Darryl Mason

Philip K Dick's Useful, Profitable 'Madness' By Darryl Mason The Letters Of Note site has published the controversial letters that author Philip K Dick wrote to police and the FBI in the early 1970s, naming friends and colleagues as possible enemies of America. The Letters Are Here This is a comment I submitted to Letters Of Note, which will make more sense if you look over the Philip K Dick letters first. It didn't get published at LoN because, as you can see below, it was too long : Philip K Dick and his second wife were approached in the mid-1950s by FBI agents who, like in films and fiction, turned up on their doorstep in suits and hats and tried to recruit them, to help save America from communists and the enemy within. They were told they could study for free on the FBI dime at a university in Mexico, they'd just have to report back on what political activities, movements and ideologies were gaining in popularity amongst the student body...

On The Information Revolutions By Darryl Mason An extract from a ramble-babble I wrote in August 2006. Hadn't re-read this in a long time, but it made me smile to remember how bizarre and uminaginable it seemed in 2006 that a worldwide youth movement, driven by internet information sharing, could revolutionise the Middle East and change the face of modern global politics. And it's only begun. August 23, 2006 Bizarre, broken, swarming with change and chaos, magic and miracles, madness and joy. This is our world today. But for all the cries of 'Terror!' and 'Hatred!', the divisions amongst the youth of all nations are few and far between. There has probably never been a time before in the history of our races that so few young people view war as the way to remake the world for the better. There is another way, a hundred other ways to make it better and a few million info-rich youth-fresh brains are chewing over those ideas into th...

One Summer Bondi Dreaming (I wrote most of this the night before I left Sydney to go back and live in England for another year in late April, 1999. The story is based around real events of the previous summer, living in a crumbling apartment near the cliffs of South Bondi. I only recently found the notebook and typed it up. Hope you enjoy it) By Darryl Mason Summer 1998-1999 It's a November dawn on Bondi Beach. The first official day of Summer, and the cream sands are dotted with more than three dozen sleepers. Not drunk locals, or the homeless. Backpackers. A new breed, doing it on the super cheap. They avoid the usually overcrowded hostels whenever possible, instead they bed down outdoors, on beaches, at bus stops, train stations, parks, caves, the backyards of obviously vacant houses. They network each other over the internet and in local bars as to the best, the safest, places to sleep for free. Feena is a 19 year old Swedish backpacker. She seems unbothered to be approached a...

A comment I left at the JF Beck blog : It was Tim Flannery who said dumping sulphur out of planes might be a solution to combating global warming. Others fear-mongering global warming for personal or corporate gain have also talked up this 'solution'. It sounds like an insane plan. Weather modification isn't a conspiracy theory. I don't want to shock you, but we've been spraying stuff out of aircraft all over the world to alter weather for decades. As for 9/11. The Bush official story of 9/11 has been changing, quite dramatically, over the years. Rumsfeld said Flight 93 was shot down by terrorists, Bush said he saw the first plane go into the World Trade Centre on live TV, Cheney recently said the towers were blown up. 10 Australians were killed on 9/11, including a good friend of my mother. I'd like to know for sure that the Bush-era official story is rooted in at least 90% fact and that it will stand up to scrutiny in the decades to come. 9/11 was used to sel...

A comment I contributed to a post at Larvatus Prodeo on the coming reality of robot soldiers and autonomous war-fighting machines : I hope you all realise that when the robots become totally autonomous and take over they'll be searching back through internet archives to find anti-robot talk, like some of the ahove, they'll trawl archives for dissent, and they will know who to round up and target as potential enemies. Do you want to have to front up to a robot interrogator one day in 2018 and explain why back in 2009 you started mouthing off like "Fuck those robots, man, we'll kick their metal arses!" And remember, robots can travel back in time from the future, so if you're already mulling over plans for an anti-robot insurgency, you'll probably have one crashing through your living room window any moment now. And some fightback advice for the anti-robot insurgency from another commenter at that thread : I gather one of those magnetic pulse thing...

A long comment I contributed to this post at Grods : I was in the US for a big chunk of 2001, and up until September 11, Bush was regarded by many on the Right, and particularly in the Righty media to be a dunce, pro-illegal immigrants and soft on Islamist terrorism. Fox News, and pundits like Michelle Malkin, went after Bush hard before the September 11 attacks somehow turned Bush into Hero President. In the first half of 2001, the online Righties were still pretty excited about what they thought was a great victory in smashing Bill Clinton into utter mockery, they thought they had real power and influence and they were going to make sure Bush did as they demanded. But Bush was not delivering what they wanted in the first half of 2001, they hammered him pretty hard, at least as hard as supposedly Lefty shows like John Stewart's The Daily Show did. Bush made a string of dimbulb verbal gaffes and took an incredible amount of holidays in those first nine months of 2001, and many of t...