Read This: Philip K. Dick’s unfinished final novel might have been like Tron

via The AV Club

When science-fiction author Philip K. Dick died at 53 in 1982, just months shy of the premiere of Blade Runner, he left behind a legacy that included dozens of novels written over the course of three decades, as well as a number of short stories and film and TV adaptations of his work. But Dick’s illness and early death did not afford him time to complete his final book, a novel called The Owl In Daylight, a title said to have been inspired by a conversation between the Chicago-born author and a Southerner. Over at Atlas Obscura, writer Eric Grundhauser shares what is known about this thwarted volume in an article called “The Shifting Realities Of Philip K. Dick’s Final Unfinished Novel.” As the title of the article indicates, the evidence is contradictory and far from conclusive.

The plot of the proposed book supposedly revolves around an amusement park owner who creates a super-intelligent computer, only to find himself trapped by the machine and forced to solve its puzzles in order to escape. Dick’s widow, Tessa, described The Owl In Daylight as “a clear rip off of a movie called Tron,” but Grundhauser points out that Tron was not even released until several months after the author died. In a letter to his agent, Dick cited other, more highbrow influences: Dante’s Commedia and Goethe’s Faust. And just weeks before his death, in an interview with Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter, Dick sketched out another plot for The Owl In Daylight, this one about a struggling music composer who gets a “bio-chip” implanted in his brain. Tessa produced her own version of The Owl In Daylight, based on what she thinks Philip would have wanted, but this was forced off the market for legal reasons and is now a pricey collectible. As it is, the unfinished novel remains a major question mark in the author’s long and prolific career. Grundhauser concludes:

We’ll never know for sure exactly what The Owl In Daylight would have looked like had Philip lived to put the story to paper, but it sounds like it would have been a rare happy ending in the Dick canon. “He considered this a sort of capstone to his career,” Tessa says. “The first novel that ends on a note of hope and love.”

CIA releases secret files of 'flying saucer' UFO sightings - including over UK

via The Independent

Spy agency releases formerly classified photographs from the 1950s to celebrate the new series of cult sci-fi series The X Files 

The CIA has posted online previously secret photographs purportedly showing UFOs or ‘flying saucers’ hovering over Britain.

The hand selected images are among formerly classified files from the 1950s which were hidden away by the American spy agency.

First released in 1978, the images show how the CIA carried out extensive and secretive investigations into whether extraterrestrial life exists.
According to the documents released, one 1952 report entitled “Flying Saucers" said all but 100 UFO sightings had a reasonable explanation.

It said: “Less than 100 reasonably credible reports remain ‘unexplainable’ at this time. It is recommended that CIA surveillance be continued.

“It is strongly urged, however, that no reports of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public.”

And the 10 files - released to coincide with the revival of cult sci-fi series The X Files - do not contain any clues to any “alien abductions” or “crashed spaceships”.

A spokesman for the CIA said:  “We’ve decided to highlight a few documents both sceptics and believers will find interesting.

“Below you will find five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity.

“We also pulled five documents we think his sceptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings.”

Some UFO conspiracy theorists do not believe the CIA’s decision is so innocent.

Stephen Bassett, the executive director of the Paradigm Research Group - which is campaigning to get the US government to "admit" aliens are real - believes the release is a face-saving exercise by the CIA to prepare the public for the existence of extraterrestrials.

He told the Mirror: "The recent postings to the CIA website could well be strategic on the part of the agency.

"It appears the CIA used the revival of the X-Files franchise as a convenient time to remind the public the agency has, in fact, engaged the extraterrestrial presence issue in the past.

"Post-disclosure the CIA will have substantial public relations issues as it has played a significant role in maintaining the truth embargo over six decades.

"These recent postings could have an inoculative effect in service to the agency's future PR strategy."

CitiGroup: The End of Pax Americana, With No Replacement in Sight

 via Disinformation:

Just a few days ago, CitiGroup released a new report that reads like an alarm klaxton sounding the end of the current geopolitical world order, with nothing but chaos to follow. Indeed, the “banksters” are admitting that everything we thought we knew about how the world operates is either wrong, or coming to a jarring end. The report is centered around the idea that “Pax Americana” has either already ended, or is in its final death throes.

“Pax Americana” is the term often used to define the (previously) current geopolitical order. That the general peace and stability of the Post-WWII world is due to America’s dominant economic and political power, backed up by its ridiculously large military. In its analysis, Citi is certain that the Pax Americana era is over, but the main problem for the future is what they’re calling the “Great Power Sclerosis.” In other words, there’s nothing to replace Pax Americana, other than chaos, disorder, and a great many panicking investment bankers.

