In relative terms, this recession has been much less hard on Oregon’s high-tech industries than the dot-com and telecom busts were early this decade. And though the state’s technology manufacturing base continues to erode, a new cluster of Web services companies have sprung up and created a vibrant culture around social-networking technology.

Hopes are high they could lead Oregon technology out of this latest downturn, though their economic impact is muted.

Many of these small companies have set up shop in previously rundown buildings downtown or on Portland’s inner east side. They share a passion for social media, which connects people online through a series of tools including wikis, blogs and the instant-messaging service Twitter.

Prominent examples include Jive Software, AboutUs and SplashCast. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of even smaller companies are bootstrapping themselves with just a handful of employees and their laptops, using low-cost open-source software to launch their businesses with a minimum of startup costs.

OregonLive: Oregon’s high-tech better off now than in dot-com bust

The article’s side panel lists a few companies that are “bucking the trend” during the recession:

Ensequence Inc.

Jive Software

TriQuint Semiconductor Inc.

Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing — fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts — and perform lap dances for male students as therapy. [...]

But because the programs are privately run, what happens within their walls is largely a mystery. No one knows whether the programs succeed or fail. [...]

Mount Bachelor’s executive director, Bitz, says her school uses widely accepted psychological treatments to help children overcome their problems. “We also use a psychodrama-treatment approach designed to do one or both of two things,” said Bitz in her statement, “get a student to embrace qualities of their character (such as beauty or courage) about which they have doubt or assist them in recognizing qualities that are unproductive (such as selfishness or conceit) about which they have little insight.” [...]

“They told me I was dirty and I had to put mud on myself for being raped,” she said in reference to another Lifesteps session. “They basically blamed me for getting raped.”

Bitz dismissed Jane’s story and called it “very suspect” in an interview with the Bend Bulletin, which also spoke with Jane. “We know that some current students have made a conscious decision to lie about our school, hoping that it will be closed as a result, and that they would then be sent back home,” Bitz told TIME. [...]

Synanon began as a drug-rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior and addiction. Synanon’s confrontational techniques influenced est and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants.

Time: An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny

Interesting article on a number of levels:

1) The potential Synanon-inspired abuse of kids right here in Oregon.

2) The implications of the court case for students and school districts.

3) Problems with private schools in general.

4) Problems with public schools, education, and therapy in general.

There’s a follow-up form the author of the article at HuffPo.

(via Metafilter thanks to Trevor Blake)

Out fucking rageous:

I received an email late last night from the Governor of Oregon.

I had written to Governor Ted Kulongoski asking him why the taxpayers of his state were subsidizing Wal-Mart with a $3.7 million tax break they didn’t deserve. “Thank you for sharing your ideas and concerns,” the Governor told me. “I believe citizen input is vital to a strong and healthy society and I urge your continued involvement.” [...]

According to the Beaverton Valley Times, Wal-Mart received a fat subsidy at taxpayer’s expense by buying a tax credit from Solar World, a German company that makes photovoltaic solar panels. The city of Hillsborough, Oregon was able to attract this large solar production plant, and its 1,000 jobs, by offering a candy store of tax-subsidized incentives to the manufacturer. But some of the profits ended up in Wal-Mart’s pocket instead, because of a bizarre arrangement that allows manufacturers to sell their tax credits to companies who are doing nothing valuable for the environment, like Wal-Mart.

According to the Valley Times, Solar World was given an $11 million renewable energy tax credit. Solar World was then allowed to turn around and sell that credit to Wal-Mart for only $7.3 million, two-thirds of its real value. The full $11 million value of the credit was 51% more than what Wal-Mart paid for it. Wal-Mart can now use the full credit to reduce its corporate income taxes on profits owed to the state, earned at Wal-Mart’s 32 stores across Oregon. Wal-Mart can spread this $11 million tax credit over the next five years. Oregon taxpayers lose out on $11 million in income taxes that the corporation would have paid, and Wal-Mart makes $3.7 million for merely buying up the credit. [...]

