Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu May 31, 2018 7:10 am

The Family Dolls, Featuring Charlie, Leslie, & More

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Leslie Meets Bobby

Leslie aced secretary school. She registered at an employment agency. The SRF thing had been a fantasy she had with Bobby (and maybe her father), but she and Bobby didn’t last.

Leslie: “When you’re young and very in love, the breakup can be very difficult—so I was trying to make it on my own.”

She moved in with friends in Victorville, California, a nowhere-to-be desert town, where she met Bobby Beausoleil, musician, artist, and knife thrower. He had a small group of women already in train, but Leslie was into him, so the two of them stole one of her friends’ cars and drove off.

Leslie: “He was an angel, and I told him I would love him forever.” Leslie called her mother to say she wouldn’t be in touch for a while—she was going to do what she wanted, when she wanted, where she wanted. She was “dropping out.” Bobby had a house tent on the bus, an old munitions truck. He called himself “Sir Hokus,” (aka “Cupid,” aka “the Frenchman”) and described himself as a minstrel; he wore a confederate war costume and carried a cane and a top hat. They drifted north, stealing food along the way.

The Haight was getting seedy, but San Francisco was Bobby’s scene. He’d been in a few bands—one of them, Love, was a big deal. Bobby said he’d been too young, seventeen, to sign the record contract.

Bobby was also an actor. Bobby had also been in a few movies. For a couple of years he’d worked with Kenneth Anger on a film. Bobby did the music and starred as Satan. But he and Anger had a blowout (they may have been lovers), and Anger had placed a curse on him. In LA, Bobby had done a soft-core porno film, Ramrodder, at an old western set—the Spahn Ranch. That’s where Bobby had met one of his women, Catherine “Gypsy” Share, who’d also had a part in the film. She was a little older, wiser, and more radical than the average hippy. Gypsy wanted a messiah, and there was one man she kept talking about, “The Wizard,” who had his own bevy of women. In late August, Leslie got to meet him.

Leslie: “He just walked up and smiled real nice, you know, and I just smiled back. And he wasn’t any different than all the others. But I could feel much strength in meeting him.”

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01 LP release of Wheels of Fire, by Cream. 02 In The Berkeley Barb, Ed Sanders publishes his satirical essay “Predictions for Yippie Activities.” Highlights: ass washing, worship of filth, protestors armed with fish eyes. 03 In his musings on The Beatles, he echoes a popular assessment of the day: “The Beatles are a new family group. They are organized around the way they create. They are communal art. They…form a family unit that is horizontal rather than vertical.” 04 At the Newport Folk Festival, Steppenwolf performs “Born to be Wild.” It’s the dawn of heavy metal. 05 In Los Angeles, Black Panthers Tommy Lewis, Steve Bartholomew, and Arthur Morris are shot dead by police. 07 James Brown records “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which will become an anthem of Black Power. 08 At the Republican National Convention in Florida, Richard Milhous Nixon wins the party’s presidential nomination. 08 Race riots in Miami, ten miles from the Republican Convention. Three die by police bullets. 09 In Van Nuys, California, Beach Boys associate Gregg Jakobson records several songs with musical prospect Charles Manson. 09 End of a 267-day strike by Detroit newspapers. 12 In New York, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company Band release the studio/live album Cheap Thrills. 12 The Beach Boys perform live in London. 13 Alexandros Panagoulis, Greek politician and poet, mounts an attempted assassination of right-wing military leader Colonel George Papadopoulos. 15 Radio Free London commences transmission of pirate FM radio. 18 The Peace and Freedom party selects Eldridge Cleaver as its presidential candidate. 19 Publication of Tom Wolf’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which chronicles the adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. 19 LP release of Best of The Beach Boys Vol 3 and The Beach Boys compilation Stack-O-Tracks. 20 Soviet tanks, backed by 200,000 troops, invade Prague. 23 In Chicago, the Yippies nominate Pigasus the Immortal, a pig, for President. The pig and six others are arrested. 24 With the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific, France becomes the fifth thermonuclear power. 25 Five days of demonstrations and riots commence at the Democratic Convention: 10,000 demonstrators versus 11,000 Chicago Police, 6,000 National Guardsmen, seven thousand five hundred army troops, and one thousand FBI and military intelligence agents. After the convention, the Chicago police reported 589 arrests, 119 police injuries, and 100 demonstrator injuries. Activists estimate 300 demonstrator injuries. The clash is dubbed “Czechago,” alluding to Russia’s lockdown of Prague. 26 The singles “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” are the first releases of Apple Records, founded by the Beatles. 27 Tom Hayden, arrested during demonstrations at the Democratic Convention, is beaten and held in the Cook County Jail.

“The God of Fuck”

Bobby hit the road and left Leslie at Spahn Ranch with “The Wizard.” Leslie saw something in Charlie Manson, and she saw that Bobby saw something in him. The sex was uninhibited, but she was still surprised when she saw Bobby giving Charlie a blow job. Charlie called himself “The God of Fuck,” and was supposed to be such a great lover that women had to beware of heart attack. Leslie wasn’t too impressed with his prowess, and they only had sex a few times—Charlie wanted to leave her for Bobby. Charlie was a musician, ambitious, and Bobby was connected and gifted and might be useful.

Charlie was older: 34, but he was a youthful person, only 5″3″ and with a young mindset—partly because he’d spent most of his life in state custody and jail. Two years before, he’d gotten parole. He’d actually asked to stay in prison, the only home he knew, but when he ended up in the Haight—the Summer of Love—he fell right in, playing his folksy, prison guitar, and living off petty crime. His rap was a mish-mash of prisonyard, Scientology, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Christianity, astrology, California cult, Satanism—whatever was going around. He played his music in the Tenderloin District, and gathered devotees.

Some of the people at Spahn were familiar to Bobby; Susan “Sadie Mae Glutz” Atkins had lived in San Francisco, and like Bobby, had been involved in Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Charles “Tex” Watson, new to Spahn, was a former High School BMOC, star athlete and over-achiever; he’d left Texas, dropped out of college, and given up his mod lifestyle as a wig salesman and dope dealer. Tex was trying to prove himself by building a house on Spahn.

Charlie knew how to keep everyone fed and jobless. And he was almost a rockstar. Traveling California, he and the women, “the Witches of Mendocino,” had hooked up with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. By August, they were all living at Wilson’s house, driving his cars, and hanging out with his friends, some of them famous, and some of them powerful. Charlie knew all the big name people and Angela Lansbury’s kids were around; the daughter, 14, carried a note from her mom saying it was ok. Dennis and Charlie churned out recordings in Dennis’s home studio. Neil Young was impressed by Charlie, and talking to industry people about record deals.

Leslie: “You couldn’t meet a nicer group of people.”


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1968, September

09.01 The Manson group purchases a school bus and paints it black. They drive the bus while the paint is wet, and the bus, festooned with flotsam, has a felty appearance. 04 In the Congo, an army coup deposes President Maseba-Debat. 06 Mattel’s Hot Wheels hit toy stores. 07 In Atlantic City, New Jersey, women liberation groups protest the Miss America Pageant. The press release reads: “this year, reality will liberate the contest auction-block in the guise of “genyooine” de-plasticized, breathing women. … It should be a groovy day on the Boardwalk in the sun with our sisters. In case of arrests, however, we plan to reject all male authority and demand to be busted by policewomen only. (In Atlantic City, women cops are not permitted to make arrests—dig that!).” 06 Swaziland gains independence from the United Kingdom. 08 Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party, is convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of an Oakland policeman. 09 Arthur Ashe is the first black person to win the US Open. 11 Responding to a statement made by the Black Unity party, which began, “The Brothers are calling on the Sisters not to take the pill,” the “Black Sisters” write “black sisters decide for themselves whether to have a baby or not to have a baby.” 11 The Beach Boys record a version of Manson’s song “Never Learn Not to Love.” 11 U.C. Berkley offers non-credit lectures by Eldridge Clever. The State, led by Governor Ronald Reagan, refuses to pay Cleaver, and threatens to withhold the University’s annual budget. 16 Richard Nixon belts out “Sock it to Me!” tagline of the television show, “Laugh-In.” 18 Amidst protests, the Mexican Army occupies Mexico City University. 24 Premiere of the television cop show, Mod Squad. 28 “Hey Jude,” goes #1 on the US charts. 30 The 900th US military aircraft is shot down over North Vietnam.

