Interview w/ Jefferey Jaxen on 'Divergent'

Admittedly inspired by the Milgram Experiment, Veronica Roth's 'Divergent' is making easy money at the box office - but do the bad reviews show that youth are rejecting this latest batch of predictive programming? Writer/researcher Jefferey Jaxen joins us to talk about - not only this dauntless manipulation of media - but some of the ways we are winning and growing stronger.



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Corbett Report: Episode243 - A Message To The Future

Listen to @CorbettReport Radio on @RBNlive Weeknights at 7 Eastern Time
from corbett report: This is a message to the future, a digital message in a bottle cast out on the binary waves of 1s and 0s, out into that digital eternity…

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Previous: Episode242 - The Meaning of 9/11 Truth

12/31 newspurge: out like a lion

biowars/envirohealth:
top scientists share their future predictions*
mailman to deliver aid if anthrax attacks*
green police: is your neighbor wasting energy?
there's an app for that*
comics help cdc pitch vaccines to kids*
world health org chief not vaccinated against swine flu*




econocrash:
tidal wave of retirees could break the bank*
al gore's website covers un's world currency coins*
video: gop & lobbyist attempt to hijack tea party movement*
are poorest states also most religious?*
how goldman made 10s of billions from econocrash in 4 easy steps*

geopolitiks:
video: was the afghan bomb attack on the cia an inside job?*
iran nuke document was forged - just like iraqi 'yellow cake' document*
top norwegian diplomat admits attending bilderberg group*
video: 'superpower' documentary*

media/memes:
james cameron: marxism for thee, but not for me*
an 'avatar' awakening*

obamessiah updates:
now, michelle obama is sliding in the polls, too*
obama ends bush secrecy policy, launches 'declassification center'*
video: 'fraud' trailer*

warwhores:
arab dictatorships take 4 of top 5 spots in purchase of US weapons & services*
are america's mercenary armies really drug cartels?*
danger room's top 10 stories from a world gone nuts*
judge drops charges against blackwater guards accused of massacre*

futurist alvin toffler discusses '3rd wave' post-industrial life

from russia today: Celebrated futurist Alvin Toffler has forecasted “death and bankruptcy” to the existing organizational institutes. Toffler elaborated on this and other predictions on where society is heading to RT.


related video: 'future shock' 1972 doc narrated by orson welles
from youtube: 1972 documentary based on the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Narrated by Orson Welles. Future Shock... is a sickness that comes from too much change in too short a time... it's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore. It's the reaction to changes that happen so fast that we cannot absorb them - it's the premature arrival of the future. For those who are unprepared, its effects can be pretty devastating.

ridley scott & dicaprio travel to 'brave new world'

flashback: 'brave new world' for hollywood*
from reuters: Ridley Scott is going back to the futurism. The "Blade Runner" director is joining forces with Leonardo DiCaprio to take on one of the most highly regarded dystopian works of literature, Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."

Both are producing the Universal project, which DiCaprio would tentatively star in and Scott direct. The studio has brought on "Apocalypto" scribe Farhad Safinia to write the script; he's expected to be working shortly.

Scott has mentioned casually in interviews that he's interested in the 1931 novel, whose film rights are owned by DiCaprio's Appian Way production company, prompting a flurry of rumors on sci-fi and other blogs over the past year. But the studio details as well as DiCaprio's personal involvement always have been murky...

Huxley sets his book in a seemingly perfect 26th century world that has achieved harmony by tightly controlling birth, which takes place mainly in laboratories, and outlawing family. The world is populated by a series of five castes, each with its own defined roles.

Characters who figure in are Bernard, a lower-caste member, and Lenina, the woman with whom he is infatuated. DiCaprio would likely play Bernard, who is persecuted when the leaders of the society find his behavior antisocial.

Dystopian stories have sometimes proved difficult to film. George Orwell's "1984" has had several theatrical turns, including Michael Anderson's Columbia version in 1956 and the somewhat better regarded John Hurt vehicle 25 years ago.

flashbacks: aldous huxley’s mind control & depopulation interview & the future has caught up with us

june 8, 1949: orwell’s big brother 60yrs later

from wired: Sixty years ago today, Nineteen Eighty-Four is published. It’s official: In the face of the monolithic state, the little guy has no chance at all.

George Orwell’s dystopian novel, one to stand alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as a towering work of futuristic pessimism, posits a grim society where the government is all powerful and all knowing and the individual spirit has been effectively extinguished. Big Brother, a seemingly benevolent but terribly vengeful ruler who may or may not exist, is the personification of the state. To keep the masses docile and pliant, books are banned, surveillance is everywhere and all information is closely guarded by the state. (Huxley envisioned a different future, one which perhaps more closely mirrors our present: In Brave New World, there is no reason to ban a book, since people are too busy pursuing their hedonistic distractions to bother picking one up.)