For Solar World, the tax credit had more value as a commodity to sell—than as a tax break, because Solar World only pays the state minimum tax of $10 per year. The tax credit was worth little to the company—unless they sold it. “A tax credit’s only good for those people who have a tax liability,” explained a representative of the Oregon Department of Energy.

Huffington Post: Wal-Mart Becomes Oregon’s Welfare Queen

October 3-5, 2008. Portland, Oregon.

Imagine how DeMarcus Blackwell felt when he was told that his son Chris had engaged in “sexual contact and/or sexual harassment” at school. School officials in Waco, Texas, said Chris rubbed his face in the chest of a female teachers’ aide.

Well, before you can imagine this father’s reaction, you need to know one other fact: His son was 4 years old when the “sexual” incident occurred.

What got Chris into trouble was giving the aide a hug. Only after DeMarcus strenuously complained did the school change the boy’s record from “sexual harassment” to “inappropriate physical contact.”

At least Chris wasn’t sent to jail, as were 13-year-old Cory Mashburn and 12-year-old Ryan Cornelison of McMinnville, Ore. The boys were charged with five counts of felony sex abuse in the first degree because of their conduct toward some 13-year-old girls at their middle school.

Full Story: Town Hall.

(via ifeminists.com).

See also: Classically Liberal’s coverage of the Matthew Brady case.

Torrent.

Direct Download.

From the New Introduction:

Join the Party

This is the record of the AAAZ, the Antarctic Astral Autonomous Zone, that occurred on the night of August 31st – September 1st, 1987.

Hakim Bey is the author of Temporary Autonomous Zone. It’s a cultural milestone for a wide variety of subversives from anarchists, occultists, vandal artists, and freaky festival people. The main idea of TAZ was to create exactly what it sounds like TAZ is about: creating places that serve as alternative realities to the prevailing system of control. Specific times and spaces designated to let chaos free, and allow psychological and social mechanisms to self regulate and mutate beyond the confines of so-called consensus reality.

The focus is on having individuals find and establish meaning on their own terms. Creating a TAZ requires face to face interaction and dialog, in a sense, creating an art form which is impossible to ever fully record or understand. In the void where stagnancy and boredom once ruled, wild fantasies called real life take root. The elusive genuine article, with no possible televised reenactments.

Before TAZ’s thought virus would reach the anti-capitalists and the rave scene as it did in the 90’s, many of the people who recognized the value of Bey’s work were few and far apart. Mail order culture was the primary mode of communication with the underground for many people in the 80’s. The postal world seen within the pages of High Weirdness by Mail by Ivan Stang has now mostly migrated to cyberspace, where many of these fringe cultures have exploded into bonafide phenomenas. In the meantime, the mutants who were plugged into the paper trail of fresh ideas were yearning for an opportunity to encounter a TAZ. This meant finding a ‘Zone’ which was totally unexpected.

It was decided to meet astrally or in dreams, at a specific sacred space in Antarctica. Bey sent invites out to his network, and arranged for everyone who participated to send him their experiences, which he would then compile and send back out. What you end up with is an compilation of rare works by an all-star cast of individuals who comprised the occulture before there was a word for it. In this instance, the media created here facilitated a syncing up of communal experiences, and was an essential component of the AAAZ, yet not the AAAZ in itself.

The objective reality of astral projection is inconsequential to the AAAZ. What is of importance is the narrative, lives encouraged to be lived mythically, drawing those lives together in the process. Then again, for those who do entertain astral experiences as accepted facets of reality, the AAAZ was most likely one of the earliest documented records of shared lucid dreams and consciousness. It is historically important for occultists, and personally fulfilling for those who got to participate in it.

The AAAZ is a window into the past, where long distance communications were laced with art and magic, and the viability of a tangible occult community was seemingly infinitesimal. This book provided my endeavors with a deeper sense of purpose to what I have been developing with esoZone, and PDXocculture, an open group in Portland, OR for individuals with esoteric interests. It was as if my magic was supplemented by ancient spells spoke at the AAAZ, spells that were finally close to reaching total fruition. “Find the Others”, Leary’s famous phrase, has become irrelevant. More people are networked than ever before, and they are well on their way to having an alternative reality subsume the toxic aeon preceding it.

