Hakim Bey interviewed in his home, May 2009.
MonthSeptember 2009
Actually, this is not so shocking:
A new Public Policy Polling survey of New Jersey voters has some shocking results: 21 percent either believe or aren’t sure that President Obama is the Anti-Christ. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans and 35 percent of “conservative” voters also either believe he is or aren’t sure.
(via Nick P)
Tolkien, one of his generation’s most respected linguists, was ”earmarked” to crack Nazi codes in the event that Germany declared war.
Intelligence chiefs singled him and a ‘cadre’ of other intellectuals to work at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire.
Its staff – which included Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker – would later decipher the ‘impenetrable’ Enigma machines.
This saved Britain from German conquest by allowing the Navy to intercept and destroy Hitler’s U-Boats.
According to previously unseen records, Tolkien trained with the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS).
He spent three days at their London HQ in March 1939 – six months before the outbreak of the Second World War and just 18 months after the publication of his first book, The Hobbit.
But although he was ”keen”, Tolkien – a professor of English literature at Oxford University – declined a £500-a-year offer to become a full-time recruit.
Telegraph: JRR Tolkien trained as British spy
(via Disinfo)
Apparently, the problem for middle-class and lower-middle-class Americans is not that their taxpayer dollars are going to prop up billionaires, oligarchs and their corrupt industries. It’s that America’s impoverished — a group that is growing rapidly — is getting too much, has too much power and too little accountability. […]
If one were to watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh — as millions do — one would believe that the burden of the ordinary American taxpayer, and the unfair plight of America’s rich, is that their money is being stolen by the poorest and most powerless sectors of the society. An organization whose constituencies are often-unregistered inner-city minorities, the homeless and the dispossesed is depicted as though it’s Goldman Sachs, Blackwater, Haillburton and combined, as though Washington officials are in thrall to those living in poverty rather than those who fund their campaigns. It’s not the nice men in the suits doing the stealing but the very people, often minorities or illegal immigrants, with no political or financial power who nonetheless somehow dominate the government and get everything for themselves. The poorer and weaker one is, the more one is demonized in right-wing mythology as all-powerful receipients of ill-gotten gains; conversely, the stronger and more powerful one is, the more one is depicted as an oppressed and put-upon victim (that same dynamic applies to foreign affairs as well). […]
John Cole highlights what might be the most telling aspect of all of this: demands for a “Special Prosecutor” into Obama’s so-called “relationship with ACORN” from the very same circles that vehemently objected to investigations into torture, illegal government spying, politicized prosecutions, military contractor theft, Lewis Libby’s obstruction of justice, and virtually every other instance of Bush-era act of criminality. Those, of course, are the very same people who, before that, demanded endless inquiries into Whitewater and Vince Foster’s murder. There’s nothing more valuable than petty, dramatic “scandals” to distract attention from what is actually taking place.
Time isn’t allowed to critique right-wing claims even when they’re totally false. Doing that would make Rush Limbaugh and Fox News angry. So rather than pointing out what actually happened — that right-wing claims about march attendance were false and debunked by news organizations — they have to pretend that this is, as always, nothing more than an irreconcilable dispute about reality between the Right and the Left, and it’s not up to Time to tell their readers what the truth is, because that’s not their role, since they’re objective and unbiased. According to the rules of establishment journalism, there is no truth and no facts — only competing, irreconcilable claims from “the Right and the Left,” and their only job is to mindlessly repeat those claims. […]
Here, the reality — that the 9/12 crowd numbered in the “tens of thousands” — has to be dismissed as coming from “liberal sources” because, as Stephen Colbert famously pointed out, “reality has a liberal bias.” Time’s readers are thus kept in the dark about the actual facts of this matter, and are actively deceived into believing that reports from establishment journalists that debunked right-wing hyperbole are nothing more than “information from liberal sources” that should be deemed every bit as paritsan and suspect as the blatant right-wing falsehoods. That’s how American journalism typically functions.
Easier said than done:
My whole idea is to lower risk in society by developing a system that can resist human error, rather than one where human error rules. The first step is to make sure that no financial institution is too big to fail. Next, make sure governments don’t favour big companies. Governments should also decrease the role of economists – they’re no more reliable than astrologers, and they do more damage. […]
My advice is that instead of investing in medium-risk securities, you should put most of your money in very low-risk securities, and a little bit in high-risk securities. Then you might get a good black swan. Also, it’s good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who’s also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
Globe and Mail: We still have the same disease
Note: article contains error, Black Swan was published in 2007, not 2008.
