Anna Campbell Kurdish fighter from Lewes- RIP

Anna Campbell  Fearless Freedom Fighter and Lewesian from Sussex

WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE

MAN WITH WORLD'S LONGEST HAIR SHOPS AT WAITROSE!

But he's thinning a bit on top!

UGLY FOOD

HEART OF BALANCE REVIEW-STEALING FIRE by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

REVIEW OF STEALING FIRE

I really was stimulated by this book particularly the chapter on psychedelics.  This is where I first heard of the amazing Sasha Shulgin and his incredible wife.  Why hasn't a film been made about this pair of beauties?  There were so many resources to follow up and, after all isn’t that what you want with one of these self-help books? A really accurate roadmap that gets you from geeky useless mental underling to superhuman hero-entrepreneur.  Isn’t this what life has now become about?  Inadequate pawn to ubermensch or uberfraulein in as short a timescale as possible?

Have we not arrived at the nexus where we can just ditch the spiritual nonsense and get right down to it?  And become great leaders because we are great kite-surfers?  Become super successful CEO’s because we go to Burning Man?  And not only will we be this super smart super-person but we will also be lean and ripped, tanned, speak several languages that we have learned while sleeping and be known at parties for hooking ourselves up to digital instruments that show us altering our heartbeat and brainwaves at will.  Everyone will laugh and want to be our friend.

Well-No!  Nope.  It actually does take the ten thousand hours. I’m really sorry to piss on part of this books premise.  I’m afraid my view is that it’s hard time, and hard regular practice to achieve mastery.  And part of that is that there is a thing called growing up and evolving the Self into additional capacities, physically and emotionally and spiritually and intellectually.  Then there is also the shadow-Self.  Growing up takes time-it is an inevitable equation. Highly focused personal development practice needs Time, lots of Time.  And I’m afraid it’s also no one way street-every step forward means half a step back-sometimes two steps back.  Sometimes the dark night of the Soul intervenes for a few years, or even a lifetime.  Personal development is evolution and takes not geological timescales but just a lifetime.

It's part of the bitch about being human-you just find out what's what, then you die.  It's a raw deal.  But the thought of the geeks transmuting their consciousness into newly made bodies and grabbing another ketogenic-enhanced seventy years is a definite no-no.  The problem with this futuristic tech is that the only humans able to afford extended life will be the nasty rich ones.  I'm ok with extending the Dalai Lama through a kickstarter campaign but I am not extending Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin or Goddess help us-the Trumpet in the West!

And the Silicon Valley billionaire premise also fills me with a dark premonition-something strange-maybe it’s dread.  Maybe it’s the feeling of nonsense upon stilts.  Possibly the idea that great wealth conveys narcissistic arrogance.  Possibly even the heresy that just cos you code-you are not a source of wisdom.  The billionaire geeky man-child villain who dreams up twisted digitally enhanced nightmares already walks among us.

That shady, Marvel-type villain, Peter Thiel, being put forward as a mentor fills me definitely with dread.  Let this sucker in and it could all turn to shit as if microwaved.  In a recent rather brilliant essay in The Baffler (March/April No 38) Eugene McCarraher, an associate professor at Villannova University describes him thusly,  '...PayPal co-founder and vampiric plutocrat Peter Thiel (an enthusiast of Objectivism and a recent recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Hayek Institute)...'  
Objectivism is of course the drivel dispensed by the arch rationaliser of greed and selfishness, Ayn Rand whose books continue to fly out the shelves apparently-it can't just be Paul Ryan buying them.  And here, the Ayn Randyan, Hayekian, economics-lite, neo-libertarian bullshit is inherent in the prose and it is what troubles me most about this silicon valley philosophy of can-do; as long as we are left alone to be great by the nanny state and it's huddled masses.  The fact that at root it appears so individualised, atomised an approach to living and the fantasy that these billionaires got there entirely by their own nerdy talents when they are just dipshits in the ocean of life-just like the rest of us.

And that teams should emulate American elite military units like the Navy Seals who are allegedly training their soldiers in meditation, yoga and psychedelics to become even better killers, to get into FLOW.  As if killing is about skill-Skilling?  When we all know killing is like sex-most of it happens in the head.

Because at root what is happening here is a re-referencing of what the meaning is about being alive.  Here, being alive is about performance.  It’s about what you do in the world!  But I suspect the truth is that what you do means very little and what you are means a very great deal.  

Gentle reader!  Read it!  Twice!

Rebirding the Peak District

A few weeks ago, the ecologist Alex Lees published an online poster on a topic that might strike you as recondite: the bird life of the Peak District. Half the poster showed the birds that currently exist there, the other half showed the birds he would like to see. It has so far been viewed 140,000 times.