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“In the quietude, you may find solace in knowing.” “In knowing, you will find the solace of quietude.”

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Without Ruth Drown, it is likely that American radionics would have ended with Abrams, a novelty from the dawn of our electrical age. Her efforts helped to push Abrams’s discipline into the realm of the vitalistic, seeking out the connective tissue between the ancient Hermetic sciences and the new science of Radionics.

It was in 1923, the year before Abrams death, that Drown, then head of the Southern California Edison Company’s mechanical addressing department, was first introduced to the radionic theories that would so impact the rest of her life. She attended a lecture on the use of radio energies in disease treatment, presented by a Dr. Frederick F. Strong, and was so moved that she immediately sought to work for him, resigning her high-paying job with Edison to take on a post as a part-time office assistant. This, in turn, led to her employment by Dr. Thomas McAllister, under whose encouragement Drown briefly studied osteopathy, before she eventually became licensed as a Doctor of Chiropractic.

First as a student and then as a doctor, Drown extensively experimented with the radionics that Strong’s lecture had introduced to her, but found problems in the theories as they had been expressed. Influenced partly by a long interest in metaphysics and Kabbalism, she came to believe that, while Abrams had touched on an underlying truth, electricity proved too coarse to be truly useful in effective diagnosis and treatment— there had to be some more subtle force at work. Further, the means of detection had to be refined to reduce the kinds of errors that had plagued Dr. X, allowing the practitioner to lock on to a very specific, individual frequency.

The answer, she speculated, might be found by studying radio technology. In her own words: “When placed on a blotter, the blood is crystallized, even as ice is crystalized steam, and each small atom is the precipitated crystallized end of an invisible line which reaches out to the ethers. This invisible line passes through the body over the nerves and through the blood vessels and the electrons from the air, water and earth supply the body structure, attaching themselves to that line, which holds the pattern of the body.”

With this understanding of life forces as a basis, it made sense to “cut the cord” between the Electronic Reactions of Abrams and a new, more overtly vitalistic radionics, replacing “ohms” with “rates”, electronic responses with human vibration radiation. Likewise, the reagent medium once used to feel out the diagnosis, too imprecise and open to interferences, could be replaced with the simpler, more sensitive radio-like mechanism of the Homo-Vibra Ray.

An excellent overview of the early history of Radionics care of the Kook Science Resistance. Thanks for your noble efforts in research, guys!

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A battered and corroded thumb-sized piece of bronze has turned out to be a unique find, the earliest representation of an Egyptian deity from any site in Britain – and appropriately, after almost 2,000 years hidden in the ground, it is Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence.

The little figure was found at Silchester, site of an abandoned Roman city in Hampshire, in last summer’s excavation, but his identity was only revealed in months of careful conservation work. His Greek and Roman designation as Harpocrates, the god of spymasters, is actually a transcription error.

“In Egyptian mythology the figure is known as Horus, the child of Isis and Osiris,” said Professor Mike Fulford of the University of Reading, director of the Silchester excavation. “He is often shown with his finger in his mouth, a gesture that in Egypt represented the hieroglyph for his name, but was misinterpreted by the Greeks and Romans, resulting in his adoption as the god of silence and secrecy.”

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Steve Foland: I hear you’ve been working on a definitive Burroughs biography. How is that going, when can we expect it and is that going to be your final word on the subject?

James Grauerholz: In 1972, when I was not yet twenty, I wrote out-of-the-blue fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in New York and London, respectively.

Allen’s reply led to my meeting him in the Lower East Side in spring 1973, and when I returned to New York City in late January 1974, Allen told me William was in New York, too, and sent me over to meet him.

William’s reply in late ‘72 is interesting. In mine to him, I had written something to the effect that I wanted to interview him, with a focus on his childhood, his school years, his early European travels.

Very little about the first 30 years of Burroughs’ life had been published, as of 1972. Only Alan Ansen’s late-1950s essay* offered any real detail, and it compared intriguingly against Burroughs’ own tight-lipped “Prologue” written — reluctantly — in 1952 for his first book, Junkie (1953), and there were only brief, superficial bios in the early “Beat” stories in LIFE, et al.

