The Enemy on Both Sides

EOBS01-RAW on Stupidity

I am testing out some of my software and website skills.  This short piece, a reading from Prometheus Rising, is a tribute to the late Robert Anton Wilson. Bob’s Work entered into my life 15 years ago, I met him 10 years ago and this past week market the 4the anniversary of his leaving the planet.

I have a soft spot for Brooklyn Kids who eventually make good.  Here’s to being one of them somtimes.

Maybe it was the launch this week of The Smoking Jacket or a recent discussion with a friend about Robert Anton Wilson’s pre-novelist career, but I’ve been thinking about Hugh Hefner.

Once upon a time Hugh Hefner was seen as a potentially significant figure for more than just his role in making pornography a larger part of people’s lives. It is difficult to imagine now in a time where he has become a kind of self-parodying cartoon in the public imagination, but in the mid-60s, having gained a foothold via his magazine Playboy he began articulating his ideas on life and living under the title of “The Playboy Philosophy.”

Playboy maintains an archive of his editorials under this title at

The Playboy Philosophy

During one of the major turning point years of the 60s, 1966, Hefner sat down with William F. Buckley on “The Firing Line” for a discussion of his ideas and of Buckley’s disputing his authority for calling the roots of morality into question. The interview can be seen divided into multiple sections, the first of which is below.  For those interested in their own copy this episode has been released for purchase as well.

Firing Line: Hugh Hefner Interview Part 1

It’s been a few months since I’ve posted anything.  Having had a major event for a Non-Profit that I am involved with last month and the mind-debris kicked up by changing some of my own self understanding and making moves to turn ideas into realities hasn’t left me with as much time for writing stray thoughts.

Well, at least not there at any rate.

Which is about to change.

The recent discussions of Stephan Wolfram’s presentation from TED reminded me of this presentation

Mark Pesce’s an odd character, in the good sense. My first encounter with him was at Disinfo.Con 2000.  I was sitting with Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Backes when Mark began his “Church of the Motherfucker” induction, easily one of the highlights of the day.  A clip of the piece was released by Disinfo but not the entire presentation.  Hopefully some day the unedited tapes will surface. They will explain by the three of us found ourselves attempting to explain a once obscure tryptamine compound to the kids in front of us who were confused by why the three of us were so shocked that Mark remained standing throughout.

…it usually takes about two months for dietary changes to have real observable effects unless you’re previous diet was causing significant hormonal (mainly insulin over-production) imbalance or you are not providing too low a nutritional access to your body. Consider tracking what you are currently doing with something like the meal tracker at http://www.fitday.com to see what your caloric numbers and the ratio of macronutrients you are consuming work out to be.

Provided you are not on blood thinners, have a tendency towards internal bleeding or are in a profession where there is a high risk of puncture or slash injury consider specifically attenuating that flax seed intake to insure about 2 grams of Omega-3 fatty acids. You can get pre-packaged flax derived Omega-3 supplements relatively easily. If you are comfortable with consuming fish products the available Omega-3 supplements are actually more easily metabolizable than the Omega-3 forms in flax. Either way consider taking the dose at night an hour or so before going to bed. This help your body in its overnight cellular repair.

Try consciously spacing your meals to insure a steady supply of nutrition. This can be tricky for folks in entertainment fields given the kinds of hours kept but putting in the extra effort will pay off in time. If you have an active lifestyle that is fairly physical you may want to look into Dr. Sears’ Zone Diet. You can find a no frills introduction to it at http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/cfjissue21_May04.pdf This diet can also be very beneficial to those with Insulin resistance associated conditions. If you are not very physically active and thus do not have the same kind of demands the Anti-Inflammatory Diet approach created by Dr. Andrew Weil might be more appropriate and easier to follow. You can find information about it at http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/PAG00361/anti-inflammatory-food-pyramid.html

Something that can be beneficial at any time in life but which many men find especially useful is taking up resistance or strength training, for at least 20 minutes a week 3 times a week. If done with a fair bit of intensity for those 20 minutes those 3 times a week such training can turn back health markers nearly a decade after only six months. Additionally such exercise has been preliminarily studied to suggest that significant improvement in concentration and even meditative focus can be made in a very short period of time. If you have never seriously done resistance training consider reading Shawn Philips Strength for Life for a good introduction to an approach aimed at people with lives and interests beyond just Gym Rat culture.

*Keep in mind that I am not a nutritionist and that my only formal work with nutrition is in attempting to reconstruct Paleolithic/Neolithic and early Agrarian dietary constraints. I have a strong hobbyist interest in Sports Nutrition and Optimal Health that may become more than simply hobbyist in a few years.

Consult a Physician before making any radical changes to your life-style and consider finding a qualified Trainer for learning the fundamentals of strength and resistance training before working on your own in these areas.

I first saw the Cronenberg “Naked Lunch” in the Summer of 1992. It was summer time and I was sick as a dog. An international batch of Group A Streptococcus bacteria were attempting their best to digest my biology.  Fever-minded and not quite right I was fading in and out of consciousness when my old man came up to my room.  ”Hey Jimmy.  Your mom and I stopped by the Video store and I found something that I think might be right up your ally,” he said while handing me a VHS cassette.  From the light of the hallway I took a look at the title “Naked Lunch” and immediately recognized it.

At the time William S. Burroughs had been one of those nebulous figures floating around the outer corners of my perception.  His name would pop up frequently in the  books on Underground Culture I was reading at the time and I even caught the review of the Cronenberg film done by Siskel and Ebert over my shoulder one sunday afternoon while playing  computer game in 1991.  Earlier that same year I had seen Burroughs doing a book signing at Astor Books and got a smile form him for making a crack about how many people lining up to see him actually knew who he was.

So, with alien entities consuming me I popped in the tape, smiled a bit about my father’s uncanny ability to find just the right “wrong” thing for me at any given time and let the images flow over my mind.  Frankly, I had to, since with a 104° temperature there wasn’t really like I was going to be critically engaged in the film. My fever dreams met David Cronenberg’s fever dreams about William S. Burroughs junk sick dreams of pain, regret and Control.

A perfect pick me up for a sick kid, don’t you think?

This morning the folks at Dangerous Minds posted Cronenberg & Burroughs on the Making of Naked Lunch.  Worth a viewing, whatever your critical capacities at the moment.

Pyramids show up just about anywhere you get a Complex Civilization. It is how Complex Civilizations keep their work force conditioned and motivated during the off season of the agricultural cycle.

The initial features that tend to develop into pyramids are platform structures used for ritual activity and social reinforcement during hereditary chiefdom phases. Every year or so the chief decides as a show of power that he’ll make things bigger, taller, more complicated.

Eventually when you get really big work forces due to the effects of successful agriculture you have a much larger work force and a much greater need to make sure people know how to follow orders and don’t simply slack off between seasons. So you rope the work force into building big, crazy things with a pyramid being the most stable structure you can build really high.

Most of the better known pyramids come from cultures that used stone in order to form them, but there are some non-stone examples as well. The Mississipian culture of North America constructed a wide variety of pyramidal mount structures, though it is better known for its novel designs such as the Serpent Mount in Ohio.

The proposition that what we experience as reality is the result of a kind of “interference pattern” that is encoded everywhere throughout reality in no way implies that reality’s existence is contingent upon belief.

The two core figures in the Holographic model were David Bohm, physicist, and Karl Pribram, neurophysiologist, never inserted a notion of reality creation or the need for belief into their ideas. Rather this interpretation of the Holographic model is the result of a New Age co-option of the idea.

The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes edited by Ken Wilber gives a good sense of the early exploration of the idea and how it was repackaged to be “spiritual” as well as how it fails to qualify as “spiritual” in a traditional sense.

There are a number of philosophical implications and jump points for exploration based upon the past century of scientific investigation into Quantum Physics. Some of the better pieces on the issues raised in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are linked at the end of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics

Need a Jacob’s Ladder to light up your Lab Space?

Want to experiment with finding the sound that will shake your victim’s internal organs?

Think there might be a future in building odd trip toys for those with idle time?

Here’s where to get your gear.

http://www.amazing1.com

Originally provided to me more then a decade ago by a Mad Social Scientist who used to work for the US Army’s Space Command.