It is not about politics. It is about the “American Hologram”, as Joe Bageant calls it:
“All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality.”
Of course Joe, who died recently, is pretty far out there. But his notion of the Hologram, which has become almost sacred in some parts of our culture, is pretty accurate. Compare and contrast, for example, main stream media with Rachel Maddow. She reports, I am told, on the negative receptions GOP members get at their so called town hall meetings. But the MSM? Or look at Wikileaks on Gitmo vs the MSM on Gitmo. Or look at the failure of the MSM to link the decline of the dollar to the price of gasoline.
So what we need is a counter-narrative that strips the current hologram of its power to delude and anesthetize. IE, until we see through the hologram and realize it is naked, as it were, we are not going to get much meaningful change. Change is not what the powers that be want, which of course is why they promote consumption, celebrity and entertainment over all. A nation of zombies, who don't even know they are being duped, is what they want.
This is not rocket science and is well known, but so far no one has been able to articulate a sufficiently compelling alternative narrative.
Nearly a decade has passed since Sept. 11, 2001, and many still vividly remember the fateful day when about 3,000 Americans lost their lives.
However, some are demanding a new explanation for the disaster.
A new registered student organization, 9/11 Truth, has been formed at Central Michigan University in an attempt to raise awareness of the physically unique collapses of the World Trade Center towers. The group follows the views of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group of more than 1,400 architects and engineers who have signed a petition demanding a federal investigation to re-explore the nature of the collapses.
Waterford junior Jared Weston formed the group after spending years conducting his own research on the 9/11 skyscraper collapses. Weston believes one of the most peculiar happenings on Sept. 11, 2001 was the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, which was not struck by a plane.
“What motivated me was the failure of the 9/11 Commission report to adequately address the collapse of building seven,” Weston said. “No steel high rises have ever collapsed from fire in the history of steel high rises, yet we have three instances all on the same day.”
this paper covers a lot of the ground we've been discussing here [at Google Group Next Net] about what kind of intentions a ‘next net' would facilitate. worth a read.
Phi Beta Iota: The current approaches to “identity” are vestiges of the industrial-era commoditization of humans and the fragmentation of the commons. In the 1990's the Hackers Conference (Silicon Valley) discussed trust and identity authentication in combination with anonymnity (or better, invisibility).
SAN FRANCISCO — Inside a darkened theater a viewer floats in a redwood forest displayed with Imax-like clarity on a cavernous overhead screen.
The hovering sensation gives way to vertigo as the camera dives deeper into the forest, approaches a branch of a giant redwood tree, and then plunges first into a single leaf and then into an individual cell. Inside the cell the scene is evocative of the 1966 science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which Lilliputian humans in a minuscule capsule take a medical journey through a human body.
There is an important difference — “Life: A Cosmic Journey,” a multimedia presentation now showing at the new Morrison Planetarium here at the California Academy of Sciences, relies not just on computer animation techniques, but on a wealth of digitized scientific data as well.
The economic statistics that you are about to read are incredibly shocking, but they are also very, very real. Tonight there are going to be millions of men and women all across America that cannot sleep because they are consumed with anxiety about their financial problems.