Jusnoctis

Jusnoctis aka London by Night or LbN (Mages) has a very specific atmosphere and it is not an optimistic one.  It is not clear why this should be the case; the Mage STs don’t want to promote anomie and alienation. However, a clique of players seems to enjoy inducing these feelings in new players.

Perhaps it is because all long-term JusNoctis players are comfortable in an environment where they have only 2 options: trivial soap opera or implausible threats of TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It).

Fear Addicts

The defining aspects of JusNoctis Mages are fear and their response to that fear. They love - they are addicted to - the frisson of possible doom. They have a need for the fictional conceit that “this time” there will be a genuine threat to their existence and hence a justifiable requirement for action. This response might be within or outside the game, but that is irrelevant to the addict. Fear is the sole justification needed for their actions and - for these players - the ideal action is cowardly, brutal or duplicitous (possibly all 3)

One interesting aspect of the JusNoctis addiction is that the alleged danger does not need to be real, or understood, or verifiable; any alleged threat is gleefully accepted.

Conclusion

Like all addicts, the clique of JusNoctis Mages needs a “fix” in order to function. They do not feel fully functional unless they can revel in a state of fear. This gives them meaning, structure and (perhaps most importantly) excuses for their behaviour.

This craving leads to the characteristics of any addiction: denial, rationalization, projection and increased tolerance to the substance (in this case, fear and reaction to it). Imbalance is accepted as normal, which leads to increasingly harmful and unpleasant consequences.

With every addiction - and JusNoctis is no exception - addicts minimize their problems and blame them on others. Unfortunately, the only available “others” are new members of the game .

On one level, a city such as London is ‘merely’ a three-dimensional exercise in architecture - or perhaps sculpture.

However, there is an undeniably organic quality to any city; it adheres to most of the definitions of ‘life’. Indeed, few would refuse to accept that (even if only in metaphor) London is alive; it moves; it changes form; it courses; it throbs; it cycles - and it may one day die.

Poets have always believed that every city has its own rhythm, its own pulse, its own personality, all in transcendence of the multiplicity of lives living within - assuming there is a ‘within’ to speak of.

In summary: the city is clearly an artificial life form . It sees and hears. Perhaps it can be said to have thoughts as well, even a consciousness, perhaps even a soul inhabiting its electric and fibre-optic nervous system, something which is more than a gestalt of many humans, and far more than a mere collection of buildings.

The Consensus apparently supports this view; the city is often portrayed in drama as being alive, as having autonomous identity. The animation of the city is especially noticeable in film noir; It is within this famous genre that the city comes to be portrayed as being quite (literally) alive - and often malevolent.

In film noir the city ceases to be merely the stage or the setting; it plays a part itself - often the dominant part. In quintessential film noir such as Night and the City (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Cry of the City (1948), and The Naked City (1948), the ‘modern’ metropolis is a disturbing entity (the actual antagonist, as these titles suggest) and a dark, frightening shadow-world of danger and corruption. The city is a force which is at once everywhere and nowhere, tangible and intangible. It is spectral. It cannot be confronted. There is, in effect, nothing to fight. The city is an ‘experience’ - an unpredictable force which is beyond the control of any mortal.

If a city (such as London) is not under our control, we must ask a question. How can we coexist with it? Escape to some pre-urban or even pre-industrial paradise seems both implausible and incompatible with Scientific experimentation. Should we accept that survival can be achieved by the simple act of resignation, a simple act of acquiescence.? Should the city dweller submit to being architecture, thereby surrendering all vain and misguided hopes of autonomy and/or personal space?

Such decisions are beyond the scope of a short article. Let us leave you once again with the poets.

“There is no impenetrable space any more, no place left for even the soul to hide away. Sanity comes with release, with a closing of the eyes, and with a growing of antennae.”

Leicester Square webcam #2 (view from Radisson Hotel)

1. Cities as lifeforms - with particular reference to the possibility of cities developing sentience, self-awareness and intelligence .
2. The Lippisch P.13a - with particular reference to its use of ‘Kohlenpulverantrieb’
3. History of the vampire group known as ‘Tremere” - and its relationship with the Order of Hermes ["House Tremere"]
4. Translations of operating manuals for the the Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-301

A representation of one of the scenarios that scientists used to study out-of-body experiences.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.

In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance.

Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person’s body.

When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.

In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.

A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London”, he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”

To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.

They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.

The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

http://spymobile.in/index.html

There is a similar problem with iphones - via the metasploit hack

And - of course - all cellphone users should be aware of the facilities offered by the numerous UK companies that offer passive location services eg: MobileLocate

Bottom Line: Your mobile phone can spy on you and your conversations (online or just in the same room).  It can tell someone where you are - even take photos without your knowledge or permission

SUPER-EMPOWERED INDIVIDUALS/GROUPS AND THE FIFTH GENERATION OF WARFARE

PROPOSITION: The Technocracy’s victory in the so-called “war for reality” has not necessarily made the world safer; the techniques used bring their own problems - and have given Reality Deviants one (last?) technique to use in their conflict with us.

