'Courage is not the absence of fear, but moving ahead despite fear. For if there is no fear, who needs courage? In the final analysis, courage is essentially an existential choice. Courage is the empowering experience of a decision to stand up and withstand the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." And, when wounded or knocked down, to pick oneself up, dust oneself off, and "keep on keepin' on." A choice to stand and fight when appropriate rather than run. To tolerate or attack rather than cower and withdraw. To persevere rather than quit. To act with integrity rather than expedience. To take responsibility rather than slough it off. To embrace reality rather than retreat from it. To move forward in life rather than regress or stagnate. To create rather than destroy. To love rather than hate. To deal with one's demons rather than not. To consciously face the existential facts of suffering, infirmity and death rather than denying them.'

'There are only five basic fears, out of which almost all of our other so-called fears are manufactured. Those five basic fears are: #Extinction #Mutilation #Loss of Autonomy #Separation #Ego-death. Think about the various common labels we put on our fears. Start with the easy ones: fear of heights or falling is basically fear of extinction (possibly accompanied by significant mutilation, but that's sort of secondary). Fear of failure? Read it as fear of ego-death. Fear of rejection? It's fear of separation, and probably also fear of ego-death. The terror many people have at the idea of having to speak in public is basically fear of ego-death. Fear of intimacy, or "fear of commitment" is basically fear of losing one's autonomy. Some other emotions we know by various popular names are also expressions of these primary fears. If you track them down to their most basic levels, the basic fears show through.'

'What is the Minotaur? First, the Minotaur represents our primal fear of the unconscious. The unconscious is that which is unknown to us. For this reason, we humans are born not only with an instinctive fear of the unknown and of death, but also an archetypal fear of the unconscious. This is one of the factors that make the psychotherapy process so threatening: a profound fear of encountering our own unconscious, of entering the dark, lonely labyrinth and meeting the Minotaur. Fundamentally, the Minotaur represents the primal fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is deeply-seated in the human psyche. Indeed, the Minotaur may be seen as a metaphor for death and death anxiety. Existentially, death is a symbol of non-being or non-existence, and, therefore, death anxiety can be understood, in Kierkegaard's words, as the "fear of nothingness." As existential psychologist Rollo May (1977) points out, "the threat of non-being lies in the psychological and spiritual realm as well – namely, in the threat of meaninglessness in one's existence." The Minotaur also embodies both fate (our biological nature) and destiny (our freedom) and the integral interrelationship between the two. But why do we find it such a dreadful image? Because to confront the Minotaur in the dark labyrinth is to confront ourselves: our fears of the unknown, our ferocious, beastly nature, our rage, aggression, sexuality, mortality, the daimonic. This self-confrontation is successfully accomplished by proceeding carefully yet courageously along one's own Ariadnean thread. The secret is that, metaphorically, we each have been given this thread to follow and lead us to our destiny – but only if we are brave enough to do so. Psychotherapy sometimes entails helping the patient who has lost touch with this precious thread to find it, take hold of it, and follow it wherever it may lead, inching along blindly on hands and knees in the darkness through the unknown. ...once grasped, proceeding slowly but steadily along one's Ariadnean thread provides a profound sense of purpose and meaning in life. As though one is being pulled or guided by some power greater than oneself.'

