Danger Room has an article posted fact checking the claims made in the new The Men Who Stare at Goats movie:
Hippie Army? True. Lt. Col. Jim Channon dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare — one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle. In the movie, Channon is played by Jeff Bridges. His First Earth Battalion is renamed the “New Earth Army.” But the ideas are the same. Much of the artwork from the New Earth manual is lifted straight from the Channon original.
Channon has been taking advantage of the publicity for his cause; this week he has a column in the Guardian newspaper, suggesting (among other things) that armies should be used for reforestation and navies to control over-fishing.
The military’s interest in Eastern and alternative practices is once again on the rise. “Warrior mind training“, apparently based on ancient Samurai techniques, is being taught at Camp Lejeune as a possible treatment for PTSD. Elsewhere the Army has a $4 million initiative exploring other approaches including Reiki, transcendental meditation and “bioenergy.” The Air Force is looking into acupuncture for battlefield pain relief.
Danger Room: Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats
As pointed out at Danger Room, you can download the original First Earth Battalion Manual from Jim Channon’s web site
Previously:
Psychic Warfare from 1981-2008
Real life DHARMA Initiative # 1: SRI (Stanford Research Institute)
The year I was born, in 1981, the US Government decided magick was real. Well, the “US Government” is of course an abstraction—specifically, Congressional Research Service was commissioned to do a report on psychic phenomena and offered the following conclusion:
“Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplified by intent and emotion.”
That sounds like a pretty accurate description of magick to me. Score one for the weirdos, right?
Of course, I don’t expect you to believe that. Ignore any claims that wouldn’t get made outside a college-level physics textbook. There is no need to believe in non-human or “extra-dimensional” intelligence, no need to believe in telekinesis, no need to believe in any of the claims made by the magick community. They are merely designing rituals to alter their perception and experiencing self-generated hallucinations.
The illusion of moving images is a puzzle that humans have cracked to great success, and by flashing sequential photographs at 24 frames per second or more, we get to watch movies—windows back in time. Humans have even learned to “fake” three-dimensional objects with holographic technology.
Full Story: Brainsturbator
“It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.
Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.”
(via New Dawn Magazine)
The Ministry of Defence funded a secret study to ascertain whether people with psychic powers could help protect the nation, it emerged last night.
The MoD arranged the tests to discover whether volunteers were able to use psychic powers to “remotely view” hidden objects. The studyinvolved blindfolding test subjects and asking them to “see” the contents of sealed brown envelopes containing pictures of random objects and public figures. [...]
Surprisingly 28 per cent of those tested managed a close guess at the contents of the envelopes, which included pictures of a knife, Mother Teresa and an “Asian individual”.
But most subjects, who were holed up in a secret location for the study, were hopelessly off the mark in their guesses. One even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope’s content.
Full Story: Scotsman (via Hit and Run).
Last night I was out for drinks with Danny Choaflux, Trevor Blake, and Crawford, and we got on the subject of Richard Metzger’s corporate cash grabs.
Metzger’s well known for having bamboozled TCI into funding the site’s creation. Once they saw the actual product, they dropped it and gave him the rights to the site. Then he and Gary Baddeley sold the site to RazorFish, who later gave it back to them after the dot-com bubble burst. Then he was able to get the sci-fi channel to pay for the Disinfo TV show, and keep the rights after they decided not to air it.
I drew the comparison to demonology… Metzger was essentially working with assorted demons and imps and other malevolent actors to manifest his will. I’m not talking so much about the more remote corporate magical tactics people like Chris Arkenberg and Wes Unruh have been working on. Instead, Metzger has worked directly with these forces through their flesh and blood representatives, sleazy businessmen with bad intentions. And so far gotten what he wanted out of them.
Or has he?
(I decided to go through and tag all my corporate magic related posts for easier reference… I found some stuff I’d nearly forgotten about).
The New York Times has announced they will publish the Downing Street Memo. Wes wonders on his blog whether his Philip K. Nixon work had any influenceon this decision. You can read about Wes’s Drowning Street Memo album here.
Along with Chris Arkenburg, Wes is emerging as a leader in the realm of using magic to assualt authority. It was his early research on the subject that lead me to invite him to guest blog at Technoccult, and he ended up posting a long article on the subject here.
Wes’ Corporate Magick expose and anti-copyright advocacy reminds me a lot of Hakim Bey and his many works. One of which – Temporary Autonomous Zone – Klint links to.
Speaking of magick, Mindwarp, lets his brief thoughts on Hellboy turn into a nice rant on Gary Lachman’s Turn Off Your Mind – a book which examines many aspects of occult culture and apparently lists Aleister Crowley as merely a “moral lesson.”
This article began in response to Jason Louv’s call for submissions for the coming book “Generation Hex.” However, the current political climate, and the absurdity of writing an anti-corporate monogram for publication by a corporation, forced me to rethink submitting this work for publication. Instead, this piece needs to be preserved in its degrading, uncopyrighted, all rites reversed form. Eris said so.
Read the rest of this entry »
Zen Werewolf has a post compiling some techniques for hexing corporations (are you working on this for the Disinfo book, Zen?). Personally, I think trying to do some work with bargaining with the egregores might be more effective. They’re powerful.
Link
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