Why Craig Ferguson Is Funny...

It's a secret...

Just watch him...

Weeknights at 11:37p.m. on CBS.

I get paid absolutely nothing for promoting him.

Solomonopoly

Cognitive Liberty

“ We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiousity can legitimately send its attention and where it can not. It's an essentially preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue, because what we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In fact, not a religious sensibility, the religious sensibility.”

Terence McKenna in: Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants, Sound Photosynthesis, Mill Valley CA., 1988, ISBN 1-569-64709-7

"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears."

The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution

McKenna theorized that as the North African jungles receded, near the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to savannas and grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began to live in the open areas outside of the forest. There they experimented with new varieties of foods as they adapted, physically and mentally, to their new environment.

Among the new food items found in this new environment were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing near the dung of ungulate herds that occupied the savannas and grasslands at that time. McKenna, referencing the research of Roland L. Fisher, claimed that enhancement of visual acuity was an effect of psilocybin at low doses, and supposed that this would have conferred an adaptive advantage. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including sexual arousal, and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia — gave selective evolutionary advantages to members of those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the introduction of this psychoactive mushroom to the primate diet. McKenna hypothesizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the human diet. McKenna argued that this event resulted in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to the previous brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.

Novelty theory and "Time Wave: Zero Point"

One of McKenna's ideas is known as novelty theory. It predicts the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. McKenna developed the theory in the mid-1970s after his experiences in the Amazon at La Chorrera led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching. Novelty theory involves ontology, extropy, and eschatology.

The theory proposes that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, or extropy (a term coined by Max More meaning the opposite of entropy). According to McKenna, when novelty is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as "timewave zero" or simply the "timewave" results. The graph shows at what time periods, but never at what locations, novelty increases or decreases and is supposed to represent a model of history's most important events.

The algorithm has also been extrapolated to be a model for future events. McKenna admitted to the expectation of a "singularity of novelty", and that he and his colleagues projected into the future to find when this singularity (runaway "newness" or extropy) could occur. Millenarians give more credence to Novelty theory as a way to predict the future (especially regarding 2012) than McKenna himself. The graph of extropy had many enormous fluctuations over the last 25,000 years, but it hit an asymptote at exactly December 21, 2012. In other words, entropy (or habituation) no longer exists after that date. It is impossible to define that state. This is also the date on which the Mayan long calendar ends. The technological singularity concept parallels this, only at a date roughly three decades later.

Check out: http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm

Solomonopoly

Gottfried Helnwein Creates Beautiful Consumable Images

There is a basic misconception that any given face, at any given time, looks more or less the same, like a statue's face.

Actually, the human face is as variable from moment to moment as a screen on which images are reflected, from within and from without. I have seen six pictures of the same subject taken in less than a minute - so different one from the other, as not to be recognizable as the same person.

Gottfried Helnwein's paintings and photographs attack this misconception, showing the variety of faces of which any face is capable. And in order to attack the basic misconception, he must underline and exaggerate by distortion, by bandages and metal instruments that force the face into impossible molds.

Images of torture and madness abound, as happens from moment to moment in the face seen as a sensitive reflection of extreme perceptions and experience.

How can a self-portrait depict statuesque calm in the face of the horrors that surround us all? The torture, disease, fear and hatred that has come to be the daily fare of what the Pope calls "the banquet of life".

These tortured faces all say: "This is what I mean... and this... and this... Look, and you will see."
You can't show anyone anything he hasn't seen already, on some level - anymore than you can tell anyone anything he doesn't already know.

It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.

Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition.

William Burroughs

Lawrence, Kansas
October 1990

"Look to the ant, thou sluggard, and be wise."

Dear precious reader,

Although it isn't ants that I am currently battling, this particularly uncompromising infestation of winged termites caused a knee-jerk Google Search resulting in this delicious piece of work by Frater Y.V.

Please enjoy.

http://www.hermetic.com/sabazius/insect.htm

Also, for some reason I got an image result for Current 93's "Thunder Perfect Mind" whenever I initially searched for images of "S 901 alprazolam". There are a couple of bestiality images thrown in there for good measure as well. Are the Google image technicians smoking DMT?

It has been a strange and curious evening, yes it has. Curiouser and curiouser by the minute.

Solomonopoly

"... Images -- millions of images -- That's what I eat -- Cyclotron shit -- Ever try kicking that habit with apomorphine? -- Now I got all the images of sex acts and torture ever took place anywhere and I can just blast it out and control you gooks right down to the molecule -- I got orgasms -- I got screams -- I got all the images any hick poet ever shit out -- My Power's coming -- My Power's coming -- My Power's coming -- ... And I got millions and millions and millions of images of Me, Me, Me, meee."

-William S. Burroughs-

---------------------------------------------

Suffer.

Solomonopoly

No Apologies

I find myself searching for clarity. Searching for simplicity. But all I usually find is strangeness. Oddity. Weirdity.

I created a new word.

Weirdity.

Suffer.

Solomonopoly