Restating RAW

Robert Anton Wilson, from Cosmic Trigger 2: "Suddenly I understood that the meek never inherit a damned thing: only the very brave and very stubborn make any impact on the world. The [Brooklyn] bridge stood there, a miracle in its time, taken for granted today, but an epiphany to met: great things are possible, to those too pigheaded to admit defeat."

John Collison on X: "As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects."

Via Nabeel S. Qureshi's "hard-won life lessons," worth a look. 

'Moby Dick' online reading group, chapters 35-42

A monument to John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his crackpot hollow Earth theory, in Hamilton,  Ohio, released into the public domain by the photographer, Christopher Roehl, details here.  For how Symmes' crazy theory helped lead to Moby Dick, see below. I live in Ohio, but I haven't seen the monument yet;  Hamilton is kind of on the other side of the state from Cleveland. 

These chapters are a pretty impressive section of the novel. The chapter describing Captain Ahab's vendetta against the great white whale,  "The Quarterdeck," Chapter 36, is pretty dramatic stuff ("Drink, ye harponeers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!").

But I have only so much time to do this blog post, so you'll have to forgive me if I write mostly about the "Whiteness of the Whale" chapter. It's mind blowing, and I'm going to quote a couple of writers I really like, Robert Anton Wilson and Scott Sumner. 

When I re-read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 2, one of my favorites of his books, some weeks ago, I was struck by how much he wrote about Moby Dick in the book. This next series of chapters is the appropriate place to bring that up, as  you will see. 

RAW gives one of the origin stories for the novel. 

In the CT2 chapter Cosmic Economics "A Great Saving of Stuff," Wilson writes about John Cleves Symmes Jr., who advocated a hollow Earth theory. He relates that Jeremiah Reynolds, influenced by Symmes' theories, led a sea expedition to Antarctica that "had to turn back before they were south of Chile" because of a mutiny. Wikipedia says this is not quite true, that  "Encountering much danger, the expedition reached the Antarctic shore and returned north, but at Valparaíso, Chile, the crew mutinied."

In any event, Wilson relates, "Reynolds consoled himself by writing a melodramatic and popular book about the cruise, including all the good sea-yarns he had heard along the way. Herman Melville read it and one chapter -- about a great white whale that had almost incredible cunning and good luck in escaping whalers again and again -- inspired Moby Dick."

In Wikipedia's telling, this was actually a magazine article: "The Knickerbocker of May 1839 published 'Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific', Reynolds' account of Mocha Dick, a white sperm whale off Chile who bedeviled a generation of whalers for thirty years before succumbing to one." And here is Wikipedia's article on Mocha Dick and Reynolds' piece about the whale. Wikipedia does indicate the piece influenced Melville.

Also in the same chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2, Wilson writes about Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, "The Whiteness of the Whale," in which Melville attempts to explain why whiteness is uniquely terrifying. 

Writes Wilson, "The whale, of course, symbolized all sorts of ghastly and mysterious aspects of the world, but mostly, I think, he symbolized the "colorless allcolor" of the materialist reality-tunnel which Melville hated, because it made art meaningless, and feared, because it might be true."

Here is the relevant passage at the very end of  Chapter 42: 

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

In another chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2, "The Square Root of Minus One & Other Mysteries," Wilson writes about his discovery of "the concept that we are living in a colorless world." Wilson explained that while colors seem real to him, "All of this is hallucination, according to physics. What is actually out there consists of clusters of colorless atoms and photons, and all the 'colors' are my brain's way of reacting to various wave-lengths of light carried by the photons bouncing off the atoms.

"Melville understood, and felt profoundly disturbed by this aspect of modern science. The phrase from Moby Dick that I mentioned earlier, 'the colorless allcolor of atheism,'  summarizes the horror that most artists feel at this bleached-out, emotionally empty view of a monochromatic world -- which also terrorized Blake and Dostoevsky and absolutely nauseated Whitman. (See his 'When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer.') This colorless, seemingly 'abstract' world reappears in the pale dead white decor of some of the gloomier films of Bergman and Woody Allen." 

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Sumner, quite recently wrote about Chapter 42 of Moby Dick. In a postscript to an unrelated article about monetary theory (Sumner is an economist who also has a wide range of interests) Sumner writes:

"Postscript: Off topic, but have you ever noticed how common it is to be thinking about something, and then a day or two later find the exact same idea being discussed in a novel you are reading? This occurred to me a few days after my clumsy attempt to express the depressing thought of a colorless universe devoid of life. BTW, stories with this sort of existential dread are much scarier than tales of ghosts or vampires, which I suspect explains the popularity of Lovecraft among intellectuals.

