Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

Lecture Series  

L‑2 The Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich

MP3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 (Approx. 118 min­utes)

First, the dis­cus­sion focus­es on the con­flict between cor­po­rate prof­its and both sub­stan­tial wages and ben­e­fits and strong envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion pol­i­cy. This con­flict results in an ele­ment of cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance on the part of most peo­ple (who must work for a liv­ing.) In order to max­i­mize prof­it, dis­com­fort must be cor­re­spond­ing­ly max­i­mized as well.

Human behav­ior is dic­tat­ed large­ly by two prin­ci­ples that psy­chol­o­gists call the plea­sure prin­ci­ple and the real­i­ty prin­ci­ple. In a nut­shell: peo­ple do what makes them feel good. When they feel bad, they must alter their envi­ron­ment in such a way as to remove the dis­com­fort. They can either change their exter­nal envi­ron­ment or their inter­nal envi­ron­ment. Polit­i­cal action, labor and envi­ron­men­tal orga­niz­ing would cer­tain­ly bring change that would relieve social and envi­ron­men­tal dis­tress. That is not as prof­itable as hold­ing down wages and prof­its. Prof­its can be max­i­mized if peo­ple can be made to alter their inter­nal envi­ron­ment in such a way as to endure or even enjoy dis­com­fort (what Mr. Emory refers to as learn­ing “to enjoy sit­ting on a tack.”)

There are a vari­ety of ways of get­ting peo­ple to attempt this. If they are ine­bri­at­ed on drugs or alco­hol, their pain will be atten­u­at­ed (at least tem­porar­i­ly) and their will to resist blunt­ed. In this con­text, opi­um would be “the reli­gion of the peo­ple.” The real thing might be even bet­ter.

The analy­sis cen­ters on a soci­ety in which peo­ple would be made into “true believ­ers,” through a com­bi­na­tion of total­i­tar­i­an polit­i­cal con­trol and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-rein­forced fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gion. Denom­i­na­tion­al affil­i­a­tion of sub­ject nations and indi­vid­u­als may well remain diverse, but the foun­da­tion and source of polit­i­cal pow­er would be tremen­dous­ly pow­er­ful, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed mil­i­tary weapons of mass destruc­tion. Most impor­tant­ly, the very exis­tence of these weapons would be unknown to the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple. An admin­is­tra­tive elite would exer­cise polit­i­cal pow­er. This elite would be reli­gious, polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary in nature — Mr. Emory char­ac­ter­izes them as “priest-spies.” They would have at least lim­it­ed knowl­edge of the pre­vail­ing mil­i­tary tech­nol­o­gy, as well as advanced tac­ti­cal knowl­edge of its appli­ca­tion.

Their “parish­ioners,” on the oth­er hand, would see (and would be encour­aged and oblig­at­ed to see) the dev­as­tat­ing appli­ca­tion of the destruc­tive tech­nol­o­gy as “mir­a­cles.” Groups or indi­vid­u­als who devi­at­ed from the pre­scribed path would be pun­ished with the tech­nol­o­gy and this, again, would be seen by a naive pop­u­lace as ret­ri­bu­tion by some super­nat­ur­al enti­ty. (It should be not­ed that New Age reli­gions are by no means immune to this kind of exploita­tion and seduc­tion by fas­cist ele­ments.)

Weapons tech­nol­o­gy that might be involved would include genet­i­cal­ly-engi­neered micro-organ­isms (“the plagues of Egypt”), Tes­la tech­nol­o­gy to cause earth­quakes or alter the weath­er (“God’s pun­ish­ment on the wicked”), long dis­tance mind-con­trol tech­niques involv­ing elec­tro­mag­net­ic radi­a­tion (“the Voice of the Lord”). (Note: this lec­ture was giv­en before infor­ma­tion about Project HAARP became pub­lic.) In L‑1 evi­dence is pre­sent­ed that so-called “fly­ing saucers” are real and do not come from out­er space. They are advanced aero­nau­ti­cal devices, whose devel­op­ment began with pro­to­types flown by the Ger­mans dur­ing the clos­ing stages of World War II. They were fur­ther devel­oped by the West­ern Allies in the years after the war. There is also sub­stan­tial evi­dence of attempts by ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to cre­ate belief in space aliens. With this in mind, Mr. Emory dis­cuss­es the pos­si­ble uses of “UFOs” and “aliens” in the fas­cist tech­no-theoc­ra­cy described above. (Record­ed in Jan­u­ary of 1995 in San­ta Mon­i­ca.)