Spahn Ranch”

Dennis Wilson had his people add it up; he’d spent over $100,000 on freeloaders. He moved out of his playboy crash pad and three weeks later, when the lease expired, Manson and the crew moved back to Spahn—but Manson still had some juice with Wilson. One of Wilson’s partners, Gregg Jakobson, and one of Wilson’s friends, Terry Melcher, who was a major LA producer (The Beach Boys, The Byrds, The Mamas & The Papas) and the son of Doris Day, were interested in Manson. Manson had his people singing and called the troupe “The Family Jam.”

Charlie would say everything was about sex, in and out. While everyone was tripping and making love, he’d stay straight to talk his game and help “his children” get over their hangups. For ex.: men had to have sex with men, and women had to have sex with him while they fantasized about their father.

Lyrics from Charlie’s song, “Always is Always Forever”: “Always is always forever / As long as one is one / Inside yourself for your father / All is none all is none all is one.”

Charlie didn’t like Hippies, he called his people “Slippies,” and kept the men in shortish hair. But Spahn was a typical Aquarian commune: big porch, showers outside. The women took care of the many children (the women weren’t supposed to talk to the children, just babble, because mothering was one of Western Culture’s biggest problems), and prepared meals with ingredients harvested from the trash of the A&P.

“All are one,” but there was a hierarchy; Leslie, as newbie, was at the bottom. Charlie could get freaked out by strong women—he hit women occasionally, because it was “what they wanted,” and one time he almost beat Gypsy to death. Leslie (now “Lulu”) regressed—lived in a dream. Every day was dress up: as cowgirl, she gave tours of Spahn; as motorcycle woman, she fixed the bikes; as a “back to the lander” she pumped water at the water pump. The women shared clothing that they hand washed and kept in a heap; their bond was sisterly.

Tex: “Then there was Leslie Van Houten, in some ways the prettiest of the women. Leslie was like a little girl—emotional, easily hurt, spontaneous, willing to do whatever she felt like doing, without thinking. The other girls ordered her around a lot and she accepted it, falling in her ‘mountain folk’ role, complete with lazy, exaggerated accent and pretended helplessness. Underneath all the crazy playacting and little-girl manner, I felt she was always genuinely afraid of Charlie. There was no question that she would do anything he told her to.”

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 9:11 am

"May 68 is of the order of pure event, free from all normal, or normative causalities. Its history is a ‘series of amplified instabilities and fluctuations.’ There were many agitations, gesticulations, slogans, idiocies, illusions in 68, but this is not what counts. What counts amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if a society suddenly perceived what was intolerable in itself and also saw the possibility of change. It is a collective phenomenon in the form of: ‘Give me the possible, or else I’ll suffocate.’ The possible does not pre-exist, it is created by the event. It is a matter of life. The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work)."

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “May 68 Did Not Take Place”


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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 1:22 pm

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Queering Tantra: Beyond Masculine and Feminine


On offering men’s and women’s circles, after in-depth discussion and some feeling of loss, my husband and I have switched to sharing sexuality as a whole group. We had been focused on the value of single-gender circles when it came to sharing sexual concerns associated with having male and female reproductive systems, like erectile disfunction or low labido that can be a symptom of menopause. Yet there is even greater value when people of all genders and sexual orientations share sexual concerns as a whole group. After all, we often share sex together, so why not communicate our concerns to one another in a peaceful, open and honest circle? In my experience, this is most inclusive and beneficial for all.

Our society bombards us with advertising and other propaganda that displays a narrow perspective on sex, and for transgender people in particular these images often do not match up with their physical or emotional reality. This can result in obstacles to sexual engagement and to the ability to orgasm. Healing from the trauma this inflicts can be a slow journey. The subtle sexual energy circulation and connection that Tantra provides can help. Making your workshops, classes and private sessions welcoming to the transgender population is a valuable service and can make a huge difference in an individual or couples’ sexual health and life.

I know, it’s a huge shift and it takes intentional monitoring and adjustment of the language you are using, but it’s important. It also allows you to reach more people who could benefit from your teachings. When you do it enough, it becomes natural. This is how cultures evolve.


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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 07, 2018 6:44 am

Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump

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Before I read Dark Star Rising, I had no idea that Trump was a devoted follower of the New Thought movement, which has it roots in 19th century mysticism. Trump's family attended Marble Collegiate Church in New York, which was ministered by a pro-Christian nationalist named Norman Vincent Peale, who promulgated a doctrine of "positive thinking" -- the idea that you can use your mind to cure yourself of disease, get rich, or even become president ("Change your thoughts and you can change the world"). I also didn't know that the alt-right bases much of its ideology on an Italian philosopher and mystic born in 1889 named Julius Evola, who thought the problem with Mussolini was that he wasn't a big enough fascist. And then there's Aleksandr Dugin, a very influential Russian fascist philosopher who is a kind of Rasputin figure for Putin and who pushes the idea that the only way to return Russia to greatness is by wiping liberal democracy off the face of the earth. Dugin is relatively unknown in the West, except among members of the alt-right and the dark enlightenment, who would love to install the kind of fascist regime Dugin is advocating in their own countries. Dark Star Rising introduced me to all of these phenomena, along with many other related concepts, such as using Pepe memes as a form of chaos magick - a postmodern magical practice that stresses achieving desired outcomes through applied experimentation as opposed to rituals and symbols of traditional mystic practices.

Lachman is an erudite scholar of occult history, and he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of esotericism with his ability to clearly explain complex ideas to good use in Dark Star Rising. He wisely avoids ascribing any kind of paranormal efficacy to occult practices, and instead presents what can, and often does, happen when zealous people apply occult-influenced ideologies to the real world.

Here's my interview with Lachman about Dark Star Rising.


https://boingboing.net/2018/06/06/dark- ... and-p.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 07, 2018 10:54 am

Here is a sample of the above:


Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump
Gary Lachman - 2018
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 10, 2018 9:36 am

https://www.larsschall.com/2017/09/19/t ... zed-crime/


The CIA: 70 Years of Organized Crime

On occasion of the CIA’s 70th anniversary, Lars Schall talked with U.S. researcher Douglas Valentine about the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Valentine, the CIA is “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government”, doing the dirty business for the rich and powerful.

By Lars Schall

Douglas Valentine is the author of the non-fictional, historical books “The Hotel Tacloban”, “The Phoenix Program”, “The Strength of the Wolf”, “The Strength of the Pack”, and “The CIA as Organized Crime”.

70 years ago, on September 18, 1947, the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA. Douglas, you refer to the CIA as “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government.” Why so?

Everything the CIA does is illegal, which is why the government provides it with an impenetrable cloak of secrecy. While mythographers in the information industry portray America as a bastion of peace and democracy, CIA officers manage criminal organizations around the world. For example, the CIA hired one of America’s premier drug trafficker in the 1950s and 1960s, Santo Trafficante, to murder Fidel Castro. In exchange, the CIA allowed Trafficante to import tons of narcotics into America. The CIA sets up proprietary arms, shipping, and banking companies to facilitate the criminal drug trafficking organizations that do its dirty work. Mafia money gets mixed up in offshore banks with CIA money, until the two are indistinguishable.

Drug trafficking is just one example.

What is most important to understand about the CIA?

Its organizational history, which, if studied closely enough, reveals how the CIA manages to maintain its secrecy. This is the essential contradiction at the heart of America’s problems: if we were a democracy and if we truly enjoyed free speech, we would be able to study and speak about the CIA. We would confront our institutionalized racism and sadism. But we can’t, and so our history remains unknown, which in turn means we have no idea who we are, as individuals or as a nation. We imagine ourselves to be things we are not. Our leaders know bits and pieces of the truth, but they cease being leaders once they begin to talk about the truly evil things the CIA is doing.

A term of interest related to the CIA is “plausible deniability”. Please explain.

The CIA doesn’t do anything it can’t deny. Tom Donohue, a retired senior CIA officer, told me about this.