SF: Were you involved with William’s magickal practices personally? And if so, would you describe an experience?

JG: Not really; let’s say, a few things early on. It’s all there in the Red Night Trilogy if you want to look for it.

But I followed my own spirit guides (so to speak), and they did not impel me to participate personally in the rather well-known “Sweat Lodge” experience that William had in 1991 — with Allen Ginsberg and Michael Emerton, as well as facilitator William Lyon, and the Shaman — whose name escapes me.

I kept the same distance — supportive, respectful, encouraging — from William’s developing contacts with the I.O.T.

(Author’s Note: I.O.T. refers to the Illuminates of Thanateros — A Chaos Magick organization founded in Britain in 1978 by Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll)

The way some people think of me as “controlling” William and all this horse shit is ironic to the point of bitter hilarity. The truth is, I made sure that I did not come between him and the people and experiences he had, and relationships he started with them, and kept up on his own. Ask Marcus Ewert, who — bless his heart — has charmingly revealed, to the printed (or electronic) page and the motion picture camera, more details about his affair with William in the latter’s, uh, latter years, than I can imagine very many people even wanting to know. But Marc is, like me, a disciple of Ginsberg (if not also of Warhol), and I can only applaud his let-it-all-hang-out policy about those days and nights with William. But Marcus will tell you, I ran our whole little crew away from that house with the two of them in it, postponed the lawnmowing, etc., so they could — well, do whatever they wanted to.

SF: William’s magickal experimentation, the aspects of recording what he called “Danger Sounds” and replaying them in proximity to his target, or using collage to hit a specific target has become the stuff of legend. Some attribute the closing of one particular establishment to William’s hexes. Is there another specific instance which you can recall that is as dramatic and apparently self-evident?

JG: Nope, not really. You are likely referring to the Moka Bar in London, where William said he received snide, snotty service and lousy, weak tea — and his tape-recorders-and-cameras mock-surveillance routine, back and forth on the sidewalk of Frith Street, and how the Moka Bar failed and was shuttered not too long after that.

Forgive me please, but my cast of mind leads me to suspect the Moka Bar, if it really did sell lousy tea with terrible service, might have been headed out of business, with or without the sound-text-tape-film sidewalk-pacing routine…

As with William’s long-ago theory that, because he had never known a NYC junky ever to get a seasonal cold, it was likely that Junk provided a protective covering to the cells (or else, maybe Junk kept the cells well-exercised and in-shape with a constant cycle of shrinking to kick, swelling back up in re-addiction, kicking, hooked again, etc.) — I pointed out that, because a junky with a good supply on hand rarely leaves his apartment to mingle on the sidewalk with other people (which would expose him to more airborne rhinovirus particles), maybe the apparent immunity was more the result of limited exposure to current pathogens…

This all might sound terrible to you, as if I was a bringdown — in fact, William and I were beautifully balanced. He appreciated that about me, and I appreciated his love for the fantastic and extravagantly-explained. Which is funny, when I remember now that it was William’s own mention of “Ockham’s Razor” in my 1966 copy of Naked Lunch that first alerted me to the existence of Occam’s principle of parsimony….

SF: William’s painting “Creation of the Homunculus IV,” graces the cover of Phil Hine’s Prime Chaos, and a glowing endorsement from William appears on the back of Condensed Chaos. Did William have frequent contact with the leaders of the Chaos Magick movement or was his involvement on an individual by individual basis?

JG: Yes, William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the I.O.T. Of course, you would have to ask (if they would even describe it for you) the persons who took part in that initiation — I didn’t. Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover; William met and liked Peter Carroll and Phil Hine, I am pretty sure. I myself only got to know the good Doug Grant a couple of years after William’s death, in August 1997.

SF: William’s “Orgone Chamber” is well known to his devotees. Did you feel the effects of it as well? When did William’s interest in Radionics begin? Can you recall who introduced him to the subject?

