Animam Recro

The Viking Youth Power Hour have two excellent episodes on Philip K. Dick, the brilliant science fiction author who was inspired by his dreams, visions, paranoia’s, and various other altered states. Dick was very interested in religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and neo-Gnosticism which heavily influenced his stories. He is known for such works as ‘The Man in the High Castle’, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, ‘Ubik’, ‘Flow My Tears’, ‘The Policeman Said’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’, ‘VALIS’, and ‘Exegesis’. Also, many films have been based on his books and short stories such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Imposter, Screamers, Paycheck, the just recently released A Scanner Darkly and the soon to be filmed Next.

Via wikipedia:

Dick’s stories often descend into seemingly surreal fantasies, with characters discovering that their everyday world is an illusion, emanating either from external entities or from the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. “All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality,” Charles Platt writes. “Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person’s dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely.”

Be sure to check out ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later‘, an entertaining and insightful essay by Philip K.Dick written in 1978. There are many wonderful quotes but I like the following two in particular:

“In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.”

and

“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”

So, yeah… The only reason I felt inclined to add some words to our lovely blog today was not boredom, it was not sudden inspiration, it was pure necessity. For I, the Esoteric Sheik, the founder of 17 types of esoteric pleasure, will be moving to a desert island in the Pacific for the next 12 days. I hope for an internet connection on said place but I am doubtful. And therefore it is my sad duty to inform you that you will not hear from me for quite a while. My plan is to spend the time there in silent contemplation, while fasting, in utter silence and loneliness, alone with my erotic fantasies. So there. Hear from me later. If you hear from me sooner rather than later, I am not having such a great time.

If you have a telephone, bank account, blog or page on a social network such as Myspace then you should expect the US government to take a peak at your info some time soon. But don’t worry! Loss of privacy is the cost of staying safe in these dangerous times. We need to give up our liberties to protect our freedom, right?!

Telephones:

You can read a previous post about US wiretapping here.

“But I don’t live in the US so why do I care?” Even though the telephone spying was directed at US citizens, the governments main focus was international phone calls.

Bank Accounts:

The recent New York Times article ‘Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror‘ has been all over the news lately. In this peice the newspaper covers how the US government is going through thousands of bank accounts of US citizens. Apparently, the newspaper has revealed a “public secret” that the United States Government, specifically the Treasury Department and the CIA, accessed the SWIFT database after the September 11th attacks. Of course, as soon as the administration is revealed to be doing something unlawful it imediately goes into attack mode. The New York time has come under fire because it apparently revealed this top secret program and is therefore helping the badguys. This point becomes slightly mute when you take into account that the New York Times only revealed that which was public knowledge. President Bush has publicly stated “if [financial institutions] fail to help us by sharing information or freezing accounts, the Department of the Treasury now has the authority to freeze their bank’s assets and transactions in the United States”. But there have even been discussions on whether The New York Times should be prosecuted for its actions.

“But I don’t live in the US so why do I care?” The National Bank of Belgium, was revealed on June 27, 2006, to have known about the US government’s access to the SWIFT databases since 2002. Belgian political party CD&V claimed on June 28, that the actions of the CIA with SWIFT were in breach with Belgian privacy laws. The Belgian parliamentary committee (Comité I), that deals with the workings of the Belgian State Security Service, will report on its findings in three weeks. How many other countries laws have been breached?

Blogs:

From an official Department of Defense news release titled ‘Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information‘:

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist, and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the 3-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said.

Via BoingBoing

Social Networks:

From a recent New Scientist article titled ‘Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites‘:

“New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”

“But I don’t live in the US so why do I care?” Well, blogs and social networks are on the internet so there aren’t any real restrictions on the US government here.

I’m just happy to know that our freedom is being protected. Sweet Dreams!

I just finished reading a collection of essays and letters by Carl Gustav Jung entitled ‘On Synchronicity and the Paranormal’. It truly is a wonderful book which taught me a lot about Jung’s lesser known background. I’ve read about many of the concepts he explores before but I wasn’t aware of the depth he went into. I’ll probably be posting several quotes by him in the future which I found interesting.

A Story:

There was a great drought where Richard Wilhelm lived; for months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss-sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said, ‘We will fetch the rain-maker’. And from another province a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quite little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day the clouds gathered and there was a great snow-storm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumours about the wonderful rain-maker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In true European fashion he said: ‘They call you the rain-maker, will you tell me how you make the snow?’ And the little Chinese said: ‘I did not make the snow, I am not responsible.’ ‘But what have done these three days?’ ‘Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and then naturally the rain came.’

I read a few articles and watched a few clips in which a man named Ray McGovern referred to some of the affluent individuals in the US administration as ‘crazies’. The men who decide on foreign policy today did not come out of the blue, they slowly rose to the top over a period of many years. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, etc. It is known that during the first Iraq war these men were pushing for the full occupation of the region. Luckily the elder Bush was able to keep these men in line since none of them were in an influential position such as the secretary of state or defense.

Fast-forward to the year 2000 when all these individuals are placed into significant positions and are itching to finish the job that was started ten years earlier. I know people have different opinions about what happened next but let’s just say everything worked out great for the neoconservatives. Some of you may disbelieve that these men would go to war out of desire rather than necessity and dismiss all this a conspiracy rubish. But don’t take my word for it…

“The people running our policies in Iraq and Iran were widely known in the 80s as the ‘crazies’. You come in on Monday morning and someone would say ‘guess what the crazies did late Friday night’ and you’d know who exactly the reference was to, it was to Wolfowitz, it was to Perle. All the same folks, some of whom have deserted the sinking ship like proverbial rats but it was Fife, Wolfowitz and the rest of them, they were the ‘crazies’.

-Ray McGovern

Here is also an extract from one of McGovern’s articles:

“[Colin] Powell’s misgivings became still more obvious in a book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie published a year and a half ago. Naughtie quoted Powell describing the neoconservatives in control of policy toward Iraq as “f*cking crazies.” (At a reporter’s suggestion that Powell use this sobriquet as a title for his memoirs, the then-secretary of state laughed uncontrollably.)

“Crazies” (with or without the preceding adjective) is an epithet in use for over 25 years to refer to Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and other ideologues of the extreme Right, at a time when they were deliberately restricted to mid-level positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations so they could not cause major trouble. The words escaped Powell’s mouth during a telephone conversation with his counterpart Jack Straw during the run-up to the war, according to Naughtie.”

So, why should you take McGovern’s word over mine? Because he was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents over 27 years, a mid level officer in the CIA in the 1960s where his focus was analysis of Soviet policy toward Vietnam. McGovern was one of President Ronald Reagan’s intelligence briefers from 1981-85 when he was in charge of preparing daily security briefs for the President, the Vice President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet and National Security Advisor. Later, McGovern was one of several senior CIA analysts who prepared the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) for President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Note: Upon retirement, McGovern was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal from George Herbert Walker Bush which he later returned in a protest of torture to Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He argued that he did “not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture,” and that “this is an order of magnitude different from my experiences in the past — there has been torture before, but never before has it been ordered and openly justified.”