This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS. […]
Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.
Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch. […]
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change. […]
Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart — which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
MonthOctober 2004
An ambitious project to build a dream imaging machine is underway:
“In a 100-year timeframe we want to understand human consciousness,” said Rubin.
Rubin and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — one of the world’s richest philanthropies with an endowment worth $11.3 billion — are approaching this ticklish problem backwards. They have bought a 280-acre farm in Ashburn, Virginia, and are building a new kind of research campus.
Reminds me of Until the End of the World
Full Story: Reuters: Wealthy New Lab Aims To
Capture Dreams, Literally
(via Posthuman Blues)
From Phil Hine’s site, a ritual from Dave Lee.
The realm of the media is the Inferno of Choronzon, the Demon of the Abyss of Hallucination. We will recapitulate these images under magical conditions, rending the veil of illusion, and plunging into the basal layer of primitive impersonal terror underlying the images. This is the Abyss, where the Great Old Ones or Archons of terror surge up from the depths of our being. These Archons are the primal forces of the instincts, of the first two neural circuits, corresponding to a vision of fear and greed on a cosmic scale.
Better Humans:
A storehouse for the brain’s “memory molecules” has been located, an advance that could offer clues for diseases characterized by learning and memory degradation.
Better Humans: “Memory Molecule” Storage Located
(via Technoshamanic).
Wikipedia’s entry on alchemy:
Up to the 18th century, alchemy was considered serious science in Europe; for instance, Isaac Newton devoted a great time to the Art. Other eminent alchemists of the Western world are Roger Bacon, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Tycho Brahe, and Thomas Browne. The decline of alchemy began in the 18th century with the birth of modern chemistry, which provided more precise and reliable framework for matter transmutations and medicine, within a new grand design of the universe based on rational materialism.
[…]
Legend has it that the founder of Egyptian alchemy was the god Thoth, called Hermes-Thoth or Thrice-Great Hermes (Hermes Trismegistus) by the Greek. According to legend, he wrote what were called the forty-two Books of Knowledge, covering all fields of knowledge ? including alchemy. Hermes’s symbol was the caduceus or serpent-staff, which became one of many of alchemy’s principal symbols. The “Emerald Tablet” or Hermetica of Thrice-Greatest Hermes, which is known only through Greek and Arabic translations, is generally understood to form the basis for Western alchemical philosophy and practice, called the hermetic philosophy by its early practitioners.
Fortune Elkins:
I guarantee that if you go into yoga class with an “attitude,” you will be frustrated. . .because very few people can do it all in their first class.
this is such a good thing, because it violently demonstrates to you that your ‘tude, which you think is protecting you in daily life, is actually a massive hindrance. it’s a fake shell that silently irks other people and blocks your way.
Just noticed that Singlenesia has a Discordian Software section, complete with “Emporer Norton Utilities.” Features a random belief generator and a tabloid headline generator. Fun stuff!
While only someone afflicted with the mental illness can know what it’s like to be at the mercy of delusions, an interactive computer technology called Virtual Hallucinations is allowing others to experience a snapshot approximation.
Globe and Mail: Framed by Fearful Asymmetry
(via Post Atomic)
From today’s Disinfo newsletter:
Key 23 is a new site on magick and related subcultures that features commentary from Jason Louv, Klint Finley and other Disinfo staff and alumni. I’ve had fun checking out their explorations of the chaos tradition and newer ideas. Jason (and Klint) have brought a regenerative perspective to the site, with their interest in magick. My own energies these days are closer to the Digital Eco-Sense study (by Chris Ryan) featured today: creative solutions on how the ‘sustainability agenda’ can inform technology research and development. My hope is that those inspired by Louv and Finley will take this creativity beyond ‘magick’ or ‘subcultures’ into their own lives and new domains. Expect to see new ideas and strange loops in the future.
From my e-mail response to Alex Burns:
Shamanism is about acquiring insight to help the village… A lot of people these days fancy themselves shamans, but do nothing to help the global village in which we all live. Beyond the idea of crafting spells to help the planet, I hope all of us modern mages and shamans will look to higher planes for creativity and ideas that we can share with the activist community and help to put into action. It’s not all about hockus pockus, but flashes of practical insight that can be transfered to the real world.
Brilliant analysis of the Passion of Christ by Mark K-Punk on Hyperstition:
Power depends upon the weakness of the organism. When authority is seriously challenged, when its tolerance is tested to the limit, it has the ultimate recourse of torture. The slow, graphic scenes of mindless physical degradation in The Passion of the Christ are necessary for revealing the horrors to which Jesus’ organism was subject. It is made clear that he could have escaped the excruciating agony simply by renouncing his Truth and by assenting to the Authority of the World. Christ’s Example insists: better to let the organism be tortured to death (‘If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out’) than to bow, bent-headed, to Authority.
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