'What is the psychospiritual significance of the mythical labyrinth? The labyrinth can be seen as an archetypal symbol of the psyche and of what C.G. Jung called the individuation process: that twisty, unpredictable, tortuous, serpentine path toward wholeness and authenticity. The goal is to reach the center, the Self, the core of our being. But this is only half the journey. For having discovered the inner center with it's treasure, the "pearl of great price," is not sufficient: One must then find a way out of the labyrinth and back to the outer world – forever transformed by this experience. And this inward and outward expedition is repeated over and over, each time yielding new riches. Psychotherapy itself can be such a labyrinthine process. Patients often seek psychotherapy because they feel alone and hopeless, confused and abandoned, much like the unlucky lost souls caught in the mythic labyrinth. Indeed, as for those suffering victims, suicide sometimes seems the only way out of the labyrinth. The impenetrable darkness, disorientation, discouragement and deep dread of the unknown may be intolerable at times. What is it about the inescapable labyrinth that makes it so tragically intolerable? Perhaps it is precisely the immense nothingness and darkness of the labyrinth that we humans find most frightening: Such places echo or reflect back to us that which dwells in the deepest, darkest recesses of our own psyche. Whatever it is we fear most – and therefore flee from – is called forth and amplified by the lightless labyrinth. The psychotherapy patient too is heroic, sacrificing his or her narcissistic arrogance by seeking help, facing fear of the unknown, willingly walking into the labyrinth and confronting his or her own personal Minotaur. When the psychotherapist invites and encourages the patient to explore the labyrinth – the unknown, the unconscious, the shadow, the daimonic – we bestow the gifts of Ariadne: the empowering sword of strength, courage, and rational, logical, analytical insight, and the means to remain tangibly tethered, rooted, related and connected to us, to reality, to the light, to humanity, to the outer, material world – and to one's self. These are essential tools for the task. Venturing into the labyrinth improperly equipped and prepared is a perilous and foolhardy undertaking for both therapist and patient, courting catastrophe. In psychotherapy, the Ariadnean thread symbolizes both the therapeutic relationship – the strong, supportive, vital, empathetic tie between patient and therapist – as well as the struggling and disoriented hero-patient's still undiscovered destiny.'

'The feeling of security and the reality of security don't always match, says computer-security expert Bruce Schneier. At TEDxPSU, he explains why we spend billions addressing news story risks, like the "security theater" now playing at your local airport, while neglecting more probable risks – and how we can break this pattern.' -- "If it's in the news, don't worry about it."

Sibling abuse manifesting in culture as a hatred of corporations (siblings) and the belief that the "government" (parents) can save them when "government" (parents) is so obviously the enabler. (But who could face the pain of that?)

'The scientific evidence underlying the near-universal resistance to reason and evidence. If you want to change the world, you first must understand the unconscious barriers to thinking.' -- '"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Western said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaledoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then get massively enforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

'“Violent extremism” is one of those undefined police state terms that will mean whatever the government wants it to mean. In this morning’s FBI’s foray into the homes of American citizens of conscience, it means antiwar activists, whose activities are equated with “the material support of terrorism,” just as conservatives equated Vietnam era anti-war protesters with giving material support to communism. Americans are the most gullible people who ever existed. They tend to support the government instead of the Constitution, and almost every Republican and conservative regards civil liberty as a coddling device that encourages criminals and terrorists. Americans are too gullible, too uneducated, and too jingoistic to remain a free people. As another Nazi leader Herman Goering said, “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. Tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace-makers for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger."'

'...one can gain much understanding of current events by paying attention to Western power-elite rhetoric in all its varied manifestations. Anyone can perform the kind of analysis the Bell attempts to provide. Simply accept (a terrible and fearful thing to be sure) that there is a power elite – a group of extraordinarily wealthy and powerful families and individuals engaged in an intergenerational conspiracy to create world governance – and then begin to track the dominant social themes that they utilize to shove a hitherto-unsuspecting public in the desired direction. -- ...the Internet has ravaged elite memes. Suffice it to say that what is happening now is a kind of huge and unstoppable tidal wave, one that is sweeping all before its path. Cultures and belief-systems will be reconfigured before all this is over. We believe the elite may have finally recognized this – certainly we see rhetorical indications that it has. (Perhaps elements read the Bell?)'

'Hafiz, a Sufi poet from the 14th century: "The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners." -- Cage-building is protecting yourself and your interests, making yourself look good, and discouraging good ideas because you weren’t the one to come up with them. Taking the credit for yourself, assigning the blame to others—that kind of thing. Key-dropping, on the other hand, is making other people look good, building them up, expanding the pie. Think about the times when someone has really helped you think or live differently. It was like they placed a key on the ground in front of you; you picked it up and unlocked a cage. (You had to open the cage yourself, of course, but it was a lot easier with a key.) What keys do you hold that could set a prisoner free? Why not start dropping those everywhere you go?'

'Once you learn to recognize it, you realize that plenty of life experiences have the same subjective signature. What all these trigger-moment experiences have in common is that they represent thresholds beyond which you are no longer in control of the consequences of your actions. Something you are creating goes from being protected by you (and your delusions) to facing the forces of the wild world. You haven’t started living until you experience and survive your first powerful “stepping on stage” moment. The bitter, depressed middle-aged adult who tells the 18-year old that “real life isn’t like the movies” is actually wrong. He has merely never dared to step onto a significant stage himself, so he doesn’t know that such powerful crossing-the-threshold moments are possible. That every life can be the Hero’s journey. The allegory of the stage is the story of your life told around the moments when you faced death, and charged ahead anyway.'

Watts on televisual magick: "It's a war *of* terror, not on terror. There's so many TV series out now on terrorism and government agencies dealing with it all, but people are lapping that stuff up, they can't tell fact from fiction any more. They see the guys in the streets with combat boots and that's all quite normal to them now. What happens is, you get into a state of flux – they call it flux 'at the top' – where you can't rationalise reality and separate it from fiction using your own perceptions to ask yourself, 'Am I really under attack right now, or is it all in my head?' But all the symbols they're giving you say, 'I'm under attack! I'm under attack! Comply! Obey!'

"ANGER, HATE, EXTREMIST, IGNORANT, ANTI-, AMMUNITION, CONSTITUTION, RACIST, VIOLENT, CONSPIRACY..." -- Yo, MSNBC. Imma let u finish but the Soviet Union had the best propagandists of all time. OF ALL TIME!

'McConnell: "We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same." -- Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.'

They all want locking up! ... In gated communities sold by Phil and Kirstie.

'... when it comes to ‘eco-quarrelling’, the arguments can become particularly poisonous, because for green couples it is only ‘scientific proof’ that can settle disputes. But with the data around climate change so vague and fluctuating, it’s hard to know which partner can rightly claim the moral high ground. -- As you’d expect, one of the recurring themes of eco-quarrels is disagreement over how to raise the kids: do parents have a responsibility to tell children that the world is going to end unless they recycle or not? But it also appears that children today are getting into arguments with their parents about how to save the planet. One 10-year-old girl, whose primary school has an oversubscribed eco club, boasts of pestering parents and teachers about their polluting ways. -- Self-disgust, ultimately, is self-obsession...'

Problem Reaction Solution -- “Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

'Dr Hibbing feels it may help explain why it is so hard to change someone's mind in a political debate. Different people, he said, started from a different psychological point. "You have people who are experiencing the world, who are experiencing threat, differently. "It's just that we have these very different physiological orientations. We're not sure where they came from, they may be genetic, they may be something from ***childhood***; we do know, though, that they run deep because it's a reflex, it's not something you can change tomorrow, the depth of that may be something of an asset in figuring out why people are so stubborn in their political beliefs."'

'...the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.' -- (See tagged: 'nearfar' comment: "3 types of politics (conservatism [very near/reactionary], libertarianism [near/rational], socialism [far/blinkered/stockholm-syndromed/numb])")

Plausible. "Because the entire system is losing all credibility." 'Alex breaks down what he thinks is the next real false flag attack on America, and it's going to be on none other than Obama himself.' -- Good analysis of Glenn Beck and the "left/right" rhetoric of American MSM.

"This is a film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon. Just like him, we've all become paranoid weirdos. It's the story of how television and newspapers did this to us and how it has paralyzed the ability of politics to transform the world for the better."

'All rage is the result of a narcissistic injury. Fear assumes limitless possibilities: the thing you fear has infinite power, infinite resources, infinite resolve, unknown identity. Hate comes when you know them. When you find yourself hating someone (who did not directly hurt you) with blinding rage, know for certain that it is not the person you hate at all, but rather something about them that threatens your identity. Find that thing. This single piece of advice can turn your life around, I guarantee it.'

'One of the most important films ever made.' -- The ways to the One are as many as the lives of men.

'...demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe. -- This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe... -- What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety.'

'Seizing on climate change as an issue around which they can create the appearance of purposeful activity, it is political elites who are the most zealous campaigners, ...the government urges us to urge them to act. At the same time, it also berates us for our apathy. Such is the bizarre relationship between the elite and the electorate today. ...putting pressure on world leaders is really an elite wish-fulfilment fantasy, in which child-citizens across the globe put their faith in parent-politicians engaged in an heroic, planet-saving mission. Climate activists may think they are critics of officialdom, but they are simply fuelling the fantasy. -- It seems unlikely that, in the long run, the elite’s search for meaning in green politics will be successful. The vision it offers – of caution and constraint, low ambition and no progress – is a negative, dystopian one which may evoke fear and conformity, but which will never inspire. It is the ideology of a demoralised society...'

'After extinction, the fear memory is merely suppressed, not erased, and therefore these memories could resurface under certain conditions, such as unrelated stress. In some cases, the re-emergence of the emotional memory is maladaptive, leading to anxiety disorders. While researchers have traditionally seen long-term memory as fixed and resistant, it is now becoming clear that memory is, in fact, dynamic and flexible. As a result, the act of remembering makes the memory vulnerable until it is stored again-a process called reconsolidation. During this instability period, new information could be incorporated into the old memory.'

'...considering the green movement’s history of setting ever-shifting deadlines for the End of Days, this is beginning to sound like ‘the boy who cried doomsday’. The idea that humans are killing nature and have a short amount of time to change their ‘ecocidal’ behaviour has been around for far longer than the IPCC, the UN’s science body whose recommendations are being discussed in Copenhagen. But the amnesia that environmentalist campaigners and theorists display when it comes to past predictions of doom is striking. For instance, in 1990 Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith co-authored the book 5,000 Days to Save the Planet, calling for an urgent decrease in CO2 emissions to avoid the Earth expiring by 2003. As it turned out, the Earth outlived Goldsmith, who passed away in August this year.' -- (There's a name for this 'Nostradoomus' phenomena where old-timers make dire predictions for the world as an unconscious externalization of their repressed fear of impending death.)

'Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense. Our penchant for movie plots blinds us to the broader threats. And security theater consumes resources that could better be spent elsewhere. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we—and our leaders—need to react with indomitability. #Refuse to Be Terrorized.' -- Applies to any other 'movie-plot' hype @AlGore

'If a climate-change sceptic suggests that the Sun, rather than man, is responsible for climatic variations he is denounced as evil, a heretic, someone whose words are so foul and twisted that they will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.” In other words, question the environmentalist consensus, and you are endangering life itself — your words are literally poisonous. Yet when a climate-change activist openly calls for calamitous events and the deaths of thousands of people as a way of focusing our leaders’ minds on the problem of climate change, no one bats an eye. So warped is environmentalist morality that those who raise legitimate questions about politics and science are accused of killing people with their words, while those who actually talk about the need for people to die are patted on the back.' -- Fundamentalism will eat itself.

'Fear motivates all sorts of animal behaviors. Schooling, flocking, and herding are all security measures. Not only is it less likely that any member of the group will be eaten, but each member of the group has to spend less time watching out for predators. Humans are both no different and very different. We, too, feel fear and react with our amygdala, but we also have a conscious brain that can override those reactions. ...we can go beyond fear, and actually think sensibly about security.

"The costs of failing to address global warming would be greater than the impact of the two world wars and the Great Depression, he said." -- We're manufacturing an even greater problem to trump the problems that I and my fellow psychopaths have historically created, he said.

'...Marsh and her colleagues have been exploring how “callous and unemotional” individuals tend to show a very specific cognitive deficit: namely, they are especially poor at recognizing, processing and responding normally to the facial expression of fear on other people’s faces (a “normal” response being ceasing an assault on the frightened person or offering aid). Curiously, their trouble in this area is not due to a problem with facial expressions in general—they do perfectly well deciphering the look of disgust, anger, happiness and so on on other people’s faces. ...it’s only the look of fear that puzzles diagnosably antisocial people (and to a somewhat lesser extent, sadness).'

'There is always a magical belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our need for it. And finally, greed is a way of avoiding making choices; if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures. When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we "wish and hope to have everything all the time"; greed "wants everything, nothing less will do", and so "it cannot be satisfied". Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear.'

