Long dismissed as the domain of Ufology and conspiracy theories, cryptozoology has come of age and become a legitimate science thanks to the discovery of various new animal speices previously unknown to science.
If you've read Scott Weidensaul's excellent book The Ghost With Trembling Wings (2002), you'll recall the story of Louise Emmons and the giant Peruvian rodent she discovered. But before I get to that, let me say that The Ghost With Trembling Wings isn't about ghosts at all, but about the search for cryptic or supposedly extinct species. Think thylacines, British big cats, Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cone-billed tanagers, the resurrection of the aurochs, Night parrots, Richard Meinertzhagen and the Indian forest owlet. It begins with Weidensaul's search for Semper's warbler Leucopeza semperi, an enigmatic parulid endemic to St. Lucia, discovered in 1870 and last seen alive in 1969 (although with a trickle of post-1969 sightings, some reliable and some not so reliable). If you're interested in the hunt for cryptic species and zoological field work and its history, it is mandatory that you obtain and read this inexpensive book.
Louise Emmons is a highly distinguished, experienced mammalogist who has worked on bats, tree shrews, cats big and small, and rodents, and is also the foremost expert on the mammals of the Neotropical rainforests (she wrote the only field guide to Neotropical rainforest mammals: Emmons 1999a). On 15th June 1997, while on an expedition to the northern Vilcabamba range of Cusco, Peru, she was walking along a forest track when, lying dead on the track in front of her, she discovered a big dead rodent. Pale grey, but handsomely patterned with a white nose and lips, and with a white blaze running along the top of its head, it was over 30 cm in head and body length, and with a tail over 20 cm long. Its broad feet, prominent and curved claws, large hallux, and palms and soles covered in small tubercles indicated that it was a tree-climbing species. A large bite wound on the neck indicated that it had recently been killed by a predator, probably a Long-tailed weasel Mustela frenata.
And it was entirely new: no one had ever recorded anything like it before. In her description of the new species, Emmons (1999b) named it Cuscomys ashaninka (meaning 'mouse from Cusco, of the Ashaninka people') and showed that it was a member of Abrocomidae. This is an entirely South American group previously known only from Abrocoma Waterhouse 1837, members of which are sometimes called rat chinchillas, chinchilla rats or chinchilliones, and from the Miocene fossil Protabrocoma Kraglievich 1927. Abrocoma is known from eight species (A. bennetti, A. boliviensis, A. cinerea, A. vaccarum, A. uspallata, A. budini, A. famatina and A. schistacea), among which A. boliviensis was only recognised in 1990 and A. uspallata in 2002 (Glanz & Anderson 1990, Braun & Mares 1996, 2002). Incidentally A. bennetti has 17 pairs of ribs - more than any other rodent. Abrocoma produces midden piles, and Pleistocene rodent middens from Chile have been identified by DNA analysis as having been produced by Abrocoma (Kuch et al. 2002).
And speaking of unkown species here is a possible explanation for the Ogopogo.
Could unknown Okanagan creature be baby Ogopogo?
Kent Spencer, Canwest News ServicePublished: Monday, November 10, 2008
VANCOUVER - A TV documentary crew has added to the mystery surrounding Ogopogo by finding an unknown biological specimen in the depths of Okanagan Lake.
"I told a radio station tongue-in-cheek I thought it was the baby Ogopogo," monster-watcher Bill Steciuk of Kelowna said Monday after the History Channel completed a nine-day shoot.
"It was all curled up. The features were really hard to see. You could see a little head tucked in and a straight tail with no fins.
"It's a huge mystery. We have no idea what it is," said Steciuk, who helped organize the shooting locations.
The unidentified specimen has been shipped to the University of Guelph in Ontario for DNA tests, but Ogopogo buffs will have to wait until February to find out more, when the Monster Quest program weighs in on the legendary mega-serpent.
Ogopogo, first sighted in the 1870s, is reputed to be 12 metres long with multiple humps and a small head.
The History Channel, which had a bigger budget than previous expeditions, mounted a thermal infrared imaging camera on a helicopter for the first time. It picked up an unidentified shadow on the lake, while sonar spotted something over three metres long moving in the water.
"That's pretty big for a fish," said Steciuk.
But divers made the most interesting find in an underwater cave on the west side of Rattlesnake Island.
"I couldn't recognize it," said Steciuk. "Nor could anyone else. Maybe a new species has been found."
See
Sea Serpent
Die Vurm
Strange Sea Creatures
Chupacabra A Shunka Warakin
Cryptozology Part 1
Cryptozoology Part 2
They Walk Among Us
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Monsters, Lake monsters, myths, legends,cryptozoology, rare, animals, biology, fish, living fossil, strange animals,
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Cloning Extinct Species
In the news last week was the proposition that scientists might be able to clone the now extinct Mammoth.
Do we really need to bring back the mammoth?
Scientists map DNA of prehistoric animalCNN - 19 Nov 2008"This really is the first time that we have been able to study an extinct animal in the same detail as the ones living in our own time," said Stephan ...
Scientists reconstruct genome of extinct woolly mammoth Business Mirror
Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million New York Times
Successful Cloning Process With 16-year-old Frozen TissueeFluxMedia - 5 Nov 2008Still, the same nuclear transfer techniques could be used on extinct species. The study notes that "techniques could be used to 'resurrect' animals or ...
A first-time research to make cloning possible from a dead cell MyNews.in
Cloned Mice Obtained Using Frozen Tissue Technique could be used ... Drug Topics Magazine
'Scientists a step closer to Jurassic Park' Hindu
No need to clone them to bring back a prehistoric createure we have them living among us. Here is a living dinosaur that needs saving.
Sturgeons in China may be among last survivors of 130-million-year-old species
08:48 AM CST on Saturday, November 29, 2008
Craig Simons / Cox News Service
SHANGHAI, China – It's hard to hold a living dinosaur in a concrete pool.
Yet the dozens of Chinese sturgeons swimming lazy circles at the Yangtze Estuarine Nature Reserve in Shanghai may be among the last survivors of a 130-million-year-old species, one of the oldest surviving animals in the world.
As recently as the 1970s, thousands of Chinese sturgeons – a flat-headed fish that can live for 40 years and grow as long as a minivan – spawned each year in the Yangtze, the world's third-longest waterway. Adults typically spent more than a decade in the Pacific Ocean before swimming thousands of miles up the Yangtze to breed.
Today, a combination of dams, over-fishing and heavy boat traffic has pushed the species to the brink of extinction. Last year, scientists documented only six adult sturgeons in their last known remaining spawning ground.
The sturgeons' plight underscores the high environmental costs of China's economic development. China has grown about 10 percent annually since the late 1970s.
But a lack of environmental controls has led to widespread pollution and habitat loss.
From its headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau to where it pours into the East China Sea just north of Shanghai, the Yangtze was once one of the world's richest ecosystems. Elephants, tigers and alligators roamed its banks. Cranes and other birds fed in wide marshes in its flood plains.
At the beginning of the 20th century the Chinese sturgeon was among the oldest living animal species in the world. Its spawning grounds stretched into Sichuan province, 2,000 miles from the sea.
Through the 1970s, fishermen prized sturgeons for their size and caught hundreds annually.
Beijing listed Chinese sturgeons as endangered in 1988 and banned killing them, but many continued to be injured by fishing nets strung along the riverbank.
Traffic in the Yangtze also became a problem because sturgeons swim near the surface, colliding with boats.
Hydroelectric dams have been the biggest challenge to the Chinese sturgeons' survival. The Gezhouba Dam was built across the Yangtze River in 1981 to test techniques later used in the Three Gorges Dam.
All of the sturgeons' traditional breeding grounds lie upstream of the Gezhouba Dam. But some sturgeons made do with a habitat just east of its massive sluice gates.
"There has been so much manmade damage to the river that I sometimes can't see how the Chinese sturgeon can recover," said Wei Qiwei, a biologist at the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute.
The Chinese sturgeon could go the way of the original New Zealand Penquin.
The discovery of a previously unknown and now extinct New Zealand penguin could be just one of many breakthroughs as scientists probe the secrets of ancient DNA.
A study led by Otago University researchers set out to look at changes in the yellow-eyed penguin population after humans settled in New Zealand.
But DNA analysis of old bones discovered evidence of a completely new penguin species, now dubbed the Waitaha the Maori word for Canterbury penguin.
The study found the yellow-eyed penguin was a recent immigrant to New Zealand, arriving just 500 years ago.
"This sort of discovery is going to become more and more common as people look at ancient DNA," said Otago University zoologist Dr Phil Seddon.
The yellow-eyed penguin filled a niche after the Waitaha became extinct following the arrival of Polynesian settlers between 1300 and 1500 AD.
SEE:
SOS
Nessie?
Jurassic Park
Capitalism Threatens Coelacanth
Prehistoric Happy Feet
March Of The Penquins to Extinction
tags
rare, penquin,, china, marine biology, fish, living fossil, endangered species, species,, mammoth,, cloning,, Jurrasic Park, extinction,, sturgeon
Do we really need to bring back the mammoth?
Scientists map DNA of prehistoric animalCNN - 19 Nov 2008"This really is the first time that we have been able to study an extinct animal in the same detail as the ones living in our own time," said Stephan ...
Scientists reconstruct genome of extinct woolly mammoth Business Mirror
Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million New York Times
Successful Cloning Process With 16-year-old Frozen TissueeFluxMedia - 5 Nov 2008Still, the same nuclear transfer techniques could be used on extinct species. The study notes that "techniques could be used to 'resurrect' animals or ...
A first-time research to make cloning possible from a dead cell MyNews.in
Cloned Mice Obtained Using Frozen Tissue Technique could be used ... Drug Topics Magazine
'Scientists a step closer to Jurassic Park' Hindu
No need to clone them to bring back a prehistoric createure we have them living among us. Here is a living dinosaur that needs saving.
