Art by Isoban

Via Technoccult:

Mac Tonnies was a ufologist, the author of After the Martian Apocalypse and The Cryptoterrestrials, and the blogger behind Posthuman Blues. He died on October 19th, 2009 due to heart complications.

The Cryptoterrestrials was released posthumously on March 15th, 2010. Fortunately, Mac gave numerous interviews on the subject of his book prior to his death, including this one with the Ballardian and an interview on Coast to Coast AM.

Since his death, a dedicated community of friends and readers has been working to preserve his legacy. Blazingbetta (aka Sarah Multiverse) has started a Mac Tonnies tribute site, and Capn Marrrk has been hard at work archiving Posthuman Blues. I talked to both of them via instant message.

Occult author Bill Whitcomb introduces some of the most deranged comics of the golden age:

Dr. Mortal — The monster building mad scientist

711 — Inmate by day, superhero by night

Madame Fatal — The first cross-dressing superhero.

Read more at Technoccult

I know you use binaural beats and other methods to enhance your music by making it consciousness altering. Can you describe some of the methods you use?

Well, much of my music is a sort of “hypersigil” imbued with specific frequencies designed to induce altered states. When combined with psychedelics, it can be intense. I have done much research on cymatics/sound healing/binaurual tones.

I started making acid house as the first electonic music i did, and binaurals were first introduced to that music. I am heavily influenced by Coil, who also did much work w/ frequencies to transmit information/altered states-specific qualities. Psychic TV is an early influence as well, which was less about traditional sound-mind altering, but more about raw feeling/energy.

And as a raver since the early 90’s UK hardcore/jungle/garage, “techno” and old-school “trance” play huge roles in the type of vibe i try to get across. Pure butt-shaking, mind-quaking funk. Also heavily effected by hip-hop and breakbeat/sample culture, that kind of cut-n-paste mentality carried over.

But what, more specifically, do you do to make your music mind altering? Or is that a secret?

Semi-secret. Much of it is energetically imbued, but as far as technical wizardry goes: binaural tone generation and specific frequencies mixed in at nearly sub-liminal levels.

I’m afraid that’s *about* all i can say to that. I do a lot of my music when in trance states, so honestly SOME of my method is not even known to me.

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In some respects, this way of thinking is a natural part of simply paying attention to things. In other ways, it’s a challenging and sometimes overwhelming course of study that can easily move from Aha! moments to a very dis-empowering sense of total non-determinism. In the face of such huge complexity it can seem impossible to make any actionable sense of things. Finding the balance and determining the appropriate scope of research in analyzing a domain is a critical skill that must be developed individually through practice, lest you tug on that thread and find you’ve unraveled the entire sweater.

Tom Henderson, a/k/a Mathpunk

Tom Henderson explains his philosophy of punk rock mathematics. Via Technoccult:

1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.

2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.

Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.

Nick Pell

Frequent Disinfo contributor Nick P is on the Gspot in conversation with Joseph Matheny. Via Alterati:

Nick Pell has been a professional writer for more than half his life. He has written about culture, arts, spirituality, and politics for “Maximumrocknroll,” “Just Out,” “The Hit List,” and “Key 64.” He has also been an editor for Immanion Press and London PA.

MP3 Audio Interview

I’ve been thinking recently about Grant Morrison’s “hypersigil” concept, but considering as not an occult/magical practice, but as as a cybernetic phenomena. [...]

The way I see it, the online persona, fictional self, or avatar one creates can create feedback loops to reinforce behaviors and perceptions and have a create significant “real world” changes in a person’s life over time.

In the case of Grant Morrison, he was also shaping his persona in the letters column of The Invisibles, in interviews he gave, and his public persona at comic conventions.

Read More: Technoccult

What are some of your most interesting recent findings?

Some of my favorite things have been mistakes. For instance, when a middle aged woman thinks that she’s sending a private message to someone she’s been seeing, and in reality she posted on her wall for everyone to see.

Yahoo Answers are amazing. It’s where a lot of very young kids ask each other ridiculous questions — and young kids answer back.

Also, looking at people’s signatures. Not their handwritten ones, but their digital ones. How they compose sentences and where they use capitalization. How they respond to things, etc. It really tells a lot about who they are.

The other thing I like to discover is digital artifacts. There are some digital archeologists and historians who try to keep data alive and in circulation. When one considers it, and Stewart Brand has mentioned this quite a bit … data is very fragile.

When one considers the pyramids and symbols carved into stone, that data is still around today. It’s been thousands of years and we still have it vs. Twitter, where data is regularly dumped and not saved.

One of the problems is that machines don’t get heavier when we put data into them. Which seems strange, because information has weight in real life.

Read More:  Technoccult

How exactly does forecasting work? What’s the process like?

To begin with, I’d like to just underline that forecasting and prediction are very different. As futurists, we’re not making predictions but, rather, making approximations based on existing trends. I like to think of it as collapsing probability space into the most likely futures.

So having said that, there are many forecasting methodologies but most of them begin with scanning. This is a process of tracking information flows to get signals around your domain. Signals are essentially any event within the domain that you’re researching. So you pay attention to as many data streams as possible to get a feel for the emerging trends, where the money is flowing, social politics, etc… And from this you can start to derive estimates of where things are heading.

Typically this activity is followed by many different methods of analysis. You might talk to experts in the field, you might use different types of axial analysis, eg ubiquitous vs. niche, social vs. individual. Then you consider how the trends you’re looking at would manifest through different aspects of the world. STEEP & DEGEST are common methodologies – these are just acronyms, eg STEEP: Social, technological, economic, environmental, political. Then typically we’ll all work together to share our forecasts and brainstorm around the core narratives. Now, again, forecasting is about exploring probability space and collapsing down what is possible into what is likely. So a Forecast may be “Climate change will impact water and food”. The scenarios for this forecast then look at different tracks. So a positive scenario would look at trends in technology for growing stronger food, recapturing water, and desalination, suggesting how we might overcome the problem with enough concerted effort. Conversely, a collapse scenario would consider the outcome of rapid and severe climate change, more fighting than cooperation, major migration, and the challenges of adaptation once mitigation is no longer possible. We might do 4 or 5 of these different scenarios to model different outcomes based on the prevailing trends.

In this manner, you provide both a narrative of what the future may hold, good & ill, as well as possible paths towards engineering the positive future and avoiding the negative.

Klint Finley: Could you give us a brief overview of what “neurodiversity” means, or at least what it means to you?

Kassiane: Neurodiversity, the word, simply means the whole variety of different brain wirings people have…from the different kinds of normal to the different kinds of not so normal. Then there’s Neurodiversity, the movement which is the shocking idea that people with non standard wiring are human and deserve to be treated as such without being “fixed” first. [...]

Is there a point at which a line is drawn between “neurodiverse” and disabled?

The 2 aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be different and disabled, but being disabled doesn’t keep you from being a human worthy of respect.

Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis, who records under the name Red State Soundsystem, has just self-released his debut album Ghosts a Burning City. Ellis — whose music sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails — recorded, mixed, and mastered the album himself. I caught up with him via instant messenger to talk about his music and DIY music production. [...]

The most important things, I think, are these: a good audio interface with minimal noise and high-bitrate capabilities, and the best microphone preamp you can afford. With those things, you can afford to be a little lax on other stuff.

Also, the most important investment is time. Learn everything you can. Listen to your favorite albums, figure out what you like about the sound, try to figure out how they did it. Read reviews of gear. Read magazines like Sound on Sound and Future Music. It took me a lot longer to learn how to record than it actually did to record the album.

Read More: Technoccult

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Four former Blackwater executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then the company’s president, had approved the bribes, and the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where Blackwater maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.

More on the The New York Times

Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.

The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. [...]

The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the minimal power restrictions placed upon satellites, DTNs approach seems prudent.

However most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication (well, our columnist Warren Ellis has that death ray of his), but Cerf sees his robust protocol having more down-to-Earth applications. Mobile networks, for example, must regularly cope with long periods of delay or loss – a train tunnel rudely interrupting a YouTube stream, for example. Perhaps looking to gain an edge on its competitors, Google has already integrated DTN into Android’s networking stack.

(via Wade)

I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.

Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Disinfo’s Joe points out at Mutate that the Griffiths has a connection to the political cult The Family:

This shouldn’t be surprising for anyone who has read Jeff Sharlet’s book _The Family_. This rhetoric is straight out of their play book. This guy is likely a member (he *spoke at* the funeral of Wallace Haines, The Family’s ‘man in Europe’, in 2007). http://www.wallacehaines.com/inmemoryof.htm

To their credit, the “Oath Keepers” acknowledge the Patriot Act’s erosion of civil liberties as well. But where were they during the 8 years that Bush was president? Obama gets 400% more death threats than Bush but still lets people carry assault rifles around him, and the Oathers think that they’re being persecuted? Bush had people hauled away for wearing the wrong t-shirts.

I have little good to say about Obama, but I can’t say that his administration is less tolerant of dissent than Bush’s.

From the Oather’s Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey: “We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.”

I take this to mean they will start refusing to do warrantless searches for drugs? For 28 years the federal government has waged war on its people (a disproportionate number of them black), using militarized civilian law enforcement agents, and it’s only now that a not-right-wing-enough black president has been elected that they are worried?

Other consumers may have no choice – Citibank has been closing some credit card accounts without reason or warning, damaging their customers credit ratings.