Let me tell you a bit about my source. In 1984, former CIA Director William Colby agreed to help me write my book, The Phoenix Program. Colby introduced me to Donohue in 1985. Donohue had managed the CIA’s “covert action” branch in Vietnam from 1964-1966, and many of the programs he developed were incorporated in Phoenix. Because Colby had vouched for me, Donohue was very forthcoming and explained a lot about how the CIA works.

Donohue was a typical first-generation CIA officer. He’d studied Comparative Religion at Columbia and understood symbolic transformation. He was a product and practitioner of Cook County politics who joined the CIA after World War Two when he perceived the Cold War as “a growth industry.” He had been the CIA’s station chief in the Philippines at the end of his career and, when I spoke to him, he was in business with a former Filipino Defense Minister. He was putting his contacts to good use, which is par for the course. It’s how corruption works for senior bureaucrats.

Donohue said the CIA doesn’t do anything unless it meets two criteria. The first criterion is “intelligence potential.” The program must benefit the CIA; maybe it tells them how to overthrow a government, or how to blackmail an official, or where a report is hidden, or how to get an agent across a border. The term “intelligence potential” means it has some use for the CIA. The second criterion is that it can be denied. If they can’t find a way to structure the program or operation so they can deny it, they won’t do it. Plausible denial can be as simple as providing an officer or asset with military cover. Then the CIA can say, “The army did it.”

Plausible denial is all about language. During Senate hearings into CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, the CIA’s erstwhile deputy director of operations Richard Bissell defined „plausible denial“ as “the use of circumlocution and euphemism in discussions where precise definitions would expose covert actions and bring them to an end.”

Everything the CIA does is deniable. It’s part of its Congressional mandate. Congress doesn’t want to be held accountable for the criminal things the CIA does. The only time something the CIA does become public knowledge – other than the rare accident or whistleblower – is when Congress or the President think it’s helpful for psychological warfare reasons to let the American people know the CIA is doing it. Torture is a good example. After 9/11, and up until and through the invasion of Iraq, the American people wanted revenge. They wanted to see Muslim blood flowing, so the Bush administration let it leak that they were torturing evil doers. They played it cute and called it “enhanced interrogation,” but everyone understood symbolically. Circumlocution and euphemism. Plausible denial.

Do the people at the CIA know that they’re part of “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government”? In the past, you’ve suggested related to the Phoenix program, for example: „Because the CIA compartmentalizes itself, I ended up knowing more about the program than any individual in the CIA.“

Yes, they do. I talk at length about this in my book The CIA as Organized Crime. Most people have no idea what cops really do. They think cops give you a speeding ticket. They don’t see the cops associating with professional criminals and making money in the process. They believe that when a guy puts on a uniform, he or she becomes virtuous. But people who go into law enforcement do so for the trill of wielding power over other people, and in this sense, they relate more to the crooks they associate with than the citizens they’re supposed to protect and serve. They’re looking to bully someone and they’re corrupt. That’s law enforcement.

The CIA is populated with the same kind of people, but without any of the constraints. The CIA officer who created the Phoenix program, Nelson Brickham, told me this about his colleagues: “I have described the intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies. A guy who has strong criminal tendencies but is too much of a coward to be one, would wind up in a place like the CIA if he had the education.” Brickham described CIA officers as wannabe mercenaries “who found a socially acceptable way of doing these things and, I might add, getting very well paid for it.”

It’s well known that when the CIA selects agents or people to run militias or secret police units in foreign nations, it subjects its candidates to rigorous psychological screening. John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate told how the CIA sent its top psychologist, John Winne, to Seoul to “select the initial cadre” for the Korean CIA. “I set up an office with two translators,” Winne told Marks, “and used a Korean version of the Wechsler.” CIA shrinks gave the personality assessment test to two dozen military and police officers, “then wrote up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate’s ability to follow orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation – why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the civilians.”

In this way, the CIA recruits secret police forces as assets in every country where it operates, including occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. In Latin America, Marks wrote, “The CIA…found the assessment process most useful for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. According to results, these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies and needed strong direction.”

That “direction” came from the CIA. Marks quoted one assessor as saying, “Anytime the Company spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would ultimately serve our purposes.” CIA officers “were not content simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the Personality Assessment System provided a useful aid.”

What’s less well known is that the CIA’s executive management staff is far more concerned with selecting the right candidates to serve as CIA officers than it is about selecting agents overseas. The CIA dedicates a huge portion of its budget figuring how to select, control, and manage its own work force. It begins with instilling blind obedience. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a sacred chain of command that cannot be violated. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it. Or you’re out.

Other systems of control, such as “motivational indoctrination programs”, make CIA officers think of themselves as special. Such systems have been perfected and put in place over the past seven decades to shape the beliefs and responses of CIA officers. In exchange for signing away their legal rights, they benefit from reward systems – most importantly, CIA officers are immune from prosecution for their crimes. They consider themselves the Protected Few and, if they wholeheartedly embrace the culture of dominance and exploitation, they can look to cushy jobs in the private sector when they retire.

The CIA’s executive management staff compartments the various divisions and branches so that individual CIA officers can remain detached. Highly indoctrinated, they blindly obey on a “need to know” basis. This institutionalized system of self-imposed ignorance and self-deceit sustains, in their warped minds, the illusion of American righteousness, upon which their motivation to commit all manner of crimes in the name of national security depends. That and the fact that most are sociopaths.

It’s a self-regulating system too. As FBN Agent Martin Pera explained, “If you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.”

Can you tell us please what’s behind a term you like to use, the „Universal Brotherhood of Officers“?

The ruling class in any state views the people it rules as lesser beings to be manipulated, coerced, and exploited. The rulers institute all manner of systems – which function as protection rackets – to assure their class prerogatives. The military is the real power in any state, and the military in every state has a chain of command in which blind obedience to superiors is sacred and inviolable. Officers don’t fraternize with enlisted men because they will at some point send them to their deaths. There is an officer corps in every military, as well as in every bureaucracy and every ruling class in every state, which has more in common with military officers, top bureaucrats, and rulers in other states, than it does with the expendable, exploitable riff raff in its own state.

Cops are members of the Universal Brotherhood of Officers. They exist above the law. CIA officers exist near the pinnacle of the Brotherhood. Blessed with fake identities and bodyguards, they fly around in private planes, live in villas, and kill with state-of-the-art technology. They tell army generals what to do. They direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of state and murder innocent children with impunity and with indifference. Everyone to them, but their bosses, is expendable.

In your opinion, it is the „National Security Establishment’s deepest, darkest secret“ that it is involved in the global drug trade. How did this involvement come about?

There are two facets to the CIA’s management and control of international drug trafficking, on behalf of the corporate interests that rule America. It’s important to note that the US government’s involvement in drug trafficking began before the CIA existed, as a means of controlling states, as well as the political and social movements within them, including America. Direct involvement started in the 1920s when the US helped Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China support itself through the narcotics trade.

During World War II, the CIA’ predecessor, the OSS, provided opium to Kachin guerrillas fighting the Japanese. The OSS and the US military also forged ties with the American criminal underworld during the Second World War, and would thereafter secretly provide protection to American drug traffickers whom it hired to do its dirty work at home and abroad.

After the Nationalists were chased out of China, the CIA established these drug traffickers in Taiwan and Burma. By the 1960’s, the CIA was running the drug trade throughout Southeast Asia, and expanding its control worldwide, especially into South America, but also throughout Europe. The CIA supported its drug trafficking allies in Laos and Vietnam. Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky, while serving in 1965 as head of South Vietnam’s national security directorate, sold the CIA the right to organize private militias and build secret interrogation centers in every province, in exchange for control over a lucrative narcotic smuggling franchise. Through his strongman, General Loan, Ky and his clique financed both their political apparatus and their security forces through opium profits. All with CIA assistance.