"This morning I read chapter 42 of Moby Dick, entitled The Whiteness of the Whale. In the chapter’s final paragraph, Melville evokes a colorless inhuman universe much more effectively than I ever could:

[Sumner quotes the last paragraph I just quoted in italics, then adds:]

“ 'all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot' I’d cut off my right leg and replace it with a whalebone if I could write like that.

"I certainly won’t claim this is the best paragraph ever written, but:

"Which novel is better than Moby Dick?

"Which chapter in Moby Dick is better than The Whiteness of the Whale?

"Which paragraph in Chapter 42 is better than this one?

"None of those are easy questions to answer."

See also Scott Sumner's piece "The tambourine men" which compares Herman Melville and Bob Dylan. ["Even though I am generally more receptive to the visual arts, Melville and Dylan are my two favorite American artists. The next eight on my top ten list would all be architects or film directors."]  It includes this observation about Melville: "He surely understood that in Moby Dick he had written a masterpiece.  I have trouble even imagining how disappointing it would be to see this sort of novel flop with both readers and critics."

Here are the lyrics for the song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which includes mentions of a "Captain Arab." 

Off topic, but in "The tambourine men," Sumner also tosses off this observation:

"PS. Someone with more knowledge of music than I have should do a post on how pop music blew up in 1965. Major albums that came out in 1966 (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, Aftermath, etc.) would have been inconceivable just two years earlier. In 1965, you have musicians starting to adopt the attitude that would eventually lead to punk (in songs like "My Generation," "Satisfaction", "Get Off of My Cloud," "Maggie’s Farm," "Highway 61"). You have the beginnings of the sort of clever wordplay (and intentional misspellings) that would later be associated with rap ("Subterranean Homesick Blues"), and a lot of other interesting experiments. Has pop ever evolved so much in such a short time, either before or since 1965?"

Revolver is my favorite Beatles album and is arguably the best rock music album of all time.  As much as I love RAW, it's hard to keep up with everything, and he was arguably a bit oblivious to what was going on in popular music in the mid-1960s. Robert Shea was really more of a Beatles fan. Dylan said of Elvis Presley, “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.” People following rock music in the 1960s must have had a similar feeling of revelation. 

Next week: Please read Chapters 43-48, "Hark" through "The First Lowering."

'Moby Dick' reading group begins

 

Cover of the Standard Ebooks version of Moby Dick. Get your free ebook here. 

Welcome to the Moby Dick online reading group! Eric Wagner assures us that Robert Anton Wilson loved Moby Dick, and indeed, when I recently re-read Cosmic Trigger 2, a book I've read again and again, I was surprised by how often RAW talked about the book. If you were going to pick a "Great American Novel," I think many people would go with Moby Dick. 

Moby Dick should be pretty widely available as a library book, as a cheap paperback, as an ebook and in pretty much any format you can think of. Here's a free audiobook, from Librivox. (There are actually two versions on the site, with another featuring different readers).

We're going to do this the way that online reading groups at this site have always worked: There will be a blog post, and then everyone else will get to weigh in using the comments. Unfortunately, I have to moderate the comments to avoid spam, but under normal circumstances, I check several times a day. Moby Dick has many chapters, and the reading assignments will be for chapters, not page numbers, so that everyone can easily follow along, no matter which edition you use. 

My co-hosts for the reading group are Eric Wagner, the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, and Oz Fritz, the Grammy-award winner recording engineer recently spotted penning the introduction for the just-published Hilaritas Press edition of Terra II by Timothy Leary, which I bought this weekend. The schedule will be Tom, Eric, Tom and Oz, unless somebody needs to switch out, or wants to change the schedule to cover a favorite passage. The three of us agreed to do about 35 written pages a week, a pace I think most people will be able to manage. We'll post every Monday.

Reading assignment for next Monday: Please read the Etymology, the Extracts, and Chapters 1-3 ("Loomings," "The Carpet Bag," "The Spouter-Inn.")

Beethoven in 'Cosmic Trigger 2'

Alfred Brendel. (Photo  from official website). 

My fascination with Beethoven continues. I decided a few days ago to listen to all of Beethoven 32 piano sonatas again, in order. I have made it through #5 so far, so obviously I have a ways to go. I am mostly listening to renditions by Alfred Brendel, but for certain performances I am switching to Sviatoslav Richter and Angela Hewitt. (Richter is my favorite piano player, but he never recorded a set of all of Beethoven's sonatas, a good example of how Richter was a maverick and would not do what he was "supposed" to do.)

Robert Anton Wilson's books are peppered with references to Beethoven. My search of the text of Cosmic Trigger 2 (I also have a paper copy, but a Kindle is useful for searches) shows four references to him. For example, in the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" chapter, RAW writes, "A movie theatre is the best place to learn the true meaning of Plato's parable of the prisoners in the cave, who accept shadows as reality. Every artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is a bit of a hypnotist."

