James Curcio
I was raped by a family of polar bears as a child and now have a deep seated terror of peanut butter. Psychological transference is weird. Author, artist, freak. http://www.jamescurcio.com
Storytelling As A National Security Issue?
David Metcalfe writes on Modern Mythology:
“If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine.”
—William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Despite the fact that it’s readily apparent Mr. Casebeer has never tried cocaine, DARPA’s current interest in narratives is an interesting development at an agency known for unique scientific inquiries. On April 25 and 26th DARPA held a conference called Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The purpose of this conference was to follow up a Feburary 26th event which sought to outline a quantitative methodology for measuring the effect of storytelling on human action.
We owe much of the early development of the internet to DARPA, along with remote viewing, remote controlled moths, invisibility cloaks and other wonders of the contemporary age. Now they’ve…
The 404 Attacks – Meme or Scheme?
Photo: Mr.Bigg23 (CC)
[UPDATE: the Wikipedia page has been deleted.]
A Wikipedia article that’s been the subject of some internal argument there (based on the fact that much associated with this meme is by its nature unverifiable) was brought to my attention by one of the readers of my books. I can’t say I’m entirely enthusiastic about the possible uses that this thing might be put to in the hands of a group like Anon — though it seems to already be “their” M.O. anyway, and the dis-organization is structured along the same lines as the fictitious (?) “Mother Hive Brain” in a way that’s always amused me more than a little. In a world teetering on the brink, and in the midst of issues such as “NymWars,” this topic at the least seems finally ripe for discussion as well as action. From Wikipedia:
In practice, the 404 Attacks are a technique for disseminating…
“One True TOPI Tribe” Compilation
The One True TOPI Tribe, thee OTTT, or simply TOPI (said like Hopi, see TOPI mission statement one), as you already know is a coum-Unity, a decentralized proccess network, founded by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.(Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Dust La Rock for Frank151 from Frank151 on Vimeo.)
You will at once notice at least two unfamiliar terms, TOPI and COUM. Let us start with COUM or coum and see if we can then speak a little more about this One True TOPI Tribe. It’s hard not to notice, how coum is spelled (but how does it sound?), COUM (the capitalization is just to draw your attention to) or coum can be pronounced ‘cum’ or ‘com’. Yet we do not stop at that level. The term also resonates with the word ‘come’ as well as ‘cum’ (like in your face).
This portmanteau word, this phoneme/morpheme, coum invokes other terms that it may combine with, such as communication and all other (dot) com- related terms, even…
Elite Reptilian Overlords Like Eating Our Brains Cold
Title taken from the lyrics to Thee Aeon Falls (which makes a nice soundtrack for the following …)
The idea of reptilian aliens that rule the planet is of course on its face patently absurd, yet it is a myth that has driven a wide range of fictional media (V, Sitchen’s various novels, etc), as well as a surprising number of people who believe it quite literally, especially those that buy Icke’s implicitly anti-semitic model of reptilian aliens.
As I said in the Immanence of Myth:
Zecharia Sitchin has written several books about the “true” origin of Sumerian mythology: aliens. This, or the mythology of planet Niburu, is a wonderful modernization of ancient mythic elements, but considered as empirical fact, one may as well buy into the hollow Earth theory. The author David Icke takes it a step further: aliens, or reptilians, exist in the world today and control the world economy. Though there…
An Epitaph for the American Dream
Photo: Reckon (CC)
Via Modern Mythology:
(Update: Since writing this entry, I recently discovered a Mother Jones article informing me that the Republican/Tea Party Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, founded a company called SOLANTIC that specializes in drug testing, among other “public services” … Could it be that this legislation stands to benefit the people who are passing it financially? Hrmm … Jigsaw falling into place.)
Recently, as many of you may have heard, Florida senators successfully passed a bill requiring welfare recipients to receive mandatory drug screenings. It is doubtful the legislation will stop there. In what seems to me to be an instance of VERY OBVIOUSLY blatant racial discrimination and discrimination of the haves towards the have-nots, they are now finding another way to invade all of our lives and rob us of more of our privacy. One gradual erosion of civil liberties at a time. The cruel and hilarious irony of the situation…
Wrangling The Giant Vampire Squid
Matt Taibbi has been waiting to watch Goldman Sachs executives go to jail for a while–at least since 2009 when he called Goldman the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Released today, the latest installment of Taibbi’s manifesto against all things Goldman sets up a pretty simple proposition based on the recently released 650-page report from Senator Carl Levin’s Subcommittee on Investigations, detailing the collapse of the American financial system. Taibbi wastes no time with whodunnit paragraphs, instead setting the smoking gun on the doorstep of the Department of Justice. Like a rewriting of the Senate investigator’s above quote, Taibbi declares, “Everything’s fucked up, and it’s time for Goldman Sachs to go to jail. You don’t even have to investigate because the Senate did it for you. Just issue those subpoenas.” (The Atlantic Wire)
Apparently the vampire squid also has an appetite…
Mythology of Business Part 1: The Veil of Ignorance
This is part 1 of an excerpted series for Reality Sandwich from the anthology The Immanence of Myth published by Weaponized.
