We not only have the ability to communicate with each other regardless of geographic location, but we are now able to manipulate our physical existence. Is this the next major wave of ‘human’ evolution? I was watching ‘Walking with the Caveman’, and they demonstrated that the ‘tribes’ that figured out how to get the bone marrow out of the bones of dead animals became the dominate tribe, since they now had access to almost unlimited protein. We, as humans, are slowly reaching the ‘outer limits’ of what we can do and change. We are slowly understanding the multi-dimensional physical existence that goes beyind any Euclidean limitations. Pay attention closely folks – this is a big friggin deal.

Call me late to the party, but I recently discovered this. In short, The Conet Project is the title of a collection of recordings from shortwave radios all around the world. But these are not simply people jabbering with each other. These are recordings of ‘numbers stations’. The first time I heard one of these recordings, I was haunted. Here’s a quick description of what one of these broadcasts sound like:

“Static. Faint voices. Seven slow, monotonous tones. A pause. Suddenly, you hear music–one of those wind-up songs played by a child’s toy. The melody repeats three times. A pause. Suddenly, you hear a female voice counting off the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 in German. A pause. She repeats the numbers. A pause. The children’s toy melody returns.”

– source

What are these wild, random noises? Popular folklore says that these numbers stations are actually coded instructions from government agencies to spies or groups of spies. The individual sounds themselves have no discernible logic or meaning. But when you’re an obsessive person like me who will listen to these absurd and wonderful noises on an endless loop, you start to hear patterns.

While it’s pretty cool to think that these recordings are encrypted messages, to me it sounds like the work of performance artists. Some musicians have embedded the spirit of these recordings into their work. Boards of Canada are clearly influenced by numbers stations. Wilco used a sample of one of these recordings on their groundbreaking album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They were summarily sued and the case was settled out of court:

“On the first of the discs, a woman in an indecipherable accent — a Mossad agent, according to legend — keeps repeating three words: “Yankee … hotel … foxtrot.”

It’s the same recording that loops for a minute and a half during “Poor Places,” the 10th track on Wilco’s 2002 album. After a two-year legal fight, Tweedy agreed in an out-of-court settlement to give Akin Fernandez, Irdial’s owner and sole employee, a substantial royalty for the recording.”

– source

How someone can claim ownership of these shortwave recordings is beyond me. Blame the lawyers.

Of course I immediately began incorporating these sounds into my own ‘music’. I use the term “music” rather loosely, as I tend to gravitate to absurd and random noises.

These recordings are freely available online. Here’s disc 1,2,3,4. I don’t know the legality of downloading this, so take your chances.

http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project/

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Please Listen to my ‘remix’ of Charles Bukowski Reading Three Poems:

“The World’s Greatest Loser”
“Love”
“The Rat”

Well, god bless you Hank. We miss you.

It’s a large file – but worth it.

Charles Bukowski Reading Poetry

Click here below…

Raymond Carver – Fat

Source

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — black and white, rich and poor, young and old — deserve far better from their national government.

“Mr. President, I’m imploring you once again to get a cabinet-level official stood up as soon as possible to get this entire operation moving forward regionwide with all the resources — military and otherwise — necessary to relieve the unmitigated suffering and economic damage that is unfolding.”

Today’s aerial tour of the 17th Street levee will be featured tomorrow on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Later, Sen. Landrieu will also appear on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

I have struggled for the past few years to keep optimistic about the essense of humankind and our ability to do the right thing when it matters most. But watching this horrible story unfold, and seeing the evil behavior of those who are left to their own devices – well – I just don’t know anymore. Perhaps I was right all along. Perhaps my earlier assumptions about the essense of humans was right all along.

4:15 P.M. – (AP): Police say storm victims are being raped and beaten inside the New Orleans Convention Center.

About 15,200 people who had taken shelter at the convention center to await buses grew increasingly hostile.

Police Chief Eddie Compass says he sent in 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly beaten back by an angry mob.

Compass says, “We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten.”

