[-empyre-] INITIAL POSTING FROM SCOTT TAYLOR:

[Scott Taylor]

Hello:

SPEED UP LEADS TO SLOW DOWN AS IN GRID-LOCK:  HYPER [wave] LEADS TO HYPO [particle]:  THESE ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE BUT MUTUALLY
INCLUSIVE ASPECTS OF TIME, SPACE, MASS AND WEIGHT [inertia]:  

 

 A propos the late, great Marshall McLuhan,
in the year of his centenary: with electronic computerized speed-up there is no
social group, no age group, no private, no public, et cetera.  There is only a bathetic attempt to validate
the last orgasm relative to the next orgasm. 

 

As a result, there is currently a growing movement slated
towards activism involving the deceleration of techno-culture.  The more complex the cognitive problem the
longer it takes to solve it.  Some forms
of reflection demand meditative states of psycho-physiological habitation.  When meditating at gamma brain wavelengths
there is greater connectivity and entrainment of cognition toward transparent
states involving cerebral “binding” or the seeming transparency of all
phenomena.   All of the neurological and
other communicational connectives in the human body move electrically at about
the speed of sound, and are whacked out of human prospective by communications
moving more rapidly.   Sonic boom is
possibly what has led to electromagnetic bust when it comes to techno-culture.

 

Ours is an age which privileges instantaneous forms of
communication and of accelerated discovery with the caveat that the far greater
bulk of discoveries are not implemented or synthesized into any whole, process
or pattern except in terms of political-economic and techno-cultural
imperatives.  Some have suggested, like the
late Barbara Tuchman and Jane Jacobs, this results, in essence, with a new time-less,
space-less dark age.  It is a dark age in
part because the holistic observation, intellection and implementation which are
the result of longer forms of duration are ignored.    

 

Take for example the findings of scientists at the Gran
Sasso and Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) that
there are neutrinos which have been detected as traveling sixty-billionths of a
second faster than the speed of light. 
That finding raises the possibility of sending information back in time,
hence, destroying all notions of universal causality.  So what would it mean to destroy universal
causality at speeds greater than light speed? 
What possible advantage could that hold for a biome?  

 

Also, there is no such thing as a personal identity or self
which isn’t constructed apart from environmental interactions, properties of
association and dissociation, as well as social, cultural and historical
events.  The major purveyor of such
interaction is human language.  Whatever
distorts, displaces and/or transforms language phenomenology does the same with
any sense of personal identity or self, as well as the status quo and all forms
of myth and consensus.  Each new
telecommunications medium distorts, displaces and/or transforms the
communication of percepts, concepts, and social constructs and customs, including
general human mores, in other words, conventions that embody the fundamental
values of any group.  

 

What is troubling is that there really isn’t any such thing
as a culture when we are talking about speed-up and digitalization.  What happens is that the whole takes on the
aspects of the universal but without any standards or scales of being with
which to measure its qualities and quantities with any meaningful
resonation.  There isn’t any Piaget
available to monitor normal ontological and epistemological developments.  For example, Sherry Turkle’s attempt to plot
new notions of psycho-physiological pathology involving electro-digital
computational communication devices is pathetic.  Ours is an age of value judgments without any
values.  Notions of ethics or morality
are obsolete.  The Thought Police won’t
be able to think with any kind of authenticity, authority or autonomy.  Autopoiesis? 
 Give me a break.  

 

The internet is often referred to as the engineered digital
superstructure for a supernatural tactility, when in fact it is post-sound or
post-audile-tactility.  The illusion and
delusion of the internet is that we are able to reach out and touch or
experience what we would not be able to do so otherwise.  Of course, in terms of commonsense this is
true, but in terms of the counter-intuitive, internet experience is nonsense
and false because it is decontextual, or sans time and sans space.  What is skin when it is neither discovered in
time nor explored in space?      

 

With the introduction of telecommunications technologies,
there is no longer any common causal measure for patterns of consensus relating
to psychology, physiology, sociology, culture and scientific advance.  There is the illusion and delusion that
problems occurring in one context can be solved by beings experiencing another
context.

 

Also, there is a troubling new development regarding normal
psycho-physiological co-ordination and orchestration involving the ability to
bring the senses and the muscularity behind sensibility to an appropriate
closure, as in “Stop, Look and Listen”, as in teaching the mind-brain-body to
decelerate without causing injury or harm. 
Find the following an illustration of this as – I hypothesize –
instantaneous, non-stop, non-look, non-listen electronic digitalization
desensitizes the body toward taking any contextual stand, whether grounded or
not [emphasis added]: 

Deceleration Mechanics: A Lost Art http://www.elitefts.com/documents/deceleration_mechanics.htm


By Jason Riddell,
Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, American University


“No, I am not talking about the grease monkey at your local garage who just
FUBAR’ed your brake job and now your car sounds like it’s grinding steel on
steel as you approach a red light. I am
writing this article because my experience of late has shown that the ability
of my athletes to decelerate their body weight, then use that potential energy
and translate it back into kinetic energy accelerating out of a jump or turn
has been lost. This problem is something that I have had to address with
the high prevalence of ACL injuries especially within my female population.

“First a little background, the
sports with the highest occurrence of ACL injuries for female athletes are in
order gymnastics, soccer, basketball, field hockey, volleyball, lacrosse, and
then softball. For men, it is close between football and wrestling. According
to the 1999 article by M.L. Ireland women are 2 to 8 times more likely to have
an injury than men. You may be asking why? The answer is comprised of a
multitude of intrinsic factors such as “hormonal influences, intercondylar
notch width, joint laxity, limb alignment, muscle strength, neuromuscular
activation, ligament size and extrinsic factors such as excessive shoe-surface
interface friction, sports activity, training/conditioning level and equipment
(4).” With all these variables the ones we as strength and conditioning coaches
can control the best for our male and female athletes are lower limb alignment,
muscle strength, neuromuscular activation and training/conditioning level. I
will come back to this later but let’s just look at what typically happens when
the ACL tears.

“Commonly, the athlete runs, suddenly
stops, and then turns, thereby causing a deceleration of the lower limb, a
forced hyperextension of the knee, or a forced tibial rotation, resulting in
injury to the ACL (3).” What I see typically with my athletes is when jumping
they land on the balls of their feet and end up with their knees out over their
toes, then jump back up. This lends to the majority of the work concentrated on
the quads and not letting their hamstrings, glutes and hips take the majority
of the impact force. In simplest terms they don’t sit back when landing, and
that leads to big problems down the road. “It is the synergistic relationship
between the ACL and the hamstrings that activates to decrease the shear forces
at the knee during pivoting and jumping motions (5).” “In contrast, the
quadriceps acts antagonistically to the ACL, encouraging forward displacement
of the tibia relative to the femur. The contraction force produced by the
quadriceps can produce forces in excess of what the ligament can handle,
predisposing a person to ligament tensile failure (1).” These facts elucidate
the two most prevalent problems I see with my athletes when they enter the
program. The first is posterior chain deficiencies in athletes are so common
that I have come to just expect it and know that it will be a priority in their
training program. And second is poor jumping/deceleration mechanics.”

For the moment I rest my case.

Thank you for your attention, best regards, F. Scott Taylor

 		 	   		  
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