First I want to say, as an amateur Futurologist, that the future arrived a few years ago. 2014 specifically. That was the year that science fiction become science fact. Teleportation would just be one quick example off the cuff, but there were many more. It was an astounding year for breakthroughs. But none of them with any meaningful application to society and humanity as a whole. Invisibility cloaks anyone?

This is my hypothesis: the convergence of the aggregate between technology and its application and utility to humanity as a whole, hit its peak in 1978.

1978 was Peak Tech! From there, it's all been downhill in real world terms for most humans on the planet. I can't think of one piece of technology that was invented after this date that has made any difference to humanity as a whole, in real terms. Sure, lots of increments, but increments don't count. Everything we have now was invented pre 1978, and all the advancements we have now are just increments of what was invented back then. That's my argument.

I'll give some examples:

+ The Car.
+ The Motorbike.
+ The Jet plane.
+ The Submarine.
+ The Ship.
+ The Jet Ski.
+ The Bicycle.
+ The Train/Tram.

World changing stuff for all of humanity. Name one advancement since 1978 in this field - transportation. You can't. There have been none. We are still a long way off from the flying car. 200 years I predict until they become commonplace. Jet packs might even exist today and rocket-assisted wing suits. But you won't find Brenda from no.23 utilising one to go grab a loaf of bread from the corner-shop on a lazy Sunday avo.

The Jumbo Jet - 747 was put in to service just a few years before the date of '78. Its impact has never been outdone. Sure, some small incremental steps. But that was pretty much the pinnacle in commercial aviation so far.

What other technology was invented pre 1978 that shook the world and changed all our lives?

+ The Guitar.
+ The Piano.
+ The Drum.

The first two are pretty new inventions, but the third one is probably the oldest invention of all with regard to ALL technology ever invented. It predates the use of the wheel and fire. Man was banging sticks on logs before he could speak. It was language before language. It advanced from a mere 'shit this makes a sound' to higher forms of tribal communication. Not just inter-tribal communication either. It became involved in ritual and I dare say forms of early magic. It bonded people. It spoke the ineffable before Homo sapiens' vocal tracts were ever deployed (apart from 'ugh' maybe).

Terrence McKenna advances a good argument in 'Food of the Gods' that psychadelic mushrooms were also one of the first drivers of human evolution and therefore one of the first and most potent technologies ever discovered. Not invented, mark you. Not all technologies are invented. Some are discovered, fully formed and ready to go.

"The drugs of the future will be much more like computers, the computers of the future will be much more like drugs." - Terence McKenna.

The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that very problem. - Terence McKenna.

Not so far fetched. We are right now making advances in nano-technology where microscopic machines will seek out broken parts in the human machine and fix them. Where does nano-tech end and drugs begin? Where do computers converge on that continuum?

As per magic mushrooms being a food from the gods, McKenna also noticed that when people are in a higher state, language breaks down, and glossolalia takes over: mfdklajjagogjrigjorgtkioeiyjumppphh! Ah ha.

He theorised that before language was 'invented' people in these primitive states would come to invent language itself through the use of glossolalia induced in these trance like states. Plausible. Now that is what I call technology, even if half true!

And even though modern man can now speak, has invented language, and can pursue sophistry to the nth degree, he still reverts to primitive glossolalia when in these 'higher' states, mimicking a time before language was born. There is a sense of 'oneness' with the universe and humanity when in these states. Of knowing what came before and knowing of what is to come. Time breaks down. It traverses both ways. It's silly hippy-dippy bullshit to us now, mang, but back then, hundreds of thousands of years ago? They wouldn't have known what the fuck was going on, but they most certainly would have known that something was up. And genetically and brain wise, I don't think they were that far removed from where we are at today. They just didn't have the tech!

Our ancestors would have been banging sticks and munching mushrooms before they could talk, before they knew what fire was, and at a point where the wheel would have seemed like such space age technology that they would have not have been able to envision a use for it.

And after man had discovered the concept of rhythm with his sticks on his logs, he would have eventually discovered that if you hit someone on the skull with it, it had a quite profound effect. It made people go to sleep. Forever. And warfare was born. See 2001 a Space Odyssey for more info. That's what I call 'chimping out'.

And I do believe they have even found evidence of early man utilising those old skulls as music technology themselves. They would line them up and play them as instruments. Each one providing a different tone and timbre that was new and curious to the primitive ear. [Insert drummer joke here]

So let us add these to the list:

+ Fire
+ The Wheel

Yes, technology advances in increments. Even the disruptive technologies advance in increments. Wheels within wheels. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so goes the famous quote.

As to both fire and the wheel - arguably two of the most disruptive technologies ever discovered or invented respectively (I'm sure I don't need to expound on why):

There is some debate between anthropologists (in my limited understanding) of when fire was roughly discovered. It was a long time ago for sure. But one thing is certain - humanity evolved and moved forward without it for many a millenia. I am talking about man's ability to create fire of course and harness it for his own use - technology. When he observed lightning strike tinder in the outback he probably just thought the gods were angry, if he even indeed had a concept of god at that point. Was God himself a human invention or discovery? A kind of technology? What about religion?

With regard to the wheel, I'm pretty sure someone has worked out when and where it was invented. But imagine going all those millenia without it. The thing is, the most primitive societies would not have even missed it. It was only when they became sufficiently advanced as a society that they found a need. Necessity is the mother of invention, said someone like Frank Zappa.

We also find ourselves coming full circle with tech as well. The most recent advances (was first discovered half a century ago but was buried as secret technology) in therapy for things like PTSD and alcoholism, utilise things like Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy). Reaching parts of the psyche necessary to heal, to advance and to make a real world difference in people's lives. That is what technology is all about. And it's an in your face example of something that is just being buried in front of our noses. Sure, we can do it ourselves, but we risk imprisonment (and bad trips).

If you really want to goof off with Futurology and predictions, tying in past world events from pre-history to the present, then I highly recommend having a look at the Timewave Zero software that McKenna was pushing for a while. It was all supposed to come to an end in 2012. It didn't. That's Futurology for you.

Technology is not just integrated circuits and more advanced versions of fire (see atomic bomb) and the wheel (see cogs and windmills and the rotor). It's stuff that really makes a difference at the most profound levels of our being, our humanity.

So we have the drum, magic mushrooms, language, fire and the wheel.

Top that motherfuckers!

To continue with my 'theory' of things peaking in 1978.

There were quite a few things that converged around that point.

There was 'peak oil' in the USA.

There was 'peak wages' with regard to how much people earned in real terms.

Some have mentioned that there was 'peak health' - the curability of diseases and disorders in accordance with their preponderance of them. Today cancer is rife, but still uncurable for the most part. Disorders such as ADHD are cropping up all the time with people wondering if they exist at all.

I think there was also 'peak quality of life'. According to some metric. At least in the western world.

I've seen many graphs and representations of this data from many different sources over the years. And that year always cries out: 1978!

I'm just throwing this out there. Not saying there is anything to it. It's just something that I have noticed. Most people aren't even looking or asking the question, so I think it counts for something, and I hope you don't think I'm wasting your time on this.

Let me give some more examples.

A little over a hundred years ago, electricity did not exist. 1880 perhaps when it was invented? People in 1910 were still not 'piped up' and were lighting their abodes with whale oil. That isn't so far back.

We can add:

+ Electricity

to the list of disruptive technologies.

And around this time, the world was just starting to discover really new worlds in the form of Quantum Mechanics. Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Schrodinger et al off the top of my head. Let me google it. Silly me, left out Heisenberg and Planck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference

That's the same year that most people were just starting to get 'piped up' with a switch in their living room that could turn on a light bulb! I doubt they gave much of a fuck about cats and double slits. The technology had arrived.

And here we are, over a century later, still waiting for the technology of Quantum Physics to really arrive, in a disruptive sense, I would argue. I know it is all around us and used in many technologies. Even the humble light-bulb and certainly the not so humble computer rely on its very principles. But disruptive? Name me one. I'm talking about the really far out stuff that Quantum physics says is possible, not just the mundane stuff we take for granted every day now. I'm probably wrong and being unfair on this one, but I'd love some examples from you.

Still, pretty fascinating to think that in the year people were going wild for switch on electricity, the future technology had been discovered that would pave the way for the atomic bomb (1945) and teleportation (which took over a century more to come to fruition 2014 - though not in a practical sense - that would be disruptive!).

I'm playing loose and fast with names and dates here, but you get the gist, I hope.

If you really want to know if a technology is disruptive or not, don't listen to those silicon valley moguls spewing buzzwords. Play this game: What if it was taken away?

