EPISODE 11 :: “Fnordsmithing”

Ben Mack and Lorenzo Clark unleash a wild fnord in the Occulterati studio, conjuring an unexpectedly smooth show.

Duration :: 00:31:32
Download :: MP3 (28.872MB)

Hosts :: Brenden Simpson, Wu

from my buddies at EyesLikeHeadlights.com:

!!!!!ATTENTION!!!!

Eyes Like Headlights Needs YOU! We need You to Go to Lawrence.com and Vote for us so we can enter the Deadwood Derby Battle of the Bands!!! Only 16 bands will win.

Click Here to Vote! And thank you so much!!!

(You may need to sign up on Lawrence.com to vote, which only takes 5 minutes!)

myspace.com/aelturnitytestproject

"A brand essence need only make sense to the marketing team. Your brand essence is not the words necessarily used in your communications. Branding is often made to appear complicated. I’m making a case that branding is understandable, relevant, and, most importantly, profitable. You can’t really profitably use this tool until you extract your brand essence." - Ben Mack

Just a sampling of the press Ben Mack is getting with his new book:

Announce Your Brand Without The $26 Million Price Tag -- PR Web (press release)

His name is Ben Mack… and he is an underground marketer… some call him the “Mad Marketer”.

‘Brad Fallon Speaking at jvAlert Live, Ben Mack Moves to #1

From the inside flap:

"…Using real examples from some of the most legendary (or disastrous) branding campaigns in history, Mack gives you an insider’s perspective—and inside advice—on which tactics will float your brand and which will sink it. He sorts the bad advice from the good, letting you avoid those missteps that get good companies in bad trouble.

Branding isn’t magic. Not since Jay Levinson’s original Guerrilla Marketing book has an insider really spilled the beans and taught you how to use the professional grade tools that are so simple they work automatically. Think Two Products Ahead reveals inside secrets that make branding work for marketing budgets of any size—so you can grow your business faster and stronger than you imagined. When it comes to your brand, this insider’s guide proves that if you aren’t thinking two products ahead, you’re hardly thinking at all. "

As of right now, as I post this, Ben Mack’s book has held the #1 spot for business book on amazon for three days now: amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/3/

Apparently, people know a good book when they see it!

UPDATE!!!

Ben Mack Grabs the Number One Best Seller Position

One of the lunch series speakers (jvAlertLive.com/lunch.htm) is Ben Mack, the best selling author of Think Two Products Ahead: Secrets the Big Advertising Agencies Don’t Want You to Know and How to Use Them for Bigger Profits.

Ben’s book just hit number one on Amazon’s Best Seller List for Business Books.  He’s got a hard hitting campaign going on right now.

Click here for more information.

Source

His book is also featured here

So here's the plan. The ides of march are always at hand. And when the power hungry strike, they strike the poorest of man. And if you dare put up a fight, they'll come and fight for your land. And they'll call it liberation or salvation. A call to the youth! Your freedom ain't so free, it's just loose. but the power of your voice could redirect every truth. Shift and shape the world you want and keep your fears in a noose. Let them dangle from a banner star spangled. I'm willing and able. To lift my dreams up out of their cradle. Nurse and nurture my ideals 'til they're much more than a fable. I can be all I can be and do much more than I'm paid to. And I won't be a slave to what authorities say do. My desire is to live within a nation on fire, where creative passions burn and raise the stakes ever higher. Where no person is addicted top some twisted supplier who promotes the sort of freedom sold to the highest buyer. We demand a truth naturally at one with the land, not a plant that photosynthesizes bombs on demand, or a search for any weapons we let fall from our hands. I got beats and a plan. I'm gonna do what I can. And what you do is question everything they say do, every goal ideal or value they keep pushing on you. If they ask you to believe it question whether it's true. If they ask you to achieve, is it for them or for you. You're the one they're asking to go carry a gun. Warfare ain't humanitarian. You're scaring me, son. Why not fight to feed the homeless, jobless, fight inflation?! Why not fight for our own healthcare and our education?! And instead, invest in that erasable lead, 'cause their twisted propaganda can't erase all the dead. And the pile of corpses pyramid on top of our heads. Or nevermind, said the shotgun to the head.
- saul motherfucking williams

INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Free Jung Word Choice Test (similar to MBTI)
personality tests by similarminds.com

It's Not About the Website

If we allow the client believe that we think they should know something about design, they’ll usually fall all over themselves to try and convince us that they do know something about design. And, with very few exceptions, they will muck up their own project by doing so. This is the trap.

