What happened to soul?

What happened to soul?

Its voice is still

In a Tower of Lies

In a Tower of Lies

Bottle the tumours in makeshift potions

Cork the bastard boy's emotions

 

            - Danielle Dax, "Tower of Lies"

One reason why it's difficult to have a substantive debate about the existence / nonexistence or purported nature of time is that, like music, everybody thinks they understand it intuitively and completely without having studied a single aspect of it in any detail.

Agency is a funny thing. Those whose sense of agency is entirely externalized ("God controls everything") are often treated somewhat respectably within society but are generally regarded as insane by most rational people. Paradoxically, a person whose sense of agency does not extend much or at all beyond the individual sphere is almost without exception regarded as not only mad but possibly dangerous to boot; a psychopath presenting with a serious malady that may result in an attempt to restrain or otherwise "treat" the offending party, in order that they be instructed as to the error of their ways, however harmless they may ultimately be.  

Class dismissed

Metal fans all over the world were saddened by the recent passing of Ozzy Osbourne. 

I'll be the first to admit it: I'm not a metal fan. Never have been, although a cursory glance at my CD shelves will yield several prototypical entries into what rapidly became nothing less than a shockingly rigid, conformist and doctrinaire ideology populated by a limitless number of piss-poor imitators with absolutely no talent whatsoever boring us (almost literally) to death with endless bulimic regurgitations of the same hackneyed, adolescent formula. It's no wonder quasi-fascist drivel like this is riding something of a wave at the moment. Sadly, hopeful paens to working-class solidarity cannot obscure the reality that the content, with its cookie-cutter format and vapid insistence on drudgery as a virtue, ultimately fails to deliver the purported release and / or spiritual uplift its adherents claim for it. One simply gets up and goes back to work the next day, bleary and hung over, still wearing the company uniform, with little hope of a promotion or better working conditions.

There is also possibly a degree of theatricality past which it is no longer possible to redeem oneself as a performer, or indeed as a public figure in any meaningful sense. Is it really too outlandish to suggest that intellectual honesty is at least something of a problem when the welfare of cute little animals is (seemingly) no match for the righteous indignation of the "working class"... who are (of course) presumably overrepresented in today's metal scene... or are they? These are questions that, as Frank Zappa might have put it, you can't ask on stage anymore.

Having said all that, there are some notable connections between Sabbath's undeniably pioneering approach to sonics and other important musical currents making waves around the same time. Some of these connextions are somewhat counterintuitive: Try playing "Master of Reality" alongside Terry Riley's "A Rainbow In Curved Air" or "Church of Anthrax" (recorded with the legenday John Cale) and you'll hear what I mean. There is more than a little of an element of drone raga and the vague stirrings of the later myriad permutations of post-rock buried in the back garden of Sabbath; abundantly fertile musical possibilities that today's disgustingly self-satisfied metal fanboy (and now, 'girl) posse still largely ignore in favor of overweening "retro" pantomime undirgirded - inevitably - by yet another run to the cosmetics supply store.

Rest your soul, Ozzy, if you ever had one to begin with.

Oh, and here's that "Church of Anthrax" album... 

Someone sat down in the seat in front of me on Metra today wearing a "Liquor Village - St. Paul, Minnesota" hoodie. I think I might actually remember where that is. 

I'm so glad I left.

Out soon!

@insectoid_intelligence · ...Echoes 3 (partially mixed)

 

Check back for updates! 

Under authoritarianism, violent murderers become national heroes, while the essentially good are subject to escalating attacks on their basic freedoms. 

Much of the richness of life lies in the imagination. The notorious alienation and anomie of modernity, whose legacy and genesis we are constantly in danger of forgetting in the rush to adopt and replace new technologies, practices and aesthetics before we truly understand or can benefit from them, is mainly a product of the mismatch between the expectations produced in the imagination for the content of our lives, and the concrete realities later substituted for them by a seemingly endless array of cultural artifacts, many of which remain startlingly unoriginal despite being constantly repackaged and sold as genuine innovation. It is rather the idea of the limitless potential of such artifacts that constitutes their perennial appeal, in contrast to the typically banal applications of their actual or eventual use.

AI is murder

AI has now been rebranded in the press as "infrastructure", as if it is essentially a public utility like water or electricity. Thus what was once either a curio or a severe existential threat to human sovereignty (at the very least) is by now largely accepted among the business and political classes as something as basic as the air we breathe. Meanwhile, the assault on the natural systems providing the actual air and water we breathe and drink continue unabated. 

Is it any wonder our children now exhibit a startling array of debilitating mental and physical health symptoms?

'..."I'm starting two political parties, actually: The Giveaways and the Up Your Asses. But the real genius of my idea is they will be confined to a harmless AI simulation run on surplus Defense Department equipment where they will be in no position to affect anyone's actual life. That's obviously much too dangerous. We're talking strictly theoretical game-play scenarios. Sort of like fantasy football. Pick your 'dream team' and all that... Day-to-day operations will still be handled by the Syndicate. You don't have to worry."   

He paused. The powerpoint slides slithered disjunctively like window blinds suddenly released from their moorings, seemingly destined to escape the screen and hurtle down onto the purplish tarmac underneath their hoverboots, were it not for the blinding beams reflected off the nearby transporter's glossy eggshell finish.     

Hardly a moment passed.

"All right. Clear the chamber." 

And then it woke up...'