I am intrigued by another of the references to Beethoven. In the "Attack of the Dog-Faced Demons" chapter, RAW writes, "In a farm in Mendocino, 1972, I was preparing for the Mass of the Phoenix, a ritual designed by Aleister Crowley in which the magician attempts to activate his "True Will." I had taken 250 micrograms of Acid, played some Beethoven, and, when I felt ready, I went to my makeshift Altar and began the invocation."

Why would RAW play Beethoven as part of his preparation? Does anyone want to comment? 

Re-reading 'Cosmic Trigger 2': A net of jewels

Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth is one of my favorite Robert Anton Wilson books, and I re-read it every few years. I have just completed my latest re-read.   I've mentioned for years that it's one of my favorites, and in fact I was allowed to write a "Foreword" for the Hilaritas Press edition.

Here is  one recurring motif I noticed this time. As the book describes, when Wilson was in his twenties, he had two great frustrations. He had trouble getting his writing career going, and he was frustrated in his search for a romantic companion. 

Both of these problems had a "happy ending" of course, and I found passages in the book that link together Wilson's two great partnerships, one that largely launched his writing career and one that gave him a happy personal and family life. 

I noticed in the latest re-read that there's a lot in the book about networking; for example, Wilson talks about the John S. Bell's Theorem and how it apparently "showed that the universe was non-locally 'connected' or perhaps more precisely, non-locally correlated."  

This can be read as a metaphor for connections between people, and the book references two important connections Wilson made. One is the one with Robert Shea that resulted in Illuminatus!, which largely launched the book writing career for both men. The story of Illuminatus! is covered in the first book of the series, Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, and Wilson does not repeat the story in CT2. But there is a scene in the book which describes Wilson and Shea participating in an antiwar demonstration together and then taking refuge in a Chicago tavern.

In the Shea scene,  Wilson records that in the bar, "I looked at the silvery mirrors with me and Shea and a room full of strangers in them: a net of jewels, each of which reflects and is reflected in each of the others." (Page 30)

Toward the end of the book, Wilson describes meeting Arlen Riley, a writer and New York intellectual, and the storyline in those chapters concludes  with a description of their marriage.

At the wedding, the officiating Buddhist priest asks Wilson and his bride to repeat the traditional triple vow, used in all schools of Buddhism, to rely upon the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha; at the time, Wilson did not know what the Sangha was (it's  the community of Buddhists). The chapter then offers various definitions of the Sangha after Wilson had read up on the subject, and the jewels recur in his favorite description: "I prefer to consider it an unbounded net of jewels each of which reflects and contains the reflection of each of the others."

With your indulgence, I may have other blog posts about other features of the book. 

A recommendation for Cosmic Trigger 2

I am always happy to pass on recommendations for Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth, which is one of my favorite Robert Anton Wilson books, and perhaps maybe a bit underrated. I am currently slowly re-reading it.

The Nocturnal Reveries blog has a post about all 3 of the Cosmic Trigger books, and here in full is what he writes about the second book (it is his favorite of the series, which of course is not the received wisdom):  

"Part 2 was by far the most enjoyable in the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson tells more of his life story in this one, and he comes across as the witty, interesting guy I know he was. He had spent much of the time between writing this and the first book in Ireland, and this is apparent in his writing. Much of the book is taken up with discussions on his 'Irish' upbringing, James Joyce and the modern Irish legal system. He also gets into the P2 conspiracy. Honestly, you could read and enjoy this one without picking up the other 2 entries in the series. It actually deals with the earliest parts of his life more thoroughly than the first entry in the series, so it’d be a fine starting point."

Dr. Richard Waterloo's favorite book

On X, Dr. Richard Waterloo posts (a short thread of two messages)  "This book for curious 'heads ... Though I love talking about books, the question 'What's your favorite book?' is such a tough one. Prometheus Rising, I'd say, is my favorite because of its profound impact, but few people would really be interested in it so I don't recommend it to casual readers. Great for 'heads."

This raises a couple of interesting points. Is Robert Anton Wilson so "way out" that it's difficult to recommend his books to ordinary readers, or would many people be  interested in him if only he could become better known? I do think that Prometheus Rising is a favorite for many RAW readers. (See this posting about the new Prometheus Rising hardcover and how it is the best-selling book in the Hilaritas catalog). 

I would be hard-pressed to name one favorite book. If I had to name a favorite RAW book, I would have to go with Illuminatus!, which to me is a very rich reading experience that started it all for me as a RAW fan. But I also have a particular fondness for Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth, which as the title suggests is aimed at everyday human concerns that apply to many of us, and perhaps more approachable for readers new to RAW. I plan to read it  yet again soon. 

