescaline, LSD, amphetamines, barbituates, mustard gas and nerve agents, the Vietnam Veterans of America and individual soldiers claim in a 2009 class action.

The government covered up the true nature of its experiments, which began in the 1950s under code names such as “Bluebird,” “Artichoke” and “MKUltra.”

In “Project Paperclip,” the Army and CIA allegedly recruited Nazi scientists to help test various psychochemicals and develop a new truth serum using its own veterans as test subjects.

“Over half of these Nazi recruits had been members of the SS or Nazi Party,” according to the class action. “The ‘Paperclip’ name was chosen because so many of the employment applications were clipped to immigration papers.”

Veterans say the government was trying to develop and test substances that could trigger mind control, confusion, euphoria, altered personality, unconsciousness, physical paralysis, illogical thinking and mania, among other effects.

The experiments in Army compounds at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., left many veterans with debilitating health problems for decades. Veterans say the government has since refused to provide proper medical care.

Restoring the Trivium

Another excellent C-Realm podcast that explores Academia in its present incarnation, its true purpose, and how one can develop independent thought and critical thinking through self-directed learning. I didn't enter the public school system until I was 7, before which time I was home-schooled by a foster family, with emphasis placed on critical thinking, not hive mind consumer slave consciousness, and before that I was homeless, a learning experience in itself. And luckily Sodium Fluoride was not added to Hawaii's public water supply until the mid 90's. More on that here.  

KMO welcomes Jan Irvan, host of the Gnostic Media Podcast, and Jarett Sanchez, host of The Next Step Podcast, back to the C-Realm to discuss the Trivium, the bedrock of classical liberal arts education which prepares young minds to be effective critical thinkers and self-directed learners. Jarett helps KMO summarize an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers about how the Trivium mirrors and takes advantage of the stages of childhood cognitive development, and Jan describes why the Trivium is now reserved for elites and systematically denied to the children of the proletariat in compulsory public schooling as a means of social control. Music by ALLFLAWS.

 Download (right click, "save as")

Another Mumford Reading Excerpt: The New Organum

I am still making my way through Vol. 2 of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine, it is going slower than normal as I am also reading and highly recommend:

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Thy Will Be done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennet 

Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton 

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

The following is only the first section of chapter 14, roughly 6 pages. The entire chapter is about 40 pages long, far too long to digest in blog format, not that I would actually sit here and type out 40 pages. I apologize if there are errors, as there are no sources of what could be considered  Lewis Mumford's most important work on the web. I am transcribing this directly from print, for previous Myth of the Machine reading excerpts see:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-mumford-reading-excerpt.html

From  The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine: Vol. II

Chapter Fourteen: The New Organum
1: Plants , Mammals, And Man

In the opening pages of this book we followed the two parallel paths of exploration that beckoned modern man: the exploration of the earth, hitherto never encompassed as a whole, and the exploration of the skies, and of all the physical phenomena, cosmic and earthbound, that could be interpreted and controlled without direct reference to man's own biological and cultural antecedents. We saw how the period of exploration and colonization gave the primal vitalities of Western man fresh outlets, at the very moment that the new mechanical order began to curb and contain them more completely than ever.

I propose here to emphasize, not only the heavy debt that modern technology has owed from the very start to terrestrial exploration, but how this exploration in turn laid the basis for a change that is only beginning to pass from the initial phase of ideation, incarnation, and rational formulation into one widely organizing and incorporating a new mode of life , radically different from that of the power system. The human insufficiency of that system has grown in direct proportion with its technical efficiency, while its present threat to all organic life on this planet turns out to be the ultimate irony of its unqualified successes in mastering all the forces of nature - except those demonic and irrational forces within man which have unbalanced the technological mind.

Terrestrial exploration, plainly, began a gigantic revolution which was both a quantitative and a qualitative one. It established contacts between the entire population of the planet, and brought about an increase in energy resources and a circulation of goods, plants, peoples and ideas on a global basis, breaking down adaptations, like that of the Negroid races to tropical Africa, that had taken hundreds of thousands of years to effect. The transplantation of the Negro from the continent to which he had so completely adapted himself, and the reverse transplantation of the European to the Americas and to Africa, were only the first of a series of wanton displacements in which the profit and convenience of the governing groups outstripped both biological knowledge and social prudence. Never was the ecological balance of nature, and even more the integrity of cultures, so violently upset as during the last two centuries.

By now this exploration has reached a natural terminus: the last frontier is closed. The landing of the first two astronauts on the moon was not the beginning of a new age of cosmic exploration but the end. The scientific technological revolution that began in the sixteenth century therewith reached its appropriately sterile terminus: a satellite as uninhabitable as the earth itself will all too soon become - unless by a massive expenditure of imagination and courageous political effor the peoples of the world challenge the age-old power complex . Without a counter-movement to slow down or reverse these automatic processes mankind comes closer, year by year, to what is in more than one sense a dead end.

Though the effect of the terrestrial exploration in offsetting the constraints  of technical invention and organization was only temporary, it actually laid the foundations for a new world order: one which would alter the original mechanical world picture by superimposing upon it a more complex model derived, not from matter and energy in their pre-organic states, but from the living organism. The geographic frontier is now closed, but a less superficial exploration is taking place. This is an exploration in time as well as space, and into subjective as well as objective phenomena. This new exploration deals not with cause-and-effect alone, but with patterns of almost inextricable and indescribable complexity, flowing through time and constantly interacting. In one field after another this organic world picture is already unfolding. In his Introduction to Darwin's 'Origin of Species', George Gaylord Simpson points to this approaching transformation. "The astronomical and physical revolutions were already well advanced in the early nineteenth century", he noted, "but the biological revolution, destined to change the world even more profoundly, was still to come."

