http://www.hungrymantv.com/shorts.php?vid=tarantinos_mind

in which one Brasilian tells the other how he's broken the Tarantino code, which reveals that all of his flicks (besides Jackie Brown) are really but episodes in a greater meta-film.

http://realitysandwich.com/voyaging_dmt_space_with_dr_rick_strassman_md

from a large and awesome interview with Rick Strassman regarding his work and latest book.

It was obviously hard to come up with a model, at least in my mind, at least with what I knew at the time, to really be able to accept and hold and take the stories that people were telling me, and come up with a theory that I could live with scientifically and personally and ones that would make sense to the volunteers. I just started off with the most gross explanations and worked up from there when those got rejected. The grossest explanation is obviously that of the brain - this is your brain on drugs - you give people DMT their brain does this - this is why people where having these entity contact experiences.

But every explanation that I tried fell on fairly much deaf ears on the part of the volunteers. They either rejected the ideas about this being a brain on drugs, or the other approach that I was taking that was pretty much a psychological approach - these were unexpressed dreams or impulses or drives or motivations to be special or to belong or to have exciting experiences - kind of the Freudian approach. So when that didn't work, I tried to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, in terms of what Jung had said about UFOs and aliens, so I tried using those models or explanatory systems to kind of encompass people's experiences. That didn't work. I tried the more generic approach of interpreting what they were experiencing as dreams, but that didn't work either.

I tried and discarded various levels of interpretation until I finally just figured I'll just start to do an experiment assuming that what people are undergoing is real and that indeed they are experiencing or making contact with real, externally verifiable, discrete, freestanding sorts of beings. This is what they're saying and this is what they're doing and this is what is going on between them and the volunteer.

What happened as a result of that is that people became a lot more comfortable in sharing with me the full range of their experiences. I stopped fighting and trying to pigeonhole a round peg into a square hole - trying to fit their experiences with the theoretical constructs that I was stuck with. I think as a result of my change in attitude or approach that I was getting deeper and richer reports from people about what was going on. But still, as a scientist, I'm into mechanisms of action and when I started to write the book, I started to hunt around for scientific models that might encompass free-standing, sentient, independently existing, outside just one's mind, explanations for what people were undergoing.

So even though I'm no expert on quantum physics or any of the more far-out psychedelic views of cosmology, I did learn a little bit of this phenomena that is known as dark matter, which is non-visible matter that neither generates light nor reflects light, but still makes up 95% or more of the mass of the universe. It seemed to me that if it makes up that much mass of the universe, it could very well be inhabited, and it would just be a question of changing the receiving characteristics of consciousness through chemical changes that occurred with DMT to be able to perceive things that were normally not perceivable. And there are plenty of examples of that in everyday reality - I mean, with a microscope we can see tiny things we couldn't see normally - with a telescope we can see things very far away we can't see normally, with ultraviolet sensors we can see things that we can't normally see - so the only difference, maybe from a philosophical point of view, is that the change in our receiving powers are not tied in with a machine - they're more in our subjective/receptive consciousness rather than with a piece of metal and electricity and glass and things that can magnify or somehow change the things that we're capable of seeing.

So it's a bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's completely that crazy. The main thing that prevents further movement along the model that I'm talking about is just the verifiability between two people - like can two people see the same thing at the same time - like if you have two people looking through the same microscope at the same time, they can pretty much see and describe the same thing - but is it possible for two people to take DMT at the same time, or not even at the same time, and be able to see the exact same thing?

I don't think that we're going to come to the answers either through science or through religion. I think it's going to be some kind of hybrid. Science is a bit too constrained in the model building, and most religions are too constrained through the maintenance of their institution at the expense of the truth. As a rule, if you can establish the veracity of your findings through science, it's believed. It isn't excluded necessarily because someone disagrees with your findings. So I think it will require some kind of hybrid of scientific religion or spiritual science to be able to take into account the entire range of the phenomenon, the ethical implications that's available and also maintain the peer review and the cross-checking of your findings that occurs within the scientific model. Yeah - so it's pretty out there. It's kind of a large view and if I get one half of one percent done before I die, I'll feel pretty good about that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/21/study-the-effects-of-sero_n_114112.html

so it makes sense that tryptamines - close relatives of seratonin - should act as entheogens. this might also explain personal differences in reactions to similar doses of tryptamine compounds. and the genetic component in some traditions of shamanism. and probably a number of other remarkable phenomena.

According to Psychology Today and referencing the American Journal of Psychiatry, serotonin, the brain chemical in charge of moderating mood, metabolism, and sexuality, has been linked to spiritual experiences. Psychology Today reports:

A team of Swedish researchers has found that the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively. Scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality because drugs known to alter serotonin such as LSD also induce mystical experiences. But now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element.

So what does this mean? Well, the researchers believe that it provides evidence that religiosity and spirituality are not defined necessarily or entirely by environmental or cultural factors, such as upbringing. Basically, those with a higher concentration of serotonin receptors will therefore most likely show a stronger inclination towards spiritual acceptance.

“And then this banker – clean-shaven, grey suit and vest – you’d never look twice at him on the street – he told me about The Five Environments.

“He leans forward, near the end of the dinner, and he says to me, There are Five Environments you can live in on this planet. There’s The City. The Desert. The Mountains. The Plains. And The Beach.

“You can live in combinations of them. Maybe a city in the desert, or in the mountains by the ocean. Or you could choose just one. Out in the plains somewhere, perhaps.

“But you need to get out there and travel, and figure out where you thrive.

“Some places you’ll go to and you’ll feel yourself wither. Your brain will fog up, your body won’t respond to your thoughts and desires, and you’ll feel sad and angry.

“You need to find out which of the Five Environments are yours. If you belong by the ocean, then the mountains will ruin you. If you’re suited for the blue solitude of the plains, then the city will be a tight, roaring prison cell that’ll eat you alive.” [+]

We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the looming climate crisis,the futility of survivalism; and we began to play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people are going to need help forging new ways of life.

Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts, political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people who are left trapped in degrading places, who don't get the green collar jobs, do?

And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems -- and getting really good at adaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip. [+]

http://www.vimeo.com/1223566

hot Communist babes. Red Army zombies. mythical warfare. Soviet propaganda. heavy metal. in short, complete and total ass-rocking awesomeness.

http://whedonesque.com/comments/16734#236716

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

Spread the word. Rock some banners, widgets, diggs… let people know who wouldn’t ordinarily know. It wouldn’t hurt if this really was an event. Good for the business, good for the community – communitIES: Hollywood, internet, artists around the world, comic-book fans, musical fans (and even the rather vocal community of people who hate both but will still dig on this). Proving we can turn Dr Horrible into a viable economic proposition as well as an awesome goof will only inspire more people to lay themselves out in the same way. It’s time for the dissemination of the artistic process. Create more for less. You are the ones that can make that happen.

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/474108

this episode of the C-Realm features a lengthy interview with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. he talks about quite a bit: how climate change models have heretofore been entirely too conservative, how there are many alternative energy sources which haven't been considered (he mentions algae and a different kind of geothermal), and what he sees as an ongoing transformation of society by tele-work, tele-eduction, and tele-everything. but perhaps the most interesting part was his discussion about the consideration of the Lifeboat Foundation's other concerns for the immediate future:

The purpose of the Lifeboat Foundation is to try to anticipate the potential existential risks to humans going forward as we prosecute what is essentially something that we've never done and seen before which is a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, double-exponential tech revolution. All of these tech revolutions are frontiers of the small but feed off one another synergistically and they're all changing things in massive ways. Currently, we have, since 1959, seen computer speeds increase 10 million times. We are currently at about a petaflop. The human brain speed is 20 petaflops. We will be at human brain speed by 2012. So the machines will be as smart as human brains.

Beyond that, as we leave silicon and go on to Bio, Optical, Quantum, Nano, and Molecular computing, we are looking at an additional speed increase beyond human brain speed of somewhere between 10 to the seventh and 10 to the 11th power by 2030 to 2040. That's some massive, massive, machine capability. So the speed will be there to produce an intelligence beyond human. Well, what about the software? The software comes from either the current self computing algorithms and (AGI) or are from biomimetics.

Then there is 'emergence'. As far as we can tell, there is no general intelligence wiring in the human brain. Each piece of our intelligence evolved in the usual billion year evolutionary context over which we developed as today's humans to handle specific problems within that evolutionary context, almost all of which was in the hunter-gatherer realm. Any general intelligence that we have is wholly emergent - i.e. make something complex enough and it wakes up.

So between emergence, biomimetics, and self computing, people are betting that by 2025 to 2030, we will begin to approach or exceed human level machine intelligence. If this happens it may become an existential threat - one of the existential threats that are being looked at by the Lifeboat people. Because once the machines get smarter than us, they can do things that could take us down even inadvertently. You don't even have to postulate an evil machine to do this. And so how do you work this going forward to make sure that in the brain stem of the machines, in the lizard part of the brain, that they understand, and it's built into them from the initial stages, not to harm humans in any way shape or form? So we have to define what "harm" is...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1934170011/

seems like a good idea.

The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

If you would like to harvest your own vegetables, raise city chickens, or convert to solar energy, this practical, hands-on book is full of step-by-step projects that will get you started homesteading immediately, whether you live in an apartment or a house. It is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.

Projects include:

* How to grow food on a patio or balcony
* How to clean your house without toxins
* How to preserve food
* How to cook with solar energy
* How to divert your grey water to your garden
* How to choose the best homestead for you

Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this illustrated, smartly designed, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. Authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen happily farm in Los Angeles and run the urban homestead blog.

What can I do, Muslims? I do not know myself.
I am no Christian, no Jew, no Magian, no Musulman.
Not of the East, not of the West. Not of the land, not of the sea.
Not of the Mine of Nature, not of the circling heavens,
Not of earth, not of water, not of air, not of fire;
Not of the throne, not of the ground, of existence, of being;
Not of India, China, Bulgaria, Saqseen;
Not of the kingdom of the Iraqs, or of Khorasan;
Not of this world or the next: of heaven or hell;
Not of Adam, Eve, the gardens of Paradise or Eden;
My place placeless, my trace traceless.
Neither body nor soul: all is the life of my Beloved.
I have put away duality: I have seen the Two worlds as one.
I desire One, I know One, I see One, I call One.

--Jalaluddin Rumi

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11581447

i don't think this is necessarily such a bad trend. i'd like to see it taken further: municipalities so independent that they have widely different social systems, allowing for experimentation, competition, and diversity that you don't get with a nationwide monoculture.

A good way to measure this is to look at the country's changing electoral geography. In 1976 Jimmy Carter won the presidency with 50.1% of the popular vote. Though the race was close, some 26.8% of Americans were in “landslide counties” that year, where Mr Carter either won or lost by 20 percentage points or more.

The proportion of Americans who live in such landslide counties has nearly doubled since then. In the dead-heat election of 2000, it was 45.3%. When George Bush narrowly won re-election in 2004, it was a whopping 48.3%. As the playwright Arthur Miller put it that year: “How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?” Clustering is how.

County-level data understate the degree of ideological segregation, reckons Bill Bishop, the author of a gripping new book called “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart”. Counties can be big. Cook County, Illinois, (which includes Chicago), has over 5m inhabitants. Beaverhead County, Montana, covers 5,600 square miles (14,400 square kilometres). The neighbourhoods people care about are much smaller.

Americans move house often, usually for practical reasons. Before choosing a new neighbourhood, they drive around it. They notice whether it has gun shops, evangelical churches and “W” bumper stickers, or yoga classes and organic fruit shops. Perhaps unconsciously, they are drawn to places where they expect to fit in.

Do not believe. Ideology has poisoned this planet. Ideology is bankrupt. It's a skin game. It's a shell game. It's only for marks. It is beneath your dignity as a body to get mixed up in ideology. After all, where is it writ large that talking monkeys should understand the nature of being anyway? Belief is an incredible cop-out on intellectual truth-seeking because belief precludes believing in its opposite. So this is a self-limitation. You become your own cop. The ideologies of the 20th century are so shoddy and hobbled-together, or toxic to human values, that they're not worth believing in anyway. So, deconditioning ourselves from belief: some people call it cynicism. I call it good sense! I'm not a cynical person, but I know shit from Shinola, and I don't expect people who don't to get a lot of respect from the rest of us. What does it mean if you're an optimist and you can't proclaim the difference between boot polish and excreta? It's ridiculous. Don't believe.

Don't follow. Following is a tasteless position to find yourself in. Pets follow, Vice Presidents follow, and bad acts follow. So why follow? All of these gurus, geisheis, roshis, and rishis are simply flim-flam artists. They've had thousands of years to get these cons together and run them on you. Believe me, I know, I'm a recovering Catholic! You have to fight your way free of belief and then do not follow. Do not follow, it's an obsolete tasteless thing and there's no human dignity in it whatsoever.

Do not, in some profoundly metaphysical sense, consume. Do not consume. For obvious reasons, and then for not so obvious reasons. The obvious reasons are that the fetish for objects made of matter is wrecking the planet. If everyone on Earth had what the people here have, there wouldn't be enough metal, glass, plastic, and petroleum on the planet to provide that kind of lifestyle to the billions of people who now aspire to it. None of this stuff brings happiness anyway. I recently had the experience of having my '75 Ford Grenada blow up on me in the middle of the night. So I had to buy a new car. So I went down a year and up a brand and got a '74 BMW. It cost me 2 grand. I guarantee you: once you have the quaternity symbol on the steering wheel, you don't need the $90,000 model. What we should all do is buy antiques; don't consume anything that hasn't already been made. There's a lot of shit, it's all over the place! The endless fetishism for consumer objects is wrecking the planet.

Don't watch. Watching is some kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic peculiarity that we are permitting ourselves because we think there are too many of us to do. I don't think this is true. I think watching is an incredibly disempowering thing. Millions of people live half-awake larval lives watching 6.5 hours of TV a day, and as long they stay in their homes, shopping by phone and fax, everybody is happy. But they participate not at all in the society. They're the marks, and they consume - the media, the entertainment, the clothes, the styles, the brands - they are the morons who are keeping this system running. Do not watch, because then you're not at the center of things.

Largely what I'm talking about here is reclaiming experience. This is what's been taken from us. This is why the new music and dance culture is so important. This is why drug culture is so important. This is why the celebration of sexual minorities is so important. This is all about coming to grips with who you are and how you really feel, and then experiencing it. You are not owned. It is not he, or she, or them that you belong to. We have been told we have to "fit in" or "make sense". This. Is. Not. True. We are creating a world that celebrates diversity and the uniqueness of every person. The complexification of our species is a process directly dependent on the complexity that we each bring to the process. The diversity that is spreading through society is a concomitant to the boundary dissolution. I really believe that science's inability to make sense of human beings in the world as part of nature - to make sense of art, love, hate, aspiration, fear - is the failure to come to terms with transcendental aspect of reality.

The world that we are leaving behind, the world that failed us, was a world of ideologies. The ideologies are, one by one, going down the tubes: Marxism, Freudianism, fascism...they one by one will be discredited. What is coming to be is a world where drugs replace ideologies. That's why drugs are so terrifying to those who oppose them. That's why they say "you just want to take to drugs to escape". That's right! You want to escape! You want to escape fascism, communism, socialism, existentialism, positivism, all of this stuff. You want to escape all of this stuff into the felt presence of the body, which means drugs, sex and syncopated music.

Do not multiply. Replace yourself, but do not multiply. "Go forth and multiply?" No - "go forth and lightly subtract" is a better way to do it.

http://www.magic-mushrooms.net/paddos/Paddos.html

a handly little HTMLized e-book all about shrooming. goes into everything from history and chemistry to legality and psychology. especially useful to me were the parts on Set and Setting, Journeying and Ritual, but there's plenty of other good stuff as well.