Arrests in Ireland in Kerry Babies case

A news story from Ireland:

A woman who was arrested on suspicion of murder as part of the investigation into the death of a baby boy in Ireland almost 40 years ago has been released without charge.

A man in his 60s who was also arrested remains under detention at a Garda station in the south of the country.

The body of the five-day-old infant, known as Baby John, was found with multiple stab wounds in a bag on a beach in Co Kerry in April 1984.

The man and woman were arrested in the Munster region on Thursday “in relation to the discovery of the body of a male infant at White Strand, Caherciveen, County Kerry”, according to a garda statement.

The high-profile discovery became known as the “Kerry Babies” case, and would lead to a state apology over the treatment of a local woman.

Joanne Hayes was arrested and charged after Baby John’s body was found in 1984, but the charge was later dropped and a tribunal of inquiry was set up to probe the handling of her case by Gardai.

Advances in DNA profiling then confirmed that Ms Hayes, as she always maintained, was not Baby John’s mother.

In 2018, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, justice minister Charlie Flanagan and An Garda Siochana apologised to Ms Hayes.

More here.  And here is the Irish Times account. 

Kudos to Prop Anon for spotting this on Twitter and calling it to my attention. On Twitter, Prop Anon explains, "Robert Anton Wilson wrote about the mysterious "Kerry Babies" murders in his book Coincidance about his time living in Ireland." 

Prop has the connection correct, but the actual book is Cosmic Trigger 2. And RAW is quite scathing in the book about the unfair treatment of Joanne Hayes. 

RAW's Yellow Springs arrest made national news

 

My favorite underrated RAW book, Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth,  describes how RAW got himself arrested by participating in a demonstration against a barber shop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which refused to serve Black people.

The above clipping,which Jesse Walker shared with me, is an AP wire story which Jesse found in an Indiana newspaper. So presumably it was published in other newspapers. "Those arrested were identified as Ken Huber, Dan Beverly, Robert Anton Wilson, Otha Nixon and Roland Smith, all Yellow Springs residents." The other details in the story match what RAW says in the book, at least as far as I can remember. 

The clipping is dated Sunday, July 28, 1963, so the "Saturday" arrests described in the article apparently are the day before. 

What to recommend to the RAW newbie?

On Twitter, RAW Semantics: "Although relatively few, I see a steady flow of people *new* to #RobertAntonWilson, curiously inquiring. Can I gently suggest you read his BOOKS first? Here's a catalog of them (from @TheRAWTrust). I predict you'll be very glad you took this suggestion! https://hilaritaspress.com/catalog/."

I asked, "Do they ask you what to try first? If so, what do you tell them?"

Brian replied, "Generally Prometheus Rising, as that was the first RAW non-fiction book I read (and it made a big impression)."

My own tentative suggestion is Masks of the Illuminati, although I wonder if The Widow's Son might be better for someone who prefers fiction. (I'm pretty sure Apuleius Charlton told me he reads it again every year, and Mike Gathers described it in a podcast as the first RAW book he finished, if I understood him correctly. The Widow's Son is a favorite of Bobby Campbell).  I also think Cosmic Trigger 2 might be a good introduction, and I think it's an underrated RAW book. 

UPDATE: Brian loves Cosmic Trigger 2, too!

Hilaritas Press podcast on Beethoven released

Eric Wagner

The latest Hilaritas Press podcast has been released today;  the topic is Beethoven, the host is Mike Gathers, and the guest is Eric Wagner.,This is a podcast I have been patiently waiting for and I will listen to it soon. Here is the RAW quote at the podcast page, from one of my favorites of RAW's books, Cosmic Trigger 2:

Whether one is transported out of one’s habitual Realty Tunnel to the multiple-choice labyrinth of Virtual Reality by marijuana or by Charlie Parker or by sexual orgasm or by meditation or by Picasso or by King Kong or by the Wicked Witch of the West, the experience has a quality of timelessness and liberation about it. One feels less mechanical and seems on the edge of grasping what the mystics mean by “Awakening”; sometimes, especially with Beethoven, one almost feels that one will never forget the “absurd good news” (as Chesterton called it) of that Awakened state.

Whenever I hear from Eric, he often mentions what he has been listening to. He is the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.

When I was growing up, my father used to put a Beethoven piano concerto (sometimes Mozart instead) on the stereo when we sat down to Sunday dinner. In high school, I started listening to Stravinsky and went on from there, but I never lost interest in Beethoven. 

