Jim Jarmusch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Timothy Leary on the Wall Street Occupation Movement

The Function of Post-Democratic Government

The primary function of a free society in the post-democratic age is the protection of individual freedom from politicians who attempt to limit it.

This individual-freedom movement is new to human history because it is not based on geography, politics, class or religion. It has to do with changes, not in the power structure, not in who controls the police, but in the individual's mind. It is a "head" revolution: a consciousness-raising affair.

Questioning Authority and Thinking for Yourself

This cultural meme involves intelligence, personal access to information, an anti-ideological reliance on common sense, mental proficiency, consciousness raising, street smarts, intelligent consumerism-hedonism, personal communication skills. The meme is not new. Countercultures go back at least as far as Hermes Trismegistus, and include Socrates and Sappho, Voltaire and Thoreau, Gurdjieff and Ginsberg.

But the rapid spread of this mutational meme from 1960 to 1990 was due to the sudden mass availability of neurochemical and electronic technology. Chemicals and screens spraying electronic information into eyedrums and earballs, activating brains. Suddenly, youth all over the world are wearing jeans and listening to John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." The individuality meme that swept American youth during the 1960s has infected the world. The McLuhan epidemic keeps spreading.

The signs of this awakening are always the same. Young minds exposed to electronic information suddenly blossom like flowers in the spring. The June 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were a classic replay of Chicago 1968 and Kent State 1970.

Power, Mao said, comes from the barrel of a gun. That may have been true in the industrial past, but in the cybernetic 1990s the very notion of political power seems anachronistic, kinky, sick. For the new breed, the concept of "political power" is hateful, evil, ghastly. The idea that any group should want to grab domination, authority, supremacy or jurisdiction over others is a primitive perversity - as loathsome and outdated as slavery or cannibalism.

It was not the Berlin Wall of concrete and guard houses that protected the "evil empire"; it was the electronic wall that was easily breached by MTV. McLuhan and Foucault have demonstrated that freedom depends upon who controls the technologies that reach your brain-telephones, the editing facility, the neurochemicals, the screen.

Mass Individualism Is New

This sudden emergence of humanism and openness on a mass scale is new and revolutionary.

In tribal societies, the role of the individual is to be a submissive, obedient child. The tribal elders do the thinking. Survival pressures do not afford them the luxury of freedom.

In feudal societies, the individual is a serf or vassal, peasant, chattel, peon, slave. The nobles and priests do the thinking. They are trained by tradition to abhor and anathematize openness and thinking for yourself.

After the tribal (familial) and feudal (childlike) stages of human evolution came the industrial (insectoid) society, where the individual is a worker or manager; in later stages, a worker-consumer.

In all these static, primitive societies, the thinking is done by the organizations that control the guns. The power of open-minded individuals to make and remake decisions about their own lives, to fabricate, concoct, invent and reinvent is severely limited.

Youth had no power, no voice, no choice.

The post-political information society does not operate on the basis of obedience and conformity to dogma. It is based on individual thinking; scientific know-how; quick exchange of facts around feedback networks; high-tech ingenuity; and practical, frontline creativity. The society of the future no longer grudgingly tolerates a few open-minded innovators. The cybernetic society is totally dependent on a large pool of such people, communicating at light speed within and without geographical boundaries. Electrified thoughts invite fast feedback, creating new global societies that require a higher level of electronic know-how, psychological sophistication and open-minded intelligence.

This cyber-communication process is accelerating so rapidly that to compete in the world information marketplace of the 21st century requires the navigational skills of change-oriented, innovative individuals who are adept in communicating via the new cyber-electronic technologies.

The new breeds are simply much smarter than the old guard. They inhale new information the way they breathe oxygen. They stimulate each other to continually upgrade and reformat their minds. People who use cyber technology to make fast decisions on their jobs are not going home and passively letting aging, close-minded politicians make decisions about their lives.

The emergence of this new open-minded caste in different countries around the world is the central historical issue of the last 40 years.

Excerpted from Timothy Leary, "The New Breed" (KnoWare, 1990); revised, Chaos and Cyber Culture (Ronin, 1994).

Published with permission of the Leary Estate.

