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This week we talk to private investigator, and head of Pallorium Inc, Steve Rambam. Steve is famous in the hacker community for his enlightening lectures on the death of privacy.

In this weeks episode we discuss: The death of privacy, smartphones: The little snitch in your pocket, The cavalier use of your data, how to (or not) avoid detection in the age of the Internet,  why Foursquare is a really bad idea (see, we told you) and much more.

Steve’s fantastic talk, ‘Privacy is Dead – Get Over It’,  is available over at Google Videos – Part 1, Part 2.

Steve Rambam Bio:

Steven Rambam is a private investigator operating out of New York and Texas. He has conducted several thousand missing-person searches over almost three decades. Steven is well known in the hacker community for his lecture ‘Privacy is Dead – Get Over It’. Steven Rambam’s upcoming book, Stealing Your Own Identity, chronicles his own playful year-long hunt for friend and co-author Rick Dakan.

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This week we talk to former member of The Process Church of the Final Judgement, Timothy Wyllie. Timothy has recently authored a fantastic book about his time in The Process, ‘Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgement‘.  In this weeks episode we discuss: The Process Church, Scientology, the controversies of the Process Church, why the church continues to have an influence, Dolphins and ET’s, and much more!

Timothy Wyllie Biography:

Timothy Wyllie is a writer specialising in the study of “non-human intelligences” such as angels. He was born in London in 1940. He moved to America in the mid-sixties and now lives in the desert of New Mexico. He had a near death experience in 1973. Afterwards, he devoted himself to the study of “non-human intelligences” (such as angels, dolphins, and extraterrestrials) using visual art, music and writing as the three main means of communication.

In 1980 he started a series of sacred landscape graphics and this led to an examination of the way graphic art can anchor spiritual information into the third-dimensional reality most typically experienced. Much of his visual work has a healing dimension, and he uses a light trance state to create either a mandala or an icon that represents the physical healing intended. His lifelong interest in telepathy inspired him to do a series of graphics designed to explore the potentials of visual telepathy and its relationship to synchronicity and the higher dimensions.

Our guest this week is Arthur Goldwag

This week I talk to one of my new favourite authors (and guests), Arthur Goldwag. Arthur is the author of the recently published ‘Cults, Conspiracies, & Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order‘, a fantastic book that I recommend to anyone that wants to be introduced to these fascinating topics in a more logical, and non-bias fashion.

In this episode we discuss: The mindset of conspiracy theorists, why the Freemasons are blamed for everything evil in the world, how L. Ron Hubbard’s rise to power baffles us, some of the weirdest cults out there, and the age old question: is Lady Gaga a puppet of the Illuminati?

If you have any queries, suggestions, insults etc. Please feel free to email ken@sittingnow.co.uk.

Enjoy!

Arthur Goldwag Biography:

After attending Kenyon College and Brown University, Arthur Goldwag worked in book publishing for more than twenty years, including stints at Random House, The New York Review of Books, and Book-of-the-Month Club. He now freelances full time.

The author of THE BELIEFNET GUIDE TO KABBALAH (Doubleday, 2005), ISMS & OLOGIES (Vintage, 2007), and CULTS, CONSPIRACIES & SECRET SOCIETIES (Vintage, 2009), Arthur is also a contributing editor at Scholastic’s STORYWORKS magazine, where he writes stories, plays, and essays for children. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two sons.

Finally, the triad of classic beasties have been covered on Sitting Now! First we brought you Vampires, then we gave you Zombies, this week we present you with a show about Werewolves!

Our guest this week, Dr Bob Curran

When it comes to discussing these iconic monsters, there is no better speaker than our old pal Dr. Bob Curran. Dr. Bob recently released his latest exploration of the mythological world in his fantastic book Werewolves: A Field Guide to Shapeshifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts.

In this week’s episode we discuss: The historical origins of the Werewolf myth, the Werewolf in classical literature, The Green Man, what do these mythological beasts tell us about ourselves, American folklore, and much more.

Never one to miss out on a good monster hunt, famous musical monster hunter Daddytank returns with his infinite supply of silver bullets. This week’s full mooners:

Black Saturn vs Subduxtion — Conquering Echo
Berry Weight — The Day Nothing Happened
Inkog and Mr. Gone — Seven

If you have any queries, suggestions, insults etc. Please feel free to email ken@sittingnow.co.uk. Enjoy!