Mark Frauenfelder on 'Cosmic Trigger 2'

 

Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth is my favorite underrated RAW book, so I am always happy to pass on a recommendation. Here is a sentence from an email from Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder: "By the way, I recently finished Cosmic Trigger II, and was astounded by how relevant it is in today's uncertain world!"

One of the points RAW makes in the book is that technology has made life better for many people. When I think about current politics, I get depressed. When I think about advances in technology, I feel optimistic.

The above picture, a girl holding a flower in the style of Salvador Dali, was made by an artificial intelligence art program named Conjure, which I read about in Mark's Substack newsletter, The Magnet. I've tried making several pieces of art with Conjure, and the one above is the one I like the best so far. Below is another one that came out pretty well, when I told the program to give me a picture of a bush with berries on the Siberian taiga.

You have to pay to get all of the issues of The Magnet, but something else  Mark that's free for everyone is Recomendo, a weekly newsletter with six recommendations in each issue from Mark, Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson.

What Kevin Kelly has in common with Mark is that you can't go wrong paying attention to him.  Kelly just turned 70, and celebrated by offering "103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known." Some of his advice sounds like RAW, e.g., "If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable."

RAW's 'HEAD Revolution'

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

A new discovery by Martin Wagner: "Adventures in the HEAD Revolution," about various experiments by Robert Anton Wilson in retuning his brain. A good read, although quite a bit of overlap with Cosmic Trigger II. Excerpt: 

I have never felt any attraction to legends about Atlantis, doctrines of reincarnation and karma, channeling, or most of the other dogmas of New Agers. Rather, I tend to agree with Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, who called such ideas “spiritual materialism”—belief systems that have no relevance whatever to the work on ego-transcendence that Mysticism demands. I always feel amused, but never offended, by the Protestant Fundamentalists who vehemently assure me I “am” enslaved by Satan and by the Materialist Fundamentalists who assure me, with equal passion, that I “am” as crazy as a waltzing mouse.

Review: Scott Horton's 'Enough Already'

Scott Horton's new book, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism serves as an excellent guide to America's misadventures and war crimes since the 9/11 attack in 2001, including the endless war in Afghanistan, the wars with Iraq, our constant bullying of Iran, the destruction of Libya and the destructive civil war in Syria, which the U.S. helped create.  The book was published in January and has in my opinion not received the attention it deserves.

Many of the places Horton writes about remain in terrible shape. Libya, attacked during the Obama administration, is still embroiled in a civil war. Yemen remains under a famine that kills children. 

Much of what Horton writes about will be known to any American who bothers to pay attention to American to foreign policy, but I suspect that's a minority of Americans. In any event, the details in Horton's book are startling. Did you know, for example, that the Obama administration sided with radical Islamists in the Syrian civil war, supplying them with arms? (We supposedly were arming "moderates," but that's not what took place in practice.) Or that Russia intervened on the side of the Assad regime largely to save Syria's Christian community, which could have been wiped out by the Islamists for all that most Americans care? 

Horton's 2017 book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan was heavily footnoted, but Enough Already does not have footnotes. When I asked Scott about this, he explained, "I skipped the footnotes because I decided to err on the side of brevity and timeliness. If I had given it the full Fool's Errand treatment, each chapter would have been its own book and it wouldn't be done for another long while. I really wanted it to be the everyman's guide to it all, rather than another liberal professor book that nobody reads. And the end of an era was fast approaching with the end of the 20-teens and the Trump government."

Still, Horton gives enough information about the source of his assertions that it's easy to find documentation. When I went look for the claim that Putin intervened in Syria partly because of pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church to save Christians, I found articles such as this one. ("One does not have to grant a single noble motive to Russian President Vladimir Putin to grasp that secular and religious leaders in Russia do not want to risk the massacre of ancient Orthodox Christian communities in Syria.")

In his chapter on Pakistan, Horton writes about how President Obama's policies resulted in many civilians being killed in drone strikes and that the civilian population was terrorized by the drone attacks. He cited a 2012 report by Stanford Law School, "Living Under Drones." That report is available on the internet; you can download your own copy. 

The details in the report are appalling. Here is a paragraph about a drone strike that killed 42 people, mostly civilians:

At approximately 10:45 am, as the two groups were engaged in discussion, a missile  fired from a US drone hovering above struck one of the circles of seated men. Ahmed  Jan, who was sitting in one of two circles of roughly 20 men each, told our researchers  that he remembered hearing the hissing sound the missiles made just seconds before  they slammed into the center of his group. The force of the impact threw Jan’s body a  significant distance, knocking him unconscious, and killing everyone else sitting in his  circle. Several additional missiles were fired, at least one of which hit the second  circle. In all, the missiles killed a total of at least 42 people. One of the survivors  from the other circle, Mohammad Nazir Khan, told us that many of the dead appeared  to have been killed by flying pieces of shattered rocks. Another witness, Idris Farid,  recalled that “everything was devastated. There were pieces—body pieces—lying around.  There was lots of flesh and blood.”

The report has pages and pages of similar accounts. Your tax dollars at work!

I am not a big fan of war crimes in general, but at least with some of the things the Allies did in World War II such as the bombing of Dresden, you can argue that there was some military justification, the war wasn't started by the U.S., etc. What is the justification for killing civilians in Pakistan, or destroying Libya, or menacing Christians in Syria? Did any of these countries attack the U.S.?

Scott Horton is the editorial director of Antiwar.com.  More information here. 

If you've read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 2 and you wonder what America has done in the area since Wilson's book was written, this will bring you up to speed. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 23

 In my Week 17 posting for the Prometheus Rising discussion group, I wrote about my plan to imitate Eric Wagner's plan to do a reading exercise that would contrast "selective attention" against "mind controls everything," his adaptation of one of the exercises in Chapter One of Prometheus Rising. You can follow my link and look back to read Eric's full explanation; here is what I said I would do: "For 23 days, I will read two of my favorite authors, Robert Anton Wilson and Tyler Cowen, on alternate days, using the 'selective attention' model. Then for 23 days, I will read them using them as 'magickal texts.' (I don't really know how to read them as 'magickal texts,' but I figure I know some people who can offer suggestions. Gregory? Cat? Oz? Anyone else?)

"As I deal with my life, I want to focus on how to stay positive and how to deal with information. So for 'selective attention,' I believe it would make sense to focus initially on RAW's Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth and on Cowen's The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. "

The selective attention part ends on March 16. I have completed re-reading The Age of the Infovore and I anticipate that I will finish re-reading Cosmic Trigger 2 by the end of the day Tuesday. 

So now it's time to try the reading as magickal texts part of the exercise, which takes me to April 8, if I counted correctly. As I know how to do that as well as I know how to fly a passenger jet airplane (e.g., not at all), you will notice from the passage I quoted that I asked for help.

Oz Fritz responded, " I can't say I have a good answer but I can offer suggestions of how to look for one as I search myself. Magick = the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will. Dion Fortune amended, or awomened, or streamlined this definition to include 'causing change in consciousness ...' Initially, beginning magick aims for the 'Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA)' which I interpret as contact with a specific (but multiple) Higher Intelligence from the territory of C6 (as in Leary's model) or beyond; only one interpretation from a concept that appears a multiplicity. The specificity of this contact has to do with the model that the HGA = the ultimate expression of one's True Will i.e. what you really wish to do in life. So perhaps reading something as a magickal text intends to move that along?

"This model includes the notion that Higher Intelligence ranges freely and can communicate through any medium. You might see a billboard that communicates something about your work when expanded out from the context of the advertisement; a young child might randomly say something that has relevance to your spiritual goals; your cat might cause spillage leading to hidden treasure, etc. So perhaps the psychokinesis model, applied to reading books, allows for the possibility that your HGA entered the consciousness of the author(s) causing them to write something personally useful to you years later. I sincerely hopes this helps and doesn't muddle things further."

So, if I'm reading this correctly, I should read passages looking for "the ultimate expression of one's True Will i.e. what you really wish to do in life."

Gregory Arnott wrote, "My answer would be: Wilson's books are some of the most powerful magical texts in my library. I've learned more about the sapient secrets of the cosmos and the darkness that lies in the heart of man from his works than most honest-to-Cthulhu grimoires. If you look at the article I wrote for Bobby Campbell's project, I have more there. Just imagine that the radical ideas and expositions of the mind you experience while reading them are becoming reality: THC helps. I'm pretty sure RAW is still alive in some manner and speaks through his texts. The grand old man, follow the threads. I don't know Tyler Cowen very well, so I can't give much advice there. Do the same thing, I guess?"

Gregory is referring to his piece for New Trajectories, "Ewige Schlangenkraft." I'll re-read it, but it seems to me the key sentence is "Just imagine that the radical ideas and expositions of the mind you experience while reading them are becoming reality: THC helps."

BFHN also pointed out in the comments that in the John Higgs interview of Alan Moore, above, about RAW, Moore talks about magickal readings of literature. (For your convenience, the interview is posted above.) There's a lot of discussion in the interview about how art and magick are largely the same thing, and Moore seems to have literature more in mind than anything else, but I think BFHN may be referring specifically to the point in the interview, that when you use the cut-up technique popularized by William Burroughs on texts, "glimpses of the future leak through."