The risk of having its ties to drug traffickers in Southeast Asia exposed, is what marks the beginning of the second facet – the CIA’s infiltration and commandeering of the various government agencies involved in drug law enforcement. Senior American officials arranged for the old Bureau of Narcotics to be dissolved and recreated in 1968 within the Justice Department as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The CIA immediately began infiltrating the highest levels of the BNDD for the purpose of protecting its drug trafficking allies around the world, especially in Southeast Asia. The CIA’s Counter-Intelligence Branch, under James Angleton, had been in liaison with these drug agencies since 1962, but in 1971 the function was passed to the CIA’s operations division. In 1972, CIA officer Seymour Bolten was appointed as the CIA director’s Special Assistant for the Coordination of Narcotics. Bolten became an advisor to William Colby and later DCI George H.W. Bush. By 1973, with the establishment of the DEA, the CIA was in total control of all foreign drug law enforcement operations and was able to protect traffickers in the US as well. In 1990 the CIA created its own counter-narcotics center, despite being prohibited from exercising any domestic law enforcement function.

Is the war on drugs also a war on blacks? Let me give you some framework for this question, because John Ehrlichman, a former top aide to Richard Nixon, supposedly admitted that: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (1) And I can quote from H. R. Haldeman’s diaries in this respect, of course. In the early stages of his presidency, more specifically on April 28, 1969, Nixon outlined his basic strategy to his chief of staff: “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (2) So, is the war on drugs that started under Nixon also a war on blacks? And if so, what does this tell us about the United States?

America is a former slave state and a blatantly racist society, so yes, the war on drugs, which is managed by white supremacists, was and is directed against blacks and other despised minorities as a way of keeping them disenfranchised. The old Bureau of Narcotics was blatantly racist: not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group supervisors (Grade 13) and manage white agents.

I interviewed former FBN Agent William Davis for my book about the FBN, The Strength of the Wolf. Davis articulated the predicament of black agents. After graduating from Rutgers University in 1950, Davis, while visiting New York City, heard singer Kate Smith praising FBN Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show. “She described him as a black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a federal narcotic agent,” Davis recalled, “and that was my inspiration. I applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or give direction to whites. The few black agents we had at any one time,” he said bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities heaped upon us.”

Davis told how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the 1930s, created a patent medicine. But McCree made the mistake of writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that prosecutors in the South were calling black agents “niggers.” As a result, the FBN’s legal staff charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine. McCree was fired with the intended ripple effect: his dismissal sent a clear message that complaints from black agents would not be tolerated.

In an interview for The Strength of the Wolf, Clarence Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police in the 1970s, explained to me the racial situation from local law enforcement’s perspective. “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because it was easy,” he said. “We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case. So rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”

Anyone who thinks it is any different nowadays is living in a fantasy world. Where I live, in Longmeadow, MA, the cops are the first line of defense against the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the nearby city of Springfield. About 15 years ago, there was a Mafia murder in Springfield’s Little Italy section. At the time, blacks and Puerto Ricans were moving into the neighborhood and there was a lot of racial tension. The local TV station interviewed me about it, and I said the Al Bruno, the murdered Mafia boss, was probably an FBI informant. The next day, people I knew wouldn’t talk to me. Comments were made. Someone told me Bruno’s son went to the same health club as me. In a city like Springfield and its suburban neighborhoods, everyone is related to or friends with someone in the Mafia.

A few years before Bruno’s murder, I had befriended the janitor at the health club I belong to. By chance, the janitor was the son of a Springfield narcotics detective. The janitor and I shot pool and drank beers in local bars. One day he told me a secret his father had told him. His father told him that the Springfield cops let the Mafia bosses bring narcotics into Springfield and in exchange, the hoods named their black and Puerto Ricans customers. That way, like Giarusso said above, the cops keep making cases and the minority communities have a harder time buying houses and encroaching on the established whites in their neighborhoods. This happens everywhere in the US every day.

Is it ironic to you that the whole drug trade wouldn’t exist as it does today if the drugs were not illegal in the first place?

The outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction from a matter of “public health” into a law enforcement issue, and thus a pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal justice and social welfare systems to prevent despised minorities from making political and social advances. The health care industry was placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of despised minorities, the poor and working classes. Private businesses established civic institutions to sanctify this repressive policy. Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political indoctrination promoting the Business Party’s racist line. Bureaucracies were established to promote the expansion of business interests abroad, while suppressing political and social resistance to the medical, pharmaceutical, drug manufacturing and law enforcement industries that benefited from it.

It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire regulation of the industries that profit from it. Briefly stated, they profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries – including the military – depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security. Read my books for examples of how this has played out over the past 70 years

Is the CIA part of the opium problem today in Afghanistan?

In Afghanistan, CIA officers manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade. Opium production has soared since they created the Karzai government in 2001-2 and established intelligence networks into the Afghan resistance through “friendly civilians” in the employ of the opium trafficking warlord, Gul Agha Sherzai. The American public is largely unaware that the Taliban laid down its arms after the American invasion, and that the Afghan people took up arms only after the CIA installed Sherzai in Kabul. In league with the Karzai brothers, Sherzai supplied the CIA with a network of informants that targeted their business rivals, not the Taliban. As Anand Gopal revealed in No Good Men Among the Living, as a result of Sherzai’s friendly tips, the CIA methodically tortured and killed Afghanistan’s most revered leaders in a series of Phoenix-style raids that radicalized the Afghan people. The CIA started the war as a pretext for a prolonged occupation and colonization of Afghanistan.

In return for his services, Sherzai received the contract to build the first US military base in Afghanistan, along with a major drug franchise. The CIA arranged for its Afghan drug warlords to be exempted from DEA lists. All this is documented in Gopal’s book. The CIA officers in charge watch in amusement as addiction rates soar among young Afghan people whose parents have been killed and whose minds have been damaged by 15 + years of US aggression. They don’t care that the drugs reach America’s inner cities, for all the economic, social, and political reasons cited above.

The drug trade also has “intelligence potential”. CIA officers have an accommodation with the protected Afghan warlords who convert opium into heroin and sell it to the Russian mob. It’s no different than cops working with Mafia drug dealers in America; it’s an accommodation with an enemy that ensures the political security of the ruling class. The accommodation is based on the fact that crime cannot be eradicated, it can only be managed.

The CIA is authorized to negotiate with the enemy, but only if the channels are secure and deniable. It happened during the Iran Contra scandal, when President Reagan won the love of the American people by promising never to negotiate with terrorists, while his two-faced administration secretly sent CIA officers to Tehran to sell missiles to the Iranians and use the money to buy guns for the drug dealing Contras. In Afghanistan, the accommodation within the drug underworld provides the CIA with a secure channel to the Taliban leadership, with whom they negotiate on simple matters like prisoner exchanges. The criminal-espionage underworld in Afghanistan provides the intellectual space for any eventual reconciliation. There are always preliminary negotiations for a ceasefire, and in every modern American conflict that’s the CIA’s job. Trump, however, is going to prolong the occupation indefinitely.

The fact that 600 subordinate DEA agents are in Afghanistan makes the whole thing plausibly deniable.

Did the U.S. employ characteristics of the Phoenix program as a replay in Afghanistan? I ask especially related to the beginning of „Operation Enduring Freedom“ when the Taliban leaders initially laid down their weapons.

Afghanistan is a case study of the standard two-tiered Phoenix program developed in South Vietnam. It’s guerrilla warfare targeting “high value” cadre, both for recruitment and assassination. That’s the top tier. It’s also psychological warfare against the civilian population – letting everyone know they will be kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, extorted and/or killed if they can be said to support the resistance. That’s the second tier – terrorizing the civilians into supporting the US puppet government.

The US military resisted being involved in this repugnant form of warfare (modeled on SS Einsatzgruppen-style special forces and Gestapo-style secret police) through the early part of the Vietnam War, but got hooked into providing soldiers to flesh out Phoenix. That’s when the CIA started infiltrating the military’s junior officer corps. CIA officers Donald Gregg (featured by the revisionist war monger Ken Burns in his Vietnam War series) and Rudy Enders (both of whom I interviewed for my book The Phoenix Program), exported Phoenix to El Salvador and Central America in 1980, at the same time the CIA and military were joining forces to create Delta Force and the Joint Special Operations Command to combat “terrorism” worldwide using the Phoenix model. There are no more conventional wars, so the military, for economic and political reasons, has become, under the junior officer corps recruited by the CIA years ago, the de-facto police force for the American empire, operating out of 700 + bases around the world.

In what form and fashion is the Phoenix program alive today in America’s homeland?

