Connective Unconscious
Started a new blog,
Connective Unconscious, to house some speculative thoughts relating Mahayana Buddhism and the physical world, with maybe a bit of information theory thrown in. The 1st post on the blog explains it's name.
From the 'Animatrix'
"To an artificial mind, all reality is virtual".
Currently working on...
Activ8 Money Payday Loans, a payday loan lender striving to be the UK's most trusted payday loan provider. Activ8 Money specialises in helping people with bad credit ratings borrow money and rebuild their ratings.
It's a major project and, as with any, financial application, high security is paramount. As such, there's little I can reveal in terms of the technical side.
A tale of two festivals
Leamington Peace Festival, 14th-15th June. I was helping out on the SGI's stall some of the time but also managed to take some time out to catch bands, including Kangaroo Moon, whom I hadn't seen for donkey's years, and the truly impressive Misty's Big Adventure.
Warwick Folk Festival was 26th-27th July, I only really caught the 'parade' of the morris dancers, many of whom these days seem to eschew the traditional plain whites and bells.
Control & culture
Listening to Radio4 yesterday, during a phone-in on knife crime, a listener attributed it in part to our highly competitive culture, one in which you're either a winner or a loser. She gave 'The Weakest Link' a mention, something that in the past I would have scoffed at, but there's so much of our television like that now, think more of the Apprentice or Big Brother. Become rich and famous - or a nobody.
As aspiration's grown, inspiration, it seems to me has declined. Virtually all popular music around now seems to be weak copies of the styles of the previous 3 or 4 decades and much of visual art seems predicated on the major dealers conferring wealth and status in return for headline-grabbing mock outrage, and the Hollywood mainstream is now unspeakably bland.
The rebellion's also disappeared - in the 60s or 70s, Anne Robinson or Alan Sugar would've been told to get f**ked, metaphorically if not literally, the world's now well and truly back under the thumb of wealth and power.
By contrast it was great to watch an interview with Werner Herzog, a film-maker not deliberately obscure, but someone who's so motivated by his dreams he's a complete misfit in this day and age. His first notable film, 'Even Dwarves Started Small', he produced and directed himself, and even financed. At 20K it was a pretty tiny budget even then, yet almost impossibly huge coming out of his own pocket. A last important message from the great man - digital film cameras are so cheap now, if you want to make a film there's no excuse for not doing so. But how few people will actually do so (as opposed to a clip of yourself dancing around your bedroom on Youtube in the hope of getting talent-spotted)?
At last I caught up with Anton Corbijn's film, 'Control'. Like many others I found it didn't really engage me until quite near the end, and from what he said in the notes on the DVD, I think it'd been loads better if he'd stuck to his original plan and done it as flashback rather than documentary. In fact I reckon he could've reduced the 'now' content to the last tragic hour or so of Ian Curtis's life.
Other seem to think that Curtis was suffering from depression when he killed himself, but it struck me that it was much more unresolvable inner conflicts. An impossible choice between his wife and girlfriend, a love of what he was doing with Joy Division against the shallowness of fame, the debilitating side-effects of his medication against the potentially lethal fits from epilepsy if he stopped taking it, and more besides. In fact, some reckon there's a psychological element to epilepsy, anger. Another creature of his time, so few these days would have the integrity to even find those conflicts as a root of suffering.
And a tie-in - the night before he died he watched Herzog's 'Stroszek' on TV.
A new low in warfare?
Wars of the last 100 years have frequently pushed the boundaries of brutality and depravity - think of the Western Front in WW1, the appalling viciousness of the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Front of WW2 or more recently the random amputations meted out to civilians in Sierra Leone's 'rebel' uprising - but if
Carla Del Ponte's allegations of human organ trafficking in Kosovo are true then warfare has plumbed new depths.
In the book, Del Ponte writes that her investigators visited a house in the remote mountainous region outside Burrel, Albania, which was allegedly being used as an impromptu clinic for the butchering of 300 young Serbs captured by the Kosovo Liberation Army and transported in lorries across the border from Kosovo to Albania.
According to witnesses - including one who said he had driven some of the organs to Tirana airport, and a team of unnamed journalists who investigated the allegations - the victims had their kidneys removed before being killed later and having other organs taken.
"Prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately," Del Ponte writes.
The "house-clinic" was visited by UN officials from Kosovo and tribunal investigators. "The team was shocked by what they saw," said Chuck Sudetic, a former tribunal official who is joint author of the book. "They found gauze and vials of medicines, including a muscle relaxer used during surgery."
And it wasn't only captured Serbs:
The victims were said to include Albanians and trafficked women from Russia and eastern Europe forced to work as prostitutes.
del Ponte's allegations have met with strenuous denials. They may be false (I really hope they are) but it's not too hard to imagine any diplomats involved in the region wanting to scotch the rumours, Kosovo's a powder keg.
The current economic crisis coupled with soaring demand from resources of every kind may soon threaten to drive the world to further mass warfare. This may prove to be one resource, one which becomes plentiful during war, the profiteers will be unable to resist.
The only way forward
While reading this chunk of
President Ikeda's 2007 Peace Proposal, I was struck by just how so many of our current problems stem from this same cause:
At the heart of the nuclear issue is a potential for destructiveness inherent in human life. It is a function of this destructiveness to shred our sense of human solidarity, sowing the seeds of mistrust and suspicion, conflict and hatred. Buddhism characterizes this as the life-state or "world" of anger, which, when it becomes undirected and unrestrained, is a rogue and renegade force, disrupting and destroying all in its path.
...
This same world of anger is at the heart of many of the issues confronting contemporary civilization, with its high degree of capitalist and technological development. It is necessary to reposition economic values within the various hierarchies of values integral to the processes of life, to train and tame the capitalist system. The key to this is a human awakening, a process of individuals and humanity reclaiming their rightful place.
Over the last 20-30 years we've had politicians preaching their "you can't buck the market" ideology, which while it's increased global wealth, has done so to the detriment of society. The wealth has not been distributed even slightly fairly leading to resentment and despair. Human values have been replaced by market prices. A hubristic war to capure Iraq's oil has left us with an increased terrorism threat, unprecedented levels of surveillance and a serious drain on the world's economy.
The attitude that we're ruled by some sort of natural law that dictates the economy and hence politics, is bogus and was carefully engineered to create this sort of society. I doubt its priests ever foresaw the dreary negativity that sprang up in its wake.
The solution isn't at the global political level, it's failed us so many times and will fail again. Contrast the high-mindedness of the Russian revolution on 1917 with its Stalinist outcome.
It's only by individuals making the change in themselves that evenually society can be turned round, in SGI parlance, "the Human Revolution".
This blog was made with recycled bytes.