He says tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon.

In hopes of defusing the unrest at the convention center, Mayor Ray Nagin gave the refugees permission to march across a bridge to the city’s unflooded west bank for whatever relief they can find. But the bedlam appeared to make leaving difficult.

Up to date news here New Orleans Blog

Here’s this little gem of mass rapes from CNN

One displaced resident at the Louisiana Superdome, however, issued a warning to authorities who may be headed to the stadium, where up to 30,000 people had sought refuge after Monday’s hurricane and now await evacuation to Texas by bus.

“Please don’t send the National Guard,” he said. “Send someone with a bullhorn outside the place that can talk to these people first.”

He described scenes of lawlessness and desperation, with people simply dragging corpses into corners.

“They have quite a few people running around here with guns,” he said. “You got these young teenage boys running around up here raping these girls.”

Elsewhere, groups of armed men wandered the streets, buildings smoldered and people picked through stores for what they could find.

Charity Hospital, one of several facilities attempting to evacuate patients, was forced to halt the effort

– Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Here.

President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day. (AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz)

Nero Fiddled as Rome Burned

Now while there was a significant artificial layer of fraud in the late 90s, underneath that vile layer was a true revolution in the way human beings acquire and disseminate information. Information WANTS to be free. That’s the nature of information. It want to travel at the simultaneity of light speed. That’s what electronic and networked media accomplishes. Of course I’m not breaking any new ground here. Marshall McLuhan was talking about this in the 60s. Oh if he were alive today.

So when the word ‘Blog’ saturated the media this past two years, most people thought ‘Oh great, yet another empty calorie buzzword that will be used to fleece greedy speculators out of their retirement’. I have to admit, I felt the same way.

Then something happened. As Bush entered the middle of his first administration, the American public began to ferociously debate issues. The war was becoming very real at this point, and those of us who thought Bush was merely saber rattling suddenly realized these guys meant business. Many people become active in finding out just what the hell was going on. Where were passionate citizens debating these topics? Where were they getting their information for debates? Where were they educating themselves? The Blogosphere became important.

Now I’m not saying it wasn’t important before this period, but indeed as the issues in front of us suddenly meant life or death for thousands of young American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the debates become fierce.

As the drunken orgy of ‘Shock and Awe’ commenced, something amazing happened. I saw Iraqi citizens BLOGGING. Most people didn’t see the significance of this, but I did.

I saw American soldier BLOGGING in real time. This was something that has never happened in the history of human warfare. Citizens back home eating freedom fries were getting direct, real time information from people on the ground not filtered though CNN. Recollect the first Gulf War. That war was broadcast on CNN. This was a revolution in itself. But it was a heavily filtered view.

Watch the evolution–

WW2 was brought to our eyes though newspapers and Gov’t sponsored ‘newsreels’ in movie theaters–completely one-sided.

Vietnam was broadcast in bits and pieces on major TV networks. Suddenly, Americans saw glimpses of how horrible war could be.

Gulf War 1 was fought on Cable

The War in Iraq changed everything. Suddenly there were WEBCAMS in Baghdad available to anyone with a network connection. Iraqis were blogging. Soldiers were blogging. And the American people were suddenly given immediate and unlimited information. Pictures surfaced of Iraqi civilians being slaughtered by bombs. Videos were distributed in real time across the Internet of BEHEADINGS. Anyone with a network connection could now see what was happening in some tiny dungeon in the middle of Iraq. This was completely unprecedented and it changed everything.

Fast forward to the election of 2004. The Blogosphere becomes the world’s largest Peer-Review network in the world. If you put something up defending Bush or Kerry on a blog, you would have your argument dissected by thousands of vehement bloggers on the other side. Then…. Dan Rather.

