Science Fiction writers sell out to the Dept. of Fatherland Security

Some of my favorite books are by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Greg Bear. But I have just read they are participating in a group called Sigma which is helping Homeland Security anticipate future threats and devise new weapons capabilities. Their motto is "Science Fiction in the National Interest." I think "Geeks kissing jackboots" is more accurate. Fuck me.

Why are they helping the Empire? In order "to save civilization," as Niven put it. Apparently you don't just need at least one technical degree to participate, you must also be susceptible to propaganda and easily lured to the dark side.

They just lost a fan.

The Human Behavior Experiments

(Many thanks to Andrew Meyer for giving me a working permalink to this documentary.)

The Human Behavior Experiments is a CBC documentary on research into how people can be manipulated into being shockingly cruel to one another. It begins with the famous Milgram experiment in 1962, in which two-thirds of the participants -- normal people -- eventually obeyed the experimenters' instructions to deliver what they believed were lethal shocks to other test subjects. Of course, the shocks and the screams weren't real. The real point of the experiment was to see how far people will go in hurting one another. Very far, it turns out.

The conditions for widespread cruelty can arise spontaneously, as was the case when many people watched Kitty Genovese get stabbled to death without coming to her aid. The conditions can also occur quite deliberately. This is what made the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, as well as Abu Ghraib, possible. The photos from Abu Ghraib are eerily resonant with the famous Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971. Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who devised that experiment, said,

When the images of the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military went on the defensive, saying, "it's a few bad apples". When we see somebody doing bad things, we assume they were bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they never could imagine doing.

We take our cues from those around us, and this seems to be very deeply wired within our brains. If no one rises up to stop an injustice, it can go on for quite a while before someone wakes up and realizes the gravity of the situation. In the presence of strong authority figures very few people will rebel, especially when they see their fellows obeying orders.

I believe the technology for producing mass obedience is far more mature than people realize. Like a snake charmer, the mass media has mutated into a hypnotic mechanism of control. It's not perfect control, mind you. Certainly there is educational and nonmanipulative content on the television, radio, in magazines, etc. But make no mistake: there is just enough control to blunt any serious questioning of authority. We are given the appearance of debate, of objection, to this or that policy. But it is simply theater.

For extra credit, and for specific examples of the manipulation I'm referring to, please watch Bill Moyers' excellent documentary Buying The War, as well as Robert Kane Pappas's Orwell Rolls In His Grave. Both can be seen online at the links provided.

Then you might just want to watch They Live again, for kicks.

Now for the good news. All we have to do is wake up. That's all. Just...wake...up.

The Golden Compass is coming to theaters Dec. 2007

I greatly enjoyed Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy entitled His Dark Materials. It's one of the very few works I know of that can stand proudly beside Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The first book, The Golden Compass, is being made into a film (official website) by New Line Cinema. The trailer is incredible! The art direction and casting are perfect.

Unwritten grammar rules

There has been some interesting insight into hidden grammatical structures within English sentences, as described in this article.

Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.

Not all noun phrases have adjectives from each of these columns. But this is the order they should be in. Thus "little old lady" or "angry young man" are set phrases in the language that illustrate the idiomatic order. "Little" (size) comes before "old" (age). And "angry" is an example of what the charts call an opinion adjective – one of the modifiers that seem less essential than those referring to age or origin, for instance.

If a person uses this kind of adjectival ordering, they can avoid using too many commas and still retain clarity of meaning.

Propaganda, by Edward Bernays

Sigmund Freud's American cousin Edward Bernays was a propagandist for the US during World War I, and when that war ended he thought to use the same techniques for manufacturing consent in peacetime, both in the private sector and for government.

Here is the complete text of his book entitled Propaganda, which outlines the ways in which consent may be elicited without the public's conscious perception of the process.

And it's an eye-opener. This is quite an old work, but it is from the pen of the man who: 1. Invented the term and profession of "public relations"; 2. Got women to smoke in the 1920s despite strong cultural prohibitions, by piggybacking on the Women's Rights Movement; 3. Made bacon-and-eggs popular as a breakfast meal at the behest of the pork and poultry industries; and 4. Helped jumpstart a brutal coup, engineered partly by the CIA, of the reformist Guatemalan government by creating a fictitious "revolution". The newly-installed regime acted in ways which strongly profited the United Fruit Company. The term "banana republic" stems directly from this masterwork of propaganda. (More info here.) He also played a part in marketing the concept of mass-fluoridation of drinking water.