Discussion

5 comments for “L‑2 The Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich”

  1. Inter­est­ing­ly, Nick Red­fern notes in his book “In Pur­suit of the Saucer Spies,” the fact that the ear­li­est alien “con­tactees” — who report­ed that the extrater­res­tri­als were Nordic look­ing and came in peace — had been asso­ciates of Amer­i­can fas­cist William Dud­ley Pel­ley dur­ing the ’30s. Mr Red­fern infers noth­ing from this odd fac­toid, but I’d say it points to a pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign in the ’50s to dis­guise the true ori­gin of cer­tain UFOs.

    Posted by SnowballsChance | June 1, 2011, 4:29 am
  2. The re-release of this arti­cle is very per­ti­nent at this time. Chan­nel 7 ABC News in South­field, MI just announced a new street-light sys­tem called “Intel­li-Lights”, by a local engi­neer and man­u­fac­tur­er. The street light sys­tem does what street lights are expect­ed to do with a few excep­tions. These lights con­tain pow­er­ful soft­ware that allows the capac­i­ty to respond to ques­tions by pedes­tri­ans, give warn­ings and alerts via the gov­ern­ment or law enforce­ment, video record with greater pre­ci­sion images with­in its path. In fact, Detroit and it’s sub­ur­ban areas, have a sin­cere inter­est in improv­ing its over­all image has been adopt­ing sev­er­al oth­er high-tech means of help­ing law enforce­ment. It reads good but it tru­ly reduces a law-abid­ing cit­i­zens pri­va­cy.
    Also, I hear time and again, after an earth­quake, Suna­mi, or any dev­as­tat­ing envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, Chris­tians say­ing the “Lord is try­ing to tell peo­ple some­thing. They’d bet­ter wake up!”

    Posted by Jack Kennedy II | November 1, 2011, 11:24 am
  3. “J K II”:

    There IS NO GOD. I think the crap state of our world is abun­dant evi­dence that there’s obvi­ous­ly no all-pow­er­ful, benev­o­lent Super­nat­ur­al Force.

    Posted by Bakunin | November 12, 2011, 3:44 pm
  4. New­ly cre­at­ed glow­ing bun­nies!

    http://natmonitor.com/2013/08/16/scientists-create-glow-in-the-dark-bunnies/

    Rest assured, they are ter­res­tri­al from very earth­ly tech­nol­o­gy.

    Posted by GK | August 15, 2013, 10:22 pm
  5. Not the Thiel and Drap­er involve­ment:

    excerpt­ing...

    ...To be clear, Cam­bri­an isn’t print­ing design­er babies or dinosaurs — yet. Still, its rhetoric alarms crit­ics. Mar­cy Darnovsky, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Genet­ics and Soci­ety, a bioethics watch­dog group in Berke­ley, sums up Heinz’s belief that “every prob­lem can be solved by engi­neer­ing” as as a kind of “tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an­ism.”
    “We have to take seri­ous­ly peo­ple like Austen Heinz who say they want to mod­i­fy future gen­er­a­tions of human beings and upgrade the human species,” she said. “I think that tech­ni­cal project is far more com­pli­cat­ed than they acknowl­edge. Nonethe­less, their sto­ry about what we should be striv­ing for as human beings, as a soci­ety, I think is very trou­bling.”

    ...This facil­i­ty, he envi­sions, could be run by anoth­er com­pa­ny, not nec­es­sar­i­ly the gov­ern­ment. Because Cam­bri­an wants to keep gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence to an absolute min­i­mum, its CEO insists that behav­ing well is in the company’s best inter­est. “It’s pret­ty obvi­ous why we wouldn’t want to do some­thing bad,” said Heinz on a recent after­noon in his South of Mar­ket office. “We wouldn’t want the indus­try to be reg­u­lat­ed. So, ‘How do we democ­ra­tize cre­ation with­out killing every­one?’ is basi­cal­ly the ques­tion.”

    Con­tro­ver­sial DNA start­up wants to let cus­tomers cre­ate crea­tures

    In Austen Heinz’s vision of the future, cus­tomers tin­ker with the genet­ic codes of plants and ani­mals and even design new crea­tures on a com­put­er. Then his start­up, Cam­bri­an Genomics, prints that DNA quick­ly, accu­rate­ly and cheap­ly.

    “Any­one in the world that has a few dol­lars can make a crea­ture, and that changes the game,” Heinz said. “And that cre­ates a whole new world.”
    The 31-year-old CEO has a dead­pan demeanor that can be hard to read, but he is not kid­ding. In a makeshift lab­o­ra­to­ry in San Fran­cis­co, his syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy com­pa­ny uses lasers to cre­ate cus­tom DNA for major phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies. Its mis­sion, to “democ­ra­tize cre­ation” with min­i­mal to no reg­u­la­tion, fright­ens bioethi­cists as deeply as it thrills Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists.