Now this to me is one of the most significant events to occur in communication ever. Dan Rather and 60 Minutes – a legendary bastion of mainstream, respected journalism – was absolutely brought to their knees by… are you ready for this? BLOGGERS. This network of ‘amateur’ journalists uncovered the sloppy (some say intentionally inaccurate) reporting of the ‘memo’ regarding Bush’s stay in the National Guard. This was a significant step toward Blogging as a mainstream channel of information. You may or may not agree with the Right – but you have to give credit where it’s due. They are just as powerful and savvy in Blogging as the left.

So… KEEP BLOGGING PEOPLE. Driving Socrates is going to spread its net across borders and bring in thoughtful people around the world to share with up new perspectives and help educate us when we aren’t informed. The global debate is here – welcome.

Call me late to the party, but I recently discovered this. In short, The Conet Project is the title of a collection of recordings from shortwave radios all around the world. But these are not simply people jabbering with each other. These are recordings of ‘numbers stations’. The first time I heard one of these recordings, I was haunted. Here’s a quick description of what one of these broadcasts sound like:

“Static. Faint voices. Seven slow, monotonous tones. A pause. Suddenly, you hear music–one of those wind-up songs played by a child’s toy. The melody repeats three times. A pause. Suddenly, you hear a female voice counting off the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 in German. A pause. She repeats the numbers. A pause. The children’s toy melody returns.”

– source

What are these wild, random noises? Popular folklore says that these numbers stations are actually coded instructions from government agencies to spies or groups of spies. The individual sounds themselves have no discernible logic or meaning. But when you’re an obsessive person like me who will listen to these absurd and wonderful noises on an endless loop, you start to hear patterns.

While it’s pretty cool to think that these recordings are encrypted messages, to me it sounds like the work of performance artists. Some musicians have embedded the spirit of these recordings into their work. Boards of Canada are clearly influenced by numbers stations. Wilco used a sample of one of these recordings on their groundbreaking album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They were summarily sued and the case was settled out of court:

“On the first of the discs, a woman in an indecipherable accent — a Mossad agent, according to legend — keeps repeating three words: “Yankee … hotel … foxtrot.”

It’s the same recording that loops for a minute and a half during “Poor Places,” the 10th track on Wilco’s 2002 album. After a two-year legal fight, Tweedy agreed in an out-of-court settlement to give Akin Fernandez, Irdial’s owner and sole employee, a substantial royalty for the recording.”

– source

How someone can claim ownership of these shortwave recordings is beyond me. Blame the lawyers.

Of course I immediately began incorporating these sounds into my own ‘music’. I use the term “music” rather loosely, as I tend to gravitate to absurd and random noises.

These recordings are freely available online. Here’s disc 1,2,3,4. I don’t know the legality of downloading this, so take your chances.

http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project/

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

These are extraordinary times. Consider the absurdity and significance of just the last six years.

In the mid to late 90s, we had a 20′s-style financial bubble that gave birth to one of the most impressive and vicious transfers of wealth in history. But underneath that financial roil, there was a revolution in the way we communicate and share information. Marshall McLuhan said that the media we use to communicate are extensions of our corporeal bodies. Print is an extension of the eye. Oral communication is an extension of the ear. Today’s electronic media is the extension of our central nervous system. The world just grew a spine–brave new world. McLuhan said that the era of electronic media will be the ‘retribalization of humankind’.

In 2001, the shell was broken further. America was born into the world of real, tangible consequences. The consequences of foreign policy were no longer hidden among the sand dunes and caves of countries the names of which we couldn’t pronounce. It was here. And it’s still here.

In 2003 we witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from the treasury of this country into the coffers of private concerns with direct ties to the ‘leaders’ of this nation. Can you spell “racketeering”? We saw tens of thousands of deaths and mutilations because of a “mistake”. We saw our ‘leadership’–the leaders of the strongest and wealthiest nation in human history–fall on its incompetent ass in front of the whole world. We broke a sovereign nation, and had absolutely no plan for the follow up.

And to top it all off, the nation re-elected the very people who got us all into this mess.

So here we are about to start 2005. Where are we? I’m bearish on the state of foreign affairs.