Here is a quote from Bernays:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind...

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences. A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a melange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares.

Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology. It operates in establishing the rising or diminishing prestige of a summer resort, in causing a run on a bank, or a panic on the stock exchange, in creating a best seller, or a box-office success.

Truly shocking stuff. One can only imagine the heights to which this art has grown, powered with sophisticated tools such as MRI and CAT-scan-powered neuromarketing techniques.

A reporter has her artificial sixth sense removed, misses it

This article is short, but thought-provoking: I spent fully 20 minutes mulling over the ramifications of this woman's strangely intimate experiment where a magnet was implanted in her finger, allowing her to directly experience magnetic fields.

A friend asked how an implanted magnet could impart any sensation, as there wouldn't be a direct neural connection. I assume that it'd produce feeling simply by virtue of being embedded; the deflections caused by different kinds of fields would translate to distinct vibrations or pressures, depending on whether they pulse or not, and their orientation.

TV audiences are shrinking. Yay!

TV viewership is down, reports CNN. Way down. And the experts are wondering how to explain it, but they fear it'll impact advertising profits. Well, I won't be shedding any tears.

20 Most Amazing Coincidences (and a few extras)

Oddweek.com has an article of the 20 most amazing coincidences. But I think they left a few out.

1. The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen, an X-Files spinoff series, involved the heroes stumbling upon a conspiracy by a rogue faction of the US government planning to take remote control of a commercial passenger jet in order to fly it into the World Trade Center; spurring a worldwide demand for arms sales against a looming "terrorist" threat. The heroes are able to hack into the plane and avert a crash -- just barely in time. This program aired on 03/04/2001, over six months prior to the eerily similar events of September 11, 2001.

2. In 1986 Martin Keating, brother of then-governor of Oklahoma Frank Keating, wrote a technothriller entitled Final Jihad. Part of the story involved muslim-backed terrorist attacks upon government buildings in Oklahoma City and included a character named Tom McVay. This was four years before Timothy McVeigh presumably attacked the Murrah Federal Building in that same city.

3. Over a hundred years before the discovery of Mars's two moonlets by telescope in 1877, writer Jonathan Swift invented them for his book Gulliver's Travels (1726). He called these two moons Phobos and Deimos and gave them orbital periods of 10 and 21.5 hours respectively, very close to the actual values of 7.6 and 30.2 hours. He also got their sizes approximately correct. The moons, of course, were given the names from Swift's book as a nod to his eerie precognition.

4. This is a personal coincidence, and not all that cosmic, but I found it kinda cool. I went bowling with my family a couple of months ago. We were given lane 18. Above various lanes were placards indicating when a PGA bowler had bowled a perfect 300 game there. As it turns out, someone named Mike Reichstein had bowled a perfect game on our lane on October 18, 2006, the date of my last birthday. The individual digits of the date 10-18-2006 add up to precisely 18. And the cost of our family's game that day came to exactly $18. How cool is that?

Skepticism and the Balkanization of Epistemology

Psychedelic Salon is offering two installments of a trialogue between Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham, downloadable as .mp3 files. They're really interesting.

Part 1
Part 2

Vantage - An FSX video

My friend lotus just finished his latest video. It's a doozy. I helped by flying in about half of the shots you see.



If you want to see the gorgeous high-resolution version, you can download it from this page; the link is in the grey bar near the top, on the right hand side.

If you like that one, be sure to check his YouTube page (where he goes by the name Ramasurinen) with all his other videos. I recommend Elyonim and Lucid.

Why religious groups feel threatened by near-death experience research

Dr. Neal Grossman discusses reasons for many religious groups' aversion to near-death experience research in this podcast. Basically, they worry such research may not support their notions of God and the afterlife.

I am personally fascinated by NDE research and have spent many hours poring over experiencers' first-hand accounts found on sites like Near Death Experience Research Foundation and Near Death Experiences and the Afterlife.

My own working hypothesis is that the experiences don't directly show us the landscape of existence following mortal life, but rather the interface between the two, a kind of antechamber to a wholly different kind of being. This interface is not "solid" in the way we think of our physical reality; it's extremely fluid in its specific details and yet remarkably consistent in the underlying themes. This is not unlike differently-flavored operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) which lie between you and the same basic hardware, customizing the look and feel of the interface to work best with your particular preferences.