I've been over at The Vicar's Lamp reading R Emmet Lee's The Time Travellers and this was my response.

There is of course the possibility Vicar our ideas about time AND space for that matter're wildly limited at best or insanely wrong at worst something you understatedly implied throughout your blog anyway.

But if there's anything to this idea we might well be surrounded on ALL sides in both Space AND Time by other entities who take it for granted time flows in all directions not just forward.

These entities might also have other odd ideas such as the possibility say the reason an electron can seem to be in two different places's because there's actually only one electron in ALL existence which merely behaves as if there's an infinitude of itself everywhere.

Such entities therefore wouldn't have the problems we have in spite of our fixation with quantum theory that everything has to boil down to either/or and may find it totally hilarious how much of our resources we expend on try'n'o convince ourselves of our solidness in spite of the fact we're mostly empty space strewn through with skeins of energy by erecting Large Hardon detectors in Cern etc.

They may even've mostly turned a blind eye to our antics down here at the bottom of the air pond even when we annihilate countless billions of their kind every time we detonate a nuke.

But if Homer's anything to go by even as we speak Athena's taking on various human and alien and time traveller forms to whisper in suitable ears messages designed to ensure the selfish hierarchical cancer-like social disease which's currently repositioning itself to move out into space so its elite of elites can vampirically gobble up the rest of the cosmos either repenses or gets gobbled up itself.

If there's anything to the Black Knight Satellite story

http://whofortedblog.com/2013/05/14/blac...

then it's that i) nearby/far off alien civilizations sufficiently more advanced than us to be undetectable ii) hidden terrestial/aquatic supercivilizations iii) civilizations located up down AND across time iv) God/Allah/Buddha/Athena've placed Aegis in orbit round Earth disguised as a satellite to transmit the message "To whom it may concern...NO."

The currently known history of the world's full of uppity empires including Atlantis which were shutdown overnight.

And rocks from space make for a much more classy and highly effective but infinitely more plausibly deniable drone.

I've been over at Michael Prescott's site reading his blogs The Slaughter of the Nabiim and Voices of the Gods and this was my response

Michael Prescott "Another possibility is that the voice persisted because, in the early stages of his postmortem existence, the king was still able to communicate through mediums - and in that society, everyone was a medium."

Michael I think you’re really onto something here but might I suggest a possible twist?

When the Pope dies they go through this procedure where they smash his personal seals and other religious paraphernalia belonging to his reign.

When the British Monarch dies the cry goes up Shakespeare style "The King is dead! Long live the King!"

We also have the case of Akhenaten where once his reign was over all evidence he even existed was literally chiselled or rehieroglyphed over particularly his name nor I suggest’s this the unique event it's often made out there being evidence it may’ve been a common if more conservatively scaled custom throughout all Pharaonic Egyptian history.

The modern assumption's this sort of thing's priestly revenge at worst clearing away the old so the new has the field to itself at best.

Yet let's take the Samuel Saul era circa the 1st Millennium BC four centuries after Exodus.

In Samuel we have an individual who starts out this mystical shamanic civil servant figure the judge a role which by divine ordainment endows him with this Shekinatic/charismatic charged persona conferring automatic universal unquestioning acceptance of his pronouncements on any issue whatsoever be it legal military theological or how to get a date because it’s assumed it’s not him speaking but God.

Meanwhile I suggest some crisis which seems to be occurring all over the world's hinted at locally by the emergence of the musical ecstatics The Shouters who it's difficult to ignore bear a striking resemblance to the Dionysian maenad phenomenon or the antics of followers of various Indo-Tibetan avatars like Krishna or crazy wisdom holders like Padmasambhava [or the garrulous nutters on pre mobile period buses and trains] because suddenly Samuel's renouncing his Confucius the civic civilizer gig and a la Gautama Zoroaster and Lao Tse etc he’s wanting the hell permanently out city life and society generally even as he’s simultaneously scaling up to become a major version of the newly emerging worldwide much more cosmologically dimensioned critters known as the prophets nor’re people anywhere happy about any of it hence Samuel’s attempt to convince Israel his sons’re judges as good as he was but the people quickly cotton on not only hasn’t God conferred on the lads anything like the same level of charisma or infallible oracular capacity but unlike the priesthood judgehood clearly isn’t and can never be hereditary viz the sons of Eli.