JG: Yes, I suppose I could feel something in the various Orgone Boxes I have sat in. William’s 1940s letters reveal his early contacts with the works of Wilhelm Reich, although it’s evident (from, for example, several sources gathered by Ted Morgan for Literary Outlaw, 1988) that Burroughs had come into contact with some of Reich’s writings, in translation, by the 1930s. As to who brought it to his attention, my immediate guess would be his childhood friend, Kells Elvins. And there are several sources we might search for more evidence of that source in William’s life for that particular influence.

SF: Given his influence on Magickal theory and practice (The Cut-Up, Third Mind, Dream Machine and his writing) who would you say was William’s largest influence? Crowley, Spare, none of the above?

JG: Pardon me but I don’t see many direct influences by William’s thought upon Magickal theory — the other way around, heavens, yes.

But Burroughs considered Crowley a bit of a figure of fun, referring to him as “The Greeeaaaaaat BEEEEAST!” in that behind-closed-doors, queeny comic delivery he used sometimes: his voice rising straight up in pitch, into an hysterical falsetto. You can hear it in lots of tapes, I’m pretty sure.

William knew quite a bit about Crowley’s life and work, and he certainly dug deep into the Necronomicon (anonymous but often attributed to Crowley) when it became available in a snazzy, black-morocco, tooled-leather hardback binding. He appreciated much about Aleister Crowley. Influenced by him? I don’t really see it. And to be truthful, I knew more about Austin Osman Spare than William did, in the beginning.

SF: What, if any, opinion did William have for Jack Parsons’s work?

JG: William’s thoughts about Jack Parsons were, I believe, based far more on what he knew about Parson’s life, than on any writings or paintings by Parsons. William knew about the origins of JPL, the early ties to L. Ron Hubbard, and so forth. If memory serves, William was mainly impressed by the way that Parsons’ life ended.

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If the human species should be destroyed on Earth, our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilization, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

The construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. if no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.

Thanks to John Harrigan of Foolish People for pointing this interesting article out.

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and from Borderland Sciences on Tumblr:

Break out the fluorescent light bulbs and dust off your Tesla coils: July 10th is Nikola Tesla Day, marking the birth of that greatest of inventors and visionaries. Here’s to you, Mr. Tesla.

  • The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (1 of 3)
  • The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (2 of 3)
  • The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (3 of 3)
  • The Tesla Mystique
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    See also Trevor James Constable’s “Cosmic Pulse of Life”

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    Yeah, we’re Gibson fan-boys here, eagerly awaiting a copy of Zero History this September.

    Tiger! Tiger! (1956)
    By Alfred Bester
    It’s also known as The Stars My Destination. My favorite literary expression of mid-century Manhattan, and I doubt I’d have written without having read it.

    Dhalgren (1975)
    By Samuel R. Delany
    It won’t work unless you can allow it to become your head for a few weeks; it helps if you’re rather young. Closest thing I know to a great “sixties” novel.

    Arslan (1976)
    By M. J. Engh
    A very different sort of alien invasion: America as Earth. One of the best works of science fiction you probably haven’t heard of.

    The Crystal World (1966)
    By J. G. Ballard
    It’s hard to pick just one Ballard, but you could certainly start with this.”

    List continues at NY times

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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

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    I just walked right in. I had studied how the Pentagon staff were dressed, and I was just like them. I wore a dark blue conservative suit. I even had a small American flag on my lapel.

    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.

    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.

    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

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    A Tour of the Borderland Museum Part 1 from Borderland Sciences on Vimeo.

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    As members of the Church of Release will tell you, and as you have doubtless heard from your reputable friends, there is no greater relief and source of lasting enlightenment than having a hole in your head.

    It is called trepanation, from the Greek trypanon (“a borer”), and it is one of the oldest forms of medical intervention known today. The trepanation is a classically simple operation— so simple, in fact, that you can perform it on yourself with some minor preparation (this is not advice): get a drill; press the drill into your skull until you’re through the bone (being careful not to press into the brain itself); and, supposing you survive the process, enjoy life as a newly minted member of Homo Sapiens Correctus.

    Wait! wait! before you run off to your hardware store or garage, we at the Kook Science Resistance have compiled the following summary of the ancient (and modern) practice of trepanation for your further study. We again caution that this is not medical advice, but that, as always, we leave it to you to judge the truth for yourself . . .

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    Part 1 of 5 - Eric Dollard presents his research on the Lakhovsky’s Multi-wave oscillator at the 1986 United States Psychotronics Association conference.

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    From Wired’s Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet:

    The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

    McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

    When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment.

    And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

    The Washington Post gave McConnell free space to declare that we are losing some sort of cyberwar. He argues that the country needs to get a Cold War strategy, one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects. Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is “losing” the cyberwar, according to McConnell.

    But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.

    McConnell’s op-ed then pointed to breathless stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal about thousands of malware infections from the well-known Zeus virus. He intimated that the nation’s citizens and corporations were under unstoppable attack by this so-called new breed of hacker malware.

    despite the masterful PR about the Zeus infections from security company NetWitness (run by a former Bush Administration cyberczar Amit Yoran), the world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec downplayed the story. But the message had already gotten out — the net was under attack.

    Those enamored with the idea of “cyberwar” aren’t dissuaded by fact-checking.

    They like to point to Estonia, where a number of the government’s websites were rendered temporarily inaccessible by angry Russian citizens. They used a crude, remediable denial-of-service attack to temporarily keep users from viewing government websites. (This attack is akin to sending an army of robots to board a bus, so regular riders can’t get on. A website fixes this the same way a bus company would — by keeping the robots off by identifying the difference between them and humans.) Some like to say this was an act of cyberwar, but if it that was cyberwar, it’s pretty clear the net will be just fine.

    In fact, none of these examples demonstrate the existence of a cyberwar, let alone that we are losing it.

    But this battle isn’t about truth. It’s about power.

    For years, McConnell has wanted the NSA (the ultra-secretive government spy agency responsible for listening in on other countries and for defending classified government computer systems) to take the lead in guarding all government and private networks. Not surprisingly, the contractor he works for has massive, secret contracts with the NSA in that very area. In fact, the company, owned by the shadowy Carlyle Group, is reported to pull in $5 billion a year in government contracts, many of them Top Secret.

    Meanwhile, White House Cyber Czar say ‘There Is No Cyberwar’:

    Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

    “There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

    “I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.”

    Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage.

    His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it.

    Makes me wonder if this has anything to do with the FBI’s (and RIAA & MPAA for that matter) push toward deep-packet inspection they are trying to force on ISPs.

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    AE911Truth’s youtube for more

    From this article about last month’s international convention:

    “Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.

    Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries.

    hese prominent architectural and engineering professionals will discuss the organization’s findings and concerns. A brief presentation of the explosive evidence they have compiled will be followed by Q & A. The presentation is an important update of “9/11: Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction,” the DVD produced by the organization, and available on their website AE911Truth.org, which analyzes the scientific forensic evidence concluding that the three skyscrapers in New York City were demolished with explosives on 9/11. The petition will be delivered today to every congressional representative by AE911Truth petition signers throughout the country. Government officials will be notified that “Misprision of Treason”, US Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense which requires those with evidence of treason to act.

    Gage and his group base their conclusions on forensic evidence. Gage states, “The official FEMA and NIST reports provide insufficient, contradictory, and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials. Gage points out the destruction of the third high-rise, World Trade Center 7, a 47-story skyscraper which was not hit by an aircraft, yet came down in pure free-fall acceleration for more than 100 feet, a significant fact that NIST has been forced to admit, due to research conducted by AE911Truth petition signers. Other disturbing facts emerging from the forensic evidence include:

    * Complete destruction of both Twin Towers in just 10 to 14 seconds at near free-fall acceleration
    * Over 100 first-responder reports of explosions and flashes at onset of destruction
    * Multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft at 60 mph
    * Mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking
    * 1200-foot-dia. debris field: no “pancaked” floors seen in the debris pile
    * Several tons of molten metal found in debris.
    * Evidence of advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material found in the WTC dust by an international team of scientists “

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