Karl Marx explained over 150 years ago how and why capitalists treat workers the same, whether at home or abroad. As capitalism evolves and centralizes its power, as the climate degenerates, as the gap between rich and poor widens, and as resources become scarcer, America police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics to use against the civilian population. The government has enacted “administrative detention” laws, which are the legal basis for Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with those conducting “anti-terror” operations, and the Department of Homeland Security has established “fusion centers” based on this model around the nation. Informant nets and psychological operations against the American people have also proliferated since 9-11. This is all explained in detail in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime.

How important is mainstream media for the public perception of the CIA?

It’s the most critical feature. Guy Debord said that secrecy dominates the world, foremost as secret of domination. The media prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing.

What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts democratic institutions.

Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of information requires media complicity. This was one of the great lesson defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly indoctrinated and well rewarded managers who run the government and media will never again allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians. Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, and Syrian children killed by marauding US mercenary forces and cluster bombs.

On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture, and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper story is the key. Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already become the template for providing internal political security for America’s leaders.

Is the CIA an enemy of the American people?

Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.



References:

(1) Dan Baum: “Legalize It All – How to win the war on drugs”, published at Harper’s Magazine in April 2016 under: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

(2) “Haldeman Diary Shows Nixon Was Wary of Blacks and Jews”, published at The New York Times on May 18, 1994 under: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/us/ha ... -jews.html

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 10, 2018 1:38 pm

Richard Seymour Oct 26, 2017 at 5:14pm

Capitalism and psychosis

I. In the traditional universe of psychoanalysis, symptoms work through the symbolic order. They speak, where the subject is unable to. They address the Other. A woman with agoraphobia is terrified of going out, in case she ‘falls’ — her symptom might be saying to the Other, “I am a fallen woman”.
Contemporary capitalism doesn’t do things this way. The symbolic Other through which all enjoyment was supposed to be mediated — the leader, the commander-in-chief, the pontiff, God — increasingly disappears. The paternal Law, guaranteed by a father’s repressive authority, disintegrates, and with it the traditional predominance of terrorised neurotics.

Instead, capitalism proposes a seemingly direct relationship to enjoyment as consumption, which can always be bought, though it always leaves us unsatisfied (because that’s not it).

Indeed, it has been argued that there is even a superego imperative to enjoy, to be the master of one’s enjoyment, to heroically bear all the dissatisfactions and distress it leaves us with and come out undefeated. We have to be champion drinkers, players and fuckers. And we have to Instagram it, or it didn't happen.

“What were once the clinical signs of manic-depressive psychosis,” Darian Leader writes, “have now become the goals of therapies and lifestyle coaching.”



II. Modern symptoms therefore tend to look a little different to how they used to. The most prevalent mental health problem in the world today, using conventional psychiatric categories, is depression and anxiety. The next is schizophrenia, followed by ‘bipolar disorder’ (what used to be manic-depression). There is an increasing prevalence of paranoia and persecution fantasies.

There is also -- perhaps helping people to cope with some of these problems -- a huge rise in the number of addictions. What addictions tend to have in common is that the Other disappears: whether it’s addiction to drugs, booze or gambling, you cut out the symbolic Other and go straight to the splendid source. The symptom doesn’t speak any more: that’s why it’s a-diction. There is no Other to hear it. It just enjoys, meaninglessly. In itself, this is arguably an ideal capitalist self-cure for its forms of distress, linked to inequality, competitive loss, and social isolation.

The contemporary treatment of psychic difficulty fits into this model of self-treatment very well. For all the initially efficacious critique of mental health institutions from the anti-psychiatry movement, the tendency has been toward ever more diagnostic labels, and ever more prescriptions. Diagnoses are made in minutes, and differ from one psychiatrist to another, so that the sufferer accumulates labels and remedies. This is linked to the neurological turn, which grounds psychic problems in putative brain structures, usually presumed to be genetically endowed.

Those who watch South Park might remember the episode in which Satan adopts the pose of a modern guru, explaining the neurological basis of addiction to Stan. Mocking pop psychological explanations involving “filling a hole” as “bullshit,” Satan offers hard science:

“So you got dopamine, right? That's the chemical that gets released in your brain whenever you do something pleasurable, like eating, sex, and that's just nature, right? Like rabbits and fish and shit. They need dopamine so that they want to consume and reproduce. … But because humans have progressed and now have access to all the shit they want whenever they want it, it's easy for them to overdo and have dopamine problems.”


But this, a pop culture version of what appears in medical and self-help literature, is also bullshit. This isn’t how dopamine works. Different dopamines have various functions in the body, including regulating lactation, and even the motivational role isn’t reducible to the administration of pleasure.

Dopamine, even where it does regulate pleasure, isn’t an explanation for anything. Lots of people experience dopamine surges after sampling drugs, food or sky-diving, without becoming dependent. Of those who do, there’s no obvious dopamine-related reason why one person should choose social media, another should choose Tumblr porn, and another cannabis. “Filling a hole” may be stupid, but at least it involves the subject and personal meaning somewhere in the story. At least it says something about the experience of lack.

The attraction of spurious ‘brain facts’, however, is partly that it is the only well-funded, well-supported alternative to disciplinary moralism: or rather, it is the softer form of disciplinary moralism available. If you haven’t got a diagnosis, then your behaviour is antisocial, or irresponsible, and your defeats make you a loser. If you can find a diagnosis, then you can claim a certain moral safeguard. If you tell your University that you have a diagnosis of ‘general anxiety disorder,’ for example, the disciplinary whip for missing classes or failing to turn in work might be slightly relaxed.

Nor is it just the moralists without that we have to contend with. Ironically, the more we worship an idealised success, the more victimised we become. The more we believe that the only proper situation for a properly human being is winning, winning, so much winning, the more defeat is experienced as an existential affront. Hence, the appeal of what is today called “behavioural science”: it takes an outright sadist like Hannibal Lecter to call this our “moral dignity pants”.

The spread of amateur expertise through the internet also means that we visit psychiatrists already prepared with our dignity pant diagnoses, and demand remedies based on diagnostic classifications discovered online. We become the (illusory) champion entrepreneurs of our own mental health, much as addicts are the (illusory) masters of their enjoyment. What no one must be allowed to do, is to admit helplessness and defeat: to admit, in effect, that they have shit themselves.



III. It is for these reasons that a great deal of Lacanian psychoanalytic commentary tends to relate capitalist discourse to a generalised psychosis. In fact, to say that capitalism is generalised psychosis might be just to say all of the above in a programmatic way.

“What distinguishes the capitalist discourse,” Lacan suggests, “is this – Verwerfung, rejection from all the fields of symbolic, with all the consequences that I have already mentioned. Rejection of what? Of castration. Every order, every discourse that aligns itself with capitalism leaves aside what we will simply call the matters of love.”

There is no Other to talk to in late capitalism because the Other is a relation between people, for which we have substituted relations between things. The direct, ‘autistic’ relationship to enjoyment can be bought. Castration is foreclosed because success is compulsory. The spectacle, the order of commodity-images, triumphs over the symbolic order. This is what the theory of commodity fetishism looks like through a Freudian prism.

The consequences of a generalised psychosis would be quite grim. Put schematically and in an overly simplified form, the neurotic represses what is intolerable, and is tormented by unconscious wishes experienced as monstrous. The psychotic, having never acceded to the law of repression, instead splits off what is intolerable and projects it into the outside world, which return as persecutory objects. The neurotic anxiously fears punishment, the psychotic dreads imminent annihilation.

The neurotic capitalist might experience guilt and try to constantly reform and philanthropise, the psychotic capitalist might simply loathe those pathetic and weaker subhumans whom he thinks are out to get him. The neurotic sexist may feel guilty about his arousal and blame the woman for wearing ‘revealing’ clothing; the psychotic sexist might think she’s persecuting him by wearing that.

Generalised psychosis could, unless a new solution was found to replace paternal Law, raise the stakes of social conflict considerably, by foreclosing the mediating structures of the Other, and subordinating everything to the imaginary order of aggressivity and rivalry. It might, under certain conditions, give rise to Donald Trump.



IV. But what does it mean to talk about “capitalist discourse” in this sense? The later Lacan uses ‘discourse’ in a way seems almost synonymous with Freud’s conception of civilisation. A discourse denotes a “social bond, founded in language”.

However, it would be a profound analytical mistake to treat this “capitalist discourse” as therefore a kind of sociology of capitalism. The ‘social bond’ Lacan has in mind here is a type of relationship between consumers, markets and products which produces certain subjective and (to that extent) clinical effects. You could say, then, that it is a schematic cell of the ideological universe of late capitalism.

The problem is that it is unclear that the Other really has disappeared in this discourse, or that capitalism could allow it to disappear completely. Paternal Law may be being replaced by discipline, domination by technique, friendships by the internet, authority by pills -- but does this actually foreclose the Other, or does it simply preserve it in a new way that allows us to disavow it?

Lacan ‘vacillated’ between describing capitalism as generalised perversity, and calling it generalised psychosis. The characteristic Zizekian move, to the point of being a caricature, is to say that capitalism is quintessentially perverse. That is, its supposed hedonistic permissiveness is actually a hypocritical lie. What we are really offered is ‘decaffeinated’ enjoyment — a domesticated version of the excesses of enjoyment (alcohol-free beer, ‘safe’ sex, and so on), which allows us to enjoy seemingly without consequences. We don’t foreclose castration, but we disavow it — we know we are castrated, but nonetheless act as though we are limitless. To that extent, the rise of addictions is an excess that capitalism seeks to manage and neutralise by bringing it back into the symbolic order of exchange.

This is superficially compatible with the Deleuzean purview in which the schizophrenic, by rejecting the grounds of individuation and ego-formation, by being exempt from Oedipal preoccupations about ‘mum, dad and I’, occupies a radically anticapitalist subject-position. The ‘schizo’ has no parents, no gods, and no homeland. If it is in the discourse of capitalism that the social bond constituted by the Oedipal relation is progressively eroded, Deleuze and Guattari held that capitalism nonetheless needs Oedipus to be continually reconstituted by the apparatuses of the state — including the psychoanalytic clinic, wherein it is understood that subjects are fully Oedipalised as a means of repressive adaptation. In other words, capitalism might produce psychosis, but it seeks to urgently bring it back into the domain of the disciplinary order.

The major difference is that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘schizo’ is a purely productive subject-position, which knows no negation. The route to liberation involves pushing the psychotic tendencies of late capitalism to their limits. Zizek would certainly not agree with this; if anything, what makes psychosis so lethally subversive and so difficult to bear subjectively is the negativity at its core.


Continues: https://www.patreon.com/posts/capitalism-and-15061407
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:05 am

Anti-Fascist Practice and Impossible Non-Violence

Natasha Lennard

Writing in 1933 Germany, Freudian acolyte Wilhelm Reich wrestled with the operations by which a society chooses fascism. He attempted to interrogate why a mass of people would choose their own oppression in an authoritarian system. He rejected narratives in which ignorant masses are duped or led into supporting a system they do not in fact want. Instead, he insisted that if we are to explain the rise of fascism, we must account for the fact that people, en masse, choose and desire fascism and we must understand that desire as genuine. Reich’s diagnosis—that the fascist subject is the product of societally enforced sexual repression, and can be thus treated with psychoanalysis—is biologically essentialist, over-general, and totally out of date. But his reckoning with fascistic desire is something sorely lacking in this moment of Trump-emboldened fascism and the battle against it.

Certain lines from Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism get regurgitated more than others in moments like this—moments in which a media cottage industry seems dedicated to defining fascism in order to prove that we are or are not faced with it. “Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated ‘little man’ who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time”: that’s a popular one, and apt. So is the reflection that it is “not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man.” But I’m more interested in his observation that “there is today not a single individual who does not have the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure.” And that “one cannot make the Fascist harmless if, according to the politics of the day, one looks for him only in the German or Italian, or the American or the Chinese; if one does not look for him in oneself; if one does not know the social institutions which hatch him every day.”

Reich’s insight is not restricted to Germany during Hitler’s rise. The problem of everyday fascisms, micro-fascisms with and by which we live, is real and complicates the fascist/anti-fascist dichotomy. There is a certain impossibility to “anti-fascist” as an identity. Philosophers and thinkers, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, have built on Reich’s idea of the perverted desire for fascism. They wrote that it is “too easy to be anti-fascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside of you.” In his famed introduction to their text Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault noted “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” For Deleuze and Guattari, fascism manifests in the various repressive and paranoid “assemblages” of society and politics.

So if we are all somehow possessed of fascism in this sense, how can we speak of anti-fascism, and how can we name and delineate the fascists of our political targeting? It is precisely through this recognition. The fascism Deleuze and Guattari are talking about is not some innate disease or pathology that we can’t shake, but rather a perversion of desire produced through forms of life under capitalism and modernity: practices of authoritarianism and domination and exploitation that form us, such that we can’t just “decide” our way out of them. But not everyone becomes a neo-Nazi. This too takes fascist practice, fascist habit; a nurturing and constant reaffirmation of that fascistic desire to oppress and live in an oppressive world. And, to be sure, the world provides that pernicious affirmation. Donald Trump is president after all.

How to break a habit? Sometimes, thought, therapy, reasoning. Sometimes. There are rare, rare stories of neo-Nazis who left the movement that way. But often habits are, if not broken, redirected by the introduction of serious consequences, such that the practices of the habit cannot be continued with the habitude that feeds and maintains them. When “serious consequences” are taken to mean brushes with criminal justice and the carceral system, that simply introduces state-sanctioned fascistic practices into the mix (not to mention the unlikelihood of the U.S. criminal justice system treating white supremacy as an enemy). This is the importance of anti-fascism also as practice and habit: if desiring fascism is not something that happens out of reason, we cannot break it with reason alone. So our interventions instead must make the entertainment and maintenance of fascist living intolerable. The desiring for fascism will not be thus undone: it is by its nature self-destructive. But at least the spaces for it to be nurtured and further normalized will be taken away.

And what of the fascisms in each of us who would be anti-fascist? “Kill the cop inside your head!” goes the anarchist dictum. Theorist John Protevi noted, following Deleuze and Guattari, “a thousand independent and self-appointed policemen do not make a Gestapo, though they may be a necessary condition for one.” How do we remove ourselves from being part of such a condition? We cannot simply be anti-fascist. We must practice and make better habits, better forms of life. “Anti-fascist” as gerund verb, not noun or adjective: a constant effort of anti-fascisting against the fascisms even we uphold. Working to create non-hierarchical ways of living, working to undo our own privileges and desires for power. The individualized and detached self, the over-codings of family unit normativity, the authoritarian tendency of careerism—all among paranoiac sites of micro-fascism in need of anti-fascist care. Again, easier said than done. But better than a faulty approach to anti-fascism that frames it as some pure position, when it is not. We act against ur-fascists in the knowledge that we need to act against ourselves too. The strategy is always to create consequences for living a fascist life and to seek anti-fascist departures.


More: http://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fa ... -violence/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 19, 2018 10:33 am

The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard

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by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte

In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.

I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.

I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.

It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.

But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.


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http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the ... hypercard/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 19, 2018 5:29 pm

Stranger Things: Uncle Sam's Secret Sorcerers II

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Sharon Tate in Eye of the Devil


So what's the real story?

The CIA and the MK-ULTRA program certainly had more than their share of connections to the counterculture and the drug movement, but careful analysis shows it was an exploitation of, and interference with, a milieu that had been established for a very long time and had caused no end of mass moral panics long before there even was a CIA.

So claiming the CIA invented the counterculture is like claiming they created prostitution because they ran so many ops out of brothels.

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Process "sabbath" in San Francisco

The CIA didn't create Satanism, black magic or Apocalypticism either, but they may well have exploiting these to great effect in the 1960s and beyond.

With the media-darling Church of Satan, the mysteriously-flush Process Church and Ford Foundation and Getty-funded Kenneth Anger all up and running in 1966 (or "Year Zero"), another pawn would be put onto the board.

By the end of the 60s he'd place the counterculture in an entirely different light for America's Silent Majority.

In 1967, lifetime con Charlie Manson had been let out of prison and he made a beeline for the mass open-air party taking place in San Francisco. And he would find himself living in an interesting neighborhood. Gary Lachman wrote in Fortean Times:

(The Process Church) set up a church at 407 Cole Street. Their neighbour at 636 Cole was someone who would cause them a lot of grief in a year or so. His name was Charles Manson, soon to become the head of the Family responsible for the gruesome Tate-Labianca murders in August of 1969. At that time,
Charlie was still an ex-con petty thief, strumming a guitar among the debris of the flower children, languishing amidst the ruins of the Summer of Love. By the end of the decade he was one of the most famous people alive, a cause célèbre in the counter-culture, Satan incarnate for the Establishment.


The question remains, did Manson have ties to the Process? It's shrouded in mystery to this day.

But, curiously enough, Manson would go from being just another drifter and ex-con to a mind-controlling apocalyptic ideologue after his alleged encounters with the Process.


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Adam Gorightly writes in Paranoia magazine:

One of the more controversial assertions I’ve heard suggesting contact between Manson and The Process comes courtesy of John Parker’s Polanski, which claims that Manson was a regular visitor at The Process headquarters on Cole Street, “reaching the fourth of the six levels of initiation, that of ‘prophet.'” At the end of 1968, he was established as a leader of a group which he called “Satan’s Slaves.”


Manson apparently crossed paths on occasion with another famous San Francisco occultist, Bobby Beausoleil, then living with Kenneth Anger on Haight. Beausoleil and Manson were part of an itinerant circle that seemed to drift on the California coast, sometimes living in SF, sometimes in LA.

Beausoleil would head for LA when things went sour with Anger, who put a curse on his young protege. There Beausoleil would move in with a school teacher and part-time drug dealer named Gary Hinman.

Of course, it was in LA that all Hell broke loose. But let's save that story for later.

THE TEMPLE

Ritual magic would reemerge in 1967 in San Francisco with New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn.

Two years later, Grady McMurtry (aka "Hymenaeus Alpha"), a former Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army, would properly re-establish the Ordo Templi Orientis in America, claiming right of succession through Crowley himself.

As Peter Levenda mentioned, another OTO lodge- the scandalous Solar Lodge - would start operations in Los Angeles around the same time as the SF group. They'd make headlines for child abuse and other offenses at the same time the Manson Family was in the news.


Image

"In one of our conversations during the Tate-Labianca trial, I asked Manson if he knew Robert Moore, or Robert DeGrimston. He denied knowing DeGrimston, but said he had met Moore. 'You're looking at him,' Manson told me. 'Moore and I are one and the same.'- Vincent Bugliosi


https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2016/09/ ... ecret.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 8:40 am

Is Psychosis Natural?

Image By Steven Morgan June 17, 2018

Ideas of mental illness carry a lot of presumption. Namely, that someone acting a particular way is sick—their mind has the flu. Plenty of thoughtful people have pointed out that what we call the mind is at best a metaphorical concept, and that metaphors cannot have health. I wholeheartedly agree.

Yet, clearly something unusual is happening somewhere if I start believing I am being poisoned despite evidence to the contrary, or—as in my own experience—I think people might be behind mirrors nefariously watching me. For a time, I believed that theorizing about “what’s happening” during these experiences was in itself a problem because theory often shuts down intuitive, heartfelt responses by others, and narrows meaning-making by oneself. If I see you as delusional, I’m not likely to connect; if I see myself as delusional, I’m not likely to investigate further.


Continues: https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/06/is ... s-natural/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 5:22 pm

To See An Atom: Psychosis and Ecology

Many paths arrive at an increase in psyche. Perhaps after being harmed, I open my senses to stay alert and better read situations, a skill to survive one circumstance that overwhelms in another. Perhaps I disengage from feelings and keep secrets until my senses burst. Perhaps I develop relationships with immaterial beings for connection, or perhaps I can no longer take poverty, racism and hate and tap instead into unadulterated joy. Perhaps I chase art or inquiry past their limits. And maybe I am having an allergic reaction, or flooding my serotonin receptors with LSD or state-sanctioned medicine, or bacteria in my gut is keeping me awake too long. Perhaps I am learning freedom, or maybe I am in fact designated to perceive larger intelligences. Maybe all at once.

Calling the end result a disease, in any case, presumes no purpose, which fits neatly with the dualistic materialism worldview that thinks of organs, like the brain, as collections of parts that can break. Gone is the notion that a brain might have its own emergent self-intelligence, that different brain states may be its way of carefully evolving. Not compensating, which presumes a holistic state of rationalism as baseline, but literally pushing towards something new, independent of will.

And there is a more convincing reason we should doubt psychosis as disease: you can eat plants to induce it. Animals do. So do other plants. Intentionally. Foods for psychosis exist in a huge variety of ecosystems and have so for millions of years, long before humans, performing vital functions for that system’s health and evolution. Psychosis-inducing plants would be neither ubiquitous nor lasting if they or the states they produced were an aberration or disease. Nature selected—rather, designed—this state of consciousness to survive.

Of course, one might argue psychosis is different from altered states produced by plants, and let them argue. Having smelled colors, heard ghosts, believed strange messages (like cutting off my left arm would stop me seeing red), been possessed by animal spirits, hallucinated, grown ecstatic, glimpsed Gaia, chatted with cartoons, and been overwhelmed by persistent paranoia and fear as well as giddiness while under the influence of LSD, a modified fungus, I cannot distinguish how such plant-induced experiences differ from what psychiatrists call psychosis, except that the latter sometimes lasts longer.


https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/10/to ... s-ecology/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:00 pm

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/articl ... -princeton


LSD at Princeton: New book blows minds

By Linh Nguyen and Sarah Warman Hirschfield | Mar 25, 2018

Image

A new book, “Blowing America’s Mind: A True Story of Princeton, CIA Mind Control, LSD and Zen,” documents the experiences of two University alumni who were subjects in LSD and hypnosis experiments at the now-defunct New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute’s Bureau of Research.

Under the research objectives of Dr. Humphry Osmond, who coined the word “psychedelic” and guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip featured in “The Doors of Perception,” John Selby ’68 and Paul Jeffrey Davids ’69 were hypnotized and given LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.

In 1977, news broke of Project MKUltra, a program of experiments on human subjects undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop drugs and procedures for interrogations and torture. The program, which started in the early 1950s and ended in 1973, used front organizations, such as colleges, hospitals, and prisons, to conduct the experiments while hiding their connection with the CIA.

“We knew we had volunteered for hypnosis and LSD research,” said Davids, “but the fact that it was being funded by the CIA and that the doctors we trusted … were working for the CIA — we didn’t know about [until] 10 years later, when MKUltra was exposed.”

On Aug. 3, 1977, former CIA Director Stansfield Turner confirmed that “86 institutions were involved” in “149 separate research projects.” Princeton and Columbia were two of these institutions, notified personally by the CIA in a set of letters admitting that Princeton students “had apparently been involved in a phase of CIA testing between 1953 and 1964.”

According to a 1977 article in the Los Angeles Times, CIA experimentation with LSD began “out of concern in the 1950s that the Russians and the Chinese had developed effective techniques in mind control,” resulting in fear that “American prisoners of war or American diplomats” would fall victim to these tactics.

A news release from the University Office of Communications on Sept. 1, 1977, provided further details about the experimentation, including that “CIA funds totaling $4,075 were paid in 1953 and 1958 for research by two individuals who were then affiliated with the University.” The release also refutes any claims that the “University as an institution was involved in this research.”

In email correspondences to former University President William Bowen on Aug. 31, 1977, former University Research Board chair Robert May confirmed that a chemistry department faculty member was paid $753 for “characterizing the alkaloids present in seeds of [Ipomoea] Sidaefolia Choisy” which are known to have “‘disorienting effects when ingested.’” May could not confirm “whether the chemistry was done in a Princeton laboratory or not.”

“I saw a notice up on the bulletin board in the [psychology] department when I was a junior,” said Selby. After completing a questionnaire and an interview with Dr. Bernard S. Aaronson, a hypnotist, Selby was signed off by the department to count his work at the Institute as course credit.

According to The New York Times, before the Institute existed, the first of three mental health facilities on the now-abandoned plot of land in Skillman, N.J., was open — the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics. This village was built in 1898 and was originally intended to be a “self-sustaining agrarian community” for epileptics to “live together in a wholesome environment” and “receive medical treatment” away from asylums and prisons.