Myth’s central importance does not end with our art or religions. It is not solely a dusty world of broken clay pots and tablets written in dead languages. Our myths determine how we engage with the world, how we enter into it. How we treat ourselves and one another. Far from being archaic relics of the past, myths will determine our future. Even if we are unaware of them, they will continue to affect us.
The advertising used to disseminate films, books and music shows the profound value that mythology has within modern markets. You just need to know what you’re looking for. However, it does not end with the entertainment industry. A brand, any brand in an increasingly interactive media environment, is myth.
This role is made all the more pervasive thanks to the…
Who Rules America? Breaking Down the Top 1%
Here’s an excerpt from an article by G. William Domhoff on Global Research. This may not exactly be news to some of us, but it certainly re-affirms a lot:
…the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.
The Myth of Work Vs. The Reality of Abuse
Via Modern Mythology:
In the wake of yet another collosal political and social disappointment, I’d like to touch on an issue which, frankly, could be the topic of a book. And it’s a book that, if it hasn’t been written already, should be written. It needs to be written, and more importantly, it needs to be talked about.
Every culture has myths about work. What is acceptable for an employee or employer, what the nature of that relationship should be. It is in the benefit of the employer to have myths throughout the workforce that tie their very identity and sense of self worth into how well they meet that employers demands, and if there aren’t forces in place, either enforced through government oversight or the unionization of the workers in some configuration, these myths can run rampant. There is, after all, a word in Japanese for working one’s self to death. (They also apparently have a word for eating one’s self to ruin. But that’s another story.)
(Matt Damon speaks out on the importance of teachers):
This process is not inherently good or bad. As I said in the chapter on initiation in The Immanence of Myth, the prescriptive nature of indoctrination may sound ominous, but many of us know what humans become when left to be feral creatures. They can hardly be called human, at all.
However, this process can still break down in any number of ways…
Goodbye Space Shuttle
Via Modern Mythology:
Many of you know by now that the US space program, though not ended in its entirety, has been demonstrably downgraded, and now faces an uncertain privatized future.
This isn’t new, the dismantling of the shuttle program is just the external proof of something that has long been in the works: the continued ideology of privatization at work.
I was saddened by this news, but not so much because of the mothballing of a program that is admittedly mired in many ways in an abandoned past.
No. It further shows that our government either doesn’t understand the nature of the scientific endeavor, or more likely, simply doesn’t care. Short term profit has completely overtaken American mythology in the past few decades, and it is leading us into a death spiral from which there may be no escape until we reach the other side of the vortex.
I’ll admit my bias in this upfront:…
Elves of the Apocalypse: “Machine Elves” and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research
Beware the “clockwork [sic] elves” who control the global elite promising them “eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys…” Via Modern Mythology:
Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine … Er … Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam’s Razor, which advocates that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” in short, that the “simplest answer is most likely the correct one.” It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think “if they look like elves, they are elves” at least makes sense!
THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!
To be fair, Alex didn’t make…
The Weather Underground and Ronald Stark
From Modern Mythology:
Named after that line from a Dylan tune, (”You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) the Weather Underground were a “radical left” organization that seemed to use white guilt to crystallize the need for revolution. Not so much on the methodology, but culturally, the forces that created the WUO couldn’t have been far from our minds when dreaming up the fictional side to the Mother Hive Brain.
Here is a rather good documentary on the Weather Men which is available free online. Watch the whole documentary on YouTube, it’s also available on Netflix On-Demand.
Skilluminati Research has an excellent write up on a figure that had connection with this organization, using more methods sanctioned by the need to counter fascist order with blind chaos, Ronald Stark :
“He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both…
The Werewolf Kung Fu Master
From Human Marvels:
Sometimes a story comes along that contains so many fanciful elements one must assume that it is the work of fiction. Such is the story of Su Kong Tai Djin.
Tai Djin was born in China in 1849. He was born unique, afflicted with hypertrichosis. Unlike Jo-Jo, who would be born a few decades later, Tai Djin was born into a highly superstitious family. As A result they saw his affliction as the work of demons and he was left in the forest to die.
A Shaolin monk traveling through the forest discovered the child and took him back to the Fukien Shaolin Temple. There Tai Djin was raised by the monks.