Sturgeons in China may be among last survivors of 130-million-year-old species
08:48 AM CST on Saturday, November 29, 2008
Craig Simons / Cox News Service
SHANGHAI, China – It's hard to hold a living dinosaur in a concrete pool.
Yet the dozens of Chinese sturgeons swimming lazy circles at the Yangtze Estuarine Nature Reserve in Shanghai may be among the last survivors of a 130-million-year-old species, one of the oldest surviving animals in the world.
As recently as the 1970s, thousands of Chinese sturgeons – a flat-headed fish that can live for 40 years and grow as long as a minivan – spawned each year in the Yangtze, the world's third-longest waterway. Adults typically spent more than a decade in the Pacific Ocean before swimming thousands of miles up the Yangtze to breed.
Today, a combination of dams, over-fishing and heavy boat traffic has pushed the species to the brink of extinction. Last year, scientists documented only six adult sturgeons in their last known remaining spawning ground.
The sturgeons' plight underscores the high environmental costs of China's economic development. China has grown about 10 percent annually since the late 1970s.
But a lack of environmental controls has led to widespread pollution and habitat loss.
From its headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau to where it pours into the East China Sea just north of Shanghai, the Yangtze was once one of the world's richest ecosystems. Elephants, tigers and alligators roamed its banks. Cranes and other birds fed in wide marshes in its flood plains.
At the beginning of the 20th century the Chinese sturgeon was among the oldest living animal species in the world. Its spawning grounds stretched into Sichuan province, 2,000 miles from the sea.
Through the 1970s, fishermen prized sturgeons for their size and caught hundreds annually.
Beijing listed Chinese sturgeons as endangered in 1988 and banned killing them, but many continued to be injured by fishing nets strung along the riverbank.
Traffic in the Yangtze also became a problem because sturgeons swim near the surface, colliding with boats.
Hydroelectric dams have been the biggest challenge to the Chinese sturgeons' survival. The Gezhouba Dam was built across the Yangtze River in 1981 to test techniques later used in the Three Gorges Dam.
All of the sturgeons' traditional breeding grounds lie upstream of the Gezhouba Dam. But some sturgeons made do with a habitat just east of its massive sluice gates.
"There has been so much manmade damage to the river that I sometimes can't see how the Chinese sturgeon can recover," said Wei Qiwei, a biologist at the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute.
The Chinese sturgeon could go the way of the original New Zealand Penquin.
The discovery of a previously unknown and now extinct New Zealand penguin could be just one of many breakthroughs as scientists probe the secrets of ancient DNA.
A study led by Otago University researchers set out to look at changes in the yellow-eyed penguin population after humans settled in New Zealand.
But DNA analysis of old bones discovered evidence of a completely new penguin species, now dubbed the Waitaha the Maori word for Canterbury penguin.
The study found the yellow-eyed penguin was a recent immigrant to New Zealand, arriving just 500 years ago.
"This sort of discovery is going to become more and more common as people look at ancient DNA," said Otago University zoologist Dr Phil Seddon.
The yellow-eyed penguin filled a niche after the Waitaha became extinct following the arrival of Polynesian settlers between 1300 and 1500 AD.
SEE:
SOS
Nessie?
Jurassic Park
Capitalism Threatens Coelacanth
Prehistoric Happy Feet
March Of The Penquins to Extinction
tags
rare, penquin,, china, marine biology, fish, living fossil, endangered species, species,, mammoth,, cloning,, Jurrasic Park, extinction,, sturgeon
Monday, December 01, 2008
Worth Reading After Mubai
Found this excellent post, long but worth the read. Especially in light of this weeks fascist attack in Mubai, which revealed an incompetant and ineffective security state in India. And again the focus was a centre of world capital, a business centre, the countries capital, and home of the Indian bourgoise, a major centre of tourism, just like New York was. And Mubai like the Twin Towers has been a repeated target of fascists.
This article was published after 9/11.
THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION: Looking at Hamerquist’s ‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism’ by J. Sakai
Fascism is rapidly becoming a large political problem for anti-authoritarians, but perhaps moving up so close to pass us that it’s in our blind spot. Fascism is too familiar to us, in one sense. We’ve heard so much about the Nazis, the Holocaust and World War II, it seems like we must already know about fascism. And Nazi-era fascism is like all around us still, ever-present because Western capitalism has never given fascism up. As many have noticed, eurofascism even crushed has had a pervasive presence not only in politics, armies and intelligence agencies, but in the arts, pop culture, in fashion and films, on sexuality. For years thousands of youth in America and Europe have been fighting out the question of fascism in bars and the music scene, as a persistent fascist element in the skinhead subculture has been squashed and driven out by anti-racist youth–but come back and spread like an oil slick in the subterranean watertable. It feels so familiar to us now even though we haven’t actually understood it.
While the scholarly debates about “classic” 1920-30s eurofascism only increase–and journalists like Martin Lee in his best-selling book, The Beast Reawakens, have sounded the alarm about eurofascism’s renewed popularity –existing radical theory on fascism is a dusty relic that’s anything but radical. And it’s euro-centric as hell. Some still say fascism is just extreme white racism. For years many have even argued that no one who wasn’t white could even be a fascist. That it was a unique idea that only could lodge in the brains of one race! Others repeat the disastrous 1920s European belief that fascism was just “a tool of the ruling class”, violent thugs in comic opera uniforms doing repression for their capitalist masters. Often, both views overlap, being held simultaneously. So we ‘know’ fascism but really we don’t know it yet. Once reclothed, not spouting old fascist European political philosophy (but the same program and the class politics in other cultural forms—such as cooked-up religious ideology), fascism walks right by us and we don’t recognize it at first.
As fascism is becoming a global trend, it’s surprising how little attention it has gotten in our revolutionary studies. Into this unusual vacuum steps Don Hamerquist’s Fascism and Anti-Fascism.(2) This is an original theoretical paper that has in its background not only study but fighting fascists and racists on the streets.
In this discussion of Hamerquist’s paper we underline three main points about fascism:- That it is arising not from simple poverty or economic depression, but from the spreading zone of today’s protracted capitalist crisis beyond either reform or normal repression;
- That as fascism is moving from margin to populist mainstream, it still has a defined class character as an ‘extraordinary’ revolutionary movement of men from the lower middle classes and the declassed;
- That the critical turning point now for fascism is not just in Europe. With the failure of State socialism and national liberation parties in the capitalist periphery, in the Third World, the far right including fascism is grasping at the leadership of mass anti-colonialism.
Fascism has shown that it can gather mass support. In many nations the far right, including fascism, has become a popular oppositional force to the new globalized imperialism. In many countries the far right has replaced the left as the main political opposition. It doesn’t get more critical than this. This stands the old leftist notion about fascism on its head. It isn’t just about some other country. Without a serious revolutionary analysis of fascism we can’t understand, locate or combat it right here. And if you don’t think that’s a serious problem, you’ve got your back turned to what’s incoming.
The modern islamic rightists, who began in 1927-28 with the founding of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, took religious ideological form but were started as a political movement against British neo-colonial domination. They were backed not by workers or peasants but by the middle-class bazaar merchants and traders. The core of the islamic rightists from the beginning were not theologians but young men who had middle-class educations as scientists and technicians (like today’s Mohammad Atta who supposedly led the 911 attacks), and who used assassinations and trade boycotts. One trend within this broader islamist political movement developed fascist politics and a definite fascist class agenda. The fact that everything is explained in religious ideological terms doesn’t change the fact that their program and class strategy fit fascism perfectly. Perhaps that’s the real “fundamentalism” that they have.(5)
Throughout the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Turkey to Pakistan, Western imperialism has helped maintain militarized neo-colonial regimes that have looted and deadended society. They have destroyed local subsistance economies of self-production for use in favor of globalized export-import economies. The number of the declassed, those without any regular relationship to economic production and distribution, keeps growing. The lower-middle classes keep losing their small plots of land, their small market businesses, their toehold in the educated professions. These are men who are threatened with the loss of everything that defined them, including the ability of patriarchs to own households of women and children.
This is the class basis of today’s pan-islamic fascism, which demands a complete reversal of fortune. Revolutions where today’s Muslim elites shall be in the prisons or the gutter and the warriors of fascism shall be the new class ruling over the palaces, mosques and markets. They are more than national in scope just as all revolutionary movements have been. Because they are in a fluid war of undergrounds and exile, striking from abroad, of retreating from savage military repression in one nation to concentrate on breakthroughs in another nation. And to them, the world citadel of globalization in New York was not an innocent civilian target but a fortress of an amoral enemy.
The key thing about them isn’t that they’re following some old book. It’s that they’re fighting for State power just like everyone else in the capitalist sinkhole. They upfront want to rule, to not work but get affluent and powerful as special classes alongside the bourgeoisie, to hold everyone else underfoot by raw police power. Whether it’s christianity or islam or whatever they claim to be following, these are definitely political movements.
SEE:
terror state/state terror
The Spectacle of War on Terror
The War Against The Metropolis
War and the Market State
World On Fire-Who Sells The Matches
India Is Now A Capitalist State
Hinduism Is Fascism
Unemployment Breeds Terrorism
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
India, Mubai, fascism, anti-fascism, terrorism, Al-Qaeda, Spectacle, Debord, Situationist, War, Bush, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism,
Middle East, globalization, terrorism, unemployment, underemployment, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, US, America, Empire, capitalism, Oil, Imperialism, gangs, warfare, market-states, armed struggle, national liberation movements
This article was published after 9/11.
THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION: Looking at Hamerquist’s ‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism’ by J. Sakai
Fascism is rapidly becoming a large political problem for anti-authoritarians, but perhaps moving up so close to pass us that it’s in our blind spot. Fascism is too familiar to us, in one sense. We’ve heard so much about the Nazis, the Holocaust and World War II, it seems like we must already know about fascism. And Nazi-era fascism is like all around us still, ever-present because Western capitalism has never given fascism up. As many have noticed, eurofascism even crushed has had a pervasive presence not only in politics, armies and intelligence agencies, but in the arts, pop culture, in fashion and films, on sexuality. For years thousands of youth in America and Europe have been fighting out the question of fascism in bars and the music scene, as a persistent fascist element in the skinhead subculture has been squashed and driven out by anti-racist youth–but come back and spread like an oil slick in the subterranean watertable. It feels so familiar to us now even though we haven’t actually understood it.
While the scholarly debates about “classic” 1920-30s eurofascism only increase–and journalists like Martin Lee in his best-selling book, The Beast Reawakens, have sounded the alarm about eurofascism’s renewed popularity –existing radical theory on fascism is a dusty relic that’s anything but radical. And it’s euro-centric as hell. Some still say fascism is just extreme white racism. For years many have even argued that no one who wasn’t white could even be a fascist. That it was a unique idea that only could lodge in the brains of one race! Others repeat the disastrous 1920s European belief that fascism was just “a tool of the ruling class”, violent thugs in comic opera uniforms doing repression for their capitalist masters. Often, both views overlap, being held simultaneously. So we ‘know’ fascism but really we don’t know it yet. Once reclothed, not spouting old fascist European political philosophy (but the same program and the class politics in other cultural forms—such as cooked-up religious ideology), fascism walks right by us and we don’t recognize it at first.
As fascism is becoming a global trend, it’s surprising how little attention it has gotten in our revolutionary studies. Into this unusual vacuum steps Don Hamerquist’s Fascism and Anti-Fascism.(2) This is an original theoretical paper that has in its background not only study but fighting fascists and racists on the streets.
In this discussion of Hamerquist’s paper we underline three main points about fascism:- That it is arising not from simple poverty or economic depression, but from the spreading zone of today’s protracted capitalist crisis beyond either reform or normal repression;
- That as fascism is moving from margin to populist mainstream, it still has a defined class character as an ‘extraordinary’ revolutionary movement of men from the lower middle classes and the declassed;
- That the critical turning point now for fascism is not just in Europe. With the failure of State socialism and national liberation parties in the capitalist periphery, in the Third World, the far right including fascism is grasping at the leadership of mass anti-colonialism.
Fascism has shown that it can gather mass support. In many nations the far right, including fascism, has become a popular oppositional force to the new globalized imperialism. In many countries the far right has replaced the left as the main political opposition. It doesn’t get more critical than this. This stands the old leftist notion about fascism on its head. It isn’t just about some other country. Without a serious revolutionary analysis of fascism we can’t understand, locate or combat it right here. And if you don’t think that’s a serious problem, you’ve got your back turned to what’s incoming.
The modern islamic rightists, who began in 1927-28 with the founding of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, took religious ideological form but were started as a political movement against British neo-colonial domination. They were backed not by workers or peasants but by the middle-class bazaar merchants and traders. The core of the islamic rightists from the beginning were not theologians but young men who had middle-class educations as scientists and technicians (like today’s Mohammad Atta who supposedly led the 911 attacks), and who used assassinations and trade boycotts. One trend within this broader islamist political movement developed fascist politics and a definite fascist class agenda. The fact that everything is explained in religious ideological terms doesn’t change the fact that their program and class strategy fit fascism perfectly. Perhaps that’s the real “fundamentalism” that they have.(5)
Throughout the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Turkey to Pakistan, Western imperialism has helped maintain militarized neo-colonial regimes that have looted and deadended society. They have destroyed local subsistance economies of self-production for use in favor of globalized export-import economies. The number of the declassed, those without any regular relationship to economic production and distribution, keeps growing. The lower-middle classes keep losing their small plots of land, their small market businesses, their toehold in the educated professions. These are men who are threatened with the loss of everything that defined them, including the ability of patriarchs to own households of women and children.
This is the class basis of today’s pan-islamic fascism, which demands a complete reversal of fortune. Revolutions where today’s Muslim elites shall be in the prisons or the gutter and the warriors of fascism shall be the new class ruling over the palaces, mosques and markets. They are more than national in scope just as all revolutionary movements have been. Because they are in a fluid war of undergrounds and exile, striking from abroad, of retreating from savage military repression in one nation to concentrate on breakthroughs in another nation. And to them, the world citadel of globalization in New York was not an innocent civilian target but a fortress of an amoral enemy.
The key thing about them isn’t that they’re following some old book. It’s that they’re fighting for State power just like everyone else in the capitalist sinkhole. They upfront want to rule, to not work but get affluent and powerful as special classes alongside the bourgeoisie, to hold everyone else underfoot by raw police power. Whether it’s christianity or islam or whatever they claim to be following, these are definitely political movements.
SEE:
terror state/state terror
The Spectacle of War on Terror
The War Against The Metropolis
War and the Market State
World On Fire-Who Sells The Matches
India Is Now A Capitalist State
Hinduism Is Fascism
Unemployment Breeds Terrorism
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
India, Mubai, fascism, anti-fascism, terrorism, Al-Qaeda, Spectacle, Debord, Situationist, War, Bush, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism,
Middle East, globalization, terrorism, unemployment, underemployment, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, US, America, Empire, capitalism, Oil, Imperialism, gangs, warfare, market-states, armed struggle, national liberation movements
Birthday Boy
Hey its my birthday so here is another version of the Beatles birthday song I have been sending to my facebook friends for their birthdays. It uses scenes from one of my favorite movies of the silent era; Metropolis.
And here are my previous posts about my birthday. for your erudition and enlightenment.
B-Day
Today In History
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Eugene Plawiuk, December 1, December 1, 1954,12/01/54,born today, today in history, Sagittarius, horse in Chinese Astrology
And here are my previous posts about my birthday. for your erudition and enlightenment.
B-Day
Today In History
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Eugene Plawiuk, December 1, December 1, 1954,12/01/54,born today, today in history, Sagittarius, horse in Chinese Astrology
Shades of Grenwal Tory Dirty Tricks
Hey remember the last time there was a minority government and the Harpocrites secretly recorded a meeting. At the time the minoritiy government was the Paul Martin Liberals, and the taping was done by Tory MP Gurmeet Grewal who claimed he was being bribed to cross the floor. Well the Harpocrites are at it again releasing secret illegal tape recordings in hopes to shore up their minority government during this crisis of confidence. A Law and Order government secretly and illegally taping the opposition the hypocrisy is only matched by their desperation.
The Tories also unveiled a surreptitiously recorded tape of a New Democratic Party caucus meeting, alleging it showed a long-existing cabal with the Bloc Québécois to defeat the government — and there were rumours that as a last resort, Mr. Harper might seek to prorogue Parliament, ending the session to avoid defeat in the Commons
The Prime Minister's Office released a secretly taped recording of a conference call of the NDP caucus in which Leader Jack Layton refers to having "locked in" the support of the Bloc early.
Mr. Harper's aides argued it showed a pre-existing NDP-Bloc agreement to look for an excuse to defeat the Tories that had nothing to do with last week's economic statement.
In the recording, Mr. Layton is heard telling his MPs they have plans to cope if the Bloc goes "offside" during the coalition.
"I actually believe they're the least of our problems, but in case I'm wrong, let's just say we have strategies. This whole thing would not have happened if the moves hadn't have been made with the Bloc to lock them in early, because you couldn't put three people together in one, in three hours. The first part was done a long time ago, I won't go into details …," Mr. Layton said.
Mr. Mulcair insisted that while the two parties have spoken about co-operation on issues like employment insurance, the first NDP-Bloc talks about a coalition took place only after elements of the government's economic update were revealed last week.
He said the party mistakenly sent the conference-call number to a Conservative MP, who dialled in and recorded the meeting. He said the NDP plans to raise the action as a violation of parliamentary ethics and will consider pressing charges.
Mr. Mulcair said the Tories "illegally" recorded a private meeting, and called it "scandalous."
"It shows the desperation of the Conservatives," he said.
Mulcair added that the NDP were also pursuing legal action against the Tories for listening in and broadcasting a private discussion.
"We're already in contact with senior lawyers in that regard," he said.
And the reason to release this tape despite the possibility of facing legal charges let alone jeopradizing their declining public support?
There were also rumours that Mr. Harper might prorogue Parliament, ending the current session so he cannot be defeated in the Commons — although some said that was a last-resort option that would look desperate.
They know full well that the majority of Canadians, heck the majority of Albertans, did not vote for them.Hence the desperation to stay in power at any cost. So of course the Harpocrites are feigning outrage about a pending coalition government made up of the opposition parties, not because it is an undemocratic power grab as they spent the weekend messaging to the media, but rather because they have used the tactic in the past and know that it can be done.
Only a day earlier, Mr. Harper's chief of staff Guy Giorno sent out an e-mail that included talking points, scripts for Tory partisans to use on radio phone-in shows and a template for letters to newspaper editors. Party faithful were encouraged to "use every single tool and medium at our disposal" to spread the word that opposition parties are trying to usurp the government in a crass bid to protect their political "entitlements."
Text of PMO e-mail to Tory MPs on key talking points
Note to all Conservative members of Parliament:
As you are aware, the Opposition parties are currently discussing a plan to topple our government and replace it with a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.
While we believe such an arrangement would be an affront to the democratic will of Canadians when they afforded us a strengthened mandate on October 14th, we must nonetheless take this threat very seriously.
The Conservative party asked its members to make "emergency" donations to help prevent the NDP and Liberals from forming a coalition government, the latest step undertaken by Tory officials to rally supporters. Irving Gerstein, the Conservative Fund Canada's chairman, sent an e-mail appeal to supporters over the weekend, asking them to "protect Canada's future and protect Canada's democracy from being hijacked by politicians who care about nothing more than power and entitlements."The message asks recipients to make a donation of "$200 or $100 -- whatever you can afford" and states "time is of the essence."
