Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“After you fiddle with psilocybin for a while the question of whether or not there is an alien intelligence becomes moot.”

“We are embedding ourselves in a matrix of silicone and glass.”

“ We are beginning to embed ourselves into a cultural membrane of some sort.”

“What is happening is a globalizing of intelligence.”

“The reductionists who want to say these drugs just perturb the brain I don’t think have taken enough of these things.”

“Our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.”

“I think psilocybin three or four times a year definitely means that you are a psychedelic person. For sure it means that your every waking moment is informed and transformed by your relationship to this stuff. It doesn’t take very much because it’s a way of thinking.”

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A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate from George Wada on Vimeo.

Guest speakers: Lorenzo Hagerty & Chris Hedges

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Chris Hedges.]

“I think when we speak today about American values what we’re really speaking about are corporate-instilled values.”

“When you spend over a decade brutalizing people, people become brutal.”

“You can’t use the word ‘liberty’ when your government watches you 24 hours a day. That’s the relationship of a master and a slave.”

“There is no difference between a night raid in Oakland and a night raid in Falluja . . . none!”

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Hedges v. Obama

U.S. Drones kill more people than ISIS: Chris Hedges

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Industrial Workers of the World A Union For All Workers

COINTELPRO

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist

PROGRAM NOTES:

The final speaker at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures, which are held at Burning Man each year, was Grover Norquist. According to Wikipedia, “… he is an American political advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases and a co-founder of the Islamic Free Market Institute. A libertarian-leaning Republican, he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” While to those who haven’t yet had an opportunity to attend Burning Man, his attendance at such an event may seem unlikely, in the extensive Q&A that followed his brief talk, it is quite evident that he has many admirers on the playa. I think that you will be fascinated as he very candidly discusses not just tax matters but also touches on what he thinks about Burning Man itself, as well as his position regarding psychedelics, legalizing cannabis, and mandatory minimum sentencing.

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Guest speakers: Glenn Greenwald and Stefan Molyneux

PROGRAM NOTES:

“What the NSA has done is essentially converted the Internet from this unprecedented zone of freedom into the most powerful means of surveillance ever known in human history.” -Glenn Greenwald

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Stefan Molyneux.]

“If we have a bitcoin universe, you don’t get to print money for war. You don’t get to have money for a prison/industrial complex. You don’t get money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.”

“So bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do.”

“Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.”

“To limit money is to limit political power.”

“If we have a bitcoin universe, you don’t get to print money for war. You don’t get to print money for a prison/industrial complex. You don’t get to print money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.”

“When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.”

“There is going to be enormous amounts of resistance to the adoption of bitcoin, but I really believe that it’s about the most peaceful revolution that we can have in this world.”

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Guest speakers: Joh Isaac Mitchell & Michael Goldstein

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today we feature two interesting talks: Art as Technology and Crypto-anarchy. The first talk is from the 2013 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. And that story is followed by a concise explanation of how bitcoin technology evolved and that cryptocurrency is only the tip of its iceberg. And should you harbor fears that bitcoin is a government operation, there is this quote by Michael Goldsetin:
“Satoshi could have been an NSA backed totalitarian, but his protocol is strictly anarchist. He could have easily been paid by the government to create it, but he created something that the government itself cannot shut down. And the protocol itself is strictly anti-government in the sense that it does not allow for government.”

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Follow Michael Goldstein on Twitter

Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

Cypherpunk in Wikipedia

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities

John Gilmore on the Psychedelic Salon

Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“A psychedelic point of view means a point of view which honors consciousness.”

“You do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate.”

“Our role is not to understand but to appreciate.”

“It’s ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality, because we don’t even know where we want to go.”J

“We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane.”

“Once nature is taken as the ground of being then permission to inflate the image of the ego is denied.”

“Intuition must be given prominence in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world.”

“Science is really the, it’s the plumbing level of reality. It doesn’t catch the integrated nature of language, the evolution of fairy tales, the dynamics of love affairs, the quintessence of genius, these are the things, that as human beings, structure and constellate and guide and inform our world. And science has nothing to say about these things.”

“Intuition is the unifying of experience into a gestalt image of the world.”

“We are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing.”