Nineteen Eighty-Four is told through the eyes of Winston Smith, a minor civil servant in the Ministry of Truth whose job it is to rewrite history for the totalitarian state of Oceania. His spirit hasn’t been entirely quashed, though, and he chafes under the yoke, eventually joining a rebellion against the state. He is soon betrayed, arrested and tortured. In the end, Smith wins his freedom by accepting the assertion that 2 + 2 = 5.

The book yielded a bounty of new coinages: “Thought Police”, “doublethink,” the aforementioned “Big Brother” and the especially sinister “Newspeak” all entered the language through Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even the author’s pseudonym (his real name being Eric Arthur Blair) became a chilling adjective: “Orwellian” is applied to any characteristic display of totalitarian might.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is often described, mainly by conservatives, as an attack against socialism. Orwell, who called himself a socialist although contemporary scholarship suggests his political philosophy was ambiguous and fluid, disputed this. He made it clear on at least one occasion that his novel was aimed squarely at totalitarianism, which he considered a perversion of socialism. His 1944 novel, Animal Farm, was a pointed attack against the Soviet system, which Orwell believed had betrayed socialism’s true spirit.

In any case, Orwell didn’t live to see the long-range social impact of his work. He had been in poor health for years and died in January 1950, only 46.

flashbacks: orwell's house surrounded by cctv cameras &
the future has caught up with us

anti-surveillance filmmaker to shoot doc w/ prosthetic cctv eye

from reuters: A Canadian filmmaker plans to have a mini camera installed in his prosthetic eye to make documentaries and raise awareness about surveillance in society. Rob Spence, 36, who lost an eye in an accident as a teenager, said his so-called Project Eyeborg is to have the camera, a battery and a wireless transmitter mounted on a tiny circuit board. "Originally the whole idea was to do a documentary about surveillance. I thought I would become a sort of super hero... fighting for justice against surveillance... In Toronto there are 12,000 cameras. But the strange thing I discovered was that people don't care about the surveillance cameras, they were more concerned about me and my secret camera eye because they feel that is a worse invasion of their privacy." Spence, in Brussels to appear at a media conference, said no part of the camera would be connected to his nerves or brain. He does not intend to create a reality TV show and the camera will be switched off when not needed, he said. "I don't want to go into a locker room. I don't want to show the world me going to the bathroom either... I'm not a life-caster and I don't plan to be one," he said.

econocrash: US has entered 'the greatest depression'

from paul joesph watson: Trends research analyst Gerald Celente, who has risen in prominence on the back of his deadly accurate economic predictions, says that the collapse of financial markets heralds the start of “The Greatest Depression”.

In his latest Trend Alert bulletin, Celente attacks mainstream pundits who falsely predicted a market bottom and the start of a recovery, noting that conventional analysts have been proven “dead wrong” again and that, “There will be no turn around in the second quarter of 2009 or 2010 or 2011.”

“The global financial system, built on endless supplies of cheap money, rampant speculation, fraud, greed, and delusion is terminally ill and will not be coaxed into remission by stimulus packages nor restored to health by government buyouts and bailouts,” writes Celente.

The most positive prediction that Celente makes is that the Dow will not reach zero, a tongue in cheek reaction to yesterday’s record plunge which saw the Dow rolled back to 1997 levels well below 7,000.

Celente warns that the first signs of real panic are starting to set in, unrest that will cause governments to “take draconian measures to prevent total economic collapse and public panic.”

“Expect massive bank failures, runs on banks, and bank holidays,” writes Celente. “Even if deposits are FDIC insured, quick access to money is by no means assured. At minimum, have reserves on hand for emergencies,” he forecasts.

Celente cites gold as one of the few investments that will continue to rise in value, eventually reaching $2,000 an ounce and beyond.

Celente’s dire forecasts were initially scoffed at by the media but as the crisis has worsened, his credibility has soared.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November 2007 that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others.

flashbacks: we're going to see the greatest depression ever & 'futurist' foresees rough times

outside the box #190 (w/ jay weidner)

here is the latest episode of "outside the box," hosted by alex ansary.
it was originally broadcast by portland community media on february 19, 2009.

from alex ansary: Alex interviews author and visionary Jay Weidner (sacredmysteries.com) about the mysteries surrounding 2012. Some of the topics discussed include the galactic alignment, the magnetic field, the sun, the cross of Hendaye, and the Mayan calendar.

plus you can always get the latest episodes of "outside the box" on the oracle broadcasting network...

'illuminated' author michael crichton dies of cancer

from ap: Michael Crichton, the million-selling author of such historic and prehistoric science thrillers as "Jurassic Park," "Timeline" and "The Andromeda Strain," has died of cancer, his family said. He died Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 66 after a long battle with the illness. Chrichton was a brand-name author, known for his stories of disaster and systematic breakdown, such as the rampant microbe of "The Andromeda Strain" or dinosaurs running amok in "Jurassic Park," one of his many books that became major Hollywood movies.

"Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand," his family said in a statement... In recent years, he was the rare writer to get on well with President Bush, perhaps because of his skepticism about global warming, which Crichton addressed in the 2004 novel, "State of Fear." Crichton's views were strongly condemned by environmentalists, who alleged that the author was hurting efforts to pass legislation to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

arthur c. clarke, futurist & sci-fi genius, dead at 90

from ap: Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who co-wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was 90... Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

arthur c. clarke: the final interview
from danger room: Spectrum has what appears to be the final interview with Arthur C. Clarke, conducted in January of this year (while Clarke was in the hospital). Clarke discusses geo-stationary communications satellites, space elevators, and his thoughts on private-sector space travel. It's an interesting dialog with a futurist and visionary who lived to see some of his predictions come true, most notably the satellites (space elevators are still a ways off). Clarke gave few interviews in his later years, so the Spectrum interview is well worth a listen.

'futurist' foresees rough times

from record online: A crashing stock market, a plunging U.S. dollar and tumbling corporate giants are among the predictions of a self-proclaimed "futurist" who says 2008 will hit this country with the economic equivalent of 9/11.

Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, claims to accurately forecast economic and business trends. If he's right, the forecast is gloomy.

"It's going to be a terrible year," Celente said. "People better grow up and be adults about it."

Celente, who holds an bachelor's degree in business and a master's degree in public administration, says signs of economic doom are everywhere, but nobody's paying attention.

Chief among his worries is that the U.S. is "selling off our most valuable assets - finance and banking."

He cites recent reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that Citigroup Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. are shoring up their cash reserves with billions of dollars from China, Singapore and Middle East governments.

"The U.S., the champion of capitalism, is being eaten up by the Chinese and Arabs," he said, adding that media outlets are populated with "morons."

human race will 'split into two different species'

from daily mail: The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.

The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000.

robochoppers, robobugs, radiohead & rudy

boeing robo-chopper for darpa's super-spyeye
from uk register: Arms'n'airliners behemoth Boeing has announced that its autonomous robotic stealth chopper, the A160T, will be the initial carrying platform for a new US airborne surveillance payload. The radical new spy system will not be so much an aerial camera as an all-seeing insect-style compound bugeye able to simultaneously look at many different things.

The spy machinery, dubbed ARGUS-IS, is under development by DARPA (596kb PDF) - the Pentagon deathboffin apparat where ideas need to be off walls, outside boxes, and well to the left of any field...

dragonfly or insect spy?
scientists at work on robobugs
from washington post: Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month. "I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,'" the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?'...

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

'dangerous' new music from radiohead
from afp: Fans of British rockers Radiohead yesterday took advantage of the band's offer to let them pay what they want for their new album, In Rainbows, with one third deciding to pay absolutely nothing for the download, reports said today.

The hit art-rockers, already authors of six albums, drew widespread publicity when they announced earlier this month that fans could decide the price themselves, saying “It's up to you” on their website...

giuliani visits portland, gets 9/11 truth on local tv
from 9/11 blogger: Rudy Giuliani made a surprise visit to Portland, Oregon. Word got out to the Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance, who demonstrated outside the restaurant where Giuliani was. Local TV news caught the action...

from katu: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani ducked into Portland Saturday for a private fundraiser at a supporter's home, then headed to a New York-style delicatessen to mingle with voters, where he was met by dozens of anti-war protesters equating him with the Bush administration. Portland is traditionally Democratic country, as evidenced by the jeers that greeted Giuliani.

news on the march

pentagon funds gay bombs & armed sharks
from abc: Creating armor that renders a soldier invisible. Stimulating the brain to suppress sleep for days. Arming sharks with chemical implants and cameras to work as spies. This year the Pentagon will spend $78 billion - about half of all government research and development dollars - on a variety of projects, according to the American Association for the Advancement for Science.


special ops forces conducting activities on US soil
from blacklisted news/examiner: The U.S. military command in charge of protecting the homeland asked the Pentagon earlier this year for a contingent of special operations officers to help with domestic anti-terrorism missions. Military sources told The Examiner that U.S. Northern Command, established at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado in 2002, requested its own special operations command similar to ones assigned to overseas war-fighting commands, such as U.S. Central Command.


