Sweden, Finland, Germany, Denmark and the UK are the Innovation leaders, with innovation performance well above that of the EU average and all other countries. Of these countries, Germany is improving its performance fastest while Denmark is stagnating.

Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and the Netherlands are the Innovation followers, with innovation performance below those of the innovation leaders but above that the EU average. Ireland’s performance has been increasing fastest within this group, followed by Austria.

Cyprus, Estonia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy are the Moderate innovators, with innovation performance below the EU average. The trend in Cyprus’ innovation performance is well above the average for this group, followed by Portugal, while Spain and Italy are not improving their relative position.

Malta, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Latvia and Bulgaria are the Catching-up countries with innovation performance well below the EU average. All of these countries have been catching up, with the exception of Lithuania. Bulgaria and Romania have been improving their performance the fastest.

Beerken’s Blog: European Innovation Scoreboard

In the context of all the good advancing copyright law can do for us as we move further into the twenty-first century (see “How creativity is being strangled by the law“), I almost shed a tear for Americans this afternoon because of these two bills being rushed into action:

House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained for subsequent police inspection. [cont.]

Download A Song–Lose Your Loan

Page 411 of this 747-page bill is “Section 494(A): CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION” wherein the bill’s meaning takes a serious detour from its title. To prevent college students from illegally accessing copyrighted material, the section says all schools shall (when you see the word “shall” in a law, it’s a requirement, not a suggestion):

1) Have “a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property”
and
2) Have “a plan to explore technology based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”

The craziest thing about this is that noncompliant schools would lose all their federal funding, for all their students. No more Pell Grants. No more federal financial aid. No more student loans. This is not just draconian punishment for students who break the law, this punishes all students at that institution even if they did nothing!

Beyond that, both requirements actually work against the point of the bill itself–implementation would likely raise school fees. [cont.]

I won’t name names, but recently I helped out a friend occultist in California review Canadian cities to expatriate to. I sent him a bunch of info on crime, lifestyle, popular job markets, and some ethnic/religious backgrounds to the cities to help him decide which was more his flavour.

As we move into an era where identity exists more and more online, and who knows as more transhuman technologies become more mainstream over the next decade. Copyright, essentially communications in general, has become the quiet battleground in the American government. Because these Draconian laws benefit not only the corporations down there, but the right-wing zealous nuts who want the world safe for their Sears-inspired Christian regime, might I suggest you, too, look at moving abroad rather than putting up with the weird Fourth Reich that is bubbling and brewing.

For those of you not caring or fighting your government before it swelters and your personal freedoms are abandoned in favour of a “safe, secure Christian state,” please feel free to inquire with any of us Canadian occultists about which cities might be welcome to you. There’s always South America, Asia, or Europe if you’re thinking more exotic, and I have friends that are always flying down to South Africa to work.

For those of you that decide to fight on your native soil, kudos to you. To the rest of you, if you don’t feel it’s your battle, the world is your oyster. America is not the end-all, be-all of the human experience.

Just a friendly word from Fell. And if there is any interest, perhaps I should put together an Guide to Canada for American Counterculture Expats. Aforementioned Californian seemed to appreciate it and is checking out his city of choice this winter. And I know we’re not exactly 100% sovereign from the U.S.’s influence, but things are nowhere near the psycho state that is growing down there. =]

EDIT — A bit of a perception/context update for the SAFE Act, via the good boys at Ars Technica:

Despite hyperbole to the contrary, the SAFE Act that passed the House yesterday won’t force local coffee shops, libraries, and home users to monitor their network connections for child porn.

I’d love to get some feedback from Klint’s wonderful community and readership here, especially those who happen to have experience in design, marketing, and business. After some discussions with fellow designer, Coe, who himself has an esoteric streak, I’ve been considering some issues that might be keeping the contemporary spiritual movement that is the occult subculture (and its legion of niche cultures and interests) from reaching its potential in North America (and possibly Europe).

First to address is whether being different is something that the members of the occult community thrives on, in and of itself. Personally, I’ve noticed differences between the persons I know involved in the esoteric arts. I’ll call them the Few for brevity’s sake. There are the goth shops that stock the books on magic that I’ll visit if I’m too eager to wait for an Amazon shipment. While the books and knowledge are the factors that draw me to their locale, the people and artefacts that are sold there are of no interest to me and, in fact, sell a stereotype that I find repugnant. (Sadly, the books in my section are the cultural accessories to the majority of wares they huck: clothing, hair dye, witchcraft gobbledygook, incense, shoddy pewter jewellery, and punky goth paraphernalia.)

