And, in other animal news...

Apparently, Cambodia (hapless southeast Asian country that they are) has a national animal that may have never really existed:

From National Geographic:

Since 1960 the Southeast Asian nation has claimed the kouprey—an ox with spectacular crescent-shaped horns and a dewlap under its chin—as its national symbol.

But after conducting genetic tests, a team of researchers from Chicago's Northwestern University has concluded that the animal was most probably not a unique species at all.

The article goes. Essentially, they think it was an ox that went wild. It's like having a feral dog, but you claim it's a wolf... I think.

From The Independent:

New research has shown that octopuses and their cousins, the squid and cuttlefish, are far more intelligent than previously thought. They can experience suffering and are capable of complex thought, even to the extent of using tools.

The discovery has provoked a rethink by the Government and European Union. Proposals are being drawn up to offer octopuses and their kind the same protection in laboratories as monkeys, cats and dogs.

So, even if you don't believe in Cthulhu, you may soon change your mind. After all, today it's simple tools... tomorrow... well, does unspeakable, indescribable terror that may rip your mind asunder from just my mentioning it mean anything to you?

MAYHEMRadio Podcast Project

One of my projects.

MAYHEMRadio Presents:
Click to go:




Hitting a little close to home on this one, Barroom argues for the existence of the Mayhem progressive community. Sure it was brought to us by the legendary and unfortunately disreputable russian with a third eye in the middle of his forehead. But whatever. Listen to it.


As always, feel free to send the bastard an email. Nonlocal221 at gmail dot com.

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!!NEW!!

It's official: the Japanese are the oddest culture ever.

Treasure hunters attracted to Japan's legendary Holy Grail

The military standard used by 17th century Japanese Christian Amagusa Shiro during a
Christian rebellion against the Shogun is preserved in Kumamoto's Amagusa Kurisuchian
Museum in Hondo, Kumamoto Prefecture.

"This standard is, along with the standard of the Western European crusaders and the flag of
Joan of Arc, regarded as one of the three great flags of Christendom. The Holy Grail is in the
center of the flag, while above it is bread to symbolize the body of Christ. Written on the flag is the Latin acronym INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Indaeorum -- Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews)," a Kumamoto historian tells Weekly Playboy, which says that Amagusa Shiro's
decision to use the Holy Grail as his standard entitles him to claim to be the direct descendant of Christ."

- -

"Christian samurai duped people into believing Shiro was the Second Coming. They told
people he could walk on water from one island to another. They also said that all he needed to do was extend his arm and a dove would fly down and lay an egg in his palm. Breaking the egg open would reveal a Christian scripture. The Christian samurai who organized the Shimabara Rebellion used Shiro by claiming he was the Messiah and getting ordinary folk to join their fight," the historian says. Though Amagusa Shiro was also cut down in the rebellion, he left plenty of mystery in his wake."

Then, further down, there's this gem from December '03:

Redoubted Rising Son true raider of the lost ark

"Despite being firmly entrenched in the Buddhist and Shinto camps, Japan claims a number of biblical ties, such as being home to one of the lost tribes of Israel and the site of Jesus Christ's grave in a small town in Aomori Prefecture, so the idea of the lost ark being in the Land of the Rising Sun isn't as outlandish as it seems."

- -

Takane's theory has it that the Gospels say God denoted lions, oxen, eagles and humans as four symbols of His glory, while the mythical creation of Japan outlined in the Kojiki notes that Shikoku, which literally translates as "four countries," was said to have four faces. Tsurugizan, as the most sacred mountain on Shikoku, was thus the logical hiding place for the ark that symbolized God's glory, according to Takane, anyway.

Takane's son, Mitsunori, the head of an academic society devoted to studying Tsurugizan, argues in his book "Alexander the Great Died in Japan," that the Macedonian marvel didn't die in 326 BC as is generally presumed, but instead faked his demise and headed to Japan, where he became the Emperor who founded Shikoku.

Alexander the Emperor ordered Tajima-mori, another legendary figure in the Japanese Creation myth, to Jerusalem. Tajima-mori spent 12 years in Israel, returning to his homeland with the Ark of the Covenant, which he hid in Tsurugizan.

- -

"Japan is one of the few places throughout the world where shrines are carried around in public and some say the practice came from having seen the Jews carrying the ark with them on their Exodus from slavery in Egypt. Giving the Japanese propensity for adaptation, some say the theory has plenty of plausibility."

I love the Japanese. They're so adorable. Even if they are, like I said, the oddest culture around.

Where has the time gone?

Been on high ate us for quite a while. Six months to be exact.

I’m posting installments on a novella named Growing Hope over at Frequency23.org. Brief synopsis:

Two hydroponic farmers in a dystopian future have fought back against the corporate taskmasters of their urban fiefdom for years by engaging in the black market barter subculture. But now they’re tired of it and looking to break away to the Freelands.

I hate writing synopses of my own stuff.

Also, I’m a regular contributor to the MAYHEMRadio Podcast Project, an experiment at DIY media. We’re a group of people who do podcasts on anything from anarchy, to philosophy, to the occult, to conspiracies, to popculture, to science.

Not sure what exactly I’m going to do with this space. I had been doing a regular blog on my myspace account, but due to TOS I’ve deleted a good portion of the entries. Apparently, Herr Murdoch does not want me to retain rights to my own creations.

He can go fuck himself.

So, in short, this is going to be updated much more regularly.

Trailer Park Dancing

Thoughts filter in and out like pieces of cotton floating in the wind days after the harvest. They're all over the place, just like I remember those little tufts of white when they were scattered across the highways and biways on the way to my grandparent's house.

Strange ruminations, pieces of ephemeral abstractions that shouldn't be but are. The moon is made of organic cheese, but Jupiter is made of a synthetically produced government brand. My girlfriend is cheating on me, but I'm cheating on her and I'm all right. The professors at the front of American lecture halls are really CIA agents and hoping that I'll slip up and give them an excuse to investigate me with the Patriot Act.

I'm not paranoid. Far from it. I keep these thoughts in check, a piece of electrical cord in hand that I beat them cross the legs with when they rear their ugly head. I'm a task master from the old south, with a modern twist. Now I roam the trailer park of my own mind, weeding out the undesirable memes and cover them with gasoline, light 'em up, dance till dawn in the flickering, twisting light of this miniature dawn. My friends bring conga drums, and together we find new life in the illumination of my fallen brain patterns, wine and acid and pot bringing us into a closer harmony than ever before.

That's right, systematically I am destroying myself and everything I hold dear, offering myself up as sacrifice to the post-modern industrial combobulatory revolution that is this world. Hope transmitted along fiber optic wiring at the speed of light, destruction delivered with pinpoint accuracy, war games on our computer screens, psy-ops on our televisions, cheap beer in our hands keeping us dull and oblivious. And all through this there is the faint illumination and crackle of fat burning in the middle of our trailer park, the fuel I beat down, the fuel I tore out of myself, the fuel and the fire of my own making. We are as one in this, and we are as different as snow flakes mass produced by an assembly line in the halls of the mad scientists, our new religioso.

See the gleeful dancing of our rulers on high? See how they move to and fro, in a false mockery of our gyrations and dips? They mock our voices too, give hateful calls to meet our glorious whoops. They're in the next park over, just the next over, one step to the side of the evolutionary ladder, climbing their own path they've constructed. What is their best way to lead us, they ask. What is the next “Big thing” to keep us under their thumb, to keep us from becoming even more discontented. “Give them their thoughts, give them their self-sacrifice, their philanthropic zeal, give them something to pray to!” come the shouts from their own pit.

For, you see, they are no different than we are. True, they're more adapted to certain goals than we; we are adapted to leading lives, feeling hope, feeling love. Our masters, though, are evolved towards crushing those true emotions out. True emotions make us surly, unmanageable. Instead, they create new ones for us, god-creatures out of corporations, legal entities that exist only in the mortar between their bricks, only exist in the minds of those who conjure them and pass them off to all of us. We buy into it and give life to monstrosities, monstrosities that serve no purpose other than to eat our souls and subjugate us.

“And what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?what do we do?whatdo we do? Whatdowe do?whatdowedo?”

Hark! An answer comes floating back beside those pieces of cotton on the winds! Read it to me my brothers! “It says,” reads one long haired, shaggy man after he deftly plucks it from mid-air stream, “bring this light out into the world, that they shall know they are not alone.”

And there's general mumbling, grumbling. Too Christian, too religious, too much like that which is being offered. And we are divided again. Already. It’s all too easy.

Memes (A brief example)

I study ideas and information, how they're constructed, how they propagate, what they are, how to control them, self-defense methods, how to destroy them, erase them, etc.

