CategoryEssay / Research

Lone No More: a look at alternative gun culture

armed in america

This article was original written for Key 64‘s Guns, Dope, and Fucking in the Streets PDF zine. I have no idea when the zine will see the light of day, so I’m running this here now.

If you have a fixed idea of what a “typical gun owner” looks like, the coffee table book Armed America may surprise you. If your main exposure to “gun culture” is the mainstream media, or magazines like the American Rifleman or Guns and Ammo, you could be forgiven for thinking all gun owners are rural, middle aged white men who dress in cammo and are desperately worried about protecting the families from gun toting “urban youth.” Armed America, a collection of photographs of gun owners by Kyle Cassidy, includes Montana survivalists and young urban black men, but also tattooed punk rockers, single moms, and American families who couldn’t look any more normal without being creepy.

armed in america 2

It turns out, in the United States anyway, the typical gun owner could be just about anyone. According to the introduction of Armed America, 39% of the US population owns guns. Chances are, even if you did have a stereotype in mind for the “typical gun owner,” you actually know a few people who don’t fit the stereotype. Guess what? Those people aren’t the exception: they’re the rule.

So with such a large and diverse range of people owning guns, why is the gun culture – the magazines, shooting clubs, lobbying organizations, etc. – seemingly so homogeneous? Partially because most people who happen to own guns don’t make a lifestyle of it. Partially because some gun owners are quiet about it because they belong to communities that frown on firearms. Cassidy told ESPN.com “There was a guy in California I really wanted to photograph. He eventually declined. He said, ‘It’s like you’re asking me to pose with my pornography collection.’ It was something he just didn’t want to be known as owning.”

And partially because the established gun culture’s authoritarian and socially conservative agenda alienates many unapologetic gun owners. There are many proud gun owners interested in fighting for the 2nd amendment, promoting individual gun ownership, reading about guns, and socializing with other gun owners. Ostracized by the established gun culture, they are creating their own.

pink pistols

Take the Pink Pistols, for example. According to their web site they were established in 2000 to sponsor shooting courses for sexual minorities, and help them get concealed carry licenses. There are now 45 Pink Pistols chapters in the US (and one in Canada), and each group sponsors monthly shooting outings.

They even gained a bit of notoriety with a bizarre mention on Fox News. On the June 21, 2007 episode of the O’Reilly Factor, “gang expert” Rod Wheeler warns viewers of the “Pink Pistol-Packing Group” – a dangerous lesbian gang active all over the country. In an article on their web site, the Southern Poverty Law Center note that while Wheeler claims there are over 150 active lesbian gangs in the DC area alone, other crime experts say there are only 150 to 175 gangs TOTAL in the entire DC area. According to SPLC, Wheeler now claims he wasn’t referring to the law abiding, gun advocacy group known as the Pink Pistols, but to some other group using the same name (that no other law enforcement agency in the US seems to have ever heard of).

american gun culture report

The alternative gun culture now has their own voice, a zine called The American Gun Culture Report. AGCR provides an alternative to culturally conservative, authoritarian gun magazines. In the introduction to the first issue, AGCR editor Ross Eliot writes “Supporters of censorship, unaccountable court systems, secret prison camps and torture have claimed gun rights as their private issue far too long. It’s time to take it away from them.” AGCR publishes views from the likes of socialists, libertarians, pagans, and queers – anyone alienated by the mainstream gun press.

The pages of AGCR feature articles on “unexpected gun owners” such as Eleanor Roosevelt, analysis of the political positions espoused by the mainstream gun press, accounts of discrimination at shooting clubs, impassioned defenses of gun ownership, and much more. Eliot, who describes himself as a “non-doctrinal socialist,” says he publishes many things he does not agree with. “I’m not the best writer or editor,” Eliot says, “But I’m putting together a magazine I want to read, which is why I’m not pushing a specific social agenda.”

ross elliot

The zine was conceived one day in mid-2005 when Eliot was reading an issue of Guns and Ammo in the break room of the factory he works in. He says the magazine was “pissing him off” and he decided it was time for an alternative. He’d never made a zine before, but “There was this huge void not being filled, so I figured I might as well fill it.” Ross published the first issue in 2006 and the second in 2007. Both are available from zine and book stores across the US, or from their web site.

Eliot bought his first gun, a Mossberg 12 gauge shot gun, in late 2004 because “I was feeling more and more socially irresponsible for not having a gun.” The Rwandan Genocide changed how he viewed social violence, he says. “It was the most effective genocide in recorded history, about a million people were killed in three months. There have been have been much larger genocides, but this happened with unprecedented speed, and it was done with machetes. One person with a gun could have made a difference.”

agcr

Surprisingly, Eliot has received no negative responses to the zine from the left, even though he distributes it at anti-war protests. “The only negative response is from the mainstream gun press and their audiences.”

Eliot says he hasn’t really considered writing for the mainstream gun press, citing the plight of writers like Dean Spier Dean Speir who were blacklisted from the mainstream gun press after criticizing major advertisers. Instead, he’d rather grow AGCR to the point where it can compete with mainstream gun magazines.

Update/Correction 9/28/09: Dean Speir commented below correcting both the misspelling of his name and my description of him as “blacklisted.” The error is my own, and not Eliot’s. Speir writes:

It’s important to note that calling my absence from the “gunzines” a “blacklisting” isn’t really accurate.

I spent the better part of three years trying to get a gunzine byline, and discovered it was pretty much a closed shop.

Then I got my foot in the clubhouse, and everyone wanted whatever I could provide.

But once “inside,” it became apparent that, like the special interest ‘zines which appeal to the automotive, boating and photography hobby-ists, there was precious little critical writing being done.

And after 12-13 years of trying to get something other than “puffery” in the “mainstream gun press,” and with the advent of the Internet as a more direct conduit for free expression, I retired, bloody but unbowed.

Is there one published who wouldn’t touch my byline with a 12-foot Chechnyan? Absolutely! Harris (Combat Handguns) in NYC.

But I still get inquiries from other Editors wondering if I’m working on anything that might interest their readers.

For the past nine-plus years, whatever fit that category, is self-published at http://www.thegunzone.com, free of advertiser interference and nervous editorial oversight.

And competing with, or ignoring, the mainstream may be their only choice. The Pink Pistols actively try to build bridges with the established gun culture. The August 2001 issue of Guns and Ammo featured a short article about the Pink Pistols and concluded “Once again, maybe we need to shrug off the things that don’t affect shooting and gun rights and step up to the firing line with our fellow shooters.” Nearly seven years later, that hasn’t happened yet. Not that it matters much for the Pink Pistols or the American Gun Culture Report. They’ve proven they need no acceptance or approval from the mainstream to build successful communities.

TAZ History: Mound Bayou, Mississippi

A Short History of Mound Bayou

I’ve been collecting a history of Temporary Autonomous Zones. I’m grateful to Hakim Bey for the conceptual phrase, but his history was more romantic than tactically useful…and after all, he is something of a pedo. So in honor of the TAZ going down right now in PDX — YOU KNOW ABOUT ESOZONE, YES?? — I’ll be sharing some of the best stories this weekend.

One of my favorite corners of Southern History was an all-black community hidden in Northern Mississippi. The story of Mound Bayou stretches across centuries and winds through everything from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. Sadly, Mound Bayou exists almost nowhere online. The Wikipedia is shallow filler, and most of the online histories are short and sloppy.

Isaiah Montgomery and Ben Green founded Mound Bayou in 1887, but the story begins with Montgomery’s father, Ben, who was a slave on the David Bend plantation. For most folks alive today, our images of a plantation are based on Roots, but things were very different at Davis Bend. It was owned by Joeseph Davis (the brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis) and he was heavily inspired by the “socialist utopianism” of an obscure thinker named Robert Owen.

As a side note, Technoccult readers might be interested to know that “Owen insisted he could communicate with great minds of the past by means of electricity.” The precise details are lost to history, but it should be noted Owens was unusually blunt after death, telling Spritualist mediums who summoned him “Oh! How you have misunderstood the laws which connect spirit with spirit…you will never understand these things…”

David Bend was an experiment in education and empowerment, and yes, I do realize how absurd that sounds when I’m still talking about white people owning slaves. Rather than draconian dormitory conditions, though, Joeseph Davis encouraged his slaves to educate themselves and even own businesses. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Davis sold his land holdings to Ben Montgomery, who had run the plantation store. The price was $300,000 in gold, and with that David Bend became one of the first autonomous black communities in the South.

The Owen-inspired focus on learning and skills carried into Mound Bayou, especially when Booker T. Washington got involved later on. This isn’t just a look into the past, though: I think that Mound Bayou has a signifigant lesson to offer us here in 2008. During the many “exodus” movements which happened throughout the history of both Davis Bend and Mound Bayou, the Montgomery family was adamant about building a strong foundation instead of leaving for the mere promise of something better. Most importantly, the education they focused on was agricultural tech and self-sufficiency techniques:

Through outlets like the town’s newspaper, The Demonstrator (1900), Mound Bayou promoted education as an essential path to community survival, in particular vocational education in scientific agriculture through the Mound Bayou Normal and Industrial Institute.

Here in 2008, John Robb, one of my favorite Big Thinkers and the author of Brave New War, has been doing an amazing series of short, potent articles revolving around global systems collapse and the concept of the Resilient Community. Although fairy tales like Gabriele D’Annunzio taking over Fiume are beautiful, they’re not realistic or sustainable solutions. Mound Bayou is a model that lasted, and it was based on smart design and hard work, not poetry and wine.

The Black Hole in the Cost of Healthcare-pt 2: Computerized Healthcare

Imagine receiving a letter in your mailbox asking you to participate in a study for cancer research, and that your doctor didn’t mention anything about cancer during your last physical. This is what happened to 400 women in Maryland. According to the Baltimore Sun, ‘A state contractor tampered with Maryland’s cancer registry, a database used by researchers to track the disease’s impact, counting hundreds of patients as having cancer when they did not, according to a legislative audit released yesterday. The company, Macro International Inc., found in an internal investigation that data were deliberately altered between August 2004 and December of that year. The company fired the employee responsible for the cancer registry. State officials said that Macro employees apparently overreported the incidence of cancer to ensure that the database met standards set by a national certification association, which closely monitors registries to ensure that states have a complete count of cases.’ These letters were sent in 2005, and they’re just addressing it now.

If this can happen with a cancer registry’s database, imagine what could happen with someone’s personal health records. The argument for computerized records is simple. It will eliminate many errors that occur with paperwork, and will help emergency workers to assist a patient if the patient is unable to communicate. While this seems like a great idea in general, the issues of privacy, confidentiality, and abuses of the system lie in the back of many people’s minds. And for good reasons.

It’s not only our health records that are vulnerable. The WSJ Health Blog reports ‘In yet another example of the health industry mishandling private patient records, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia sent some 202,000 explanation of benefits letters to the wrong addresses last week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The letters, which were mistakenly directed to the addresses of other policyholders, included names and insurance identification numbers of patients as well as the names of the doctors and other medical providers they were using.[..] A small proportion of the letters also had Social Security numbers, a spokeswoman for the company told the paper. Vulnerability to identity theft is one concern. But EOB letters are especially sensitive from a privacy standpoint because they contain some treatment information. And this is one of a steady stream of mistakes by the health-care industry when it comes to protecting electronic data. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia told the AJC that a computer system change was to blame, and it’s taken steps to avoid the problem in the future.’

I foresee many ‘computer system changes’ in the future. Is this what we have to look forward to? The steps they’re taking to ‘avoid the problem in the future’ currently may be completely different whatever steps are needed in the future. Will everyone be up to speed?

According to USA Today advocates for electronic prescribing ‘say it will have many benefits including decreasing medical errors, which harm least 1.5 million people every year, according to the Institute of Medicine. Doctors’ scrawl will be replaced with typed information, and potentially dangerous interactions with patients’ existing medications will be flagged.’ Yet privacy advocates are worried. ‘Transforming prescriptions from scrawl into a standardized electronic format can make them even easier for pharmacies to sell and trade, violating patient privacy, says Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. ‘Any time you put something in a digital format and standardize it, it becomes much more profitable and easy to move those records.” The WSJ Health Blog also quotes the Coalition for Patient Privacy which said ‘While e-prescribing is attractive to many, Americans do not want their private prescription information data mined and used without their permission. Many Americans would be quite alarmed to discover their employer and others know they take an anti-anxiety medication or that they are being treated for an STD.’

I’m all for simplifying the paperwork process involved in healthcare. But I, like many others, am also worried about personal information being altered or available to those I don’t want accessing it. Will there be enough people enforcing our HIPAA rights? Will there be enough people to oversee these systems, to address immediate problems and to correct any glitches? Or will this be a windfall for Big Pharma and those who work in the field of law?

(Resources: Baltimore Sun-‘Md Cancer Statistics Altered’, WSJ Health Blog- ‘Insurer Sends Patient Info To The Wrong People’ and ‘Privacy Advocates Sound Alarm about Electronic Prescribing’, USA Today- ‘Writing is on The Wall for Doctors’ E-prescriptions’, Journal of Medical Internet Research-‘The Emergence of National Health Record Architectures in the United States and Australia: Models, Costs, and Questions’, and National Academy Press-” For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information” )

(See also: The Black Hole in The Cost of Healthcare: Big Pharma and Transparency)

July Moon

After discovering the complexity of the different layouts for various situations within the Kolduny Tarot, and finding difficultly in explaining them in a few brief blog posts, Natalia Tikimirov has agreed to walk us through monthly New and Full Moon Tarot readings. These methods were handed down to her from her mother, and her mother before that.

‘The date of the New Moon is July 2 or 7/2. Draw the 7th card of the major arcana which is the Chariot and the 2nd card of the major arcana which is The High Priestess. Lay them down. Add 2 plus 7 and pull the ninth card of the major arcana which is The Hermit.

