A forum for radical insight into philosophy, politics, and social analysis."Have no fellowship with the works of darkness, but expose them" Ephesians 5.11
Kushmonster
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Internet Tower of Babble
Perhaps it's just a testimony to an acute personal case of "dégoûté de la vie", but after only a few years of jockeying my keyboard across the perennially pale and infinite expanses of cyber space I have come to the conclusion that the mad cacophonous din arising from every corner and crevice of the known world and parading in effusive and largely vainglorious display on these ubiquitous screens is simply our own post modern version of the ancient biblical Tower of Babel.
According to the biblical narrative, a generation reconstituted after the great flood and possessing "one language" arrived in the environs of present day Iraq in what was later to become Babylon and there under the aegis of Nimrod, son of Ham, gathered together to construct the legendary edifice lest they be "scattered abroad across the face of the earth" (Genesis 11:4). Evidently the Creator realizing that His erring creatures had learned nothing from the catastrophic annihilation of their predecessors from the face of the earth, came down to visit their building.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
The unprecedented amalgamation of known language into one electronic cyber platform made readily available due to the "magic" of instantaneous translation appears to be a technological reversal of the divinely mandated confusion of tongues, rendering all languages mutually comprehensible, thus restoring the single language of a common humanity to the builders of our modern Babel. Yet Babel seems, by the nature of its very impossible original mission, to condemn its denizens to "confusion" (as in the original Hebrew).The mere proliferation of information which serves as the elemental building blocks of the internet disseminates a similar confusion, if not of tongues, than of understanding, and more significantly, knowledge. The very volume and seemingly infinite extensity of "information" guarantees that even the meaningful and significant species of thought will be literally drowned out in the superficiality and trivialization arising from the vast and inexhaustible reservoirs of human folly and ignorance.
What is even more significant is that very processes of human imagination and cognition have come to seamlessly interface with the electronic and digital platforms with which they interact, thereby being irrevocably transformed. As a result all forms of social interaction, commerce, transportation, communications, industry, finance, and entertainment have likewise become interconnected and dependent upon computerized technological applications. From high frequency stock trading to e-commerce and social media, the very profile of human interaction has taken on the image and likeness of its cyber creation. It is no wonder then that the once unthinkable science fiction of a manufactured human/machine hybrid is taking shape in the quest for so called transhumanism and "singularity" by the social engineers of our scientific technological imperative.
Against the background of this unprecedented supremacy and preeminence of technological innovation , the narrative of the Tower of Babel and most especially the increasing realization that "the people is one and they all have one language" is also rapidly developing in the context of the widespread acknowledgment of the so called New World Order and the unmistakable construct of global governance presently in progress. The obvious and essential role that the internet has played in this process is undeniable. Only some three decades ago internet usage was 16 million or 0.4% of the world's population. As of 2013 that figure has grown exponentially to 2.7 billion or more than 38% of world population. In the more highly technologically advanced countries the rise in internet usage is even more pronounced. In North America, the participation of internet usage is presently 85%.
In an incredibly short period in human history, society has been transformed into an collectively invasive and unavoidable matrix of "total information awareness" from which emanates the the specter of a national surveillance and security statism prefigured long ago by George Orwell in his novel "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". The alacrity with which an enslaved and only dimly aware populace embraces the very conditions of their collective servitude as evidenced in these works of fiction become all too real is readily on display as people surrender their autonomy and privacy in a headlong rush to collective subsumption. As the walls and battlements of our modern Babel rise confidently and presumptuously towards the empyrean, challenging the majesty of divinity itself, little can they guess that within the shadows of those proud ramparts rests the haunting future of their undoing and confounding as of old.
After listening to the welter of unfounded speculation, misinformation, propaganda, and simply ordinary foolishness erupting across the internet in the endless and hopelessly muddied streams of talk shows and the clamorous cacophony of multifarious websites concerning the escalating and convulsive economic crises and geopolitical embroilments gripping the nations, one cannot fail to observe the veritable confusion of tongues referred to in Genesis 11. Meanwhile and perhaps even more disturbing is the quiescent apathy, complacency, and blind self satisfaction embracing large sectors of the populace seeking to escape the approaching storm as they burrow even more deeply into the reassuring and yet illusory comfort of their status quo normalcy bias cocoons. Amidst the blustering gusts of the self righteous crusaders for truth blowing athwart the silent abysm of unquestioning acceptance languishes an enervation of spirit poised between the yearning of unrealized expectation and the hopelessness of denial.
What is apparent from visiting the various sites purported to be outposts of truth and beacons of freedom across the net is the very bewildering homogeneity of opinion which can only reduce the honest and unbiased researcher to despondency not only at the seemingly infinite array of cherished and yet delusory opinions but the elemental commonality which one encounters with unfailing consistency. Subtly and incrementally manufactured in exposé, half truth and innuendo, the universal language of agreement has been indelibly stamped with the impress of unchallengeable authority into the malleable waxen consciousness of undiscerning acceptance. And yet just as with the minions of Nimrod, this brave assault on the empyrean has stalled, its battlements and crenellations abandoned and forsaken, its very construction left as a monument to the very futility of its invention.