Electricity and switch on lighting in homes. Kettles that boil water. Modern plumbing! Fancy doing without that? What would you rather have? Your iPhone or electricity? Moot point I know as your iPhone won't work without electricity from your tap in the wall.

The

+ Internet

was a big leap for mankind. But not as big a shock as the

+ Radio

was.

Just like Heavy Metal was an incremental advancement of Rock'n'roll, it was never as jarring and as shocking and as disruptive as Chuck Berry singing My Ding-a-Ling! Perspective.

All this pre 1978 remember. Talking of music.

+ Modern Music

Music also has not advanced technologically since 1978. The year that Disco and Punk took hold. Punk has died off now pretty much, but it was an original movement in itself, it just didn't lay the ground for many future generations. It was an evolutionary dead-end, though its spirit lives on. Disco, however is alive and well and ruling the day. All forms of modern music such as Techno, Drum 'n' Bass, Dubstep, EDM come from it.

Look how dead we are as a society, that we have not been able to invent even one new form of music this century. Where as around 1978, Punk and Disco were laying the ground (it could be argued that Punk was the progenitor for movements like the NWOBHM - Iron Maiden, Motorhead and the like, so let us not totally discount its cultural significance), we already had Country and Western, Rock, Classical, Folk, Avant-Garde and all the other genres that sub-let off them. Name me one genre invented after 1978 that did not have its progeny in one of these movements. You can't.

Music is important. It's one of mankind's greatest inventions. It touches every single person on this planet, no matter how poor, how isolated, no matter that they don't have a computer or internet connection (like most of humanity). Everyone is within earshot of a radio. Even those that break ships in the blistering sun for nothing but peanuts and cancer. Do you think they don't work to the tune of 'My Ding-a-Ling'? Of course not. It's probably their favourite song.

Basically, some weird shit happened last century and humanity has spiked through the roof. Population, disease, technology. That thing was oil. You can find all the charts and graphs for this yourself. Humanity hit log phase around the time of this discovery, like bacteria in a petri dish - exponential growth. See cellular automata and 'game of life' for further elucidation.

Now things are getting out of hand. No matter the technological advancements we make, they can never be enough for the whole of humanity to benefit. This is the crux. This is why it is getting harder to make changes that matter. This is what I believe Phoenix is talking about. Correct me if I'm wrong and stop me from going down this evolutionary dead-end myself, if so.

Let's explore the fuel angle a bit more. We got

+ Nuclear Energy
+ Nuclear Bomb

but still no Nuclear Fusion. It's decades away. Pretty soon we are going to start running out of all that 'easily extractable' cheap oil that is our ultimate fix for how we live. I may be wrong on this. But one thing is for sure, it won't be an easy transition to non-fossil fuels.

I won't get in to the Abiotic argument about oil. Or any of the conspiracy theory perpetual motion machine stuff. As I see it, Oil and our dependency on it has been the other most determining and driving factor for evolution, probably even more than fire, the wheel, language etc.

We have come too far too quickly. There needs to be a reckoning. Not necessarily some kind of Malthusian population crash, but who knows how it will manifest. People aren't stupid. They are clever. And they are greedy. And this is their downfall. And ours too.

We had

+ Agriculture/Intensive farming
+ Metallurgy

and all that that entailed, pre oil discovery. Things were moving along Ok for humanity. The discovery of oil put a major spanner in the workings. It is only through oil that we can maintain electrical supply. Electricity does not grow on trees. It comes from trees. Under the ground. Abiotic arguments not withstanding.

We need oil for pesticides, for fertilizers, for fuel. Electricity is not a fuel. It is a distribution mechanism for fuel. You can't make pesticides out of electricity, you can't drive modern agriculture without oil.

There are only 7 types of Crystal. Everything is a variation of that. There is only so much more to discover. Yet we all have so much more to learn.

Music:

Even though Hip-hop was a mash-up of established music types, nothing like it existed before it. Hip-Hop was created out of circumstance as DJs and Emcees did not have access to full bands, nor did they understand full music theory, just the basics of patterns, harmony, rhythm, and beat matching. It was invented, and it was new.

History still has not given Hip-hop its due. It has been the most commercially viable music genre in history (does not matter your views on the modern radio stuff, which is crap IMO). Plus, for better, or for worse, it reestablished the re-tooling of research into new music creation technologies which sped up advancements in DAW and other software platforms. Old relics music corps like Roland, for example, were seeing new money opportunities and all jumped back in to try and cash in.

All this above new tech for electro music. Anybody could buy a groove box and get something to hook-it-up to Garage band. Basement Electro producers have always been around. It was the Hip-Hop surge that put more emphasis on commercial tech which lead to the greater expansion of electro style music as a whole..... Before Abelton it was FruityLoops.

Let me wrap up my silly little thought experiment with a few more examples.

First I'd like to just qualify our dependence on fossil-fuels. It's not so much the energy we derive from them, it's the materials that we derive from them as well. I know that nuclear is n times more efficient. But can you make plastics out of a lump of uranium from the black hills and the badlands of the USA?

Technology always needs raw materials. Raw materials always need raw energy for discovery, extraction, purification, transport to point of manufacture, transport to point of market.

When this gay earth burns, and there is little left except for embers, do you think the future humans putting the pieces back together will work better with peat from the bogs, or uranium deep in the rocks? Will they fashion their cooking utensils from the clay from the earth, or will they mine it from the ores in the rocks, to further melt and mold?

When it comes down to it though, this may be man's greatest achievement of all:

+ Moon Landing

So take my baseline of 1978 being 'Peak-Tech' and roll that back a decade or so! What in God's beautiful garden have any of us done since that point?

How many millenia did man look up to that great big bright orb and think: one day we will go there, one day we will escape our earthly shackles and go forth in our exploration of the universe - the first step of a toddler towards becoming a record-shattering runner? Not that man could even think of such things back then, not having discovered fire, the wheel, language. Higher thought. But he could feel. Back then 'the feels' meant something. Man had little else. Today we know better. Or at least some of us do.

This is probably the greatest achievement in totality of all mankind. It's going to be a hard one to better. So you have a computer screen on a fingernail with a resolution of 100K - well done - hope you have some good glasses to read that with. Like you even 'need' it.

We use technology to hook up when we could just see/smell/hear people in real life in a 'club' - remember those? Trying to fill the void. Not just of our sexuality but our whole core existence as a human being. Our parents didn't love us? There's an app for that.

We are in the garden of Eden. We have everything we need. Humanity has everything at its disposal ten times over. Yet we manufacture this hell.

Some more examples:

+ Pain Relief

Is there a better pain killer than an opiate? Probably. Is it anywhere near to being manufactured and distributed to the poor over the world dying in agony of cancer? Nope. Most countries do not have access to the 'milk of the poppy'. It's not just for blotting out your wretched existence you know.

And what about

+ Penicillin

Antibiotics in general. That will be a fun party when it's over won't it? Do we have much technology in place for that one?

Opiates and Antibiotics - all invented/discovered before 1978.

The ability to take away the worst pain known to man, to cure the worst diseases known to man. Any advances like that post 1978 you care to name? Thought not.

I know this is an arbitrary point. I'm just playing a game. Please don't think of me as more of a lunatic than I already am.

Couple more things to wrap up. Talking of going to the moon and space exploration and all that. What about

+ The Telescope
+ Astronomy

Sure we make incremental advances in both. We even make incremental advances with regard to

+ The Microscope

But can you name me one thing that has been added to humanity's box of tricks since those? Post 1978 for extra points. Hard one, eh?

But there will be further advances to come, I've no doubt. We are on the cusp of great things. For example, we are just getting in to the realm of DSP.

Funnily enough

+ DSP (Digital Signal Processing)

was actually invented and utilised for the good of humanity as a technology in what year?

That's right!

19 seventy fucking 8 (1978).

In 1976, Richard Wiggins proposed the Speak & Spell concept to Paul Breedlove, Larry Brantingham, and Gene Frantz at Texas Instrument's Dallas research facility. Two years later in 1978 they produced the first Speak & Spell, with the technological centerpiece being the TMS5100,[5] the industry's first digital signal processor. It also set other milestones, being the first chip to use Linear predictive coding to perform speech synthesis.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor

1978.

Every.
Single.
Fucking.
Time!

DSP. The future.

Digital Signal Processing is one of the most powerful technologies that will shape science and engineering in the twenty-first century. Revolutionary changes have already been made in a broad range of fields: communications, medical imaging, radar & sonar, high fidelity music reproduction, and oil prospecting, to name just a few. Each of these areas has developed a deep DSP technology, with its own algorithms, mathematics, and specialized techniques. This combination of breath and depth makes it impossible for any one individual to master all of the DSP technology that has been developed. DSP education involves two tasks: learning general concepts that apply to the field as a whole, and learning specialized techniques for your particular area of interest. This chapter starts our journey into the world of Digital Signal Processing by describing the dramatic effect that DSP has made in several diverse fields. The revolution has begun.


The roots of DSP are in the 1960s and 1970s when digital computers first became available. Computers were expensive during this era, and DSP was limited to only a few critical applications. Pioneering efforts were made in four key areas: radar & sonar, where national security was at risk; oil exploration, where large amounts of money could be made; space exploration, where the data are irreplaceable; and medical imaging, where lives could be saved. The personal computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s caused DSP to exploded with new applications. Rather than being motivated by military and government needs, DSP was suddenly driven by the commercial marketplace. Anyone who thought they could make money in the rapidly expanding field was suddenly a DSP vender. DSP reached the public in such products as: mobile telephones, compact disc players, and electronic voice mail.

http://www.dspguide.com/ch1/1.htm


This is freely available education. It may change your world. Even those that don't think they need to understand DSP will find something useful here to apply to their technology. I'm sure. Maybe. Probably.

http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm

This whole DSP thing is tied in with computers and with robotics as much as anything else. It is the future of disruptive technology. It is the core of the automation that will rob many of us of certain jobs. I got in to it trying to understand musical instruments such as synthesizers better. That and all the Effects processors such as Limiters and Compressors, Reverbs and Clippers etc.

It was instructive that a few years ago now, one of the vendors that made a high level program to do low level shit like make up your own synthesizers etc. - well they pulled the plug, sold out and turned the program itself in to something that you use for controlling robotics. Big fuss. Look up Flowstone. They knew which way the wind was blowing.

I used to dabble in robotics a couple of decades back. Pneumatics and hydraulics kind of stuff. Logic gates powered by compressed air - essentially mini computers. Fun stuff. Just fucking about. It's how humanity learns. That and dropping your bit of dead antelope in to the fire that a lightning spark started and you were too stupid to put out and too hungry not to eat the remains of. 'Happy' accidents. I invented FuckingMachinesDotCom that day. It didn't advance humanity very much though, I'll admit.

The world of technology is fueled as much by discoveries as it is by inventions.

But yeah, Speak and Spell -

1978 they produced the first Speak & Spell, with the technological centerpiece being the TMS5100,[5] the industry's first digital signal processor.

1978.

Every single fucking time.

:-)

I am with Rigsby, 1978 was the peak quality of life.

Not much of worth has happened since then, and we have gone backwards in a hell of a lot of ways.

(05-28-2017 03:47 PM)kosko Wrote:  Music:

Even though Hip-hop was a mash-up of established music types, nothing like it existed before it. Hip-Hop was created out of circumstance as DJs and Emcees did not have access to full bands, nor did they understand full music theory, just the basics of patterns, harmony, rhythm, and beat matching. It was invented, and it was new.

History still has not given Hip-hop its due. It has been the most commercially viable music genre in history (does not matter your views on the modern radio stuff, which is crap IMO). Plus, for better, or for worse, it reestablished the re-tooling of research into new music creation technologies which sped up advancements in DAW and other software platforms. Old relics music corps like Roland, for example, were seeing new money opportunities and all jumped back in to try and cash in.

All this above new tech for electro music. Anybody could buy a groove box and get something to hook-it-up to Garage band. Basement Electro producers have always been around. It was the Hip-Hop surge that put more emphasis on commercial tech which lead to the greater expansion of electro style music as a whole..... Before Abelton it was FruityLoops.

I'm with you.

Go-go music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-go

Go-go is a popular music subgenre associated with funk that originated in the Washington, D.C., area during the mid-60s to late-70s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_school_hip-hop (approximately 1979–1983)

Notice something about those dates?

Yup. 1978 is your boy!

In fact, if you really drill deep down in to it, 1978 was probably the crucible year for all of the melting materials that made up hip-hop. From the earlier Go-go scene, to the just about emerging Rap, and the very start of old school Hip-hop.

I totally agree with you on this kosko. Your post only strengthens my point about 1978 being a pivotal year. It was the year the modern incarnation of Hip-hop was born (through old school).

And you are right. It has never been bettered. Not commercially, not critically. Ok, things might have gone down hill a bit with the current crop of clowns, but the point still stands.

Hip-hop never got its due. It never will. But the facts speak for themselves. It was one of the most potent forms of new music technology ever invented. And gangster rap (love it or hate it) and the commercial shit we see today owes it a debt of gratitude.

In that respect, I suppose that Hip-hop plowed its own furrow.

In parallel to Disco. It was not borne by it (though some might argue that if you want to get really deep).

My argument still stands. All this technology (albeit musical) was invented by 1978, or its progenitors and precursors were at least.

Hip-hop has stood the test of time, critically and commercially. There is no argument there. Funny to think at this one point in history though, you had Punk over in the UK, Disco in San Francisco and Hip-hop brewing up North on the coast. Man, what a time to be alive. And today, we have Ed fucking Sheer Shit and Ad fucking Delete.

I'm with you brother.

Thank you for strengthening my argument.

We can get in to the finer points of Time-Stretching algorithms later if you like. But you are right about that as well. It did drive advances in DAWs like FLStudio and Ableton. But even those worlds are stagnating now. Technology is slowing down.

It's still a fucking amazing time to be alive though. But like the folks of yore, we are blind, not just to the future, but what stands right before us - a palm of your hand distance away.

It is not technology we lack. It is vision. And more, the strength to dare to have that vision as we are corralled evermore in to little boxes.

Hip-hop will have it's day again. It will mutate and survive.

Eh eh, my my, hip and hop will never die...

increments count for everything. You might say the automobile was disruptive and revolutionary. But what was the disruptive innovation? It wasn't until Ford and the Model T in 1919 that cars started changing everyday life. But that was more than 30 years after the first car, and from 1900 to 1919 the industry evolved rapidly. The interstate highways we take for granted in the US were not built until the 60s.

The basic internet technology was finished in the 80s. But youtube wasn't until 2005 and even then video quality was low res. Now, millenials get their news from youtube more than network tv. That is disruption.

You say GPS is revolutionary, but would it be as valuable as it is without Google maps?

In 1990, if you wanted to learn about the history of the automobile, you had to go to the library or own am encyclopedia. I just reviewed it from my phone. How is that not life-changing?

How many of you write and mail a personal check for each and every bill you pay? How many use auto pay and review your budget for 5 minutes every month instead?

These innovations were all life changing, all incremental, and all depend on some key piece of technology. Trying to evaluate the pace of technological change and then ruling out incremental improvements and software makes no sense.

(05-28-2017 01:59 PM)Rigsby Wrote:  ...
The first two are pretty new inventions, but the third one is probably the oldest invention of all with regard to ALL technology ever invented. It predates the use of the wheel and fire. Man was banging sticks on logs before he could speak. It was language before language. It advanced from a mere 'shit this makes a sound' to higher forms of tribal communication. Not just inter-tribal communication either. It became involved in ritual and I dare say forms of early magic. It bonded people. It spoke the ineffable before Homo sapiens' vocal tracts were ever deployed (apart from 'ugh' maybe).

Terrence McKenna advances a good argument in 'Food of the Gods' that psychadelic mushrooms were also one of the first drivers of human evolution and therefore one of the first and most potent technologies ever discovered. Not invented, mark you. Not all technologies are invented. Some are discovered, fully formed and ready to go.

"The drugs of the future will be much more like computers, the computers of the future will be much more like drugs." - Terence McKenna.

The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that very problem. - Terence McKenna.

Not so far fetched. We are right now making advances in nano-technology where microscopic machines will seek out broken parts in the human machine and fix them. Where does nano-tech end and drugs begin? Where do computers converge on that continuum?

As per magic mushrooms being a food from the gods, McKenna also noticed that when people are in a higher state, language breaks down, and glossolalia takes over: mfdklajjagogjrigjorgtkioeiyjumppphh! Ah ha.

He theorised that before language was 'invented' people in these primitive states would come to invent language itself through the use of glossolalia induced in these trance like states. Plausible. Now that is what I call technology, even if half true!

And even though modern man can now speak, has invented language, and can pursue sophistry to the nth degree, he still reverts to primitive glossolalia when in these 'higher' states, mimicking a time before language was born. There is a sense of 'oneness' with the universe and humanity when in these states. Of knowing what came before and knowing of what is to come. Time breaks down. It traverses both ways. It's silly hippy-dippy bullshit to us now, mang, but back then, hundreds of thousands of years ago? They wouldn't have known what the fuck was going on, but they most certainly would have known that something was up. And genetically and brain wise, I don't think they were that far removed from where we are at today. They just didn't have the tech!

