QUOTE OF THE DAY: MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2014

“If you put fresh cucumbers into a barrel of pickles, they will soon turn into pickles.”

- The new mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, uses a colorful metaphor to explain the gravity of the situation in post-revolutionary Ukraine.

TESLA CEO COMPARES A.I. TO "SUMMONING THE DEMON"

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc, has a history of warning society about the potential dangers posed by research into artificial intelligence, once tweeting that AI could become "more dangerous than nuclear weapons." At today's Centennial Symposium at MIT, Musk expanded on his previous comments, stating:

If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

These comments make me wonder whether Musk is just resorting to a popular metaphor - along the lines of calling AI a "Frankenstein's Monster" - or if he grasps the very real parallels between what today's cutting edge scientists are doing when they work towards creating AI, and what sorcerers, alchemists, and ceremonial magicians have always done when attempting to communicate with or conjure up the powerful dark and primal forces that have haunted our universe since before we were even a twinkle in God (or the Demiurge's) titanic, all-seeing eye.

Readers of sf master Alfred Bester's unjustly neglected novel Golem100 know what I'm talkin' 'bout. That's the cover art, above, btw.

PHYSICIST WORKING ON TIME MACHINE JUST MIGHT SUCCEED...

The more I read from and/or about Dr Ronald Mallett, the University of Connecticut physics professor who wrote the 2006 memoir Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, the more that the man seems to me to emanate the kind of potentially world-historic, game-changing light that shines off so many other, ostensibly off-the-wall, world-historic, game-changing super-geniuses. People like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Buckminster Fuller , John C. Lilly, and Werner von Braun. 

If anyone else out there has any thoughts on Mallett or his work, please post it in the comments section, below.

THE BEST END OF THE WORLD MOVIE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE

With 1998's Last Night, Canadian director Don McKellar created a work of transcendent beauty and almost unbearably intense emotional poignancy. The end of the world has never felt so intimate, so possible, so viscerally present as it does in this film.

If you consider yourself an aficionado of apocalyptic cinema and you have yet to see this film, be prepared to make room in your personal Top Ten list. It's incredible to me that McKellar was still in his 30's when he directed this. 

The thing that he seems to get, and convey so eloquently, is that, in such a global endgame scenario, regret would loom just as large as dread, and that all our emotions - bad and good - will be heightened to an almost supernatural degree. 

Anyway, I've said too much already. Watch, experience, share. This film deserves to be seen by everyone... starting with you.

COURT CASE ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERS DARK PENTAGON SECRETS

According to this Washington Post article, a probe and court case stemming from an illegal "insider" deal relating to the manufacture and sale of hundreds of on-spec automatic rifle silencers to a tiny Pentagon planning office is leading investigators down some very dark and spooky hallways. Consider:

The mysterious workings of a Pentagon office that oversees clandestine operations are unraveling in federal court, where a criminal investigation has exposed a secret weapons program entwined with allegations of a sweetheart contract, fake badges and trails of destroyed evidence.

Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers. 

The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas. 

The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.

To anyone with even a modicum of imagination, the potential implications of this accidentally uncovered secret weapons deal are staggering. A tiny Pentagon back-office (with upwards of ten employees) orders nearly half a thousand silencers for automatic rifles... why? For whom? The article implies, without much evidence, that these weapons might have been intended for use "overseas" by illegal (but American-supported) paramilitaries, or, as they're more commonly known by their victims, death squads. But why not consider the possibility that these "Made in America" munitions were meant for a far more... domestic purpose?

This story, of course, will require a great deal more research and thought. For instance, what's the deal with this Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration? What is its history? Who has been involved with it? I'll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops, as will the participants at the Rigorous Intuition message board (the thread about this particular case can be found here).

You can learn more at the topmost link, obviously.

FOLLOWUP RE: KSM INTERROGATOR'S MURDER IN FLA

More information has begun trickling out about the final weeks and months in the life of Navy intelligence commander Alphonso Doss, the man whose tortures extracted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession re: masterminding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. You will recall that I first reported on his murder in February of this year in an October 12 posting on this very blog.

Over the last couple of days, more information has come to light, and is being shared by the community of participants at the discussion board for Jeff Wells' (sadly dormant) Rigorous Intuition website, which is where I first learned of this story before reporting on it. For instance, on top of his marital woes (his wife of 22 years was divorcing him), sources have now revealed that Doss was suffering from substance abuse issues... perhaps not surprising considering the time he spent in Central America and the Caribbean working on (ahem) "anti-drug" ops in the field.

Keep watching this space - and the Rigorous Intuition thread - for more information.

KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED'S INTERROGATOR MURDERED IN FLA HOTEL

Mainstream media sources were curiously, suspiciously silent about the news that Navy Commander Alphonso Mortimer Doss - the man who waterboarded al-Qaeda operative and alleged 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed upwards of two hundred times, among other tortures - was murdered in a Florida hotel room this past February. For instance, there is no mention of Doss's eminently noteworthy career highlights in this Florida Times-Union report on his murder, which instead focuses on the details of how his estranged wife and two others conspired to murder him for, allegedly, a million dollars in insurance money.

Indeed, one must dig deep to find information about Doss's exploits. For instance, in this Economic Policy Journal article, which reports in part:

In 2006 Doss was ordered by the Deputy Secretary of the Navy to assist in conducting the Annual Review Boards for suspected enemy-combatants held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
There, Doss’ team was charged with interviewing detainees and conducting boards to determine if the detainee in question should be released, transferred to another facility or be recommended for continued detention at Guantanamo Bay.
It was during this tour that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed admitted to Doss’ team that he was one of the masterminds behind 9/11.

The same article, using military and military journalistic sources, details how, earlier in his career, Doss was stationed in the Caribbean and Central America as part of a military operation targeting the narcotics trade, "completing two secret counter-drug missions" while "stationed onboard USS Connolly (1997/1998)".

Because we all know how much the American military just loves to say no to drugs, right?

A CHRONICLE OF ONE MAN'S AWAKENING

This is an interesting video documenting one man's awakening re: the terrorist attacks of 9/11 not being entirely what the mainstream media and Powers That Be would like us to believe. If you're a regular reader of Conspiracy Culture or Useless Eater Blog, nothing here will be new to you, except maybe for the admirable attitude of the narrator, who has some wise words for all Truth Seekers towards the end of this video.

ADAM CURTIS IS BLOGGING AGAIN

BBC documentarian Adam Curtis is, in this blogger's opinion, one of the most important public intellectuals of the first half of the 21st century. The fact that he is blogging again is cause for rejoicing, and perhaps evidence that he's hard at work on yet another amazing extended philosophical examination of one of the core problems that lurk at the heart of these dangerous, Apocalyptic times.

Bookmark his blog page, and expect a full rundown of his amazing career and works, which I will publish both here and at my "house blog", the Daily Dirt Diaspora, (see link at right) in coming months.