The Faust story is a retelling of the Simon Magus story, but instead of being set at the birth of Christianity, this is at the birth of Lutheran Protestantism, nearly fifteen hundred years later. Here we’ve worked out the tangled web of Georgius Sabellicus Faust, the child molester and fountain of necromancy as he styled himself, Johannes Faust, who was the completely blameless doctor of divinity at Heidelberg University, who was known as the demigod of Heidelberg, and we’ve worked out how these two got mixed up together by people who were just confused by all these Fausts and that even Georgius Sabellicus Faust, in the first reference to him, he refers to himself as “Faustus Secundus,” and we were looking at this, and I said, “But that makes ‘Faust Second,’ and this is the first Faust that we’ve ever heard referred to” — he’s refered to by Johannes Trithemius — so we thought, “Who was Faust the first, then?” And Steve looked up in his Latin dictionary, and the word “faustus” means “fortunate, lucky, prosperous, auspicious,” so it would have been a great generic name for a sort of generic folkloric magician, like we might say, “Oh, he was a bit of a Merlin,” and they were saying, “He’s a bit of a Faust, he’s a lucky man,” with an implication that his luck comes from magical means, like Prospero was a good name for a magician. This is a Latin word, that is presumably, there must have been a Faust in folklore before any of these other jokers got in on the act. That’s just in one page of The Book of Magic, because we’re only giving one page to each of the lives of the great enchanters that we’re including. […]
We also found out that Paracelsus invented modern medicine. This was quite interesting. We found out he was the first person to say that epilepsy was an illness rather than a madness. He was the person who pioneered the use of anesthetics and antibiotics. He was the first person to say that disease originated from outside the body and that illness came from agencies outside the body, which is the beginning of disease theory. He invented homeopathy, and he was a magician.
It points out how much of our culture, all of it, the science, the medicine, the art, has seemingly sprung up from a hardcore magical basis. That most of the people, like Isaac Newton who was an alchemist, who ideas were based on those of John Dee, who was a flat-out necromancer, and even Einstein, his ideas were very much influenced by theosophy, which was the product of the fantastic 19th century fraud, that inspired fraud of Madame Blavatsky. So it’s interesting, much of the culture that surrounds us comes out of magic, pure and simply. That was something I suspected for a long time, but doing the research for this book, that is something which is becoming more and more evident, and we are gathering the evidence for that point of view with every new aspect of it we research.
Previews: Alan Moore interview
You can compare Paracelsus’s Alphabet of the Magi and Dee and Kelley’s Enochian alphabet at Omniglot:
I’m intrigued by Moore’s claim about Theosophy influencing Einstein. Anyone know anything about it?
The Obama administration has told Congress it supports renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act due to expire at year’s end, measures making it easier for the government to spy within the United States.
In a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said the administration might consider “modifications” to the act in order to protect civil liberties.
“The administration is willing to consider such ideas, provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities,” Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, wrote to Leahy, (.pdf) whose committee is expected to consider renewing the three expiring Patriot Act provisions next week. The government disclosed the letter Tuesday.
The secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has awarded arms globocorp General Dynamics a $10m contract to set up a network of psychological-warfare “influence websites” supporting the Global War On Terror. France and Britain are specifically included as “targeted regions”. […]
The SOCOM psywar sites will be run much in the same fashion as any normal web-media portal. There will be “indigenous content stringers and editors” within “targeted regions” providing 24-hour “original features, news, sports, entertainment, economics, politics, cultural reports, business, and similar items of interest to targeted readers”.
Register: US Spec Ops operates psywar websites targeted at UK
(via Cryptogon)
I guess if all newspapers fold, we’ll always at least have state propaganda. See also: Voices of America.
BioArts International, a biotech company in the San Francisco area, has discontinued its commercial dog cloning services. As such, the company has also ended its partnership with South Korean cloning vendor Sooam Biotech Research Foundation and its head Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk.
The fifth and final set of cloned dogs was delivered in September.
Lou Hawthorne, chief executive officer, cited a list of reasons why the company made its decision, a tiny market being one of them. […]
Hawthorne also blamed black market competition. A company that would offer the same services would be in violation of international patents, he said, because BioArts holds the sole, worldwide rights to clone dogs, cats and endangered species.
For instance, a South Korean biotech company advertised in February 2008 that it would clone dogs at a fraction of BioArts’ price, starting at $150,000 and then down to $30,000.
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