Yep, we’re late on covering just about everything currently but here’s some pictures from the chaos in the streets inspired but the understandable hatred for the G20. Wouldn’t you be pissed if someone extinguished your eternal flame of hope too?




Great lulz and counterpoints to be had over @ HipsterRunoff’s “Does n e 1 know what G20 protesters are even protesting? Seems like they just want to make .jpg internet memes”
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“In podcast episode 87, we’re joined by Kephra from Occult Digital Mobilization to discuss the free dissemination of esoteric texts on the web.
Kephra explains that Occult Digital Mobilization,or DigiMob, is a collective of individuals virtually gathered together to compile and facilitate the distribution of occult and esoteric texts. He tells how it works, including the intention and mission of the group, the submission process for the quarterly digests, the volume of content, and the technology which allows decentralized distribution, specifically BitTorrent.”
Listen to the podcast at Occult of Personality
Visit the Occult Digital Mobilization site

… in 1995, Burroughs joined with computer animator Roger Holden in producing a series of computer-generated stereograms created by digitally scanning a detail of one of Burroughs’ paintings into a computer, color-enhancing it, and printing it with a laser printer. When viewed with relaxed and slightly crossed eyes, the three dimensional effects of these “cybernetic cut-ups” form imaginary landscapes of extreme intricacy and depth not unlike those imagined works described by Burroughs in 1981 [in Cities of the Red Night] as made by “some lost color process… used to transfer three dimensional holograms onto the… pages. You ache to look at these colors.”
The image can also be viewed in this slideshow as part of the exhibit it’s housed in at The Spencer Museum of Art.
Via Technoccult
I was attacking Mars, the god of War. He’s still our ruling god. If you think Mars is an extinct thing from the antique past that we can just laugh at now, forget it. Mars is still here. That is not my opinion, but my knowledge. Mars is a terrifying but sobering vision. I have had this vision of Mars—you have to do all the things at certain times of the year, and then he does come through. And he’s about 500 feet tall, he’s not very handsome, he’s very strong, he’s armored, he’s bearded in a scraggly way, he’s got the fiercest eyes of any of the gods. He makes Jupiter—Jove—look benign and effete in comparison. But Mars is kind of childish—that’s why it’s so hard to get to him. He just loves bloodbaths. This is his thing. He does it very well. And he’s always thinking up new ways to do hideous things to the human race. This is his FUN. He’s the god of War. And he’s been alive since there were humans in tribes. War is the most consistent activity of the human animal. For whatever reason, some good, and a lot bad, we’ve been doing it as a race since the cave days. Of course, some wars are justified, like World War II, fighting the Nazis, I can’t think of a better cause. But Mars has nothing to do with being fair. Mars loves bloodshed, and he is a force that’s still operating in the world—it’s a force that according to modern thinking is irrational, but nevertheless there. Freud would have called it the unconscious or something but I believe that these are actual living entities. Not ‘living’ in the way like humans living and breathing, [but] living in a way that are much beyond our capacity, because they’ll never die.
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In a personal sense, men more than women have a big problem with Mars. Most soldiers from the beginning of time have been men, and still are. And the Pentagon is controlled by men. The Pentagon itself is sort of an occult shape—like a five-sided collapsed star.
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I went from one men’s room to the next. I didn’t stop until I had scattered all 93 of my talismans—because 93 is a sacred number for Crowley. Then I walked out, it was all very inconspicuous. The security guard looked at me and gave me a nice look, like we’re all looking after each other.
Via Technoccult
Paranoid much?
Drug research and neurobiology FTW.