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Dr. Bob Curran is a native of Northern Ireland, born and raised in the Mourne Mountains area of County Down, a region steeped in folklore and legend.

Throughout a varied life, he has worked in many fields — as a gravedigger, professional musician, journalist, and civil servant. He is now a history teacher and well known throughout Ireland and beyond as a writer and broadcaster.

He has written extensively, in English and several other languages, on various aspects of history and folklore and acted as advisor to the Cultural Committee of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly. He currently lives in Coleraine, County Derry, with his wife and family.

This week we delve back into the realm of reality hacking with our guest Antero Alli.

Antero has been involved in the study of the 8 circuit model of consciousness for many years now, and has authored several books on the subject.

Antero is also involved in a unique consciousness experiment called ‘Paratheatre’, in which initiates and researchers experiment, and more importantly, experience consciousness change.

We discuss: The 8 circuit model of consciousness, Timothy Leary, Paratheatre, the difference between reading about a ritual and actually experiencing it, and much more.

About Antero Alli:

Born 11/11/1952 in Helsinki Finland, Antero Alli is the author of ANGEL TECH, TOWARDS AN ARCHEOLOGY OF THE SOUL, ASTROLOGIK, THE VERTICAL ORACLE, and THE AKASHIC RECORD PLAYER.

Antero’s deep background in theatre and paratheatre have resulted in numerous original performance works since 1977 and he is currently artistic director of ParaTheatrical ReSearch, a Berkeley-based group of trained physical performers exploring asocial ritual dynamics.

Since 1991 Antero has been writing, directing and producing his own films, which include six feature fictions, three paratheatre video documents and about twenty short works. Between 1991–95 he was editor and publisher of Talking Raven Quarterly, an iconoclastic literary journal in Seattle which featured the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, Hakim Bey, and Rob Brezsny among others. Between 1992 and 2002 Antero curated the successful Nomad VideoFilm Festival, a west coast touring venue dedicated to showing experimental short films and videos. In 1996 Antero teamed up with his future wife, Sylvi to form Vertical Pool as an intermedia film, music and publishing company. He is also a world renown astrologer and currently resides in Berkeley, California.

Brutal-Koala-Jedi-Action seemed relevant to this post

Ken Eakins writes on Sitting Now:

Here we go again …

The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.

But online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia said trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the “Streisand” effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt.

Once again ED is attacked, and once again people miss the point of the site.

The Internet really is srs bsns.

(more @ Sydney Herald)

Hitting your screens this May

So we finally took the plunge — after a year of planning and debate and — and announced our new Sitting Now TV show. The show will initially be available on the site, and via online distros like iTunes, YouTube, and Vimeo, and then later will appear on a channel to be announced later in the year (confusing I know).

Anyway, check out this ‘teaser’ intro, and let us know what you think!

This week we venture back into the worlds of the Occult, and film-making. Brian Butler is a filmmaker, magician, and colleague to legendary director Kenneth Anger.

In this weeks episode we discuss: Jack Parsons and his magickal journey, The Night of Pan, Kenneth Anger, and how the occult can influence the filmmaking process.

This weeks guest is Brian Butler

Brian is screening his new film The Night of Pan, as well as performing live music with Death in Vegas’ Richard Fearless in London this week, make sure you don’t miss it — the event is free, and you can get more details here.

Read More: sittingnow.co.uk

It’s been a while since we’ve visited the realm of UFO investigation; so we felt when we did return, we would need to bring along a true expert in the field. Luckily for us, we found just that in Dennis Balthaser. Dennis actually lives in Roswell New Mexico, and has been studying the famous ‘Roswell Incident’ for many years. He has appeared on countless television and radio shows, and is often published in UFO Magazine.

This week we discuss: The Roswell Incident, Dulce underground base, Area 51, The state of Ufology today and much more. Please feel free to email ken@sittingnow.co.uk. Enjoy!

Our Guest this episode, Jim Marrs

We take a break from the recent onslaught of occult-related episodes, and delve head-first into the world of conspiracy theory with legendary author Jim Marrs. Jim is the author of the New York Times bestseller Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, Above Top Secret, The Sisterhood of the Rose and many more.

This week, we discuss: Did the Nazis ever really go away, Who killed JFK, was Lee Harvey Oswald a Patsy or the lone gunman, and much more.

Joining Ken is SittingNow veteran Jacob ‘JW’ Williams, a man plauged with questions about the Kennedy assassination. One such question, “was Kennedy’s door open?”, is now available for your digestion:

Jacob’s eagle-eye spotted this…

Enjoy!

About Jim Marrs:

Jim Marrs was born in Fort Worth. After graduating from University of North Texas he joined the United States Army. On his release in 1968 he joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He served as police reporter and general assignments reporter covering stories locally, in Europe and the Middle East. After a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence unit during the Vietnam War, he became military and aerospace writer for the newspaper and an investigative reporter. Marrs began to take an interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After interviewing several members of the Dallas Police Department he became convinced him that the Warren Commission was a cover-up. Marrs continued to investigate the case and interviewed several important witnesses as well as city and county officials.

In 1976 Marrs began teaching a course about the assassination for the University of Texas at Arlington. He left the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1980 and worked as a freelance journalist while continuing to investigate the death of Kennedy. Marrs eventually became convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been set up by the government and in 1989 he published Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Published to critical acclaim and reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list in mid-February 1992. It also became a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK and he served as a chief consultant for both the film’s screenplay and production.

Since 1980, Mr. Marrs has been a freelance writer, author and public relations consultant. He also published a rural weekly newspaper along with a monthly tourism tabloid, a cable television show and several videos. Beginning in 1992, Mr. Marrs spent three years researching and completing a non-fiction book on a top-secret government program involving the psychic phenomenon known as remote viewing only to have it mysteriously canceled as it was going to press in the summer of 1995. Within two months, the story of military-developed remote viewing broke nationally in the Washington Post after the CIA held a press conference revealing the program but putting their own spin on psychic studies. Psi Spies is now available from JimMarrs.com.

In May, 1997, Marrs’ in-depth investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda, was published by HarperCollins. Marrs has been a featured speaker at a number of national conferences including the Annual International UFO Congress and the Annual Gulf Breeze UFO Conference. Publisher’s Weekly described the book as “the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers and their crew in years.” The paperback edition was released in mid-1998 and has since become the best-selling UFO book ever in the United States. Beginning in 2000, he began teaching a course on UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington.

In early 2000, HarperCollins published Rule by Secrecy, which traced the hidden history that connects modern secret societies to the Ancient Mysteries. In 2003, his book The War on Freedom probed the conspiracies of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.

Other books by Jim Marrs includes Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies (2004), Terror Conspiracy, The: Provocation, Deception and 9/11 (2006) and Rise of the Fourth Reich (2008)

Almost 'throwing some horns', which would be handy at metal shows

This week, Italian scientists announced that in a month-long experiment conducted last year, an amputee’s nervous system was attached to a mechanical hand disconnected from his body. The man, Pierpaolo Petruzziello, was not only able to move the robotic appendage, but was apparently able to receive feedback and feel sensations from the hand. From the Baltimore Sun:

This story is not unlike last year’s story of mechanical-arm-moving monkeys, in which electrodes were wired directly into the brains of monkeys, allowing them to learn how to move remote robotic arms to reach and grab for tasty treats. The main difference, here, of course, is the proof-of-concept that we can do the same thing with the human nervous system. This reminds me of my favorite Marshall McLuhan quotes (from Understanding Media, 1964):

• The human subject need not be an amputee in order to be a cyborg. Any person can be jacked into a robotic appendage and be trained to move it around at will.
• The appendage need not be a robotic hand, or even analogous to an existing biological appendage. There no reason, theoretically, that a human can’t be jacked into a robotic car, or a robotic plane or a robotic space cruiser, and learn to control it. Forget the dangers of embodied artificially intelligent brains, we are now able to embody human consciousness into any arbitrary robotic form with appropriate sensory feedback.
• All of this can be done at a distance. A robot can be embodied with human consciousness remotely across any arbitrary distance.

Joe McFall received his undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Emory University in 1998, and went on to receive two Masters degrees, in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Georgia in 2005 and 2007. He holds a lifetime interest in culture and counterculture, fringe science, paranormal, alternate history and conspiracy theory. He works as a software developer and lives in Atlanta, GA. He is also, alongside our buddies Raymond Wiley and Austin Gandy, one of the hosts of Disinformation the Podcast, Disinformation World News, and OutThere Radio.

