John Sinclair: The Mohawk Interview

John Sinclair & Steve Fly: Mohawk:

Enjoy it. x steve fly

Cosmic Trigger Video Delights

Cosmic Trigger Play is the background story to Illuminatus! featuring the extraordinary life and times of its co-author, Robert Anton Wilson, the unstoppable fnord that was Ken Campbell, and some key scenes from 1976 stage production of Illuminatus!. It is a fresh new script by Daisy Eris Campbell (Ken's daughter) based on Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger. cosmictriggerplay.com / twitter.com/2CosmicTrigger3 / facebook.com/CosmicTriggerPlay

Cosmic Trigger Play - Indigogo crowdfund. Pull It NOW!

Proposed Dutch Coffeeshop closures

http://www.cannabisarmy.com/blogs/user/ohmsweetohm

The municipality announced today the distance criterion for coffeeshops to introduce gradually. Among the first things that must close by July 1, 2014, include The Grasshopper and Homegrown Fantasy. The Bulldog on Leidseplein in 2016 to close.

 Thus, the list of 31 coffee shops, owned by AT5. The two cases on the Nieuwezijdsvoorburgwal are according to the municipality within sight of a school. Their tolerance statement expires therefore by July 1, 2014, thus ending exercise. Other cases by July 1, 2014 to see their tolerance statement expired: Golden Bean (Da Costa Street), Ocean (Dusartstraat), Betty Boop (Nieuwezijdskolk), Quay (Stadionkade), The Power (Wibautstraat), Ben (Kolksteeg) Magic (Herengracht) and The Wow Shop (Spaarndammerdijk).

As of January 1, 2015 The shops Abraxas (Spuistraat) Anyday (Short Kolksteeg), The Energy Shop (Spuistraat) and Biba (Hazen Street) have another year. Because they are within 150 meters of a school, is the tolerance statement from 1 January 2015 to expire. As of January 1, 2016 Then there is a larger group of shops located between 150 and 250 meters from a school are, they may sell weed to January 1, 2016.

Those are Crown Three (Rietwijkerstraat), Space Mountain (Dusartstraat), High Time (Jan van Galenstraat) Resin (Hekelveld), Lucifera (Frederik Hendrikstraat), Mediterranee (Spuistraat), The Rookies Bar (Short Leidsedwarsstraat), Utopia (Nieuwezijds voorburgwal), The Grail (Albert Cuypstraat), Get Down to It (Short Leidsedwarsstraat) Mellow Yellow (Vijzelgracht, The Bulldog (Leidseplein), Today (Dusartstraat), Crown Two (Old Bridge Steef, Pit (Oudebrugsteeg), El Guapo ( New Neuve) and Little (Vijzelgracht).

 In 2014 already limited open All 31 coffee shops that are within the distance criterion, are limited open by January 1, 2014. These coffee shops may be open on weekdays from 18.00 to 01.00, so they are not open when young people are at school. The restriction does not apply during holidays and weekends. http://www.cannabisarmy.com/blogs/user/ohmsweetohm

Four Wars, including drugs

Food for thought. Brilliant presentation. High information content.

Christian Doper's Dualism Crusade: Singing matter, shouting matter, dancing matter.

Christian Doper's Dualism Crusade: Singing matter, shouting matter, dancing matter.

By Fly Agaric 23.

It was 1957. I was very interested in jazz at that time, and I told a black friend about some of Korzybski's exercises to get to the non-verbal level, and he said, "Oh, I do that every time I smoke pot." I got interested. I said, "Could I buy one of these marijuana cigarettes from you?" He said, "Oh hell, I'll give it to you free." And so I smoked it. I found myself looking at a quarter I found in my pocket and realizing I hadn't looked at a quarter in twenty years or so, the way a child looks at a quarter. So I decided marijuana was doing pretty much the same thing Korzybski was trying to do with his training devices. Then shortly after that I heard a lecture by Alan Watts, and I realized that Zen, marijuana and Korzybski were all relating the same transformations of consciousness. That was the beginning.--Robert Anton Wilson, Interview, Positive Atheisim.