There’s also the New Age shops that huck their own brand, though with a more aligned focus to the ultimate goal of spiritual exploration: crystals, incense, oils, lame calendars with ooh-ahh paintings on them, CDs, cheesy T-shirts, et cetera.

So all this material would be the halo effect, as it’s referred to in marketing. Unfortunately, goth and witch cultures seem to have let the accessories take the focus away from the core cultural values that spawned them in the first place. Which leads me to wonder what state does the North American occult community find itself.

Now, keep in mind that I’ve worked in design for a number of years and now currently work as a brand consultant. What most people don’t understand about brands is that they are what the people say they are, not what the companies wish to define them as.

This is an interesting point to get across because persons that decide to hate a particular brand are projecting their own form of identity by hating on the brands that rub them the wrong way. The little mental boxes in your mind that you used to define that brand is neurologically linked to other elements that you associate with in your life that you use to define what you’re not. Sadly, by choosing one’s enemies, like I see in these books and posts about “occult warfare,” fans of this thinking do themselves the disservice of filling in all the boxes they dislike. The mental boxes (or mental white space) that remains moulds personal self-identification with the cultural or experiential leftovers that haven’t been already commandeered by others.

Rarely do I see popular subculture movements hijack and infiltrate the mainstream in order to spread their art among the masses. The Few that become self-inflicted prisoners, bound by the things they refuse, begin to wrap these leftover ideas into its own mishmash subculture. Then they get mad when the mainstream adopts and makes it their own. Think of punk culture adopting military garb as their own, or the Barbie girls out there that seem to be standardised with a back-ass tattoo and pierced bellybutton and tongue.

This brings up the universal archetype known as the Elixir. In Joseph Campbell’s monomyth one of the necessary traits of a Hero is to enter the underworld and return to the masses with a so-called Elixir. The Elixir is wisdom. And I define wisdom as knowledge + experience.

“It is important that art is produced, but it also has to be consumed. The dynamics of producers and consumers is the motor of art.” Turkish caricaturist Ercan Akyol said that, and it remains true in all elements of life (unless you’re pursuing a Zen-like knowledge of the self, in some cave somewhere, by choice.) But think of art in this case as a the Elixir of wisdom, this knowledge and experience that is being hoarded by one group or the next, but rarely shared across borders. Borders who’re really only being defined by these little, semantic boxes we build in our heads: aka brands.

One of my favourite things that Grant Morrison says during his well-known Disinfo talk has nothing to do with sigils or his writing. It’s that he’s wearing a Donna Karan suit. Then he spills his drink on it and cheerfully laughs, “Fuck it!” The suit is a beautiful piece, and it serves its purpose. It’s Morrison’s mask magic at work. He doesn’t avoid fashion as a vice of contemporary life, but embraces it and uses it as a magical tool in his everyday life-experiencing what a fine garment can elicit in others, and how that attention can be embraced.

Rollo May says, in Man’s Search for Himself, “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice… it is conformity.” Whom among us have conformed to our particular set of friends? Their expectations of us, our subcultures’, or our families’? Why? Like Morrison, laugh out loud, “Fuck ‘em!” I want everyone reading this right now to say to themselves, three times, Fuck occultism, fuck conspiracies, fuck the little boxes in my head that keep me from exploring the things I simply believe I hate.

And on that, as I digress from my initial hope to encourage some feedback to better a conversation I am having with Coe and sometimes with Rev Max, I leave you with two quotes to encourage some thought on this matter. But remember, they apply when you embrace the lifestyle of a Hero yourself. The archetypal Underworld in many a case might just be the very mainstream that so many so-called “occultists” tend to avoid and dismay. It is that very nightmare I encourage you to embrace! Learn to flirt, learn to dress up as much as you might desire to dress down, and truly put Robert Anton Wilson’s and Ramsey Duke’s ideas to work:

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”
-Thomas Sowell

“A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.”
-unknown

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

[...]

But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called ‘a very delicate time, and a dangerous time.’

‘There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,’ said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. ‘It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.’

Full Story: The New York Times.

(via Hit and Run).

I thought legitimizing gay unions would destroy marriage:

Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says.

Historical evidence, including legal documents and gravesites, can be interpreted as supporting the prevalence of homosexual relationships hundreds of years ago, said Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

If accurate, the results indicate socially sanctioned same-sex unions are nothing new, nor were they taboo in the past.

Full Story: Live Science.

(via Lupa).

The survey concluded that “high levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. Most nations characterized by high degrees of individual and societal security have the highest rates of organic atheism, and conversely, nations characterized by low degrees of individual and societal security have the lowest rates of organic atheism. In some societies, particularly Europe , atheism is growing. However, throughout much of the world – particularly nations with high birth rates – atheism is barely discernible.”

It found the US to be one of the most religious nations.

Full Story.

(Via Sorceress Jade).

You’re referring to our ‘Rogues Gallery’ project in which we took our GraffitiWriter robot to public spaces across the United States and Europe and offered it for use by the general public. One of the things that was so interesting about this project was that so many people were wiling to participate! We’d simply show up unannounced in a public park or city center, drive the robot around, and invite people to use the machine to spray paint messages on the ground. Virtually everyone we encountered was willing to give it a try, even though what we were doing was clearly illegal. To us, this seemed to be an interesting inversion of the usual narratives about technology extending human abilities. With Rogues Gallery, the robot overcame certain kinds of social conditioning not because of its mechanical capabilities but simply because it was seen as legitimate, based on the assumption that anyone possessing a robot represented some large research institution which probably had the ‘right’ to spray its messages on public space, rather than simply being a couple of crazy people who built a machine in their garage. Imagine if we had tried the same experiment without a robot, using only a few cans of spray paint – no one would have participated because the action would have been clearly understood as an illegal act of public defacement.

Full Story: WorldChanging.

Institute for Applied Autonomy web site.

Europe’s first Pyramid:

Near the city of Visoko, 30 km north of Sarajevo, there is a stone pyramid of monumental size, claims the Bosnian archeologist Semir Osmanagi?, who lives and works in the USA.

After several months of geological and archeological research, Mr. Osmanagi? concluded that under the present hill of Viso?ica hides a stairs-like pyramid, about 12,000 years old. Osmanagi?, who intensively researched on pyramids in Americas, Asia and Africa for the last 15 years and wrote several books on the subject, says he’s quite sure he found the first pyramid in Europe, which is quite similar to ones in the Southern America.

Unjournaled.

It is the latest craze among teenagers not only in the United States and Europe but also right here in Barbados. Jason is just one of a growing number of youngsters who has rejected Christianity and is embracing witchcraft as a way of life.

Link ( via Robot Wisdom).

The word biopunk has been bandied about for some time now. Google already has over 1,000 results for a search on the term. R.U. Sirius wrote a piece in Rolling Stone a couple years ago about the possibility of garage biotechnologists, a movement he called biopunk. But I’d like to throw a new meaning for the concept out there: the near future (already here?) biotechnology black market.

The biotechnology market has already captured the imaginations of the business world. For the past few years it’s been hyped as the next big thing, the new dot-com bubble. For instance, Paul Allen wants to turn a neighborhood in Seattle into a biotech industry fueled urbanist utopia.

Ample private and federal investment is being poured into biotech research, but I expect U.S policies banning cloning research and limiting funding for stem cell research will effectively limit the U.S.’s role in biotechnology development. Less restrictive policies and/or cheaper labor will give Europe, Russia, and Asia advantages in the global biotech industry.

But other factors will drive an underground biotechnology market: the crippling expense of prescription drugs, health insurance, malpractice insurance, and student loan debts.

Chemistry students have been making money manufacturing LSD, MDMA, and other illegal drugs for years. But the demand for black market prescription drug clones could create a new use for the college chemistry lab. Imagine thousands of undergrads manufacturing HIV meds and other expensive drugs for cheap underground resale.

Meanwhile, medical school students, un-licensed doctors, or even licensed doctors trying to keep up with insurance payments will be performing a myriad of unauthorized procedures. Genesis P. Orridge could be at the forefront of a movement again. Sex changes are nothing new, but P. Orridge and Lady Jaye’s sex change as installation art project is on the forefront of the body modification movement, which constantly grows more extreme. Face transplants are about to become a reality. But these black market surgical procedures won’t be limited to weird body art projects. Uninsured Americans will be seeking all types of surgical procedures on the black market, and finding students and doctors to perform them will become increasingly easier.

