There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; 

yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance,

 as in the strife of Nature itself, 

some new principle of order, 

or some new impulse of conduct,

 develops itself, 

and controls, and regulates, 

and brings to an harmonious consequence,

 passions and elements 

which seem only to threaten despair and subversion

 

“People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” 

“Why?” 

 “Because they have better stuff,” 

 

Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a "Death of a Thousand Cuts." 

In other words one grand act is not occuring

 but a multitude of small expressions on the part of individuals,

 both slowly and swiftly taking the place of heirarchy and history.

 

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; 

until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. 

After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. 

For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. 

Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers.

 It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future

 

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

 

When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. 

Later, someone forged an iron spring, set clockwork running, imagined grid-lines on a globe.

 Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. 

So we’ve always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real. 

It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. 

And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the lands spread out before us ― never mind. 

We've always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real

 

science fiction was always about the period in which it was written

 

When you raise the dead, 

they bring their baggage

 

Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. 

Sense doesn't come into it. 

People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is

 than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy

 

We're an information economy. 

They teach you that in school. 

What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

 Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified..

 

Three in the morning.

Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, 

using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water

 

My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop

 

If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now,

 a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.

 I also suspect that you don’t know it, 

because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture

 

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks,

 triggering visions in the minds of others

 

Voodou 

It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. 

What it’s about is getting things done. 

 there are many gods, spirits. 

Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. 

There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation

Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met,

 but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. 

, you know how this works, it’s street religion, 

came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. 

Voodou’s like the street. 

Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? 

No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. 

 

"your songs are sad."

-"My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you." 

 

You know what your trouble is?

 You're the kind who
always reads the handbook. 

Anything people build,
any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific
purpose. 

It's for doing something that somebody already
understands. 

But if it's new technology, it'll open
areas nobody's ever thought of before. 

You read the manual, and you won't play around with it, not the same way.

And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do
something you never thought of

 

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: 

The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, 

or in a gallery

 

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. 

We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp.

 Bolt labels on the result. Handles. 

Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves

 

The future is there looking back at us. 

Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. 

And from where they are, 

the past behind us will look nothing at all

 like the past we imagine behind us now

 

A nation, consists of its laws. 

A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time.

If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals.

 If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, 

and soon isn’t a nation

 

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. 

That’s just the act of all good writing

 

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones

 

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.

 

Imagine a novel from the sixties whose author had somehow fully envisioned cellular telephony circa 2004, and had worked it, exactly as we know it today, into the fabric of her imaginary future. 

Such a book would have seemed highly peculiar in the sixties, even though innumerable novels had already been written in which small personal wireless communications devices were taken for granted.

 A genuinely prescient cell-phone novel would have moved in a most unsettling way, its characters acting, out of an unprecedented degree of connectivity, in ways that would quickly overwhelm the narrative.

 

All fiction, 

whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, 

is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written

 

Cliches became cliches for a reason; 

that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, 

and the following cliche is truer than most:

 You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been

 

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; 

and if it is present, it will be future as well

 

We see in order to move; 

we move in order to see

 

We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. 

In that sense, we have no future. 

Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration.

 For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. 

We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... 

We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition

 

The street finds its own uses for things.

 

Time moves in one direction, memory another. 

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting

 When you want to know how things really work, 

study them when they're coming apart

 

Cyberspace. 

A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... 

A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.

 Unthinkable complexity.

 Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

 Like city lights, receding...

Friday the 13th

           Vassago: Search results for friday 13th

 

The future is already here –

 it's just not evenly distributed 

 

The future is there... looking back at us. 

Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

 

Man has no automatic code of survival. 

His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. 

He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, 

what values his life depends on,

 what course of action it requires...

Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, 

which nature will not force him to perform.

 

There is no conflict of interests among men, 

neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires—

if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?

 

Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. 

Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? 

It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. 

The only man who desires to be moral

 is the man who desires to live.

 

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis.

Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. 

But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame.

 It is your moral code that’s through, this time.

