Here are a few of my favorite posts of 2006. See you next year!
Didgeridoo Playing Improves Your Sleep.
Fashion is contemporary mask magic.
Chuck Pahlaniuk on living as a story that you’ve created.
Skinny Ice (Skinny Puppy/Vanilla Ice video mash-up)
Channel Nulls “Woodshed” series: Part 1, Part 2.
Esotech: Manifesto and Action Yoga.
Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari part one.
According to Kendrick Frazier & The Executive Council…
CSICOP’s name has been shortened. The Executive Council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) has formally adopted a shorter name for the organization: Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).
Read more: It’s CSI Now, Not CSICOP.
See also: “CSI? Man, I ain’t paying member fees for CSI. I want to be a CSICOP.”
Chinese scientists are conducting laboratory work hoping to identify a 2,800-year-old mummy presumably of a shaman in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The well-preserved mummy of a seemingly Caucasian man with a Roman nose and deep-set eyes was unearthed from a cluster of ancient tombs in 2003 and research work has been going on ever since.
Archeologists found the mummy most intriguing because a sack of marijuana leaves was found buried alongside the corpse.
The mummy remains intact in its original outfit despite the passage of time: leather hat, heavy coat and boots, huge earrings of copper and gold, a turquoise necklace, a copper laced stick in the right hand and a bronze ax in the left, according to Li Xiao, head of the heritage bureau in Turpan.
Full Story: People’s Daily Online.
(thanks Danny Chaoflux)
Lupa says:
Rending the Veil is a new occult ezine aimed at magicians, including Thelemites and other ceremonialists, Chaos magicians, experimental magicians, and so forth. However, there is some pagan/witchy/shamanic material as well.
It features writing by Lupa and her husband Taylor Ellwood.
“If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offhoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overtuns the model and outlines a map, even if it constiutes its own heirarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable… We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all seek-PLURALISM=MONISM-via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.” (A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (20-1)
This Wikipedia article details the Indian martial art Lathi, and claims that it is based around raising Kundalini. However, no sources are cited.
I’ve posted these links around solstice for the past couple years.
Here’s a new one this year: Jesus Never Existed.
And the usuals:
The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus Santa and the aminita muscaria mushroom.
E-Sheep: Saturnalia a Jack Chick parody about the origins of Christmas.
Pagan Origins of Modern Christmas Traditions
Wikipedia: Christmas linked Holidays
And, why not: Wikipedia: Christmas
Happy holidays everyone!
(it’s also available for pre-order from Amazon).
I will suggest that we look at the Bush administration through the lenses of three controversial theorists who have had much to say about secrecy in both its religious and political dimensions: the German-born political philosopher, Leo Strauss, the Florentine philosopher, Niccol? Machiavelli, and the French postmodern theorist, Jean Baudrillard. I have chosen these three, seemingly disparate, theorists because they correspond to and help make sense of three of the most important forces at work in the Bush administration, namely: 1) the Neoconservative movement, which is heavily indebted to Strauss’ thought and has a powerful presence in the Bush administration through figures like Paul Wolfowitz (a student of Strauss) and the Project for a New American Century;[15] 2) the manipulations of Bush’s pious public image by advisors like Karl Rove (a reader of Machiavelli) and Vice-President Dick Cheney (often compared to Machiavelli), who have used the President’s connections with the Christian Right for political advantage; [16] and 3) an astonishingly uncritical mainstream media, whose celebration of Bush’s image as a virtuous man of faith and general silence about his less admirable activities is truly “hyperreal,” in Baudrillard’s sense of the term.
(thanks Jay!)
Danny Chaoflux talks with Triskele and Squink about the new version of Irreality, set to drop in a few days:
The initial idea was to create some initial conditions that would allow the development of a complex adaptive system analogous to the third-order emergent properties found in the stock market, ant colonies and cloud formation. In this sense we have created a system that has mechanisms for rapidly adapting to the chaotic whimsy of meme-space; responding to the needs of the individual whilst simultaneously enacting the will of the hive mind.
Letting a culture develop around an intent is, to me, a much more sensible option for the long term survivability of a community than the concept of developing a community around a culture.
© 2024 Technoccult
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