"The Liberals are holding secret negotiations with the socialist NDP and separatist Bloc Quebecois to overturn the wishes of Canadian voters and take power," Mr. Gerstein wrote. "They want to take power and impose on Canadians a prime minister without a personal mandate, a Liberal-NDP coalition not one voter has ever endorsed and have it all backstopped by the separatist Bloc Quebecois who simply want to destroy the country."
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre said the tape proves the NDP has been plotting to usurp results of the election. "The mask has been lifted off -- the separatists and the NDP have been having these backroom talks for months," he said. "Their goal is to reverse the election results and seize power. Now their scheme is exposed ... it's incumbent upon the Liberal Party to ... no longer participate in the secret discussions."
Poilievre said he doesn't know who made the tape and declined to comment on its ethical implications.
But roll back the tape to September 2004, just a little more than two months after Canadians elected a minority Liberal government. Then-opposition leader Harper appeared at a news conference with Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe -- you know, the guy who wants to destroy the country -- and NDP leader Jack Layton to announce that the three of them had conspired -- sorry, agreed -- on a list of demands that would give them a larger role in governing.
"The agreement that we are announcing today will profoundly alter the operation of the House of Commons in ways that opposition parties have been demanding for years," Harper told reporters.
The three opposition leaders also wrote to then governor-general Adrienne Clarkson urging her to "consider all of your options before exercising your constitutional authority" in the event the Martin government lost a confidence vote.
The opposition leaders said the letter was an attempt to head off any attempt by Martin to hold a snap election in the hope of coming back with a majority.
"I would not want the prime minister to think that he could simply fail in the House of Commons as a route to another general election. That's not the way our system works," Harper said.
SEE:
Flaherty's Fiscal Failure
NDP the New Reform Party
tags
Canada, Flaherty, politics, Conservatives,illegal taping, opposition coalition, Grewal, economy, government, Conservatives, Harper, recession, NDP, Liberals, BQ, politics, , federal election, minoirity government Jack Layton,
The Tories also unveiled a surreptitiously recorded tape of a New Democratic Party caucus meeting, alleging it showed a long-existing cabal with the Bloc Québécois to defeat the government — and there were rumours that as a last resort, Mr. Harper might seek to prorogue Parliament, ending the session to avoid defeat in the Commons
The Prime Minister's Office released a secretly taped recording of a conference call of the NDP caucus in which Leader Jack Layton refers to having "locked in" the support of the Bloc early.
Mr. Harper's aides argued it showed a pre-existing NDP-Bloc agreement to look for an excuse to defeat the Tories that had nothing to do with last week's economic statement.
In the recording, Mr. Layton is heard telling his MPs they have plans to cope if the Bloc goes "offside" during the coalition.
"I actually believe they're the least of our problems, but in case I'm wrong, let's just say we have strategies. This whole thing would not have happened if the moves hadn't have been made with the Bloc to lock them in early, because you couldn't put three people together in one, in three hours. The first part was done a long time ago, I won't go into details …," Mr. Layton said.
Mr. Mulcair insisted that while the two parties have spoken about co-operation on issues like employment insurance, the first NDP-Bloc talks about a coalition took place only after elements of the government's economic update were revealed last week.
He said the party mistakenly sent the conference-call number to a Conservative MP, who dialled in and recorded the meeting. He said the NDP plans to raise the action as a violation of parliamentary ethics and will consider pressing charges.
Mr. Mulcair said the Tories "illegally" recorded a private meeting, and called it "scandalous."
"It shows the desperation of the Conservatives," he said.
Mulcair added that the NDP were also pursuing legal action against the Tories for listening in and broadcasting a private discussion.
"We're already in contact with senior lawyers in that regard," he said.
And the reason to release this tape despite the possibility of facing legal charges let alone jeopradizing their declining public support?
There were also rumours that Mr. Harper might prorogue Parliament, ending the current session so he cannot be defeated in the Commons — although some said that was a last-resort option that would look desperate.
They know full well that the majority of Canadians, heck the majority of Albertans, did not vote for them.Hence the desperation to stay in power at any cost. So of course the Harpocrites are feigning outrage about a pending coalition government made up of the opposition parties, not because it is an undemocratic power grab as they spent the weekend messaging to the media, but rather because they have used the tactic in the past and know that it can be done.
Only a day earlier, Mr. Harper's chief of staff Guy Giorno sent out an e-mail that included talking points, scripts for Tory partisans to use on radio phone-in shows and a template for letters to newspaper editors. Party faithful were encouraged to "use every single tool and medium at our disposal" to spread the word that opposition parties are trying to usurp the government in a crass bid to protect their political "entitlements."
Text of PMO e-mail to Tory MPs on key talking points
Note to all Conservative members of Parliament:
As you are aware, the Opposition parties are currently discussing a plan to topple our government and replace it with a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.
While we believe such an arrangement would be an affront to the democratic will of Canadians when they afforded us a strengthened mandate on October 14th, we must nonetheless take this threat very seriously.
The Conservative party asked its members to make "emergency" donations to help prevent the NDP and Liberals from forming a coalition government, the latest step undertaken by Tory officials to rally supporters. Irving Gerstein, the Conservative Fund Canada's chairman, sent an e-mail appeal to supporters over the weekend, asking them to "protect Canada's future and protect Canada's democracy from being hijacked by politicians who care about nothing more than power and entitlements."The message asks recipients to make a donation of "$200 or $100 -- whatever you can afford" and states "time is of the essence."
"The Liberals are holding secret negotiations with the socialist NDP and separatist Bloc Quebecois to overturn the wishes of Canadian voters and take power," Mr. Gerstein wrote. "They want to take power and impose on Canadians a prime minister without a personal mandate, a Liberal-NDP coalition not one voter has ever endorsed and have it all backstopped by the separatist Bloc Quebecois who simply want to destroy the country."
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre said the tape proves the NDP has been plotting to usurp results of the election. "The mask has been lifted off -- the separatists and the NDP have been having these backroom talks for months," he said. "Their goal is to reverse the election results and seize power. Now their scheme is exposed ... it's incumbent upon the Liberal Party to ... no longer participate in the secret discussions."
Poilievre said he doesn't know who made the tape and declined to comment on its ethical implications.
But roll back the tape to September 2004, just a little more than two months after Canadians elected a minority Liberal government. Then-opposition leader Harper appeared at a news conference with Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe -- you know, the guy who wants to destroy the country -- and NDP leader Jack Layton to announce that the three of them had conspired -- sorry, agreed -- on a list of demands that would give them a larger role in governing.
"The agreement that we are announcing today will profoundly alter the operation of the House of Commons in ways that opposition parties have been demanding for years," Harper told reporters.
The three opposition leaders also wrote to then governor-general Adrienne Clarkson urging her to "consider all of your options before exercising your constitutional authority" in the event the Martin government lost a confidence vote.
The opposition leaders said the letter was an attempt to head off any attempt by Martin to hold a snap election in the hope of coming back with a majority.
"I would not want the prime minister to think that he could simply fail in the House of Commons as a route to another general election. That's not the way our system works," Harper said.
SEE:
Flaherty's Fiscal Failure
NDP the New Reform Party
tags
Canada, Flaherty, politics, Conservatives,illegal taping, opposition coalition, Grewal, economy, government, Conservatives, Harper, recession, NDP, Liberals, BQ, politics, , federal election, minoirity government Jack Layton,
Alberta Loses Billions
Poor fiscal management is the heritage of the Tired Old Tories....as in Heritage Trust Fund lossing billions in investment interest and the Alberta Treasury Branches (the Socred Bank)losing billions in the toxic paper loans. Anywhere else heads would roll. Howerver in the province of the one party state those in charge just keep on keeping on, including rewarding themselves for bad management decisions.And the Alberta Treasury Branch brass - who showered themselves with hefty bonuses last year - are getting their ducks for an "additional provision" to cover the toxic asset-backed commercial paper they lost Albertans' money on.
ATB Financial has made an additional $55.5-million provision for potential losses on its holdings of asset-backed commercial paper, bringing its total provisions for possible ABCP losses to $308.6 million.ATB's net income for the quarter ended Sept. 30 fell to $5.7 million, the financial services company said Friday in its latest quarterly report. That's down from $8.5 million in the year earlier period when ATB took a $77.6-million provision for potential losses for its holdings of asset-backed commercial paper. ATB's $1.14-billion principal investment in ABCP will be converted to longer-term notes that reach maturity in six to nine years. ATB will revalue the restructured ABCP investment upon closing. "Times are getting tougher, even in resilient economies such as Alberta's, and interest rate conditions and uncertainty in the marketplace continue to impact our business. But our continued growth and positive results mean Albertans can be confident in ATB," said Dave Mowat, ATB's President and CEO.
Knowing full well that Alberta taxpayers will bail you out.
SEE:
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:$100 oil, Alberta, tarsands, oilsands, Canada, peak oil, royalties, oil, profits, Province, Bill Hunter, Alberta Royalty Review,Alberta Cabinet, CAPP, Ed Stelmach,Big Oil,oil royalties,
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Flaherty's Fiscal Failure
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters that the Harpocrite neo-con austerity plan aka the fiscal update was not 'written on a napkin, we have planned it for months'.
Oh dear that means all these cuts, the attack on democratic public funding of political parties, the plan to freeze public sector workers wages and take away their right to strike, and the plan to sell off crown assests and privatize infrastructure spending was all planned months ago. Then why didn't they make that known to the public during the election? Because of course it was couched as 'balancing the budget' and 'we won't run a deficit'.
