blogs

In the week gone by, the Dow Jones plunged more than 400 points. Obama vowed to rescue economy. McCain supported the Bush administration push to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Cover-up of health effects from cosmetics. The House approved $700 billion bailout for Wall Street. America's secret dealings between Shell and the Iraq Oil Ministry was disclosed. A US-India nuclear deal was passed. The FBI opened probe into financial troubles of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG. The global food crisis worsens.

Forget the war on terror: global military has been engaged in a decades-long campaign to find chemicals that can control the mind, and 50 years after their first experiments it seems the battlefield of the brain is once again front and centre, writes Rak Razam...



According to the US Centre for Strategic Command, the US is presently engaged in a campaign of "Full Spectrum Dominance" in all fields of existence – land, water, space, cyberspace, etc. – and now the realm of the mind itself. Yet the military's interest in psychoactives has been long and sustained. During the height of WWII the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, began the search for a truth serum they could use in intelligence interrogations. In 1945 the US Navy Technical Mission reported that Nazi scientists experimented with mescaline on subjects at the Dachau concentration camp. After the war the U.S. Navy began investigating mescaline itself under the guise of Project Chatter, and for the next three decades they engaged in experiments with mind-altering drugs in an attempt to crack the secrets of the brain.

I hadn't had much sleep the night before, due to the fact that I'd suffered an emergency root treatment on one of my front teeth that afternoon. It was supposed to have been just a routine checkup, but before I knew what was up I was surrounded by magnifying glasses and long needles. But at 7.00 AM the next morning, no painkillers were strong enough. In too much pain to lie down, I’d spent most of the previous night uploading music to my Ipod, programming my GPS and messing with my kit. I'd had breakfast with the kids, then knocked back another cocktail of antibiotics, vitamins, etc., before hitting the road. The early morning isn't my given time, but I couldn't think of a reason to look back.

If you’ve been following this rather long blog, sometimes rant, you’ll know that Dennis Joey and me have just spent three nights on Ibiza, but by the time I’d woken up on day four it seemed that we’d been here much longer. It hadn’t been that late a night and I’d slept well enough. There were no relevant excuses. It’s officially Saturday and it was time to return from forever, or to forever. Whatever. (There's a short movie at the bottom of the page, in case you want to skip to that now.)

So far in this continuing blog: Dennis, Joey and Schwann (online below) have met in Malaga, Spain, then tripped to Ibiza to stay with Richard Wolfe and the Goddesses. “One Night on Ibiza” is the blog directly before this if you want to go backwards, otherwise begin at the blog “Fear and Loathing with Dennis Mckenna on the Costa del Sol”, where it all began.

Sunday, March 16, 2008
Current mood: insubordinate

O moderators of media, O makers-of-cults, O compressors of nostalgia, O renderers of neural text, O transferers of holographic memory,

This blog serves to notify you that Cognition Factor has escaped the confines of my hard drive and studio and is now on its way to the Cannes Film Festival to be judged.

Maybe it's time to let you all in on a secret. Or let me put it differently, it's a bleep from the deep.

Those of you who hated the slow pace of "What the bleep" and "The Secret", but liked the idea of a movie that require you to think, might be interested to know that Headspace Studios, located in Cape Town, South Africa, is about to unleash "Cognition Factor".

Featuring more than 20 of the most important minds of our age, the movie is about a cyberpunk's search for enlightenment, during which the viewer is taken through a narrated virtual world in search of answers to the " Big Five" questions relating to the human experience.

So you still think you’re not a techno-savage?

Perspectives ever changing. Focussing on the unfocusable. Overlays. Heartbeats like giant footsteps in hollow deserted places. Background windows. Unidentifiable forms. Icons. I’m trying to put it all down. This life, this time, these things are memes that live in formats we can't see because we are the dust that scatters from a fireplace after the trance-dance is over.