It’s at this stage we realise we aren’t just witnessing a Bruce Banner gamma ray sized transformation of the SPIRITUAL landscape but a similarly monumental transformation of the whole urban political scene hence Samuel publicly bollocks Israel for the idiocy of wanting the complete absence of upto spec judges filled with one of these newfangled latest fashion crazes kings just because just about everyone everywhere’s got one.

He points out not only’re kings not just for Christmas but where prophets and judges have their unique direct hotline to and from God to keep ‘em incorruptible the institution of kings place the onus permanently’ll on the people themselves to keep the bastards’ arses in line and if they don’t they’ll only have themselves to blame for the consequences which is exactly the mitigating circumstance Saul pleads when he realises just how seriously pissed off God and Samuel are with him.

Yet what most people don’t suspect when Saul and Samuel make their statements’s the possibility they’re talking about something very much along the lines of your society of mediums who dead kings could still communicate with.

…only with two possible twists 1) this communication business didn’t just apply to dead kings but possibly even more so to living ones and 2) it wasn’t just the living and dead kings who were invested with the capacity to subtly telepathically and psychokinetically influence the people with their movie star like glamour but the people themselves who under certain conditions became capable of telepathically and psychokinetically compelling their kings to do whatever the hell they wanted hence again Saul’s lament all the debauchery murderousness material greed and endless infidelities with foreign gods he exhibited was purely a reflection of his own inability to resist the spell the people’d placed on him by way of giving themselves permission to join in all the forbidden foreigner fun hence Samuel’s explicit loathing for Saul for not having it in himself to develop an equally powerful desire to stand up to his peoples’ materialistic obsessions by cleaving to God [and hence I suggest King Agag’s cheeky uppitiness before Samuel because he can’t conceive for one moment Samuel might be immune to the more tolerant approach Saul and the people’ve already decided on to deal with him].

And to get an idea what those special king controlling conditions might’ve been we only need review the Tower of Babel story which among several possible layers of ideas and levels of meaning encoded in it explicitly states the purpose of the tower was to create a sort of vertically rising magic circle to prevent the human race from dispersing across the planet and indeed God explicitly confirms this cramming together on the same spot’s precisely how they’re deriving their power when He states the only way to put an end to the humans’ capacity to act with such monumentally monolithic potency’s to scatter the buggers cross the face of the Earth confusing in the process the common tongue which’s been facilitating them acting with one mind and bringing ‘bout the sort of pronounced cultural differences which’ll ensure monolithic recombination’s almost impossible.

It’s the same idea I suggest also contained in the story which goes a Sufi student suddenly dug his teacher in the ribs and gasped “Oh my god Master there goes the notorious black magician known as the Beast are we scared?” “Of him? Dear me no the black magicians who should scare us’re the ones so powerful they don’t need to advertise…and they move unsuspected all round us.”

Most people grasp the level of this story which implies there might be those amongst us so powerful they’re able to bring to bear an almost god like influence upon us without us suspecting a thing but they usually miss the much deeper implication this god like influence might actually be being achieved by deceiving and covertly steering the REAL all powerful magicians who move unsuspected all about us the human race itself a race of magicians whose abilities usually only docilely manifest in their unconscious moment by moment collective efforts to bring into existence and maintain the world in forms convivial to human beingness until every so often they become sufficiently provoked or antagonised to trigger off their collective aggression or resentment and suddenly English French American Russian or Chinese Revolutions start spontaneously erupting all over the place not to mention Arab Springs while Berlin Walls start quite literally coming down round the ears of the likes of the CIA or the KGB without them having so much as the slightest clue any of it’s about to happen.

So according to this particular interpretation of the Babel story the reason humanity condemns countless generations of itself to building what’s effectively a sky high tower block prison’s because certain parties among them who might be thought of as anti-judges or anti-prophets’ve beguiled them into forgetting about expanding back out into and exploring the rest of the planet by entrancing their collective ego with the concept of making a name for itself in which case the human race wasn’t being punished or diminished when a stop was put to Babel but rather being rescued from a fate which would’ve seen them becoming a cross between Star Trek’s the Borg and attaining Mao’s vision of a world so perfectly unified everyone speaks dresses eats thinks lives and believes exactly the same thing the exception being of course the hypothetical anti-judges and the anti-prophets.

It’s the surreptitious manipulatory antics of precisely these individuals I suggest Aristotle’s alluding to when he speaks of cities containing those who’re men those who’re more than men and those who’re less than men ie human demons.

It’s also these guys I suggest the Bible’s alluding to when it speaks of certain non-gift bearing scoundrels who Saul behaves powerless before in spite of the fact they’re shamelessly rubbishing him to his face when he’s just become king.

And it’s these guys I suggest who’re ultimately the reason for Samuel’s monumental spiritual career change as well as the growing murderousness towards seers and ultimately prophets alluded to by Zechariah because Samuel strongly suspected as powerful psychics and mediums themselves they’d not only brought about a Babel style pooling of their perverted mystical talents to effectively seize surreptitious control of the psychic internet making judges redundant by interfering Devil’s Verses style with any transmissions between them and God but they’d embarked on a progressive agenda to gradually destroy any similarly talented competition to the degree people’d either forget there’d ever been such things as psychics or at least’d relegate them to the level of mere figures in fairy tales.

This’s also I suggest why God adds to the section of Zechariah you provide this qualifier “In the whole land," declares the LORD, "two-thirds will be struck down and perish; yet one-third will be left in it. 9 This third I will bring into the fire; I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, 'They are my people,' and they will say, 'The LORD is our God.' "

The inference being I suggest despite what the anti-judges and the anti-prophets might think their behaviour was all part of a design to bring about a new form of human being operating at a level beyond even that of Samuel.

What’s happened in America’s truly awful and few’d be surprised if the culprit turned out to be an American saving America from Americans.

But thanks to the implications of things like the Cyprus banking crisis and developments in the Korean peninsula there’s more than six billion potential suspects.

Yet’s anyone REALLY surprised if you strap your cock to a drone and the world tries to willy-slap you back?

But America seems intent on reviving its old military-industrial habit of willy-slapping its commercial rivals into economic submission.

It seemed to work of course when Commodore Perry stole lucrative exclusive trade rights off the Dutch by willy-slapping Japan into submission with gunboat diplomacy.

Then again Japan claimed it was America willy-slapping them round in their own Asian Pacific commercial basin which led to Pearl Harbour in the first place.

Nor’ve I any argument if you claim Great Britain deserved it when America used War Plan Red to willy-slap us into handing over enormous commercial chunks of our Empire to avoid getting caught between Hitler and a ninth potential US invasion of Canada.

But trying the same stunt on China’s exponentially more risky.

Not only is China already practically the world’s foremost industrial and military powerhouse but it’s been dealing with uppity piratical barbarians circling it and demanding freebies for thousands of years.

Its record’s equally as harsh as America’s or indeed Britain’s when it comes to dealing with provocative behaviour or things not going their way.

Ask Tibet.

So willy-slapping round what many consider China’s Rottweiler North Korea to extort enormous economy boosting commercial advantages from China in exchange for peace and quiet might prove to be a whole new ball game pardon the pun.

Yet for those of you out there who remain as psychotically deranged as our blessed leaders and believe as Blair Bush Obama Cameron various Kims and all the rest of ‘em seem to you’ve some murderous mandate from Heaven to keep willy-slapping round the world until it assumes a form acceptable to you don’t be willy-slapping the little people.

That suits our blessed leaders agenda of full personal consequences for everyone else total impunity for them.

Willy slap our blessed leaders.

Not their wives not their kids.

Them.

Maybe if they find themselves jumping out their skin every time a car drives over a carton a ball bounces against a board or a bus backfires they’ll think twice about willy-slapping anyone else.

Personally though I’d rather people’d try this thing I heard about as a kid called turning the other cheek.

Apparently some guy called Gandhi even tried it out.

It might just avoid all this willy-slapping over who willy-slapped who first.

Then again Blair Bush Obama Cameron Merkel etc’re all supposed to be Christians so maybe it’s just something I dreamed up as a kid.

I'm over at the BBC News Magazine reading Adam Gopnik unfavourably comparing Galileo with John Dee in his A Point of View: Science, Magic, and Madness.

[Let me point out here at the time of writing I suspect Adam's made a typo when he states Galileo tested Aristotle’s theory a feather'll always fall at the same rate as a brick because Aristotle's idea was actually denser heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones but perhaps Adam’s done this deliberately as a means of covertly proving his stated conviction slightly smarter than average types like me're less well informed than we imagine ourselves to be being neither sufficiently intelligent or sufficiently educated enough to realise the reason our opinions don't correspond to the consensus’s because we’re actually something close to delusive.

[Which’s quite possibly true but I'll put down my half-baked take on Galileo and Dee anyway just in case I get lucky and accidentally stumble on something capable of slightly flummoxing superior more highly educated intelligences than my own].

Where I disagree with Adam is in his styling of Galileo as a true scientist who went round physically testing things unlike Dee "who read everything there was to read in his time and knew everything there was to know in the esoterica of his time - but didn't know what was worth knowing" and who not once in his life asked “the essential question - is this idea bull or is it for real?”

Let me take Galileo first.

In July 1609 he hears about something we'd call the telescope and as Galileo himself tells it in the sort of ‘bigging it up’ language of the born entrepreneur he applied to everything he ever touched within six months he'd not only worked out the technical principles by which such a device must operate but he's also learned how to grind out supposedly peerless innovative hi-tech lenses of unprecedented technical quality but's also built and knocked out to the commercial public shedloads of the ‘new’ wonder of the age the astronomy quality telescope [as well as a whole host of other technological wonders of his design] and while achieving all this also apparently taught himself how to overcome the fact the damned telescope’s so badly designed it can only be poorly focused to produce very narrow very blurred very eye-tiring imprecisely defined images.

And yet by January he’s so convinced of his newfound expertise as an astronomer not to mention the importance of his observations he's already started writing The Starry Messenger and finished proofing and printing it and put it on sale by March.

And this I suggest’s one of the most striking things about Galileo the supposed first modern scientist etc etc how little attention’s actually paid to his lack of scientific thoroughness and his somehow very modern tendency to rush to conclusions to rush into the limelight to rush to publish in case someone else publishes first the rush to assert the importance of him and his achievements the rush to assert he’s right and everyone else’s wrong and the snidey almost Thomas Edison covert like rush to use media of the day to undermine or even scurrilously discredit the work of any potential rivals.

Take Galileo’s explanation for the tidal system and his assertion that explanation was the definitive proof for Heliocentrism the only problem being the theory required one tide a day when there were actually two and yet Galileo the supposed prime exemplar of modern observation based Science goes instead with rejigging the theory rather than admit observations prove he’s wrong.

On the other hand the infinitely more experienced astronomer Kepler despite being seven years younger than Galileo and a public defender of Copernicus’ Heliocentrism with his own Mysterium Cosmographicum for at least ten years's supposedly a weirdo so obsessed with mystical Biblical crankery he's unfit to wipe Galileo’s arse as a scientist yet kepler was the one who went with what actual observation showed namely a clear but inexplicable relationship between the position of the moon and the strength height and direction of the tides.

And this’s where I even more sharply diverge from Adam Gopnik’s take on things because while I don’t see Galileo as quite the definitive father of modern science Adam and many others imagine him to be it’s very clear to me his extreme tendencies to truculence and self-assertion ultimately proved a devastatingly effective bomb up the arse of the Aristotelians whose determination to maintain their master’s stranglehold on science was I suggest what was almost certainly behind much of the treatment doled out to Galileo by the Church.

But surely even Adam can see it was precisely Galileo’s obsession with the idea if not the actual practise of so-called modern observational science which prevented him from conceiving what the two mystical ponderers of intangible forces Kepler and Newton could namely the observational facts of a clear if inexplicable reciprocity between the tidal mechanism and the position of the moon implied the operation of some unseen force still even to this day not fully explained.

In which case could he also be wrong John Dee was a man so learned he had compacted shit for brains.

I recently found myself trapped on a packed bus with a young American chap who was so utterly inept in his attempts to convert me to his religion in the end I felt had to school him away from all the mechanical spiel he’d been trained to use on complete strangers like me and get him to try to establish a more sincere connection via his own actual experience of his own religion. How did he come to find Jesus I asked was he just brought up to believe in him? “Oh no” he insisted “I opened my heart to him and invited him to enter if he was really there and he came. You could do the same…”

“Oh I could” I said “But I might get your version of Him and I tend towards intellectual claustrophobia at the thought the Earth might only be a few thousand years old.”

“But it is.”

“Oh I can well conceive the possibility it may be but personal experience also suggests to me the possibility the entire universe ceases to exist moment by moment only for Something to immediately keep willing it back into existence again but even experiencing that doesn't make me automatically believe that's the true explanation either.”

My point being despite what many people claim even religion has verifying procedures in it and the main reason why most of us don't want to scientifically test them's because they might bleedin' work!

My other point is this Adam Gopnik thinks it’s somehow important to call bullshit on ideas you don’t like but then Galileo agreed with him and called bullshit on any ideas he didn’t like either.

For instance he scurrilously denounced Father Grassi the Jesuit Aristotelian’s observation comets were some sort of fiery body voyaging from far beyond the moon on a curved trajectory of some sort apparently akin to an orbit because Galileo the believer in stone cold hard scientific facts knew for a stone cold hard scientific mathematical fact comets were only tricks of the light but as to what that might tell us about how good his telescopes were I'll leave you to decide.

Similarly when the far more experienced Kepler trained by the master observational astronomer of the age Tycho Brahe observed the orbits of the planets were ellipses Galileo called bullshit on that too because he knew for a stone cold hard scientific fact maths compelled the planets to orbit in perfect circles.

John Dee on the other hand I suggest was acting more like a true scientist following scientific method when he actually tested whether it was possible to turn lead into gold or communicate with abstract nonphysical entities existing on other planes by following the various protocols and methods outlined by other researchers.

That he believed he succeeded of course means Adam gets to call bullshit on Dee because he doesn’t like the idea such a thing's even remotely possible but then Kepler’s take on the tidal system was supposedly occult mumbojumbo too.

Upto a few decades ago science used Evolution to prove as a stone cold hard scientific fact homosexuality was complete mental fuckery so electrically fried peoples’ brains or lopped bits off to cure 'em.

Upto a decade ago people who reported hearing things like music and seeing things like colours or numbers parading through the air had bullshit called on them too because of course such things’re completely impossible and some of them were so disturbed by this stone cold hard scientific fact they either got locked up for life or they killed themselves.

Nowadays though it's called synaesthesia.

Adam maybe Galileo was right all along and there are no strange intangible inexplicable forces emanating from the moon and it’s us moderns who’ve merely become collectively moonstruck.

Then again maybe the angelic intelligences Dee thought he was interacting with were something else far more mysterious or something along the lines of a more elaborate synaesthesia or the perceptually testing Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

So why can’t the Dees and Keplers and Newtons of the world be allowed to investigate their thing and the Galileos their thing without you or Galileo or anyone having to call bullshit on anyone?

If this potted history teaches us anything it’s surely both points of view have their virtues and both can be highly productive especially when they're allowed to communicate or even interact?

The only other thing I’d like to suggest Adam's mystic nutjobs like my mates Dee Kepler and Newton might well’ve had an easier time dealing with quantum physics etc than your mate Galileo.

Just a thought.

I've been over at the New York Time's Opinion Pages [courtesy of Kat] reading Joseph E Stiglitz's A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent and this was my response.

Joseph to give an illustration of just how much the merely rich never mind the super rich depend on ordinary scum like me for their affluence do the following thought experiment.

Imagine everyone on a hundred grand or less a year suddenly deciding they don' wan'o play that game no more and withdrawing their labour to live a kind of mutually supportive subsistence existence until something fairer and aboveall just finally arises.

Straight away every business going shuts down as does the infrastructure and the stockmarket and the banks and government and even island owners no longer have lackeys or indeed anywhere to get food or fuel and all that gold and all those stocks and all that property's not only worthless but from now on'll only be protected by them themselves and even then only if they can find someone to provide them with bullets or even a pitchfork.

That's also the main reason why we're not likely to see any genetic 'accidents' wiping out billions of us because to be mega rich today not only requires billions of tax payers to sustain such an unprecedented scale of lifestyle but also provide the searing levels of unbridled envy which compensate for the abject soullessness of living it.

But here's the twist.

We're only at best a couple of decades off the moment when an algorithm finally dispenses with the need for any kind of paid workforce right the way up to the President and that'll be the moment when we'll finally get to see just how civilized we really are.

I've been over at Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog reading his Death As A Basketball

http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/04/14...

concerning certain images which seem to suggest some Pre-Columbian civilizations put people to death in the form of human basketballs.

But after applauding Beach's thoroughness as a historian by bundling himself up in ball form to get a sense of what such a process might involve I was struck by him refering to his "ageing body" which provoked this response

'One day' in the midst of the remorselessly unchanging world that was eternal existence for the Ancient Egyptian gods for the first time a novelty arose called a sarcophagus.

So begins Beach a version of the Osiris story which was one day downloaded in my own midst circa the midst of the Millennium.

The gist of it's all the gods're entranced by the thing's perfection wond'ring just what exactly a god eater is and trying the thing on for size only to find it doesn't quite fit any of 'em until only Osiris's left and he doesn't wan'o know but the rest of the gods threaten to nag him for all Eternity unless he submits and finally he clambers in the damned thing only to admiringly admit it fits so perfectly it clearly was intended for him at which point Set and his cohorts immediately slam down the lid and nail him in.

The Sufi version of the same idea I suggest's in the Idries Shah story which has a bunch of schoolboys' desire to have the day off thwarted by their awareness their teacher's the world's healthiest most relentlessly robust full of vim and beans man that ever lived hence The Plan arises the boys'll arrange themselves along the route he always takes to reach the classroom and subject him to the following "'A'y'u Sir...oh" "'A'y'u Sir...ooh" "You alright Sir?" "Sir if y'don't mind me sayin' y'lookin' a bit under the weather" "Sir is it me or's your skin a funny lookin' colour?" "Sir why you sweating so profusely?" "Ooh Sir've you seen nurse about that?" and at first Teach manages to brusquely brush aside the sheer absurdness of such statements especially given how he's never felt fitter yet by the time he finally reaches the classroom his knees're buckling under him and he's drenched in so much sweat he decides the boys can have the day off and he'll go home to recuperate.

One of the esoteric dimensions of both stories I suggest's the possibility we weigh down to the point of imprisoning ourselves and each other by relentlessly bombarding ourselves and each other with negative thoughts/feelings especially concerning concepts like aging an effect so crucial according to one possible interpretation of the Osiris story this's literally how the possibility of death arose and came into existence.

I'll even give you a specific example of exactly the sort of thing I mean.

I recently encountered a friend I consider a brother and a far better man than me who looked momentarily aghast when he initially spotted me after a hiatus of six years so much so he rushed up to me and began predatorily circumabulating me until he finally suddenly triumphantly proclaimed from somewhere to my rear "Aha! There's a load of white hair round the back here!" to which I could only respond by stroking my Amish style beard and observing "Aren't the white patches on this sufficient for y'u?" while all the time thinking Now if that isn't one of those nails Set and his pals used to sentence Osiris and ultimately themselves to death then I don't know what is.

I've been over at Michael Prescott's blog reading Let George Do It

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/micha...

and this was my reply

Michael Prescott "If a hypnotist, bypassing the conscious mind, tells George that he is drunk, George will make his human host act drunk, even if the person hasn't touched a drop. It's my contention that George is the library angel."

George meaning Earth Worker conveys the image of a sort of stolid unimaginative farmhand or beast of burden and I suggest Michael by a curious coincidence the esoteric mystical take on who or what George is corresponds to precisely that description.

In Sufism or Esoteric Christianity for instance George's often styled a donkey.

In Taoism an ox.

Amongst the lovers of Sophia such as Socrates and Plato a horse.

In Hinduism an elephant.

In other words George is supposedly the body viewed as an animal or more accurately a whole zoo or even ecosystem of highly adapted animals possessed of their own particular forms of genius but with a natural tendency to cooperate for the mutual benefit of all the parts which gradually becomes disrupted by society's insistence on convincing the narrational mind or ego to view itself not at best as a helpful adviser or consiglieri intended to act as a cultural interface but as the entire organism itself.

This's supposedly why things like yoga and tai chi arose to simultaneously rewaken the body and its subcomponents to their true nature/purpose as well as to reacquaint the mind/ego to its true status as being of crucial but ultimately far more limited importance which's also supposedly why so much store's placed in so many mystical systems on observing bodily and mental stillness since this's supposedly the best way to witness and verify if there's any evidence for any of this scenario being even remotely true.

The curse and blessing of the body's supposedly its incredible responsiveness to suggestion via the mind hence the great importance placed in traditional societies on storytellers such as poets as shapers of society for good or bad as well as the importance placed on the power of stories in all mystical traditions.

This's supposedly the mechanism behind the nocebo or pointing the bone type effects in say voodoo or the placebo effect.

This's also supposedly the reason why the placebo effect works even when patients're openly told they're receiving a sugar pill because the body's being told a story via the mind concerning the possibility of being healed even when you take inert substances.

But supposedly the story doesn't even have to be delivered via your own mind because so long as some other mind's reception of the story's resulted in its own body's awareness of it then even as that other body's remotely praying for your well being your body will sense this and respond by attempting to join in with the healing story.

Thanks to observing how our hands can grab objects in midair before our minds've even had a chance to notice the objects've been dislodged Modern psychology's coined the phrase the zombie to describe the body's apparent capacity to behave as if it has independent intelligence.

But according to various mystical systems the body isn't so much a zombie as a sleeping prince or princess which can be gradually or abruptly reawoken and one sign of it's stirring is the manifestation of strange phenomena like library angels.

A sign it's becoming even more awake's supposedly the spontaneous manifestation of psychic powers though this's also supposedly the stage where the narrator or ego makes a particular effort to reassert itself. This's also the stage when the narrators/egos of others may also start manifesting either to put a stop to things developing any further aka the poison apple manoeuver or to harness such capacities to agendas of their own aka stealing the lamp.

In fact that's supposedly what the genie really is the infinite possibilities which gradually become available to the body when the narrational mind or ego finally abandons all hope fear or doubt and gradually quietens down in submission to the plenuum of silence.

And Michael there's you thinking all this time you were just some writer but all along you've been a creator and destroyer of worlds.

I've been over at the Spectator reading Hugo Rifkind's How Bitcoin Could Destroy the State (and Perhaps Make Me a Bit of Money)

http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/hu...

where SWIM@mailinator.com made this comment "You all know what MP3's did to the music industry around 15 years ago? Bitcoin is going to do the same thing to the financial industry."