Unfortunately this biological revolution has already been recognized and eagerly hailed by the exponents of the power system as the next step in one-sided technocratic control. Carried out on their own peculiar terms this revolution would lead, not to a fuller development of man but to his progress into a quite different kind of organism, or series of organisms, genetically transformed in the laboratory or modified in an artificial womb. Man in any recognizable historic sense would be thrown on the scrapheap. This series of changes would give the Power System, itself a segregated, time-abbreviated product of human intelligence, an authority that man, by the virtue of his own constitution, has always declined to give to Nature. To what rational end?

On this matter, a poet of our day has spoken wise and timely words: an admonition that might be specially directed to the priests of the megamachine, now sharpening their nano-needles, sot to say, in preparation for permanently altering the nature of man.

"Re-shaping life!" exclaimed Boris Pasternak in 'Dr. Zhivago'. "People who can say that have never understood a thing about life - they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat - however much they have seen or done. They look in it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processes by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself."

Happily for early man's development, his own mind seems to have made an even greater impression on him than the physical environment; and even in that environment he was more aware of the edibility of plants and the activities of birds and animals thane he was of purely physical manifestations of  nature, except when the occurred violently, as in storms, floods, and volcanic eruptions. Nature itself spoke to him as an animate being: in exhibiting malice or friendliness, stones might be lifelike, but organisms were not petrified. Even after Neolithic grinding and polishing had introduced people to regular industry the improved environment was mainly one belonging to living organisms, though copiously invaded by gods, demons, and sprites more lively than man dared to be.

Although systematic industry and enforced drudgery had been introduced by the early civilizations, the greater part of the human race largely escaped complete subservience to the power system. Under the prevailing hunting and agricultural economies, a good part of mankind remained dispersed in villages outside the province of the megamachine, never rising to the heights it achieved in reshaping the habitat or enlarging the mind, yet never sinking to its depths, except when under the calamitous external pressures of 'civilized' war.

Until our own day human culture as a whole  developed in an organic, subjectively modified environment, not in a sterile machine-made enclosure. In a confused unfocussed way, the criteria of life prevailed everywhere and man's own existence prospered or failed in so far as a balance favorable to life was preserved among all organisms. It is only in the worst degradation of ancient slavery - namely, in the working of underground mines - that human existence has been conceived as possible in an environment devoid of life.

Man lived in active partnership with plants and animals for whole geological periods before he fabricated machines. His mental involvement with the world of life began with the consciousness of his own existence. Many of his basic qualities he shares with other animals: prolonged sexual pairing and nurturing the young, social companionship and erotic delight, playfulness and joy. His deep love of life was fostered by finding himself in an environment prepared, not merely to maintain life with the requisite amount of physical nourishment, but to promote its unceasing self-transformation. On these matters, even the simplest organisms have something essential to teach us beyond the rang of our most sophisticated technology. If we were dependent for our instructions and material sustenance upon machines alone, the human race would long ago have died of malnutrition, boredom, and hopeless despair.

Remember Loren Eiseley's observation in 'The Immense Journey' about that turning point in organic development when the Age of Reptiles gave way to the age of Mammals, those warm-blooded beasts that suckled their young. He pointed out that the Age of Mammals was accompanies by an explosion of flowers; and that the reproductive system of the angiosperms was responsible, not only for covering the whole earth with a green carpet composed of many different species of grass (over four thousand) but for intensifying vital activity of every kind; since their nectars and pollens and seeds and fruits and succulent leaves dilated the senses, quickened the appetite, exhilarated the mind, and immensely increased the total food supply.

Not merely was this explosion of flowers a cunning device of reproduction, but the flowers themselves assumed a variety of forms and colors that in most cases cannot possibly be accounted for as having survival value in the struggle for existence. It may add to the attraction of a lily to have all its sexual organs displayed among teasingly open petals; but the huge success of so many compositae, like the daisy and goldenrod, with their insignificant florets, shows that biological prosperity might have been purchased without any such floral richness and inventiveness.

Efflorescence is an archetypal example of nature's untrammeled creativity; and the fact that floral beauty cannot be explained or justified on purely utilitarian grounds is precisely what makes this explosion so wonderful - and so typical of other life-processes. Biological creativity and the esthetic creativity that so often accompanies it exist for their own sake and transcend the organism's earlier limitations. If survival were all that mattered, life might have remained in the primal ooze or crept no further upward that the lichens. Though one may abstractly conceive a world with neither colors nor any richness of living structures, that muted world is not the actual world of life.

Long before man himself became conscious of beauty and desirous of cultivating it, beauty existed in an endless variety of forms in the flowering plants; and man's own nature was progressively altered, with his increasing sensitiveness to sight and touch and odor, through his further symbolic expression of beautiful form in his ornaments, his cosmetics, his costume, his painted and graven images: all by-products of his enriched social and sexual life. In this sense, we are all 'flower children'.

For at least twelve thousand years, possibly far longer, man's existence has depended upon the close symbiotic partnership between man and plants, rooted in thousands of small village communities spread over the entire earth. All the higher achievements of civilization have rested on this partnership, one devoted to the constructive improvement of the habitat and the loving and knowing care of plants: their selection, their nurture, their breeding, their enjoyment, in a routine of life that punctuated and heightened the delights of human sexuality. That culture, as Edgar Anderson has suggested, made some of its best discoveries in plant breeding by being equally concerned with the color, the odor, the taste, the flower and leaf pattern, and the nutritive qualities of plants - valuing them not only for food and medicine but for esthetic delight.