Of course, those policy restrictions will create another biotech black market: clandestine cloning research labs and illegal human testing projects. Illegal human testing is almost certainly already a reality. And even with recent improvements in the job market, there are still thousands of desperate unemployed people to be taken advantage of.

And let?s not forget R.U. Sirius?s frightening prediction from his Rolling Stone article: garage production of germ weapons.

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.

Link.

I read Paulo Coelho’s the Alchemist on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam last spring, and was impressed at how simply Coelho was able to explain the magical path. This seems to be Europe’s best seller, and here it is explaining alchemy to anyone who cares to take time to read this short little novel.

I’ve been curious about Coelho’s connections to the occult, and it turns out he’s lead a pretty interesting life. He’s Catholic now, but was a practicing occultist for several years.

In 1973, Paulo and Raul became part of the Alternative Society, an organization that opposed capitalist ideology, defended the individual’s right to do what he or she pleased, and also practised black magic. He later described these experiences in The Valkyries (1992).

During this period, they began publishing “Kring-ha”, a series of comic strips, calling for more freedom. The dictatorship considered these subversive, and Paulo and Raul were detained and imprisoned. Raul was soon released, but Paulo was kept in for longer because he was considered to be the ‘brains’ behind the comic strips. His problems did not end there however; two days after his release, Paulo was seized as he was walking down the street and taken to a military torture centre where he remained for several days. According to him, he only escaped death by telling them that he was mad and had already been admitted to mental hospitals three times. He started physically harming himself when his kidnappers were there in the room, and, in the end, they stopped torturing him and let him go.

Link.

Well, it’s May 31st, which means that Klint is due back from Europe tomorrow. I’d just like to express my appreciation for him letting myself and Wes take control for the past two months. It’s been an excellent experience that has made me more blog-savvvvvvvvy (wanted to make sure I put enough v’s in there).

In addition to Klint, I’d like to thank Wes for a great deal of valuable input, and for having excellent timing when it came to posting during days when I was having blogger’s block.

I’d also like to thank my boss at my real job, for never being in the office to monitor my work productivity. Without his absence, I would have scarcely found enough time.

Would you consider getting a brain implant?

Yes: 69.5%

No: 17.3%

not sure: 13%

Total votes: 23

No new poll for a while, I need to install new polling software and I don’t want to mess with it until I get back from Europe.

I got back to Seattle yesterday, it’s nice to be back.

This year didn’t start out well, something pretty bad happened in my family on Friday. I hope this isn’t how things are going to go all year.

On the other hand, the new year’s party I went to was a blast. I saw a bunch of people that I pretty much only see on New Year’s. It’s weird to think that that party might be the last time I see a lot of them. I’m guessing most of us won’t be around Sheridan for New Year’s anymore. This realization drives home the fact that I really need to make a stronger effort to keep in touch with people from now on.

What I did last year:

Recognized the one year anneversary of Jon’s disappearance/death.

Got my heart broke. Bad.

Interned for the Washington State Arts Commission.

Graduated from college.

Got a new car.

Saw Brad for the first time in 3 years.

Moved to Seattle, lived in the same city as Brad for the first time in over 4 years.

Went to Burning Man.

Started my “career” as a temp worker.

Also: I joined Stare and Margin Walker, and mets lots of cool people through them.

I met some really cool people from the blogosphere in meatspace: Dr. Menlo, Pagan Moss, Kirsten Anserson, Molly Wright Steenson, and Adam and Nurri.

I drank too much, and excercised too little.

So what’s on the agenda for this year? Going to Europe this spring. Maybe finally getting a real job after that (maybe not, though). I’ll probably drink less, but I doubt I’ll get any more excercise.

Most of all I just want to be in a better headspace than I was last year. Last year my life was written and illustrated by Peter Bagge, with a soundtrack by Modest Mouse. This year my life will be written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Philip Bond with a soundtrack by Gold Chains

Some might claim that the machines have a hidden agenda, that there already is an intelligent machine out there, directing traffic, infinitely patient and connected to the world. One might allege that these protesters are merely the pawns of a conspiracy which they themselves do not fully understand, a conspiracy by machines, for machines… against humanity.
Read the rest of this entry »

“On Project Purple and It’s Initiatives,” the manifesto of Project Purple, was written in 1971 by the nebulous Thomas Jefferson Allen. As a legendary figure within the underground movement, this bizarre work of principles of propaganda and misinformation fueled the fires of the subversive organization he’d helped found years earlier.