The full PDF of the report, “Global Political Risk: The New Convergence Between Geopolitical and Vox Populi Risks, and Why It Matters” is available here, and I encourage all to take the time to read its 70+ pages. Because, there are times when the pragmatic warnings, predictions, and fears of those advising investors are very important to we, the skeptical. This is most certainly one of those times.

Some key excerpts follow…

The report begins with:

"2016 has begun, as 2015 ended, amid a significant worsening of the global political climate and along with that, considerable volatility in financial markets. Investors and businesses are increasingly aware of the need to understand the drivers and the implications of a greater level of event risk exacerbated by shifting social patterns.

Well, tell us something we didn’t know.

In the section titled, “Is This the Dawning of a New Era,” with regard to the death of Pax Americana:

"What’s more, we see little sign of this trend of political risk cutting across advanced and emerging economies reversing. We think it’s unlikely that the moderate global growth that Citi’s economists forecast as their central scenario will dampen these risks. If anything, the data we have analyzed for this report, combined with our combined expertise in comparative political science and international relations and security and defense analysis, underscores how, by many measures, these risks are on the rise and indeed could endanger even the already modest prospects for global growth
In other words, translated from investor-speak; put on the air mask and assume crash-landing position.

And invocation of the dreaded, “Black Swan”

"In our view, political and business leaders will need to be more attuned to the new shape of global political risk, a paradigm shift that means that previous policies will fail to keep pace and uncertainty will remain high, with the potential to interact in unexpected ways. Among the key implications of this more fragile and interconnected risk outlook is that so-called Black Swan events — in this case, geopolitical events producing instability spanning several orders of magnitude — may be both more likely and more difficult for leaders and global financial institutions to resolve.

The Black Swan theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, as the disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. The 9/11 attacks are a prime example of a Black Swan.

The report closes with this bit of doom-porn:

"Over the long-term, failure to devise policies to address middle class anxiety and declining living standards increases the likelihood that Vox Populi risk — including mass protests and government collapses — could move from being episodically disruptive to systemic, undermining globalization in the process. And we are deeply concerned that the political capital necessary to stem the refugee crisis and terrorist threat, perhaps best-characterized as the collision between previous foreign policy failures and current governance capacity, exceeds that available to government leaders, who have relied upon central banks to manage the lion’s share of global crises over the past several years. 2016 could be a very political year for markets.
Overall, the report is an excellent analysis of the condition our condition is in, which isn’t good by any measure. It’s very enlightening read, and worth your time.

Earth ‘covered in plastic’: 5bn tons of waste has contaminated marine life, entered food chain

 Some 5 billion tons of plastic waste are littering our planet and the total amount is enough to wrap the Earth in clingfilm, a new international study has found. Scientists compare the grave pollution levels to a start of a new geological epoch.

Since the end of World War II, mankind has produced about 5 billion tons of plastic and now the remains of water containers, supermarket bags, polystyrene lumps, compact discs, cigarette filter tips, nylons and other plastics can be found everywhere, a team of scientists led by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz from Leicester University has found in a study titled, “The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene.” The study has been published in the journal “Anthropocene.”

Plastic was found on the ocean floor, remote islands, buried underground in landfill sites and even in polar regions which used to be considered as pristine zones before 2014, when significant amount of plastic were found frozen in the Arctic Sea.

“The results came as a real surprise. We were aware that humans have been making increasing amounts of different kinds of plastic – from Bakelite to polyethylene bags to PVC – over the last 70 years, but we had no idea how far it had traveled round the planet,” The Guardian cited Zalasiewicz as saying.

“It turns out not just to have floated across the oceans, but has sunk to the deepest parts of the sea floor. This is not a sign that our planet is in a healthy condition either,” he said.

Plastic doesn’t just pollute the planet, the scientists say, but has become a part of the food chain – a factor that has a colossal environmental effect.

“Just consider the fish in the sea,” Zalasiewicz said, referring to study data that shows the extraordinary degree to which fish caught in oceans have been polluted with plastic.

“A vast proportion of them now have plastic in them. They think it is food and eat it, just as seabirds feed plastic to their chicks. Then some of it is released as excrement and ends up sinking on to the seabed. The planet is slowly being covered in plastic,” he added.

Sometimes wildlife adapts to plastic pollution – for example, on islands such as Diego Garcia hermit crabs are using plastic bottles as homes. But largely, the consequences of plastic spread are negative – lots of seabirds and turtles, for example, get entangled in plastic and drown or choke to death.

Zalasiewicz and his team believe that the spread of plastic in the last 70 years has had such a grave effect on the planet that it can be viewed as a marker for a new geological epoch on the Earth, called Anthropocene, which has put an end to the Holocene era that began about 12,000 years ago.

“Plastics are already present in sufficient numbers to be considered as one of the most important types of ‘technofossil’ that will form a permanent record of human presence on Earth,” the study concludes, according to the Daily Mail.

Humankind produces about 300 million tons of plastic annually, and the manufacturing figures continue to grow, the paper says. Plastic degrades very slowly, so it takes plastic bags and bottles about 200 years to degrade.

Alan Watts: The Difference Between Belief and Faith

via BrainPickings

A century and a half before Carl Sagan explored the relationship between science and religion, Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, contemplated the subject in a beautiful letter. Two centuries later, Alan Lightman crafted an enchanting definition of secular spirituality. This question has also been addressed by Albert Einstein in answering a little girl’s question about whether scientists pray, Flannery O’Connor in considering dogma, belief, and the difference between religion and faith, and Jane Goodall in her exquisite conversation with Bill Moyers on science and spirituality — and yet the question is, and perhaps is bound to remain, an open one.

One of the most articulate and lucid attempts to answer it comes from Alan Watts, who popularized Eastern philosophy in the West, in his fantastic 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library) — the same treasure trove of insight that gave us Watts on happiness and how to live a full life and his prescient admonition about our modern media gluttony.

 Watts writes:

"We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

[…]

The present phase of human thought and history … almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint.

But “religious” people who resist the scraping of the paint from the glass, who regard the scientific attitude with fear and mistrust, and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are curiously ignorant of laws of the spiritual life which they might find in their own traditional records. A careful study of comparative religion and spiritual philosophy reveals that abandonment of belief, of any clinging to a future life for one’s own, and of any attempt to escape from finitude and mortality, is a regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. Indeed, this is actually such a “first principle” of the spiritual life that it should have been obvious from the beginning, and it seems, after all, surprising that learned theologians should adopt anything but a cooperative attitude towards the critical philosophy of science."

The Wisdom of Insecurity is the kind of book that stays with you for life. Complement it with Watts on money vs. wealth and your ego, the universe, and becoming who you really are.

WTF is Magick?

by Gabriel Roberts via Disinformation

In an attempt to not sound absolutely crazy to anyone who might see me mention magick, I’d like to bring some illumination of what magick is.  This may prove to be a challenge because the term itself is a moving goalpost of sorts.  To some, magick means a man on a stage sawing a woman in half as an act of illusion. Ironically, this can also be seen as a metaphor for our own subjective predilections toward illusion in all aspects of our life.

In order to explain this correctly, I must try to get you to set aside what you think you might know about actual magic and allow yourself to hear me for what I’m saying unencumbered by preset notions.

The Buddhist might say that everything is Maya (illusion) and the ancient Gnostic might say the same, but with the twist that this material construct is a kind of incubator for us to occupy ourselves why Archons feed on our thoughts and feelings without our knowing it (think, people being batteries for the machines to live off of like in the film series, The Matrix).   Whether these ideas are true, or not the metaphor that they produce is indeed powerful.  In many different ways, these concepts can be seen as true.

Ok, on to actual explanation.

Magick is first a method of transforming the world you see by changing the way you see the world.  This requires one to willfully change hard-wired behavior and practices through mental gymnastics.  Much of this involves understanding and playing with the thought-form.

A thought form is the primary way we construct ideas; it is exactly the formation of our thoughts.  A thought form can also be in some ways associated with what Jung referred to as archetypes.  Archetypes are overarching themes and images that we associate with primary things in our life.  For example, for many, our fathers represent an image of what God might be like; If our father is cruel, then we may see God as inherently cruel.  The thought form of who God is creates a landscape for our reality in a highly subjective and personal fashion and may be entirely incorrect in contrast to the actual truth of the matter.

But we are not looking for truth with a capital T here, because of the paradoxical nature of truth itself.  It is like the problem scientists have with the idea that the observer changes the results of behavior simply by nature of observing.  Instead we are looking to change the nature of our thoughts and tinkering with the wiring we have in our minds.

So how exactly does one manipulate one’s own thought forms and for what purpose?  This is the crux of the magical practice.  One must in many ways trick one’s own mind, which is no small feat, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done.

Think of a time in your life in which you radically changed stances on a subject.  Did the way you see the world change?  Did some kind of transformative experience catalyze this change?  In one way, or another, something changed the wiring of you mind on that particular subject.  In one sense, you received gnosis (experiential understanding) on that particular thing.  But the fact that this experience happened to you through your particular lens means that it may not have happened to others in the same way, even if the experience has happened to many people.  For instance, no two people lost their virginity in the same way, but all were transformed by the experience in some form.  The event is highly subjective and personal, though many themes may be similar within the broader context of the experience.

The greatest act of a magician then is to transform one’s self and therefore change the world that they see.  In changing our perception, we change the nature of reality.  And this toying with perception can change the world from something banal into something divine.  Regardless of our cosmology, we can see how this happens to everyone, hence my assertion that everything is magick.  If you ask a Kung Fu master what Kung Fu is, he might say the same thing.

In many ways magick is a western term for a traditionally assumed eastern idea, but our western traditions have much to contribute, though they have been stamped down and literally burned in books and people by two millennia of monotheistic suppression.  The stigma is palpable and yet our disciplines of science came through these occult channels from ancient sources.  Astronomy and Astrology were once one and the same, Pharmacology, Chemistry and Herbalism were once Alchemy.

So in short, the manipulation of one’s own mind to achieve a specific goal in one’s self, or in the world around them is the core of magick.  To those who might think magick to be a foul and odious working with demons and other fancied creatures, this is a misunderstanding brought forth by a long tradition of slander.  Consider what it means to work on yourself in such a way that your goal is personal growth for the highest goal of society through your own contribution.  Consider this quote from the much maligned and misunderstood book, The Black Pullet:

    “Do you feel, my son, do you feel this heroic ambition which is the sure stamp of the children of wisdom? Do you dare to desire to serve only the one God and to dominate over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to prove to be a man and to be unwilling to be a slave since you are born to be a Sovereign? And if you have these noble thoughts, as the signs which I have found on your physiognomy do not permit me to doubt, have you considered maturely whether you have the courage and the strength to renounce all the things which could possibly be an obstacle to attaining the greatness for which you have been born?”

    At this point he stopped and regarded me fixedly as if waiting for an answer, or as if he were searching to read my heart.

    I asked him, “What is that which I have to renounce?”

    “All that is evil in order to occupy yourself only with that which is good. The proneness with which nearly all of us are born to vice rather than to virtue. Those passions which render us slaves to our senses which prevent us from applying ourselves to study, tasting its sweetness, and gathering its fruits. You see, my dear son, that the sacrifice which I demand of you is not painful and is not above your powers; on the contrary, it will make you approach perfection as near as it is possible for man to attain. Do you accept that which I propose?”

If I have explained myself correctly, you will understand that magick is simply a broad term for one working on the improvement of one’s self for the betterment of self and humanity at large through the manipulation of one’s own thoughts and ideas, questioning every notion and challenging each one in practice and critical review.

New Thinking Allowed: Two Videos for the New Year

Jeffrey Mishlove is back at it, turning out Episodes of his groundbreaking show. Two episodes are presented for your consideration.

Stephen E. Braude, PhD, served as chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also served as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is author of Crimes of Reason, The Gold Leaf Lady, Immortal Remains, The Limits of Influence, First Person Plural, and ESP and Psychokinesis. He is the recent recipient of the prestigious Myers Memorial Medal awarded by the Society for Psychical Research for outstanding contributions.

Here he describes the academic challenges of conducting serious inquiry into paranormal phenomena, a major problem being the emotional resistance from colleagues. He points out that critics of parapsychology often commit the logical error of arguing from the weakest, rather than the strongest, cases. He notes that similar irrational resistance also occurred with regard to the academic acceptance of hypnosis and dissociative identity disorder (or multiple personalities). Braude also voiced certain criticisms aimed at some colleagues within the field of parapsychology. In particular, he felt that the arguments in favor of the survival of the human personality after death were weak insofar as they did not take into account the extent and range of both normal and paranormal human abilities.

Stafford Betty, PhD, is a philosopher and professor of religious studies at California State University, Bakersfield. He is author of Vadiraja’s Refutation of Shankara’s Non-Dualism, The Imprisoned Splendor, The Afterlife Unveiled, and Heaven and Hell Unveiled.

