This is it! EsoZone is upon us again!
If you want to volunteer, please show up around noon. Otherwise, doors open at 6pm.
It’s free, so bring anyone who’s interested!
And don’t forget the EsoZone Astral Temple if you can’t make it in person.
A word about parking:
Please park on or around Schiller, on the north side of the bridge, to avoid getting your car towed and/or getting our hosts in trouble.
Reading Mutate makes you smarter:
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.
Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
New York Times: How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
(via Cryptogon)
Robert Anton Wilson explained this years ago:
The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.
Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic1.
Environments often change in unpredictable ways and over timescales from the seasonal to millennial. Rainfall and temperature change both seasonally and annually; populations of predators, prey and pests rise and fall; soil conditions change.
Biology News: Conformists may kill civilizations
(via Weird Fiction via Blustr)
Possible explanation for near death experiences:
Electrical readings from seven patients who died in hospital suggest that the brain undergoes a surge of activity at the moment of death, according to a study just published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. […]
This is not the first time these have been noticed, but previous reports were single cases and the electrical surges were explained away as due to electrical interference from other sources. In these new cases, the doctors could be pretty confident that previously suggested sources of interference weren’t present.
Instead, they suggest that the surge was due to ‘anoxic depolarisation’ – a process where the lack of oxygen destabilises the electrical balance of the neurons leading to one last cascade of activity.
Spending on science in the developing world grew at three times the rate of that of richer countries between 2002 and 2007, according to figures released yesterday (6 October) by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).
And the number of researchers in developing countries jumped from 1.8 million to 2.7 million over the same period.
SciDev: Poor countries spending more on science
(via Beerkens)
I haven’t listened to this yet, but it sounds interesting:
Tom Rees has conducted research into religion and personal insecurity in 50 countries. Using figures on how much people pray and how unequal income is in each of them, he claims to have found evidence to show that the most religious societies are the most unequal, and concludes the inequality leads to religion. Is it fear and hardship that makes people of one country more religious than another, or is there a mysterious third factor that can explain why some nations pray so much more than others? Laurie Taylor talks to Tom Rees about his findings, and to sociologist of religion David Voas.
(via Disinfo)
Human Rights Watch is trying to help Iraqi homosexuals flee the country:
Long and Moumneh formulated a plan. They would build an underground railroad of sorts, reaching out to gay men in Iraq through the Internet and their existing contacts in Iraq, then advising and supporting gay Iraqis until they could ferry them to a safe city somewhere in Iraq, then to a haven elsewhere in the region, and eventually perhaps to the West.
Why?
It has never been easy being gay in Iraq. During the Saddam Hussein era, open homosexuality wasn’t technically outlawed, but it was effectively forbidden, and harassment and torture of gay people, if sporadic, were not unknown. After the American-led invasion of the country in 2003, a similar atmosphere persisted. Fadi was 12 years old during the American invasion, so he had little knowledge of what it was like to be gay under Saddam, but as far back as a year and a half ago, he was walking past his local hussainiyah (a Shia gathering place similar to a mosque) when a man at the entrance of the building called out to him. “Come in for a minute,” the man said. Fadi knew there was no point in running because they knew where he lived. He assumed the man calling him over was from the Mahdi Army. He walked to the door of the hussainiyah thinking, This is the end for me. After some ten hours of being whipped, kicked, and spit on, Fadi was told to pick himself up off the floor and get dressed. “This is a warning for you,” one of his tormentors told him. “Tell people like you what happened to you.”
As virulent as the violence against gay people (men mostly) was, it operated at a kind of low hum for many years, overshadowed by the country’s myriad other problems. But in February of this year, something changed. There was no announcement, no fatwa, no openly declared policy by a cleric or militia leader or politician, but a wave of anti-gay hysteria hit the country. An Iraqi TV station, with disapproving commentary, showed a video of a group of perhaps two dozen young men at a private dance party, wiggling their hips like female belly dancers. Terms like the third sex and puppies, a newly coined slur, began to appear in hostile news reports. Shia and Sunni clerics started to preach in their Friday sermons about the evils of homosexuality and “the people of Lot.” Police officers stepped up their harassment of openly gay men. Families and tribes cast out their gay relatives. The bodies of gay men like Mazen and Namir, often mutilated, began turning up on the street. There is no way to verify the number of tortured or harassed, but the best available estimates place that figure in the thousands. Hundreds of men are believed to have been killed.