Once again, thinking about the Dutch Coffeeshop politics and double-crossed language and policy involved with the operations on all sides, i return back to the language. The language of Christian Parties and Conservative politicians has a lot in common at a base level, i notice that a general monotheistic mind set often leads to generally Aristotelian language and logic, severely limited and dogmatic when based upon two valued logic, or duality.

I am no linguist, but anybody with a sharp eye and ear for similarities will recognize the linguistic traps set by these people. And anybody who has looked at the war on some people who use some drugs will recognize the language of drug war, the lack of any consistent pluralistic logic, the nihilistic imagery, and the religious overtones of puritanical crusaders.

The solution to a part of the problem, as i view it, in Holland, consists of a more focused linguistic analysis of everything published by the anti-coffeeshop and anti-drug crusaders. If i can detect many meaningless statements, and bare faced lies, surely others who are looking to defend the case for coffeeshops can too? and so what is the strategy for addressing their wrong headed criticism? how do you engage in meaningful debate with the goal of a more scientific approach to processing information, based on a widely distributed array of current data? How to communicate with monotheistic Christian crusaders and their Aristotelian either/or world view of good/evil, god/devil right/left in/out for/against white/black etc.

This is my calling for anybody interested in helping the plight of Dutch coffeeshops, and in particular those in Amsterdam affected by the recent school rule. I implore you to take what you view to be the strongest parts of your opponents argument, and start with those. Begin to provide better versions of that argument, build it up to be as strong as you can make it. Then begin to tear it apart piece by piece, syllable by syllable, and show that there are further arguments against it.

"Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress."--Gandhi

I feel that the exercise of strengthening your opponents arguments will keep you on your toes, and with luck, combined with what i have said above, and what i will link to below, encourage you to obsolete any dualistic argument with a superior, intelligent, and fair (fairer) model of the information, a pluralistic presentation of just some, of the vast array of information on the subject, in this case arguments for and against cannabis coffeeshops in Holland.

Next, when you have terse and meaningful paragraphs that describe the situation as it is, according to your own nervous system, and the information fields you have created--hopefully based on sourced documents including timebinded 'quotes' and other 'exhibits'--start to rewrite those paragraphs.

Rewrite those paragraphs in as many different styles as you can think of. As a comedian, a classical historian, a typically shallow news broadcaster, a scene from your favourite T.V series or movie, a song lyric, a limerick, a Haiku, an entire short story, a mathematical equation, a picture!

If you are still with me, you catch my drift. What we need to do is turn the process of art and poetry and spontaneous creativity into something that can address directly, the terrible ills and trickery at work in our surrounding environment, wherever that may be. Together we can break the spell, and as i said, obsolete the corrupt medieval arguments with superior scientific 21st century solutions.

Singing matter, shouting matter, dancing matter, these are the tale of the tribe. Write, paint, dance, sing, make merry with the knowledge that your research methodology is light years ahead of the opposition, and so anytime spent fighting the opposition is time spent in the past, an important consideration. There are ways to include both history and 'the long poem' together, these are the methods of study i recommend.  Break on through and make it new.

“The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases."--Robert Anton Wilson.

--Fly Agaric 23
Damsterhom

Yes we can, mushrooms can change the weather

Mushrooms can change the weather, according to new research by UCLA and Trinity College that looked into how the fungi can disperse their spores without wind. The study discovered mushrooms create their own wind by creating water vapor, cooling the air around them and thereby creating a current that turns into wind, helping the spores create new mushrooms. RT's Ameera David takes a look at which types of mushrooms are the wind-creating kind.

How Mushrooms Can Save the World

Crusading mycologist Paul Stamets says fungi can clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear meltdowns.

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/13-mushrooms-clean-up-oil-spills-nuclear-meltdowns-and-human-health#.UqGzpidTDoa

By Kenneth Miller|Friday, May 31, 2013

Pioppino mushrooms (Agrocybe aegerita) induced tumor regression, reversing cancer in lab mice. The species also controlled blood sugar in diabetic mice.

Stuart Isett

For Paul Stamets, the phrase “mushroom hunt” does not denote a leisurely stroll with a napkin-lined basket. This morning, a half-dozen of us are struggling to keep up with the mycologist as he charges through a fir-and-alder forest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. It’s raining steadily, and the moss beneath our feet is slick, but Stamets, 57, barrels across it like a grizzly bear heading for a stump full of honey. He vaults over fallen trees, scrambles up muddy ravines, plows through shin-deep puddles in his rubber boots. He never slows down, but he halts abruptly whenever a specimen demands his attention.

This outing is part of a workshop on the fungi commonly known as mushrooms — a class of organisms whose cell walls are stiffened by a molecule called chitin instead of the cellulose found in plants, and whose most ardent scientific evangelist is the man ahead of us. Stamets is trying to find a patch of chanterelles, a variety known for its exquisite flavor. But the species that stop him in his tracks, and bring a look of bliss to his bushy-bearded face, possess qualities far beyond the culinary.

He points to a clutch of plump oyster mushrooms halfway up an alder trunk. “These could clean up oil spills all over the planet,” he says. He ducks beneath a rotting log, where a rare, beehive-like Agarikon dangles. “This could provide a defense against weaponized smallpox.” He plucks a tiny, gray Mycena alcalina from the soil and holds it under our noses. “Smell that? It seems to be outgassing chlorine.” To Stamets, that suggests it can break down toxic chlorine-based polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Most Americans think of mushrooms as ingredients in soup or intruders on a well-tended lawn. Stamets, however, cherishes a grander vision, one trumpeted in the subtitle of his 2005 book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Mushroom-producing fungi, he believes, can serve as game changers in fields as disparate as medicine, forestry, pesticides and pollution control. He has spent the past quarter-century preaching that gospel to anyone who will listen.

HOW MUSHROOMS CAN SAVE THE WORLD

Timothy Leary — transhumanism with a SMI2LE by R.U. Sirius

Timothy Leary — transhumanism with a SMI2LE

June 9, 2013 by R.U. Sirius

 Most people know Timothy Leary as the “LSD guru” who encouraged people to “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” in the 1960s. But a surprising number of transhumanist types don’t know that he was one of them.

In fact, Leary may have been the first to signal a memeplex for the transhuman future — SMI2LE (Space Migration Intelligence Increase and Life Extension) — back in the mid-1970s.
My new book, Timothy Leary’s Trip Thru Time, explores Leary’s life and philosophies, including his transhuman explorations.

Here’s an excerpt from the book. You can read the entire electronic version free here, or buy a print version.

1976–1996 — Transhumanism with a SMI2LE
Leary emerged from prison in 1976 as one of the advocates for advances in the human condition that would soon be called transhumanism. At that point in time, you could probably have counted the number of proto-transhumanists with a voice in the world on the fingers of one hand.
In fact, going back to 1974, about a year after Leary expressed, in his Starseed Transmission, his wild prison fantasy of taking 5,000 advanced mutants out to galaxy central, Gerard K. O’Neill, a physicist and professor at Princeton University released a paper claiming that human settlements could be built in space at Lagrange points — locations where a habitat could theoretically remain stable.
One of these stable points was called “L5” and it soon became the focus of a movement to colonize space. Besides Leary, a number of major figures in 1970s culture became part of the movement for space colonization, including Carl Sagan, Freeman Dyson, Stewart Brand — a former Merry Prankster who had started the Whole Earth Catalogue and was about to become, arguably, the central figure in the creation of digital culture, NASA astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and California Governor Jerry Brown, who sponsored a conference to explore the possibilities. (This is where he got the nickname “Governor Moonbeam.”)
Other people cycling through the movement who would later become widely known for their participation in other techno-movements included K. Eric Drexler — considered by many the father of nanotechnology — and Hans Moravec, one of the early proponents of “strong AI” (Artificial Intelligence that exceeds human capacity).
The enthusiasm for Space Migration dissipated not so much because the L5 concept was unworkable as that it was way too expensive to pull off. While space colonization fell into disrepute, arguments are once again being raised that it is the only way to resolve problems of population, energy consumption and the psychosocial impact that the absence of a frontier might be having on the human species.
Timothy Leary’s arguments for Space Migration were tied in with his advocacy for Intelligence Increase and Life Extension (SMI2LE). Always one for sloganeering, Leary came up with “No Rejuvenation without Space Migration,” believing that issues around overpopulation, limited resources and the potential for exhausting personal and cultural novelty on this limited planet could be answered by spreading out and finding new adventures in the stars. (He would later believe he’d found an answer to at least the latter problem in Virtual Reality.)
The potential for technologies that increase intelligence and expand lifespans beyond their apparent biological limits has become the obsession of a large and growing movement called transhumanism.
The first of eight points in “The Transhumanist Declaration,” originally written in 1998 and revised, reads, “We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet earth.”
In other words, SMI2LE. Leading transhumanists rarely acknowledge that Leary defined the movement with precision 38 years ago.

Related:

• Timothy Leary’s Trip Thru Time

Video games and your degree: Can they ever mix?

Yes, i would argue they can mix, and do mix, and will mix into something unlike a game, or video, or CGI, something to blow your socks off. Let us play, steve fly>

2009's Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine included a study which revealed the findings that people who are highly stressed and suffer from depression could vent their aggression and frustration through playing video games. If people can knock out a pedestrian on the streets of GTA's Liberty City and only suffer the consequences of the animated police chasing after them then, it could be argued, that it is much better the gamer vents their aggression in a virtual world then in the real world.

Researchers at the University of Rochester found due to the nature of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and how the gamers often have to make “life or death” decisions for their characters, people who participated in these games would gain plenty of practice, and therefore improve, their decision making skills for use in the real world. The most well known and one of the longest running MMORPGs is World Of Warcraft in which players can develop their characters to gain various talents and skills. The game provides an inexhaustible system of goals and success which make the games more competitive for the players. -- http://www.independent.co.uk/student/student-life/video-games-and-your-degree-can-they-ever-mix-8926365.html

Cory Doctorow on Singularity 1 on 1: The Singularity As A Progressive Apocalypse

 

Published on 11 Sep 2012

http://www.singularityweblog.com/cory...

Cory Doctorow is one of my all time most favorite science fiction writers. So it is no surprise I had so much fun interviewing him.

I don't know how he does it, but Cory is one of those rare individuals who can juggle successfully being a father, an avid reader, a blogger, an activist, a journalist and a prolific science fiction writer, all at once.

It is for this reason that I was persistent in chasing Cory for over 2 years so that I can finally get him on Singularity 1 on 1. And it was totally worth it: Doctorow is indeed a very dynamic, eloquent, passionate, challenging and fun interlocutor.

During our conversation Cory covers a wide variety of topics such as: how Star Wars inspired him to become a science fiction writer; Cory's initial jobs as a bookstore seller, Greenpeace activist, web developer, entrepreneur and director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; the intimate relationship between being a science fiction writer, a blogger and an activist; the motivation and goals behind his work; what science fiction is about and what it is good and bad at doing; Doctorow's take on the technological singularity as a "progressive apocalypse"; his "militant atheism" and technology activism.

Some of my favorite quotes that I will take away from this interview with Cory are:

"Science fiction is very good at predicting the present."

"Evolution is not perfection. Evolution is suitability."

"We have failed to appreciate the gravitas of the internet and continue to regulate it as if it is a glorified video on demand service. And as we do this, we put everything that we do on the internet -- which is everything -- in jeopardy."

Synthetic Biology and Open Cog for 2013

Do violent video games lead kids to....

Yes, if the games are produced by the US armed forces, and other armies around the planet who use games or gaming environments to actually, carry out violent crimes, but, alas, at a distance, so thats OK i guess.



"Texas A&M International University Professor Christopher Ferguson told NPR, “You know most of the debate now is really on to these minor acts of aggressiveness,” he said. “You know we’re talking about little children sticking their tongues out at each other and that sort of thing.”
Ferguson conducted his own meta-analysis and found no connection between video games and youth violence. “We have done a number of studies of video game violence with both children and adults and find no evidence to support links between video game violence and youth violence. Furthermore, youth violence has declined to 40 year lows, not gone up in recent years,” Ferguson told PC Gamer. -- http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2013/02/22/do-violent-video-games-lead-kids-to-be-violent-in-the-real-world/

The Tide is turning on the war on some drugs

Life after cannabis prohibition: The city announces its ambitions

Peter Stanners

March 15, 2013 - 22:53

The Copenhagen Model will see the production, sale and consumption of cannabis legalised, but many questions remain

 

The conference was the latest attempt by mayor Frank Jensen (Socialdemokraterne), centre, to legalise cannabis in Copenhagen for a trial period (Photo: Peter Stanners)

The tide is turning against the criminalisation of cannabis. Portugal, the Netherlands and several US states have to varying degrees decriminalised its use and now Copenhagen has decided to join the movement with a three-year trial to decriminalise the drug.

READ ON HERE

Swimming in Mexican Cenote, Tulum.

From my recent trip to Mexico, bringing Maybelogic and drums to Chitchen Itza offerings. I snapped some underwater footage at Cenote Encantado, the morning after a great fire ceremony and honoring of local spirits in the most delicate and awe-inspired setting imaginable. aho.

Professor David Nutt - The Inconvenient Truth About Drugs

Professor David Nutt - The Inconvenient Truth About Drugs

Terence and Dennis Mckenna on James Joyce from True Hallucinations

On a recent re-reading of 'True Hallucinations' by Terence Mckenna, this paragraph jumped out at me like a Jaguar:

"This particular afternoon, Dennis called our attension to the little hen, saying that if one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? only the one who could have fashioned the perculiar world that we had fallen into. And that was? He looked around expectantly, but finding no takers he delivered his own punch line:
"James Joyce.

Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case: that Finnegans Wake represented the most complete understanding yet achieved of the relation of the human mind to time and space and that therefore Joyce, at his death, had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing this corner of God's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis, who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.

"Jim and Nora," as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were both in and acting through everything at La Chorrera, particularly in the things that Joyce had loved. The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the wake was one of these things. It was Joycean humor that radiated outward from everything in our jungle Eden. These ideas were absurd but delightful, and they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace."--Terence Mckenna. Looking Backward. Truse Hallucinations. pg. 147. 

Alan Watts on 'these drugs' (psychoactive compounds)

" The nearest thing i know in literature to the
reflective use of one of These drugs is the so-called
Bead Game in hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi (Das
Glasperlenspiel). Hesse writes of a distant future in
which an order of Scholar-mystics have discovered an
ideographic language which can relate All branches of
science and art, philosophy and religion. The game
consists Of playing with the relationships between
configurations in these various Fields in the same way
that the musician plays with harmonic and
Contra(pun)tal relationships. - The Joyous Cosmology,
Alan W. Wattts, Page 21.

Taken from my poem:

https://sites.google.com/site/ourhistorysback/prose-toolz-2-0

Protest planned against Dutch 'weed pass'

There was one exception: the "Easy Going" shop of Marc Josemans, chairman of the coffee shop owners' association, which remained open just long enough to provoke two legal conflicts he hopes may ultimately derail the policy.


First Josemans turned away a group of foreigners who oppose the rule, and who went to the police to file a discrimination complaint. Then he started selling weed to anybody willing to buy, without checking for passes.--Miami Herald. May 1st, 2012.

 

 

Protest planned against Dutch 'weed pass'

A tourist smokes marijuana at a coffee shop called 'de Dampkring' or 'Atmosphere,' in the centre of Amsterdam, Netherlands. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

AMSTERDAM — A policy barring foreign tourists from buying marijuana in the Netherlands went into effect in parts of the country Tuesday, with attention focused on the southern city of Maastricht, where a cafe was warned over violating the ban and a buyers' protest is planned for later in the day.

Weed is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but it has been sold openly for decades in small amounts in designated cafes known as "coffee shops" under the country's famed tolerance policy.
Under a government policy change, as of May 1, only holders of a "weed pass" are supposed to be allowed to purchase the drug in three southern provinces. Nonresidents aren't eligible for the pass, which means tourists are effectively banned.

The policy isn't supposed to go into effect in Amsterdam, home to around a third of the country's coffee shops, until next year -- and it may never be. The city opposes the idea and the conservative national government collapsed last week, raising questions about whether a new Cabinet will persevere with the policy change after elections are held in September.

Most attention Tuesday was on the city of Maastricht, which borders both Belgium and Germany and which has suffered the effects of a constant flow of traffic from non-Dutch Europeans driving to the city just to purchase as much cannabis as possible and drive back home.

Most shops in Maastricht plan to refuse to use the pass and kept their doors shut Tuesday.

There was one exception: the "Easy Going" shop of Marc Josemans, chairman of the coffee shop owners' association, which remained open just long enough to provoke two legal conflicts he hopes may ultimately derail the policy.

First Josemans turned away a group of foreigners who oppose the rule, and who went to the police to file a discrimination complaint. Then he started selling weed to anybody willing to buy, without checking for passes.

"The police paid me a visit about a half an hour later and warned me I was violating the new rules, and if I do it again, I'll be closed down for a month," he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.

Josemans said he planned to continue selling to all comers, and he fully expects to see his shop closed. His response to that would be to take his case to the European Court of Justice.
"Discrimination is never the right answer," he said.

Early reports from other affected cities -- Tilburg, Roermond and Eindhoven, among others -- were that most shops were either remaining closed, or ignoring the pass.

"They'll wait it out until this whole pass plan goes away," Josemans said.

Even most Dutch weed smokers aren't getting the passes, assuming the law won't be enforced. Some are worried the information they have obtained a weed pass will somehow leak from a government database and cause them difficulties with health care insurance or getting a mortgage.

A former chairman of the Netherlands' Police Union Hans van Duijn told reporters in front of "Easy Going" that he believes the new policy's negative side effects will outweigh any benefits and that enforcing it would waste precious resources.

"Everyone who is rejected here will walk a few meters (yards) down the street to the drug dealers who drive over from Rotterdam, among other places, and ride around in large numbers," he said.
Robert Anthony, a Belgian, said he "regularly" comes to the Netherlands "to buy weed in peace."

He predicted it will be "chaos on the streets very soon."

Ironically, the reason the Dutch tolerance policy got going in the 1970s was not on the theory that marijuana was OK -- it has always been viewed as a public health problem -- but because containing it in shops seemed like a pragmatic way to deal with the problems caused by street dealing.

But a growing body of evidence linking the drug to mental illness and a decade-long shift to the political right in the Netherlands has already led to minor changes in the policy, notably the closure of many shops located near schools or known for causing problems.
But the weed pass policy represents a significant change.

Asked whether he thought the policy will succeed, Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten said he was certain it will.

"The next Cabinet can always roll back everything, but they will continue prudent policies," he said. "I think this is smart policy, so I'm not worried about that."

http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120501/120501_netherlands_marijuana/20120501/?hub=CP24Extras