From a recent interview with Phil Hine:
Christopher: I know that it was the magic part that attracted to me even into Wicca. Danger is one of the excuses used not to teach teenagers magic, because of their constant roller coaster emotional ride makes for poor choices and decisions. Then there is unexpected consequences. We get results but in some other way than we expected. In Wicca we have a few people afraid of using magic at all for fear it might even accidentally cause unexpected harm to someone.
How much of this fear is overblown from your experience? Have you run into any areas where you felt yourself to be in danger in your magical practice?
Phil: I think in part, it relates to control - and the inherent unpredictability of magic. As you say, results come “in some other way than we expected”. Despite much gassing about magic being a science it still doesn’t have that 1-to-1 repeatability - do ritual x and you will have result y - has it?
I actually think it’s okay to be have concerns about it. Many years ago, whilst I was training to be a therapist, I had an experience which comes to mind on this subject. I was working in a psychiatric dept and my boss and I were doing this “guided visualization” - walking a group of clients into a forest. Fairly innocuous stuff you might think. Suddenly there’s a bang and this old geezer is out of his chair, out of the room and down the corridor.
So I checked up on him and he said that last time he’d been in a forest (in similar circumstances to the journey scenario) was in 1940, listening to the rest of his platoon being machine-gunned by Germans. Neither me or my boss were expecting anyone to react in the way this guy did to what we thought was a “safe” exercise.
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Christopher: I know in my own magical experience, there comes a question of how much of what I am doing is necessary, and how much is merely decoration? Usually when we think of magic, we think of ceremony, tools, movement and chants and what have you? It is certainly good theater, but is all of it necessary? What about magic in day to day life, where it might not be possible to do full ceremony?
Phil: All you really need is to remember that you have a body. Yes, it’s nice to do “big ritual” occasionally in the way you describe, but I really think we need to break down this distinction between ritual space and day-to-day-life space.
Much of the tantra practice I do is oriented towards “day-to-day life” and “big ritual” doesn’t necessarily translate into heightened intensities. I’ve had some really intense experiences as by-products of really simple rituals, with not much in the way of props and limited space for flouncing around.
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Christopher: What was different about Chaos Magic from other systems of magic that drew you to it for awhile?
Phil: I first encountered what came later to be described as “Chaos Magic” through two texts - Peter J. Carroll’s “Liber Null” and Ray Sherwin’s “The Book of Results” - in the late 1970s, and engaged with the latter text first.
This was because I’d come Austin Osman Spare a few years earlier and found it quite easy to get into the practice of casting sigils. In fact it was Spare’s work which got me interested in magic in the first place. Between 1979-80 I was doing a correspondence course in Qabalah, and was getting ticked off by my mentor because I told him I was doing sigils.
I didn’t really start doing anything with Liber Null until 1981, by which time I was in a Wiccan coven and the High Priestess encouraged me to “find out more about this chaos stuff”. I think what initially attracted me to Liber Null was the idea that all magical “techniques” were essentially similar, regardless of the context they appeared in - and also the idea that you could take material from outside of what’s considered to be the “occult corpus” - such as fiction. I’d already made some moves in this direction - having done some rituals inspired by Lovecraft’s fiction between 1979-80.
I think Chaos Magic was, for me, an arena for experimentation, although it didn’t really become dominant in my strands of practices until the late 1980’s.
Just to give some more background - I first became interested in Tantra in 1982, following a series of recurring dreams in which the goddess Kali loomed large, but again, this didn’t become a dominant theme for me until the late 1980s.
I read Robert Anton Wilson’s & Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy in 1985, and began to work with the discordian goddess Eris around that time - but I was approaching Eris very much through a Wiccan framework, being still in contact with the coven I’d joined in 1981.
In fact I didn’t really begin to focus heavily on what was then becoming known as Chaos Magic until around 1986, after I’d left the coven and started to strike out on my own.
I’d moved to Leeds by then, which was a kind of melting pot for experimental magic, and got involved with the Chaos scene there - as well as hooking up with people who were experimenting with Lovecraftian magic, Tantra, and politically-oriented Pagan activism.
The “urban shamanism trilogy” of chapbooks (you can find them on www.philhine.org.uk as pdfs) were written in this period, and, together with a few friends, I started publishing a monthly pagan ‘zine - Pagan News (again, there’s some pdf-ed issues on the website).
This was a very vibrant time for me - I was doing a hell of a lot of magical experimentation in different directions - and involved with several groups simultaneously.
In 1991 I moved to London, and because a high proportion of the people I knew were involved in the chaos magic scene down there, Chaos Magic came to dominate my approach to magic. I’d already written two short chapbooks on Chaos Magic - “Condensed Chaos” and “Chaos Servitors” - both based on stuff I’d been doing in Leeds, but these didn’t get released until I hit London - to be followed (in
1993) by the first edition of Prime Chaos - which I’d been working on since 1988. I did quite a few workshops, lectures, etc., both in the UK and in Europe/America - latterly through being a member of the IOT.
It was through the American head of the IOT - the late Bob Williams, that I managed to get a deal with what was then New Falcon Publications, who went on to publish “Condensed Chaos,” a heavily revised “Prime Chaos,” and my little chapbook on Lovecraftian magic - “The Pseudonomicon,” which remains my favourite of the three.
All the way through this heavily chaos magic-oriented period, I was still pursuing my interests in tantra, and by 1995 was running, with my partner, a tantrically-oriented group - and were in contact with other tantrically-inclined folk in the UK (AMOOKOS). We were also regular participants in a kind of free-form, dance-oriented pagan group called “the Mad Shamans”
Christopher: At what point did you come to the conclusion it was time to move on to something else?
Phil: It wasn’t that simple. One of the reasons I’ve answered the previous question with so much “biographical” info is to highlight that I’ve always - until fairly recently - had several irons in the fire at once, and these irons were often related to the different networks of friends I was moving in.
I’ve friends for example, from my period of being Wiccan-dominant who still invite me to gatherings and I’m sometimes amazed how easily I can slide back into that framework for ritual work - it’s like “coming home” in a way.
But, to answer your question, I think I’d hit a point where I’d become dissatisfied with some of the patterns I’d let myself become habituated to. Firstly, I came to realise that a lot of my own practice had become workshop-orientated - by which I mean that I was doing stuff with a view to turning it into a workshop session, rather than for its own sake. So that had to stop.
Secondly, I left the IOT in 1996 (or thereabouts) and in so doing, lost contact with that particular network of chaos people. Thirdly, my tantric practice, which had become increasingly dominant for me, was what I wanted to concentrate on (don’t forget I’d been pursuing this on and off since 1982). This latter point might help understand one of my problems with Chaos Magic as an approach.
One of CM’s primary assertions is that magic can be formulated in terms of “techniques” and that the theoretical underpinnings or cultural-historical context in which those “techniques” appear isn’t really important. A good example would be the idea of “mantras”.
The term mantra is now used fairly widely in books on modern magic to denote any iterative repetition of a word or phrase - so something you’ll sometimes see advocates of CM asserting is that singing rune charms and repeating Hindu mantras are essentially the same procedure - the forcus being on the repetition of a word or phrase - in order to enter an altered state of consciousness. So mantras are something that gets chanted - and the chanting (i.e. the iteration) is what’s important - not the content or the context.
This, to me, is a kind of reductionism. It predicates a universal explanation - that the “technique” of iterative speech is enacted in order to establish an altered state of consciousness in the practitioner - and subordinates all instances which apparently look as though that’s what’s going on - to it. So for an advocate of CM, there would be little practical difference between, say, chanting a rune poem, repeating the Gayatri mantra, or singing a sea shanty.
Apparently Phil’s books are receiving a new printing and his new blog has a wealth of thought provoking ideas.
(Extra thanks to Plutonica.net for helping to keep us in the loop)