As the Moon waxes it will be governed by The Chariot, a card of drive and ambition, plowing on to reach its goals. Many decks display The Chariot being raced forward by a warrior. The early Visconti Decks however are unique in displaying a woman wearing a crown operating the chariot at a slower pace. This is to remind us that many times the fastest chariot crashes and never finishes. It is important to operate the chariot skillfully, knowing when to slow down for curves, and knowing how to avoid rough spots in the terrain. As the Moon waxes, remember the skill required to operate and maneuver the chariot.

As the Moon wanes it will be governed by The High Priestess card. Through the centuries this card has been overloaded with meanings that it did not originally have. Occultists of the 18th and 19th centuries began to attribute many meanings, many of which are thought provoking and worthy of consideration. However, if we return to the early Visconti deck we see the original meaning implied by the culture that produced this particular deck, and that meaning is quiet faith. The image presented in this deck is that of a woman sitting upon a stool of humble origins. She wears a Papal tiara on her head and a gown belonging to the Order of the Humiliati founded in 1134, the tiara and the gown tied with a simple rope shows the contrast between the pomp of religious hierarchy and simple faith of the single soul. Many lay claim that this card is a display of Giovanna who had claim and should have risen to the Papal throne in 854. And while that is just a theory, this card tells us that as the Moon wanes, we need to be willing and brave enough to acknowledge the simple faith that resides in all of us.

The soul of this Moon will be governed by The Hermit, who in the early decks held an hourglass as opposed to a lantern. Reflecting more upon time then illumination. This is a Moon to be skillful, faithful, and very much self reflective. Take the time to examine yourself closely, and don’t let this Moon pass away leaving you a stranger to yourself.

The time of this new moon along the East Coast is very interesting it will happen at 14:32. If you add these numbers together it adds to 10 just as you add this year 2008 together it adds to 10. This tells us this moon will be a very important moon for those living in the East Coast time zone.

The Full Moon this month also is very interesting. It falls on 7/18. Add 7 plus 1 plus 8 and you get 16, The Tower. Along the East Coast the Moon will go full at 2:59. Add 2 plus 5 plus 9 and again you get 16. This will be a powerful Full Moon ruled intensely by The Tower card, which is a warning for sure to be both a skillful operator as well as a faithful child. When troubled this month don’t hesitate to withdraw and slow down for some self reflection, remember The Hermit is the soul of this Moon.

If you examine the time of this new moon 14:32, you will see a pattern. The 1 jumps at us, then we see a very organized 4 3 2 taking us back to the 1. We will see a surprise this month, perhaps even a shock, but when we consider it all carefully like The Hermit, we will be forced to ask ourselves “why did that surprise me”? This time adds to 10. The year 2008 adds to 10. The tenth card of the major arcana is The Wheel, which really isn’t a tool for assistance but rather an awareness that things happen outside of our control.

(For your time zone just find the exact time of the Moon for your particular area and follow the instructions above.)

Here is a neat old Kolduny thing I will share with you. It is a good tool for considering the day.

Take the month and day you were born, and add them together. For example, if you were born on May 27th, add 5 (May) and 2 and 7: 5+2+7=14. That is the Temperance card. This number related to the Tarot, explains your needed tool for every venture you enter into. Now add the current date which is July 3, 7+3=10, which is the Wheel of Fortune card. This tells you what to expect for the day.

Now add the two together by single digits 14, and 10, 1+4+1+0=6. This would be The Lovers card. This would be your daily card; adding the day of your birth, the date of the day, in singular numbers, and reducing the numbers if over 21.

The final card is your daily card. The other two cards combined with your daily card create your daily spread. If you want to know what is happening in aspects of your life, reduce the number to less than 10, and pull the minor arcana cards for that number.

Cups: represents love, interpersonal relationships, and family.

Wands: represents intellect and creativity.

Pentacles: represents earthly considerations, work, money and survival.

Swords: represents lusts, desires and conflicts.

Give it a try. It might surprise you.’
Natalia Vladimirova Tikimirov

(See also: “An Interview with The Koldun: Natalia and Anton Tikimirov”, parts one, two and three)

The Black Hole in The Cost of Healthcare: Big Pharma and Transparency

It’s no secret that Big Pharma has been providing doctors with special perks in return for prescribing their products. This has been going on for ages. But to get a better grip on why the costs of healthcare have been increasing dramatically we need to understand about the massive networks that Big Pharma is involved in. Believe it or not, Big Pharma is connected to everything. The AMA, the FDA, the financial markets/big business, the insurance industry, law and politics; these are all affected by Big Pharma.