This is a rare work that has only been previously released to the original participants. It is provided in its first reprinting to the participants of esoZone as a bonus gift, and as a memetic primer. Be sure to look out for works by Coil, Shirley Maclaine, James Koehnline, Ivan Stang, Feral Faun (aka Apio), Reverand Crowbar (aka Susan Poe), Trevor Blake, and of course Hakim Bey. All notables to be sure, but I can think of someone more important.

This is where you come in.
The coincidences you are experiencing as part of esoZone ARE REAL.
All the doorways of the venue have been transmuted into portals.
They lead twenty years into the past from Portland [Land of Portals] to the Antarctican AAAZ.
As you navigate the space of esoZone, you may notice dimensional leakage.
It is no accident and a very special effect. Have fun with it.
Interact with entities and your awareness of the past and present places, slipstreaming into the future.

Tell your friends.

If you are up for it, during the exact 20 year anniversary of the AAAZ, on the night of Aug. 31st, take an astral voyage. Bring your memory back to esoZone, and the experiences you had within it, and use the doorway Portals to the AAAZ of 87. The rest of this book should prep you for the journey.

This time, there will be no zine compiling the experiences. Take advantage of our Aeon. Post about your adventures online wherever you normally post, and if you do not have a space for that, start an account on Irreality.net. Your words will find their proper destination, and be part of a grand chain of events that leads to something currently inconceivable, twenty more years down the line.

Danny Chaoflux
New Alamut, Portal Palace
July 2007

Portland, OR. August 10-12, 2007.

Be there.

I am just testing this out, seeing as how I am going to be part of an ?ber-?lite troupe holding down the Technoccult fort while it’s baron heads off to Washington and Oregon for a couple weeks. And for the record, Oregon is my favourite U.S. state thus far.

So anyhow, for anyone interested in information management and communication, you may want to check out information aesthetics. Here we see an installation at NYU of 200-plus cable tv channels all being streamed together and arranged into a real-time mosaic representation of the persons that stand in front of it:?

I am not going to extrapolate on why I find this so cool, but trust in the fact that it is a sweet-ass mataphor for stuff. I remember a bit from Angel Tech, by Antero Alli, where he talks about the nature of the psychopath in people. That, in the West, people tend to be a culmination of approximately 22 per cent individual experience, that which shapes their own personal Gestalt, perspectives, and emotional responses to events. The remaining 78 per cent is dogma: social means, peers, culture and subculture, family, schooling, et cetera.

I have always liked this ratio. Though I cannot prove its accuracy, some days I tend to believe that this is true, and other days I find myself sympathising with Colin Wilson’s claim and research that only about 5 per cent of people are capable of any sort of psychotic achievement of seperating themselves from the dogma and achieving at least 51 per cent individual, out-voting the social means and taking beautiful responsibility for one’s own actions unto themself.

Over and out.

Drowning Ran is a Burning Man inspired camping trip this weekend in Oregon:

Drowning Rat is simply a camping trip in the rainy, miserable, cold woods of Oregon, happening the weekend after Mother’s Day. We make a rat (out of branches, last year) and do a little ritual, and drown the thing.

There’s also hot springs, whiskey, fire, pirate songs, feather boas, George Bush in the forest with a disco ball and the Golden Pee Pot. Eating feasts, and pies that appear to be covered in rat turds. It ain’t a festival. It’s in a regular campground, exact location TBD.

Link.

Here’s a fascinating piece on Jim Goad: unrepentant misogynist, editor of ANSWER Me! author of Shit Magnet: One Man?s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World?s Guilt. He spent time in prison for assault, but now he’s out and telling his side of the story.

Jim Goad may in fact be the bad man his wife, his girlfriend, the State of Oregon and numerous others said he is, but he?s also a man of principle. You may disagree with his ethics, they may even repulse you, but you can?t deny that he?s thought them through, can articulate them with unusual clarity, tries to live by them more faithfully than you live by yours and if you debated him on them he?d probably kick your ass.

Link (via Robot Wisdom).