Sagan/Hawkins Remixed.

September 23: Martian Apocalypse In Sydney.

Golly Good New Noises: Orson Welles Meets H.G. Wells.

As everybody knows, Google has gone hog-wild for ufo imagery lately:

The official reason released by Google is to celebrate the 147th birthday of the great British futurist, political theorist, and architect of modern science fiction HG Wells. Make of it what you will. Prior to the revelation of the Wells connection, All News Web, a bastion of stringent reportage if ever there was one, felt compelled to offer the following explanation, received via email from "Tina":

‘Tina’ has a university degree in marketing and came to work on the project which she declines to name via an initial position in the Pentagon's public relations operations. Her position involved relaying and rewriting electronic messages for distribution to certain world organizations regarding imminent open contact with an alien race. We are unsure as to why she has contacted All News Web.
According to 'Tina' the last and only physical meeting between aliens and the Government and indeed the only actual official Government recorded UFO landing and alien visitation in the last century up until now occurred in the early 1950’s. This was a meeting between three alien explorers and President Truman. The meeting involved some form of limited telepathic communication and involved the Aliens expressing relief that WW2 had come to an end. The aliens promised to return one day. The Aliens were about three foot and of somewhat classic ‘Grey’ appearance. Photographs were taken and these, which have been seen by a handful of media figures (Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg), have become a basis for the traditional image of ‘Grey’ aliens.
The Aliens are believed to come from a planet about thirty light years away and it is unknown if they possess faster than light transport. 'Tina' did not receive any information on Roswell or any reverse engineering projects involving ET technology. She does not discount other informal alien or UFO incidents.
The aliens seek to establish ties with Earthlings. They are able to monitor the goings on here remotely and it appears they are at least a thousand years ahead of humans technologically
According to 'Tina' SETI is receiving and concealing regular explicit signals (and has been doing so for at least seven years) from this race that state that they are returning to earth in around four years (2013) and have spacecraft essentially mid-journey. The extra-terrestrials will land openly and in a way that will conclusively prove their presence and are doing so unilaterally. They have given the US government until then to prepare humanity for this event.
'Tina' alleges that some powerful security figures would like to thwart this open contact but are powerless to do so. Many figures associated with NASA and even the Pentagon are positive about the event and a conspiracy to hide the truth form the world’s population is not unanimous.
What all parties agree on is that the best course of action is to leave any announcement of the event to the absolute latest possible time so as not to frighten people or harm the economy.
Major churches have been briefed on the matter and are being given time to shift their positions so as to accommodate this new reality. The US Govt has been ‘requested’ to mend and clean up rivalries and conflicts in preparation and this extra-ordinary event and this is the primary reason for Barack Obama’s peace gesture to Iran and indeed his very presidency. Barack Obama is in almost daily contact with SETI and is communicating with the aliens directly.
The aliens indirectly contributed to the development of internet search engines and they are in limited contact with Google through SETI (and allegedly via NASA's Ames Research Center). They are able to access the internet currently and their involvement in search engine research is for the purpose of allowing them to understand as much about earth as possible prior to their next arrival. It is believed that search engine algorithms are somewhat based on the form of telepathic communication they use.

It is astonishing where a degree in marketing can take you nowadays. Anyway, as a birthday tribute to HG Wells, here is a link to the audio of a meeting between the great man and the equally great Orson Welles. The velvet baritone of Mr. Orson Welles requires no introduction; the voice of Mr. HG Wells transpires to possess the comforting quality of a pair of slippers combined with a dry sherry (and perhaps a loyal, heartbreakingly stoical cocker spaniel.) The prefix "Mr" is used a stunning amount of times in this short audio.

The Secret Life of Hoaxes Part 3: A Labyrinth in Curved Space.