Recently it was reported that there are more Americans addicted to prescription drugs than illegal drugs. An article in The New York Times stated that ‘An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.’ That’s a pretty hefty number. I know quite a few people who became addicted to prescription drugs. Some said tranquilizers and painkillers were harder to quit than illegal drugs. Prescription pain killers have become the ‘new heroin’, and are increasingly becoming a major problem in the school system.

Not only are the doctors getting ‘perks’ from the drug companies, but the professors and the research facilities of major universities have been the recipient of ‘special benefits’ as well. Recently ‘three influential psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School seem to have been caught with their hands in the drug-laced cookie jar, and now they’re in big trouble. Two days after it was alleged that the three doctors failed to report a collective $4.2 million in payments from pharmaceutical companies, Harvard and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have launched an investigation into the doctors’ behavior.’ Big Pharma = Big Money.

Let me just state for the record that I think research and development in pharmaceuticals is an important factor in saving lives. Not all prescription drugs are addictive or deadly. Many are necessary to keep people alive. But let me also state that many side effects from certain drugs are not discovered until many years later. This can be a ‘Catch-22’. Also more money is spent on advertising than on R&D. In an article by Science Daily it was reported that ‘the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion.’ Instead of prolonging or enhancing life, getting the word out about their products is of priority.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is proposing legislation for reporting any payments over $500 paid by pharmaceutical companies to doctors or academic research to be on public record. ‘If they are being paid, it ought to be reported,’ said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley is also looking at the money drug companies pay doctors for academic research. He is investigating some 20 top medical schools – including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Cincinnati, for under-reporting the income top researchers are getting from the drug industry. Grassley wants to learn if the money is influencing research.”

I think transparency on this is issue is way overdue. When the absurd ‘war on illegal drugs’ becomes part of a cover for the pharmaceutical companies’ desire to line their pockets, then something needs to be done.

(References: Discover Magazine-“Psychiatrists Who Hid Big Pharma Money Now Face Inquiry”, New York Times-“Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal”, Science Daily-“Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising Than Research and Development, Study Finds”, Weeks MD “Are Perks Compromising MD Ethics?”, The Providence Journal- “CVS Trial: Celona Tells of Becoming Point Man For CVS” , Campus Progress-” A New Kind Of Addiction”, Wired-“Prescription Drugs: Rock’s New Coke and Heroin?” and a h/t to Dr. Peter Rost’s Pharma Law Blog.)

Broken Sex: remembering Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge

Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, born Jacqueline Breyer in 1969, passed away Tuesday 9th October 2007. Lady Jaye and her partner Genesis Breyer P-Orridge spent the past several years living an “art as life project” sometimes called “Breaking Sex.” The couple altered their own appearances to look more and more like each other, forming a third ” pandrogenous” entity they called Breyer P-Orridge.

Lady Jaye met Genesis in 1993 and the couple began to align their appearances. Eventually, Genesis had gone as far as he could in making himself more feminine without surgery. So for their tenth anniversary, on Valentines Day 2003, the couple got matching breast implants together.

Genesis underwent the most visible changes, but Lady Jaye went through surgeries as well. The plan was not to make one look like the other, but for them to look like each other: to meet in the middle. In an interview with John E. Mitchell Lady Jaye said:

“My nose was made to look somewhat more like Djin’s. My chin was made to look more like Djin’s. Djin had cheek implants that resemble mine. There’s only so much that can be done in that way. We made a decision not to try to go after a conventional idea of beauty. We both could have changed our faces to look like some kind of ideal, but we wanted to look like each other, that was the idea. We didn’t want to look pretty according to someone else’s standard or anything like that.”

“Breaking Sex” was simultaneously an assault on the tyranny of gender and DNA and a deep exploration of Lady Jaye and Genesis’s relationship. In an essay titled “Our Practice in Art” Breyer P-Orridge explained the inspiration for hir art:

The work of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin has been highly influential to us, particularly in relation to the practice of the “cut-up”. To liberate the word from linearity, they began to cut-up and, incorporating random chance, re-assembled both their own and co-opted literature “…to see what it really says…” They referred to the phenomena of profound and poetic new collisions and meanings that resulted from their intimate collaborations as the “Third Mind”. This was produced with a willingness to sacrifice their own separate, previously inviolate works and artistic “ownership”. In many ways they saw the third mind as an entity in and of itself. Something “other”, closer to a purity of essence, and the origin and source of a magical or divine creativity that could only result from the unconditional integration of two sources.

Breyer P-Orridge created art installations featuring photographs, collages, sculptures and personal items to share the experience of living in pandrogeny. The installations have appeared in galleries in both the US and Europe.

Genesis P-Orridge has not yet, to my knowledge, publicly discussed the question of whether Breyer P-Orridge died along with Lady Jaye. Lady Jaye told Mitchell “We view Breyer P-Orridge as a separate person who is both of us. Neither of us take credit for the work, the work is a melding of both of our ideas which we would not have had singly,” and “Both of us are in all of our art. That third being, Breyer P-Orridge, is always present.”

The idea that Breyer P-Orridge can exist without Lady Jaye seems counter intuitive. But consider this passage from the first Breaking Sex Manifesto:

The common view of cosmetic surgery is the Pamela Anderson archetype. In fact it is incredible how her particular idealized look has spread to hundreds of thousands of women. Almost as if she has cloned herself. Apart from the group idealization of an image made flesh this also culturally engineers a shift in what is an acceptable or desirable way to look both in terms of physiological technique and perceptual aspiration for people across all social and economic boundaries . The drone may mimic the queen.

Lady Jaye Breyer P. Orridge is dead. But she lives on through Genesis, and through the body of work the two created together. I don’t know if this extreme body transformation will catch on. But I’m certain that the sacrifices she made for art were not in vein. Her dedication has raised the bar for everyone.

More information:

John A. Mitchell’s interview with Jady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.

Mitchell’s article on Breaking Sex.

Breaking Sex section of Genesis P-Orridge’s site.

Sex TV documentary “Breaking Sex” about Breyer P-Orridge (includes excerpt).

(This article original appeared in Key 64)

5 real products of the 90s cyberpunk & transhumanist hype

Life Extension – As covered previously here on Technoccult, aspirin is the best life extension drug on the market. And it’s cheap. See: Top Ten Life Extension Drugs.

Intelligence amplification – Mind machines and smart drugs never did live up to the hype, which is probably why you don’t hear much about them anymore. I actually conducted some trials with volunteers using a brain entrainment machine for my cognitive science class in college. The results: the machine didn’t do jack. I was only ever able to experiment with self-medication with smart drugs, but my general conclusion is that some of them work as stimulants (piracetum, vassopressin) but they’re not worth the money.

The good news is, there are some new high tech intelligence amplification tools on the market: “brain fitness” games like Brain Age and Lumosity. I’m not sure how much good it will do, though. See Seed Magazine’s coverage.

Virtual Reality – We’re still waiting on decent immersive VR, but the Nintendo Wii has brought some elements of VR to homes.

Brain Backups – There’s no wetware brain backup, but if you want to preserve your knowledge for all of eternity, you can try posting the contents of your brain on the web. Google and the Internet Archive (backed by Amazon) are both attempting to archive and back-up the entire web.

Space Migration – Like brain backups, this remains vaporware. But space tourism and private space programs are taking off, including one by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos.

The US as Police State, part 1

This week marks the beginning of the “terrorism preparedness” drills Top Officials 4 and Vigilant Shield 08:

VS-08 will be conducted concurrent with Top Officials 4 (TOPOFF 4), the nation’s premier exercise of terrorism preparedness sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and several other linked exercises as part of the National Level Exercise 1-08. These linked exercises will take place October 15-20 and are being conducted throughout the United States and in conjunction with several partner nations including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Territory of Guam

As usual, the truthers are shitting their pants in anticipation of a false flag terror attack and/or a preparation for the declaration of martial law. Nevermind that these threats failed to materialize during Operation Noble Resolve last August. (Aside: does anyone have a list of times that Alex Jones has “cried wolf” about terrorist attacks and/or declarations of martial law?)

Critics on the war on terror often remark on how our reaction to 9/11 is exactly what the terrorists wanted. We now cower in fear of terror attacks, give up freedoms, and question each other loyalty. I can’t help but wonder if the reactions to these drills aren’t exactly what the police state wants: a constant state of fear and loathing. Besides, “they” don’t have to declare martial law. We’ve been living under martial law since at least the 80s, when Reagan escalated the war on drugs to its current paramilitary status. But even before the effective beginning of martial law in the 80s, the US has had a long history of government repression. The real question is not whether the United States is becoming police state, but to ask if it has ever been a democracy.

When the Constitution was adopted in 1787, it was still legal for a person to own another person, only property owners were allowed to vote, and women weren’t allowed to vote at all. Only about 10-16% of the population had the right to vote.

It wasn’t until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment was passed in 1865 that slavery was constitutionally banned. It was another 5 years before the fifteenth amendment, guaranteeing blacks the right to vote, was ratified. Until the 19th amendment, ratified in 1920, women didn’t have a constitutional right to vote.

However, even these constitutional protections didn’t ensure a right to vote for every US citizen – it took another amendment, the 24th, to ban poll taxes. The 24th amendment wasn’t ratified until 1964. Also in 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, finally ending any legal basis for racial or sexual discrimination. In other words, for the first 177 years of US history there existed state based repression of significant segments of society (and that’s aside from the Lebensraum policy of US expansion that all but eradicated the native population).

Even those who were allowed to vote couldn’t rely on their vote being counted. Vote fraud didn’t start with Diebold machines and the 2000 election – the case against Kennedy is one of the most famous.

Meanwhile, throughout the Vietnam War, men who couldn’t get deferments were enslaved by the government to fight and die on foreign soil, until the draft expired in 1973 (thanks to a one man filibuster by Mike Gravel).

Which brings us up to the War on Drugs, declared by Richard Nixon on June 17, 1971. Before we even had all our troops out of Vietnam, Nixon was already declaring war on a segment of US citizens: drug users. Though, as stated on Wikipedia the “war on drugs” could be considered to go back to the prohibition of opium in 1880, it was Nixon that began using the martial term “war.” So just as the US was finally being freed of slavery and granting a universal right to vote (except of course in the cases of prison labor, and I won’t even go into voter suppression issues), we entered a new era of government repression.

But if there was ever any “free” period in US history, perhaps it was the 1970s. Although the war on drugs was officially declared, the country seemed to be awash in drugs at the time. The war was ending, segregation was ending, AIDS hadn’t hit epidemic levels and homosexuality was being more accepted. In 1993 R.U. Sirius wrote:

The seventies actually were cool. Much cooler than the ballyhooed sixties. There was more sex in the seventies, more tolerance, the right wing was completely in retreat, Richard Nixon was still a pig, and cocaine wasn’t bad for your health yet! In the mid-seventies it was possible to believe that the whole country was moderately hip–and if that wasn’t enough, Punk was coming along to kick moderately hip’s laidback butt.

I’m sure there was more of a dark side, but if there’s a case for nostalgia for a period of US history, I guess this was it. But if the people of the United States were at last free from government repression in the 70s, the state made up for it in the 80s.

End Part One.

Read part 2.

Design of Everyday Things notes

Notes on the Design of Everyday Things

Principles of design for understandibility and usability

  • Provide a good conceptual model
  • Make things visible
  • The Principle of Mapping
  • The Principle of Feedback

The three requirements for a system to be explorable:

  1. In each state of the system, the user must readily see and be able to do the allowable actions.
  2. The results of the action must be both visible and easy to interpret.
  3. Actions should be without cost

Seven principles for transforming difficult tasks into simple ones:

  1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head
  2. Simplify the structure of tasks
  3. Make things visible: bridge the gulf of Execution and Evaluation.
  4. Get the mappings right
  5. Exploit the power of contraints both natural and artificial
  6. Design for error
  7. When all else fails, standardize

Re: mapping. Make sure the user can determine the relationships:

  • between intentions and possible actions
  • between actions and the effects on the system
  • between actual system state and what is perceivable by sight, sound, or feel
  • between the perceived system state and the needs, intentions, and expectations of the user

Whenever the number of functions and required operations exceeds the number of controls, the design becomes arbitrary, unnatural and complicated.

People usually blame themselves for errors

When there is a problem, people are apt to focus on it to exclusion of other factors, thus performing dangerous actions like sticking a knife in the toaster to get a stuck piece of bread.

magical assault on corporations (Version 2.35)

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.

Despite their non-corporeality, corporations are able to display a wide range of behaviors in a conceptual framework of legal reality. Disconnected from the material plane, except in the way their influence is manifested, these entities grow, absorb each other, competing, altering their identities, renaming themselves, creating and losing capital, sway political parties, own and oversee property, pay taxes, sue, and be sued. Yet because of the nature of their existence, they cannot be imprisoned, physically coerced, or killed. Immortal legally, corporations as they are currently, are something of an egregore brought into being through the collective vision of the founders, an egregore that manifests through the collective will of the governing body and given qi, given energy through the financial investment of its stockholders. The political activist, when confronted with such an insular system, is forced to either buy enough stock in a corporation to create a voice in its decisions, something most individuals are not equipped financially to do, or to petition the courts and their congressional members to modify the laws regarding that corporation’s actions. The magical activist, however, has an entirely different perpective from which to work. And for a magical activist, those very attributes that make physical protest ineffectual to corporate growth are routes through which sympathetic associations can be formed.