This week, IBM scientists and their university partners announced a breakthrough in cognitive computing research: the simulation of a brain the size of a cat’s. Using 144 terabytes of RAM and almost 150,000 processors, scientists were able to model a neural cortex with 1 billion simulated neurons and 10 billion synaptic connections. The researchers have subsequently been awarded $16.1 million for completion of phase 0 of DARPA’s SYNAPSE project. The goal of SYNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), according to DARPA, is “to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.” In layman’s terms, their goal is to put simulated brains onto microchips.

Sleep easy tonight dogs, for tomorrow...

While a disembodied brain on a microchip is itself interesting as an object of study, the real question is: what happens when this brain is embodied? The unstated intention of the SYNAPSE project is the embodiment of simulated mammalian brains into robots. Before we lose ourselves to rapturous visions of snuggly pet purrbots, we should consider the possible range of behaviors of not only the feline brain, but of mammalian-size brains in general. Cats are predators, as well, after all. The brain controls an animal’s body and behavior, and much of its function would be superfluous to a robotic replica (presumably, for example, these robots would not able to mate and multiply). If individual behaviors can be added and removed willy-nilly, then any given mammalian behavior could be isolated and reproduced onto a microchip. Feline predation is just one possibility, and a scary one at that. Imagine hordes of 14ft-tall steel tigers rampaging through your suburban neighborhood, programmed with insatiable hunger and an instinctual urge to maul and devour bipeds (did I mention that robots can be carnivorous?).

The presentation of this cortical simulation as the equivalent of a feline brain lends an aspect of cutesyness to the project, but this cutesyness, of course, is just a facade. It allows us to envision it as something benign. Right now, there’s no harm in a disembodied brain with no behaviors sitting on a hard drive in Livermore, CA, being trained to distinguish images of corporate logos to the awe of of fawning scientists. But what happens when they let the cat out of the bag (sorry)? Such a virtual brain could be trained with any given set of potentially distasteful behaviors and embodied in a machine of practically limitless size and strength. This is a DARPA project, after all, and as much as we might want snuggly purrbots, we should be aware that what we might get is marauding swarms of giant predatory killbots.

Joe McFall

Joe McFall received his undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Emory University in 1998, and went on to receive two Masters degrees, in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Georgia in 2005 and 2007. He holds a lifetime interest in culture and counterculture, fringe science, paranormal, alternate history and conspiracy theory. He works as a software developer and lives in Atlanta, GA. He is also, alongside our buddies Raymond Wiley and Austin Gandy, one of the hosts of Disinformation: The Podcast, Disinformation World News, and Out There Radio.

After a pretty lengthy break from the world of podcasting, Ken Eakins (Sitting Now) and Raymond Wiley (disinformation) return with a real 90 minute treat!

This weeks guest, Mitch Horowitz, is the author of the excellent new book Occult America: How Mysticism Shaped our Nation. Mitch has held a lifelong interest in the Occult and Supernatural, and after pursuing the subject for as long, naturally, became the editor of one of the largest publishers of Occult and Supernatural works Tarcher/Penguin.

In this weeks episodes we discuss: Freemasons, Mesmirism, Theosophy, Astrology and the dark side of American occultism.

Daddytank and his army of flying (musical) monkeys return this week in the shape of:

• Memories of Tree’s — Snakes and Headaches
• Diamond District — I Mean Business
• Vlooper — Muzungu

Enjoy!

Mitch Horowitz is a writer and publisher of many years’ experience with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. The editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, he is the author of Occult America: How Mysticism Shaped our Nation (Bantam, September 2009).

A frequent writer and speaker on metaphysical themes, he has appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, The History Channel, The Montel Williams Show, All Things Considered, Air America Radio, and Coast to Coast AM. He has written for U.S. News and World Report, Parabola, Science of Mind, the Religion News Service, and the popular weblog BoingBoing.

At Tarcher/Penguin, Horowitz has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. He has also published notable works in philosophy, social thought and politics. His recent titles include Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch; 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck; The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders by Jacob Needleman; The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Reader’s Edition by Manly P. Hall; and Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq by Sheldon Rampton and John Stau.