I've bought a bunch of the RAW Hilaritas Press books as ebooks, so thought one way to do the cutup technique might be to do screenshots of passages selected a random on my laptop (using the Amazon Reader app) then do screenshots on my Chromebook, here's what I came up with in the first experiment:

 

So, for the magickal texts effort, I'll alternate from concentrating on Oz's suggestion, Gregory suggestion and doing cutups. 

The FDA, then and now

The FDA building, where dedicated federal bureaucrats work hard to make sure we don't get lifesaving vaccines too quickly. (Public domain government photo.)

The Food and Drug Administration is one of my least favorite federal agencies. It's one of the aspects of the U.S. government which makes me wonder why almost everyone I know who expresses a political preference is a Democrat or Republican, rather than a Libertarian.

Robert Anton Wilson, no fan of the FDA, wrote over and over again about how the agency treated Wilhelm Reich. Here are a few words from the "Taking the Name of the Lord in Pain" chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2: " ... I had read about Dr. Reich, when the Food and Drug Administration invaded his laboratory, smashed his equipment with axes, burned all of his books and threw him in jail."

If you read the rather long entry about Reich on Wikipedia, you can see that while this summary removes a certain amount of nuance (the FDA supposedly only supervised the destruction of Reich's equipment and books, rather than taking part), RAW's summary omits details which makes its actions even worse. Not only Reich but an associate, Dr. Michael Silvert, were sent to prison (Silvert killed himself after being released). And the U.S. Supreme Court -- you know, the tribune of the people, which steps in to protect our constitutional liberties -- declined to hear Reich's appeal.

Only a relatively few people apparently thought any of this was worth making a fuss over. The American Civil Liberties Union (in those days, an organization concerned with civil liberties) did issue a press release criticizing the book burning.

Fast forward to 2020-2021, and with half a million Americans dead from the pandemic, and tens of millions wishing they could get a damn vaccination shot already, the FDA has kept itself busy by trying to impede the testing necessary to track the disease and slow its spread, and by trying to hold up the distribution of vaccines as much as possible.

If you think that's an exaggeration, then I will submit you haven't been following press coverage of the FDA very closely. You can, for example, read a New York Times account of May 15, 2020, relatively early in the pandemic, of how a test backed by Bill Gates was used to learn more about the spread of the virus, until the FDA ordered a halt in testing. 

As for my claim that the FDA is holding up vaccines, feel free to offer your own explanation for why the Oxford AstraZeneca has been authorized by the World Health Organization, the United Kingdom, all of the member nations of the European Union (27 countries such as Germany, France, etc.),  India, Mexico and probably some other countries I have forgotten. But here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I am not free to take it, even if I am brave enough to take a vaccine that's been in use for weeks around the world.

When the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical company applied for an Emergency Use Authorization at the FDA on Feb. 4 to distribute its vaccine, the FDA decided to wait more than three weeks before it convenes a panel to discuss the matter. The meeting, in fact, is being held today. The current seven-day average for COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. is 2,174.  So that's what, 40,000 deaths or so while the FDA considers the matter? The 3,000 deaths from the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack were used as an excuse to turn the U.S. into a police state.

As with all of the Wilhelm Reich stuff, only a relatively small number of apparent oddballs seem to think there is anything wrong with the FDA's actions and lack of actions, libertarians on Twitter and the like. It doesn't seem to bother anyone in the Biden administration or anyone I have heard about in the U.S. Congress. 

Reasons to be cheerful

 

In Cosmic Trigger 2, Robert Anton Wilson writes (in the "Barbaric Age Recalled" chapter) about how awful living conditions were as he grew up. (He was born in 1932.)

"When I remember life in Gerritsen Beach in those days, I define it chiefly in negatives," he writes. "Most readers born since 1945 cannot imagine the ignorance and brutality of those days. Many middle-aged women had goiter, a disease causing an ugly lump in the neck, which looked like a cancer. (The cure was found sometime in the 1940s and goiter disappeared from America). People regularly died of tuberculosis, which is now normally cured in its early stages, and children had dozens of diseases now abolished. I myself survives measles, German measles, mumps, flu (still a major killer in those days), rheumatic fever, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio."

The passage has many other details. "The community had no paved roads and nobody had central heating. wall-to-wall carpeting or central bathrooms ... When ecologists like Gary Snyder talk about 'going back to the way things were in the 1920s,' I think they must be a few gallons shy of a full tank. The '20s were even worse for poor people than the '30s ... " 

We all went through a tough year in 2020 because of the pandemic. Most people, regardless of their political persuasion, did not particularly enjoy the U.S. election and other events associated with it, although obviously Democrats preferred the ultimate outcome.

With that noted, perhaps it is useful to point out last year was a good year for technological progress. A couple of recent columns I ran across made that point.