In today’s world, a corporation hides behind its logos, holdings, and subsidiaries. The franchising, outsourcing, and reselling of products further removes the consumer from the corporation, all of these abstractions that proceed from the corporate egregore’s will through media. Thus constructing magical links through a corporate logo becomes highly ineffective if the intent of the ritual is to harm the corporation. The logos are the corporation’s magical tools, each additional logo brought into existence thus feeds the corporation’s overall energy base. What is needed is a magical link not generated from the egregore, but through which the egregore had been created.. it’s true name, a sigil constructed from cut-ups of its articles of incorporation, or an astrological chart based on its moment on incorporation. Fortunately for the magical activist, all of these bits of information are freely available to anyone with a web browser, (the internet being the grand grimoire of our generation.)

Determining that an egregore is both the holy guardian angel/superego and the shadow/id, of a groupmind, I started out on this project with a vague idea that corporations could be manipulated through a demonological perspective, a kind of pseudo-goetia for the stock market. A serious re-evaluation of the ritual presented in that and other grimoires is certainly in order, but the premise is the same. Working with corporate egregores with the intent to subvert and/or otherwise disperse that manifestation is toxic magic, and certain steps are important in such work to protect the worker. Egregores such as these that are purely profit-driven are a kind of energy vampire, existing through the energy put forth both by those that work within the corporation, its investors, and its consumer base. If called into a hostile environment into a spiritual presence, it would not hesitate to drain an attuned magician of all available energy as well, for that is in its nature.

This raises the issue of attunement. Upon approaching this issue, I was confronted by the same problem as using the corporate logo. Both invocation and evocation involve the magician psychicly attuning to the entity to provide a conduit for manifestation, effectively feeding the entity gnosis. While this is important in the psychiatric deconstructionist view of demonic entities being gradiations of shadowy unconscious energies one is calling up and mastering by way of the superego, it does little good when the intention is lessening the influence of an entity.

What is needed then is a convocation, a calling of the entities in question to conference. Convocation allows a magician to interact with spiritual entities without manifesting that entity. But before the calling out can occur, the ritual space for the entity to be confined must be created. It is here that the ‘narrowing of focus’ trully begins. The more baroque temple would probably sport ritual space for the magician and a space for the egregore delineated with chalk or paint, sand or ink. The more ornate, the more baroque, the more prcise, the stronger the psychic focus becomes. As this focus intensifies, the circle itself begins to produce a void, an energy vortex unspecific in its attraction.

A short overview of grimoires and mandalic art reveals some standard forms magical circles can take. There should be at least one circle for the egregore’s sigil to be placed at the point of convocation, and it is this circle which should be done last, should a second circle for the magician also be desired. This circle in summoning a demonic form would traditionally be ringed by three lines of holy and divine names, boundaries between the sigilic space in the center and the exterior or physical world. This is fine fore working within a religious paradigm, but corporations do not necessarily fear the same deities that a traditional demon would fear. Rather, I would suggest ringing such a circle with the names of the markets, NASDAQ, AMEX, or NYSE.. in the US, the SEC is the closest to a governing entity a corporate entity could fear, and an evocation of the SEC in such a ritual might also prove effacious. Franz Bardon’s magical writings suggest alternate routes through which to prepare the magic circle.

How, then, does one design a sigil by which to conjure? Sigils are a matter of taste and preference. Talismantic imagery can be mapped out on enochian tables using the stock symbol abreviations, transliterations of the corporation’s name into Hebrew, or bindrunes of some sort, or through an astrologically derived geometric nest of lines.. “Pseudo-goetic sigils by Phil Legard” was what I consulted in creating sigils for Halliburton(HAL), ConocoPhilips(COP.N), Boeing Aerospace(BA), and General Electric(GE). Upon completion of the boundry and the edges of the magic circle, the inner portion is then designed, culminating in the sigil’s presentation. The introduction of the sigil occurs not at the begining of the ritual, but at its midpoint. Finally, the circle and the sigil is ritually deconstructed, representing a release of the energy the entity has until now kept contained within itself. From this point on, energy must be allowed to slowly drain and defuse from the circle, a process that introduces entropy into the egregore. This ritual ends when there is no trace of the circle or the sigil, and the worker or workers have removed all trace of the corporate egregore’s energy from the ritual environment.

In simpler terms, what is being performed is the charging and creation of energy traps for these egregore forms – energy is fed primarily into the circle in which the sigil is placed. Remember, the sole intent of these rituals is to degrade and undervalue the stock price. Keeping this foremost in mind insures success in the operations. What I’ve discovered in working with devaluation is that the operation should be returned to multiple times – there’s a great deal of inertia. I performed two operations with the HAL sigil, one around Dec 25th or 26th, the second on March 9th, and in both cases the stock did seem to adjust itself after an initial drop. However, there was a drop. And, even more important, the more people work within this paradigm, the more effective these magical assaults will eventually become…

(K) 2004 ‘All Rites Reversed’
if you read this, you must make a copy of it and give it to someone else to read.

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