The Gorilla
Of course the 800 pound gorilla is Iraq. No it’s not going well. So what? The real danger as I see it is this: the domino theory. Remember that concept? It’s back. What our illustrious leaders did was exchange a two-bit, secular Stalinist dictator for a decentralized hydra of the world’s most calculated and unforgiving Islamic fundamentalists. No, Saddam had no reason to empower these people. They were in fact a bigger threat to his leadership then we were. But he sure kept them out of Iraq. Saddam wasn’t a nice guy, no. But now the security of Iraq is our responsibility, and we’re failing.

So what happens if these “Al Qaeda” (whatever the hell that means anymore) types take control of Iraq? We could see the entire Mid East collapse under a wave of revolutions and military coups, as these militant groups rally the poor, disenfranchised youth against the military dictators that the U.S. supports. Dominos fall and we are forced to pull our military back into Saudi Arabia to protect the oil. Let’s just hope the Pakistani nukes stay safe.

The Economy
The popular mantra today is that ‘our national debt is in a historically healthy ratio to our GDP’. Yes, pay no attention to the unprecedented amount of personal debt that Americans carry. Nor should we point out the social security and Medicare liabilities that–combined with our debt–lead us to 10s of trillions of dollars of liabilities. Pay no attention to the reports that Fannie Mae was caught buying trillions in mortgages without properly assessing the quality of those mortgages. You know who is responsible to bail out Fannie Mae is they go bust? We are. We would be on the hook for many times our total GDP.

So what? The bad word is deflation. That’s exactly what we DON’T want. Deflation leads to falling prices. Sounds good, eh? Well, it’s devastating. Deflation is the contraction of liquidity and basically grinds the economy to a halt. It happened before in the 30s and it could very well happen again. But most people are expecting–indeed joyfully expecting–inflation. Inflation is the increase of the money supply and dilution of the dollar leading to rising of prices. People who are in a lot of debt want inflation. Inflation makes their debt much smaller in terms of dollar value. $10,000 suddenly means a lot less than it used to. In this scenario, it’s better to owe then to lend. But ONLY if wages remain in lock step with inflation–they aren’t.

What would lead to deflation? A spike in interest rates could do it. What would case that? Right now, the American economy and operations are being financed by foreign lenders–Japan and China. Since we have a huge deficit, we need to borrow money to operate. Japan and China buy our treasuries and finance our country. Recently both Japan and China have been slowing down their purchasing significantly. America still needs to borrow extraordinary amounts of money to operate, but our lenders are getting tired. So how do we entice buyers of treasuries? Raise the yield. That would raise the interest rates throughout our labyrinth of debt finally landing square in the nuts of home buyers. You know all those people who are on multiple interest-only, variable rate mortgages? Let’s hope they can continue to make their payments, because massive default in the mortgage industry would lead to catastrophe. This is only one, very simplistic scenario. The reality of the situation is actually much more frightening.

So What?
Indeed, so what. Perhaps all those ‘fringe’ post-modern political science professors I had in college were right. The end of the nation state is near. Watch the deployments of “our” military. The military’s sole purpose now is to protect the interests of private oil concerns. From Colombia to the Caspian Sea to Iraq, the winds of a major war could be starting to blow. I read a story about investment bankers who are actually taking physical delivery of barrels of oil and storing them in warehouses. They are actually buying oil fields. This isn’t commodities speculation, this looks like preparation.

Fox News will not tell you this ahead of time. Neither will Air America. Indeed, the revolution will not be televised. We need to stop the adolescent partisan nonsense, and look at our real problems with an objective eye. I don’t trust our government. I don’t trust their competence. I don’t trust the judgment of the ‘American People’. I don’t trust Wall Street, and I don’t trust Wal*Mart. But I do trust social inertia. You can’t stop the natural order of things. Humans might be outgrowing the arbitrary ‘lines in the sand’ of the nation-state system. This is neither good nor bad–it just is. How will we adapt? Nature won’t wait for us to adapt. It will happen just as Hemingway described going broke–gradually, then suddenly.