In 1953, the village was turned into the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, a research and treatment center catered towards “alcoholics, drug addicts, emotionally disturbed children[,] and people with cerebral palsy.”

The Institute was remodeled a final time in 1983 and renamed the North Princeton Developmental Center, focusing primarily on “developmental disabilities, cerebral palsy[,] and other neurological disorders.” The center closed permanently in 1998 and was completely demolished by 2012.

“I learned about the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute’s hypnosis research from a poster on a kiosk on Nassau Street,” explained Davids. “It made it out that it would be research that could help you lose your inhibitions. The implication was that it might even improve your sex life.”

According to Davids, the all-male campus culture placed “enormous pressure on how [the students] would meet women,” and students would “have to go to lengths to meet girls and maintain relationships.”

The Institute presented its research as a study of meditative states and altered awareness. In reality, research subjects experienced “some of that,” according to Davids, but the research took an unexpected turn.

“It put us through some harrowing experiences, very deliberately because [the researchers] wanted to study our behavior and reactions under psychedelic drugs and/or deep hypnosis conditions in which our sense of reality was changed, sometimes in ways that would provoke temporary psychotic episodes … other times, a positive and more mind-expanding experience,” he said.

“Before 1966, you had people disseminating LSD everywhere,” explained Davids. Sandoz, a pharmaceutical company, produced the drug. In 1966, public funding was cut and LSD became harder to procure, an effect that “certainly has thwarted serious and vital scientific work,” as a Daily Princetonian reporter wrote in 1966.

Although LSD sources became scarce, the Institute continued to carry out the studies.

“From 1966 onward, they were ordered … to cease all LSD studies, and they therefore should have used hypnosis to induce similar states,” explained Selby. “But they didn’t. They kept using LSD.”

In 1967, Selby conducted a questionnaire survey of drug use among students. He found that 15 percent of undergraduates at the University experimented with marijuana, hashish, or LSD, and that two thirds of the users are on the Dean’s List, as The New York Times reported.

That same year, the Princeton University Student Committee on Mental Health, which Selby served on, released a pamphlet discussing the “social, medical, and legal aspects of psychedelic drug use, descriptions of a successful and unsuccessful trip, and clear definitions of drug-related terms.” Aimed towards dispelling “pretensions and moral judgments” about psychedelic drugs, the pamphlet was sold at the local town bookstore.

Robert Herbst ’69, an associate opinion editor for the ‘Prince,’ published a “critique of the drug report” and excoriated the lack of medical information in the pamphlet. Herbst claimed that “hardly any LSD is used and interest centers around marijuana and hashish” at the University, making the pamphlet’s legal and social sections obsolete for the majority of students.

Former University President Robert Goheen commended the efforts of those students who distributed the booklet, “Psychedelics and the College Student.” He said, however, that “what good it will do, I don’t have the vaguest idea in the world.”

Goheen asked to meet with Selby to better understand psychedelic use on campus.

“He was a very devout religious fellow,” said Selby, adding that the President was upset about the situation on campus. Selby met with President Goheen between eight to 10 more times, and Goheen became more involved, eventually sponsoring a forum on psychedelics, according to Selby.

Goheen even arranged for Selby to receive a diploma his senior year, when Selby and his pregnant wife fled for California one night after a bad encounter with the CIA. Selby met Alan Watts, a British philosopher who popularized Eastern philosophy in the West, at a seminary in San Francisco.

Davids and Selby recall the some troubling effects of the drug experimentation at the Institute.

When Davids began his time at the Institution as a research subject, Selby, then a research hypnotist, was assigned to him to train him to go into deep hypnotic states.

“At that time, [Selby] was undergoing a psychological crisis as a result of the deep hypnosis experiences he had been put through for over a year, in which there were hypnotic conditions that he was convinced were never erased. He felt he was still being manipulated by the doctors at the Institute,” explained Davids.

When Davids was in a trance, Selby had an out-of-body experience where he was hypnotically made to experience that he was a bird and flying away, according to Davids. Selby, convinced the doctors had never restored his memory of growing up on a cattle ranch in the West, went upstairs to confront Dr. Aaronson, who ended Selby’s panic by putting him into a trance.

Coming to the University, Selby had never even had a beer.

“I was an absolute straight, Republican, conservative, Presbyterian cowboy,” he said, adding that he was lonely and lost his freshman year.

His sophomore year, he was “pretty much an alcoholic.” Joining Tower Club, he had the opportunity to enter a stabilizing group, but felt he was still drinking too much.

“The main problem at Princeton, when I was there, was alcohol,” he added.

When he started at the Institute and was introduced to hashish, Selby stopped drinking. As he continued research at the Institute, he began using more psychedelics.

“I did get more and more weird … mostly from the LSD and research we were doing,” he said. “Dissociative disorder is what it would be called now.”

Selby looks back on his involvement with the CIA’s LSD experiments as rather traumatic, but emphasizes that he does not believe that the psychedelic drugs themselves were the cause of his distress.

“I wouldn’t blame the LSD for my freakout,” said Selby. “I would blame the Institute. But also just the fact that we were so frightened of getting caught, that made us paranoid. And when you take a psychedelic and you’re dealing with paranoia, it’s dangerous.”

“The process of writing the book was therapeutic,” said Davids, adding that it allow him to “break through some of the fog we’d been put in.”

Davids is an independent filmmaker and writer. He has written and directed several films and has written television episodes for the Transformers series as well as a spin-off of the Star Wars series.

Selby is a psychologist and author. He has written over two dozen self-help, spiritual-growth, business-success, and psychology books. Recently, he has written a book and accompanying mobile app, Mindfully High, to provide marijuana users with professional insight to guide their experience.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 24, 2018 12:28 pm

Here is a photo I made of a dose of "Clearlight" LSD:

Image


"Clearlight" LSD became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s. At that time, most LSD was being distributed either in the form of tablets or paper into which liquid LSD had been soaked. "Clearlight" was a major innovation in LSD packaging. It appeared in the form of tiny machine-cut squares of clear hard gelatin, each of which contained very high quality LSD. Quantities of "Clearlight" were packaged in beautiful wooden boxes. Each box contained 40 tiny bottles. Each bottle contained 100 doses of "Clearlight". It was often sold for approximately $1,200 for each 4,000 dose box. (Weak doses of "commercial grade" LSD tablets were often sold for approximately $500 for 4,000 doses. Strong doses of crumbly "Sunshine" tablets were often sold for approximately $800 for 4,000 doses.)


(Here is a link to a photograph, by Marc Evans, of a wooden "Clearlight" LSD box:

Image


"I used LSD from approximately 1972 to 1974. I would ingest the LSD...in a hard form of gelatin."
---Steve Jobs, in a 1988 interview.

I think it is probable that the design and marketing of Apple computers was inspired by Jobs' use of "Clearlight" LSD.



"At the time that "Clearlight" LSD was first distributed, the people I knew in charge of the operation were insistent that their product was sacred. They told me that I should never distribute any of their product to anyone who referred to it as "windowpane", which they felt was a disrespectful term...

The original doses of "Clearlight" LSD (which first came in white plastic boxes and were larger gelatin squares, and then, prior to the appearance of the wooden boxes containing glass bottles, came in the standard-size smaller squares which were packaged in heat-sealed sections of clear surgical tubing, each section containing 100 doses) were amazing beyond all description and very, very clean. Perhaps the extremely positive experiences people had were due in part to the unified belief system that the manufacturers and distributors originally seemed to have. They said that the purpose of "Clearlight" LSD was to make the world a better place, NOT to get rich. The belief-system of the person(s) who provides LSD (and the belief system of the person(s) who provided it to her or him) to one does in fact greatly influence the experiences one has has while tripping. Often the belief system of the LSD provider(s) is communicated non-verbally to the person who is going to ingest the LSD.

Not far down the road things changed, of course. Ego-trips and greed reared their violent and ugly heads. Low-quality counterfeit product appeared and the dream died."


https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdyf333/2075297284
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 24, 2018 1:33 pm

Image

Those things are tiny. I once dropped one on the carpet. We looked for an hour, but never found it.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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