When the fiscal update was released it was anything but....rather it was another example of Harpers political agenda being foisted on Canadians by a minority government intent on neo-con social engineering at any cost. Until that cost was deemed politically too expensive. Then Harper blinked. At least when it came to public financing of political parties.
Government reverses itself on political funding decision
As far as freezing wages, removing the right to strike and privatization that is still on the agenda.
The Harpocrites have no fiscal plan, they have their same old tired neo-con agenda; reduce government. In particular reduce programs that they and their right wing base are opposed to as we saw with their announcement of arts cuts and before that their attack in their first term on womens programs and legal aid programs.
The biggest wasrte of government funding has been Harpers war in Afghanistan, but reducing our involvement and reducing military spending is not on their agenda.Instead they are increasing spending on the military and refusing to withdraw our troops any earlier than 2011.
With unemployment increasing and predicted to get worse,due to the collapse of the manufacturing sector in Ontario, especially with the auto industry, again the Haprocrites failed to come up with a stimulus plan.
Instead the cynical might be forgiven for thinking the this Law and Order government has only one real infrastructure plan given their propensity to imitate the U.S. Increased incarceration means building more prisons, to house the unemployed forced into a life of crime.
Harper is following in the footeps of another Conservative PM from Calgary; R.B. Bennett. He failed to deal with the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Flaherty's fiscal update shows that the Harpocrite government is failing Canadians just as Bennett did.
SEE:
Neo-Con Industrial Strategy.
Too Little Too Late
WSJ Criticizes Contracting Out
Mayor Of Kabul Says Get Out
Economics 101
Common Sense
Neo-Cons Have No New Ideas
Here Come the Seventies
Auto Solution II
Wage Controls
Arts Vote Cost Jaffer His Job
C.D. Howe Canada's Grand Poobah
Calgary Herald Remembers R.B. Bennett
tags
Canada, Flaherty, politics, Conservatives,consumer spending, tax-credit, Stelmach, economy, government, Conservatives, Harper, recession, Conference Board of Canada, consumer confidence, Economy, Finance Minister, CPP, net debt, pension, debt, P3's, public-private-partnerships
Oh dear that means all these cuts, the attack on democratic public funding of political parties, the plan to freeze public sector workers wages and take away their right to strike, and the plan to sell off crown assests and privatize infrastructure spending was all planned months ago. Then why didn't they make that known to the public during the election? Because of course it was couched as 'balancing the budget' and 'we won't run a deficit'.
When the fiscal update was released it was anything but....rather it was another example of Harpers political agenda being foisted on Canadians by a minority government intent on neo-con social engineering at any cost. Until that cost was deemed politically too expensive. Then Harper blinked. At least when it came to public financing of political parties.
Government reverses itself on political funding decision
As far as freezing wages, removing the right to strike and privatization that is still on the agenda.
The Harpocrites have no fiscal plan, they have their same old tired neo-con agenda; reduce government. In particular reduce programs that they and their right wing base are opposed to as we saw with their announcement of arts cuts and before that their attack in their first term on womens programs and legal aid programs.
The biggest wasrte of government funding has been Harpers war in Afghanistan, but reducing our involvement and reducing military spending is not on their agenda.Instead they are increasing spending on the military and refusing to withdraw our troops any earlier than 2011.
With unemployment increasing and predicted to get worse,due to the collapse of the manufacturing sector in Ontario, especially with the auto industry, again the Haprocrites failed to come up with a stimulus plan.
Instead the cynical might be forgiven for thinking the this Law and Order government has only one real infrastructure plan given their propensity to imitate the U.S. Increased incarceration means building more prisons, to house the unemployed forced into a life of crime.
Harper is following in the footeps of another Conservative PM from Calgary; R.B. Bennett. He failed to deal with the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Flaherty's fiscal update shows that the Harpocrite government is failing Canadians just as Bennett did.
SEE:
Neo-Con Industrial Strategy.
Too Little Too Late
WSJ Criticizes Contracting Out
Mayor Of Kabul Says Get Out
Economics 101
Common Sense
Neo-Cons Have No New Ideas
Here Come the Seventies
Auto Solution II
Wage Controls
Arts Vote Cost Jaffer His Job
C.D. Howe Canada's Grand Poobah
Calgary Herald Remembers R.B. Bennett
tags
Canada, Flaherty, politics, Conservatives,consumer spending, tax-credit, Stelmach, economy, government, Conservatives, Harper, recession, Conference Board of Canada, consumer confidence, Economy, Finance Minister, CPP, net debt, pension, debt, P3's, public-private-partnerships
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Dream Machine
Speaking of American Trancendentalism I came across this article in the Globe and Mail about Brion Gysin, Edmontonian, member of the beat generation, creator of the Dream Machine, William Burroughs collaborator and lover, and shaman. He is finally getting his due in a new documentary based on a biography written by another Edmontonian; John Gieger.
Back in the ninties I collaborated with Bruce Fletcher on a journal called Virus 23 published in Edmonton and wrote an article on Gysin.
Gysin grew up partly in Edmonton before leading a typically itinerant beat existence in Paris, London and Tangier. An enigmatic figure, even among Burroughs's coterie, he came up with the concept for the Dream Machine by accident. He was looking out of the window of a bus in 1958 while travelling to an artists' colony in Marseilles, and the flickering pattern of light through the trees gave him a feeling of transcendence.
Later, a young mathematician, Ian Sommerville, another within in the beat circle, helped to build the device. Gysin then spent years trying to peddle the invention to electronics and media companies. Long story short, his invention got no takers and Gysin died in relatively obscurity in Paris in 1986.
Only now is he getting his due. The Dream Machine is widely seen as much more than a mere device, as Gysin himself described it, but as an art piece, blending the Arabic patterns that influenced his work with his idea of a kind of almost mechanical abstraction that ran throughout his artistic work. For instance, Gysin is primarily known (and increasingly being rediscovered) for his “cut-ups,” pieces of newspaper joined randomly together.
What Burroughs and Gysin wanted was to fight societal control, to fight the middle-class normality that pervaded postwar America.
“Remember the transcendentalists in the American literary tradition – Emerson, Thoreau – and this whole tradition of individualism, of taking over your own world, whether it be Walden Pond or whatever,” Sheehan says. “It's often said that the beats were the 20th-century answer or echo of the transcendentalists. Again, ‘Take control, don't trust the Man. The control systems are out to get you. They are blasting at you their television and radio.'”
So Burroughs and Gysin's alternative was the Dream Machine. “And they literally were serious. They wanted to replace the television with these machines in everyone's suburban living room,” Sheehan adds.
Strange and wonderful visions of the counterculture
Based on John Geiger's well-received book Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, Sheehan's compelling documentary delivers a culturally incisive job of unmasking Gysin. That's no small feat, considering the mercurial and spectre-like nature of a man who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins and who counted writer William S. Burroughs, singer Marianne Faithfull and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones among his friends and lovers.
Sheehan goes out of his way to prove that, for a man who lived in infamy and died (in 1986) in obscurity, Gysin's influence on today's culture extends beyond rap and dub poetry and into the emergence of audiences as creators of their own computer-made and distributed entertainment. Experts from stuffy neurosurgeons to hip DJs are interviewed in an attempt to shed light on Gysin as a visionary and the Dream Machine as a precursor to anything Apple Inc. puts an "i" in front of and sells to the creative masses: iPhones, iPods, iMovies.
A hit when it screened earlier this year at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival -- it was awarded a special jury prize for Canadian Documentary -- the film explores the life of Gysin, who was born in a Canadian military hospital in England in 1916, raised in Edmonton and lived the impoverished-yet-glamourous life glorified by the Beat writers. He left Canada for Paris, where he fraternized with the Surrealists and later lived in the Beat Hotel (where William S. Burroughs finished Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg wrote Kaddish); worked as a spy during the Second World War; and co-founded a restaurant for the expat community of Tangier, Morocco. A renaissance man, Gysin was a writer, an artist, and, perhaps most of all, an innovator; he was the originator of the "cut-up" technique (the literary process later used by Burroughs and others in which text is literally cut up, rearranged at random and reconstructed to make a new work). Sheehan, though, chooses to focus on the life of Gysin by filtering it through another one of his inventions: the dream machine.
Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic ... - Google Books Result
Interview with John Geiger
Author of Books on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine
John Geiger is the author of four books. His first two concerned Arctic exploration. His next two, Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and The Dream Machine and Nothing Is True - Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, concerned the Beat movement. In an age when many authors opt for specialization, publishing book after book on the same topic, the range of Mr. Geiger’s publications might strike the casual observer as odd. Here’s a guy who is a Governor and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. What’s he doing writing about the Beats?
Impressed by the Gysin biography and curious to know more about the juxtaposition of Mr. Geiger’s interests, RealityStudio prepared the following interview questions and Mr. Geiger graciously agreed to respond.
RealityStudio: What first drew you to study Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, their peers and their era?
Geiger: I had written two books concerned with geographic exploration, and — at the time — didn’t want to write a third. I was interested in Gysin and Burroughs both as another kind of explorer, of inner space… I was also intrigued by the idea that someone like Gysin, a bohemian, gay, had come from Edmonton, Alberta, which was a small conservative town in the 1920s. He was such a fascinating creature, Brion: how is it that such a barren landscape — then — could produce such a harvest? But the idea for the book came from a lovely guy, James Grauerholz.
Interview with John Geiger(Pataphysics)
You’ve been working on this book for many years. What was the thing that really began your interest in Brion Gysin?
