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MonthMarch 2008

New on Key 64: remembering Christopher Hyatt, Nine Inch Nails Ghosts review, occult secrets of Lost

March 11, 2008 /

Key 64 is back with a new format. From editor Nick Pell:

Key64 is returning to a rolling format. Anyone can sign up and submit articles, they just have to be approved by me and Szul before anyone can see them on the site. Check the site regularly for updates, or add our MySpace page for updates.

In addition, I’m putting together a PDF journal type thing for the long anticipated Key64: Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Streets We want the usual stuff. But we also want… ART. Cover art, interior art, whatever. Just send me the scans. Also, we prefer articles in word format now as we won’t be dealing with the XHTML weirdness in the PDF format.

Get ahold of me if you want to throw something in the DGFITS issue.

Nick’s gmail address is nicholasjpell.

Some recent content from the new format:

Ohne Garantien: Memories of Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt by Mobius Frame.

At Edges by Samuel 23.

Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV review by Michael Szul.

The Occult Secrets of Lost by me.

The Occult Origins of Lost

March 11, 2008 /

I wrote an article on Lost and the occult for Key 64. Probably nothing new for readers of this blog.

ABC’s Lost isn’t the first pop culture phenomena to crib from occultism – movies, television shows, and video games have integrated occult themes and rituals for years. But one thing that sets Lost apart from the crowd is the apparent sincere interest on the part of executive producer and co-creator Damon Lindelof. While most pop cultural attempts at integrating magic and the occult are done merely to add atmosphere to the story, Lindelof has a deeper interest in the material. And rather than beating the viewer over the head with “authentic” occult rituals, Lindelof is more content to pepper the series with references and concepts, leaving the the viewer to decipher their significance.

Full Story: Key 64.

Spliced 004: TV Ate Itself

March 10, 2008 /

videodrome

My latest column at Alterati:

By the end of David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome we find that not only is television a literal part of the body, but that this brain part can spread contagious disease: the brain tumor inducing ‘Videodrome signal.’ This metaphor carries into reality. Television does indeed transmit a particularly destructive disease. Symptoms include: lethargy, apathy, psychosis, and even death.

TV Carnage is an inoculation: the worst of television, cut-up, rearranged, and fed back into itself. Derrick Beckles takes television at its most dehumanizing and packs it into a feature length megadoses that will leave your psychic immune system ready for anything.

Full Story: Alterati.

Chinese etymology can help with your sigil magic

March 10, 2008 /

Chinese characters

I came across this very interesting piece by xiaoJ on the design site COLOURlovers yesterday. Anyone interested in sigil magic would do well to read over this.

Many outsiders think that modern Chinese remains a purely pictographic language, similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. While it is true that Chinese script began as a pictographic system, pictures do not make for a particular efficient writing system. Some pictograms do still exist (e.g., ? ?mountain’, ? ?person’), but 90% of modern Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds: they are part semantic (a portion of the character, called a radical, provides the general meaning) and part phonetic (the other portion of the character tells you how it is pronounced).

The characters for red, green, blue, and purple in Chinese are phono-semantic (all bearing the radical for silk, ?), but a few color characters are associative compounds: two or more ideographic elements combined to create another meaning.

I find the phono-semantic description very intriguing. It reminds me of the utteral and inutteral elements of magic as espoused in R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing books. Albeit fiction, his understanding of philosophy has given him some great insight into how human will and the universe can coalesce.

While I am not too familiar with the works of Michael Bertiaux, I was led to believe him and the Cult of the Black Snake (I think that was their name) were constructing ever larger sigils out of carefully constructed smaller ones. Careful consideration may be placed unto the original sigils, to be wed together on a dreamscape of a sort by the members of the Cult. What they were accomplishing with this stuff, I dunno.

Anyhow, just an interesting read for anyone that works with sigil magic. Let me know if anyone is doing any interesting or experimental work with sigils or chaos magic these days. =]

How Science Could Soon be Manipulating Our Choice of Food

March 10, 2008 /

“I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. ‘Would you like coffee?’ he says, all cryptically. ‘No, water will be fine,’ I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated. A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as he waits for my next move.

If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself. ‘What does all that mean?’ I ask. ‘Well, you were on edge because I was smirking,’ says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part of his test.

‘And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real significance they hold the same amount of water but subconsciously, you were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was interesting.’ At least it had nothing to do with my penis. Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.”