(via OVO)
The Pirate Bay is going on a road trip through Europe, one they hope to end today in a former NATO bunker. After a move from Sweden to the Ukraine, The Pirate Bay has now arrived at CyberBunker, an ISP that can provide them with a facility that can resist a nuclear attack as well as electromagnetic pulse bombs.
After being chased by various anti-piracy groups, The Pirate Bay returned a few hours ago. “Nobody puts The Pirate Bay in a corner,” they say on their frontpage, referencing Patrick Swayze’s famous line in Dirty Dancing. Not in a corner, no, but what about a bunker?
Torrent Freak: The Pirate Bay Relocates to a Nuclear Bunker
(via Alterati)
Frater Zir will lead a group astral projection to an EsoZone astral temple this Saturday October 10th at EsoZone at 3pm PST. Those who can’t participate in the actual event are invited to join on the astral plane.
For the purposes of this working, I have chosen to locate the EZOSONE Astral Temple (EZTRAL) inside of an orb of liquid metal, floating in the molten viscous fluid in the very center of the Earth.
Within this orb, on the horizontal axis, circumscribing the perimiter are four sphinxes, marking the quarters, facing in toward the center of the temple. Above the center of the temple is an octagonal window, thru which the night sky can be seen. In the center of the floor is an octagonal pool of black fluid, upon which we will skry the vision.
Floating above this pool is a seed pod, about the size of a basketball. Its composition is a hybrid of organic and cybernetic materials. This sentient seed could be viewed as a chaosphere, upon/into which we will be focusing our intentions and interpretations of what the ESOZONE phenomenon means, what it will foster, how it will evolve, why it exists.
The first Esozone could be iconographically described as a key, which unlocked the gateway to a more practical and interpersonally direct understanding of our modern version of the esoteric community, which until then largely existed in the virtual realms. The second, a pyramid, which allowed us to climb to meet the sky, bringing us to the understanding that the stars of this EZ phenomenon are none other than ourselves.
This year, the meaning is as much a mystery as the previous two, but the intent has evolved into a free assembly of modern esoterics connected on the virtual and organic levels, a hope for the phenomenon to spread to other locales, an uncertainty of what kind of information will be presented, by whom, and for what purposes. It is up to us, ours for the making and taking, right here and now, free of charge, open to all.
Therefore, charge this cyber-ganic EZTRAL seed with your unique intentions for the future of this far-reaching community of free individuals, and contemplate in the pool below on the manifested information which the group’s effort transmits back to you. At the ritual’s peak, we will lift the seed to the sky, and focus our intent upon it with an intensity which will heighten to the point that it explodes, sending forth genetic copies of itself outward to the far reaches of this planet, in the hopes that these seeds will find fertility, and manifest in future ESOZONE festivals in other places, linking back to our efforts here at “Headquarters,” and blossom into a cornucopia of previously unseen communal fruit.
And have a happy harvest season, while you’re at it.
And feel free to project yourself forward or backwards in time if 3pm on Saturday doesn’t work for you.
Jeff Kepner gabbed with his brothers and snoozed in a chair at his mom’s house in Manheim Township over the weekend, ordinary activities for a trip back home to see family.
But the 57-year-old former Lancaster resident also showed off his two new hands, which he received in May in Pittsburgh during the nation’s first double hand transplant.
The former McCaskey High School student and retired noncommissioned Air Force officer visited here before he finally returns to his Augusta, Ga., home at the end of this week, following four months of recovery and rehabilitation in Pittsburgh.
Lancaster Online: Ex-county man ready to go home after double-hand transplant
(via Grinding)
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