 Your moral code has reached its climax, 

the blind alley at the end of its course. 

And if you wish to go on living, 

what you now need is not to return to morality—

you who have never known any—

but to discover it.

 

A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behaviour. 

He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 

‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, 

'virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it.

 ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question:

 of value to whom and for what?

 'Value’ presupposes a standard, 

a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. 

Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

 

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. 

Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, 

but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires,

 so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud,

 but the torture of frustration is all he will find,

 unless he seeks the happiness proper to man.

 The purpose of morality is to teach you, 

not to suffer and die,

 but to enjoy yourself and live.

 

No, you do not have to live as a man; 

it is an act of moral choice. 

But you cannot live as anything else—

and the alternative is that state of living death 

which you now see within you and around you,

 the state of a thing unfit for existence, 

no longer human and less than animal, 

a thing that knows nothing but pain 

and drags itself through its span of years 

in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

 

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, 

these two—existence and consciousness—

are axioms you cannot escape, 

these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake,

 in any part of your knowledge and in its sum,

 from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life

 to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.

 

There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another—

if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, 

that lies do not work,

 that the unearned cannot be had, 

that the undeserved cannot be given,

 that the destruction of a value which is,

 will not bring value to that which isn’t.

 

It’s not that I don’t suffer, 

it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, 

I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, 

not to be accepted as part of one’s soul 

and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.

 

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. 

If an organism fails in that action, it dies...

It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of 'Value’ possible.

 It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

 

 "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission"

 It's not always possible to seek permission before making decisions 

and you won't get it right every time.

In those cases, you'll need to seek forgiveness. 

You hope your friend, your family member will understand you tried your best. 

You hope they'll show you grace. 

Asking yourself for forgiveness can be even harder. 

We carry the burden of our past mistakes. 

But if you let them go, you can soar.

 

Pain, 

you just have to fight through, 

because the truth is 

you can't outrun it, 

and life always makes more.

 

To think is an act of choice. 

The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’

 the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness.

 Reason does not work automatically;

 thinking is not a mechanical process;

 the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

 

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. 

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. 

A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—

to value the failure of your values is an insolent negation of morality

 

You have sacrificed justice to mercy. 

You have sacrificed independence to unity.

 You have sacrificed reason to faith. 

You have sacrificed wealth to need. 

You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial.

 You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

 

they have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. 

A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—

 yet search is there image of man’s nature: 

the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost 

a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own 

and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, 

that only the unknowable exists.

 

What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? 

That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives.

 

You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist.

 Once, you believed it was "only a compromise": you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. 

Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. 

Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. 

Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, 

while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country 

and that your moral duty is to live for the globe.

 

ritual. 

t's a way to shut out the rest of the world and mentally prepare.

 no matter how experienced you are, it's never easy 

no room for self-doubt. 

You have to silence that small voice that says you aren't ready. 

Because if you wait to make a move until you're ready, you might never leave the starting gate.

 You simply have to trust you'll be able to weather the storm. 

Whatever that storm may be.

Mr Olympia

 

1992 

Dorian 

Kevin 2nd 

Shawn 4th 

1993 

Dorian 

Flex 2nd

 Shawn 3rd

 Kevin 5th 

1994 Dorian

 Shawn 2nd 

Kevin 3rd 

no Flex 

1995 

Dorian 

Kevin 2nd

 Nasser 3rd 

Shawn 4th

 Flex 8th 

1996 Dorian 

Shawn 2nd 

Kevin 3rd 

Flex 4th 

Ronnie 5th 

Nasser scored 3rd disqualified 

otherwise 96 would be 

Dorian 

Shawn 2nd 

Nassar 3rd 

Kevin 4th 

Flex 5th 

Ronnie 6th 

a chance to have them all together in a classic lineup

 1997 

Dorian last Olympia

 Nasser 2nd 

Shawn 3rd

 Kevin 4th

Ronnie 9th

------------------------

Kevin came second to Dorian in 92, as said here, Dorian's first win 

Kevin came second again in 95 

He, Shawn, Flex and Nasser were the guys "fighting for second place"

 there were others there of course, Vince Taylor, Chris Cormier, Paul Dillett to name a few, however these were the Big Four who were going to place after Dorian on stage and switching places with each other over those six years T

hen of course in 98 Ronnie overtook them all and stayed there

-----------------------

96 may well have been the best year ever 

Shawn came second for the second time, having done so in 94, and dropped to 4th in 95 

Kevin came second in 95, the second time he had done so after 92

 Nasser, despite being disqualified had placed 3rd again, just as he did in 95 

Shawn and Kevin, were either side of Nasser being 2nd and 4th, and these switched over the three year period (Nassar did not place in 94) 

Ronnie got onto the final six for the first time so we could see him up against the Big Four plus Dorian himself 

Nobody realised that Ronnie would be Dorian's successor, everyone thought it would have been one of the Big Four in 97, Ronnie ended up back down at 9th, and Nasser placed second to Dorian 

Flex came second to Dorian once, in 93, and a lot of people had him as next Mr O, and he came second to Ronnie in 98 

Nasser came 3rd 

Kevin and Shawn switched places yet again

------------------

Superman

 

 "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" this was the famous quote from the George Reeves black and white show - and these were Superman's original powers as they were shown in the comics and in the first shows

 These powers were down to gravity - just like John Carter

 Similar to Spiderman's strength being proportional - a spider or an ant can lift 50 times it's body weight

 It is never properly explained how Superman can fly - the yellow sun radiation being stored and used by him is what the later and modern writers rely on - but there is no "scientific" theory behind self powered flight 

Of course lots of superheroes later have flight 

In Man Of Steel Jor El explains about the earth's yellow sun being younger that Kryptons red sun and that his cells absorb the rays he also says "the gravity is lighter but the atmosphere is more nourishing" all these add up to the explanation - at least for this version

In the comics Krypton orbits a red sun while earth orbits a yellow sun 

This has been carried over into the most recent movies 

In Man Of Steel, Jor El says Earth's yellow sun is younger than Krypton's red sun

 In 2025 Superman he uses the machine with yellow sun radiation to heal, and explains that Supergirl can't he drunk under the yellow sun so goes to a red sun planet

 People write about "the sun is white and looks yellow due to the air, etc" 

However, even if the early comic writers got the sun colour thing wrong, DC has decided to keep it to this day 

So in the DC Universe - a FICTIONAL Universe, Earth has a yellow sun, and Krypton has a red sun 

There are different coloured suns, same as there is different coloured Kryptonite, and they have different effects

hypocrisy

 

 We tell our kids to chase their dreams as we constantly question our life choices. 

We love fixing everyone's problems. 

But don't ask us to fix our own. 

Sometimes hypocrisy catches up to us. 

That's when things get interesting. 

Will you stay the course? 

Keep on keeping on? 

Business as usual? 

Or take your own advice and change for the better?

 

Existence is Identity, 

Consciousness is Identification.

 

If any part of your uncertainty 

is a conflict between your heart and your mind

—follow your mind.

 

Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, 

of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, 

but the life of a thinking being—

not life by means of force or fraud, 

but life by means of achievement—

not survival at any price, 

since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: 

reason.

 

Man’s life is the standard of morality, 

but your own life is its purpose . 

If existence on earth is your goal, 

you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—

for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

 

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. 

Where there’s service, there is someone being served. 

The man who speaks to you of sacrifice

 is speaking of slaves and masters,

 and intends to be the master.

 

We will not deal with men on any terms but ours

—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself 

and not the means to any end of others. 

We do not seek to force our code upon them. 

They are free to believe what they please.

 

Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult:

from heretic to materialist to exploiter—

every form of iniquity: 

from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation—

every form of torture: 

from sneers to rack to firing squad—

have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness 

and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. 

Yet only to the extent to which—

in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, 

in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders—

some men continued to think, 

only to that extent was humanity able to survive.