And this was my response

Even if it isn't Bitcoin sooner or later and contrary to what they think the megacorporations megastates etc'll be cut out the loop and out of existence by a truly democratic trading algorithm which'll facilitate the exchange of goods labour etc through the whole world modelled on the way bodies' cells and organs cooperate to achieve a healthy organism

an observation though which should be qualified by my earlier response to the actual Rifkind piece

People don't seem to realise it yet but we seem to be at the same stage the CIA were the day before the Berlin Wall fell - clueless what's about to happen.

So not only could we be watching Capitalism going the same way as Communism but also both national sovereignity/statehood and the New World Order's dream/nightmare of a unified one world state which's probably why so many parties're currently desperately scrabbling to reposition and limit the effect of the internet in the hope of avoiding such developments.

I've been over at Wired reading Brandon Keim's Something Other Than Adaptation Could Be Driving Evolution and this was my response

Brandon part of the problem may be we tend to think of evolution in terms of individuals but a close look at individuals reveals they themselves may actually be composites or hives composed of still other smaller animals.

For instance from a certain point of view we ourselves could be said to be composed of a wide range of very highly adopted organisms such as the hands the fingers the limbs the joints the heart the chambers of the heart the heart cells ditto the liver and its components the brain and its components the skeleton and its components etc.

And even though he concentrates on the genes this in fact's one of the implications in Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene idea and may even explain why our hands for instance're capable of so-called reflexes which enable them to behave as if they have sufficient independent intelligence to pluck objects out thin air before our minds've even noticed our elbows've 'inadvertently' knocked the damned things off. It also may explain why all through nature cells seemingly volunteer to die for the greater good in order for things like fingers to emerge during the foetal stage and maybe even why deformities result when they 'refuse'.

If this's true of our bodies maybe it's true of ourselves as subcomponents of species and those species as subcomponents of the entire ecosphere in which case evolution becomes less about supposed individuals supposedly struggling to prevail over each other and more about conceptual blindness resulting in the failure to perceive cooperative behaviour which in turn might explain the emergence of behaviour where species including humans adopt family members from thoroughly unrelated species but also why species including humans've demonstrated a preparedness to dive on grenades or risk drowning in order to protect or rescue not just fellow species' or adopted species' members but members of unrelated species with which they have no prior relationship.

Over at the BBC I'm reading Google Gets Ungoogleable Off Sweden's New Word List.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-2...

Apparently Google've banned a new Swedish word 'ogooglebar' which in popular Swedish usage mean a thing which can't be found with search engines because they insist it should only apply to Google's search engine so the Language Council of Sweden've simply tossed it.

Now the cheek of this's Google aren't the first to commercially use that name in that form and they themselves pinched it from the mathematical/philosophical term googol meaning the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes and one wonders how they'd've felt if Edward Kasner and his nephew Milton Sirotta who coined the term'd duffed them up before their enterprise'd even gotten underway in much the same way they're now throwing their weight round with the speakers of the Swedish language.

For that matter I bet Larry Page and Sergey Brin as students vacuumed their own floors before they hit the Google jackpot and whenever they did they'd've almost certainly've called it hoovering even though they'd've equally as certainly've been using any kind of vacuum cleaner EXCEPT Hoover in which case how much's that got'o be worth in compound interest to the descendants of the Hoover family?

What next the English banning any other nation from speaking English unless they pay royalties? Come to think of it doesn't the Irishman Bono write his lyrics in English...?

It's like Lady Gaga. She is to my seventeen year old daughter what David Bowie was to me GOD and as an out and out admirer of Gaga myself I can actually see Gaga's very definitely the first female David Bowie.

Yet that name Gaga was pinched off Queen's hit single Radio Gaga so when I read Gaga's banned some ice cream parlour from paying homage to her Ben & Jerry Cherry Garcia style by calling one of their breast milk ice cream products Baby Gaga I can't help wondering how she'd feel if at the start of her career Roger Taylor the writer of Radio Gaga'd planted his legal boot equally firmly between her musical plums. She might never in fact've sufficiently recovered to become the considerable recording artist she now is.

What next England forbidding any other nation from using the English language unless they pay royalties?

Now there's a thought because doesn't that Irish guy Bono write his lyrics in English...?