The deadly Retard-o Ray.

It's hard for conspiracy aficionado to keep up with new developments in the arsenal of the military-industrial-police-state. There are remote control flying bugs now, the debilitating heat ray, the head splitting sonic weapons, and so on. These are just a few of the crowd control weapons that are not the products of conjecture, but documented and accessible to anyone that cares to look. Weapons that used to be sci-fi fantasy are now in weapons catalogues of military and police forces around the world. If these are the ones that are verifiable, what is in R&D?

That said, are these the scariest things to pose a threat to humanity at present, or are there even more dubious suppression devices that we might be concerned about?

I was certain for years that the most powerful tool used in the march against humanity was...Television. Bill Hicks described the pop culture players as "fevered egos that are tainting our collective unconscious (sic) and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine." I think that television, in particular, and pop culture in general yields systematic degradation of human expectation.



I was aware of the human (though predominantly male) tendency to fixate on the television due to an evolutionary fight or flight mechanism in the brain. We are compelled to make sense of strange things in our environment. On a deep level, we ask "that thing- am I going to eat it, or is it going to eat me? and the strangeness of the telly keeps changing, flashing, and exploding more and more every year. We're wired to do it.

So I kicked the TV out of my house. Felt good about that. Stayed away for close to ten years. In that time I replaced the passive viewing of TV with self expression in the form of writing, sculpture, stage performance, etc. I went outside, hiked in the mountains, altered my sense of time by just sitting and being, randomly interacted with people on the street, had more sex.

Then I entered into the world of the Web. Timidly at first, I felt I needed to familiarize myself with this new medium. First there was the chat rooms, then the blogging, then the news aggregate sites, YouTube, MySpace, Tribe, Facebook, Bebo, Craigslist, etc.

Yesterday, I found this article , "Why we're Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Data" in the Wall Street Journal. I realized that I have succumbed to the fight or flight mechanism again. This time the TV editors aren't making the rapidfire editing that keeps me glued to the box. I am. Cyber opiates. I'm addicted and they are destroying me.

I have to balance my consumption before I overdose. Less web consumption, more creative production. It's that fucking moderation thing again.

A smart drug dealer doesn't touch the stuff he sells.