For shorthand, some people call ideas and information “memes”. These are, simply put, bits of information, singular ideations that are the building blocks of culture and able to use that culture as a medium for transmission. Written words are not memes, neither are hand gestures, paintings, or musical pieces. They are outward products of these memes, they are just symptoms of their existence. Memes are as real as viruses were before Louise Pasteur. People still died of viruses before Dr. Pasteur “discovered” them, didn’t they?

(As a side note, I think it’s interesting to examine what the word “symptoms” means to us. Is it a bad thing, a good thing? What kind of connotation does that word have?)

There is no formal study of memetics yet. Memetics is, truthfully, the application of genetic theory to memes, looking how they evolve within culture throughout the years. I don’t look at just that, though… I guess you’d call my area of interest “memeology”. I apply a variety of models to these abstractions, just as religion applies a variety of models to the abstraction of god.

Memes are, in a sense, atoms. Like I said, they’re a building block for society, but they’re also a bit more. They’re also capable of being combined together into complex systems, like we do with atoms and molecules. I’ll list a few memes here (I’ll just do the grammatical symbols of the ideas), and pictures of a couple meme complexes these memes could apply to.

Spinning
Dancing
Ecstasy
Drugs

These four ideas blend together very well. To the right is one interpretation. It's a rave (I'm sure you gathered that). A DJ spinning records all night, people dancing, taking ecstasy, which happens to be a drug.

To the left is another, slightly differing interpretation. These are whirling dervishes who dance and spin till they reach a point of ecstatic union with the godhead, sometimes under the influence of hashish (a drug). (I've seen and heard of other Magick practitioners doing similar techniques to reach gnosis).

See? Memes are subjective, stand alone bits and pieces. Admittedly, these individual ideations are very weak and simple, unable to effect any sort of genuine change. But, together, you can paint abstract pictures. You can interconnect them in a variety of different ways, or attach new ideas to old ones and create something totally different. For instance, if you attach Allah to the rave, you can take a bunch of people listening to techno all night and transform them into a religious sect.

Or...

You can build something from scratch. Take a bunch of memes and attach them together into a more complex pattern. I'll do an example in my next entry, using these four memes. We'll see if I can create a new idea by rearranging these things.

In the mean time, though, think about your own brain. You’re a unique meme complex, made up of thousands upon thousands of ideas that you’ve “caught” from other people in your society. How many ideas do you have swimming around in there? How crazily are they bonded together? What memes control your thoughts, your goals, your views, opinions, your life?

1

I’m finding it increasingly hard to learn new things. It’s not that I’m unwilling to learn. It’s just that philosophy doesn’t seem to hold much interest for me anymore. I need to go and start studying something new. I consider this place as something I can flesh out my thoughts on (believe me, I know that’s nothing new) and maybe get some new ideas from other people.

Please don’t mistake this for me saying, “I know the meaning of everything” or “I’m so fucking original” because it’s precisely the opposite. I figured out that I can never know the meaning of everything. Truth can never be described. Our “reality” is objective and subjective. Therefore, portions will conceivably never be known to me (or any of us). We’re all just spiritual fishes in a metaphysical ocean. Our ripples touch one another, and help to create the waves that lap at the shore of existence. And that’s it. Or, maybe, we’re not metaphysical at all. There’s, more than likely, a completely rational explanation for everything. But, damn it, metaphors are just frameworks.

Consciousness is not a “thing” in the traditional sense. It’s not an object or a piece of energy, or particle. I don’t know what it is. I have a strong hunch that it’s interaction between matter and energy, a sort of overlapping area. An MRI can pick up the products that our consciousness throws off (or create our consciousness. Whichever it is, I’m not sure. I think it may be a logic loop) like electricity, magnetic fields, etc. The chemical interaction between lipids and electrical charges, with neuropeptides and hormones thrown into the mix, seem to create, as a byproduct, this “consciousness” us humans have such a hardon for.

Using said consciousness we create an idea. Which, in turn, creates more ideas. And more. And more. And more. Until we have (at least in our culture) a string of 26 symbols which can be arranged to signify damn near anything we want, and ten arabic symbols which can form any number we want. This enables this fun little thing called memory, where we categorize and organize experience and ideas for other people. It’s important that we all realize that. Our symbols are for communication, not to ourselves, but to others. It’s for the purposes of cohesion and cooperation.

Or, maybe, the language came first and the ideas came after. After all, we could talk before we understood the number zero.