Futureproofing: A Guide To Your Saints

Inspiration has many sources. I prefer to stand on the shoulders of giants.

This series is inspired by many profound thinkers, chief among them Philip K. Dick. Dick, or PKD, was a science fiction author, a visionary whose work and influence loom large over the present time. Indeed, it was Dick who best predicted artificial intelligence and virtual reality. He also predicted misuse of technology as a means of social control. Paranoid, drug-addled and the unwitting recipient of a series of spiritual experiences, PKD is the patron saint of our time. Remember, it was he who warned us our toasters would be spying on us.

If PKD described the black iron prison that keeps us enslaved. Terence McKenna sought to teach us how to break out of it. Psychedelics, spirituality, science, any tool that works is to be used. McKenna advocated finding a new operating system to replace the buggy one in use, while reminding us that this is not a dress rehearsal. Life is to be lived, and the first step to living is to reclaim the personal sovereignty that has been surrendered, either by intent or by default, to modern society.

PKD and McKenna are no longer with us on the physical plane, but a powerful contemporary influence is Gordon White, whose book The Chaos Protocols and writing at Rune Soup directly inspired this series. Solid advice on magic, geopolitics, economics and more can be found there. The Archonology series is a must-read for anyone interested in futureproofing their life (and provides quite a bit of hidden history that explains how we got here).

This is just a shortlist of influences. As the series progresses, I'm sure to drop more names, and hopefully links. Until next time, a thorough reading of the above is more than enough to get you started. And perhaps even finished!

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The World In Which We Live: Safety Is An Option Edition

In a world in which Fight Club , The X Files , and the complete works of Phillip K Dick have collided into one twisted reality we call normal (with a dash of Black Mirror and The Big Short for flavor), we now learn that software upgrades that could have prevented the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max passenger jets were available... at a price . "Want your passengers to live to fly another day? Sure, but it'll cost you." And I'm unsure who is more evil, the manufacturer for making safety features ON A FLYING MACHINE optional at additional cost or the airlines for declining to install the features. This is a stunning failure of human decency in the eyes of this writer. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. This is business as usual in our extortionary economy. In the US, medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy , a real-world manifestation of the "your money or your life" ethos of the street thug in literature and film. The hand wringing over w...

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Author, editor, blogger, and so much more Shaun Mullen has passed. Noting his blog Kiko's House hadn't been updated in a while, I did a search and discovered his obituary . My friendship with Shaun goes back to 2006. While living in Australia, I'd discovered his blog when searching for informed commentary on US foreign policy in the Middle East. Sadly, much of that policy remains unchanged 14 years later, but that is for another post. Shaun had noticed that his blog wasn't rendering correctly in Internet Explorer and asked if anyone could suggest a fix. I, being a bit of a tech head at the time, suggested Firefox or similar browser, and the problem was solved. We kept in and out of touch, finding common ground in music (I mentioned my love for the Grateful Dead and Shaun sent a dozen CDs of concert recordings. By International mail. The man was generous to a fault.), worldview, and more. My old site got its greatest number of hits when Shaun linked to a few o...

The Willowdale Bridge

During my childhood, when I-75 was a divided four lane and Highway 41 was still the main road through town and smaller roads snaked over and between the hills, the Willowdale bridge crossed Mill Creek along one of those side streets. That is, until The Day The Truck Tried To Cross. On that day in the late 70s, a truck driver tried to drive too large a truck over too small a bridge, causing a collapse and putting the truck in the creek below. My dad insisted we go have a look, so into the car and on the way we went. It was quite a sight for my young eyes and the memory still feels fresh. My wife, who lived nearby, remembers the event well, as I suppose all who saw it did. Willowdale is also the site of a train derailment many years ago. Here's the story as told by Norman Blake: The bridge was decommissioned long ago and has fallen into disrepair. A walking trail has replaced the road, but the remains of the bridge still stand.

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