What surprised me was the discovery that Brion Gysin grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, which still has some very ‘old west’ sensibilities about the place, so you can well imagine what it would have been like in the 1920s, when Brion was there, growing up and receiving most of his schooling. It was a very conservative, small frontier town perched on the edge of the great forests of the North. It struck me as being remarkable that this kind of person could’ve come out of that kind of place. I think that exploration in our own time has been undertaken by people like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and I think in the case of Burroughs, a book like The Yagé Letters is very much a narrative of exploration, in the same way Ernest Shackleton’s narratives are. So to me, I was just conducting research into another very different manner of exploring. Those things together caught my interest. I was already aware of Gysin, but interestingly not throug! h Burroughs so much, although in hindsight I had seen his name obviously—you can hardly read Burroughs without seeing Gysin’s name or some reference to his ideas—but it was really through Paul Bowles that I first discovered him.
It’s interesting that right at the end of Semiotext(e)’s Burroughs Live, in a discussion with Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs mentions that Brion was a potent shaman. Certainly he had an erudite involvement with magic, and his availability to intuitive principles seems quite advanced. How did you take those things into consideration when you were writing the book?
When I first spoke to William Burroughs about the biography—he was an enthusiastic supporter—he made it very clear to me that the approach should be a conventional biography, and he felt that Brion needed to be taken seriously, and that there had been enough homages and remembrances, that really someone ought to just examine his life very carefully and set out the facts of that life. So, obviously his interest in ‘the other way,’ in what Burroughs called ‘the magical universe,’ was integral to Gysin’s character. I mean it’s something that he learned from the very earliest moments of his life from the Indian people he was encountering. Brion Gysin was always different, he wasn’t a normal child anymore than he was a normal adult, and consequently he found himself hanging out with people who were marginalized, even when he was a child. In the context of Canada in those years and p! robably even to this day, those people were aboriginal people, they were North American Indians. It was through those interactions that he first took magic mushrooms—that was when this interest really first took hold and he was introduced to an alternative approach to life and thought.
Key to Hallucinations Found
Almost fifty years ago, the beat poet Brion Gysin (1916 - 1986), described a visual hallucination that he experienced while riding a bus:
...Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me? (Brion Gysin, 21 December 1958)
Gysin, a writer and performance artist, though known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, which inspired writers like William S. Burroughs, was also the co-inventor (along with scientist Ian Sommerville) of the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produces visual stimuli.
At the end of his documentation, Gysin asks, "Was that a vision? What happened to me?"
PURKINJE PATTERNS
According to Dominic ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and author of 'The Hodology of Hallucinations,' a study recently published in an issue of Cortex, "Fifty years on we are able to answer Gysin's question." Gysin's hallucinations were quite similar to what Jan Purkinje (1787-1869), the father of contemporary neuroscience, experienced as a child.
"I stand in the bright sunlight with closed eyes and face the sun. Then I move my outstretched, somewhat separated, fingers up and down in front of the eyes, so that they are alternately illuminated and shaded. In addition to the uniform yellow-red that one expects with closed eyes, there appear beautiful regular figures that are initially difficult to define but slowly become clearer. When we continue to move the fingers, the figure becomes more complex and fills the whole visual field. (Purkinje, 1819)
When Purkinje moved his fingers, he simulated an effect similar to that of Gysin's Dreamachine.
Because of the brevity and unpredictability of hallucinations, up until now, surprisingly little is known about brain changes that occur during hallucinations—one cannot anticipate when a hallucination will occur. The chances of capturing a hallucination during a brain scanning are small.
However, it has long been recognized that flashes of light at particular frequencies, like those experience by Gysin and Purkinje, produce hallucinations of intricate patterns and vivid colors. Indeed, these stimulated visual patterns are described as Purkinje patterns. For anyone who's confused out there, the Purkinje patterns ffytche describes in his paper are much more complicated than the stuff everyone sees after a camera flash or when we stare at the sun too long without protective eyewear. They're actually much more than that.
"They are more complex...entirely unexpected the first time you encounter them. At slow rates of flashing through closed lids you experience exactly what you might expect, a dull red light pulsing with each flash. At the critical frequency the whole thing changes and colours, patterns and forms appear. The Beat poet Brion Gysin's description puts it better than I can."
Most people have a rough idea of what a hallucination experience might be like, but when it comes to defining a hallucination, that's more difficult. If a hallucination is defined as 'seeing or hearing something that is not actually there,' then dreams and imagery would be considered hallucinations.
According to ffytche, visual hallucinations, (people do hallucinate with other senses), "are located in the world around us, not in the mind's eye. They are not under our control, in the sense that we cannot bring them on or change them as they occur. They also look real and vivid, although the things one sees may be bizarre and impossible. Purkinje phenomena meet all these criteria and can thus be considered true hallucinations.
However, Purkinje phenomena are induced by experiment rather than occurring spontaneously as in the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, an eye disease that causes patients to have complex hallucinations. ffytche points out:
"We are only beginning to understand just how common this Syndrome is, partly because patients have been unwilling to admit their hallucinations for fear of being labeled as having serious mental illness. Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients almost all hallucinate patterns and geometrical forms identical to Purkinje phenomena. Many also see figures, objects and faces, the types of experience we generally associate with hallucinations. The hope is that what we learn from the Purkinje phenomena will also apply to these other hallucination experiences."
ffytche also adds that "most people will experience Purkinje hallucinations under appropriate conditions of visual stimulation, although their clarity and ease of induction varies from subject to subject. I have only encountered a few subjects who do not seem to have the experiences for reasons I do not fully understand. I assume the visual systems of such 'immune' subjects are wired up in a slightly different way."
SEE:
HOWL
New Age Libertarian Manifesto
100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005
Kenneth Patchen
Back in the ninties I collaborated with Bruce Fletcher on a journal called Virus 23 published in Edmonton and wrote an article on Gysin.
Gysin grew up partly in Edmonton before leading a typically itinerant beat existence in Paris, London and Tangier. An enigmatic figure, even among Burroughs's coterie, he came up with the concept for the Dream Machine by accident. He was looking out of the window of a bus in 1958 while travelling to an artists' colony in Marseilles, and the flickering pattern of light through the trees gave him a feeling of transcendence.
Later, a young mathematician, Ian Sommerville, another within in the beat circle, helped to build the device. Gysin then spent years trying to peddle the invention to electronics and media companies. Long story short, his invention got no takers and Gysin died in relatively obscurity in Paris in 1986.
Only now is he getting his due. The Dream Machine is widely seen as much more than a mere device, as Gysin himself described it, but as an art piece, blending the Arabic patterns that influenced his work with his idea of a kind of almost mechanical abstraction that ran throughout his artistic work. For instance, Gysin is primarily known (and increasingly being rediscovered) for his “cut-ups,” pieces of newspaper joined randomly together.
What Burroughs and Gysin wanted was to fight societal control, to fight the middle-class normality that pervaded postwar America.
“Remember the transcendentalists in the American literary tradition – Emerson, Thoreau – and this whole tradition of individualism, of taking over your own world, whether it be Walden Pond or whatever,” Sheehan says. “It's often said that the beats were the 20th-century answer or echo of the transcendentalists. Again, ‘Take control, don't trust the Man. The control systems are out to get you. They are blasting at you their television and radio.'”
So Burroughs and Gysin's alternative was the Dream Machine. “And they literally were serious. They wanted to replace the television with these machines in everyone's suburban living room,” Sheehan adds.
Strange and wonderful visions of the counterculture
Based on John Geiger's well-received book Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, Sheehan's compelling documentary delivers a culturally incisive job of unmasking Gysin. That's no small feat, considering the mercurial and spectre-like nature of a man who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins and who counted writer William S. Burroughs, singer Marianne Faithfull and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones among his friends and lovers.
Sheehan goes out of his way to prove that, for a man who lived in infamy and died (in 1986) in obscurity, Gysin's influence on today's culture extends beyond rap and dub poetry and into the emergence of audiences as creators of their own computer-made and distributed entertainment. Experts from stuffy neurosurgeons to hip DJs are interviewed in an attempt to shed light on Gysin as a visionary and the Dream Machine as a precursor to anything Apple Inc. puts an "i" in front of and sells to the creative masses: iPhones, iPods, iMovies.
A hit when it screened earlier this year at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival -- it was awarded a special jury prize for Canadian Documentary -- the film explores the life of Gysin, who was born in a Canadian military hospital in England in 1916, raised in Edmonton and lived the impoverished-yet-glamourous life glorified by the Beat writers. He left Canada for Paris, where he fraternized with the Surrealists and later lived in the Beat Hotel (where William S. Burroughs finished Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg wrote Kaddish); worked as a spy during the Second World War; and co-founded a restaurant for the expat community of Tangier, Morocco. A renaissance man, Gysin was a writer, an artist, and, perhaps most of all, an innovator; he was the originator of the "cut-up" technique (the literary process later used by Burroughs and others in which text is literally cut up, rearranged at random and reconstructed to make a new work). Sheehan, though, chooses to focus on the life of Gysin by filtering it through another one of his inventions: the dream machine.
Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic ... - Google Books Result
Interview with John Geiger
Author of Books on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine
John Geiger is the author of four books. His first two concerned Arctic exploration. His next two, Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and The Dream Machine and Nothing Is True - Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, concerned the Beat movement. In an age when many authors opt for specialization, publishing book after book on the same topic, the range of Mr. Geiger’s publications might strike the casual observer as odd. Here’s a guy who is a Governor and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. What’s he doing writing about the Beats?
Impressed by the Gysin biography and curious to know more about the juxtaposition of Mr. Geiger’s interests, RealityStudio prepared the following interview questions and Mr. Geiger graciously agreed to respond.
RealityStudio: What first drew you to study Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, their peers and their era?
Geiger: I had written two books concerned with geographic exploration, and — at the time — didn’t want to write a third. I was interested in Gysin and Burroughs both as another kind of explorer, of inner space… I was also intrigued by the idea that someone like Gysin, a bohemian, gay, had come from Edmonton, Alberta, which was a small conservative town in the 1920s. He was such a fascinating creature, Brion: how is it that such a barren landscape — then — could produce such a harvest? But the idea for the book came from a lovely guy, James Grauerholz.