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Guest speaker: Lorenzo

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today’s podcast picks up with the third section of the workshop that Bruce Damer and I led on January 28th. This section features my second presentation of the day in which I try to live up to the advanced billing for the workshop which read: “Lorenzo will take us from 2013 into the emerging era of cyber-enhanced humans, immersed in a meme-space stranger than we can suppose.”

In the Occupy segment of the podcast I feature an interview with and a talk by Chris Hedges, including his criticism of the Black Bloc hooligans who are doing their best to destroy the Occupy Movement.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

Art by Randal Roberts (who provided the art for this podcast)

Description of the elements in “Fawkes” by Randal Roberts
» Continue reading “Podcast 300 – “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” Part 3”

Guest speakers: David Graeber & Tim Pool

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today’s podcast takes a look back at some of the roots of the current Occupy Movement on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Today is also the eve of the third anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and so I have put together an audio collage that ranges from some early sounds of the movement to interviews with David Graeber and Tim Pool, as well as some comments by fellow saloner Jaret, and a couple of sound bites from Lawrence Lessig and Senator Bernie Sanders to round things out.

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Links to topics discussed in this podcast:

Battle in Seattle
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – Lawrence Lessig Interview
Brian Leher Program with David Graeber
Majority Report interview with Tim Pool
Jaret Johnston’s FEEDBACK ART

Guest speaker: Hakim Bey

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Hakim Bey.]

“Why are artists still meddling, or mediating, between people and their desires?”

“All livelihoods are arts, from midwifery to war, nothing is mere labor.” [In reference to gift economies.]

“The artist sacrifices talent for money. The audience sacrifices money for talent.”

“One can no longer distinguish between cops and cop-culture, the media-induced hallucination of a society designed by its lawyers and police.”

“Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.”

“The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desires.”

“I will argue that illegality means more than mere law-breaking. Illegality as a positive attribute of the Temporary Autonomous Zone implies that the very structure, or deepest motivation of the TAZ-group necessitates the overcoming of consensus values, and that this is true when even no statute or regulation has been broken.”

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone should serve as the Matrix for the emergence of a Sorelian myth of uprising.”

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise any more than the revolution can be realized without dancing, as Emma Goldman put it.”

“Today quilts. Tomorrow, perhaps, The Uprising!”

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Today’s talk by Hakim Bey is from the following 2-CD Set.
T.A.Z.
Temporary Autonomous Zone

Joseph Matheny, Rob Brezsny, Hakim Bey, Nick Herbert, and Robert Anton Wilson

BrainMeats Podcast
Episode 1 Occupy BrainMeats

The inaugural episode of the BrainMeats podcast is devoted to the Occupy movement and what hackers and makers can do to support the protesters on the ground. Willow spoke over Skype to Ari Lacenski, Eleanor Saitta, Matthew Borgatti, Rubin Starset, and Smári McCarthy about the history of OWS, the meaning of illegibility within the movement, software tools for protesters, and more.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Occupy Segment alone is available at: Occupy Updates Day 46

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“It’s impossible to stop the forward march of information.”

“This is the chaos at the end of history.”

“Because our culture crisis is so much deeper [than during the Renaissance], we are casting back to 20,000 or 30,000 years back into the past.”

“I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is a task of recognizing it when you find it.”

“When talking about evolution it is important to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics is that there is no teleology. That means that evolution is not moving toward something. All notion of purpose has to be given up. It isn’t that things evolve or move toward higher forms. It’s just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher form.”

“Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.”

“One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is because they catalyze the evolution of language.”

“I see the whole world we’re living in as basically the legacy of LSD.”

“The dreams of the alchemists of the 16th Century have been entirely realized in the technical accomplishments of the 20th Century.”

“[Acid] heads are in charge of designing the cutting edge of culture.”

“But there are no professionals in the field of self-exploration. That’s everybody’s job. I mean, you all are Ph.D.s in consciousness exploration, or if you’re not you should be, because what else have you got going?”

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Occupy Video Streams

Livestream.com

Ustream.com

OccupyStream.com

Links to David Graeber’s Work

Wikipedia entry about David Graeber

Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination by David Graeber

A conversation with anarchist David Graeber about anthropology on the Charlie Rose program

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber