"A man well versed in all disciplines, curious about each and every mystery, father of alphabets, languages, utopias and mythologies, host of paradises and infernos, author, pan-chess player, and perfect astrologer in indulgent irony and generous friendship, Xul Solar is one of the most peculiar events of our times" - Jorge Luis Borges

If the essence of critique, as per Foucault, is the desubjugation of the self in the politics of truth, and if utopias, as per Jameson, represent the limit condition of social critique, Argentinian Xul Solar (1887-1963) is one kind of subject exemplar of the wholesale reconfiguration of modernity. Standing at the initiation of an age of world history which harvests humanity for a totalitarian global market, offers alienation and conditioning in the name of freedom, policed uniformity in the name of creativity and multiculturalism, dromologic deformation in the name of progress, animal lust and aggression cloaked as civilization, Xul Solar, like his friend Jorge Luis Borges, made of his life and its expressions a performance at the margins which opened the cracks to alternate worlds of creative communitarian self-fashioning, poised between internal coherence and external noise, negotiating their realities and truths in real-time. An epic personality, Solar leaves his legacy of the message that it is not through the politics of the democratic vote but through what may seem an eccentric creative aspiration towards global and teleological alternate integralities, resistances to assimilation and an assimilation of resistances, that we may gather the invisible threads and weave the text of a world which makes possible the gnostic community.

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...Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the alternative-culture best seller “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl” — and a guest on “Coast to Coast AM” — has introduced a young and savvy audience to the school of millenarian thinking that has gathered around Mayan calendrics. To do so, he has employed viral marketing and a tireless schedule of public appearances at bookstores, art spaces, yoga studios and electronic-music festivals...

Over breakfast at Cafe Gitane in Manhattan, Pinchbeck told me recently that “there’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.”... “Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing,” Pinchbeck went on, “and I think the process is already under way. We’re on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness that’s more intuitive, mystical and shamanic.”

Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age. ...   more »

Wearing a new hat in Galadima, a hamlet in Abuja, Nigeria [photo added by ronjon]

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200... It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries...

OLPC slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country. ...   more »

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative unveiled its final industrial prototype of the XO - a laptop computer with a toylike look. But to say it's a toy is misleading. The device is intended to bring the most isolated tribal village into the Information Age, with the ultimate goal of offering one to every child on the planet. [Except for India, whose education bureaucracy vetoed OLPC participation last year.]

By keeping the price low, the OLPC initiative hopes that governments in the developing world will be able to afford them. Already, Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand, Uruguay, and, most recently, Rwanda have committed to participate in the program. Rwanda hopes to have laptops for all of its schoolchildren within five years. ...   more »

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has just taken another step forward by shipping the first 10 computers from the manufacturer in Taiwan, to the US State Department for testing. This is the first batch of the $100 laptops for children in poor countries such as Nigeria, China, Brazil, Egypt and Thailand who have already placed an order for 1 million laptops... India was part of the program initially until Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee reversed the decision to back the OLPC project. ...   more »

This is another experimental audio file. It's a 5-minute talk by Terence McKenna, a cultural anthropologist who spent many years doing participant observation research with indigenous tribes in Central and South America. The experiences he had with the Shamans of those tribes led him to believe that humanity is in the midst of a major cultural transformation that's being mediated by an "Attractor that lies ahead in the temporal dimension."

"Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of Attractor, or dwell point, that lies ahead in the temporal dimension... It's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past––illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary––and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of Eternity, we can build a kind of map of not only the past of the universe, of the evolution and ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future. ...   more »

The world - especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil - will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts. -- But the prediction of a future of nasty extreme weather also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season. ...   more »