Interview with John Geiger(Pataphysics)
You’ve been working on this book for many years. What was the thing that really began your interest in Brion Gysin?
What surprised me was the discovery that Brion Gysin grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, which still has some very ‘old west’ sensibilities about the place, so you can well imagine what it would have been like in the 1920s, when Brion was there, growing up and receiving most of his schooling. It was a very conservative, small frontier town perched on the edge of the great forests of the North. It struck me as being remarkable that this kind of person could’ve come out of that kind of place. I think that exploration in our own time has been undertaken by people like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and I think in the case of Burroughs, a book like The Yagé Letters is very much a narrative of exploration, in the same way Ernest Shackleton’s narratives are. So to me, I was just conducting research into another very different manner of exploring. Those things together caught my interest. I was already aware of Gysin, but interestingly not throug! h Burroughs so much, although in hindsight I had seen his name obviously—you can hardly read Burroughs without seeing Gysin’s name or some reference to his ideas—but it was really through Paul Bowles that I first discovered him.
It’s interesting that right at the end of Semiotext(e)’s Burroughs Live, in a discussion with Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs mentions that Brion was a potent shaman. Certainly he had an erudite involvement with magic, and his availability to intuitive principles seems quite advanced. How did you take those things into consideration when you were writing the book?
When I first spoke to William Burroughs about the biography—he was an enthusiastic supporter—he made it very clear to me that the approach should be a conventional biography, and he felt that Brion needed to be taken seriously, and that there had been enough homages and remembrances, that really someone ought to just examine his life very carefully and set out the facts of that life. So, obviously his interest in ‘the other way,’ in what Burroughs called ‘the magical universe,’ was integral to Gysin’s character. I mean it’s something that he learned from the very earliest moments of his life from the Indian people he was encountering. Brion Gysin was always different, he wasn’t a normal child anymore than he was a normal adult, and consequently he found himself hanging out with people who were marginalized, even when he was a child. In the context of Canada in those years and p! robably even to this day, those people were aboriginal people, they were North American Indians. It was through those interactions that he first took magic mushrooms—that was when this interest really first took hold and he was introduced to an alternative approach to life and thought.
Key to Hallucinations Found
Almost fifty years ago, the beat poet Brion Gysin (1916 - 1986), described a visual hallucination that he experienced while riding a bus:
...Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me? (Brion Gysin, 21 December 1958)
Gysin, a writer and performance artist, though known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, which inspired writers like William S. Burroughs, was also the co-inventor (along with scientist Ian Sommerville) of the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produces visual stimuli.
At the end of his documentation, Gysin asks, "Was that a vision? What happened to me?"
PURKINJE PATTERNS
According to Dominic ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and author of 'The Hodology of Hallucinations,' a study recently published in an issue of Cortex, "Fifty years on we are able to answer Gysin's question." Gysin's hallucinations were quite similar to what Jan Purkinje (1787-1869), the father of contemporary neuroscience, experienced as a child.
"I stand in the bright sunlight with closed eyes and face the sun. Then I move my outstretched, somewhat separated, fingers up and down in front of the eyes, so that they are alternately illuminated and shaded. In addition to the uniform yellow-red that one expects with closed eyes, there appear beautiful regular figures that are initially difficult to define but slowly become clearer. When we continue to move the fingers, the figure becomes more complex and fills the whole visual field. (Purkinje, 1819)
When Purkinje moved his fingers, he simulated an effect similar to that of Gysin's Dreamachine.
Because of the brevity and unpredictability of hallucinations, up until now, surprisingly little is known about brain changes that occur during hallucinations—one cannot anticipate when a hallucination will occur. The chances of capturing a hallucination during a brain scanning are small.
However, it has long been recognized that flashes of light at particular frequencies, like those experience by Gysin and Purkinje, produce hallucinations of intricate patterns and vivid colors. Indeed, these stimulated visual patterns are described as Purkinje patterns. For anyone who's confused out there, the Purkinje patterns ffytche describes in his paper are much more complicated than the stuff everyone sees after a camera flash or when we stare at the sun too long without protective eyewear. They're actually much more than that.
"They are more complex...entirely unexpected the first time you encounter them. At slow rates of flashing through closed lids you experience exactly what you might expect, a dull red light pulsing with each flash. At the critical frequency the whole thing changes and colours, patterns and forms appear. The Beat poet Brion Gysin's description puts it better than I can."
Most people have a rough idea of what a hallucination experience might be like, but when it comes to defining a hallucination, that's more difficult. If a hallucination is defined as 'seeing or hearing something that is not actually there,' then dreams and imagery would be considered hallucinations.
According to ffytche, visual hallucinations, (people do hallucinate with other senses), "are located in the world around us, not in the mind's eye. They are not under our control, in the sense that we cannot bring them on or change them as they occur. They also look real and vivid, although the things one sees may be bizarre and impossible. Purkinje phenomena meet all these criteria and can thus be considered true hallucinations.
However, Purkinje phenomena are induced by experiment rather than occurring spontaneously as in the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, an eye disease that causes patients to have complex hallucinations. ffytche points out:
"We are only beginning to understand just how common this Syndrome is, partly because patients have been unwilling to admit their hallucinations for fear of being labeled as having serious mental illness. Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients almost all hallucinate patterns and geometrical forms identical to Purkinje phenomena. Many also see figures, objects and faces, the types of experience we generally associate with hallucinations. The hope is that what we learn from the Purkinje phenomena will also apply to these other hallucination experiences."
ffytche also adds that "most people will experience Purkinje hallucinations under appropriate conditions of visual stimulation, although their clarity and ease of induction varies from subject to subject. I have only encountered a few subjects who do not seem to have the experiences for reasons I do not fully understand. I assume the visual systems of such 'immune' subjects are wired up in a slightly different way."
SEE:
HOWL
New Age Libertarian Manifesto
100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005
Kenneth Patchen
Tags
American Transcendentalism, Brion Gysin,
William Burroughs,
counter culture,
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John Geiger, dream machine,
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Nik Sheehan,
Henry David Thoreau Weeps
The father of American Transcendentalism , individualist anarchism and environmentalism would weep. A pond is such a small thing and yet it reveals the seriousness of climate change and the ensuing mass extinction of species caused by capitalism.
For the past few years, Davis and colleagues from Harvard and Boston University have been perusing the notebooks of the famous naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, using his
notes about his sanctuary at Walden Pond to uncover the drastic effects of climate change. With his graduate student, Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, Primack stumbled upon Thoreau’s observations of changes in plant flowering times and species occurrences over time. “It became the gold mine,” Primack said. “What was great was that Thoreau was so famous and that his records were the oldest we found in the United States.” Together with his graduate students, Charlie G. Willis and Brad R. Ruhfel, Davis compiled an evolutionary tree of the entire community of flora that had existed in the Concord area in the mid-19th century. “Using phylogenies to think about interesting patterns of bioevolution and global [climate] change just seemed like a perfect avenue to think about this pattern of species loss using a novel evolutionary perspective,” Davis said. Primack and Miller-Rushing had observed that the plants around Walden Pond were producing flowers on average more than a week earlier than they were in Thoreau’s time, when temperatures were 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit lower. The shift in flowering times, however, was not uniform—some species groups were flowering more than three weeks earlier, while others were flowering “like clockwork around mid-May,” Davis said. Applying these data to an evolutionary perspective, the researcher--s found that the species that adjusted to the changing climate survived, while the “clockwork” plants had declined in number. “The real downer about this all is that the groups that are being hardest hit are our most cherished temperate flowering species: orchids, buttercups, roses, dogwoods, violets,” Davis said. “These are the kind of species that people go out on botanical forays to see, and now they can’t see them.” Davis said that about one-quarter of the plants Thoreau observed in his notebooks have become extinct, and that 36 percent now are in such low abundance that they are “hanging by a thread.”
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth..
For the past few years, Davis and colleagues from Harvard and Boston University have been perusing the notebooks of the famous naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, using his
notes about his sanctuary at Walden Pond to uncover the drastic effects of climate change. With his graduate student, Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, Primack stumbled upon Thoreau’s observations of changes in plant flowering times and species occurrences over time. “It became the gold mine,” Primack said. “What was great was that Thoreau was so famous and that his records were the oldest we found in the United States.” Together with his graduate students, Charlie G. Willis and Brad R. Ruhfel, Davis compiled an evolutionary tree of the entire community of flora that had existed in the Concord area in the mid-19th century. “Using phylogenies to think about interesting patterns of bioevolution and global [climate] change just seemed like a perfect avenue to think about this pattern of species loss using a novel evolutionary perspective,” Davis said. Primack and Miller-Rushing had observed that the plants around Walden Pond were producing flowers on average more than a week earlier than they were in Thoreau’s time, when temperatures were 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit lower. The shift in flowering times, however, was not uniform—some species groups were flowering more than three weeks earlier, while others were flowering “like clockwork around mid-May,” Davis said. Applying these data to an evolutionary perspective, the researcher--s found that the species that adjusted to the changing climate survived, while the “clockwork” plants had declined in number. “The real downer about this all is that the groups that are being hardest hit are our most cherished temperate flowering species: orchids, buttercups, roses, dogwoods, violets,” Davis said. “These are the kind of species that people go out on botanical forays to see, and now they can’t see them.” Davis said that about one-quarter of the plants Thoreau observed in his notebooks have become extinct, and that 36 percent now are in such low abundance that they are “hanging by a thread.”Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth..
Basic Premises:
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and the world in terms of an individual.
2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.
This dualism assumes our two psychological needs; the contracting: being unique, different, special, having a racial identity,ego-centered, selfish, and so on; the expansive: being the same as others, altruistic, be one of the human race, and so on.