Our ancestors would have been banging sticks and munching mushrooms before they could talk, before they knew what fire was, and at a point where the wheel would have seemed like such space age technology that they would have not have been able to envision a use for it.

...

We also find ourselves coming full circle with tech as well. The most recent advances (was first discovered half a century ago but was buried as secret technology) in therapy for things like PTSD and alcoholism, utilise things like Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy). Reaching parts of the psyche necessary to heal, to advance and to make a real world difference in people's lives. That is what technology is all about. And it's an in your face example of something that is just being buried in front of our noses. Sure, we can do it ourselves, but we risk imprisonment (and bad trips).

If you really want to goof off with Futurology and predictions, tying in past world events from pre-history to the present, then I highly recommend having a look at the Timewave Zero software that McKenna was pushing for a while. It was all supposed to come to an end in 2012. It didn't. That's Futurology for you.

Technology is not just integrated circuits and more advanced versions of fire (see atomic bomb) and the wheel (see cogs and windmills and the rotor). It's stuff that really makes a difference at the most profound levels of our being, our humanity.

So we have the drum, magic mushrooms, language, fire and the wheel.

Top that motherfuckers!

McKenna is a fraud, he's a deep state social engineer, closely connected with Huxley and MK Ultra, along with timothy Leary, Gordon Wasson, Alan Watts.

His concept of drug-fueled "archaic revival" boils down to weaponized anthropology, it was based on fraudulent anthropological concepts (similar to Margaret Mead's pseudo-research) and used successfully to cause Boomers to turn away from traditional values and to drop out from the political process by dumbing them down through a drug-centric fake anti-establishment culture. It has been successful beyond their wildest expectations.

Jan Irvin and Joe Atwill have done a great job covering this:

http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturin...jan-irvin/






Joe Atwill joins Tim Kelly to discuss "weaponized anthropology", the creation of the Sixties Counter-Culture by the intelligence agencies and degradation of society through entertainment and the arts. We talk about how the CIA used the research of anthropologists to manipulate American society and bring about an "archaic revival." He argues that music and other forms of entertainment have been weaponized and used against the general population in order to secure oligarchic rule.

There is an Aeon essay that sort of agrees with Rigby's 1978 theory. It contends most important technological progress was made during the golden quarter of the 20th century (1945-1970s). Combat pressure, which bred high risk-tolerance and concentration, is one of the reason for the technological boom. Now we are experiencing stale peace, and all the low-hanging fruits are picked.

https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-s...-to-a-halt

Quote:The golden quarter
Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled?

Michael Hanlon
Has "innovation" supplanted the idea of progress?


We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like magic only half a century ago: cloned organs, stem-cell therapies to repair our very DNA. Even now, life expectancy in some rich countries is improving by five hours a day. A day! Surely immortality, or something very like it, is just around the corner.

The notion that our 21st-century world is one of accelerating advances is so dominant that it seems churlish to challenge it. Almost every week we read about ‘new hopes’ for cancer sufferers, developments in the lab that might lead to new cures, talk of a new era of space tourism and super-jets that can fly round the world in a few hours. Yet a moment’s thought tells us that this vision of unparalleled innovation can’t be right, that many of these breathless reports of progress are in fact mere hype, speculation – even fantasy.

Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics. Space travel. Civil rights.

There is more. Feminism. Teenagers. The Green Revolution in agriculture. Decolonisation. Popular music. Mass aviation. The birth of the gay rights movement. Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles. High-speed trains. We put a man on the Moon, sent a probe to Mars, beat smallpox and discovered the double-spiral key of life. The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.

Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. The US economist Tyler Cowen, in his essay The Great Stagnation (2011), argues that, in the US at least, a technological plateau has been reached. Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox. As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’

Economists describe this extraordinary period in terms of increases in wealth. After the Second World War came a quarter-century boom; GDP-per-head in the US and Europe rocketed. New industrial powerhouses arose from the ashes of Japan. Germany experienced its Wirtschaftswunder. Even the Communist world got richer. This growth has been attributed to massive postwar government stimulus plus a happy nexus of low fuel prices, population growth and high Cold War military spending.

But alongside this was that extraordinary burst of human ingenuity and societal change. This is commented upon less often, perhaps because it is so obvious, or maybe it is seen as a simple consequence of the economics. We saw the biggest advances in science and technology: if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be working. But we also saw a shift in social attitudes every bit as profound. In even the most enlightened societies before 1945, attitudes to race, sexuality and women’s rights were what we would now consider antediluvian. By 1971, those old prejudices were on the back foot. Simply put, the world had changed.

But surely progress today is real? Well, take a look around. Look up and the airliners you see are basically updated versions of the ones flying in the 1960s – slightly quieter Tristars with better avionics. In 1971, a regular airliner took eight hours to fly from London to New York; it still does. And in 1971, there was one airliner that could do the trip in three hours. Now, Concorde is dead. Our cars are faster, safer and use less fuel than they did in 1971, but there has been no paradigm shift.

And yes, we are living longer, but this has disappointingly little to do with any recent breakthroughs. Since 1970, the US Federal Government has spent more than $100 billion in what President Richard Nixon dubbed the ‘War on Cancer’. Far more has been spent globally, with most wealthy nations boasting well-funded cancer‑research bodies. Despite these billions of investment, this war has been a spectacular failure. In the US, the death rates for all kinds of cancer dropped by only 5 per cent in the period 1950-2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Even if you strip out confounding variables such as age (more people are living long enough to get cancer) and better diagnosis, the blunt fact is that, with most kinds of cancer, your chances in 2014 are not much better than they were in 1974. In many cases, your treatment will be pretty much the same.


For the past 20 years, as a science writer, I have covered such extraordinary medical advances as gene therapy, cloned replacement organs, stem-cell therapy, life-extension technologies, the promised spin-offs from genomics and tailored medicine. None of these new treatments is yet routinely available. The paralyzed still cannot walk, the blind still cannot see. The human genome was decoded (one post-Golden Quarter triumph) nearly 15 years ago and we’re still waiting to see the benefits that, at the time, were confidently asserted to be ‘a decade away’. We still have no real idea how to treat chronic addiction or dementia. The recent history of psychiatric medicine is, according to one eminent British psychiatrist I spoke to, ‘the history of ever-better placebos’. And most recent advances in longevity have come about by the simple expedient of getting people to give up smoking, eat better, and take drugs to control blood pressure.

There has been no new Green Revolution. We still drive steel cars powered by burning petroleum spirit or, worse, diesel. There has been no new materials revolution since the Golden Quarter’s advances in plastics, semi-conductors, new alloys and composite materials. After the dizzying breakthroughs of the early- to mid-20th century, physics seems (Higgs boson aside) to have ground to a halt. String Theory is apparently our best hope of reconciling Albert Einstein with the Quantum world, but as yet, no one has any idea if it is even testable. And nobody has been to the Moon for 42 years.

Why has progress stopped? Why, for that matter, did it start when it did, in the dying embers of the Second World War?

One explanation is that the Golden Age was the simple result of economic growth and technological spinoffs from the Second World War. It is certainly true that the war sped the development of several weaponisable technologies and medical advances. The Apollo space programme probably could not have happened when it did without the aerospace engineer Wernher Von Braun and the V-2 ballistic missile. But penicillin, the jet engine and even the nuclear bomb were on the drawing board before the first shots were fired. They would have happened anyway.

Conflict spurs innovation, and the Cold War played its part – we would never have got to the Moon without it. But someone has to pay for everything. The economic boom came to an end in the 1970s with the collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods trading agreements and the oil shocks. So did the great age of innovation. Case closed, you might say.

And yet, something doesn’t quite fit. The 1970s recession was temporary: we came out of it soon enough. What’s more, in terms of Gross World Product, the world is between two and three times richer now than it was then. There is more than enough money for a new Apollo, a new Concorde and a new Green Revolution. So if rapid economic growth drove innovation in the 1950s and ’60s, why has it not done so since?

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen argues that progress ground to a halt because the ‘low-hanging fruit’ had been plucked off. These fruits include the cultivation of unused land, mass education, and the capitalisation by technologists of the scientific breakthroughs made in the 19th century. It is possible that the advances we saw in the period 1945-1970 were similarly quick wins, and that further progress is much harder. Going from the prop-airliners of the 1930s to the jets of the 1960s was, perhaps, just easier than going from today’s aircraft to something much better.

But history suggests that this explanation is fanciful. During periods of technological and scientific expansion, it has often seemed that a plateau has been reached, only for a new discovery to shatter old paradigms completely. The most famous example was when, in 1900, Lord Kelvin declared physics to be more or less over, just a few years before Einstein proved him comprehensively wrong. As late as the turn of the 20th century, it was still unclear how powered, heavier-than-air aircraft would develop, with several competing theories left floundering in the wake of the Wright brothers’ triumph (which no one saw coming).

Lack of money, then, is not the reason that innovation has stalled. What we do with our money might be, however. Capitalism was once the great engine of progress. It was capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries that built roads and railways, steam engines and telegraphs (another golden era). Capital drove the industrial revolution.

Now, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. A report by Credit Suisse this October found that the richest 1 per cent of humans own half the world’s assets. That has consequences. Firstly, there is a lot more for the hyper-rich to spend their money on today than there was in the golden age of philanthropy in the 19th century. The superyachts, fast cars, private jets and other gewgaws of Planet Rich simply did not exist when people such as Andrew Carnegie walked the earth and, though they are no doubt nice to have, these fripperies don’t much advance the frontiers of knowledge. Furthermore, as the French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out in Capital (2014), money now begets money more than at any time in recent history. When wealth accumulates so spectacularly by doing nothing, there is less impetus to invest in genuine innovation.


During the Golden Quarter, inequality in the world’s economic powerhouses was, remarkably, declining. In the UK, that trend levelled off a few years later, to reach a historic low point in 1977. Is it possible that there could be some relationship between equality and innovation? Here’s a sketch of how that might work.

As success comes to be defined by the amount of money one can generate in the very short term, progress is in turn defined not by making things better, but by rendering them obsolete as rapidly as possible so that the next iteration of phones, cars or operating systems can be sold to a willing market.

In particular, when share prices are almost entirely dependent on growth (as opposed to market share or profit), built-in obsolescence becomes an important driver of ‘innovation’. Half a century ago, makers of telephones, TVs and cars prospered by building products that their buyers knew (or at least believed) would last for many years. No one sells a smartphone on that basis today; the new ideal is to render your own products obsolete as fast as possible. Thus the purpose of the iPhone 6 is not to be better than the iPhone 5, but to make aspirational people buy a new iPhone (and feel better for doing so). In a very unequal society, aspiration becomes a powerful force. This is new, and the paradoxical result is that true innovation, as opposed to its marketing proxy, is stymied. In the 1960s, venture capital was willing to take risks, particularly in the emerging electronic technologies. Now it is more conservative, funding start-ups that offer incremental improvements on what has gone before.

But there is more to it than inequality and the failure of capital.

During the Golden Quarter, we saw a boom in public spending on research and innovation. The taxpayers of Europe, the US and elsewhere replaced the great 19th‑century venture capitalists. And so we find that nearly all the advances of this period came either from tax-funded universities or from popular movements. The first electronic computers came not from the labs of IBM but from the universities of Manchester and Pennsylvania. (Even the 19th-century analytical engine of Charles Babbage was directly funded by the British government.) The early internet came out of the University of California, not Bell or Xerox. Later on, the world wide web arose not from Apple or Microsoft but from CERN, a wholly public institution. In short, the great advances in medicine, materials, aviation and spaceflight were nearly all pump-primed by public investment. But since the 1970s, an assumption has been made that the private sector is the best place to innovate.

The story of the past four decades might seem to cast doubt on that belief. And yet we cannot pin the stagnation of ingenuity on a decline in public funding. Tax spending on research and development has, in general, increased in real and relative terms in most industrialised nations even since the end of the Golden Quarter. There must be another reason why this increased investment is not paying more dividends.

Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes. Many of the achievements of the Golden Quarter just wouldn’t be attempted now. The assault on smallpox, spearheaded by a worldwide vaccination campaign, probably killed several thousand people, though it saved tens of millions more. In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible.

The time for a new drug candidate to gain approval in the US rose from less than eight years in the 1960s to nearly 13 years by the 1990s. Many promising new treatments now take 20 years or more to reach the market. In 2011, several medical charities and research institutes in the UK accused EU-driven clinical regulations of ‘stifling medical advances’. It would not be an exaggeration to say that people are dying in the cause of making medicine safer.

Risk-aversion has become a potent weapon in the war against progress on other fronts. In 1992, the Swiss genetic engineer Ingo Potrykus developed a variety of rice in which the grain, rather than the leaves, contain a large concentration of Vitamin A. Deficiency in this vitamin causes blindness and death among hundreds of thousands every year in the developing world. And yet, thanks to a well-funded fear-mongering campaign by anti-GM fundamentalists, the world has not seen the benefits of this invention.


In the energy sector, civilian nuclear technology was hobbled by a series of mega-profile ‘disasters’, including Three Mile Island (which killed no one) and Chernobyl (which killed only dozens). These incidents caused a global hiatus into research that could, by now, have given us safe, cheap and low-carbon energy. The climate change crisis, which might kill millions, is one of the prices we are paying for 40 years of risk-aversion.

Apollo almost certainly couldn’t happen today. That’s not because people aren’t interested in going to the Moon any more, but because the risk – calculated at a couple-of-per-cent chance of astronauts dying – would be unacceptable. Boeing took a huge risk when it developed the 747, an extraordinary 1960s machine that went from drawing board to flight in under five years. Its modern equivalent, the Airbus A380 (only slightly larger and slightly slower), first flew in 2005 – 15 years after the project go-ahead. Scientists and technologists were generally celebrated 50 years ago, when people remembered what the world was like before penicillin, vaccination, modern dentistry, affordable cars and TV. Now, we are distrustful and suspicious – we have forgotten just how dreadful the world was pre-Golden Quarter.


Risk played its part, too, in the massive postwar shift in social attitudes. People, often the young, were prepared to take huge, physical risks to right the wrongs of the pre-war world. The early civil rights and anti-war protestors faced tear gas or worse. In the 1960s, feminists faced social ridicule, media approbation and violent hostility. Now, mirroring the incremental changes seen in technology, social progress all too often finds itself down the blind alleyways of political correctness. Student bodies used to be hotbeds of dissent, even revolution; today’s hyper-conformist youth is more interested in the policing of language and stifling debate when it counters the prevailing wisdom. Forty years ago a burgeoning media allowed dissent to flower. Today’s very different social media seems, despite democratic appearances, to be enforcing a climate of timidity and encouraging groupthink.

Does any of this really matter? So what if the white heat of technological progress is cooling off a bit? The world is, in general, far safer, healthier, wealthier and nicer than it has ever been. The recent past was grim; the distant past disgusting. As Steven Pinker and others have argued, levels of violence in most human societies had been declining since well before the Golden Quarter and have continued to decline since.

We are living longer. Civil rights have become so entrenched that gay marriage is being legalised across the world and any old-style racist thinking is met with widespread revulsion. The world is better in 2014 than it was in 1971.

And yes, we have seen some impressive technological advances. The modern internet is a wonder, more impressive in many ways than Apollo. We might have lost Concorde but you can fly across the Atlantic for a couple of days’ wages – remarkable. Sci-fi visions of the future often had improbable spacecraft and flying cars but, even in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles of 2019, Rick Deckard had to use a payphone to call Rachael.

But it could have been so much better. If the pace of change had continued, we could be living in a world where Alzheimer’s was treatable, where clean nuclear power had ended the threat of climate change, where the brilliance of genetics was used to bring the benefits of cheap and healthy food to the bottom billion, and where cancer really was on the back foot. Forget colonies on the Moon; if the Golden Quarter had become the Golden Century, the battery in your magic smartphone might even last more than a day.

It took Europe over 2,000 years to progress from bronze to iron (Bronze Age to Iron Age).

It took about 5,000 years to go from riding and dragging things behind horses to get to the next best thing.

A century ago, half of the homes in America didn't even half electricity.

But somehow things like 3D printing, stem cell, etc. are only "incremental" increases in technology.

aeon essay:

Cancer research is advancing at a pace today that was not possible in 1970s, thanks to genetic sequencing technology and computational advances.

you can make argument that we have addressed most of the low hanging fruit with regards to transportation, domestic labor, and infectious disease, and that was done before 1980. It's not that tech has slowed down, it's that the problems have gotten a lot harder.

Also, future predictions have to know human psychology, and be able to predict that, too. Wall-E has a particularly pessimistic take.

Stem cell research and genetic engineering are still pioneering fields which have the potential to be planet changing, for better or worse.

I still predict that the first wealthy nation to abandon all moral restraint on genetic tinkering will become the next and perhaps final superpower on earth.

(05-28-2017 09:45 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  Stem cell research and genetic engineering are still pioneering fields which have the potential to be planet changing, for better or worse.

I still predict that the first wealthy nation to abandon all moral restraint on genetic tinkering will become the next and perhaps final superpower on earth.

Agreed.

There you have it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...edict.html

(05-28-2017 02:58 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  As to electric cars - there are small companies - one in Poland that transforms conventional cars to electric ones. It costs from a few grand to 20.000$ for the most expensive one. They make better electric cars than the big manufacturers and they do it cheaper. The reach of the 20.000$ transformation of the Volkswagen Golf by the way is 600 miles.

There are scores of small-time inventors who constantly come up with cheaper alternatives that somehow strangely elude the big manufacturers.

As for example for the plastic transformation back to oil and fuel - of course they can do it, but why should they? That would cut into their supply matrix even more. So they tell us the lie that plastic cannot be recycled while in truth a country full of Hobos could easily live off that business alone.

Most of the holdups are what I would call minor like with the light-bulbs. Sure - we could have close to eternal light-bulbs like they used to do in the East German Wolfram factory, but they rather want to sell us hundreds of bulbs across our lives.

Where it gets truly evil however is when utterly game-chaning tech is held up that would for example make the petrol industry and combustion engine redundant (all while claiming that you need to pay carbon taxes to save the planet). Another point is cancer research which is a joke - collecting money for cancer research just gives it to Big Pharma who pour it all back into a "better" version of mustard gas.

I would be interest to know the name of this company in Poland if you have it?

(05-28-2017 06:01 PM)911 Wrote:  

(05-28-2017 01:59 PM)Rigsby Wrote:  ...
The first two are pretty new inventions, but the third one is probably the oldest invention of all with regard to ALL technology ever invented. It predates the use of the wheel and fire. Man was banging sticks on logs before he could speak. It was language before language. It advanced from a mere 'shit this makes a sound' to higher forms of tribal communication. Not just inter-tribal communication either. It became involved in ritual and I dare say forms of early magic. It bonded people. It spoke the ineffable before Homo sapiens' vocal tracts were ever deployed (apart from 'ugh' maybe).

Terrence McKenna advances a good argument in 'Food of the Gods' that psychadelic mushrooms were also one of the first drivers of human evolution and therefore one of the first and most potent technologies ever discovered. Not invented, mark you. Not all technologies are invented. Some are discovered, fully formed and ready to go.

"The drugs of the future will be much more like computers, the computers of the future will be much more like drugs." - Terence McKenna.

The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that very problem. - Terence McKenna.

Not so far fetched. We are right now making advances in nano-technology where microscopic machines will seek out broken parts in the human machine and fix them. Where does nano-tech end and drugs begin? Where do computers converge on that continuum?

As per magic mushrooms being a food from the gods, McKenna also noticed that when people are in a higher state, language breaks down, and glossolalia takes over: mfdklajjagogjrigjorgtkioeiyjumppphh! Ah ha.

He theorised that before language was 'invented' people in these primitive states would come to invent language itself through the use of glossolalia induced in these trance like states. Plausible. Now that is what I call technology, even if half true!

And even though modern man can now speak, has invented language, and can pursue sophistry to the nth degree, he still reverts to primitive glossolalia when in these 'higher' states, mimicking a time before language was born. There is a sense of 'oneness' with the universe and humanity when in these states. Of knowing what came before and knowing of what is to come. Time breaks down. It traverses both ways. It's silly hippy-dippy bullshit to us now, mang, but back then, hundreds of thousands of years ago? They wouldn't have known what the fuck was going on, but they most certainly would have known that something was up. And genetically and brain wise, I don't think they were that far removed from where we are at today. They just didn't have the tech!

Our ancestors would have been banging sticks and munching mushrooms before they could talk, before they knew what fire was, and at a point where the wheel would have seemed like such space age technology that they would have not have been able to envision a use for it.

...

We also find ourselves coming full circle with tech as well. The most recent advances (was first discovered half a century ago but was buried as secret technology) in therapy for things like PTSD and alcoholism, utilise things like Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy). Reaching parts of the psyche necessary to heal, to advance and to make a real world difference in people's lives. That is what technology is all about. And it's an in your face example of something that is just being buried in front of our noses. Sure, we can do it ourselves, but we risk imprisonment (and bad trips).

If you really want to goof off with Futurology and predictions, tying in past world events from pre-history to the present, then I highly recommend having a look at the Timewave Zero software that McKenna was pushing for a while. It was all supposed to come to an end in 2012. It didn't. That's Futurology for you.

Technology is not just integrated circuits and more advanced versions of fire (see atomic bomb) and the wheel (see cogs and windmills and the rotor). It's stuff that really makes a difference at the most profound levels of our being, our humanity.

So we have the drum, magic mushrooms, language, fire and the wheel.

Top that motherfuckers!

McKenna is a fraud, he's a deep state social engineer, closely connected with Huxley and MK Ultra, along with timothy Leary, Gordon Wasson, Alan Watts.

His concept of drug-fueled "archaic revival" boils down to weaponized anthropology, it was based on fraudulent anthropological concepts (similar to Margaret Mead's pseudo-research) and used successfully to cause Boomers to turn away from traditional values and to drop out from the political process by dumbing them down through a drug-centric fake anti-establishment culture. It has been successful beyond their wildest expectations.

Jan Irvin and Joe Atwill have done a great job covering this:

http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturin...jan-irvin/






Joe Atwill joins Tim Kelly to discuss "weaponized anthropology", the creation of the Sixties Counter-Culture by the intelligence agencies and degradation of society through entertainment and the arts. We talk about how the CIA used the research of anthropologists to manipulate American society and bring about an "archaic revival." He argues that music and other forms of entertainment have been weaponized and used against the general population in order to secure oligarchic rule.

I was deep into the psychedelic community for a longish time. I don't know if they were CIA controlled, but having read some about its relationship with the psychedelia of the 50s, 60s and 70s (look up "Acid Dreams" if interested) I would not be surprised. Anyhow, and without signing up to any conspiracy, I can, 100% sure say, that McKenna was full of shit.

Anyone aware of the book The Great Stagnation?

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will Feel Better is a pamphlet by Tyler Cowen in 2011.

The story is: most tech breaktroughs were in the late 19th and early 20th century, the age of low hanging fruit for innovation and growth stalled in the 1970s or so.

Now, we have to wait for a new era of 'low hanging fruit', if it ever comes.

The point that the book makes is that the innovation we have today is too much focused on consuming rather than improving the world. Think about how anyone finds the iPhone 8 such a cool innovation, whereas in reality it really isn't.

Anyone else read the book?

Patent US3885832 - Apparatus and method for large tunnel excavation in hard rock (1974.)



A tunneling machine for producing large tunnels in rock by progressive detachment of the tunnel core by thermal melting a boundary kerf into the tunnel face and simultaneously forming an initial tunnel wall support by deflecting the molten materials against the tunnel walls to provide, when solidified, a continuous liner; and fragmenting the tunnel core circumscribed by the kerf by thermal stress fracturing and in which the heat required for such operations is supplied by a compact nuclear reactor.

My note: supposedly used since 70s for making tunnels that connect secret underground bases. Needs no wall reinforcing and thus reduces cost of the tunnels.


Patent US5676977 - Method of curing AIDS with tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices (1996.)






The diamagnetic semiconducting molecular crystal tetrasilver tetroxide (Ag4 O4) is utilized for destroying the AIDS virus, destroying AIDS synergistic pathogens and immunity suppressing moieties (ISM) in humans.
A single intravenous injection of the devices is all that is required for efficacy at levels of about 40 PPM of human blood. The device molecular crystal contains two mono and two trivalent silver ions capable of "firing" electrons capable of electrocuting the AIDS virus, pathogens and ISM. When administered into the bloodstream, the device electrons will be triggered by pathogens, a proliferating virus and ISM, and when fired will simultaneously trigger a redox chelation mechanism resulting in divalent silver moieties which chelate and bind active sites of the entities destroying them. The devices are completely non-toxic. However, they put stress on the liver causing hepatomegaly, but there is no loss of liver function.

(05-29-2017 03:27 AM)Ski pro Wrote:  

(05-28-2017 02:58 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  As to electric cars - there are small companies - one in Poland that transforms conventional cars to electric ones. It costs from a few grand to 20.000$ for the most expensive one. They make better electric cars than the big manufacturers and they do it cheaper. The reach of the 20.000$ transformation of the Volkswagen Golf by the way is 600 miles.

There are scores of small-time inventors who constantly come up with cheaper alternatives that somehow strangely elude the big manufacturers.