It was also, says Ludwig (self-anointed scholar of “The Grand and Mutable History of Plundergate”), a fraud.

“The distribution commonly given freely on the Internet today was written by a close friend of Allen, and is so full of nonsense that it tends to provoke the myth that Project Purple is a hoax, or at least a discordian conspiracy. This was, I suspect, the original intent,” says Ludwig. Project Purple customarily releases such misinformation regarding it’s formation to the conspiracy community at large. This adds to the mystery and intrigue of the group, but, according to the (supposedly) original version of “On Project Purple and It’s Initiatives” is also a tactic which they borrow from the “socioeconomically inclined” (the upper class) to cloak their activities from the prying eyes of the government.

While the history of Project Purple is, expectedly, contradictory in several ways and very difficult to untangle, the most commonly accepted version of events begins in 1934.

Thomas Jefferson Allen was born to a poor family in the year 1934, earning an education under the tutelage of his grandfather and the papers (as he worked for a news stand from age twelve to age sixteen). The first exposure to the underground, anti-war movement within the United States was when a group of people, masked, defaced an Uncle Sam poster, replacing the words “for US Army” into “to Kill, Kill, Kill!” (or “to Kill those Chinks!”, depending on who you ask).

By age twenty-three he had written a number of essays on a variety of topics, but his written work alone was not enough to satisfy his desire to take action. Two years later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he is said to have made his first overture to a group of close friends about forming “an organization aimed at disorganization, a subversive society aimed at subverting society. In short, my friends, an opposition to effective governance within our stifled, dry little world.” (from “the Strange-ness of October”, first p. in 1962, Masked Press)

The group (at first calling itself “Bach’s Orange Six Overture”) contented itself with the circulation of false reports to the local press and small-scale culture jamming antics. However, as the group drew in new interest from other youth groups, it began to take it’s role only slightly more seriously. As the sixties rolled around, the group took on a whole new face: an activist group.

Throughout the sixties the group worked within student organizations on university campuses and spread it’s liberal, funloving doctrines. Always working under a new guise they managed to incite protest where ever they ended up and seemed to enjoy themselves. Rather than being mere harbingers of misinformation they had become social activists with real enemies.

It wasn’t until 1971, when the group was performing some of it’s more memorable acts, that Thomas Allen decided the group needed a manifesto of intent. With the usual attitudes intact, Allen released “On Project Purple and It’s Initiatives” to an awaiting audience. As expected, it was a success.

The newly christened “Project Purple” was more than just a clique of friends doing what they felt was right, it was an underground movement that could not be put down. Throughout the seventies the group prospered as small cells popped up across the United States and Canada, then into Europe. As the eighties dawned the group became less well-recognized and fell deeper into the underground. While the campaign of misinformation and sometime outright rebellion against the social climes continued, with a perfect target in Ronald Reagan and his Cabinet, the group began to dwindle away.

Then came the Internet.

“The Internet revived and expanded Project Purple, much like it did to many other audience cults, including discordianism,” Ludwig speculates. “It allowed the group, as a whole, to come out and cause trouble in a whole new landscape. I suspect that some of the pioneers of the Internet freedom activism were involved in Project Purple, to one extent or another, at some point in time.”

It was in 1999, after years of medical troubles, that Thomas Allen passed away in his sleep. The founder of Project Purple, and some say a pioneer of modern day culturejamming, died at the age of sixty-seven.

As many will tell you, Ludwig included, all of this information is subject to speculation. True to form different accounts involving the “Bach’s Orange Six Overture” being called by different names (Greenman and Plundergate are popular candidates) and varying reports of differing antics, including the establishment of the Earth Liberation Front to “make other activist groups seem peaceable and reasonable by comparison.”

For further information on Project Purple or Thomas Allen, contact ppinfodev@soft-ware.de.

Thanks to Jon Spencer, Atomic Boy, The Walrus and Mad Hatter for their assistance.

Special thanks to Ludwig for his assistance in gathering background information and providing sources.

Further Reading

twenty-purple:the age of the internet astronaut includes the original distribution of “On Project Purple and It’s Initiatives” as well as links to discordian sites.