In our machine-dominated world, there are plenty of people working in scientific laboratories today who, though they may still call themselves biologists, have no intimate contact with this organic culture and no respect for its achievements. They have already begun to regulate the creative process in accordance with the market demands of the power complex. One of the latest triumphs in plant breeding, for example, has been to develop a variety of tomato which not merely grows to uniform size but ripens in quantity at the same time, in order that the crop may be garnered by an automatic picking and packing machine.

From such preconceptions flow further dreams of an even more tightly ordered world from which all more primitive or non-profitable species and varieties will be eliminated - even though primitive stocks remain essential for creative hybridization. Perhaps only the residual wildness left in man himself, still stirring in his dream life, will now save him from submission to such deadly conformity.

Admittedly, in the earlier stages of human development the relation between man and plants had been a one-sided one, not an effective relation of mutual aid. Though plants, birds, and insects have been man's active partners as well as his chief food for most of his history, he did little at first to modify the natural vegetation, still less to assist in the cultivation of favored plants. Man's attachment to the existing plant life was parasitic rather than symbiotic. But first by preservation and selection, and then by active cultivation, man found himself able, when the last glacial period ended, to make his own environment more habitable, more edible, and - what was no less important - more stimulating and lovable. In the very act of establishing a new role for plants, man both deepened his roots in the landscape and gave himself a new leisure and a new security. It was in the garden that man, thanks largely to woman's efforts, found himself completely at home: at peace, if only fleetingly and precariously, with the world around him.

The prolonged tending of plants began with the fruit and nut trees, the mango and the durian, the olive and walnut and palm, the orange, and not least, if Henry Bailey Stevens prove right, the apple. Here in orchard and garden, a world in which life prospered without inordinate effort or systematic carnage, man had his first glimpse perhaps of paradise, for paradise is only the original Persian name for a walled garden.

Significantly, it was in another garden, according to fable, the Garden of Eden, that man, by eating an apple, lost the innocence of animals and gained the consciousness of good and evil, of life and death. All those selective discriminations that aim to promote life and to reduce  or countermand the forces that would diminish it must be alert to the presence of evil in its many forms, from fixation to wanton violence and destruction. Though Walt Whitman might, in 'Song of Myself', praise the innocence of animals, he was sufficiently are of the realities of human existence to proclaim that he was the poet of evil as well as the poet of good - and he knew the difference.

The capacity for growth, exuberant expression, and transcendence, symbolized esthetically as well as sexually by the flowering plants - this is the primal gift of life; and in man it flourishes best when living creatures and equally living symbols are constantly present, to stir his imagination and encourage him in further acts of expression both in the mind and in his daily performances of life-sustaining work and human nurture. Love begets love as life begets life; and eventually every part of the environment should be open to this response even if, under the command of love, one sometimes serves it best by withdrawing and allowing it, like a redwood forest or an ancient monument, to remain itself, simply mirrored in man's mind, without more than the faintest sign of man's own presence. A day without such contacts and emotional stirrings - responses to the perfume of a flower or an herb, to the flight or the song of a bird, to the flash of a human smile or the warm touch of a human hand - that is, a day such as millions spend in factories, in offices, on the highway, is a day empty of organic contents and human rewards.

There are no mechanical or electronic or chemical substitutes for whole living organisms, though one may have frequent need for symbolic enlargements and re-enforcements of actual experience. To be condemned for any length of time to a devitalized megalopolitan habitat, in which human beings are isolated not merely from each other but from all other organisms, and may even be forbidden by housing regulations to keep a dog or a cat for company, is to unlearn and discard all the lessons learned in cooperation by living organisms during some three billion years on earth - and by man, especially, during the last hundred thousand years. "we live by helping one another", a soldier in combat wrote. This applies to all creatures at all times; and it holds not only for survival but for further human development.

For man to restrict his social activities and his personal fulfillments solely to those that conform to external megatechnic requirements would be a form of collective suicide - or more accurately biocide - is in fact taking place before our eyes. Our elaborate mechanical equipment may be a useful supplement to organic existence: but it is not, except in grave emergencies - as with a mechanical kidney - an acceptable permanent alternative. It is from the organic world in its entirety, not merely from a swollen fragment of man's mind, his technique for handling abstract symbols, that the materials for further development are to be drawn. Once the new organic world picture becomes intelligible and acceptable, the ancient 'myth of the machine', from which our compulsive technocratic errors and misdirections are largely derived, will no longer keep its grip on modern man.

Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

Its been a while now since I finished reading Kaczynski's Technological Slavery, and I meant to do a blog article on it earlier. Rather than get into a personal review I am just using one from amazon.com that I completely agree with and found adequate in briefly summarizing this critically important work. Highly recommended.

Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

81 of 88 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 starsThe Definitive Beach Book for the Oil-Gushing Summer of 2010

By Lydia L. Eccles - See all my reviews

Technological Slavery starts off with "Industrial Society and It's Future", the notorious 35,000-word essay that was published in the New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995 in accordance with a demand letter from "FC" which promised to cease its 17 year anti-technology bombing campaign in exchange for verbatim publication of the Manifesto in a major newspaper. The Manifesto begins, "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" and goes on to call for revolution against the industrial-technological system. Although he eluded the FBI for 17 years, Ted Kaczynski was arrested in April 3, 1996 after his brother read the Manifesto and tipped off the UNABOM task force. Kaczynski is now serving a life sentence in the Federal Supermax in Florence, Colorado.