The transcendentalist expectation is to move from the contracting to the expansive. This dualism has aspects of Freudian id and superego; the Jungian shadow and persona, the Chinese ying/yang, and the Hindu movement from Atman (egotistic existence) to Brahma (cosmic existence).
THOREAU'S PENCILS
Thoreau's clay-mixed graphite wasn't entirely original. The Germans had used something like it a few years earlier. It's not clear whether Thoreau had any inkling of the German process. But what is clear is that he transcended it. He developed a new grinding mill. He developed all sorts of process details. Historian Henry Petroski adds to the list of Thoreau's inventions -- a pipe forming machine, water wheel designs. They probably never told you in your English class that Thoreau often signed the words "Civil Engineer" after his name. Yet Thoreau was content to walk away from an invention without making personal profit of it. He was, after all, the same man who wrote ;... the seventh day should be man's day of toil ... and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul -- in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature ...
Many readers mistake Henry's tone in Walden and other works, thinking he was a cranky hermit. That was far from the case, as one of his young neighbors and Edward Emerson attest. He found greater joy in his daily life than most people ever would. He traveled often, to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod several times, and was particularly interested in the frontier and Indians. He opposed the government for waging the Mexican war (to extend slavery) eloquently in Resistance to Civil Government, based on his brief experience in jail; he lectured against slavery in an abolitionist lecture, Slavery in Massachusetts. He even supported John Brown's efforts to end slavery after meeting him in Concord, as in A Plea for Captain John Brown.
Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice."
Ziga Vodovnik interviews Howard Zinn — Rebels Against Tyranny.
There is, of course, much with which to disagree, but overall, it's a valuable read, especially the parts about the philosophy's American history:
One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.[....]Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.
Traditional individualist anarchism
Theorists in traditional American individualism (historically called "Boston anarchism" at times, often derogatorily) include Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, William B. Greene, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner,Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Henry David Thoreau. Josiah Warren is commonly regarded as the first individualist anarchist in the American tradition. He had participated in a failed collectivist experiment called "New Harmony" and came to the conclusion that such a system is inferior to one where individualism and private property is respected. He details his conclusions in regard to this collectivist experiment in Equitable Commerce. In a quote from that text that illustrates his radical individualism, he says: "Society must be so converted as to preserve the SOVEREIGNTY OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL inviolate. That it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate. WITHOUT INVOLVING THE PERSONS OR INTERESTS OF OTHERS" (Tucker's emphasis). Warren coined the phrase "Cost the limit of price" to refer to his interpretation of Adam Smith's labor theory of value. The labor theory holds that the value of a commodity is equal to the amount of labor required to produce or acquire it. Warren maintains, therefore, that the price of labor of one individual must be equal to the production of the equivalent amount of labor of every other individual. And, consequently, that an employer who labors not, but retains a portion of the produce of an employee as profit is guilty of violating the "cost principle" --he recieves payment without cost to himself. Warren regards this practice as "invasive." If an employer is to be paid, he must not be paid unless he labors. In 1827, Warren put his theories into practive by starting a business that he called a "labor for labor store" in Cincinatti, Ohio. Warren, like all the American individualists, that followed was a strong supporter of the right of individuals to retain the product of their labor as private property. Josiah Warren (1799-1874) was an American social reformer and commonly regarded as the first individualist anarchist. ... Ezra Heywood was a 19th century North American individualist anarchist, slavery abolitionist, and feminist. ... Benjamin Tucker (April 17, 1854 - 1939) was Americas leading proponent of individualist anarchism in the 19th century. ... Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) was an American political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century. ... Stephen Pearl Andrews (March 22, 1812 - May 21, 1886) was an anarchist. ... Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is most famous for his essays Walden on appreciation of nature and Civil Disobedience (available at wikisource) on civil disobedience. ... New Harmony is a town located in Posey County, Indiana. ... His Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was one of the earliest attempts to study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe. ... The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory in economics and political economy concerning a market-oriented or commodity-producing society: the theory equates the value of an exchangeable good or service (i. ...
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:Walden, individualist anarchism, capitalism, industrialization, envrionment, mass-extinction, flowers, species, biology, ecology, David Henry Thoreau, American Transcendentalism
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and the world in terms of an individual.
2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.
This dualism assumes our two psychological needs; the contracting: being unique, different, special, having a racial identity,ego-centered, selfish, and so on; the expansive: being the same as others, altruistic, be one of the human race, and so on.
The transcendentalist expectation is to move from the contracting to the expansive. This dualism has aspects of Freudian id and superego; the Jungian shadow and persona, the Chinese ying/yang, and the Hindu movement from Atman (egotistic existence) to Brahma (cosmic existence).
THOREAU'S PENCILS
Thoreau's clay-mixed graphite wasn't entirely original. The Germans had used something like it a few years earlier. It's not clear whether Thoreau had any inkling of the German process. But what is clear is that he transcended it. He developed a new grinding mill. He developed all sorts of process details. Historian Henry Petroski adds to the list of Thoreau's inventions -- a pipe forming machine, water wheel designs. They probably never told you in your English class that Thoreau often signed the words "Civil Engineer" after his name. Yet Thoreau was content to walk away from an invention without making personal profit of it. He was, after all, the same man who wrote ;... the seventh day should be man's day of toil ... and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul -- in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature ...
Many readers mistake Henry's tone in Walden and other works, thinking he was a cranky hermit. That was far from the case, as one of his young neighbors and Edward Emerson attest. He found greater joy in his daily life than most people ever would. He traveled often, to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod several times, and was particularly interested in the frontier and Indians. He opposed the government for waging the Mexican war (to extend slavery) eloquently in Resistance to Civil Government, based on his brief experience in jail; he lectured against slavery in an abolitionist lecture, Slavery in Massachusetts. He even supported John Brown's efforts to end slavery after meeting him in Concord, as in A Plea for Captain John Brown.
Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice."
Ziga Vodovnik interviews Howard Zinn — Rebels Against Tyranny.
There is, of course, much with which to disagree, but overall, it's a valuable read, especially the parts about the philosophy's American history:
One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.[....]Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.
Traditional individualist anarchism
Theorists in traditional American individualism (historically called "Boston anarchism" at times, often derogatorily) include Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, William B. Greene, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner,Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Henry David Thoreau. Josiah Warren is commonly regarded as the first individualist anarchist in the American tradition. He had participated in a failed collectivist experiment called "New Harmony" and came to the conclusion that such a system is inferior to one where individualism and private property is respected. He details his conclusions in regard to this collectivist experiment in Equitable Commerce. In a quote from that text that illustrates his radical individualism, he says: "Society must be so converted as to preserve the SOVEREIGNTY OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL inviolate. That it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate. WITHOUT INVOLVING THE PERSONS OR INTERESTS OF OTHERS" (Tucker's emphasis). Warren coined the phrase "Cost the limit of price" to refer to his interpretation of Adam Smith's labor theory of value. The labor theory holds that the value of a commodity is equal to the amount of labor required to produce or acquire it. Warren maintains, therefore, that the price of labor of one individual must be equal to the production of the equivalent amount of labor of every other individual. And, consequently, that an employer who labors not, but retains a portion of the produce of an employee as profit is guilty of violating the "cost principle" --he recieves payment without cost to himself. Warren regards this practice as "invasive." If an employer is to be paid, he must not be paid unless he labors. In 1827, Warren put his theories into practive by starting a business that he called a "labor for labor store" in Cincinatti, Ohio. Warren, like all the American individualists, that followed was a strong supporter of the right of individuals to retain the product of their labor as private property. Josiah Warren (1799-1874) was an American social reformer and commonly regarded as the first individualist anarchist. ... Ezra Heywood was a 19th century North American individualist anarchist, slavery abolitionist, and feminist. ... Benjamin Tucker (April 17, 1854 - 1939) was Americas leading proponent of individualist anarchism in the 19th century. ... Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) was an American political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century. ... Stephen Pearl Andrews (March 22, 1812 - May 21, 1886) was an anarchist. ... Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is most famous for his essays Walden on appreciation of nature and Civil Disobedience (available at wikisource) on civil disobedience. ... New Harmony is a town located in Posey County, Indiana. ... His Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was one of the earliest attempts to study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe. ... The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory in economics and political economy concerning a market-oriented or commodity-producing society: the theory equates the value of an exchangeable good or service (i. ...
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Consumption=Death
Today is Buy Nothing Day....yesterday was Black Friday....and it lived up to its name as frenzied American consumers like rogue elephants stomped to death a worker in order to get in on the discount prices. Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
Like the rush to make a quick buck off the housing boom, this rush to consume is part and parcel of the psychopathology of capitalism. It is the current variation of the emotional plaque; whereby the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so lets consume ourselves to death.
At least one writer suggests that the alternative to these two faces of the same coin(Buy Nothing Day/Black Friday), is to actually produce something, to make your own toys or at least consume locally made goods.
The great myth of the middle class was a social construction of post WWII capitalist economies, especially the growing service based economy, is that we are not producers/workers but consumers. After 9/11 George Bush told America to consume, it is this consumption that results not only in the death of workers in shopping frenzies but the mass exctinction of species on the planet and the climate crisis.
Like the rush to make a quick buck off the housing boom, this rush to consume is part and parcel of the psychopathology of capitalism. It is the current variation of the emotional plaque; whereby the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so lets consume ourselves to death.
At least one writer suggests that the alternative to these two faces of the same coin(Buy Nothing Day/Black Friday), is to actually produce something, to make your own toys or at least consume locally made goods.
The great myth of the middle class was a social construction of post WWII capitalist economies, especially the growing service based economy, is that we are not producers/workers but consumers. After 9/11 George Bush told America to consume, it is this consumption that results not only in the death of workers in shopping frenzies but the mass exctinction of species on the planet and the climate crisis.
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about: shopping, boom, bust, boomers, consumers, debt, personal debt, debt, Black Friday, mass extinction, buy nothing day, death,
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