A troubling pattern of for-proft prosecution in the US

Recent investigative journalism features highlight what many have long suspected: career charlatans are deeply entrenched in the American criminal justice system. What this has led to is a kind of "spoils system" whereby unjust punishments are meted out on often entirely innocent parties, in many cases essentially ruining their lives, for the explicit purpose of collecting large professional fees for providing allegedly expert testimony against them.   

It's tempting to shrug your shoulders and mutter something like "only in America." But these are only token examples of what is in reality a much wider problem. We need to confront head-on, in the words of Daniel Quinn (remember that guy? No, he wasn't on TV), the "man-eating Minotaur" at the heart of traditional religious ideology. Where else would such a culture of cruelty come from? No wonder so many of them don't like science. Very little of this would be possible in a society in full possession of its critical / analytical toolkit. Instead, "skepticism" as an idea has somehow become associated with partisans of the new right when, ironically, they are, fairly reliably, extremely credulous in comparison to those they take to be their opponents.

(See also: The Thing directed by John Carpenter).

 "Who is number one?"

"That would be telling. We want information... information... information..." 

Sanction Israel

There are no excuses.  

https://feps-europe.eu/sanction-israel-now-europes-long-overdue-moral-reckoning-on-gaza/ 

Join the effort here:

https://ampalestine.salsalabs.org/sanctionisrael/index.html 

こんにちは

Mark my words

The oldest "con" in the world is to treat a person badly; to spurn someone, systematically destroy their spirits, make light of their sufferings, visit unfairness upon their plight, and to twist their judgement by encouraging them to ingratiate themselves through graft, only to condemn, in mock earnestness, the base and lowly nature of that person; the inevitable "stain" that cannot be erased, etc., as if to confirm what someone else wanted to think, suspected, or already believed about that person, etc; but in reality is only the likely outcome of the sum total of maltreatment suffered by that person, which would produce probably the same or a similar result more or less regardless of the identity of the sufferer. The stain of guilt is thereby transferred from the oppressor to its intended victim, who by this time is usually unable to rally his or her defenses in order to escape from the trap set for them through the malevolence of others. 

Through the looking-glass,

inside of a jewel

Which watchmaker's blind

and which one's only a fool? 

Color is evidence of the deep structure of time. 

The nose DOES know

"There's a mickey in the tasting of disaster..."  - Sly Stone 

Jonas Olafsson's new book The Forgotten Sense definitively explodes a lingering duality that had persisted for a surprisingly long time regarding the human sense of smell - that we aren't good at it, but our smaller and furrier cousins (dogs, rats, rabbits) are particularly adept, often possessing keen senses of smell far in excess of our own sensitivity. Well it turns out this is just about... are you ready for this? ... entirely NOT true.

(ed. note: this is something of a spoiler, but it's mentioned so early in the book I will let it pass. Olafsson's book is positively crammed with fascinating revelations like this). 

Instead, human beings DO in fact have a highly developed sense of smell; one that is at least roughly on par with that of the majority of other mammalian species, if not substantially better, contrary to longstanding conventional wisdom. Not only this, but the locus of our intellectual abilities - long associated more or less exclusively with language - is strongly intertwined with the 'forgotten' sense of smell (and its related sense, taste: more like different aspects of the same neurological system, but each with its own distinct set of external receptors).

What's more, Olafsson draws his conclusions from a rather surprising and novel source: the baffling array of olfactory disorders suffered by COVID-19 patients, including anosmia (loss of smell), hyposmia (decreased sensitivity to smell), hyperosmia (unusual sensitivity to smell), and dysosmia (a change in the quality of certain smells). There's clearly a lot more than meets the eye regarding the role smell plays in defining some of the most important characteristics of the experiential world we encounter every day of our lives, and in light of this it's almost unsettling how little is actually known about the underlying process. It is surprising, for instance, that there is no general consensus or universally accepted theory explaining the exact mechanism by which odors are detected. That's not at all to say that there are any mysterious, extra-dimensional "goings on" going on (although one of the more exotic theories of olfaction does involve quantum tunneling - I'm really not kidding), but only that the precise mechanism - among several competing hypotheses - is not currently known. What does seem to be clear is that both smell - and taste - play a significant role in establishing the identities of the places, people and things, coloring the feelings we associate with them, and contributing to the quasi-semantic structure of memory.

 

Footnote: Interestingly, it would appear that the book I've just got through describing reveals itself as a possible example of nominative determinism, the concept that people are influenced in their choice of profession or area of research according to meanings associated with their own name. (This was something featured on Wikipedia recently). Since "Olafsson" is a near permutation of "olfaction", the formal term in English for the sense of smell, can we conclude that the author arrived at their chosen field of study at least partly as a result of such a connection? Sadly, the preliminary results are not promising, as by all accounts it seems the one thing that definitely cannot be proved is that it was the name by itself that caused someone to make a particular choice. The problems with nominative determinism do not in any way end there, however. The basic issues, to my thinking anyway, revolve around the inherent indefinability of what constitutes a "close enough" fit between a profession and a name. Do we permit near-permutations such as this, along with possibly even more abstruse associations like Feather the ornithologist or Snide the etiquette instructor, or must we restrict ourselves to the Bakers, Clarks, and Smiths? Finally, the idea fails to account for the likely far more numerous examples of names and professions that would seem to lack a clear reference to the other category without, as it were, overtaxing the imagination in the service of plausibility. Somehow, I don't think we're going to see a rash of baby names like "IT Specialist" or "Hooker" popping up anytime soon, but I suppose anything's possible...