    With the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy and gen­er­ous fund­ing, a grow­ing num­ber of star­tups are tak­ing sci­ence and med­i­cine to the edge of sci­ence fic­tion. In the works or on the mar­ket are col­or-chang­ing flow­ers, cow-free milk, ani­mal-free meat, tests that detect dis­eases from one drop of blood and pills that tell doc­tors whether you have tak­en your med­i­cine.
    ‘Total­ly new organ­isms’

    But few founders are push­ing the tech­ni­cal and eth­i­cal bound­aries of sci­ence as far as Heinz, who told the Wall Street Jour­nal, “I can’t believe that after 10 or 20 years peo­ple will not design their chil­dren dig­i­tal­ly.” At a recent con­fer­ence in Vien­na, he said, “We want to make total­ly new organ­isms that have nev­er exist­ed.”
    His 11-per­son team has raised $10 mil­lion from more than 120 investors, includ­ing Peter Thiel’s ven­ture firm Founders Fund. “It’s a fun­da­men­tal­ly new tech­nol­o­gy that can open up a whole new indus­try,” said part­ner Scott Nolan.
    Ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Tim­o­thy Drap­er, anoth­er investor, prais­es Heinz as an “excep­tion­al leader with a unique pas­sion for his busi­ness.”
    “I love Cam­bri­an,” he wrote in an e‑mail. “The com­pa­ny is lit­er­al­ly print­ing life. Can’t wait to see all the great things that come of it.”
    To be clear, Cam­bri­an isn’t print­ing design­er babies or dinosaurs — yet. Still, its rhetoric alarms crit­ics. Mar­cy Darnovsky, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Genet­ics and Soci­ety, a bioethics watch­dog group in Berke­ley, sums up Heinz’s belief that “every prob­lem can be solved by engi­neer­ing” as as a kind of “tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an­ism.”
    “We have to take seri­ous­ly peo­ple like Austen Heinz who say they want to mod­i­fy future gen­er­a­tions of human beings and upgrade the human species,” she said. “I think that tech­ni­cal project is far more com­pli­cat­ed than they acknowl­edge. Nonethe­less, their sto­ry about what we should be striv­ing for as human beings, as a soci­ety, I think is very trou­bling.”
    ‘Pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy’
    Sci­en­tists mod­i­fy the DNA of liv­ing organ­isms for many rea­sons: to make plants resis­tant to her­bi­cides and pests, for exam­ple, or to make research ani­mals mim­ic human con­di­tions and dis­eases.

    Edit­ing DNA has become sig­nif­i­cant­ly less cost­ly over the last decade, and Cam­bri­an has mod­i­fied or built machines that make the process even cheap­er and faster. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, Heinz said, machines cre­ate DNA strands one at a time and many of them con­tain errors. His method makes mil­lions of strands at once, errors and all, to also gen­er­ate a few cor­rect ones.
    “It is the most pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy humans have ever cre­at­ed,” Heinz said. “Hydro­gen bombs can destroy whole plan­ets, but this is a tech­nol­o­gy that can cre­ate plan­ets. This is the great­est human achieve­ment of all time — the abil­i­ty to read and write life, because that’s who we are.”
    DNA is made up of four chem­i­cals rep­re­sent­ed by the let­ters A, C, T and G. When Cam­bri­an receives an order for spe­cif­ic genes, it adds DNA chem­i­cals mil­lions of times onto tiny beads that are then lay­ered onto a glass slide. A machine assigns a col­or to each DNA chem­i­cal. The next step is the key one: A laser pro­grammed to ana­lyze the col­or com­bi­na­tions ignores the erro­neous strands and “prints” the cor­rect ones by push­ing them apart from the rest. The final prod­uct arrives on a small plas­tic plate as a pow­der that cus­tomers put inside the cells of an organ­ism.

    Right now, employ­ees check each order to make sure that a cus­tomer isn’t print­ing, say, base pairs of Ebo­la. But staff won’t have time to do that if, as Heinz pre­dicts, orders dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase in the next two years. In that case, he said, Cam­bri­an might first ship the plates to an inde­pen­dent facil­i­ty where experts would put the DNA inside cells, film and ana­lyze it, and make sure that it is safe before releas­ing it.

    This facil­i­ty, he envi­sions, could be run by anoth­er com­pa­ny, not nec­es­sar­i­ly the gov­ern­ment. Because Cam­bri­an wants to keep gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence to an absolute min­i­mum, its CEO insists that behav­ing well is in the company’s best inter­est.

    “It’s pret­ty obvi­ous why we wouldn’t want to do some­thing bad,” said Heinz on a recent after­noon in his South of Mar­ket office. “We wouldn’t want the indus­try to be reg­u­lat­ed. So, ‘How do we democ­ra­tize cre­ation with­out killing every­one?’ is basi­cal­ly the ques­tion.”