Article edited by Michael Horowitz and Lisa Rein.

@'truthout'

Home Improvement with Harper

The separatists are dead. Long live the Queen.
Via

King Midas Sound Documentary Part 2

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jamesrbuk James Ball 
One question, since I'm getting abuse today anyway: what exactly does a case relating to alleged sex offences have to do with free speech?

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Translation of article by detained Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah

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I did not expect that the very same experience would be repeated after five years, after a revolution in which we have ousted the tyrant, I go back to jail?
The memories of being incarcerated have returned, all the details, from the skills of being able to sleep on the floor with eight colleagues in a small cell (2 x 4 meters) to the songs and discussions of the inmates. But I am completely unable to remember how I secured my glasses while asleep. They was trampled upon three times in one day. I realize suddenly that they are the very same pair I had when I was jailed in 2006, and that I am imprisoned, now, pending investigation under similar flimsy accusations and reasons of that incarceration, the only difference is that we have exchanged State Security prosecution with military prosecution: a change fitting to the military moment we are living.
The previous time, I was joined in detention by 50 colleagues from the Kefaya movement, but on this occasion I am alone, together with eight wrongly accused, the guilty is as wronged as the innocent.
As soon as they realized that I was from the "Youth of the Revolution" they started cursing at the revolution and how it failed in "sorting out" the Interior Ministry. I spent the first two days only listening to stories of torture by the hands of the police that is not only adamant on resisting reform, but is seeking revenge for being defeated by the downtrodden, the guilty and the innocent.
From their stories I discover the truth of the great achievements of the restoration of security. Two of my colleagues are seeing jail for the first time, simple youth without a grain of violence and their accusation is? Forming a gang. Indeed, Abu Malik alone is an armed gang unto himself. Now I understand what the Interior Ministry means when it reports that it has caught armed gangs. I congratulate us for the restoration of security then.
In the following few hours, sunlight will enter our always dim cell, we read creative Arabic engravings of a former colleague, four walls from floor to ceiling covered in Quran, prayers, supplications, thoughts and what appear to be the will of a tyrant to repent.
The next day we discover in the corner the date of the inmate's execution and we are overwhelmed by tears.
The guilty plan on repenting, but the innocent do not know what to do to avoid a similar fate.
I stray from them in the radio, listening to the speech of his Excellency the General inaugurating the tallest flag in the world, one which will certainly enter the record books. And I wonder: Was the inclusion of the name of the martyr Mina Daniel as one of the instigators in my case also a record in audacity? On the basis of it not being sufficient for them to be first to kill the victim and to walk in the funeral but also to spit on the corpse and accuse it of a crime?
Or perhaps this cell can win the record of the number of cockroaches? My thoughts are interrupted by Abu Mailk: "I swear to God Almighty, if the wronged was not absolved, this revolution will not succeed."

The third day, 1/11/2011
Cell 19, Prison of Appeal, Bab Al Khalq
Alaa Abdel Fattah (@Alaa)

Translated by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi from the Arabic version that appeared in the Egyptian newspaper Shorouk on November 2nd 2011.
Via

FatherBob FatherBob 
My friends,Ghost Productions, their doco about Rowland S Howard "Autolumeniscent" reviewed 10pm tonight ABC1 Margaret/David

After giving the use of his mobile kitchen to the #OccupyMelbourne crew, Father Bob now tweets about Roland S. Howard. Respect!

Attack on French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo

The offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have been destroyed by a petrol bomb, French police say.

It comes a day after the publication named the Prophet Muhammad as its "editor-in-chief" for its next issue.
The magazine said the move was intended to "celebrate" the victory of an Islamist party in Tunisia's election.
Charlie Hedbo's editor is quoted as saying: "We no longer have a newspaper. All our equipment has been destroyed."
A single Molotov cocktail was thrown at the offices of Charlie Hebdo during the night and a large amount of material in the office was destroyed, police said.
There have been no reports of injuries.
Charlie Hebdo's website has also been hacked with a message in English and Turkish attacking the magazine.
The magazine was criticised by Muslims in 2007 after reprinting the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that caused outrage around the Islamic world.
@'BBC'