One of the preeminent concepts that shapes our thinking about virtually everything in the modern world is evolution. It is often argued that almost all classical ideologies and belief systems partake to some degree in Platonism – in the belief that certain things retain the same essential form throughout eternity. Evolution constituted a paradigmatic sea-change because it argued for mutability instead of permanence, for the temporal instead of the eternal, and – in almost all interpretations – the contingent rather than the preordained. (The significant implication of the latter point being that there were a variety of other forms that the basic building blocks of nature could have taken – and no inherent necessity in our emergence from the primordial stew.) An unavoidable implication of the William James quotation cited in previous posts is that truth may itself be a quantity subject more to evolutionary mutation than to unchanging Platonic perfection. (To clarify, I mean truth here not in terms of a record of events – such as the Holocaust – but rather in terms of the underlying bedrock of how we understand ourselves and our position in the universe.) It rarely occurs to evangelical Darwinists to extend the evolutionary paradigm into the realm of truth itself. Science must always juggle its awareness of the temporal nature of theories – the principal of falsification – with its strongly Platonic impulse to discover eternal and immutable laws and theories.

In order for truth to be a fully evolutionary entity – it would require that truth be more a creative than a receptive activity. Being an activity grounded in the reception of exterior things would allow for the progressivist outlook that fuels most mainstream science – for the belief that our perception of those external realities becomes ever more acute and clear, until we can arrive at a system of postulates which will remain irrevocably true for all time. (The holy grail of this particular outlook being the Theory of Everything eagerly sought in certain factions of the physics community.) On the other hand, truth being an activity more thoroughly grounded in interior mental processes allows for a whole slew of complications to intrude on the principal of objectivity – for the most self-evident, commonsensical truths to be hopelessly enmeshed within a wider net of physiological, linguistic, socio-ideological , emotional, and evolutionary factors. If this is correct, then truth may be envisioned as a entirely temporal, constantly mutable entity – a creature that grows a coat of fur when the weather is icy, sheds it when the sun shines, and developes a poisonous sting when threatened by larger predators. The movement towards truth may not be, as the progressivist envisions it, a journey along a linear path towards a definitive destination, but rather an endless amble through a labyrinth in curved space. A labyrinth in curved space would be traversed forever, so long as its inhabitants maintained the assumption that it conformed to the standard, and possessed a way out, however ingeniously hidden; but what appeared to be the way out would always be the way back in again.

(The popularity of the labyrinth as a metaphor in contemporary culture, evident in Borges, Escher, Last Year in Marienbad, and elsewhere, is often related, no doubt correctly, to the theories of Einstein. But many of these ideas were already evident in the works of Kafka, who was writing more or less contemporaneously to the great discoveries of Einstein. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether the creative artist or the scientist has priority, or whether both are merely carving shapes from the same clay.)

Bowie gestures to Einstein from the depths of Jungian Hyperspace.

The questions, Mr. President, the questions....

In what is either this century's grandest act of celebrity folly, or its most unique act of political activism, reformed actor Charlie Sheen has made a direct demand to President Obama to re-open the 9 11 investigations. This strangely orchestrated media event began about a week ago, when Texan firebrand Alex Jones promised that his biggest ever news story was going to break during the 9 11 anniversary. On september 8, Jones' website prison planet published a fictionalised, hypothetical 20 minute interview between Sheen and the President. Controversially, perhaps ingeniously, the interview was online for a few hours without any disclaimer, or indication of any kind that it was entirely fictitious. Two things are noteworhty here. First of all, this is the first on record that the "fanfic" form has been used in the pursuit of a political cause. Secondly, there is a kind of fighting fire with fire logic at work here - Jones and Sheen are attempting to expose a false flag terror attack....by means of a false flag interview.

Jones came under severe fire from the alternative community for the stunt, with many posters on Above Top Secret and Coast to Coast host Georgre Noory decrying the manovere. Undeterred, Jones rather feebly cited technical difficulties for the lack of a disclaimer, and boldly declared that he and Sheen were carrying out a "psyop on the New World Order." That psyop was intensified in the past few hours, with the following video address to the President:

I cannot help but admire the peculiar madness in the way this stunt has perpetuated thus far - and Jones claims that it is only the opening salvo in a chain of events. Whether it blows up in their faces, or initiates a new era of false flag journalism and viral activism remains to be seen.

2032: The Return of the Flying Teapots.

This is the video for Gong's How to Stay Alive, featuring the drawings of Davevid Allen animated by Japanese Manga maestros Mood Magic. Be sure to watch in fullscreen!

Visions of Things to Come, Courtesy of Raquel Welsh.

Raquel Welsh - immortal lovely, actress, dancer, and futurist:


Here Raquel rocks some Mayan and Astrological memes with a distinctly 2012 flavour: