"In our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the 'liberties' that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history?
"We know how, in the past, humanity has been able to endure the sufferings we have enumerated: they were regarded as a punishment inflicted by God, the syndrome of the decline of the 'age,' and so on. And it was possible to accept them precisely because they had a metahistorical meaning [...] Every war rehearsed the struggle between good and evil, every fresh social injustice was identified with the sufferings of the Saviour (or, for example, in the pre-Christian world, with the passion of a divine messenger or vegetation god), each new massacre repeated the glorious end of the martyrs. [...] By virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history"[25]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Return_%28Eliade%29
Monday, July 21, 2014
History, Terror, Time
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Have yourself a blast: Cosmic Triiger Stage Play
http://cosmictriggerplay.com/
Our crowd-funding runs from 23rd May – 4th July 2014. We have all sorts of goodies on offer, with plenty of Bob Wilson & Ken Campbell related collectables and limited editions. The money will get us to the first performance; touring costs will be met by ticket sales.http://cosmictriggerplay.com/
We are a small independent theatre company with passion and vision. We are producing this show for the love of Bob, and will do so on a sliding budget – the more money we raise, the better will be the show. Please help us make this the greatest show on Planet World.
Seedfunders
When Daisy first announced her intention to stage this production, folk began sending her £23 or $23 (or multiples of) to help her get started. These generous early champions are our seed-funders, and are very close to our hearts, as we wouldn’t have had a bat in hell’s chance without them.
Friday, January 10, 2014
The greatest poem of the 21st Century: Somebody Blew Up America
Amiri Baraka R.I.P
In my estimation, Baraka was the greatest poet of the 21st century, and a he contender for the later half of the 20th.
His poem 'Somebody Blew Up America' stands as a testament to the power of poetry and had a deep effect on me when i first heard it. Then and now, i rate it as the single most informative investigation into the events of 9/11. Full of questions, contradictions, street slang, horror, truth and so a special beauty, the feeling of the unstoppable forces of language, gathered around the poet, Baraka, oozing out into the shared world through his fine tuned poetic being.
What a great American. And somebody i was fortunate to meet once in New York, handing his latest publication to Ravi Coltrane right in front of my eyes. I will cherish this chance encounter for all my days.
--Steve Fly
His poem 'Somebody Blew Up America' stands as a testament to the power of poetry and had a deep effect on me when i first heard it. Then and now, i rate it as the single most informative investigation into the events of 9/11. Full of questions, contradictions, street slang, horror, truth and so a special beauty, the feeling of the unstoppable forces of language, gathered around the poet, Baraka, oozing out into the shared world through his fine tuned poetic being.
What a great American. And somebody i was fortunate to meet once in New York, handing his latest publication to Ravi Coltrane right in front of my eyes. I will cherish this chance encounter for all my days.
--Steve Fly
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Friday, December 6, 2013
who do you truss' by Steve Fly
who do you truss'
where
do you get your
information.
who do you share
it with
why so selective
eh?
paranoid
what you thought
what you doodled last night
that book
those songs
what made you do it
who do
you think
that you are
publishing
like that
without our permission
from the law
makers
american beef
men
global intel &
fast food and fast
bullets
mafia or gov.
who to truss'
--Steve Fly
where
do you get your
information.
who do you share
it with
why so selective
eh?
paranoid
what you thought
what you doodled last night
that book
those songs
what made you do it
who do
you think
that you are
publishing
like that
without our permission
from the law
makers
american beef
men
global intel &
fast food and fast
bullets
mafia or gov.
who to truss'
--Steve Fly
Monday, November 11, 2013
Seth Blake on The United States of Paranoia : A Conspiracy Theory.
A great book, and the chapter 'Operation Mindfuck' of particular interest to RAW fans and heads. Enjoy, steve fly.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/
Walker proceeds to lay out a general taxonomy of American conspiracy
theories, “five primal myths […] archetypes that can absorb all kinds
of allegations, true or not, and arrange them into a familiar form.”
These he distinguishes as “The Enemy Outside” (foreign actors who plot
society’s downfall from a distance); “The Enemy Within” (domestic
threats to the status quo); “The Enemy Above” (conspiracies of the
ruling classes); “The Enemy Below” (conspiracies of the lower classes
and social pariahs); and “The Benevolent Conspiracy” (a secret force
working behind the scenes to improve people’s lives).
Enumerating examples of these five primal myths and how they have recurred and recombined throughout American history, Walker is able to convincingly illustrate how conspiracy narratives that may appear at first glance to be isolated, episodic interludes specific to the idiosyncratic circumstances of a particular era or social sphere, though distortions, are also real manifestations of enduring facets of a national consciousness. Conspiracy theories, according to Walker, and contra Hofstadter, are endemic rather than aberrant phenomena, and manifest at every level of American society.
In a particularly telling example, Walker traces the myth of The Enemy Outside from the period between the Pequot and King Philip’s wars (when English colonists’ fears of a “universall [sic] combination” of Indians lead them to form The New England Confederation) to the contemporary misunderstandings by US policymakers concerning the diffuse nature of al-Qaeda (Walker cites a Washington Post from 2012 that referred to Bin Laden as a “terrorist CEO in an isolated compound”). In both cases, an inaccurate but powerful metaphor — diverse and diffuse Indian societies likened to the absolute monarchies of Europe on the one hand, a diverse and diffuse terrorist network likened to a private corporation on the other — opened up a space for conspiratorial thinking and mythical misreadings that lead to reaction-formations with devastating real-world consequences. For infamous conspiracy theorist John Todd — who for nearly four decades beginning in the late 1970s, wound a crooked path across the United States, speaking at churches and community centers about the intertwining plots of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, witches, Jesus movements, and the music industry — the toll of belief came at a no less devastating individual cost: estrangement from his friends and family, frequent arrests, institutionalization, and an early death.
Walker’s chapter on conspiracy spoofs and spoofers is a more lighthearted counterpoint to the personal and political tragedies detailed in much of the book, and also may be his most effective. Here he discusses the Church of the SubGenius (a wicked send-up of New Age religions and self-help guides, ostensibly led by the beatific, pipe-smoking übermensch “Bob Dobbs”) and The Realist, a magazine that often printed earnestly submitted conspiracy theories alongside deadpan satires of the same. Just as science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy came to serve as a sort of primary text for those who actually believe that its eponymous secret society manipulates global events, the communities fostered by these intended hoaxes were, in fact, very real. For a short time in the early seventies, Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist, even became convinced that people were following him: as Krassner’s explains: “I thought that what I published was so important that I wanted to be persecuted, in order to validate the work.”
If Walker has, as he claims, written a sort of contemporary American demonology, it is populated by demons of the antique tradition: not necessarily evil spirits, but ones capable, like the humans who invented them, of a wide range of behavior. Perhaps a better term to describe the form of The United States of Paranoia is a bestiary. What differentiates the bestiary as a form most from its more buttoned down cousin, the encyclopedia, is the transparency of its animating ethos. In contrast to the definitional, indexical project of the encyclopedia — whose scriptural tone foregrounds its status as the official book of record, as much as possible striving to erase the specter of human authorship — the bestiary is essayistic, speculative, and most importantly, allegorical. It is as much a work of moral instruction for the beasts that read it as the beasts with which it is ostensibly concerned.
Conspiracy theories, like religious beliefs, have the power to transfigure the believer, and our hardwired apophenia — our tendency to read meaning into random and meaningless data — may lead us to stretch even the most homely and harmless of these theories far past the point of credibility or charm. For all the scope of The United States of Paranoia, Walker’s moral is ultimately a humble one: as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “we are what we pretend to be.”
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/
Seth Blake on The United States of Paranoia : A Conspiracy Theory
Enumerating examples of these five primal myths and how they have recurred and recombined throughout American history, Walker is able to convincingly illustrate how conspiracy narratives that may appear at first glance to be isolated, episodic interludes specific to the idiosyncratic circumstances of a particular era or social sphere, though distortions, are also real manifestations of enduring facets of a national consciousness. Conspiracy theories, according to Walker, and contra Hofstadter, are endemic rather than aberrant phenomena, and manifest at every level of American society.
In a particularly telling example, Walker traces the myth of The Enemy Outside from the period between the Pequot and King Philip’s wars (when English colonists’ fears of a “universall [sic] combination” of Indians lead them to form The New England Confederation) to the contemporary misunderstandings by US policymakers concerning the diffuse nature of al-Qaeda (Walker cites a Washington Post from 2012 that referred to Bin Laden as a “terrorist CEO in an isolated compound”). In both cases, an inaccurate but powerful metaphor — diverse and diffuse Indian societies likened to the absolute monarchies of Europe on the one hand, a diverse and diffuse terrorist network likened to a private corporation on the other — opened up a space for conspiratorial thinking and mythical misreadings that lead to reaction-formations with devastating real-world consequences. For infamous conspiracy theorist John Todd — who for nearly four decades beginning in the late 1970s, wound a crooked path across the United States, speaking at churches and community centers about the intertwining plots of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, witches, Jesus movements, and the music industry — the toll of belief came at a no less devastating individual cost: estrangement from his friends and family, frequent arrests, institutionalization, and an early death.
Walker’s chapter on conspiracy spoofs and spoofers is a more lighthearted counterpoint to the personal and political tragedies detailed in much of the book, and also may be his most effective. Here he discusses the Church of the SubGenius (a wicked send-up of New Age religions and self-help guides, ostensibly led by the beatific, pipe-smoking übermensch “Bob Dobbs”) and The Realist, a magazine that often printed earnestly submitted conspiracy theories alongside deadpan satires of the same. Just as science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy came to serve as a sort of primary text for those who actually believe that its eponymous secret society manipulates global events, the communities fostered by these intended hoaxes were, in fact, very real. For a short time in the early seventies, Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist, even became convinced that people were following him: as Krassner’s explains: “I thought that what I published was so important that I wanted to be persecuted, in order to validate the work.”
If Walker has, as he claims, written a sort of contemporary American demonology, it is populated by demons of the antique tradition: not necessarily evil spirits, but ones capable, like the humans who invented them, of a wide range of behavior. Perhaps a better term to describe the form of The United States of Paranoia is a bestiary. What differentiates the bestiary as a form most from its more buttoned down cousin, the encyclopedia, is the transparency of its animating ethos. In contrast to the definitional, indexical project of the encyclopedia — whose scriptural tone foregrounds its status as the official book of record, as much as possible striving to erase the specter of human authorship — the bestiary is essayistic, speculative, and most importantly, allegorical. It is as much a work of moral instruction for the beasts that read it as the beasts with which it is ostensibly concerned.
Conspiracy theories, like religious beliefs, have the power to transfigure the believer, and our hardwired apophenia — our tendency to read meaning into random and meaningless data — may lead us to stretch even the most homely and harmless of these theories far past the point of credibility or charm. For all the scope of The United States of Paranoia, Walker’s moral is ultimately a humble one: as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “we are what we pretend to be.”
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/
Most recent on Ed Snowdon from Guardian.
Most recent
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11 Nov 2013: Jack Straw: Are we to believe that the Guardian's decisions have been motivated entirely by a selfless concern to protect the security of the nation?
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11 Nov 2013: Christopher Graham says issues of national security cannot be allowed to overshadow concerns of legitimate public interest
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11 Nov 2013: Wisconsin congressman attends meeting of EU civil liberties committee and labels Feinstein reform proposals 'scary'
2 comments -
11 Nov 2013: • Welcome to our hub for all Edward Snowden, NSA and GCHQ-related developments around the world
• New to the NSA revelations? Catch up here
• What do the NSA files mean for you? 59 comments -
11 Nov 2013: Home secretary follows cabinet colleagues in criticising newspapers over stories based on Edward Snowden revelations. By John Plunkett 199 comments
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11 Nov 2013: Delegation will consider press regulation and Snowden coverage 3 comments
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10 Nov 2013: Senator gives interview to Der Spiegel, saying general should 'be held accountable' for Edward Snowden leaks
434 comments -
10 Nov 2013: John Gummer, now Lord Deben, says left and right should worry about terrorism being used as an excuse to curtail freedom
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9 Nov 2013: Rusbridger to appear before home affairs select committee after claims that revelations were damaging national security
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8 Nov 2013: • Welcome to our hub for all Edward Snowden, NSA and GCHQ-related developments around the world
• New to the NSA revelations? Catch up here
• What do the NSA files mean for you? 76 comments -
8 Nov 2013: Australia would not want to harm relationship, says foreign minister, but we don't comment on intelligence
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8 Nov 2013: Sir John Sawers makes claim in first ever joint public hearing by heads of UK's three intelligence agencies
966 comments -
8 Nov 2013: We analyse the questions the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ faced from MPs and how they performed
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7 Nov 2013: Intelligence panel votes 13 to two in favour of bill which would force the public disclosure of civilian drone-strike deaths
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7 Nov 2013: A historic 90-minute session of the intelligence and security committee lacked the heat and light of a real grilling
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Who Was Really Behind the 9/11 Attacks?
Who, who, WHOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo?
I watched an interesting and thought provoking podcast called ‘The Corbett Report’ in which James Corbett delivers a series of consistent and well researched pieces on topics the mainstream-of-piss media would not go near (orders from the top son) The latest podcast, called 'who was really behind the 9/11 attacks?' seems to me the best overview of the more probable scenarios, and a good class in basic detective work.
I can hear the echo of Kurt Vonnegut shouting 'Fire, FIRE, fire Rummy' and, of Amiri Baraka shouting “WHO WHO WHOOOO?” in his epic poem ‘somebody tried to blow up America’. Now the question becomes who would start a proper criminal investigation, and a court case to bring Rummy and the others, in particular ENAC members, to the stand for questioning, examination and cross-examination concerning the critical facts raised by the main points of the 'Corbett Report'
Fly Acrillic 23
I watched an interesting and thought provoking podcast called ‘The Corbett Report’ in which James Corbett delivers a series of consistent and well researched pieces on topics the mainstream-of-piss media would not go near (orders from the top son) The latest podcast, called 'who was really behind the 9/11 attacks?' seems to me the best overview of the more probable scenarios, and a good class in basic detective work.
I can hear the echo of Kurt Vonnegut shouting 'Fire, FIRE, fire Rummy' and, of Amiri Baraka shouting “WHO WHO WHOOOO?” in his epic poem ‘somebody tried to blow up America’. Now the question becomes who would start a proper criminal investigation, and a court case to bring Rummy and the others, in particular ENAC members, to the stand for questioning, examination and cross-examination concerning the critical facts raised by the main points of the 'Corbett Report'
Fly Acrillic 23
Monday, July 29, 2013
BUT THE EYE OF MODOR IS UPON YOU by Mick Farren R.I.P
BUT THE EYE OF MODOR IS UPON YOU
The classic
scene in the 19th and 20th centuries – part fact, part
fiction – when the officer orders his men to open fire on the starving workers
as the bread riot gets underway, and, one by one, the soldiers lower their guns
and then turn them on the bloody officers. It’s the cliché tipping point of
revolution. Am I deluding myself with wishful thinking that Edward Snowden,
Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, are a
more modern version of the same revolutionary. Can all those wage slaves at the
NSA, CIA, GCHQ, etc. fucking over their comrades and spying them night and day become
mad as hell and refuse to take it any more. Okay so the crypto-fascist
cocksuckers in power are watching every move we make. Fuck ‘em. Give them the
finger and go on making the move. They can’t arrest all of us. That’s welcome
to Planet Gulag.
Friday, July 5, 2013
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