“When we get past the chaos, the horror, and the paradoxical hope of all that’s unfolding, what we’re talking about and living through is apocalyptic collapse as a spiritual path.” Last Thursday I noted that we were then living through a week of apocalypse here in America. The very next day saw the first-ever police…
‘Sirius’: A film about the scientific reality of UFOs, ETs, and advanced energy technology
Tonight will see the official premiere in Hollywood of the new documentary film Sirius, which promises to be one of the more interesting — and perhaps more starkly significant? — UFO-related film projects to emerge since, well, ever. The film brings together the enduring “UFO disclosure” meme with the equally enduring theme of our planetary…
Downgrading humans in the age of robots
From a recent essay by University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education about “the dream-logic of all technology, namely that it should make our lives easier and more fun,” and the dark side of the age-old science fictional — and now increasingly science factual — vision of creating…
Week of apocalypse: Boston bombs, Waco explosions, poisoned letters
It’s been a week full of high-profile mayhem and catastrophe here in the U.S., and two of its manifestations have hit very close to home for me personally. My sister lives in Salem, Massachusetts, right next to Boston, and was driving through Boston itself on Monday when chaos broke loose in the city after the…
JĂłhann JĂłhannsson: “Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory)”
“The next to last track on the album [FordlĂąndia] is named after an actual research paper, ‘Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device based on Heimâs Quantum Theory’, which seriously proposes a method of faster-than-light space travel. Burkhard Heim was a German physicist who dedicated much of his life to developing a method of space travel….
Art, meaninglessness, and salvation by despair
Start the music playing and then read the excerpted texts that follow, which may or may not be connected to each other and/or the music. (The music is JĂłhann JĂłhannsson’s “Fordlandia,” titled after Henry Ford’s epic, disastrous, and somehow mythically tragic folly of trying to create an artificial industrial worker’s utopia in the Amazon rainforest…
Mass culture, best-sellerism, and the future of literature
From an essay by Philip Van Doren Stern that was first published in Virginia Quarterly Review in January 1942, immediately after America’s entry into the Second World War and several decades into the rise of modern mass culture: Bookselling itself has changed. It has taken a lesson from the department store which long ago learned…
A new flood of apocalyptic cinema, where art imitates life
From an unexpectedly meaty piece published by — of all sources — NBC, on the current upsurge of apocalyptic cinema and its real-world meanings and implications: Ready for the end of the world as we know it? The popular culture certainly is. When “Defiance” arrives Monday night on the SyFy channel and “Oblivion” hits theaters…
Recommended Reading 38
Mexican Cartels Dispatch Trusted Agents to Live Deep Inside United States The Washington Post (Associated Press), April 1, 2013 Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe…
Learned Psi: Training to Be Psychic
“Learning to become psychic involves a fundamental restructuring of the way we process information both inside and outside ourselves. This can dramatically alter one’s life, and not always in a conventionally positive manner.” Is it possible to take normal, healthy, emotionally stable people who do not think they are psychic, and who don’t recall having…