It's good to reread the Unabomber Manifesto fifteen years later --during the BP catastrophe, it's downright therapeutic-- and to reflect on how many of Kaczynski's predictions about the evolving technological system are coming true (I'm thinking especially of the intensity of genetic engineering efforts and the increasing power of the psychiatric drugging/mood management industry). During these 15 years global warming caused by the Industrial Revolution has developed from a tentative theory into a widely-acknowledged reality threatening human survival. Kaczynski argues that "technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster", but unlike environmentalists, the disaster he most fears is the destruction of human dignity and freedom, as rapidly developing physical, psychological, chemical, genetic and artificial intelligence techniques are applied to humans to engineer us to satisfy the ever-more stringent specialization and control requirements of a complex social system. He argues that the inevitable use of emerging technological powers to expand social control will be undertaken in incremental steps, each seen as beneficial. One can't read his arguments and hypothetical scenarios without a flood of current examples of the encroachment process he describes springing to mind. Although lip service is always given to the need for ethical discussion, can you think of one technological power humans have acquired and chosen not to use?

The BP spill, an old-fashioned mechanical kind of disaster, has reminded me that one Unabomber target was an executive at Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm hired by Exxon to clean up its image after the Valdez oil spill. In a twenty-year legal process, Exxon succeeded in shrinking its penalty from billions to a mere $500 million.(1). I wonder if anyone from BP will ever serve time, or even be seen as criminal. I don't advocate killing, but I would like to see violence acknowledged across the board, not just revolutionary violence: by my count, right now the score is BP 11, Unabomber 3, counting human lives only.(2) But it seems that if profit or national interest is being pursued and the actors are large organizations rather than individuals, predictably unpredictable `collateral' effects (such as civilian victims of remote-controlled drone bombings) are deemed purely accidental. Our political notions of personal accountability, liability and criminality cannot encompass the forms and scale of industrial violence and destruction.

"Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them...Our lives are depend upon whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution is in the air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth."
--Industrial Society and It's Future, par. 67

It's interesting to eavesdrop on Kaczynski's elaborations of Manifesto arguments in his correspondence with academics, anarchists and others identified only by their initials. He asserts that "social justice" issues serve the system as a red herring that diverts attention and energy away from an issue that is of incomparably greater importance, namely, the question of where technology is taking us. The book also includes a variety of material which gives a sense of his personality in the round; a detailed interview about the tranquility of his daily life in the Montana mountains where he lived for twenty-five years in a small cabin on the edge of the wilderness, making long excursions of up to 6 weeks into the wild country; observations about the nature of boredom--he never experienced it there; reflections on how living close to nature creates the luxury of a sense of alertness with fully opened senses while in the city "your environment is crowded with irrelevant sights and sounds, and you get conditioned to block most of them out of your consciousness."

"...one of the FBI agents who arrested me said, "I really envy your way of life up here.""
--"An Interview With Ted"
Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, Lincoln, Montana

The book contains his journal entry on the decisive day when he visited one of his most loved wild places a two-day hike from his cabin, "the beautiful and isolated plateau where the various branches of Trout Creek originate," to discover that it had destroyed by development. There and then he decided that war against the technological system would thenceforward be the main purpose of his life.

Kaczynski provides the first full behind-the-scenes account of how the justice system disposed of his case, first admitting evidence collected in an unconstitutional search, then coercing a guilty plea by restricting his only other option to an insanity defense prepared by his court-appointed lawyers. Kaczynski was denied his constitutional right to represent himself. He desired to stand trial, then appeal for a new trial based upon the search warrant lacking probable cause. He knew he then would probably be convicted and executed, but he preferred the slim possibility of freedom to life imprisonment (an echo of the values expressed throughout the Manifesto). As it stands, he is imprisoned for life after being denied a trial--his appeal based on the coercion of his guilty plea was denied in legal process a dissenting judge found Orwellian, as he rhetorically asked, "Is this 1984 or what?" In a final twist, the courts are currently poised to rule on a proposal by the US Attorney for the Eastern District to round up and confiscate the original and every copy of all Kaczynski has ever written, including confiscating the papers he has donated to library archives such as the Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan (archives of anarchist, communist and other non-mainstream political papers).

So Kaczynski has lived to continue writing, and Technological Slavery is basic reading for anyone concerned about the consequences of technology, because no one is as realistic as Kaczynski about the crucial problem - the impossibility of human (political) regulation, guidance or control of technological development--while remaining hopeful that there is still a window of opportunity during which we are still "unadapted" enough to change course. And he's the only civilization critic I know of who's not an armchair primitive.

Kaczynski knows a lot about primitive ways of life, and not just from experience -- his studies on this subject date back to his days at Harvard. A long, heavily-footnoted essay summarizes anthropological research indicating that primitives were not necessarily politically correct (in defiance of utopian, childlike innocence we would wishfully project upon them). He criticizes the selective scholarship of John Zerzan and fellow anarcho-primitivists as bourgeois, pastoral romanticism, a kind of false advertising for revolution. He instead advocates truthfulness about what sacrifices of technology-based benefits and protections entail-- but he thinks the sacrifices are worth a recovery of dignity and "the kind of freedom that counts." He analyzes how the modern concept of freedom is mainly symbolic, restricted to cultural consumption and lifestyle choices which don't interfere with, or even enhance, the smooth functioning of the system. He argues that contemporary leftism promotes reforms that actually strengthen the system and immunize it against fundamental challenges, but he reserves his ridicule for right-wingers who bemoan the loss of traditional values while endorsing a high-tech society that inevitably restructures social life.

