Tuesday, May 8, 2012

First Class


First Class

         Back in the days of yore I had a friend who had this rubber stamp that said “First Class”. It was meant originally to be used on packages and letters, lest the postal authorities not figure it out for themselves. Most of the time however he didn’t use it to send letters, but kept it around as a marker of things he thought of particular value, like for instance, the second Roxy Music Album.
    For the sake of a little context American suburbanite kids live an underground existence, Part of it is the drugs and part of it is the legal system which is the most draconian on earth. They live in basements and attics in their parents houses, collecting amusements, waiting for the ship to come in. And what is more we grow up in terror that we will not “make the cut.” In most countries there are safety nets, health care systems and free education but these are all things that one must fight for in the US because there are people dead set again letting them have these things.
          Skipping around, a few years after college, in the early nineties I was talking to Frank Language and she was saying she was impressed by the movie “Titanic” and I commented that the film demonstrated the virtue of going First Class; meaning one had a far better chance of survival in that case.
To understand the subconscious psyche of America you could do worse then turn to James Cameron. The greatest and most successful artists are invariably those who add a little contemporary relevance to their story choices. Consider the film Pearl Harbor – a mediocre film, terrible box office, then consider Independence day, if anything a worse movie – great box office. Needless to say those ubiquitous alien saucers are but stand ins for the fears that really obsess us; real fears based on real dangers – such as the fear of General Electric or TimeWarner.
                      “We make money the old fashioned way – we steal it” John Hussleman
                 Certainly one can argue whether these fears are justified, but I do not. I have seen the light. In fact the whole demand for even handedness and a fair trail leaves me a little cold. They had their fair trial - yesterday. Besides which I’m not out to destroy the one per centers – I’m trying to keep them from destroying me.
What is being said here is that there’s a great desire and rush to the lifeboats. Those in First Class will presumably live and those in steerage will die. Death. The real final frontier. The land of no return. The thing that no one likes to talk about. The thing that happens to people without health care.
These instances are worth mentioning because they hint at an underlying theme here at ye old Tamlinmediaco, which is – If you don’t have a first class awareness of what is happening you are dead meat. But even that would not save you. In the battle we face the fact that you are aware of the enemy will not spare you. The system is so contrived that it must destroy the smart as well as the dumb and the strong as well as the weak.
                             Herbert Spenser was the Milton Friedman of the 1890’s – he gave a pseudo scientific justification for the thievery of the robber barons. To do this he misquoted Darwin. He said Darwin argued for the survival of the strongest, but actually the word was the “fittest”. So the joke is the neoliberals not only destroy the weak and defenseless, but everyone else as well – thus being twice as effective!
We are they who have been battling the technostate since before we were born. We’re good at it, or we like to think so, but then maybe they just allow us to exist to have a putative enemy to justify their lawlessness.
Anyway the only effective countermeasure is not allow the state to classify you as second class. This is why we speak of information warfare. The more the technostate knows about you the more vulnerable you are to attack and neutralization. To clarify – the technostate is not the government. The technostate often wants nothing else then to eliminate the government because the government operates with laws that are more or less out in the open and the technostate operates only in the shadows.
                                  It is also good to remember that all the old terms are fungible in the borderless society.
                        Getting back to the notion of First class then, there is a considerably large group of Americans who, in a functioning society might have been expected to take the reigns of power, but the system as we all know is broken, intentionally, and I could even make a nationalist case about how destroying human capital eventually must weaken the standing of the USA, however I’m not inclined to go down that road. Perhaps ironically the natural advocates of such an idea, right wing nationalists, won’t touch it because it implies responsibility to aide all Americans and not just us white folk.
In any case evolution is not restricted to any one race or creed, nor is anything else for that matter, and in the same way Jefferson and Franklyn reached outside the borders of the colonies to gain aid in fighting the Brits, we must think about getting aide wherever we can find it.
                             So the concept I like is world class, sort of like the Olympics. It’s pretty obvious that the powers that be are interested in keeping the American educational system strictly third world. I won’t argue – the numbers support me. It is only by enforcing ignorance that the technostate can assert it’s most effective control over the masses. For Americans that would go first class – and find the doors closed I suggest you go world class – skip a grade.
                                Not to hurt anyones feelings but the preponderance of upper order post grad degrees goes to immigrants. Obviously. Increasingly they are returning to their homelands after graduation. This is just one of those time bombs that no one cares to notice, largely because to fix it we’d have to support the American educational system at levels not under serious consideration.
                           And just in case you have missed the point - my attitude is not of a radical who wants dynamic change – or god forbid of a revolutionary. I just think there’s got to be a few hundred of us in the same boat and we should develop a modus operandi for getting as many of us out of “the bad places” as possible. This could be done individually or collectively.
Soros invented a term called reflexivity to understand systems as continually changing. Flexibility is critical here with what I am speaking of. It is the solid, tangible logos that will prove most dangerous. In the recursive search methods the first thing the program looks for is repeating patterns and there fore these must be eliminated as much as possible.
                        In fighting a company like Verizon the less they know about you the easier your task will be – and don’t forget –like vampires, the corporation cannot simply mark you as customer/victim - they have to be invited into your bank account.
                      One time in the beginning of the great war Bertrand Russell took part in a pacifist rally. For many reason the first world war was at it’s inception tremendously popular and as you can nmagine , anyone who opposed the war was not popular.
                     So, Russells there with his sign and the locals were around and they started beating the anti-war protestors bloody. One of Bertrands friends rushes up to the constables and says “Can’t you stop that – they are likely to put people into the hospital?” The Constables turned away and ignored him. Then the guy says
                     “But he’s a member of the House of Lords!”
                    That changed everything. The house of lords, which is now a largely ceremonial group used to be something like the equivalent of the US senate.

                                     The game , thus, is this. As best as possible one must try to avoid the labeling of one as an enemy of the state. But the whole survivalist, hide away thing seems a bit mental actually. One can’t live their life in the context of avoiding life. What has to happen then is we have to invent a new language, a new code.
                        Just to refresh you on the difference between verbal law and code law. The usual example is the library. In legal law if you don’t return a book on time you bring it back later and pay a fine. In code law the book ceases to be readable at midnight of the day it is due. Or if you have an argument with a business person about money in verbal law you go to court and one side or the other forces payment – in code law the payment is automatic and happens immediately.
                                  There’s no daring getaways in code law. Your car simply stops working. And so on.
The second aspect of flexibility is that in any two tier state the underclass, which is us, creates a sublanguage – one that can be spoken before the authorities and yet not understood by them, that language will then be broken but the trick is to keep the sublanguage in a continual state of fluxion so it cannot be cracked easily.
These methods are already in common usage. They are used everyday in business to create virtual trusts and enter into criminal conspiracies that when revealed to the public appear to be perfectly legal, mere matters of coincidence.
              Returning to what I mentioned earlier about the need to invite Vampires into your home for them to  be effective, The law of code, which is the new actual law, works two ways and it works via information.
             For instance in the past if you had a dispute about who owes who what in terms of money you did not have to pay until it was settled,  Now the access to your money is electronic and your assets are reachable instantaneously.  Or you may find money removed from your paycheck. Code law is perfect and never makes mistakes, except when it does make mistakes.
                That is the second aspect of  the information weapon. By knowing everything about you pain can be applied to you in terms of removing your money and/or many of the choices in life that you depend on. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
                 In the past when you were victimized in a robbery you could at least aid the police and possibly even find the culprit.  When Goldman Sachs steals your life savings however such regress is not permitted.  they are a corporation and hence above the law and you are a serf, a virtual slave in the techno state. What are you going to do? Shoot the CEO? It's just not done. It's not polite.
               The primarily usage of information as a weapon of the corporations to induce self destructive behavior in humans is by finding out the  specific wants and needs of individuals they are able to create the most effective means of persuading you of the harmlessness of their suggestions.  
but ultimate they are not your friends. Sorry to tell you this. I know they have told you you are cripples and only their magic powers can help you walk but it just ain't so.

 
                      John Rockefeller is an interesting case. His father was a con man who often cheated him when he was a boy and he then used those skills in later life to fool dozens of competitors. He was vilified in life yet he though himself an excessively moral man. He was paradigmatic in that not everyone who works most to support the monster state thinks themselves a bad person either.
                       He was not a brilliant oil man, whatever that is, but what he did is he added a new skill set to the game. His companies operated under masked identities, communicating via a system of extensive code words. They reached hidden agreements with selected firms to eliminate competitors. They bribed legislators but hell, everyone does that.
                              The other most hated and richest man in America was Jay Gould who was a more conventional sort of thief. Remember you don’t become a plutocrat without killing people so if you conscious bothers you by all means sell hot dogs. Gould was in railroads and he’d basically build shoddy railroads, over sell the stock and the trains would crash and people would die and that’s the way it went. Then as now. Neither he nor Rockefeller was ever in serious danger of being apprehended by the law.
The law will only catch the small fish. Did I mention the “D” word yet? When it is the common mood to be corrupt to expect that somehow the law will rise above the herd of common men is foolish. Hence we have all the current online restrictions coming into play.
                              That’s the thing about world class. The First class game is rigged. Kobayashi Maru Scenario as is stated in the First Star Trek movie. You cannot win as the game is structured. You have to get out of the mental and physical jurisdiction of the game. Both ways are possible.
All games exist solely for the opportunity to enforce their rules which is to say that the rules needed to succeed in one may well be superfluous in another. For this we can often be thankful.





Sunspot Madness


      Sunspot Madness
                   From the desk of the Mad Scientist  

                          – a few weeks ago I mentioned Terrence Mckennnas Time wave theory which postulates a cyclical aspect to events on earth which can be predicted by, among other things the I-Ching.
             I don't have much faith in astrology as a science  nor do I ever play the lottery but that said, one can  be intrigued at that mathematical point where coincidence seems to carry over to cause and effect. You could even say this is what quantum effects are all about.

           The usual explanation for the seeming predictive abilities of the I-Ching as well as most other such systems is based on the psychological mechanism known as projection. In other words the scenario is laid out in terms sufficiently vague for the subject to , as it were, “fill in the blank spaces” with actual events. This is traditionally aided by the fortune tellers ability to discern the wishes of the advice seeker. This isn’t that difficult.
                    If you suggest to a teenage girl she is looking to meet a tall, attractive, youngish man of means you probably will hit the mark.
                 There are other possible explanations as well. Gravity waves in space are not impossible. When you try to consider how strange space is just think of dark matter which indicates most of the universe is not there, or here, or anywhere –but we don’t quite know where it is. And of course, waves of probability which are mathematically impossible but no more so then quantum physics.
Speaking of math, it is math that takes us from the realm of chaos to that of predictive order. Again, if you want to get really weird, mystical in fact, you can suggest that there is no chaos in the inverse – there’s simply order we are not able to comprehend.
          Perhaps the effects of sunspot activity were in some way input into the creation of the Mayan Calender and the I-Ching- both of which, independently seem to have some sort of fixation on this year, 2012. It would be easier to believe if they had had tube radios, or even accurate statistical records of events but there’s no evidence of either.
                 Also some are saying these events will be apocalyptic, but from what I read it is more like the end of the cycle which is certainly not the same thing.
Michio Kaku teaches physics and has had a radio show on WBAI for years of interest to a small but dedicated audience including yours truly and he mentions that every 11 years the sunspot activity reaches an apex and flips polarity. I knew that sunspot activity rose and fell periodically but there are other things to consider. First is the fact that the normal barriers to radiation from space are eroding as a result of the weakened atmosphere that we associate mostly with global warming. Another is that the way waves work is if they operate on eleven year cycles some are bound to be larger and some smaller.
                          The third is a little difficult to describe. Essentially we have taken bandwidth that once broadcast television signals and replaced them with mobile phone stuff. No big deal
(although I’m still pissed off at the loss of free TV and refuse to pay for it –) But even though the data is digital it is transmitted via cyclic waves. Enough digital data and you get a pile of bricks, enough electronic data and you get a bolt of lightning.
              So the third aspect is while in the past we were not sensitive to the fluctuations of solar activity (except when it effected the weather) because our mechanisms weren’t effected this may change and possibly even assume a cumulative effect.
                      Street hackers are always talking about the EMP’s (Electromagnetic pulse) that could shut down society as we know it. It’s been almost twenty years since the rumors started and no one’s used it yet – plus the effect is mitigated by distance and by shielding – so one would think that at least in terms of important things, eg military, the shielding has been upgraded.
                          There’s not much you can do to control a solar event, but on this end it doesn’t appear as if anyone gives any credence to the idea of one. Anyone recall the neutron bomb? That was, I believe in the Carter administration and it was the same principle. If you take a floppy disk and put it on an oldstyle ringing telephone the fluctuation of the magnetic field effectively wipes the disk.
                              One last consideration – which I think is in the category of a sick mind is that a neutron bomb and it’s various offshoots eliminates tech and leaves humans unscathed. The sick thing is that is not what we want. We want to eliminate humans and preserve technology.  That at least is what our actions indicate.  If humanity wants to suggest that it actually values human life more then property and technology then let them behave as such.

                         The dream sequence, under the influence of heightened sunspot activity
I confess and admit that while I am not self destructive I am at times sickened by the stupidity of the human race. One sometimes feels there’s no point in helping them because they are so manifestly dedicated to killing and their own extinction. A few years back this despair overcame me and I tried to understand the rationale by which the stock market operated. It was
                    “The purpose of life is to build ever more complex and productive machinery.”
                And having built these damn things we then fall to our knees and bow down to our own creations.
Economics is a hobby of mine and unemployment is needless to say a problem. I jest that we have taken upon ourselves the prerogatives of the Gods and we are not up to the job!
                     Then again there are bio weapons that eliminate people and leave the machines – which would solve the unemployment problem. That is to suggest there is no unemployment problem We have a population explosion problem- too many women, in the workplace. so how solve it- Scientifically? According to the free market?
                 Actually the evidence is that the free market works very effectively to depress prevailing wages and the way to counter act that is to keep everyone else the hell out.
              Okay no problem. Persons making less then the average income are to be sterilized. It can be sold as the humane choice- one that will solve the prison problem as well. And the more money you have the more children you are allowed to have. This is the case already anyway.
             Heh – here’s a weird thought - what if sunspot activity effects our brains – like the schizophrenics nightmare. How would we know? The majority determines sanity, right?

I’d like to retain the rights to make that movie.


  

The Crap App




    Und jetzt eine anderin kauftundsmertz projekt   wir wissen

          Like a lot of geeks and geekettes I read rather more software reviews then is good for me. Actually it's equivalent to being a child and watching toy commercials.  Somehow the toy is never as good as it seems on the the tube.

        And practically no one is left alive that remembers my first forays into writing online, in  1994  when I reviewed the ever expanding world of MAC Audio software. The action in those days was in the shareware field and with Cubase, which was developing the Virtual instrument concept.
       Things were happening so fast that my main challenge was getting the reviews out the door before the next versions were released. Then in 98 or so reality set in. This meant primarily that Time/Warner and the other dominant media firms were systematically going to exterminate the thousands of small companies that did not have the deep pockets.
        In 2000 we received yet another lesson in the failure of American Capitalism when the tech bubble burst.  i had had enough of writing about slime balls and moved to Europe and eventually Oxford, to study Pre Christian Celtic Myth.
         Magazine publishing has a built in limitation however, which is the stuff you write about is often the same stuff that buys the add pages and so the tendency is to write puff pieces. The notion that media tends to tear people down is a little dubious actually.  Plus people often honestly write about things they are enthusiastic about.
           What would be at least as valuable would be to speak of the clunkers, the ripp offs and the trappers that have come to the fore in recent years. And  so I'd like to make two small comments about garbage as in Garbage in- Garbage out.
          I used to go to Version Tracker or MacUpdate almost everyday and would find things I was interested in. Graphic, sounds and mind candy,  now allt here is, is spin offs, products meant to enhance your facebook experience.
         My attitude towards Facebook is the net has enough morons on it already without having to give them even more exposure.
          And just to mention what happened is Apple has used policies that continually favor large companies. it is Standard Oil all over again  and many people have come to the conclusion that fighting them is a losers game.
          Secondly my vote for the biggest piece of garbage software goes to I-Tunes  - an effort to demonstrate that ease of use counts for nothing and all that matters is steering the suckers into the revenue producing stream. I'd tell you in detail what's  wrong with it but why bother?
           I made a few people a great deal of money by inducing them to invest in Apple in the days when it looked like it might go bankrupt. I was no genius. The company was plainly undervalued,  terrible management  and yet the idea of the Mac   was not going to go away. Creative people are going to want an edge and  to save time.  In other words if there had been no MAC then the market would have invented one only with a different name.
       As to the present all i can say is in tech if you piss off the employees it's not a good sign. Yeah, i say to you , look ye upon the humblest app - the quick time movie player - where's the queue?   Where's the GUI?  What happened?!?!? 
      From a systemic vantage I knew a  few people in Apple and the creative ones tended to find other things to do. That's not an Apple problem alone. it happens in Microspft too where the best retire very young- because coding can be boring and fixing bad code or making two incompatible code blocks fit together is really boring.

     Love is more fun the first time around.