He was trained in martial arts and it quickly became apparent that he was exceptional in both appearance and ability.
Perhaps the most amazing part of that much the story is true. Su Kong Tai Djin was a real man, he…
The End Of The World: It’s In The Numbers (Video)
Via Modern Mythology:
Or maybe some of us only wish it was…
Osama Bin Laden: Myths of Villainy and Deceit
Commentary on the subject of the week, on Modern Mythology:
This is how it works with terrorism, by definition. Our own psychology works against us. Fear, a popular tool of the Bush administration, was used to do a real disservice to their own “war on terror” by painting the picture of this guy hanging out in his underground bunker with Destro, Cobra Commander, and The Joker. (That is should they ever hope to win a “war on terror” — I assume they actually intend to “win” as much as the “war on drugs” could ever be won, as we meanwhile prop up the regimes that supply the materials).
Recent reports say Osama didn’t have a gun. But that’s almost beside the point, since the deed is done and it’s not likely we’re going to be seeing criminal investigations in the assassination of a figure like Osama Bin Laden. In the end he…
West Virginia Man High On Bath Salts Kills Neighbor’s Goat
Some of you may recall our previous report on “Taking A Bath” with the bath salts “craze.” Well, they’re at it again. There’s really nothing to add to this story, it kind of sells itself. From the Charlston Gazette:
CHARLESTON, W.Va.— Police say an Alum Creek man high on bath salts killed his neighbor’s pygmy goat and that neighbors found him in his bedroom, dressed in a bra and panties, next to the dead animal, said Lt. Bryan Stover of the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department.
Mark Thompson, 19, of Greenview Road, is charged with animal cruelty after police got a call from a woman who said he stole her goat at about 3:15 a.m. Monday, Stover said.
Thompson allegedly told police he was on bath salts for about three days.
When police entered the house they found fresh blood near the front door of the bedroom and in Thompson’s bedroom to the right of the front…
An Outsider’s Firsthand Look At The Aghori And Tantra Traditions
James Curcio
Special guest host James Curcio talks to William Clark about the time he spent in India, covering everything from tabla, the aghori sects of tantra, hinduisim and all points in between.
Over the course of the Immanence of Myth project, James Curcio has had many conversations with mythic artists, intellectuals and professors, and outright mutants who in Hunter’s words are “too weird to live and too rare to die.” Most of these are being written or transcribed in part for the book.
The Gspot: William Clark and Tantra (Or listen to the podcast on Alterati.com)
In the time since, we produced a “Gonzomentary” satyr-play about the modern artist called Clark. This podcast provides a very different look at the character behind the character.
Joscelyn Godwin’s ‘Atlantis and the Cycles of Time’
David Metcalfe provides a thorough look at Joscelyn Godwin’s Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations:
Existing in the liminal spaces of the cultural narrative Atlantis has been a magnet for alternative theories of history and a tool for those looking for a vision of unity in the evolutionary development of human culture. With the solidification of allegory during the Enlightenment Atlantis provided the perfect mythic capstone for rationalists in a quest for historical accuracy in their explorations of the possibilities of a perennial culture.
From the 17th century inquiries of Athanasius Kircher to the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, the empirical search for Atlantis has provided an impetus for archaeological speculation on the unification of cultures across the globe. Where present facts show disunity, the idea of an advanced and far reaching civilization in prehistory gave momentum for theorists to develop complex models of…
Is Myth Dead?
An excerpt from the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology:
It may seem that the word “myth” has lost its meaning to us as a psychological or spiritual term. No, the situation is more drastic than that. Myth has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.” The popular television show on the Discovery Channel, Myth Busters, uses this definition, attempting to disprove “myths” with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they have shaped our cultural history. It is neatly overlooked that myths remain at the center of the bloody stage of modern religious, national, economic or ideological dynamics, not to mention our personal and everyday lives.
The fact that the word “myth” has become synonymous with untruth belies an underlying shift in the Western epistemological focus over…
Are Secret Microwave Mind-Control Tests Making Television Personalities’ Brains Melt Down?
Is Judge Judy a victim? Tom Leonard writes in the Daily Mail:
A bizarre spate of television presenters dissolving into on-air gibberish has sparked claims that the U.S. military could be to blame.
In four high-profile cases, the latest involving fast-talking Judge Judy, the presenters have started off speaking properly but have then descended into undecipherable nonsense — looking confused and unstable.
The frequency of the ‘attacks’ — and the fact that recorded examples of the mental meltdowns have been popular on websites – has led to conspiracy theorists pointing the finger at shadowy government experiments.
Here’s another potential victim:
