1.
Mind control, levitation and no pain: the race to find a superman in sport (2019), The Guardian:
America and the Soviet Union held a common belief: the existence of superhumans. Both world powers believed in a race of cosmic beings who could, just like in the sci-fi movies, slow down time, speed it up, change their body shape, feel no pain, levitate, see into the future, and more.
The Russians deployed a psychic to project losing thoughts into Karpov’s opponent at a chess match.
The effort was taken seriously by both sides. "Murphy was an adviser for the Jedi warrior training programme at West Point Military Academy in New York" –
soldiers in the programme were taught invisibility, seeing into the future and extraordinary intuition, like knowing how many chairs were in a room before walking in - but also stopping the hearts of animals.
That was 1982.
Always worth considering: if that was then, then what is being looked at now? With four decades of progress under the belt of these programmes.
2.
British student’s wearable CNC machine gives makers “superhuman” abilities (2023), Dezeen.
CNC = precision motorised drill. Used to sculpt the aluminium bodies of MacBooks, for example.
Jasper Mallinson’s device is a cubic frame that you wear like a glove, and when you approach things you can mechanically alter and shape them with high precision.
Now imagine that with 40 years of development behind it.
3.
Russia Says It’s Losing Because Ukraine Has Experimental Mutant Troops Created in Secret Biolabs (2022), Daily Beast.
I always regard accusations like this as a kind of deflection or projection of the national psyche.
Like, why would you accuse them of doing that? What do you even have in mind that takes your imagination in that direction? In dreams, truth.
4.
How Vladimir Lenin Became a Mushroom (2017), Atlas Obscura.
From 1991, a hoax in Russia, manifested by artist Sergei Kuryokhin and journalist Sergei Sholokhov on an investigative TV show seen by millions:
Over the course of an hour, Kuryokhin, playing the part of the verbally precise scholar, built a loosely logical case that Lenin, after consuming a steady dose of psychedelic mushrooms over the course of several years, had at some point himself become a mushroom.
I mean…
"Lenin had consumed so many mushrooms that their fungal “consciousness” had completely consumed him in return."
…why not?
More posts tagged: filtered-for (106), mushrooms (4).