'Cargo Cults, Copycat Behaviour, Crazes, End-of-the-World Panics, Fads, Fantasy-proneness, Hoaxes, Mind Control Fears, Moral and Sexual Panics, Possession, Religious Revivals, Sects, and all kinds of mass persecutions of minority groups, both real and imagined. But underlying all these diverse manifestations are two chief vectors: a negative one involving exaggerated fear and uncertainty, and a positive one driven by hope and expectation. In both cases, these emotions of fear and hope can multi­ply to such an extent that they shape society for better or worse… mostly, it has to be said, for the worse.

The horror... the horror... -- 'Government officials have not determined the source of the music or what it could portend, but they urge Americans to avoid deserted mansions, woods, and eerily quiet lake cabins.'

'TAKING LIBERTIES is a shocking but hilarious polemic documentary that charts the destruction of all your Basic Liberties under 10 Years of New Labour. Released to coincide with Tony Blair's departure, the film and the book follow the stories of normal people whose lives have been turned upside down by injustice - from being arrested for holding a placard outside parliament to being tortured in Guantanamo Bay.' -- First they came for the protestors...

AUDIO CONTAINS SPOILERS -- 'Adam Curtis discusses how the show affects its audience and whether it aims to shock: "We wanted to push it because we were trying to make a political point. People are really hungry for experience these days, to actually experience things themselves, it's part of the individualism of our time. ...let's see how far we can take people, frighten them, but then make them reflect on what that fear is really about... the idea that the individual is the central supreme object of devotion of our time might not be the whole truth... its about how you turn 'stuff' into stories and that's how history is made. ...maybe you will stitch it together in different ways yourself and then at the end you turn to having your own experience which is completely fragmentary... ...most people run out screaming."'

'EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees. Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.'

"... the grand strategy of Al-Qa’ida can be thought of as auto-immune warfare... The aim is to provoke and manipulate the enemy until their reactions create many more zones of dubious authority where they can move in, and eventually until the West is exhausted economically. ...we are to be destroyed by the over-reaction of our own security system, just as auto-immune diseases turn the immune system on the body. The main-force guerrillas’ role is to stage spectaculars, which provide propaganda of the deed, create chaos, and intimidate or chase off the representatives of the state or of traditional authority. The other elements of a classic guerrilla system – the clandestine administration, and its part-time local guerrilla force – then step in. Meanwhile, the strike force moves on to other battles or melts back into hiding."

'The Yorkshire Ranter recasts terrorism as an "auto-immune war" -- a war intended to inflict maximum damage by getting the host's defense mechanisms to overfire, damaging the host well beyond than the actual terrorist attacks: "Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US."' -- The cancer that is killing /e

1984 vs Brave New World: 'What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.' -- It's both.

'"We're in a complete mess and the consumer is smart enough to know it," says Howard Davidowitz, whose firm does consulting for the retail industry. "If the consumer isn't petrified, he or she is a damn fool."' -- Video inside.

"Live From Congress: According to Congressman Porter, gang members have infiltrated our neighborhoods, our schools, and even the Capitol."

'Business Week ranked the airport last in customer satisfaction due to long delays, bureaucratic employees, and overall oppressive atmosphere.' -- Have you lied to us? Have you lied to us? Have you lied to us? Will you lie to us? Liar.

'The London police have bested their own impressive record for insane and stupid anti-terrorism posters with a new range of signs advising Londoners to go through each others' trash-bins looking for "suspicious" chemical bottles, and to report on one another for "studying CCTV cameras."' -- Next it'll be anyone receiving 'instructions' on their mobiles.

"The agony of inflation, however prolonged, is perhaps somewhat similar to acute pain — totally absorbing, demanding complete attention while it lasts; forgotten or ignorable when it has gone, whatever mental or physical scars it may leave behind. ...the process of collapse of the recognised, traditional, trusted medium of exchange, the currency by which all values are measured, by which social status is guaranteed, upon which security depends, and in which the fruits of labour are stored, unleashes such greed, violence, unhappiness, and hatred, largely bred from fear, as no society can survive uncrippled and unchanged."

'Ecclesiastes: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." -- Carl Jung, said, "We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time." We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting one, a time that seems full of endings. Too bad there's no pill for that.' -- Red Pills. And lots of 'em.

