blog.arithm

So, my last crazy prediction didn’t pan out so I guess I’ll post about the bizarre sounds people keep reporting.

Some are obvious fakes, like this one from Alberta:

Note the sound of tropical birds in frosty Alberta. The creator of this video released it to illustrate how easy it is to create a hoax. She filmed the outside of her apartment while one of the original “sky sounds” videos played on her laptop.

And then we have videos like this from Oregon:

What the hell is this? Trumpets of the Apocalypse? Earth resonance along the skirt of the Ring of Fire? HAARP?

Midwestern mom posting hoax videos to kill the time?

And what about the booms?

See Linda Moulton Howe’s (yes that Linda Molton Howe) Earthfiles for more.

One of these days I sincerely believe that Cafferty will tell us that he’s mad as hell.

(Jump to the 7:00 minute mark for the meat of Eisenhower’s warning.)

As Cafferty points out, the American people have no voice, no say in any of this any more. The wars seem to be on a timetable, decided in advance, with the concept of Congressional approval little more than a quaint and outdated ritual.

And now the drums beat again. So I’ll call it: On or around the equinox, March 21st, there will be a declaration of war (or kinetic action or whatever the hell it’s called these days) or some kind of event that forces the US into military action, probably against Iran.

If I’m right, this will be no coincidence. After all, the Military Industrial Complex has bills to pay.

Letters of Note recently posted an enlightening letter that Aldus Huxley penned to George Orwell some time after Nineteen Eight-Four had been published. I’d always wondered about these two authors. Based on snippets of speeches I’ve heard given by Huxley, I had suspected that Huxley was somehow in favor of his own Brave New World, and that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was a response, a wake-up call of sorts. As it turns out, both authors view their dystopian nightmares as just that — nightmares. Huxley, however, argues that his version of the future is more likely because it is simply more efficient, and clarifies his position that governments of the world are likely to adopt mass pharmaceutical mind control over outright oppression:

Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

Creepy.

As I wrote about last year here, the drones are, indeed, coming home to roost. Welcome to the Panopticon.

Its on, folks. You’ve got to see it now. On like Donkey Kong.

Literally.

More interesting diagrams at geke.us.

This is the first time I’ve ever purchased anything from iTunes.

Now is later.

The latest incarnation of the NDAA authorizes, in direct contradiction to the U.S. Constitution, the arbitrary detainment of American citizens, codifying into law unconstitutional precedent initiated a decade ago by the Bush administration. Passage of this NDAA follows quickly on the heals of nationwide “Occupy” protest crackdowns.

If anything, the widespread phenomenon of OWS protests awakened a large part of the country to Washington’s infestation of corrupt global corporatist influence. OWS protesters made no demands, instead opting to peacefully wait out the establishment. I suppose OWS was waiting for justice. Many stood up to mace, batons, and brutality in expectation of a response; some kind of answer.

And the answer received, is the NDAA.

You will be missed.

Discovered a nice little git trick today.  I haven’t seen this documented, so I’m not sure if it’s a feature per se, but if you set your user.name via git config like so:

[user]
    name = accountname
    email = email@company.com

and then commit with the --author="Full Name" flag set to another name, this will set git’s commit metadata such that “Author:” is “Full Name” and “Committer:” is “accountname”.

Useful when you want to see the Author in your git logs and the Committer in tools like Hudson or Jenkins.