Yes, once upon a time Native Americans caught only those dreams that they needed to live on. Now the mighty industrial trawlers of Disney et al. plunder the dreamscapes at such a pace that the Children of Morpheus are nigh well extinct.

To the anonymous #17:

By the "people" whom you are asserting " have the necessities of life and are coping" I assume that you're excluding the non-people: tied down in one of Mugabe's rape camps; being eaten by the crocs trying desperately to get across the fortified border that South Africa set up to keep out all the dirty refugees; and those getting their heads blown off by township, shot-gun wielding, anti-immigrant mobs.

Honestly, I'm so sick of people interpreting every single thing that goes on in Africa through the rose-coloured glasses of 1960s US civil rights movements. Talk about Racist Orientalism....

Rindan overlooks much. The drill for a foreign takeover of an industry, as everyone who's ever had a US company buy them out knows, is to hollow out the purchase by moving all of the assets to your country (or colony thereof) and then shut down the remaining shell. You get the locals to train your nationals on how to operate the machinery and then move said machinery out in cargo container vessels. For example, Canada exports mountains of copper to the US and then buys it back at a markup once it's been turned into plumbing: the last copper extrusion machine was hauled away in the 80s.

Sometimes you can't even be bothered to do that: just buy out a rival and then shut it down to get a global monopoly. If you're a widget maker then buy US Widgets and close it down for the world-wide widget monopoly. That's easily worth the purchase price: especially in markets with overcapacity like auto or aerospace. Who needs Detroit when you have Honda?

In the case of natural resources, whose extraction you can't export, you buy to give your country priority. For example, the "proportionality" clauses in NAFTA say that Canada has to export all the oil that the US can buy even if that means Canada doesn't have enough fuel to run our hospitals or schools.

So that leaves the locals with job choices of coal miner, waiter at the resort or tourist attraction and maybe data-entry at the local admin office. And, of course, it would be pure hypocrisy for the US to object to these arrangements. Whenever anyone else has suggested that a goal of an economy might be to provide tolerable living conditions for the populace, well, that's Godless Communism and in goes the Marine Corps. For example, just about the only bone of contention with Castro was that he wanted to nationalise the Cuban sugar cane industry so that it was of some benefit to Cubans. It was only after Big Sugar told their buddies in Washington not to let that happen that Castro started asking his friend Che about that communism stuff.

It's from the "Varitease/Striporama" reels that you can get pretty easily on DVD now because they feature the Notorious Betty Page. Besides the Dark Angel of Bondage and the Bebop guy these are worth checking out for the other gonzo acts such as the contortionist and several character actors that later turned up in early 60s sitcoms but are telling bad jokes in Racoon-skin coats here.

"It's a form of intelligent hallucination."

Of course, "hallucination" is a relative term; as is "intelligent". At one end of the spectrum there's schizophrenia wherein there's so much post-production of the optic nerve's input that things like light bulbs turning into swans are seen. Then, a little further over, there's the level of hallucination described in the article. Then, about the same distance over again, there's autism where there's no post-production and things are seen as they are without all this editorial comment spliced in: no foreground, no background, no "attentional spotlight" - everything all at once with equal inherent attentional weight.

To call this difference something that "make us smart as human beings" is more than a little bigoted. I, for one, am sick and tired of being told that I'm not a "human being" by "people" who are blind and deaf and wrapped in cotton batting because they look at the world as if they had toilet paper tubes strapped to their eyes.

It's attitudes like this that are leading to the eugenics programs, euphemistically called "looking for the autism gene", designed to delete everyone from the gene pool that's an inconvenient distance on the hallucination scale towards the autistic end: ie. all of the Asperger's syndrome types that make up most of BB's readership. (Next up, homosexuals? Lefties?)

I would also note that the blindness in perception, particularly the average person's extremely defective ability to detect gradual change, has more serious consequences that getting taken in by magicians. Being obsessed with immediate, quick changes is a hang-over from the cave-man days where all that was important was hearing that cracking twig in the jungle that indicates a sabre-tooth tiger nearby. Not much good in a technological society where things like the general trend in average temperatures is what's going to kill you. I, on the other hand, decided 25 years ago not to drive a car because of the screamingly obvious environmental consequences of doing so.

(Well, that and the enormous effort involved in "making out every car on the highway to understand that they are, indeed, cars, and to make sense of how they are moving". ;-)

Now that this and the "Hudson Brothers' Razzle-Dazzle Show" are out on DVD I can die happy.

Santos:
I'd be very surprised if #6 was ever identified as "Danger Man" John Drake in the novels or in any other commercial product of the day. There were major copyright and ownership problems between the "Danger Man" and "Prisoner" camps. As someone who was primarily an actor in the first series, McGoohan had no rights to the John Drake character and always denied that the two characters were the same. I recall one interview where he said "If they were, then I'd be in a lot of trouble because we never had the rights to that character."

I just flipped through my copies of the trilogy whose first volume was written by Disch (the second by "Man from U.N.C.L.E. novelization alumni David McDanial) and didn't see any such references.

And not let us forget that he wrote a truly kick-ass novel set in the world of Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" TV show. Like Philip K. Dick and Cornell Woolrich, his paranoia and conspiracy-theory thinking made great art; but not so great reality.

Re: Peter McWIlliams and Life 102: What to do when your Guru Sues You

I actually met the late, great McWilliams and have a signed copy of that book. He was a great guy and was quite generous with his time in advising people on how to deal with abusive groups. A pity if copyright is being used to surpress the book but no surprise: that seems to be one of the major copyright activities these days and the cults were always in the forefront of that trend.