I cut-up my credit cards last night.

If you want to support us, it’s not too late to donate or buy a t-shirt. Or, show up and spend money with our sponsors!

And don’t forget, after EsoZone on Saturday the one and Ivan Stang will perform along with a variety of other SubGenius at the Cyclone of Slack.

Can’t make it to Esozone? Astral Project!

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.

As a follow-up to my recent post Is It Too Late to Stop Fascism in the US?, I worked from the definition of fascism proposed by Robert Paxton.

There are several other definitions of fascism, many of which are listed on the Wikipedia entry Definitions of Fascism. I’ve decided to go through the definitions that include specific lists of criteria and see which of them the United States fits.

I’ve made the case before that when Ronald Reagan signed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act, he was quietly declaring martial law and creating a police state (and that the US has never really lived up to its liberal democratic ideals). I’m sure those with more knowledge of the right-wing populist movement of the 70s that culminated in Reagan’s election and with the Reagan administration itself could make the case that fascism, under many standard definitions, actually started then. I have more knowledge of the conteporary politics, so I’m focused mostly on the actions of the Bush administration, and to a lesser extent, the Obama administration.

I should also note that by the definition many of the pro-capitalist right wing definitions of fascism, which essentially equate fascism with the left, the entire world is fascist and the US was has been fascist at least since the New Deal. Still, I focus here on elements from contemporary America. For the most part, I’m considering business interests (especially Wall Street), right wing media (especially Fox News and talk radio pundits), the “Tea Party” Movement, the Republican Party, and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party to be one loosely connected coalition (even though some of them often fight amongst themselves).

Nearly 40 years after widespread fear over recreational abuse of LSD and other hallucinogens forced dozens of scientists to abandon their work, researchers at a handful of major institutions – including UCSF and Harvard University – are reigniting studies. Scientists started looking at less controversial drugs, like ecstasy and magic mushrooms, in the late 1990s, but LSD studies only began about a year ago and are still rare.

The study at UCSF, which is being run by a UC Berkeley graduate student, is looking into the mechanisms of LSD and how it works in the brain. The hope is that such research might support further studies into medical applications of LSD – for chronic headaches, for example — or psychiatric uses. [...]

In 1966, the federal government made LSD illegal, and by the early 1970s, research into all psychedelic drugs in humans had come to a halt, although some scientists continued to study the drugs in animals.

(What a Wonderful Place to Be)

Sara Robinson outlines the definition of fascism and the stages all fascist nations have gone through in arriving at fascism and concludes that the US is on the brink of fascism. Robinson gives some suggestions on how to fight back and prevent fascism in the future, but I think it may be too late:

Read more: Is it too late to stop fascism in the US?

Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression? [...]

In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits. [...]

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test. [...]

Depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. (There are several effective therapies that focus on just this.) It is also essential, in instances where there is resistance to discussing ruminations, that the therapist try to identify and dismantle those barriers.

For those who think modernity or civilization or technology is the problem:

Or, perhaps, depression might be like obesity — a problem that arises because modern conditions are so different from those in which we evolved. Homo sapiens did not evolve with cookies and soda at the fingertips. Yet this is not a satisfactory explanation either. The symptoms of depression have been found in every culture which has been carefully examined, including small-scale societies, such as the Ache of Paraguay and the !Kung of southern Africa — societies where people are thought to live in environments similar to those that prevailed in our evolutionary past.

Trevor Blake of synchronofile.com has been providing essential research material on the Dymaxion Car to Crosthwaite and Gardiner since February 2009. C&G researcher Phil King wrote: “More and more details are slowly coming out from the archives and from people like yourself, but I must say your information has been the most informative and the most prolific so far. [...] I know I keep saying it but your help has been fantastic and you have made a difference.”

synchronofile.com has been granted the great honor of announcing the restoration of the Dymaxion Car – because our readers are now invited to help in the project. Can you identify the manufacturer for this component?

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These allegations are contained in court records [PDF] filed on Monday by Justice Department lawyers prosecuting five Blackwater contractors for the September 2007 shooting frenzy in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that killed 14 Iraqis and wounded 20 others. Anticipating that lawyers representing the contractors will argue that they were acting in self defense, the prosecution is seeking to introduce evidence that “several of the defendants had harbored a deep hostility toward Iraqi civilians which they demonstrated in words and deeds.” The charges are similar to those that recently emerged in civil lawsuits against Blackwater, stemming from the Nisour Square episode.

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Moebius and HR Giger were tapped for design work, Pink Floyd was to do the soundtrack, and Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles were all to appear in the film.

To make matters weirder, David Lynch may have ended up directing Return of the Jedi had Jodorowsky pulled off Dune.

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