    The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment already reg­u­lates forms of genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tion. The Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion over­sees gene ther­a­pies for humans, and anoth­er agency has indi­cat­ed it will not approve pro­pos­als to change par­ents’ sperm and eggs with the goal of pass­ing genet­ic changes to their off­spring. But Darnovsky, the bioethi­cist, said that it’s less clear what rules would apply to Heinz, who isn’t propos­ing to design mod­i­fied humans him­self, but to some­day pro­vide the DNA to a third-par­ty design­er.

    “There does need to be a pub­lic dis­cus­sion, and pub­lic pol­i­cy about when and who and under what cir­cum­stances and how new life forms can be cre­at­ed,” she said.
    Heinz and oth­er sci­en­tists have years of tech­ni­cal hur­dles to clear before they can cre­ate liv­ing, breath­ing humans from a plate of print­ed DNA. Such an act is not pos­si­ble right now. But he doesn’t hide his enthu­si­asm about the pos­si­bil­i­ty.

    Is he essen­tial­ly enabling eugen­ics? He rejects that term, which to him means gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence with repro­duc­tive rights. He insists that it dif­fers from his approach, which he describes as allow­ing indi­vid­u­als to elim­i­nate future suf­fer­ing in a more humane way than abor­tion, “which is pret­ty bar­bar­ic.” “A decent per­cent­age of peo­ple have real­ly nasty muta­tions that cause real­ly bad, hor­ri­ble things,” like Down syn­drome and cys­tic fibro­sis, he said. “These are basi­cal­ly like hell on Earth, and I think it’s smart to be able to avoid those things.”
    DNA print­er

    The tech­nol­o­gy could also be used for more super­fi­cial means, like print­ing desired eye and hair col­ors, and Heinz has no prob­lem with that. “Peo­ple are already try­ing to make those deci­sions by decid­ing who they’re going to breed with.”

    Then there is the poten­tial mat­ter of cre­at­ing liv­ing things that are now the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion. “If you could take a chick­en and make it the size of my build­ing,” Heinz mused, “you would prob­a­bly learn a lot about genet­ics, which could be use­ful for human appli­ca­tions.”

    Wouldn’t that be dan­ger­ous? “If the chicken’s car­niv­o­rous, then yeah.”
    Heinz became inter­est­ed in genet­ics as a stu­dent at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty in North Car­oli­na, his home state. In 2008, he moved to South Korea for a doc­tor­al pro­gram in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing and com­put­er sci­ence, where he built the DNA laser print­er used today. In 2011, after giv­ing a talk about the tech­nol­o­gy at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, he dropped out of school and returned to the Unit­ed States to incor­po­rate Cam­bri­an.
    Cam­bri­an cur­rent­ly prints DNA for Roche, Glax­o­SmithK­line and Ther­mo Fish­er Sci­en­tif­ic at 5 to 6 cents per DNA let­ter, Heinz said. Next year, the com­pa­ny wants to open a pilot ver­sion of the ser­vice to aca­d­e­mics at a steep dis­count: $50 for 20 dis­tinct 500-let­ter strands of DNA.
    To suc­ceed, Cam­bri­an is invest­ing in and work­ing with com­pa­nies that share its vision. It made an ear­ly invest­ment in Glow­ing Plant, which raised more than $480,000 on Kick­starter to cre­ate genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied glow-in-the-dark plants. In response, the crowd­fund­ing plat­form banned projects involv­ing genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered organ­isms. Glow­ing Plant plans to use Cambrian’s tech­nol­o­gy as it makes more plants.
    Improved aro­ma
    Cam­bri­an will also share its tech­nol­o­gy with star­tups in which it holds a 10 per­cent equi­ty stake. One is Petomics, which is mak­ing a pro­bi­ot­ic for cats and dogs that makes their feces smell like bananas. Anoth­er is Sweet­Peach, which hopes to take sam­ples of users’ vagi­nal microor­gan­isms and send back per­son­al­ized pro­bi­otics to pro­mote vagi­nal health. (Con­trary to Heinz’s descrip­tion of Sweet­Peach at a recent con­fer­ence, the prod­ucts will not make vagi­nas smell like peach­es.)
    Heinz seeks to help cre­ate “thou­sands” more star­tups in this vein. On top of that, he wants to replace lost limbs, fight virus­es and devel­op alter­na­tives to antibi­otics. Maybe some­day, he said, sci­en­tists will even print DNA on Mars. “It’s going to be an amaz­ing next few hun­dred years.”

    Posted by Tiffany Sunderson | January 5, 2015, 3:53 pm

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