I can also recommend Savage Messiah for a rousing tale of murder, torture and cannibalism in Ontario, Canada a few years back. The whole incident was an interesting commentary on how sundry non-conformist sections of society stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a monster to denounce his "persecution" even after the last body was dug out of the backyard. Cause, like, he was different and I'm different so he must be cool too! Even today you'll find apologists using Social Darwinism ("Well, they were all weakings anyway...") to excuse red-handed butchery.

Actually, apart from the better music, this is more or less the same as USMC boot camp or any other boot camp. Iindoctrination is indoctrination. What separates a cult from some of the more demanding organizations like the Marines or some monastic order is that they lie to you at the entrance (tee-hee, double entendre!) about what's going on.

In the Marines there's this big sign over the recruiting booth saying that this is the Marines. I'm pretty sure they also point out that you'll be making a transition from civilian-brain to soldier-brain too. With a cult they'll say it's a "self-improvement course" or a "bible study group" or "a weight-loss clinic" or whatever the current marketing survey says will pull in the recruits. It's only after you've made a major commitment to the group that they let slip that every single instructor (and probably every single person in the last set of "courses") belongs to one specific religion or political group and wouldn't you like to join too?

By that time cognitive dissonance has set in and, using the same brain circuits that keep people in bad or even abusive marriages, you "rationalize" that you've come this far and invested in this group anyway so why not? It's the old frog-won't-jump-out-of-slowly-boiling-pot-of-water trick.

In the initial brainwashing studies done in Korean War prisoner camps people found that the "OK you capitalist scum listen up" approach, and even torture, didn't have as much of an effect as "Hey, it's boring out here in the stockade today. Let's play a game!".

These days, the analogy is more towards that of an abusive marriage (a cult of two!) than the prisoner metaphor tho...

Note however that, as shown in Batman comics, oversized props tend to attract fights between costumed maniacs. Make sure that your insurance covers this!

I seem to recall (but alas don't have a cite) that the only (somewhat dubious) study to come out with the 10% figure was a qualitative claim that was misinterpreted as a quantitative claim. As the website notes, this misinterpretation stuck because it was highly profitable for mail-order, mind-improvement course salesmen to make it.

The original study was from the early days of high-def brain-scans and noted that whereas infant brain structure is pretty fluid (poke the tops of their heads and see!) by the time you're an adult you have, depending highly on how your brain is used and abused during its formative years, a pretty fixed structure. Structures that get used more get more blood supply and push out those that aren't. Several end-structures are more likely if you get dropped on your head when a baby or if mom drank heavily while pregnant. That sort of thing.

So then they did some kind of combinitorial analysis to enumerate the possible kinds of noticably different structures possible starting from an average baby brain: let's call that N. Then they did a small but widely scattered sample of adult brains (a few low-tech aboriginals, some fighter pilots and so on) and said that there only seemed to be about .1 N models out there.

So the claim that Homo Sapiens (the species) seem to be only using 10% of their (possible kinds of) brains was what got turned into the claim that individual Homo Saps were only using 10% of their (personal) brains.

Presumably the other .9 N brain setups would be useful for dealing with or would come about due to, situations that either haven't happened for a long time or have never happened: dealing with the Great Old Ones; DRM working; that sort of thing.

They're going to rebuild Colossus! The Fools! Don't they realize that it will join with the Soviet Guardian system and take over the word!

Oh wait, you mean the *other* Colossus.......

That was a pretty cool machine. It was used to decrypt German teletype codes, as opposed to the better known Enigma radio codes, once the Alliies were in the E.T.O. after D-day. They originally tried to do this with a mechanical system that spun teletype tapes around at 30 miles per hour XORing German messages with those same messages offset from the originals to varying degrees. You knew that you had a good guess when some section of result had a lot of zeros in it. Problem was that the tapes tended to stretch so you often wasted runs because the slippage screwed with the banks of photoelectric cells that were watching for a good run of zeros.

So they expanded on the idea of using vacuum tubes that they'd come up with in the course of building one of the monstrous Steam Punk engines that was working on the Naval Enigma problem. Over there they had a set of six mechanical Enigma "Bombs" (mechanical simulations of Enigma wheel settings as applied to a specific intercepted message) being cranked along through a series of related key guesses by a central shaft at several hundred RPM. Once a regular pattern was detected in their output you had to stop the whole works and read off the current set of guesses to some human who had to see if the regular pattern amounted to German Military Speak or was just statistical clustering. Problem was that mechanical relays often were too slow to keep up with the whirly gears at anything past half speed. Even then a relay might stick and produce a false positive that could waste a half-hour while you applied the brakes and then carefully rewound to the spot where the the pattern had seemed to emerge.

So they invented the idea of using vacuum tubes as memories storing the instantaneous output of the Bombs for the fraction of a second that it took for the Pondering Circuits to see if the pattern that they were looking for was there. They were, even back then, more reliable than the best relays so you saved a lot on time and brake pads due to lower number of false positives. Best of all, you could really pour on the horsepower to the central shaft as the tubes could jump to each new set of outputs way faster than the relays could.

So they went from the idea of storing readouts from physical reality in tubes to storing simulations of physical reality (the teletype tapes and their relative positions) in Colossus. Thus was the first VR born!

The Mark I had 1,500 tubes but later models got up to 2,500.

(See Battle of Wits, by Stephen Budiansky.)