sexiest woman room

It was only just recently that I became familiar with Jacques Fresco. And yes, I know that Les Visible pointed us all at him way back when, but what with me using an internet cafe wherein heavy downloads are a frowned upon no-no, I was unable to view the movie links he provided. But a lovely fellow who sits out the back of the cafe with me, gave me Zeitgeist Addendum straight from his hard drive. Finally I catch up.


And there it all was. The beauty of technology as a means of freeing us of want. With limitless energy providing limitless food, shelter, clothing, and transport, whole fields of unproductive un-endeavour would disappear. Without want, we'd see the end of crime and it's concomitant allopathic responses by way of the police, judiciary, and prisons. We'd have no need of the military. With money being unnecessary so would the industries dealing with it - banking, insurance, the stock market, all gone. Advertising too! Hurray! I'll bring the beers.

Sure enough, I'm down with all of the above. But as is my wont, I just had to pick at this thing. It occurred to me that it was less a case of, 'Here are the problems and now what is the answer?' than it was, 'Here is the answer and what problems may we solve with it?' The answer is technology sure enough. And clearly technology can solve many, many problems. And in doing so will, more or less, address the big picture. But it looks to me that the big picture view we have here has been assembled from lots of little pictures. Dig it, it's like a David Hockney photo montage.


But like a Hockney snapshot, what with the gaps in the pictures, the smooth flow of my mental eye stuttered. For mine, what Fresco's picture lacked was a coherency, a unifying overall philosophy. It seemed not to have anything to tie it together. I wondered about Fresco's world. If something were to pop up, some blemish on the perfection of it all, I had the impression that the response would be, 'What technology is there to throw at this?'

Hmm... maybe that'll work. Or maybe not. I'm thinking 'not'.

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There are only two 'philosophers' (not the right word, but never mind) that I consider to be bullet-proof in their entirety. They are Charles Darwin and the Buddha. Me putting words in Darwin's mouth - food and protection from the elements are not the fundamental human drive. They are merely responses to what is the fundamental drive - the need to pass on one's genes. Or to put this more simply, any entity that exists must (wittingly or unwittingly, it really doesn't matter) seek to continue its existence. This is ipso-facto territory. Any entity that lacks this drive will cease to be an entity. Any entity that exists will have it. That's all there is to it.


The simple truth of existentialism - 'why am I here?' - is that there isn't one. Not beyond, 'a thing is'. The flipside of this is, 'a thing that isn't isn't'. Bloody genius, me. I've just done away with the whole field of existentialism. A fig for Descartes!

But forget such abstractions. Let's just view them as a basis for understanding the far more visceral phrase 'the sex drive'. Believe it or not, this 'drive' is existential in nature, not that that ever occurs to us. What does occur is something like 'Phwooar, look at that arse! You could bounce twenty cent coins off that!' Or is that just me? Anyway, every thirty seconds folks - you, me, the lot of us - a thought like this jolts our brain.

Believe it or not, such thoughts (by way of what drives them) are more fundamental in terms of the human condition than the basic needs of food and shelter. Sure, we need food and shelter to survive but we need to survive because of our 'without-it-we-wouldn't-be-here-to-begin-with' sex drive.

Back to Darwin now. Darwin says that there are various means of dealing with how to get it on with members of the opposite sex. Nature presents more variations on this theme than there are stars in the sky. Mates are chosen because they are: fat and sleek; good at fighting; have shiny feathers; sing well; dance well; build a better home; have superior artistic taste; on and on. Funny how humans barely differ from animals, birds, and fish isn't it? That's one of the beauties of Darwin. He says that anyone who thinks they're special is fooling themselves.


But that's only half the picture. All of the above responses are appeals by those hoping to be selected to those who'll be selecting. Those who select are after quality. For those being selected, quality is neither here nor there. They're after quantity. There's no point condemning this. Like any creature with a sex drive is going to stop with one partner. Honestly. Any creature that gets laid might be shagged out momentarily, but the sex drive doesn't take long to reassert. It only has one message and it says, 'Get Rooting!' Nor should any women out there feel smug. Nature is replete with examples of species which appear to be monogamous but are actually no such thing. Philandering abounds, females included.

So what was my point exactly? The point is that food and shelter cannot be divorced from our fundamental Darwinian sex drive. Even with all things provided for us we will still seek to find better partners and more of them. And we will do this by differentiating ourselves from our neighbours. Whoever has the biggest house, the best clothes, the shiniest car will get laid more often. Getting circular now - this need to one-up our neighbours must exist because we exist. And whatever Jacques Fresco promises us, it won't put a dent in it.

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What a load of crap! We all know perfectly well that people who have nothing but generosity of spirit can get laid too. What about that huh?


I thank that imagined individual for segueing me into the Buddha. The Buddha acknowledges all that Darwin says, with his dictum 'life is suffering'. And suffering of course is desire. Of course, the Buddha doesn't dwell solely on the desire to get laid like Darwin does. He goes beyond Darwin to view things in terms of the 'self'. So what's the difference?

Hopefully I've done enough fleshing out above to save us yet more circuitousness and thus allow me to declare that there isn't one. Darwin's addressing of the necessity of 'being' and Buddha's view of the self as desire, are (if you cock your head and squint) the same thing. Our existence predicates the furthering of our existence and this necessarily places the self front-and-centre, first-and-foremost, the thing without which we are nothing.

The Buddha goes very very far in these thoughts. Too far for this discussion. Let's just stick to the Buddha as an answer to Darwin's imperatives. The Buddha has no beef with Darwin. He acknowledges the self but says that to view it as a thing separate to that-which-is-not-the-self is a mistake. Selflessness is not so much a rejection of yourself, ahem, but rather a means of viewing yourself in context.


Side note - Anyone who imagines a selfless person as being some idiot giving all their food to others and starving to death as a result, is being silly. Not only would this break Darwin's dictum but would also be a statement of separation of the self against that-not-the-self which is contrary to everything Buddha is on about. And yes, I can imagine a situation where such things would occur and still be described as 'right', but we shouldn't confuse extreme anomalies with the truth of the whole. In statistics, such extremities on the bell curve are discarded (2.1 standard deviations, blah blah, blah) and quite right too. Anomalies do not speak of a system but of its tolerances, a whole separate subject.

Anyway, with this selflessness as a lens, or a mindset, or a guiding principle perhaps, all of Darwin's dictums can be fulfilled. The world will function just fine. We'll all be fed, clothed, and sheltered and yes, even laid. Whilst it's no perfect 'Just one quick spray and it's gone!' antidote to Darwin's inevitable need to get laid more often, nor is it about anything else.

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So hopefully you should have that mess of pottage above sitting in your head as a coherent perfect thought. Yes? Excellent. Now you understand the hole in Jacques Fresco's model of providing all that we need. He's got the cart before the horse. I don't know if anyone has ever actually tried to do this but I expect that with enough fiddling, it could be made to work. But not very well and not for very long. Likewise, Fresco's wish to sate our desires is one way of quenching the fires but not a very good one. The truth is desires cannot be sated. Like the TV show said - the nature of monkey is irrepressible. Subsequently any resemblance between Fresco's envisioned world and selflessness is merely a well-meaning coincidence.


Even viewed in solely practical terms the whole thing will be doomed to fail. In spite us of having all things in abundance, if the nature of the self is left unaddressed, those of a monstrous ego (pyschopaths if you prefer) will inevitably sacrifice all on the altar of their own regard. And frankly there seems to be nothing in Fresco's model to stop them.

In the big dreamy picture that is Jacques Fresco's brave new world, something big is lacking. There seems to be no coherent sense of 'This is who we are'. Or in negative terms, there is no 'When all else fails see rule 1'. Me, I reckon a continuum of selflessness provides a sense of 'who we are', a 'rule 1'. It does so as a stripped-down go-cart, a bare-bones lean-machine, a wonder tool good for any eventuality. It cannot be slurred or impeached since it favours none. It's as right as a thing can be.

Even if Fresco's plans were fully realised, it would eventually fail and we'd be back to where we started. On the other hand, if we could explode some kind of gigantic world-affecting Buddha-bomb and fill everyone's head with the truth of selflessness, the world that would result would pretty much resemble Fresco's vision anyway. And have a basis to it that made sense.


Brilliant! This and a thousand other mad dreams of a Buddhist dictator. What are the odds on Fresco's dreams seeing reality? Given that it threatens to replace insanely powerful and greedy institutions, who would rather fight to the death than let it live, it would have to be the bookie's dream. A buck will get you a million. Selflessness on the other hand is a personal trip. You can do it all on your own, and no maglev trains required.

What do you want? I'm assuming you wish to live. Since you've expressed nothing to the contrary, that is. The question it seems is - Why. Why do you wish to live?

Best I can make out, you wish to sit here watching sport on the TV all day long. Day in, day out, every day the same. It seems not to matter which sport. Nor does it matter whether you've seen it before. On any given day we probably watch that fifteen minute Fox Sports News bulletin twenty times. More, probably. The same stories over and over and over. And none of it worth a pinch of shit of course. If we were to take out the endless histrionic moralising about footballers and cricketers getting on the piss and punching some fellow, or molesting some woman, there'd be very little left.

Wait a minute! Benfica beat Galatasaray on a 2-1 aggregate and escaped relegation in the Bundesliga! In spite of the fact that we have no idea what this means we'll watch it twenty times. As long as there's winning and losing, and all accompanied by screaming, it's all good.

What is there besides Fox Sports? Food used to be very important. Well, not food so much as processed sugar and grease. Actual food, the food I cooked, you would peck at, complain that you were full, or that it was too dry, or that your false teeth couldn't handle it, or whatever (honestly, any idiot excuse was good enough) and then throw it out. Just before you'd shuffle over to the fridge for a creme caramel. Followed by some ice cream. And a bowl of custard. And perhaps a cornetto ice cream. And some chocolates, biscuits, and toffees. Hmm... how about one of those little Woolworths-brand petit choux things? Why not. A day well spent! Ninety percent of your caloric intake comprised entirely of sugar and grease. Oh! It's good to be alive!

Sorry, I'm being sarcastic. But you really loved that stuff. So much so that you put up with chronic diarrhoea for months - shuffling off to the toilet every fifteen minutes. For months! Good God, there was shit everywhere, the walls, the floors. How many times did you shit your bed? I can't even remember. God knows what lies you told your doctors. And God knows what they made of it all. By all rights you should have been constipated, what with that being a major side-effect of your chemo. Anyway you gobbled those anti-diarrhoea pills like yet more candy. And the only thing you could think of that might be at fault was my cooking! Ha ha ha ha - it's funny really.

But now you don't even have that. With the cancer taking hold, and you with no appetite and vomiting all the time, you barely eat anything. The petit choux sit in the fridge uneaten.

You have no friends and family. You trashed all that long ago. No one calls or visits now. If one of my clueless brothers calls occasionally you talk for five minutes and then say, 'Well, I'll let you get back to it', and hang up. Really you'd rather watch TV.

Your doctors are your social life now. Would you argue if I said your relationship with them could be defined as 'Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir'? You go through the motions, they go through the motions - it's a game of charades that goes on and on. I understand their part in the charade. They've got a mortgage to pay and kids to put through an expensive private school. And with your DVA gold card you're their cash cow. They love you to death. Literally, now that I think about it. God forbid your death should come early. Where's the money in that? Prolongation is the name of the game. And billing all the while.

But you don't seriously think they give a shit do you? Billing aside, best I can tell they view you as a technical exercise. Imagine some fellow in charge of a new soft-drink product launch. For him to succeed doesn't require that he drink the product or even like it. And since the product is entirely without nutritional value or anything beneficial at all, he'll oversee a campaign that pivots entirely on violence. Or sex. Or any goddamn thing. He really doesn't care.

And nor do your 'carers'. They don't care. They just go through the motions. And so do you. They prolong your life - you prolong your life. And the question of 'What's it all about, Alfie?' is nothing more than a cue for a conversation about Michael Caine. "Gee, he's good that Michael Caine, isn't he?" Otherwise I know what's in it for them. Money. But what's in it for you? Why do you continue? For yet another day of sitting watching Fox Sports News to see if Benfica escapes relegation?

Perhaps you do it for me? I am the only thing in your life besides the doctors, the TV, and the sweets. And the mad thing is that we have nothing in common. Everything you hold as worthy I have nothing but contempt for. Certainly there's the aforementioned trinity - I hate 'em and you know it. And it gets worse when we take a break from sport each night to watch the SBS news. It's your half hour of suffering as I get iconoclastic on everything that you ever held dear in your life. The government, the military, duty, loyalty, and respect, all that stuff, everything - I smash it to pieces. As I lay bare the litany of lies we're told, the obvious parallels to your life spent making pointless war upon Asians is unmissable. If I call John Howard a war criminal, what does that make you? Everything you were proud of, now shown to be the thoughtless actions of a dupe. What a nightmare. Finally the weather report! You - "Is it alright if we put it back to the Sports?" Me - "Dad, I've already done it." A sigh of relief.

And so we come back to the question - Why do you wish to live? Your wits are gone and the sports is meaningless. You're in pain all the time and you can barely eat. There's no one in your life but for a fellow who's a walking-talking indictment of everything that was you. What is there in your life?

Here, now, in this forum that you will never see, I'll tell you what it is - it's fear. I see it in your eyes you know. It's never not there. And with everything turned to dust, all joy banished, and every reason to live gone - fear is all that's left. Here it is, without adornment, the perfect, elemental, hard, white stone of fear. This is the ultimate fear - the fear of non-existence. Anything but that. Any delusion, any charade, any noisy trumpeting TV distraction is preferable to facing this thing.

You'll never know it for what it is. Which is to say, you will never know yourself. All you know is delusion, and delusion is all you ever were, are now, or ever will be.

I know you have never wondered at the meaning of 'today is a good day to die'. Since you have no idea what it means, you will never say it. Regardless, it's as true for you as it is for one who understands. When your 'today' arrives it will be a good day. The fear, the delusion, the suffering, held only by your terrified grip will become as nothing - a waft of smoke from a dream in some movie you barely remember. A thing that never was, to become never again. An end to it all. A good day.

Is there a purpose to life? Hmm... has anyone ever asked that question before? Maybe I'm the first, ha ha. And then there's stinkbugs. I wonder if a stinkbug ever asks this question? I shall call this curious fellow Jonathon Livingstone Stinkbug.


Are we familiar with stinkbugs? For those who groove on the Linnaean system they are family Pentatomidae, order Heteroptera. There's at least 5,000 different species and they're found on every continent on the planet. Their means of surviving environmental depredations, or more specifically predators, is very successful. They nail a predator with a really foul smelling liquid and otherwise taste like shit. Whilst I've never eaten one, I've smelt them and they're nasty. The smart money gives them a wide berth.

I saw a perfect demonstration of this when I was out on the balcony talking to my local grey butcherbird. I do all the talking sure enough, but he sings me a song and it's fair deal all round. And there we were when a big fat stinkbug landed less than a metre from the both of us. Both our heads turned and I waited for the coming inevitable violence. Nothing doing. He knew precisely what sort of bug it was and went straight back to the very important question of whether I had a bit of ham for him or not.

I knew not to touch the stinkbug because back when I was six or so, some other six year old said something along the lines of 'Don't touch it! It's a stinkbug!' Humans are clever like that. They can tell each other things. Butcherbirds don't have that facility. The only way any butcherbird learnt not to eat a stinkbug was by eating one and learning the hard way.

To hell with the butcherbird

Forget the butcherbird now, there's something extraordinary going on here. Stinkbugs are spectacular survivors and none of them are within cooee of extinction. But their mechanism of survival is arse-about. They don't ensure their own survival so much as they ensure each other's. The only way a butcherbird learns to leave them alone is because a stinkbug gave his life.

So, for our heteroptera philosopher, Jonathon Livingstone Stinkbug, between the two questions of, 'What is the purpose of life?', and 'What is the purpose of death?', one is a no-brainer (which is just as well since they are bugs of little brain). For our Jonathon, the purpose of death is to ensure life. Not for himself of course, but for every other stinkbug. And weirdly enough, in answering the latter question he goes some way in answering the former.

Obviously I'm drawing parallels here. Parallels with humans, natch. And if we're talking about humans we have to address the question of choice. Stinkbugs don't have a choice. And we do. Sure enough, we make choices all the time. Social Darwinists choose to emulate the predators of the world. As I've discussed before, that says less about Darwin than it does about them being self-serving motherfuckers. But it is what it is, and the human world is full of predators and the predated.

The occasional spook aside, if you're reading this blog it's my melancholy duty to inform you that you belong to the latter group. You are the predated. But happily Darwin says that there is more than one way of dealing with predators. Mostly we choose to emulate those creatures that run with a herd. We let the predators take the weakest whilst muttering, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' Or to put it another way, 'Please God let them eat somebody else, not me.'


Frankly this is piss-weak. It's not so much a thought, as a non-thought, the product of a brain seized by fear. As has been discussed in the comments section here recently, any herd that runs from predators could, if they chose to, stomp the shit out of them. But only if they stopped and thought about it, if they weren't possessed of fear, and crucially, if they acted in concert.

The predators know this of course and have ensured that the possibility of people acting in concert is nigh on impossible. The means of mass communication are subsequently in their hands. No voices of resistance or of organisation will be permitted. And yet here we are on the net, talking freely. But the net is purposely designed to be a cacophony. It's as precisely flooded with crap as the mainstream media is - millions and millions of people on facebook blathering about Paris Hilton and her foo-foo dog. But still, the potential is there and this is enough to warrant its destruction. Right this minute Australia's very own Senator Stephen Conroy is doing his damnedest to shut it down. It's all for our own safety, of course.

To hell with the herd

Let's not obsess on herds and the possibility, or lack thereof, of the herd acting in concert. I have no doubt that such resistance will take place. To a certain extent it already is. Not forgetting of course, that history is replete with such movements being co-opted and led by agents of the predators. The French Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, Eastern Europe's various colour-coded revolutions, all run by the usual suspects and all designed to ensure that no harm comes to the top predators. As ever, the wolves lead the sheep in throwing down their shepherds. Three cheers - free at last!

Back to the stinkbugs now. They emphatically do not act in concert. Numbers ain't their bag. Their whole strategy functions on the sacrifice of fearless individuals. Certainly, they do not choose to be fearless. Their weeny grain-of-sand brains aren't up to it. But that's not the point. Our brains are up to it. We can choose. And we can be that fearless.

How might this plucky individual embody the strategy of Jonathon Livingstone Stinkbug? How might one, as a singleton, stick in the collective craw of the predators of the world? To be honest, actions such as this are quite common. We need merely look to the suicide bomber.


Suicide bombers sacrifice themselves in order to kill their oppressors. But suicide bombing has the precise opposite effect of that intended. As ever, the depiction of an event trumps its reality. With the bloc-media owning the rights to the meaning of a suicide bombing, they will achieve nothing useful, will enable the sowing of further seeds of fear and hatred, and most importantly will allow the bloc-media to portray the oppressed people (which the suicide bomber was ostensibly trying to help) as murderous madmen who deserve death. Everytime a suicide bomber does that thing, the motherfuckers clap in delight.

To hell with suicide bombing

What's needed is something unimpeachable, something that cannot be portrayed by the silken media voice of the predator as an excuse for more predation. Since it's me talking here, there is only a single thing that cannot be slurred, twisted, or impeached. And that thing, sure enough, is selflessness. If there's nothing in it for the person sacrificing himself, and no harm comes to others, how might that person's actions be misrepresented? Certainly the bloc-media will try but it will be a sure case of shit uphill. People know selflessness when they see it.

Has anyone heard of Norman Morrison? How about Thích Quảng Đức? No? Their names don't ring a bell? Funny that. In spite of their being two of the most extraordinary men in history they're almost perfectly absent from the media. It's not for no reason that the media ignores them. For mine, when the media ignores a subject it's a clue as to what they fear. The media voice of the predators would no more tell you about these men and what they did, than Achilles would say, 'Hey, did I tell you about my heel?!'


Somehow I doubt that either of these men were inspired by a stinkbug. But regardless, that's effectively what they did. They jammed themselves in the craw of the predator and ruined his fucking day. And yep, they did this by setting themselves on fire and being burnt alive. Are you recoiling in horror? Precisely, that's the whole idea. But over-the-top shock value aside, no one was harmed but themselves. The message was unambiguous and as loud as could be. Certainly they blew the minds of the punters but I expect they also blew the minds of the predators. True full-tilterama selflessness taken to the nth degree in this fashion is a real mindfuck.

To hell - with details

As usual, the devil is in the details. Let's skip the selflessness. This is actually the biggest hurdle but for the sake of the exercise, we're just going to take it as read. Beyond that first biggie, if the message and the means of delivering it aren't considered, all will be for nought. Like I said in a piece, Bloody Sunday, over at the cinema blog - If a monk burns in a plaza and no one sees, will it have done any good? (Actually, may I recommend that people read that piece? Sure it's a film review but it's not really a film review so much as a discussion of non-violent resistance, and the crucial aspect of it that the bloc-media unsurprisingly would prefer went unacknowledged).

Let's tackle our first question - Who are we aiming our action at? Our two heroes above were looking to shame the US military. And hats off to that. But we here are a little bit beyond that. The military is merely a servant. We want the masters. We want the bankers.


Here in Oz, the Reserve Bank of Australia is smack dab in the middle of Martin Place, which is smack dab in the middle of Sydney's CBD. Apart from the wee hours of the morning, Martin Place rarely has less than a hundred people in it. Most of the time there are thousands there, with more handicams and mobile phones than you could poke a police baton at. Perfect.

Okay, so it's filmed, uploaded to youtube, forced into the media with everyone seeing it. And?
'Man! Some guy burned himself alive in Martin Place!'
'Why?'
'Beats Me!'

Worthless. You may as well have slathered yourself with guacamole and sung the Yah Di Buckety song. (Well, if you're going to be meaningless, you may as well be funny). If you don't want to be meaningless, you need a message that makes sense and a place it can be seen. Welcome to the internet. The internet is a big place sure enough but people could be directed by way of a thousand flyers scattered about with a url printed on it. Nothing else, just that. After all, you don't want to give the game away early. And later, after the TV crews arrive and bail up the ashen faced witnesses, they'll stare into the camera and say, 'I don't know man, it seems the answer is on this piece of paper. It says...'

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Okay I admit it. I've taken huge dapartures from the simple brainless method of the Stinkbug. But the fundamental principle is right there and the aim is unchanged. It's still a simple act of selflessness for the sake of others. And when the politicians get on the telly (with their sad faces on) and say, 'We don't want anyone copying this individual' you'll know they're scared. Something just got stuck in their craw.