If current world events have you wondering — or especially if they don’t have you wondering — about the possibility of a bona fide new world war, please bear this in mind: a hundred years ago World War One was impossible — until it was inevitable.
So, is anybody really surprised that Facebook was (is?) running a scientific experiment to manipulate users’ emotions? “We’re really, really sorry,” says their second in command. Time magazine points out one reason to be worried beyond just the obvious ones: private sector and tech companies are increasingly funding what was once independent social science research.
Nick Hanauer, himself a certified member of America’s ruling “one percent,” warns his fellow plutocrats that the pitchforks are coming for all of them: “No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”
In The Washington Post, political commentator Dana Milbanks reflects on the current disastrous reign of boomers in American politics.
If this were a joke, it would be a bad one — but it’s not a joke at all: Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws.
We’re told that “predictive policing” isn’t — really isn’t! — dystopian SF come to life. But then we read something like this: Predicting crime, LAPD-style.
Canary in the coal mine for the American southwest: Las Vegas is seriously running out water.
Then there’s my own home state of Texas, which is also running out of water due to greed, drought, and rampant overdevelopment.
Guardian journalist Rory Carroll investigates the psychic toll of unrelenting failure in Silicon Valley’s frantic culture of tech startups.
Mark Edmundson (author of, among many other things, the classic 1997 essay “On the uses of a liberal education: As lite entertainment for bored college students”) warns that while attentive absorption in some worthy work or subject is the essence of happiness and fulfillment, we live in a culture afflicted with ADHD and devoted to absorption’s evil twin, electronic mesmerization.
BBC journalist Nicholas Barber delves into the mysterious fascination of exorcisms.
Psychologist Charles Fernyhough emphasizes the normalcy of hearing voices (with a reference to the Society for Psychical Research): “The sooner we come to appreciate that voice-hearing is something that happens to people, rather than merely a symptom of a diseased brain, the sooner we will close in on a genuinely humane and enlightened understanding of the experience.”
Religion scholar Timothy Beal (author of the wonderful Religion and Its Monsters) examines the relationship between our spiritual impulse and our enduring fascination with the monsters of supernatural horror: “The import of the spiritual mainstream is holistic and ‘cosmic,’ speaking to our desire for grounding and orientation within a meaningfully integrated and interconnected whole. The monsters of contemporary horror, on the other hand, often remind us of the more chaotic, disorienting, and ungrounding dimensions of religion, envisioning an everyday life that is not without fear and trembling. ”
David Duchovny muses on future possibilities for The X-Files: “It’s not done until one of us dies.”
I’ve begun reading A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lyndsay it’s my favourite novel now . Has all this stuff I like.. reconciliation, self-loss, alchemy, androgyny, psychic powers, the end of sleep and continuous dreams and wakefulness.. begins with a seance then a journey to a planet in a binary star system . Here’s an audiobook.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90hLehiXM8g .
the Exorcism article had a paragraph heading that read “Spirited Away” which I am pretty sure was a direct nod and reference to the Miyazaki film . Studio Ghibli’s next film is called When Marnie Was There which is about a young girl and her reconciled relationship to a ghost . The trailer demonstrates connections between creativity and mediumship.
Oh there’s actually a movie from the 1970s adapted from David Lyndsay’s novel,