My favorite Manifesto quote at this moment:

"One of the most dangerous features of the techno-industrial system is precisely its power to make people comfortable (or at least reduce their discomfort to a relatively acceptable level) in circumstances under which they should NOT be comfortable, e.g., circumstances that are offensive to human dignity, or destructive of the life that evolved on Earth over hundreds of millions of years, or that may lead to disaster at some future time."
--Letter to David Skrbina March 17, 2005
(Antidepressants anyone?)

Kaczynski doesn't claim to be right about all his points, many of which he considers preliminary or tentative. He actively solicits revisions and modifications to the by-any-means-necessary argument that he is advancing, as well as his proposed principles concerning the dynamics of social change--revolutionary and otherwise. Technological Slavery is a discussion-generator. Perhaps Kaczynksi is unique as a non-utopian revolutionary who thinks in terms of the behavior of complex systems, not ideology. He argues that while a social future cannot be designed, the continued development of the technological system generates only catastrophic possibilities.

It seems most of all that he would like to cut through the ideology of liberal democrats, leftists and anarcho-primitivists, for a realistic assessment of where humanity is going, and what the options are. And failure is definitely an option. Technological Slavery permanently sets to rest any notion that TK is insane (while perhaps raising questions about the sanity of others). I appreciate the courage of Feral House in publishing this book, especially when it's possible that Kaczynski's ability to communicate from the Florence, Colorado Supermax may be cut off in the future by proposed Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations that would silence prisoners designated domestic terrorists. (Kaczynski should be flattered that the justice system finds his prose so powerful. Incidentally, nowhere in this book does he advocate violence.)

I have long been concerned with the dangers invoked by Kaczynski, so I hope there will be journalists with the guts and independence to review this book -- it provides a perfect framework for analyzing the uncontained Gulf disaster and subsequent reform efforts, attempts to regulate the financial/market system, political paralysis on global warming and nuclear proliferation, panics about obesity and mental illness epidemics, and it is highly relevant to a recent sudden burst of `who knew?!?' media features on the psychic effects and addictive nature of networked digital accessories. Technological Slavery also makes it clear that traditional political delineations are obsolete. It provides a lens through which the daily news with all its separate issues coheres into one big story -- about technology.

This book faces an uphill battle for visibility against political taboos of our times. But no one need worry about rewarding militant acts with authorial exposure -- The New York Times and The Washington Post published the manifesto unedited before Ted was even arrested! (...way back when, before newspapers were ravaged by internet.) Also, I understand that all profits will be going to non-profits working for environmental recovery in the Gulf and elsewhere.

* * *

(1) It had been stated in the Earth First! Journal that Burson-Marsteller handled Exxon's Valdez oil spill PR. Exxon was definitely a client of B-M, but the New York Times denied that B-M had any connection with the Valdez incident. But given B-M's previous work for Union Carbide in what's known in PR as "crisis management" for the Bhopal incident, it's hard to believe that B-M didn't strategize Exxon's oil spill PR. In the worst industrial accident in history, Union Carbide's pesticide factory in Bhopal leaked toxic gases that immediately killed thousands and permanently disabled thousands more, leaving a permanent toxic waste dump at the city's center. The accident was caused by extreme corporate negligence, and although India sought 3.3 billion in compensation, Union Carbide was able to minimize its penalty at 350 million (plus interest), which was entirely covered by its insurance. Arrested in India in the days following the catastrophe, Union Carbide's American CEO spared himself any convenience by promptly skipping bail and returning to the US.

BP's current "This s--- never should have happened" public relations strategy includes the hiring Anne Kolton to direct its damage control efforts. She was formerly Dick Cheney's press secretary, and was director of public affairs at the US Department of Energy during the W. Bush administraton.

(2) At least 2 clean-up workers have died since this writing.

It will be interesting to see whether BP's experiment of dumping hundreds of millions of barrels of toxic chemical dispersants into the depths of gulf has unforeseen consequences of its own.

See also:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/04/relentless-spread-of-humanity.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/02/decisive-ecological-warfare.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-mumford-reading-excerpt.html

http://submedia.tv/splash/


The Birth of Post Petroleum Human

Occupy With Aloha

Having grown up in Hawaii, and having the fortune of being stationed there with the U.S. Army as a young adult, I was particularly moved by the following Extra Environmentalist Podcast. (I was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, same division firebrand director Oliver Stone deployed to Vietnam with and used his firsthand experience to direct Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, and later JFK and W., all highly recommended.)

Makana is truly inspiring. The podcast takes a little bit to get going, spending some time exploring the origin of Hawaiian Music, but overall this is one of the best Extra Environmentalist Podcasts I have heard thus far.

Dont miss this podcast. 

Source: http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/

The people of Hawaii have lived an incredible story of cultural assimilation. Numerous external influences on the island have driven a process of creation and destruction, resulting in innovative musical styles. Now, Hawaii faces difficult challenges with food security and genetically modified seeds as it survives the dying values of a corporate culture. Can we learn from the adaptability of the Hawaiian people to facilitate a process of cultural change in Western society?

In Extraenvironmentalist #43 we speak with Makana about his mastery of the slack-key guitar and the lessons Hawaiian culture has to teach us at this tumultuous time. Makana tells us about GMOs in Hawaii, the importance for food security and the story of his experience in singing truth to power at an APEC dinner in Honolulu hosted by President Obama. We ask him for a brief summary of how his aquaponics system works. Next, we speak with Darren Drrda [at the 1h12m mark] about the themes in his book The Four Global Truths and how we can take the first steps towards living an interconnected life that embodies the new story we’re creating about our species.