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college.
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But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.
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Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.
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Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.
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The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”
Thanks to Klintron of Technoccult for bringing this article to our attention.
Quantum computers promise superfast calculations that precisely simulate the natural world, but physicists have struggled to design the brains of such machines. Some researchers have focused on designing precisely engineered materials that can trap light to harness its quantum properties. To work, scientists have thought, the crystalline structure of these materials must be flawlessly ordered — a nearly impossible task.
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One approach to quantum computing relies on entangling photons and atoms, or binding their quantum states so tightly that they can influence each other even across great distances. Once entangled, a photon can carry any information stored in the atom’s quantum state to other parts of the computer. To get that entangled state, physicists pin light in tiny cavities to increase the likelihood of quantum interaction with neighboring atoms.
Lodahl and his colleagues didn’t set out to trap light. They wanted to build a waveguide, a structure designed to send light in a particular direction, by drilling carefully spaced holes in a gallium arsenide crystal. Because the crystal bends light much more strongly than air does, light should have bounced off the holes and traveled down a channel that had been left clear of holes.
But in some cases, the light refused to move. It kept getting stuck inside the crystal.
“At first we were scratching our heads,” Lodahl says. “Then we realized it was related to imperfections in our structures.” If imperfect materials could trap light, Lodahl thought, then physicists could couple light and matter with much less frustration.
To see if disorder could help materials trap light, Lodahl and colleagues built a new waveguide, this time deliberately placing the holes at random intervals. They also embedded quantum dots, tiny semiconductors that can emit a single photon at a time, in the waveguide as a proxy for atoms that could become entangled with the photons.
quantum_peaksAfter zapping the quantum dots with a laser to make them emit photons, the researchers found that 94 percent of the photons stayed close to their emitters, creating spots of trapped light in the crystal. That’s about as good as previous results using more precisely ordered materials. Intuitively, physicists expect light to scatter in the face of disorder, but in this case colliding light waves built each other up and collected in the material.
Read More at Wired Science
Green was his raiment, green his monstrous mare.
He rode unarmed, uncorsleted, unshielded,
Except that in his huge right hand he wielded
A frightful battle-axe, with blade as green
As coppery rust;—but the long edge shone keen.
A Happy Solstice and Merry Christmas to you and yours! Join now round as we gather together for drink and merriment, being certain to adjust your awareness to the proper frequencies that you might hear the yearly story of the Axe Game, as recounted by the ever-obliging Chuck Logos.
HEAR! the tragic ways to death on the high and low roads of Infictive County;
DISCOVER! the puissance of what can only be called It;
WITNESS! the astonishing resurrection of Charles “Brainbeard” Logos;
UNCOVER! the secret wisdom and terrible power of the undead!
Ep4: “Boy, you’ll be damned to Hell!”
A Halloween 2009 mix-tape from the Infictive crew to all you creeps out there. Walk free ’til dead… and then maybe a little more.

In anticipation of the upcoming performance of The Abattoir Pages, Joseph Matheny in conversation with John Harrigan about anything and everything that comes to their mind.
Listen here and check out Apocryphon.org for Foolish People’s upcoming performance.