As for example for the plastic transformation back to oil and fuel - of course they can do it, but why should they? That would cut into their supply matrix even more. So they tell us the lie that plastic cannot be recycled while in truth a country full of Hobos could easily live off that business alone.

Most of the holdups are what I would call minor like with the light-bulbs. Sure - we could have close to eternal light-bulbs like they used to do in the East German Wolfram factory, but they rather want to sell us hundreds of bulbs across our lives.

Where it gets truly evil however is when utterly game-chaning tech is held up that would for example make the petrol industry and combustion engine redundant (all while claiming that you need to pay carbon taxes to save the planet). Another point is cancer research which is a joke - collecting money for cancer research just gives it to Big Pharma who pour it all back into a "better" version of mustard gas.

I would be interest to know the name of this company in Poland if you have it?

http://www.auto_elektryczne.republika.pl/index.html

I think that may be the oldest company there doing it already for 20 years, but there are others in Poland. I cannot find the link to another one I checked out.

By the way - I checked out even a casual glance and found the operating costs of those cars to be at 1$ per 100km at least with Polish electricity prices.

Also the claim by GM that they destroyed all the EV cars in the 1990s because they did not receive the federal grants is bullshit. Back then the celebrity customers like Mel Gibson would have even paid 100.000$ to keep those cars. GM willfully destroyed those electric cars, because they found out that they were far more durable, did not need oil and air filters, had x-times lower number of repairs and maintenance needs. It is possible that GM designed those cars too good and they had to remedy that by scrapping all of them and even destroying the engine of the museum models.

The tragedy about American car manufacturers is not that American engineers were shit compared to Japanese and Germans. It was that they went the planned obsolescence and de-industrialization route way before the other big nations. Even the German cars were better in terms of durability in the 1970s. You have s-class Mercedes Benz models which did not need oil changes for decades and tens of thousands of miles driven. US cars in the 60s and 70s were designed to drive coast to coast for years and years without any repair. The globalists wanted consumers to turn away from US manufacturers, because it fit better into their globalisation model.

Something similar likely happens with electric cars when small local producers make cheaper and more long-lasting electric cars than huge multinationals who have access to far better engineers and design studios.

Yes - we will get electric cars, but they will be beset with all possible disadvantages built into it that you can think of.

As a final note - most customers of those electric companies are small and medium businesses who are cutting down on transportation costs, since their reps rarely drive more than 100-150 miles a day and can recharge for the night.

Regarding electric cars, anybody here heard of Mate Rimac? He is Croat that makes super expensive, high performance electric sports cars.

Below is just one random article from today's WaPo about how advances in targeted immunotherapy are saving the lives of patients (some of them young) that would have been condemned to death with complete certainty just months ago.

As the bolded paragraph towards the end of the article indicates, one of the main problems in that field at the moment is that progress is being made so fast that even leading experts in the field are sometimes unaware of the most recent advances.

The only thing there is to say about today's technology is that rapid gains in computing power (that smartphone in your palm being effectively more powerful than yesterday's supercomputer) are leading to an astonishing acceleration in the pace of technological progress, which will eventually be translating into game-changing differences in kind. We are not quite there yet but we are not so far away, either.

The other thing to say is that the human being's ability to whine and be an ingrate in the face of unimaginable bounty, comfort, and variety is essentially infinite, and is in itself a part of the human comedy to be enjoyed for those who have a taste for that sort of thing.

Here is the WaPo article:

‘This is not the end’: Using immunotherapy to target genes gives cancer patients hope

Quote:The oncologist was blunt: Stefanie Joho’s colon cancer was raging out of control and there was nothing more she could do. Flanked by her parents and sister, the 23-year-old felt something wet on her shoulder. She looked up to see her father weeping.

“I felt dead inside, utterly demoralized, ready to be done,” Joho remembers.

But her younger sister couldn’t accept that. When the family got back to Joho’s apartment in New York’s Flatiron district, Jess opened her laptop and began searching frantically for clinical trials, using medical words she’d heard but not fully understood. An hour later, she came into her sister’s room and showed her what she’d found. “I’m not letting you give up,” she told Stefanie. “This is not the end.”

That search led to a contact at Johns Hopkins University, and a few days later, Joho got a call from a cancer geneticist co-leading a study there. “Get down here as fast as you can!” Luis Diaz said. “We are having tremendous success with patients like you.”

What followed is an illuminating tale of how one woman’s intersection with experimental research helped open a new frontier in cancer treatment — with approval of a drug that, for the first time, targets a genetic feature in a tumor rather than the disease’s location in the body.

The breakthrough, made official last week by the Food and Drug Administration, immediately could benefit some patients with certain kinds of advanced cancer that aren’t responding to chemotherapy. Each should be tested for that genetic signature, scientists stress.

“These are people facing death sentences,” said Hopkins geneticist Bert Vogelstein. “This treatment might keep some of them in remission for a long time.”

In August 2014, Joho stumbled into Hopkins for her first infusion of the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. She was in agony from a malignant mass in her midsection, and even with the copious amounts of oxycodone she was swallowing, she needed a new fentanyl patch on her arm every 48 hours. Yet within just days, the excruciating back pain had eased. Then an unfamiliar sensation — hunger — returned. She burst into tears when she realized what it was.

As months went by, her tumor shrank and ultimately disappeared. She stopped treatment this past August, free from all signs of disease.

The small trial in Baltimore was pivotal, and not only for the young marketing professional. It showed that immunotherapy could attack colon and other cancers thought to be unstoppable. The key was their tumors’ genetic defect, known as mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency — akin to a missing spell-check on their DNA. As the DNA copies itself, the abnormality prevents any errors from being fixed. In the cancer cells, that means huge numbers of mutations that are good targets for immunotherapy.

The treatment approach isn’t a panacea, however. The glitch under scrutiny — which can arise spontaneously or be inherited — is found in just 4 percent of cancers overall. But bore in on a few specific types, and the scenario changes dramatically. The problem occurs in up to 20 percent of colon cancers and about 40 percent of endometrial malignancies — cancer in the lining of the uterus.

In the United States, researchers estimate that initially about 15,000 people with this defect may be helped by this immunotherapy. That number is likely to rise sharply as doctors begin using it earlier on eligible patients.

Joho was among the first.

***

Even before Joho got sick, cancer had cast a long shadow on her family. Her mother has Lynch syndrome, a hereditary disorder that sharply raises the risk of certain cancers, and since 2003, Priscilla Joho has suffered colon cancer, uterine cancer and squamous cell carcinoma of the skin.

Stefanie’s older sister, Vanessa, had already tested positive for Lynch syndrome, and Stefanie planned to get tested when she turned 25. But at 22, several months after she graduated from New York University, she began feeling unusually tired. She blamed the fatigue on her demanding job. Her primary-care physician, aware of her mother’s medical history, ordered a colonoscopy.

When Joho woke up from the procedure, the gastroenterologist looked “like a ghost,” she said. A subsequent CT scan revealed a very large tumor in her colon. She’d definitely inherited Lynch syndrome.

She underwent surgery in January 2013 at Philadelphia’s Fox Chase Cancer Center, where her mother had been treated. The news was good: The cancer didn’t appear to have spread, so she could skip chemotherapy and follow up with scans every three months.

By August of that year, though, Joho started having relentless back pain. Tests detected the invasive tumor in her abdomen. Another operation, and now she started chemo. Once again, in spring 2014, the cancer roared back. Her doctors in New York, where she now was living, switched to a more aggressive chemo regimen.

“This thing is going to kill me,” Joho remembered thinking. “It was eating me alive.”

She made it to Jess’s college graduation in Vermont that May. Midsummer, her oncologist confessed he was out of options. As he left the examining room, he mentioned offhandedly that some interesting work was going on in immunotherapy. But when Joho met with a hospital immunologist, that doctor told her no suitable trials were available.

Joho began planning to move to her parents’ home in suburban Philadelphia: “I thought, ‘I’m dying, and I’d like to breathe fresh air and be around the green and the trees.’ ”

Her younger sister wasn’t ready for her to give up. Jess searched for clinical trials, typing in “immunotherapy” and other terms she’d heard the doctors use. Up popped a trial at Hopkins, where doctors were testing a drug called pembrolizumab.

***

“Pembro” is part of a class of new medications called checkpoint inhibitors that disable the brakes that keep the immune system from attacking tumors. In September 2014, the treatment was approved by the FDA for advanced melanoma and marketed as Keytruda. The medication made headlines in 2015 when it helped treat former president Jimmy Carter for melanoma that had spread to his brain and liver. It later was cleared for several other malignancies.

Yet researchers still don’t know why immunotherapy, once hailed as a game changer, works in only a minority of patients. Figuring that out is important for clinical as well as financial reasons. Keytruda, for example, costs about $150,000 a year.