Download (right click, save as)



See Also:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/why-america-failed-from.html

Quantum Consciousness

I believe the following article from Reality Sandwich adds a bit of credence to what I said earlier, depending on how open minded you are to what we are actually confirming within the rigid parameters of Mechanistic Reductionist Science. Again, if the science is confirming this, yet even science and Atheistic oriented minds still refuse to acknowledge it, is that an example of science or religious dogma?

Highly Recommended: 

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by Robert Lanza

Quantum Consciousness


Kingsley L. Dennis

 
The following is excerpted from The Struggle for Your Mind: Conscious Evolution and the Battle to Control How We Think, available from Inner Traditions. 

The human body is a constant flux of thousands of chemical/biological interreactions and processes connecting molecules, cells, organs, and fluids, throughout the brain, body, and nervous system. Up until recently it was thought that all these interactions operated in a linear sequence, passing on information much like a runner passing the baton to the next runner. However, the latest findings in quantum biology and biophysics have discovered that there is in fact a tremendous degree of coherence within all living systems.

Extensive scientific investigation has found that a form of quantum coherence operates within living biological systems through what is known as biological excitations and biophoton emission. What this means is that metabolic energy is stored as a form of electromechanical and electromagnetic excitations. These coherent excitations are considered responsible for generating and maintaining long-range order via the transformation of energy and very weak electromagnetic signals. After nearly twenty years of experimental research, Fritz-Albert Popp put forward the hypothesis that biophotons are e mitted from a coherent electrodynamic field within the living system.2

What this means is that each living cell is giving off, or resonating, a biophoton field of coherent energy. If each cell is emitting this field, then the whole living system is, in effect, a resonating field-a ubiquitous nonlocal field. And since biophotons are the entities through which the living system communicates, there is near-instantaneous intercommunication throughout. And this, claims Popp, is the basis for coherent biological organization -- referred to as quantum coherence. This discovery led Popp to state that the capacity for evolution rests not on aggressive struggle and rivalry but on the capacity for communication and cooperation. In this sense the built-in capacity for species evolution is not based on the individual but rather living systems that are interlinked within a coherent whole: Living systems are thus neither the subjects alone, nor objects isolated, but both subjects and objects in a mutually communicating universe of meaning. . . . Just as the cells in an organism take on different tasks for the whole, different populations enfold information not only for themselves, but for all other organisms, expanding the consciousness of the whole, while at the same time becoming more and more aware of this collective consciousness.3

Biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho describes how the living organism, including the human body, is coordinated throughout and is "coherent beyond our wildest dreams." It appears that every part of our body is "in communication with every other part through a dynamic, tuneable, responsive, liquid crystalline medium that pervades the whole body, from organs and tissues to the interior of every cell."4

What this tells us is that the medium of our bodies is a form of liquid crystal, an ideal transmitter of communication, resonance, and coherence. These relatively new developments in biophysics have discovered that all biological organisms are constituted of a liquid crystalline medium. Further, DNA is a liquid-crystal, lattice-type structure (which some refer to as a liquid crystal gel), whereby body cells are involved in a holographic instantaneous communication via the emitting of biophotons (a source based on light). This implies that all living biological organisms continuously emit radiations of light that form a field of coherence and communication. Moreover, biophysics has discovered that living organisms are permeated by quantum wave forms. Ho informs us that

. . . the visible body just happens to be where the wave function of the organism is most dense. Invisible quantum waves are spreading out from each of us and permeating into all other organisms. At the same time, each of us has the waves of every other organism entangled within our own make-up. . . . We are participants in the creation drama that is constantly unfolding. We are constantly co-creating and re-creating ourselves and other organisms in the universe. . . .5

This incredible new information actually positions each living being within a nonlocal quantum field consisting of wave interferences (where bodies meet). The liquid crystalline structure within living systems is also responsible for the direct current (DC) electrodynamic field that permeates the entire body of all animals. It has also been noted that the DC field has a mode of semiconduction that is much faster than the nervous system.6 If biological living systems are operating within a nonlocal interwoven field of resonating energy, then perhaps it is possible to see this manifesting in physical behavior?

Mae-Wan Ho describes how coherent excitations in living systems operate in much the same way as a boat race, where the oars (people) must row in step so as to create a phase transition. This indicates that there is an inherent tendency in Nature and in living systems to resonate in sync as a way of maintaining order and coherency. This type of behavior serves to reinforce the relationship between the individual and the collective that before had been thought random. This discovery is important in that it lends validity to the emerging paradigm of the global brain and of the growth of a planetary empathy-the third revolution (as discussed in chapter 6). Each person is thus not only in an empathic relationship with others but also entangled. This view has recently been corroborated by neuroscience with its finding of mirror neurons.

A mirror neuron is a brain neuron that is activated (fires) when a living being (such as a human, other primates, or mammal) observes the action of another. In other words, if an individual watches another person eat an apple, then the exact same brain neurons will fire in the person observing the action as if he were performing the act. Such neuron behavior has been found in humans to operate in the premotor and inferior parietal cortex. This phenomenon of mirror neurons was first discovered by a research team in Italy in the 1990s when studying the neuronal activity of macaques. This discovery has led to many notable neuroscientists to declare that mirror neurons are important for learning processes (imitation) as well as language acquisition. In more modern general terms we might also say that this capacity is what ties a person in sympathy and empathy to another's situation. It may also explain why people become so emotionally attached to events on television, and even cry in response to watching someone crying on the screen. In this way we are emotionally entangled through a mirroring of brain neuronal firing. When we also consider that our bodies are entangled through a quantum field of electrical bio-photon resonance, it explains how we are affected by and from others -- via wave/field interference. This information is significant when considering a shift toward heightened empathy between people both near and at a distance (via digital communications) as well as the potential for catalyzing future abilities for telepathic communication between individuals.

Neuroscience, quantum biology, and quantum physics are all beginning to converge to reveal that our bodies are not only biochemical systems but also a sophisticated resonating quantum system. This helps us to understand how the body can be efficiently coherent, as well as explaining how we feel drawn to others, especially when we use terms such as good vibes, good energies, and we just seem to click. Our bodies, then, as well as our brains appear to function like receivers/decoders within a constantly in-flux information energy field. This explains how the human brain is able to store a lifetime of memories and experiences* as a wealth of data may well be stored within the informational field that encompasses the brain, and indeed the whole body. (Eminent mathematician John von Neumann calculated that during an average lifetime of seventy years we accumulate some 280 trillion bits of information.)

This new understanding of the quantum human informational field also gives credibility to the existence of extrasensory perceptions (ESP) and related abilities. Human consciousness is not only empathic, in a "wave-interference" relationship with other mind fields, but also is constantly transmitting and receiving information.  If this is indeed an inherent aspect of human functionality then we can see why the power hierarchies maintained by a minority have been active in suppressing its operation. As children we are told/conditioned from very young age to dismiss our fantasies-to grow out of and grow up from such illusions and get with the "real world" (whose world?). Early educational and social-peer conditioning serves to wire our brain neurons into a particular set: a fixed pattern of receiving and interpreting the world. Thus we are literally hardwired into a specific reality paradigm and social operating system. Within this paradigm any thought of extrasensory perceptions are sneered at as childish nonsense (manufactured social peer pressure). Many of our early expressions of intuition are thus suppressed and stifled and replaced with "normal" thoughts and perceptions. Imaginative insights and visions are usually left to the eccentric artists, mystics, and fringe creative innovators. Much of our modern minds have been denied their left-right brain full function and pulled into a tight left-brain rational functioning that operates as mechanical, linear, competitive, and narrow.

The Modernity Project has fashioned a mind-set that is a highly focused and logical narrow-band receiver. This arrangement has been further strengthened by modern social institutions in order to suppress visionary and creative insights and our intuitive capacities. The abstract right brain, with its magical world of creative visionary thinking, has been sidelined. Much of this right-brain activity was the source for indigenous wisdom, shamanic practices, and similar traditions that modern materialism has mercilessly eliminated over the years. We have been conditioned to think of such "magical practices" as primitive, barbaric, and worthy of little more than Western colonialism and imperial rule.

The social institutions in our modern materialistic age act to influence us to reject anything extrasensory as a load of nonsense, wishful thinking, or New Age delusion. Thus with our left-hemisphere-dominated brain we live in the everyday world of matter: of material objects and external attractions. We are shown to exist as separate forces, as islands in a chaotic sea of physical and natural impacts, and at the whim of random neutral influences. Yet we now know that this is not the case.

To recap, quantum biology has shown that the body displays an incredible degree of quantum coherence, and that a quantum consciousness field exists throughout the human DNA and thus the human nervous system. Our biochemical structure is composed of a confluence of energies in complete entanglement and that operate as a nonlocal field within and outside the human body. Further DNA is a liquid-crystal, lattice-type structure that emits biophotons, which are light based. What this leads to is a new understanding that human DNA operates also as a quantum field. In other words, we can begin referring to DNA as quantum DNA. Therefore the 97 percent of human DNA that is not involved in protein building is active within a quantum state. It may well be that a future manifestation of quantum consciousness will come from part activation of the 97 percent quantum DNA that so far has baffled our scientists with its function. This quantum DNA activation may likely be related to the state of human consciousness and has remained dormant in response to human consciousness not being sufficiently prepared, or made ready, for its manifestation. This field "life force" may be similar to the pervasive pranic energy that, as Gopi Krishna states, forms the impulse for evolutionary growth in the human nervous system:

. . . . An ever-present possibility, existing in all human beings by virtue of the evolutionary process still at work in the race, tending to create a condition of the brain and nervous system that can enable one to transcend the existing boundaries of the mind and acquire a state of consciousness far above that which is the normal heritage of mankind at present.7

This transcendental stage of consciousness that is depicted above as being a part of our natural evolutionary heritage is connected with the human brain and nervous system. We now know that we have a DNA quantum field activated within our bodies. Some biophysicists are already discussing whether quantum behavior may not be a common denominator for all living processes. As such a quantum informational field throughout the human body will determine the coherence of our light (biophoton) resonance as a vibratory rate. If human consciousness begins to shift its vibratory rate then there is every likelihood that DNA -- as a quantum field -- will likewise undergo a resonance shift, bringing into activation parts of its 97 percent hitherto "inactive" capacities. This may or may not be linked to the increase in electromagnetic frequencies now impacting our solar system from the galactic core. Is there a possibility that a phase step in the "engine of evolutionary energies" is under way?

The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev, who has studied human DNA with his research team in Moscow, found that the 97 percent "inactive" DNA actually has complex properties. Garjajev discovered that the DNA, which is not used for protein synthesis, is instead actually used for communication -- more exactly for hypercommunication. In their terms, hypercommunication is a data exchange on a DNA level. Garjajev and his group analyzed the vibration response of the DNA and concluded that it can function much like networked intelligence, and that it allows for hypercommunication of information among all sentient beings.

