The new Universal Credit Rating Group (UCRG) is being set up to rival the existing agencies Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, and its first rating will be issued this year.
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Day: January 15, 2015
American Zombies: What’s So Scary About Brains?
Mention the term “zombie” to any pseudo-contemporary and you will undoubtedly get a laundry list of film references – from the legendary George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to Marc Forster’s more up-to-date take on a plague of undead, World War Z. In the company of brain-eaters, it could be argued that we Americans are just as wary of those capable of thinking for themselves. In a country dominated by commercialism and an unrelenting mass media, the life of the mind has not only been forgotten, but turned against. As noted in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.”
For an entire young population raised on a steady diet of beyond-the-bleeding-edge, ever-changing technology and so-called social media outlets requiring little if any physical interaction skills, has the notion of intelligence-driven communication abilities gone the way of the dodo bird…the rotary telephone…the 78 RPM record? It could be argued that today’s younger generation are slaves to the wills of those glowing rectangles that seemingly remain attached to their hands – sure, the mobile device revolution has in fact changed the way we obtain our information, but we’ve suddenly gone from viewing motion pictures in classic theater settings to playing them back on the go via a handheld screen just a few inches in size. Our entertainment absorption agenda has dropped to such an all-time low, many observers of this social phenomenon feel, that it’s not even about the art any longer…but merely how quickly we can download it, stream it or cloud it. Continue reading
Where Virtual Reality Is Going
“In the early 1960s, I was sitting in a crowded New York theater watching one of the first dubbed Japanese monster imports. I was hoping the police would stop the huge lizard, who was clomping around, wrecking the city, toppling buildings, squashing humans I gradually became aware that the audience was cheering for the monster. A cultural shift had happened. I hadn’t known about it until then.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Virtual Reality 101 – The Complete Guide to VR
I want to sketch the path along which virtual reality is going.
Right now, companies are selling improved tech that allows a helmet-wearer to see landscape and people in a wider perspective, and hear layers of sounds to the left and right, and above and below him. He can also walk inside the virtual set up.
He can’t touch everything he sees yet, but that’s coming. And perhaps one day, he’ll be able to sit down at a lavish meal and smell and taste the food.
Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. A five-sense envelope.
He’ll leap off a cliff, fly through the clouds, and attack a monster coming his way, and he’ll win. He’ll do this over and over, and begin to control his own attendant fear. (You can see the obvious military use.)
But…the money men behind virtual reality will want more. They’ll want to program the user’s reactions AHEAD OF TIME; his feelings, sensations, nervous-system responses, endocrine outputs, brain signals. Continue reading
What Is A National Nervous Breakdown?
“When the citizenry cease to believe the lies, the nation suffers a nervous breakdown.” – C H Smith
Last week I used the phrase National Nervous Breakdown without clarifying its meaning. (The War on Our Intuition That Something Is Fundamentally Amiss) By National Nervous Breakdown I do not mean the breakdown of civil order or the economy; I mean the breakdown of the officially sanctioned narratives that underpin the Status Quo. These Master Narratives legitimize the current arrangement; once they erode or break down, the legitimacy of the Status Quo is lost.
The shell remains in place, but nobody believes the system is a fair, just meritocracy.
Let’s consider the erosion or breakdown of these master narratives.
1. No accountability for abuse of power. The core narrative is no one is above the law, which means not only that everyone is supposedly treated equally before the law, but that abuses of power are punished or limited.
Now that police departments are essentially stealing from private citizens without due process via civil forfeiture, it’s clear there is no accountability for abuses of power.
This is simply one example of many in which blatant abuse of power is sanctioned by the Status Quo, and there is little recourse for citizens who have been abused unless they are wealthy enough to fund a high-powered legal team.
In effect, our legal system is broken. This mirrors the erosion and breakdown of accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when abuse of power was rampant and there was little recourse for the citizenry. Continue reading