Technoccult

ADHD: a Farce

May 4, 2004 / Michael

Looks like some physicians are finally seeing the light on the whole ADD/ADHD excuse that runs rampant in our society:

Retired California neurologist Fred A. Baughman Jr. fired off a letter in January 2000 to U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in response to Satcher’s Report on Mental Illness. ‘Having gone to medical school,’ Baughman wrote, ‘and studied pathology – disease, then diagnosis – you and I and all physicians know that the presence of any bona fide disease, like diabetes, cancer or epilepsy, is confirmed by an objective finding – a physical or chemical abnormality. No demonstrable physical or chemical abnormality: no disease!”

“It is this direct, no-nonsense style that has made Baughman a pariah among the psychiatric and mental-health communities and a hero to families of children across America who believe they have been ‘victimized’ by the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) label. The ‘disease,’ Baughman tells Insight, ‘is a total 100 percent fraud,’ and he has made it his personal ‘crusade’ to bring an end to the ADHD diagnosis.

Full Story: Insight Mag

(via Invisible College).

Reality Cracking

May 3, 2004 / Wu

fravia.com: reality cracking labs

some gems:

Metaphysics & meta-reality-cracking: Disjoint application of beliefs and The Cosmic Pyramid Scheme: Philosophical problems with a popular omni-benevolence paradigm by -Pantheon

Consumer self-defense: an anti-advertisement tutorial by +Insiderbetraying

Supermarket enslavement techniques, by +ORC

I Ching

May 2, 2004 / Wu

sauceruney pointed me towards number-in-iching.com, a must-see use of flash & the I Ching.

For I Ching information & divination, I’ve been using the deoxy pages off and on for a while now.

Coffins w/ Panic Buttons

May 1, 2004 / Michael

A cemetery in Santiago, Chile is offering its clients coffins with a sensor that detects any movement inside them after they have been buried.”

“According to the Camino a Canaan cemetery the sensor attached to the coffin is to avoid anyone being buried alive.

What kind of lack of confidence in the medical system is required to motivate someone to put panic buttons in coffins?

Full Story: Ananova Quirkies: Cemetery offers coffin with panic button

Interesting collaborative game

April 30, 2004 / Klint Finley

I’m quite interested in the possibility of using games to get work done, and here’s a quite interesting application. Boing Boing explains:

The game throws up an image in a Java applet, then asks you and an anonymous “partner” elsewhere on the net to type in keywords until both of you have a word in common — IOW, until you and a stranger can agree on a good label for the picture. Presumably, this is being added to a metadata database for the purpose of cataloguing all the images on the net. Neat idea.

Colonel Condor

April 30, 2004 / Wu

Behold the world of Colonel Condor, where performance art, psionics, mind-control and all manner of deviancy meet by
uncle chuckie

I was going to reference Charles Cosimano in the Tesla post below, having first read about magnetic helmets in his writing, but after actually finding his website, I realized he needed a post all his own.

Tesla

April 30, 2004 / Wu

Someone, for some reason, wanted Tesla’s work suppressed…

At the top of the suspected conspirator list is Thomas Edison. Edison despised his former employee’s success with AC, and it is known that he set out on a campaign to smear Tesla’s name. He held demonstrations at which animals were lethally electrocuted with AC-powered devices, in a deceptive and inhumane effort to warn the public of the danger posed by Tesla and Westinghouse’s “unsafe” new electrical system. Edison also sat on the War Department advisory board that rejected Tesla’s proposals of the death ray and his radar-like device.

J. P. Morgan is also implicated in the anti-Tesla cover-up. Morgan counted on increasing his already monumental wealth by exploiting Tesla’s ideas, until he learned that Tesla was considering the free distribution of energy — a terrifying idea to any self-respecting capitalist. He ended his funding of Tesla’s experiments at once, and some think he used his considerable clout to ensure that no one else would bankroll Tesla’s threatening schemes[Source]

Tesla’s (web archived) life story: index, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6 (originally hosted at parascope.com)

There was a PBS documentary, and there’s some interesting (albeit derivative) information at viewzone.com on modern uses ov Tesla’s inventions and research, from radio transmitters to weather control to transcranial magnetic stimulation through electromagnetic fields (God Helmets – DIY)

(and that’s without mentioning Project Rainbow, the Montauk Project, or the whole Ong’s Hat mess)

Another do-it-yourself project: Building a Tesla Coil

personally, I think Tesla rocked

Synchronicity

April 29, 2004 / Michael

Synchronicity’s a word the seminal psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined to refer to a seemingly occult phenomenon he had noticed anecdotally: two apparently disconnected but at minimum thematically related events occurring more or less simultaneously, as if some more complex form of cause and effect was at work. You pick up the phone to call someone you haven’t spoken with in a long time and find them on the other end of the line calling them, that sort of thing. Jung chalked it up to a function of the collective unconscious, and for a long time in the ’70s, ‘synchronicity’ became a catch-phrase for both the self-help shrink crowd and the ‘magic is real’ crowd, and still pops up now and then, though the word’s almost never used as Jung meant it.

Full Story: Comic Book Resources: PERMANENT DAMAGE: Issue #137

(via Cabbages & Kings)

Processing: visual arts programming

April 29, 2004 / Klint Finley

Processing “programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketchbook.” (via Bev Tang)

Experiences are the new status symbol