'Robbie Feather, managing director of Feather & Black said: “Confidence in banks has hit an all-time low and fears of a recession crime wave have been raised by the Home Secretary. As a result people genuinely seem concerned about the safety of their money. Our new Safe bed began as a slightly tongue-in-cheek idea but we are now confident that it will appeal to home owners who want to store their money or valuable belongings in a safe place."'

"Human Farms" -- Red pills don't taste nice.

"Like real porn, the economic variety gives you the illusion of control, and similarly it only leaves you hungry for more. But econo-porn also feeds a powerful sense of intellectual vanity. You walk the streets feeling superior to all these heedless knaves who have no clue what’s coming down the pike. By making yourself miserable about the frightful hell that awaits us, you feel better. Pessimism can be bliss too." -- Comment: Shnaps: "In this type of porn, you are watching YOURSELF being f*cked." -- MOAR!! (Thanks, D ;^))

"I wonder if anyone would notice if I deleted the original post...?"

"Despite their differences, psychoanalysis and AI have always shared theoretical affinities –among these, the challenge to the idea of the autonomous, intentional actor, the need for self-reference in theory building, and the need for objects such as censors to deal with internal conflict. The strength and the weakness of object theories are the same in both psychoanalysis and AI: the strength is a conceptual framework that offers rich possibilities for models of interactive process; the weakness is that the framework may be too rich. The postulated object may be too powerful: they explain the mind by postulating many minds within it."

"It certainly seems that the mainstream are all becoming increasingly interventionist. This is in part because they look at the symptoms, not at the cause of the symptoms. They see that there has been lunacy in the banking system, and think that this lunacy is the result of a free market. However, they do not ask why it is that people were happy to place their money so blindly in a system that was simply not working. They do not ask why there was such a flood of capital in the first place."

“Nobody wanted to get off this drug.” -- Cowards.

"Doomerism is a narcissistic behavior rooted in childhood experiences that set deep in the doomer's psyche an unconscious expectation of their own kind of doom, such as sudden decline into sickness or poverty, or some other misfortune. They then project this undefined general sense of personal foreboding onto the world... dooming is not about understanding the nature of a dysfunctional economic or financial system process and how long it is likely to take to reach its turning point so that one might deal constructively with the risks. It's about the emotional impact of the idea of the threat, the drama of it." -- Dooooooom

“They sleep like Count Dracula, he thought, junkies do. Staring straight up until all of the sudden they sit up, like a machine cranked from position A to position B. ‘It–must–be–day,’ the junkie says, or anyhow the tape in his head says. Plays him the instructions, the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio.... it sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something. The music from the clock radio is to wake you up; the music from the junkie is to get you to become more of a means for him to obtain more junk, in whatever way you can serve. He, a machine, will turn you into his machine. Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.” -- From Philip K. Dick’s 'A Scanner Darkly' (via Ambient Girl)

"This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth... On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships."

"the Daily Mail Headlineinator allows you to upload a PNG, GIF or JPEG image and have its subject matter automatically condemned by everybody's favourite alarmist right-wing negative vibe merchant. Be aware that the image you create will be publically viewable by anyone who looks in the right directory. In other words, don't put on here anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the real Daily Mail."

"He doesn’t catch cold."

"The analysis recommended that the government and health system educate people about chemical and biological attacks so they can recognize real symptoms, as well as quickly isolating both real and psychosomatic victims in the case of an attack or perceived attack." -- This is classic.

"... neurotic parents don't need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They're already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks. . . Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release."

'Someone cleverer than me once described this condition as having an "Alfred Hitchcock mind". I prefer to think of it as being perpetually stuck in the opening moments of an episode of Casualty, where every stepladder, plug socket, and loose-lidded food processor is a grinning, lurking deathtrap.'

Wieden and Kennedy: "Fail harder"

Wieden and Kennedy: "Fail fast"

"The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy... those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither."

"Suggests a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them."

"Suggests a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them."

"Suggests a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them."

"Web security firm Garlik surveyed hundreds of eight to 15-year-olds and found 20% have met an online friend in person - and one-in-20 do so regularly. - Just 7% of parents were aware of their child's behaviour, the study suggested."