By the time Joho arrived at Hopkins, the trial had been underway for a year. While an earlier study had shown a similar immunotherapy drug to be effective for a significant proportion of patients with advanced melanoma or lung or kidney cancer, checkpoint inhibitors weren’t making headway with colon cancer. A single patient out of 20 had responded in a couple of trials.

Why did some tumors shrink and others didn’t? What was different about the single colon cancer patient who benefited?

Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Hopkins, and top researcher Suzanne L. Topalian took the unusual step of consulting with the cancer geneticists who worked one floor up.

“This was the first date in what became the marriage of cancer genetics and cancer immunology,” Pardoll said.

In a brainstorming session, the geneticists were quick to offer their theories. They suggested that the melanoma and lung cancer patients had done best because those cancers have lots of mutations, a consequence of exposure to sunlight and cigarette smoke. The mutations produce proteins recognized by the immune system as foreign and ripe for attack, and the drug boosts the system’s response.

And that one colon-cancer patient? As Vogelstein recalls, “We all said in unison, ‘He must have MMR deficiency!’ ” — because such a genetic glitch would spawn even more mutations. The abnormality was a familiar subject to Vogelstein, who in the 1990s had co-discovered its role in the development of colon cancer. But the immunologists hadn’t thought of it.

When the patient’s tumor tissue was tested, it was indeed positive for the defect.

The researchers decided to run a small trial, led by Hopkins immunologist Dung Le and geneticist Diaz, to determine whether the defect could predict a patient’s response to immunotherapy. The pharmaceutical company Merck provided its still-experimental drug pembrolizumab. Three groups of volunteers were recruited: 10 colon cancer patients whose tumors had the genetic problem; 18 colon cancer patients without it; and 7 patients with other malignancies with the defect.

The first results, published in 2015 in the New England Journal of Medicine, were striking. Four out of the 10 colon cancer patients with the defect and 5 out of the other 7 cancer patients with the abnormality responded to the drug. In the remaining group, nothing. Since then, updated numbers have re­inforced that a high proportion of patients with the genetic feature benefit from the drug, often for a lengthy period. Other trials by pharmaceutical companies have shown similar results.

The Hopkins investigators found that tumors with the defect had, on average, 1,700 mutations, compared with only 70 for tumors without the problem. That confirmed the theory that high numbers of mutations make it more likely the immune system will recognize and attack cancer — if it gets assistance from immunotherapy.

The studies were the foundation of the FDA’s decision on Tuesday to green-light Keytruda to treat cancers such as Joho’s, meaning malignancies with certain molecular characteristics. This first-ever “site-agnostic” approval by the agency signals an emerging field of “precision immunotherapy,” Pardoll said, one in which genetic details are used to anticipate who will respond to treatments.

***

For Joho, now 27 and living in suburban Philadelphia, the hard lesson from the past few years is clear: The cancer field is changing so rapidly that patients can’t rely on their doctors to find them the best treatments. “Oncologists can barely keep up,” she said. “My sister found a trial I was a perfect candidate for, and my doctors didn’t even know it existed.”

Her first several weeks on the trial were rough, with an early hospitalization after she cut back too quickly on her fentanyl and went into withdrawal. She still has some lasting side effects today — joint pain in her knees, minor nausea and fatigue — but they are manageable.

“I have had to adapt to some new limits,” she acknowledged. “But I still feel better than I have in five years.”

The FDA’s decision last week was an emotional moment. Diaz, now at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, immediately texted her. “We did it!” he exulted.

“I got chills all over my body,” Joho said. “To think that I was at the end of the road, with no options, and then to be part of such a change.”

Her experience has prompted her to drop plans to go back into marketing. Now she wants to help patients navigate the new cancer landscape. “Become an expert on your cancer” is her message. “Don’t be passive.” She encour­ages patients to try clinical trials.

As a cancer survivor with Lynch syndrome, Joho will be closely watched; if she relapses, she is likely to be treated again with immunotherapy. And if her mother relapses, Keytruda might now be her best chance.

“Coming out the other side, I feel really lucky,” Joho said. She’s also grateful for something else: A few years ago, her sister Jess was tested for the disorder that has so affected their family. She was negative.

Quote: Yet researchers still don’t know why immunotherapy, once hailed as a game changer, works in only a minority of patients. Figuring that out is important for clinical as well as financial reasons. Keytruda, for example, costs about $150,000 a year.

This statement alone, buried in the "story" basically shows you the story is more fiction than fact.

The treatments aren't as effective as they'd have you believe, no there is no conspiracy, no there is hardly a lack of knowledge about the topic --- if it works, people would use it across the board.

Nothing works for you? You'll try anything. If it works for a while, we might see another article of lamentations about how so many more people could be helped. On the other hand, if it doesn't work for you, you'll be "lost to followup." (-: Interesting how that works.

Medicine aside from trauma treatment is one of the most manipulated fields of all. What has been suppressed here starting from nutrition, prevention, nutrients and health, toxicology - ranging to outright scams like fluoride, cholesterol scam and other massive manipulations; all of this is tremendously manipulated and clad in "honest scientific knowledge".

(05-29-2017 09:58 AM)Kid Twist Wrote:  

Quote: Yet researchers still don’t know why immunotherapy, once hailed as a game changer, works in only a minority of patients. Figuring that out is important for clinical as well as financial reasons. Keytruda, for example, costs about $150,000 a year.

This statement alone, buried in the "story" basically shows you the story is more fiction than fact.

The treatments aren't as effective as they'd have you believe, no there is no conspiracy, no there is hardly a lack of knowledge about the topic --- if it works, people would use it across the board.

Nothing works for you? You'll try anything. If it works for a while, we might see another article of lamentations about how so many more people could be helped. On the other hand, if it doesn't work for you, you'll be "lost to followup." (-: Interesting how that works.

There is no fiction. Indeed, this specific treatment is only effective in a minority of patients; but for those patients for whom it is effective it is the difference between being dead or alive. It's quite real for them.

The point about the lack of knowledge is precisely that because the treatments are not widely applicable, they are also not widely known. Therefore, they might be missed in some cases by patients who happen to be part of the targeted group to whom they apply.

We may well see for a while a trend in which there are many different targeted immunotherapy treatments, each of which by itself applies only to a subset of all patients, but between them (taken in aggregate) they make a very significant dent in morbidity. Patients will be subjected to a battery of genetic tests and depending on the results they will be a candidate for one or another targeted treatment. We are not quite there yet in terms of the number of available treatments or the costs of both the medications and the tests, but the tendency is clear; though of course it may also be overtaken by more generally applicable methods that are more effective.

It would be very strange if continuing order of magnitude gains in computing power did not result, over time, in game-changing advances across a wide variety of technologies; and indeed, that is precisely what is happening. The above is just one illustration taken more or less at random from an article that I happened to come across today.

(05-29-2017 09:58 AM)Kid Twist Wrote:  The treatments aren't as effective as they'd have you believe, no there is no conspiracy, no there is hardly a lack of knowledge about the topic --- if it works, people would use it across the board.

What are you talking about? Medical advances do not happen overnight. They have to go through a long process of vetting. During this transitional stage, these new treatments are used only in an experimental basis.

For instance, one high-profile case of someone being alive who should be dead is Jimmy Carter.

I also had a facebook friend who discovered ovarian cancer at a late enough stage that the MD I was dating at the time, when I told her, shook her head and said she's a goner. But she wound up going to the Cayman Islands to receive immuno therapy and she's in full remission. This immunotherapy pathway is THE REAL DEAL. It's probably going to largely replace chemotherapy in the end. Cancer survivability even after late detection is going to skyrocket. It will totally change how people view cancer diagnoses, from a death-sentence to something that is in most cases overcome as a normal side-effect of aging.

(05-29-2017 08:59 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  The other thing to say is that the human being's ability to whine and be an ingrate in the face of unimaginable bounty, comfort, and variety is essentially infinite, and is in itself a part of the human comedy to be enjoyed for those who have a taste for that sort of thing.

...I use varied typographical emphasis.


I'll be sure to remind the next cripple I see of his unimaginable bounty. Complaint and greed is the path to progress, not appreciation and gratitude. I'm acquainted with a lot of researchers, and the bulk of them need to be called out as the leisurely useless cleverboys they are.

(05-29-2017 08:59 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  As the bolded paragraph towards the end of the article indicates, one of the main problems in that field at the moment is that progress is being made so fast that even leading experts in the field are sometimes unaware of the most recent advances.

Bullshit. By definition, if he's unaware of the most recent advances, he's not a leading expert, is he?