Writing for his column at Bloomberg news, Tyler Cowen wrote in "The Silver Lining of 2020" that the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, developed in record time, were not the only example of technological advances during the year. 

"Other advances in the biosciences may prove no less stunning. A very promising vaccine candidate against malaria, perhaps the greatest killer in human history, is in the final stages of testing. Advances in vaccine technology have created the real possibility of a universal flu vaccine, and work is proceeding on that front. New CRISPR techniques appear on the verge of vanquishing sickle-cell anemia, and other CRISPR methods have allowed scientists to create a new smartphone-based diagnostic test that would detect viruses and offer diagnoses within half an hour," he wrote.

2020 also saw breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, transportation and green energy, apparently providing a path forward to deal with climate change. The column notes "progress in solar power, which in many settings is as cheap as any relevant alternative. China is opening a new and promising fusion reactor. Despite the absence of a coherent U.S. national energy policy, the notion of a mostly green energy future no longer appears utopian.

"In previous eras, advances in energy and transportation typically have brought further technological advances, by enabling humans to conquer and reshape their physical environments in new and unexpected ways. We can hope that general trend will continue."

David Brooks wrote a column making similar points in the New York Times. Yes, I know the country is largely divided between people who hate Brooks or who hate the Times, but "The Coming Technology Boom" is a good column that mentions many new technologies Cowen did not list. 

Try the new audiobook

Want to try the new Cosmic Trigger 2 audiobook before you buy it?

Click the above video from Hilaritas Press to hear Chapter One, narrated by Oliver Senton.

Cosmic Trigger II audiobook released

Hilaritas Press has announced the release of a new audiobook: Cosmic Trigger II, narrated by Oliver Senton, who portrayed RAW in Daisy Campbell's production of the Cosmic Trigger Play.

While I welcome all Hilaritas Press announcements, Cosmic Trigger II is a book I'm particularly fond of. I know that most RAW fans would likely prefer the first Cosmic Trigger. If you like audiobooks, you don't have to choose, because there's an Oliver Senton-narrated audiobook for it, too.  (I now have both audiobooks on my phone.)

You will want to read the whole announcement, because as with many other such announcements, a particular highlight is Christina Pearson's contribution, which includes memories about what life on the farm was like, when her family tried going back to the land in Ohio:

On the homestead our family lived in an old ramshackle 2-room house, where we took our baths in a big tin tub (see picture!) that would get pulled out and put on the floor in the kitchen, and filled from the hose attached to the kitchen sink), and used the outhouse out back for going to the bathroom. (imagine telling your 6 year-old daughter she needs to go poop in the outhouse while it was 19 degrees out and icy! Yep . . . we just cried so us kids ended up getting a chamber-pot (read pot with lid) we could use inside the big house to keep from freezing our little rear-ends off that winter . . .)

The Stringless Yo-Yo Company

From the Harvey Matusow library at the University of Sussex. See blog post. 

From Rasa on Facebook:

In Cosmic Trigger II, RAW writes about Harvey Matusow, and his Stringless Yo-Yo Company. I still haven't found the film RAW mentions, but doing a little research on Matusow's life was interesting. About the International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines, Matusow wrote in the late 60's:

"The computer has a healthy and conservative function in mathematics and other sciences," but "when the uses involve business or government, and the individual is tyrannized, then we make our stand.

Here's the passage from Cosmic Trigger II:

• • •

A fellow named Harvey Matusow made his living for a few years identifying people as Communists he had known while in the Party. Then he suddenly confessed that he had never been in the Communist Party, at all, and had been making everything up out of his rich Slavic fantasy life. Everybody was furious at him — both the Left and the Right — and eventually he went to jail for perjury.

When he got out of prison, Harvey made a documentary film about his adventures, which I saw. A lot of it involved his testimony about the Stringless Yo-Yo Company, which he had claimed was run by the Communist Party. None of the Congressmen who heard this testimony asked him what the hell a stringless yo-yo was.

The film may still be available. It’s called The Stringless Yo-Yo and I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how politics works. 

 – Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II 

• • •

There's a lot online about this odd character. This is a tantalizing synopsis:

https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/07/harvey_matusow_.html

This is a bit of writing from Matusow that I found interesting:

http://www.ibiblio.org/mal/MO/matusow/chapters/ch1.html

Someone found a copy of The Stringless Yo Yo documentary:

Part One:

https://www.facebook.com/ldstrobel/videos/10206198367422904/

Part Two:

https://www.facebook.com/ldstrobel/videos/vb.1375982982/10206198592988543

Thanks to Jon Swabey for finding this.

I watched it last night. Pretty uneven as film making goes, but altogether really very interesting.