For centuries, we have had to cope with the possibility that some psychotic Verbena Reality Deviant might release a new Black Plague - now we must deal with the possibility that the same result could be achieved by any competent genetic microbiologist. Likewise, major political changes have been achieved by quite ordinary individuals that use the WWW for the co-ordination of political campaigns.

It is therefore appropriate to guide the world’s nation-states into consideration of how to deal with super-empowered individuals and their associated networks. To provide a conceptual framework, this problem will be termed “Fifth Generation Warfare” or 5GW.

[Where 3GW is Maneuver Warfare (or Lightning Warfare aka 'Blitzkrieg') and 4GW is Netwar, 5GW is Secret War.]

Secret War requires (obviously enough) secrecy to be successful. Since knowledge of the 5GW will often resemble ‘weird conspiracy’ theories, 5GW practitioners will use that to their advantages to discredit and marginalize those that might recognize the 5GW movement. Most societies will - by default - consider weak evidence of 5GW as nonsense and dismiss it.

CHARACTERISTICS

• Secret War (5GW) is performed by very small dispersed networks. [Worryingly, it is possible that 5GW groups will be the result of emergent/leaderless behavior.]

• The 5GW group is separate from the state, or - in the case of Reality Deviants - the Tradition, Tribe or Bloodline (and is perhaps not known to the parent group).

• Secret War will be waged for various motives - on the behalf of the parent group or an obsolete idea/meme(s), or the small 5GW group itself.

• 5GW rides on the decline of the state (or parent group) and its loss of power and legitimacy. [For example, our destruction of the Traditions' Control and Indoctrination networks - and hence their internal discipline]

It is probable that 5GW tactical operations will be small, have short timespans, and be numerous (to avoid detection and targeting).

“The operative question is probably whether the attacker or the defender has initiated 5GW - once you are already attacked you have missed your opportunity to shape the battlespace.”

Examples of Possible 5GW

• Control and redirect the activity of a 4GW group for a separate purpose (note: this group could be anything from the Mafia to a subset of the IRA)
• Infiltration of cultural and learning institutions - to change the enemy’s future generations.
• Assassination of potential future leaders of an opponent or key current network nodes. The assassinations will not look like outsider assassination: e.g. car accidents, drug overdoses, mugging gone bad, heart attacks, in-fighting/civil war
• The aforementioned development and use of biowarfare - by an individual

Lastly, 5GW is not the Global Guerrillas (GG) concept that has been used by the Virtual Adepts. GG does not quite fit into the xGW framework. GG seems to use the tactics of Netwar, but concentrates on disrupting the complex systems of modern societies to: distract/disrupt the state (and the Technocracy), collapse part or some of the state, and create ungoverned spaces which can then be used by the GG patrons for some other ends (the GG are not just anarchists)

BACKGROUND

1GW (Direct Massed Warfare) was defined by conflict centered around an enemy’s ability to decide and act

2GW (Attrition Warfare) was defined by conflict centered around an enemy’s ability to orient and decide

3GW (Maneuver Warfare) is defined by conflict centered around an enemy’s ability to orient

4GW (Netwar) is defined by conflict centered around Observe and Orient.

5GW (SecretWar) is centered around an opponent’s ability to Observe

see here for the official tender - specifying the desired capabilities

“the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located at hundred meters away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system”.

Once at the target, DARPA says, “the insect must remain stationary either indefinitely or until otherwise instructed … [and] must also be able to transmit data from [Department of Defense] relevant sensors … include[ing] gas sensors, microphones, video, etc.”
Gizmodo has pictures of a cyborg moth here

The implantation technique involves inserting the relevant microchips into the pupa of the insect - which has the capability to grow ‘around’ foreign objects

This machine/insect combination avoids many of the problems involved with micro UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) design. It simply uses an existing (and highly efficient) framework to transport a sensor payload.

There has been speculation about weaponizing the design - perhaps with ‘tailored’ viruses.

“We’re heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming…” Drew Endy, MIT.

“I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together…” Tom Knight, MIT.

Great introductory article on synthetic biology (synbio) by Rick Weiss in the Washington Post:

At the core of synthetic biology’s new ascendance are high-speed DNA synthesizers that can produce very long strands of genetic material from basic chemical building blocks: sugars, nitrogen-based compounds and phosphates. Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with “natural” DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell’s old DNA and become its new “brain” — telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute.

A nod towards platform development (smart):

If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

Essentially, the tinkering networks we see in the software industry will be mirrored in synbio. Further, the skill sets associated with synthetic biology will be as widely dispersed as software programming is today and the tools will be just as inexpensive/ubiquitous. The implications of this for open source warfare are world altering.