For example, the Moscow research group proved that damaged chromosomes (such as those harmed by x-rays) can be repaired. Their method was to capture the information patterns of particular DNA and then transmit these patterns, using focused light frequencies, onto another genome as a way of reprogramming the cells. In this way they successfully transformed frog embryos to salamander embryos simply by transmitting the DNA information patterns. Garjajev's research shows that certain frequency patterns can be "beamed" (such as with a laser) to transfer genetic information. This shows how DNA operates through resonance and vibratory frequencies. It also shows that human DNA can be modified -- or altered -- through the impact of external frequencies. This may also help to go some way toward validating the existence of such phenomena as remote acts of healing and other psychic attributes. It also suggests that DNA is a living, fluid, and dynamic "language" that as a quantum informational field is responsive not only to laser waves (as in the above experiment) but also EM waves and sound, given that the correct frequencies are applied.

The knowledge that human DNA can be influenced and modulated by frequencies (sound, light, language, and thought) is likely to have been known to various spiritual traditions, mystics, and teachers over the ages. This is perhaps why a variety of exercises have existed that utilize thought focus (prayer), sounds (music, chanting, singing), light (both natural light and produced light, such as in stained glass), and language (specific recitations such as a mantra and zikr). DNA appears to function not only as a protein builder (the minority function) but also as a medium for the storage, receiving, and communication of information.

Somewhat more controversially, Garjajev and his Russian colleagues also found examples where DNA could cause disturbing patterns in a vacuum, resulting in the production of what seemed to be magnetized wormholes. (For more information see the work of Grazyna Fosar and Franz Bludorf.) These wormholes appeared to function as connections outside our normal fields of time and space (which hints at interdimensional communication). This phenomenon is indeed worthy of further analysis and experimentation. Yet it does seem probable that DNA is involved with various forms of hypercommunication of which, at present, we know very little about. However, there are examples of hypercommunication at work in Nature. For example, the organization of ant colonies appears to make use of this distributed form of communication. When a queen ant is separated from her colony, the worker ants continue to build and construct the colony as if following some form of blueprint. Yet if the queen ant is killed, then all work in the colony ceases, as if the blueprint had suddenly been taken offline. This suggests that the queen ant need not be in physical contact to continue to transmit the blueprint, yet upon her death the group consciousness ceases to operate within a hypercommunicative informational field. We can thus refer to these forms of hypercommunication as quantum-field consciousness, or simply as quantum consciousness (since quantum implies non-local field effect).


At-a-distance human phenomena such as remote healing, remote sensing, and telepathy may work along comparable lines. On a more basic level we could say that many of us experience this as the sense of intuition and moments of inspiration. We may even be receiving these forms of hypercommunication when we are asleep. There are countless examples of people, artists, and designers who gained inspiration for their work in their dreams. One example is the Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini who one night dreamt that a devil sat beside his bed playing the violin. The next morning Tartini wrote down the piece from memory and called it the Devil's Trill sonata. Not only do these experiences seem to be increasing (or perhaps people are more open to speaking of them?), but also newer generations of children are manifesting a higher level of clairvoyance and other extrasensory capacities. In recent times they have been referred to as indigo children, or the "new children." These developments may indicate that a higher form of group consciousness is emerging within humanity and that these abilities are now finding greater expression. This does not, however, deny the presence of negative influences against collective quantum consciousness since stress, fear, and similar impacts (see Armageddon meme) all serve to disrupt awareness and manifestation of quantum states. In this context we would do well to return to those practices recommended for centuries by spiritual traditions and teachers, that is, mediation, reflection, watchfulness, and mindfulness. Einstein was famous as a daydreamer throughout his life, and he often claimed that his greatest inspiration came to him when in such states. Enhanced connectivity between humanity may thus be served by each of us paying more attention to our inner states and striving for harmony and balance in our lives.



Notes

1. Krishna, The Dawn of a New Science, 56.
2. Popp, Li, Mei, Galle, and Neurohr, "Physical Aspects of Biophotons," 44, 576-85.
3. Ho and Popp, "Gaia and the Evolution of Coherence."
4. Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm, 210
5. Ibid, 241.
6. Becker, The Body Electric.
7. Krishna, Kundalini, 226.
8. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field.
9. Narby, Cosmic Serpent.
10. Narby, Intelligence in Nature.
11. Krishna, Higher Consciousness and Kundalini, 166.
12. Ibid, 147.
13. Gulbekian, In the Belly of the Beast, 251.


Becker, R. O. The Body Electric. New York: William Morrow, 1998.

Gulbekian, S. E. In the Belly of the Beast: Holding Your Own in Mass Culture. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 2004.

Ho, M-W., and F-A. Popp. "Gaia and the Evolution of Coherence." In Third Camelford Conference on The Implications of The Gaia Thesis: Symbiosis, Cooperativity and Coherence. The Wadebridge Ecological Centre, Camelford, Cornwall, 1989.

Ho, M-W. The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms. Singapore: World Scientific, 1998.

Krishna, G. The Dawn of a New Science. Markdale, Ont.: Institute for Consciousness Research, 1999.

---. Higher Consciousness and Kundalini. Ontario, Calif.: F.I.N.D. Research Trust, 1993.
---. Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man. Boston: Shambhala, 1997.

Laszlo, E. Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004.

Narby, J. Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. London: Phoenix, 1999.
---. Intelligence in Nature. London: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006.

Popp, F-A., K.H. Li, W.P. Mei, M. Galle, and R. Neurohr. "Physical Aspects of Biophotons." Experientia, 1988 Jul 15;44(7):576-85.