Here he suggests that most people, without necessarily realizing it, are philosophical dualists. They accept intuitively that the mind or soul is of a completely different nature than the physical body. Unlike monistic materialism, dualism seems compatible with the empirical data of parapsychology. The problem with dualism, however, is that it offers no good explanation for how the mind and body are able to interact with each other. Another philosophical position, dating back to the ancient stoic philosophers and consistent with the Vedantic philosophy of India, is a perspective known as transcendental materialism. This viewpoint postulates gradiations of matter to more and more subtle levels beyond those known to physics today.

Scientists: Human activity has pushed Earth beyond four of nine ‘planetary boundaries’

via The Washington Post


At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world.

The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.

“What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center and is the lead author of the paper.

These are not future problems, but rather urgent matters, according to Steffen, who said that the economic boom since 1950 and the globalized economy have accelerated the transgression of the boundaries. No one knows exactly when push will come to shove, but he said the possible destabilization of the “Earth System” as a whole could occur in a time frame of “decades out to a century.”

The researchers focused on nine separate planetary boundaries first identified by scientists in a 2009 paper. These boundaries set theoretical limits on changes to the environment, and include ozone depletion, freshwater use, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution and the introduction of exotic chemicals and modified organisms.

Beyond each planetary boundary is a “zone of uncertainty.” This zone is meant to acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in the calculations, and to offer decision-makers a bit of a buffer, so that they can potentially take action before it’s too late to make a difference. Beyond that zone of uncertainty is the unknown — planetary conditions unfamiliar to us.

“The boundary is not like the edge of the cliff,” said Ray Pierrehumbert, an expert on Earth systems at the University of Chicago. “They’re a little bit more like danger warnings, like high-temperature gauges on your car.”

Pierrehumbert, who was not involved in the paper published in Science, added that a planetary boundary “is like an avalanche warning tape on a ski slope.”

The scientists say there is no certainty that catastrophe will follow the transgression of these boundaries. Rather, the scientists cite the precautionary principle: We know that human civilization has risen and flourished in the past 10,000 years — an epoch known as the Holocene — under relatively stable environmental conditions.

No one knows what will happen to civilization if planetary conditions continue to change. But the authors of the Science paper write that the planet “is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies.”

The authors make clear that their goal is not to offer solutions, but simply to provide information. This is a kind of report card, exploiting new data from the past five years.

It’s not just a list of F’s. The ozone boundary is the best example of world leaders responding swiftly to a looming environmental disaster. After the discovery of an expanding ozone hole caused by man-made chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, the nations of the world banned CFCs in the 1980s.

This young field of research draws from such disciplines as ecology, geology, chemistry, atmospheric science, marine biology and economics. It’s known generally as Earth Systems Science. The researchers acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in what they’re doing. Some planetary boundaries, such as “introduction of novel entities” — CFCs would be an example of such things — remain enigmatic and not easily quantified.

Better understood is the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The safe-operating-zone boundary for CO2 had previously been estimated at levels up to 350 parts per million. That’s the boundary — and we’re already past that, with the current levels close to 400 ppm, according to the paper. That puts the planet in the CO2 zone of uncertainty that the authors say extends from 350 to 450 ppm.

At the rate CO2 is rising — about 2 ppm per year — we will surpass 450 ppm in just a couple of decades, said Katherine Richardson, a professor of biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a co-author of the new paper.

Humanity may have run into trouble with planetary boundaries even in prehistoric times, said Richard Alley, a Penn State geoscientist who was not part of this latest research. The invention of agriculture may have been a response to food scarcity as hunting and gathering cultures spread around, and filled up, the planet, he said. “It’s pretty clear we were lowering the carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago,” Alley said.

There are today more than 7 billion people, using an increasing quantity of resources, turning forest into farmland, boosting the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and driving other species to extinction. The relatively sudden efflorescence of humanity has led many researchers to declare that this is a new geological era, the human age, often referred to as the Anthropocene.

The Earth has faced shocks before, and the biosphere has always recovered. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the planet apparently froze over — becoming “Snowball Earth.” About 66 million years ago, it was jolted by a mountain-sized rock from space that killed half the species on the planet, including the non-avian dinosaurs. Life on Earth always bounced back. “The planet is going to take care of itself. It’s going to be here,” Richardson said.

“There’s a lot of emotion involved in this. If you think about it, the American ethic is, ‘The sky’s the limit.’ And here you have people coming on and saying, no it isn’t, the Earth’s the limit,” she said.

Technology can potentially provide solutions, but innovations often come with unforeseen consequences. “The trends are toward layering on more and more technology so that we are more and more dependent on our technological systems to live outside these boundaries,” Pierrehumbert said. “. . . It becomes more and more like living on a spaceship than living on a planet.”