(via Mind Control 101)

Mysterious Pits Shed Light on Forgotten Witches of the West

March 10, 2008 /

“Evidence of pagan rituals involving swans and other birds in the Cornish countryside in the 17th century has been uncovered by archaeologists. Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.

The finds have been dated to the 1640s, a period of turmoil in England when Cromwellian Puritans destroyed any links to pre-Christian pagan England. It was also a period when witchcraft attracted the death sentence. Jacqui Woods, leading the excavations, has not traced any written or anecdotal evidence of the rituals, which would have involved a significant number of people over a long period. There are no records of similar practices anywhere else in the world.”

(via Times Online)

Global warming doubters grasping at straws

March 10, 2008 /

Over at the excellent libertarian blog Clasically Liberal, CLS points to a story in the Edmonton Journal to try to poke hole in the claim that there is a scientific consensus on global warming:

Only about one in three Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.

The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.

A 99-per-cent majority believes the climate is changing. But 45 per cent blame both human and natural influences, and 68 per cent disagree with the popular statement that “the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.”

Full Story: Edmonton Journal.

I know it’s lazy/sloppy to use Wikipedia as a reference, but check here for a list of national and international scientific organizations who’s official position is that human actions are very likely the cause of global warming. The article also notes: “With the July 2007 release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate.” (Emphasis mine.)

If you think the Edmonton study pokes any holes in the claim that there is a scientific consensus, perhaps you should also read the Wikipedia entry on scientific consensus.

(Classically Liberal link via OVO)

For some better environmentalist iconoclasm, see A Tale of Two Scientific Consensuses.

Update: See here for polling of climate scientists about what they believe about global warming.

Vatican lists “new sins,” including pollution

March 10, 2008 /

Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of “new” sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today’s “new sins,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

Full Story: Comcast.

(Thanks Bill).

WorldChanging: do biofuels do more harm than good?

March 10, 2008 /

WorldChanging has a good round-up of anti-biofuel literature here. I looked into getting a biodiesel car last year but eventually decided that biodiesel wasn’t actually preferable to petroleum. Currently, I have no car and would prefer to keep it that way, but if I think if you must drive, it’s better to focus on getting a car with very good gas mileage rather than trying to get something that runs on biodiesel or ethanol.

Perhaps the most promising area of future biofuel development is algae for biofuel. Currently it costs too much, but if someone can figure out how to get the costs down (industrial production in giant vats?) it could work.

It was encouraging to see some open mindedness about nuclear energy from WorldChanging as well:

Sure, the mining, refining and shipping of uranium means that it’s not really a carbon-free technology. And sure, some nuclear plants are finding it hard to keep running, because the rivers they use to cool their reactors are getting too warm during the increasingly hotter summer months.

But at least these are problems we know about, whereas biofuels are suddenly looking like a jack-in-the-box of unpleasant surprises, ranging from higher food prices to ecosystem destruction to an actual worsening of the greenhouse gas emissions problem. I have been staunchly anti-nuclear for all of my adult life; but even I am beginning to scratch my head and wonder whether shutting down Sweden’s nuclear power plants — which the country originally committed to doing by 2010 — is such a good idea just now.

See what Stewart Brand had to say about nuclear here.

(For the record I’m highly skeptical about nuclear, but I do think it should be considered, especially as the risks involved are more and more mediated).

A Review of Methodology in “Biblical Entheogens”

March 9, 2008 /

An argument about the theory that “Moses was high on drugs”.

“Over the last week, Benny Shanon’s article ‘Biblical Entheogens: A speculative hypothesis’ has been a rather popular topic online, both in mainstream media outlets and specifically in the skeptical community. I wonder how much of this interest, especially in the the skeptical community, is just a case of Schadenfreude. After my skeptical comments on the article earlier this week, I have decided to go through the article thoroughly, and offer a more concrete review of Shanon’s work.

Effectively, Shanon’s thesis is that Moses, throughout his encounters with God, was under the effects of an Entheogen, a mind altering psychedelic drug, which lead to hallucinations and an altered state of consciousness. This is certainly an interesting theory, but one that I believe Shanon fails to support. His main evidence appears to be comparison to known historic and modern usages of such substances in religious and spiritual endeavors. However, his comparisons to Pre-Columbian and modern American examples may serve as example of entheogen use, they cannot serve as evidence of Israelite use.”

(via Archaeoporn)

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