Trust me, you don’t want to fall into the trap. This happens when we ask design questions of the client, only to find out later that their business or marketing aims and needs conflict with their personal design preferences. Oops.

The problem with this situation is that clients have this annoying habit of hanging-on to their misguided design preferences like a bulldog hangs-on to a rope toy. They then expect us professionals to just “make it work.” In this lose-lose situation, they either end up with a website they hate or one that will not effectively support their business or marketing needs. Yes, the trap sucks.

1 - 10 of about 40 for philip k nixon tanuki testicles.

I'm looking for programs that are able to be stored on a USB memory stick that will allow me to run them off the stick and stay on top of things wherever I am. Anyone point me in the right direction?

http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/20213

We Will Bury You. In Mud. David E. Brown



Forget Bush's National Missile Shield. The best military defense is a Russian winter. It got the better of King Charles XII of Sweden, sent Napoleon packing, and eventually shooed Hitler away. A few years after that, though, it was the Germans that were favored by the weather gods—for weeks, Patton's Third Army was stuck near the edge of Germany, plagued by rain that kept American tanks and trucks and soldiers in place. The general's solution? A prayer to those gods:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.1

Patton was certainly not the first military leader to beseech His Great Goodness for favorable conditions. When Hannibal invaded Italy in 217 BC, he waited for the marshes to freeze so his mounted troops could pour in. In 1776, the harsh winter helped George Washington's army, letting it move quickly across the frozen Delaware River. And in 1941, the Japanese essentially hid their aircraft carriers moving toward Pearl Harbor in a large Pacific storm.

But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, everybody prayed about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. That changed in 1946, when General Electric scientists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir created an artificial cloud by introducing dry ice into a freezer, and then developed a technique for "cloud seeding," still used today.

By the late 1950s, people began to think about our new ability to alter the weather in military terms. The Cold War was kicking into high gear, and the US intelligence community became aware that the Soviets were experimenting with cloud seeding and other kinds of weather control, such as cloud dissipation. In 1957, Henry Houghton, chair of MIT's meteorology department, noted, "I shudder to think of the consequences of a prior Russian discovery of a feasible method for weather control."2 That same year, a Presidential Advisory Committee on Weather Control noted (with perfect deadpan sensationalism) that, "weather modification could become a more important weapon than the atom bomb."3 The weather race, though never as fierce or as public as the space race or the arms race, was on. (The Soviets really were working on weather, with the hopes of, among other things, warming its vast northern regions and removing the ice in the Arctic Sea.)

That any new technology that could be used as a weapon would be used as a weapon now seems obvious—a kind of first principle of warfare—but it is a relatively recent idea, a product of the "total war" strategy of the two world wars, where tactics and weaponry became increasingly more destructive. And there was historical precedent for offensive uses of the environment. During the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, for example, the Dutch breached the dikes around Amsterdam, flooding part of the low-lying country and putting the French on the defensive. (The Dutch won.)

With the political and military stage set, the US got to work on figuring out how to alter the weather, and what to do with that knowledge. Much of the work seems to have been done at the Navy's China Lake weapons research center. "Between 1949 and 1978," the base's in-house newspaper, The Rocketeer, reported, "China Lake developed concepts, techniques, and hardware that were successfully used in hurricane abatement, fog control, and drought relief."4

"Drought relief" is an interesting way to put it. China Lake's research caught the eye of the CIA in the early 1960s, which saw the potential of weather control in the rapidly expanding conflict in Vietnam. The CIA's first use of the Navy's technology was crowd dispersal. "The Diem regime was having all that trouble with the Buddhists," an agent told Seymour Hersh in 1972. "They would just stand around during demonstrations when the police threw tear gas at them, but we noticed that when the rains came they wouldn't stay on. The agency got an Air America Beechcraft and had it rigged up with silver iodide. There was another demonstration and we seeded the area. It rained."5

In 1966, the idea of raining on Vietnam became the top-secret Project Popeye, which ran for some seven years and included more than 2,600 cloud-seeding flights over Vietnam and Laos. The objective was simple: Make rain that would make or keep the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a main supply route for the North Vietnamese—so muddy that it was unusable. (Why "Popeye"? The artificially created rain was apparently called "Olive Oil.")

The story of the top-secret project—flown by the Air Force but controlled by the CIA and the White House—was broken in 1971 in Jack Anderson's national newspaper column, then, to greater fanfare, in July 1972, with Hersh's front-page story in The New York Times. And while there were no rules at the time about weather modification—or any environmental warfare, for that matter—the Nixon administration was not happy with Hersh's revelations. The White House and the State Department declined comment, and one unnamed official said, "This is one of those things where no one is going to say anything."6 (People said even less about CIA weather-modification in Cuba. During 1969 and 1970, planes from China Lake seeded clouds that rained over non-agricultural regions of Cuba, leaving at least some of the country's sugar cane fields dry.)

The eventual response was an international treaty, the Convention on the Publication of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, or ENMOD, which was ratified by the US in 1977. The main tenet of the treaty, which stands today, is this: "Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party."7

Weather-control activities seem to have quieted down after ENMOD, but fortunately for the US military, the treaty has a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: It prohibits only action with "widespread, long-lasting or severe effects." When Air Force intelligence analysts turned their thoughts to the weather in the mid-1990s, they made up their own definition of these limits: widespread means affecting more than several hundred kilometers; long-lasting means for a period of months; and severe "involves serious or significant disruption or harm to human life, natural or economic resources, or other assets."8 Which is to say that, except for the human life part, most military applications, which tend to be short-term and localized, are allowed. These analysts' conclusions are contained in an extraordinary report, published in 1996, called "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025." If the US intelligence community did ignore the weather for a while, "Owning the Weather" certainly made up for it. Envisioning a world where technology has made control over the local weather phenomena much more precise—and where a global network of sensors has greatly increased available atmospheric data—the writers declare that in three decades time, "US aerospace forces can 'own the weather'," and "shape the battlespace in ways never before possible."9

While "Owning the Weather" relies primarily on extensions of existing weather modification techniques, the authors strike more boldly into the future with speculation about nanotechnology-based "artificial weather." "A cloud, or several clouds, of microscopic computer particles," they note, "all communicating with each other and with a larger control system could provide tremendous capability. Interconnected, atmospherically buoyant, and having navigation capability in three dimensions, such clouds could be designed to have a wide-range of properties."10

At times, the Air Force report reads like a declaration to violate the ENMOD agreement. The authors even note that the only reason they don't discuss more serious weather control—made-to-order weather, large-scale climate modification, control of storms, etc.—is that it won't be technically feasible by 2025. "Such applications would have been included in this report as potential military options," they note, "despite their controversial and potentially malevolent nature and their inconsistency with standing UN agreements to which the US is a signatory."11

Why is the United States so interested in the weather that it would violate international treaty? The answer may lie more in the psyche of the government than in specific tactical advantages. The US military has long been used to having a stacked deck. The US Navy once owned the seas; later, the Air Force had the run of the skies. For a while, our sole possession of the atomic and hydrogen bombs gave us the "ultimate" weapon. Dominion over the atmosphere might be the next "ultimate" weapon, proof not only of military invincibility but perhaps, finally, of Divine Right.

1 — Msgr. James H. O'Neill, "The True Story of the Patton Prayer," The Review of the News, October 6, 1971, available at .
2 — United States House of Representatives Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Health and Science, Weather Modification Research: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Health and Science. Eighty-fifth Congress, Second Session, 18-19 March, 1958 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958), p. 55., as quoted in Nayef H. Samhat, "A Genealogy of Climate Change," Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution 1.4 (November 1998), at .
3 — M.S. Venkataramani, "To Own The Weather," Frontline (Chennai, India), Jan. 16–29, 1999 , .
4 — "China Lake Weapons Digest: 50 Years of Providing the Fleet with the Tools of the Trade," The Rocketeer, Nov. 4, 1993, reprinted at .
5 — Seymour M. Hersh, "Rainmaking Is Used As Weapon by U.S.," The New York Times, July 3, 1972, pp. 1-2.
6 — Hersh, op. cit.
7 — "Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques," 1108 U.N.T.S. 151, entered into force Oct. 5, 1978, available at , p. 2.
8 — Col. Tamzy J. House, Lt. Col. James B. Near, Jr., et al., "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025," in "Air Force 2025," Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 1996, p. 7 , .
9 — Ibid., p. vi.
10 — Ibid., p. 27.
11 — Ibid., p. 6.


David E. Brown is an editor and artist living in Brooklyn. He is the author of Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse (MIT Press, forthcoming) and a co-founder of Place magazine.






©2003

Paranormal Phenomena, Paranormal, Paranormal Phenomena Unexplained Phenomena

restructured

NSA's Subliminal Posthypnotic Scripts

8.3.6.5. Religious Relevance and Convictions:

8.3.6.5.1. The NSA typically implants posthypnotic suggestions that are clearly
referenced in the Bible. The subject may be punished (through negative
reinforcement) by anything that is referenced in the Bible to substantiate the
validity of the "Word of God". When the NSA does not follow the standard
Biblical references, most subjects fail to recognize the contradictions out of
ignorance or an inability to rationalize, or, they find other ways to justify
the events to receive peace from God (NSA). This component of the NSA process is
to provide the subject with an increased sense of fear and intimidation
resulting from God's presence and force. "Thou shall not disobey God".

okay, I'm a magic geek. I've been playing for a while. This is my most successful 5 color 62 Card deck.

(if I'm only playing one opponent I take out the howling mine & the prosperity)


4 Anarchist

3 Swamp

3 Mountain

Cinder Marsh

Vic Townships

3 Forest

3 Plains

2 Island

Minamo, School at Water's Edge

Grand Coliseum

2 Thalakos Lowlands

Treva's Ruins

One Dozen Eyes

Howling Mine

Legacy Weapon

Gilded Lotus

Vigilance

Clone

Bringer of the Green Dawn

Avatar of Might

Axelrod Gunnarson

Ryusei, the Falling Star

Vacvictis Asmadi

Palladia-Mors

Arcades Sabboth

Nicol Bolas

Chromium

Shifty Doppelganger

Living Death

Tranquility

Fireball

Exotic Disease

Sift

Prosperity

Channel the Suns

Reanimate

Kitsune Healer

Catacomb Dragon

Greater Werewolf

Weathered Wayfarer

Woebearer

Tornod's Crypt

Fill with Fright

Volcanic Island

2 Rampant Growth

Soul Foundry

Book Burning

Disturbed Burial







For the real magic geeks out there, I have this green and blue deck affectionately named the R.A.W. (definately not Type 2- unglued & unhinged intermixed with some other favorites):

7 Forest

9 Island

Remote Isle

Ambiguity

Rampant Growth

Fertile Ground

Land Aid '04

Old Fogey

Crash of Rhinos

Rib Cage Spider

Tidal Bore

Alexi's Cloak

2 Denied!

Sorry

Number Crunch

Tranquility

2 Rackling

Thresher Beast

Feast of Worms

Sylvan Hierophant

Horned Troll

Zephyr Falcon

Storm Crow

Double Header

2 Flaccify

Name Dropping

Redwood Treefolk

4 Counterspell

2 Spell Counter

Chub Toad

2 Metallic Sliver

Regeneration

Gulf Squid

Monkey Monkey Monkey

Scragnoth

Orochi Sustainer

Lone Wolf

Shadow Rift

Field of Reality

Wall of Wood

Elder Druid

Mnemonic Sliver

World Bottling Kit

Mise

Laughing Hyena

Chill



I can assure you, this deck will annoy the hell out of whoever you play. It makes them highly aware of the things they say out loud.


Then there's the Eris Mindfuck deck.

This deck is chaos, pure and simple. It's like a booby trap, and works best in multiplayer games, and also includes some very odd abilities using unglued and unhinged.




Fountain of Cho

3 Swamp

Ebon Stronghold

3 Island

Svyelunite Temple

Lonely Sandbar

4 Forest

3 Mountain

2 Plains

2 Counsel of the Soratami

2 Awol

Storm Cauldron

2 Zuran Orb

Charcoal Diamond

Fountain of Youth

Farsight Mask

Glasses of Urza

Phyrexian Splicer

Phyrexian Walker

Lantern of Insight

Conjurer's Bauble

Squee's Toy

Etched Oracle

Essence Bottle

2 Mind Stone

Welding Jar

Manakin

Skyreach Manta

Ornithopter

Feroz's Ban

Manabarbs

Darksteel Pendant

Liar's Pendulum

Thran Forge

2 Lotus Petal

2 Touchstone

Living Artifact

Ashnod's Transmogrant

Summoner's Egg

Talisman of Unity

Sex Appeal

Apathy

Stop That

Rolling Stones

Aether Barrier

Bottle Gnomes

Rock Lobster

Keeper of the Sacred Word

Kill! Destroy!

Artful Looter

Barrin's Codex

Sawtooth Thresher

Stangg

Tobias Andrion

Rith's Charm

Johan

Wand of Denial

Mirror, Mirror

Tainted Monkey

Clockwork Vorrac

Heliophial

Bubble Matrix

Arcbound Hybrid

Wall of Spears

Suntouched Myr





I'm not serious enough to bother creating any tournament level decks. (I like friendly games, with lots of unintelligible strategy.)

I have some more traditional decks - an infinite goblin combo in green and red, the predictable direct damage deck, the banding, and the spirit deck come to mind... but these are my top three favorites for down and dirty M:TG.

If that's not proof I'm a geek, I don't know what is...

There have been 235 documented sightings of milky seas since 1915

Results from Chakra test, Take 2

Root	Sacral	Navel	Heart	Throat	Third Eye	Crown

Root: under-active (-37%) Sacral: under-active (6%) Navel: under-active (-12%) Heart: open (12%) Throat: open (50%) Third Eye: over-active (68%) Crown: open (18%)

Ben Mack's review of Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut

Thank you Kurt.

If you are a humanist, you will probably dig Man Without A Country. I’ve read the Amazon
reviews and on other sites that take book reviews. I’m astounded by people who take offense to Vonnegut’s humanistic perspective. One reviewer below suggests that Man Without A Country contains talking points straight from the Democratic National Committee. I checked the DNC website and couldn’t identify any lines from Vonnegut’s book. So it goes.

Yes, Vonnegut draws connections between Bush and Hitler—they both called themselves Christians despite what many liberal documentaries suggest about Hitler being a pagan. But being opposed to Bush doesn’t make Kurt a Democrat. Read Kurt’s words, HE’S A HUMANIST. For those of you that are anti-humanists, there are plenty of sentences to be taken out of context to exploit towards your own divisive agendas. Vonnegut reminds us of a line by Shakespeare: “The Devil will quote scripture for his purpose.”

When did respecting each other become politically divisive? I’ve often wondered why respecting science is politically divisive. Kurt sheds some light on these topics among others.

Look, if you think the world is all hunky-dory, this won’t be your cup of tea. Or, if you dug Vonnegut’s earlier work solely for his humor, you may be disappointed with this read. Vonnegut grapples with his grasp on turning out humor, about how other humorists loose their humor as they age. Vonnegut still has his humor, but he is pissed off—many readers haven’t known when he has been joking and when he has been serious. For the remedial readers he annotates his jokes by saying, “I’m kidding.”

Just because Kurt loves humans, he isn’t beyond shaking his finger at those who preach love as they drop bombs and enslave little brown folks. If you object to this assessment of our current world order, and you have read the books Vonnegut suggests every non-twerp has read, then, I’m open to reading your objections to the content of Kurt’s assertions. Seriously, do you consume much non-American media?

Fellow humanists,
it’s time to take these ideas seriously. Enough of the politicians spewing their intellishit. Kurt begins his penultimate book: “There is no reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.”

Here’s to Bokonon. * Kurt, I look forward to reading your next novel. I hope you do find a way to write it’s ending.