did bush's grandfather steal geronimo's skull?
from abc: It has all the ingredients for the ultimate conspiracy theory. Take President Bush and his father, throw in a legendary Apache chief, strange rituals performed in the dead of night in a building named the Tomb, grave robbing, and a secret society of elite students called Skull and Bones.
related: skeletons in the bush family cupboard


oregon to participate in dirty bomb response drill
from salem news: The Oregon Public Health Division will participate next week with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Idaho Bureau of Laboratories in a full-scale public health preparedness exercise to evaluate the region’s response should an actual terrorism event occur.
(ed: this 'article' is the verbatim press release from oregon public health division)


rudy's campaign chair busted for coke
from the stump: Meet Thomas Ravenel. He's South Carolina's Treasurer, a rising political star, the state chairman of Rudolf Giuliani's campaign for president (until yesterday), and friendly neighborhood coke distributor. We're not talking soda, either. What is it with Giuliani's friends? First Bernard Kerik, now Ravenel. The silver lining to all of this, however, is that we now have a brilliant new simile to add to the English vernacular: He's like a coke fiend in the treasurer's office!


judge orders fbi to turn over 1000s of patriot act abuse docs
from blacklisted news/wired: Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency's use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.

robobear rescues wounded troops

from cryptogon/bbc: The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers away from the battlefield.

The Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR) can scoop up even the heaviest of casualties and transport them over long distances over rough terrain.

New Scientist magazine reports that the "friendly appearance" of the robot is designed to put the wounded at ease.

It is expected to be ready for testing within five years...

Daniel Theobald, the president of Vecna Technologies, which is developing the robot for the US Army, said: "We saw a need for a robot that can essentially go where a human can. The robot will be an integral part of a military team."

Gary Gilbert, from the US Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre in Frederick, Maryland, said that the teddy bear appearance was deliberate.

"A really important thing when you're dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch."

Vecna is working on other potential applications for the robot technology - including helping move heavy patients in hospital.

darpa to create brain-chipped cyborg moths

from cryptogon/register uk: Famed US military mad-scientist bureau DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is engaged in an effort to grow/build cyborg moths for use as spies. No, really.

The program is called Hybrid Insect Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, or HI-MEMS. In it, the arguably over-caffeined DARPA boffins aim to construct a tiny lepidopterine infiltration borg by growing a living moth around a "micro-mechanical system".

"Animal world has provided mankind with locomotion over millennia," says Dr Amit Lal, DARPA HI-MEMS program manager...

In a Times article today, Rod Brooks of MIT's computer science and artifical intelligence lab (CSAIL), was quoted on the insectoid cyber-infiltrator project.

"This is going to happen," said Mr Brooks. "It's not science like developing the nuclear bomb, which costs billions of dollars. It can be done relatively cheaply... There's going to be more and more technology in our bodies... there's going to be a lot of moral debates."

For now, DARPA only aims to manufacture chipped moths, which it reckons to send into suspected terrorist facilities (presumably including al-Qaeda linen cupboards - that'll show them)...

Meanwhile, in what can only be yet another chilling media coincidence, other cyborg-related news broke today. Reuters reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger - the man who gave such a convincing portrayal of a soulless killer machine wearing human flesh as a disguise - is spearheading a new biological research initiative as governor of California.

"We are as powerful as any one can ever be on stem cell research," Mr Terminator reportedly said.

Reuters also noted that: "Stem cells are a kind of master cell for the body, capable of growing into various types of cell or tissue and cell. Scientists hope to use the cells to repair tissue damaged by disease or injury."

Terrifyingly, this mirrors the language of DARPA's Lal as he describes his process for chipping-up innocent creatures and turning them into zombie slaves under computer control.

"The renewed tissue growth around the MEMS will tend to heal, and form a reliable and stable tissue-machine interface..."

That's it. We're down to the bunker with a whole lot of survival rations. And bug spray.

i'd buy that for a dollar: approaching 'robocop' world

from freedom in our time: When I saw that film twenty years ago, it struck me as uncannily prophetic. (I speak of the original, not the pointless sequels.) Of all the dystopian visions available in literature and on film, RoboCop (directed by Paul Verhoeven, a Dutchman) created an uncannily plausible vision of American totalitarianism – not the dismal, leaden grayness of Soviet Communism, or the lurid pageantry of Nazi Germany, but rather a society run by an all-pervasive corporation that controls its subjects through a combination of synapse-killing mass entertainment and soul-chilling violence.

In that world Omni Consumer Products is the government; it is the military, the police, and the media.

We're not in RoboCop world yet, but we can see its suburbs from here.

revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips

a grim vision of the future
from guardian: Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts". It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

'salvaging civilization' eerily close to reality

from post chronicle: To most Americans with a recollection of the Cold War, it was assumed the global superstate would be brought about through military conquest. However, in Salvaging Civilization, H.G. Wells suggests how this planetary political organization could be brought about through education and the management of public opinion.

According to Wells, the future of mankind is dependent upon the establishment of world unity in order to protect the human race from social disintegration and physical destruction. However, instead of blatantly imposing this new world order from without, Wells suggests conditioning the masses into accepting the world state through targeted forms of intellectual manipulation.