Allspace in a Notshall

Was listening to some music tonight and a song began playing called Scilly Automatic, by the artist “Ott”.  It’s a great song and you can listen to it for free here.

It’s got a great bassline, good beats and some killer melodica melodies.  But it’s not until the song hits the sample does the track get really interesting, for me anyway.  I’m almost positive the speaker at the 4:09 mark is Alan Watts: the great western teacher of Zen Buddhism and psychedelic explorer, with some nasty Soundwave-from-Transformers effects on it.

The words are as follows:

They took animals apart. They took flowers apart. They took rocks apart. And then when they cut everything to its tiniest pieces, they tried to find methods of taking those apart too, so that we could eventually discover what the very smallest small things were, and hoping that that would lead us to an understanding of how life works.

Man himself in all his puzzle looked upon as a creation. Something made. Lonely. If you believe in the world in accordance with the fully automatic model, you’ve really got to admit that man too is fully automatic. In other words, he is a machine rather than a person. ‘How do you do, I am a perso, I am alive, I am sensible, I talk, I have feelings.’ But you wonder, do you really? Or are you just… an automaton?

And then at the end of the song:

Looking out on the world is strange, and that is not me (??). I am the most likely to meet into the worlds of consciousness, between the darkness and the darkness. And that isn’t too happy, I would like to be able to believe that it was more than that. If I could, like so many of us say, if I could only still believe that there is an intelligent and eternal god, in whose eyes I am important, and who has the power to enable me to live forever, that would be very nice. But for many people, that’s an extrordinarily difficult thing to believe.

And since I was in the correct frame of mind at the time, the words really got to me and made me start thinking about people and who and what they really are; just general life-type questions.  I began writing some of my thoughts down, which I’ll post later when I feel they’re finished, but I wanted to quickly share some cool stuff regarding the speaker, Alan Watts.

Now, I’ve been listening to Alan Watts’ lectures for a few good years now and I’m a huge fan of his. I’ve also got a few books of his, but I haven’t really read them as there is a lot of information in his lectures that I have still to devour. But I’ve always loved listening to him speak because has a beautiful gift of explaining the absurd in an hilarious and mind-splitting way–much like Terence McKenna.  Watts has the greatest laugh too which is really infectious.  It seems as if he knows a lot more about the secret of life than most did and it’s trying to escape, but he’s holding in it because he’s enjoying himself too much.

So I spent a few minutes searching for some great Alan Watts clips to post here and I found my way here, which has some amazing short videos of South Park-stype animation with recordings of Alan Watts talking about various subjects.  Be sure to checkout “Life and Music”.  I think it’s got really good message.  Ponder it for a second…or longer.

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I’m a huge Solar Fields fan, so any announcement of new music from him and I immediately wet myself in anticipation.

New album is called “Movements”. Listening examples can be found on the label’s website, Ultimae.

Here are some of his songs found throughout youtube.

Amazing huh?

Very important and timely piece by Thomas H. Greco on the state of money, the economy and its (probable?) collapse on Reality Sandwhich.

Here’s a highlight:

The problem then becomes, how do we transcend the barter limitation, i.e., the “double coincidence” of wants or needs? While commodity money can be useful in particular circumstances (it was common in early post-war Europe, to pay with cigarettes, Hershey bars, and nylon stockings), I believe that the more evolved form of credit money is more appropriate to the goals of personal freedom, social justice, peace, harmony, and economic equity. I have no gold or silver. What I do have to offer to the market is goods and services. You, likewise, probably have no gold or silver, but offer other goods and services to the market. Ultimately, we each pay for the things we buy with the things we sell. In other words, goods and services buy other goods and services. It is much more efficient to simply sell to one another on credit, and then spend our credits to requisition whatever we may want from others in the market. The supply of any chosen commodity (like gold or silver) is limited and most of the gold and silver is closely held by those who run the system, the central governments and central banks. They decide the price we must pay for those commodities. But credits can be created as needed at minimal cost so all desirable trades can take place.

Definitely give it a read.

Just found out that Thomas Pynchon has a new novel on the way. Exciting news for us Pynchon fans. The book, titled Inherent Vice, will be his first book since 2006, which is remarkable, considering the fact he usually takes about 10 years to write a new book.

You can read about the new book and as well as an excerpt of it here.

Can’t wait to read the damn thing, but I’ve got some time.  Comes out 8/4/09.  Which is good, because I’m currently only 300 pages in to Against the Day.

But what a hell of a novel AtD is.  And because one of the story arcs takes place in Colorado, in the late 1800s mining towns, it immediately got a special place in my heart.

Any other Pynchon fans excited for the new one?

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While I’m not a conspiracy nut, the more I read about things the more I tend to come to the opinion that there is more than meets the eye on just about everything (no shit?).  Sometimes, I can go full blown conspiratorial, especially when a very large sum of money transfers with such ease, especially now, as information about the TARP(+) (the “+” sign is my addition) bailout plan becomes more and more available.

Keep in mind that US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is not required to report where any of the TARP(+) money is going.

In F. William Engdahl‘s article “Citigroup Abyss“, he claims:

A case in point is the secretive manner in which Paulson has used the $700 billion in taxpayer funds voted him by a labile Congress in September. Early on Paulson put $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for his old firm, Goldman Sachs. However, if one compared the value of the equity share that $125 billion bought with the market price of those banks’ stock, US taxpayers have paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could have bought for $62.5 billion, according to a detailed analysis from Ron W. Bloom, an economist with the US United Steelworkers union, whose workers face devastating job losses were GM to fail.

That means half of the public’s money was a gift to Paulson’s Wall Street cronies.

What neither Paulson nor anyone in Washington is willing to reveal is the real truth behind the Citigroup bailout. By his and the Republican Bush Administration’s adamant earlier refusal to take an initial resolute action to immediately nationalize the nine or so largest troubled banks and reorganize the assets into some form of ‘good bank’ and ‘bad bank,’ similar to what the Government of Sweden did with what it called Securum, during its banking crisis in the early 1990’s, allowing the healthy banks to continue lending to the real economy so the economy could continue operating, while the State merely sat on the undervalued real estate assets of the Swedish banks for some months until the recovering economy made the assets again marketable to the private sector, Paulson and his ‘crony capitalists’ have turned a bad situation into a globally catastrophic one.

His apparent realization of the error of his initial refusal to nationalize, deeming it in effect ‘un-American’ came too late. When Paulson reversed policy on September 19 and presented the nine largest banks with an ultimatum to accept partial Government equity ownership, abandoning his original bizarre plan to merely buy up the toxic waste asset-backed securtities of the banks with his $700 billion TARP taxpayer money, he never revealed why.

Paulson soon realized the scale of crisis, largely triggered by his inept handling of the Lehman Brothers case, had created an impossible situation. Were Paulson to use the $700 billion to buy up toxic waste ABS assets from the select banks at today’s market price, the $700 billion would be far too little to take an estimated $2 trillion ($2,000 billion) in Asset Backed Securities off the books of the banks. The Levy Economics Institute states, ‘It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today — with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson’s entire $700 billion in one gulp.’

That reality is the real reason Paulson was forced to abandon his original ‘crony bailout’ TARP plan and opt to use some of his money to buy equity shares in the nine largest banks. That scheme as well is ‘dead on arrival.’ The dilemma he has created with his inept handling of the crisis is simple: If the US Government paid the true value for these nearly worthless assets, the banks would have to write down huge losses, and, as Levy economists put it, ‘announce to the world that they are insolvent.’ On the other hand, if Paulson raised the toxic waste purchase price high enough to protect the banks from losses, $700 billion ‘will buy only a tiny fraction of the ‘troubled’ assets.’ That is what the latest nationalization of Citigroup is about.

And the most important quote of the entire post:

It is only the beginning. The 2009 year will be one of titanic shocks and changes to the global order of a scale perhaps not experienced in the past five centuries. This is why we speak of the end of the American Century and its Dollar System.

Now onto Naomi Klein, who I believe is doing amazing work. Here is her interview with Democracy Now about the bailout, which she calls “Multi-trillion-dollar Crime Scene” and more about what I posted above:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyhC_zUaOhg&hl=en&fs=1]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcyyZo-Br9M]

And you can read her article about it in The Nation here.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. “None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression,” explained one unnamed Congressional aide.

How could you not start thinking like a conspiracy nut now? This is quite possibly the greatest swindle of all time. And there was nothing we could have done either, because to do so would be labeled unpatriotic; which is what Bush and co. has been doing for eight years.

Change?

It’s too much money for “change”.