As the day of reckoning approaches in which all the false measures, transparent threats, and empty promises of deliverance are gathered together in the unerring hands of judgment, and the sound of the hammer cock echoing metallically and implacably in the now menacing emptiness of expectation becomes the explosion delivering the projectile unerringly towards its target, the flimsy words of false prophecy will disperse into the void along with the minds and mouths which projected them so furiously and convincingly, undaunted by the incomprehensibility of their sudden and preemptive meaninglessness.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Interstate Highway National Security Lockdown
As the terminal national nightmare progresses inexorably into its now tortuously prolonged and final denouément, the spectacle of police agencies effectively blockading 12 lanes of I-270 for more than one hour near Washington DC at Rockville, Maryland ostensibly in search of fugitive bank robbers, only reaffirms our suspicions that the interstate highways will be the scene of massive illegal internments as the progressive and incremental martial law lock down continues. While the unprecedented action was welcomed by the credulous as an effective and necessary law enforcement measure, against the backdrop of an increasingly militarized society characterized by a plethora of cascading "emergency measures" which have de facto suspended constitutional guarantees, these actions have taken on the obvious character of arbitrary and dictatorial measures designed to beta test the eventual rollout of a national security grid lockdown of the US. Obviously the absolute control of the means of transportation is one of the prerequisites essential to the complex machinations required in the monumental effort to put the vast reaches of the North American continent under the iron matrix of martial law. While an unthinkable and even ridiculous notion to most of those paralyzed by the prevailing normalcy bias, the facts on the ground speak for themselves. This is especially so when one considers the similar and parallel lockdown of the Boston metropolitan area after the false flag provocation of the staged Boston marathon "bombing", once again in search of supposed criminal culprits involved in the so-called bombing.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Whangdepootenawha
Whangdepootenawha-A Sudden Disaster Which Strikes Hard
We can thank our long lost literary mentor, Ambrose Bierce, for the genesis of this colorful, extensive, and largely apocryphal word attributed by him, in his delightfully irreverent “Devil’s Dictionary”, to some equally lost Indian tribe likewise long ago consigned to a grateful perdition, and descriptive of what he describes as “a sudden disaster which strikes hard”. Being presently on the precipice of a long awaited, frightful, and yawning abyss into which the present world is being hastily catapulted, I find it a nomenclature particularly and highly appropriate for the grim juncture of affairs confronting a human race which Mr. Bierce regaled with his acerbic and mordant wit before mysteriously disappearing into the revolutionary wilds of 19th century Mexico. It was indeed the perennially disastrous and highly uncertain state of the human condition which attracted the skeptical and unrelenting devotion of “Bitter Bierce” to his literary devices which pitted the whims and largely hopeless expectations of human fancy against the cruel and inexorable workings of fate. Bierce’s personal experiences in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment in American Civil War, especially his brutal experiences at the battle of Shiloh, augmented his significant personal familial tragedies to produce the hard bitten and iron clad pessimism which marked his literary output in such masterpieces as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “What I Saw at Shiloh” in addition to the humorously philosophic satire of ”The Devils Dictionary”.
With the cataclysmic geopolitical events now rapidly unfolding in the Middle East and Ukraine accompanying the ongoing international economic meltdown, and pancaking geo-engineering environmental catastrophes reaching full throttle, only the most sanguine and blissfully ignorant could fail to realize the specter of rampant, wanton destruction which is descending upon the human species. While the former remain blithely unengaged to the extent to which their capacities of discernment remain inoperative, clinging blindly to the manifold dead end distractions offered them by ubiquitous media immersion and mesmerization, others become inescapably overwhelmed by the vortices of panic and mass hysteria at the spiraling chaos. In either case we can discern the innate fallibility, the vulnerability of the unfortunate masses engendered by necessary and useful interdependence which can transform in an instant into its equally necessary concommittant-the spectacle of “every man for himself and God against all”. It is the great irony that this inevitable and distasteful conundrum with which Bierce was so conversant and unflinching in the observation of, is so long in the making, and yet appears so suddenly, irrevocably and disastrously.
“While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.” 1 Thessalonians 5:3
Though Bierce, as with so many other American literary luminaries, was evidently possessed of no professed religion, it is evident that his philosophical cast of mind obviously allowed him the profound ruminations which naturally gravitate towards the metaphysical. And, as with so many of his contemporaries, his deep reflections upon the human condition led him just as naturally towards the inevitable confrontation with not only the moral dimensions of human character but the ridiculous excesses of vanity and folly which inhabit it as well. It must be remembered that during the battle of Rich Mountain, Bierce undertook the “daring rescue, under fire, of a gravely wounded comrade”. Such an action displays the courage and self sacrifice which in many ways speaks as loudly and convincingly as his literary gifts and more so. It is just this same deeply felt concern which informs and directs Bierce’s uncompromising vision which just as inevitably brought him into conflict with existing authority. As he writes, “We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our subjection a posture of respect“ and further, “A popular author is one who writes about what people think. Genius invites them to think something else”.
It is just this “thinking something else” which necessarily informs those of us who can gain enough personal leverage to elevate ourselves above the onrushing current of temporal events to survey the past and look into the future long enough to gain the perspective necessary to understand the larger picture which comprises the full extent of our destiny, both collective and individual. As long as our vision remains obscured by the blinders which allow us to methodically and yet narrowly navigate the boundaries of the present avenue, we will remain in thrall to the limitations of convenience and certainty which safely prescribe and yet at the same time circumscribe our potential and actions often to our own detriment. Herein lies the lesson of our present crisis which is but itself a recapitulation of the same wrong turns and blind alleys which we are being led into yet again by hands leading us by reins all but invisible to us.
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