Illuminatus online reading group, Week 14

Hassan Sabbah, leader of the Assassins. 

(This week: Page 134, "Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit," to page 144 "to see if Danny found this 'Pat' who wrote them.")

In class at Harvard, Hagbard Celine realizes that his unpopular opinions are not welcomed by many of the other students: "As in law school, the other students were disturbed. Hagbard began to understand: they are not here to learn, they are here to acquire a piece of paper that will make them eligible for certain jobs ... "

While I agree that many people go to college and emerge with all of their previous beliefs intact, there are people who see the campus experience as a kind of voyage of discovery. I went to the University of Oklahoma (in 1974) thinking I was a liberal Democrat, and emerged  (in 1978) (acquiring my piece of paper, a journalism degree, one year later) thinking of myself as a libertarian, a person who had peculiar opinions and who sometimes read very peculiar books.

It is interesting to go to college and see RAW's observations on belief systems played out, not only in the diversity of opinion among various folks who are all convinced that they are right, but in the way people change their belief systems. I had one friend who was a various times a Marxist and a Jesus Freak. (He was always into drugs, though, and never had a libertarian phase.) The Marxist bit stuck.

Try as I might, I cannot remember how I heard about Illuminatus! or how I "found the others," the other campus libertarians. I might have heard about Illuminatus! from some of my new friends, or I might have run across it in paperback book rack (then, as now, I was a voracious reader, particularly of cheap science fiction paperbacks.) I wrote to a couple of these guys over the weekend, asking what they could remember. Steve Browne (he has a blog and still calls himself a libertarian, his views resemble the Instapundit's) wrote back: "I remember finding out about the trilogy. My late friend John Aynesworth discovered it and brought it over to my place and read the entire 'Atlas Shrugged' parody 'Telemachus Sneezed' to me and some others that were there, can't remember who." (Many years later, when I was in the 50s, I discovered that John was a fellow member of the Libertarian Futurist Society. In the libertarian movement, there are seldom very many degrees of separation.)

The bit about Ayn Rand is telling. Most libertarians in those days obtained their opinions by reading Rand tomes such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There was even a popular libertarian book by Jerome Tuccille called It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. (Hmm, I see that there is a cheap revised Kindle edition.) 

But not me. I went to a high school on the south side of Tulsa where I was surrounded by conservative Republicans, some of them my friends. (It's the side of Tulsa that had the "Socs," if you've read S.E. Hinton). I was a liberal Democrat who opposed the war in Vietnam, although when I went to college I found I didn't have any affinity, either, with the Marxists who celebrated the fall of Saigon. Reading Illuminatus! was a critical stage in discovering that I was something called a "libertarian."

So for me it began with Illuminatus! and continued with books such as the ones mentioned above and with The Illuminati Papers. Illuminatus! resembled the world I sometimes found myself in, at least when I went to parties. And for other people, I think it began with Illuminatus! too.

If you read my 2011 Jesse Walker interview, you can see he went through a political evolution similar to mind. Here is a passage from that interview: "Illuminatus! is one of the first forthrightly libertarian books I read. I've joked that the great invisible divide in the libertarian movement is between the people who were transformed by reading Atlas Shrugged in high school and people who were transformed by reading Illuminatus! I never went through a Rand phase, so you can put me firmly in the Illuminatus! camp."

Jesse says he jokes about it, but even now, I think the Rand fans tend to be a little more "right" than the RAW fans, although many libertarians would cite both as an influence.

In the 1970s, when one became a libertarian, one usually went on to read various movement books. For me, those books included For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard, The Incredible Bread Machine and Rand's anthology, For the New Intellectual, still the only Rand book I've ever read.

It's interesting to me that Illuminatus! fans tend to fall in different camps. I don't remember that my friends and I talked about magick or Kabbalah, or even reality tunnels. I don't remember any particular interest in Timothy Leary. Libertarians in those days favored legalization of drugs, of course, but when I think about it, I realize that the libertarians I knew were not, in fact, the biggest druggies of my acquaintance. We were all involved with the nascent Libertarian Party. The biggest surprise to me in writing this blog is that not many RAW fans seem terribly interested in libertarianism. Perhaps it's a testimony to the man that he had so many different interests, and people pick up on them in so many different ways.

So, how did you discover Illuminatus!, and what effect did it have on you? 

Some notes on the text:

"it seemed to him a frieze and a freeze in time: a moment that would linger, as another stage in illumination," pages 134-135 this sounds to me like Zen, the Buddhist path to sudden insight. 

"But more years had to pass .... and  Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight," page 135. This is apparently in 1969-1970. According to the handy Iluminatus! timeline in Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, the bombing took place on April 23, 1976.

"Tequila y Mota Street," page 136. Named after the ruling dictator, Captain Ernesto Tequila & Mota (page 18) but I did not realize until now that "mota" is slang for marijuana.

"The SAC bases," page 137, the Strategic Air Command, the bombers  in the U.S. Air Force deployed to drop nuclear bombs.

The Book of Lies, by Aleister Crowley, written under the pen name of Frater Perdurabo.

Hassan i Sabbah, leader of the Assassins. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that according to the Wikipedia article, he had an associate named Malik: "Hassan's austere and devoted commitment to the da'wa brought him in audience with the chief missionary of the region: ‘Abdu l-Malik ibn Attash."

"Jesus Christ went by on a bicycle," page 142. LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann rode home on a bicycle during the first intentional acid trip. See the reference to Jarry on page 143.

"they are here to acquire a piece of paper that would make them eligible for certain jobs," page 144. For the concept of signalling, go here. An amusing British perspective on signalling in American colleges is here.

(Next week: From page 144 "ILLUMINATI PROJECT MEMO #15" to page 154, "and you're going to tell the judge that, in exactly those words.")

Sunday links

Many of these deserve a separate blog posting of their own, but I am trying to get caught up and have many things to post about, so please forgive me.

Michael Johnson on various kinds of logic. Don't forget to read the comments, too; Michael's bit about the Jains is lovely.

Adam Gorightly discusses Week 13 of the Illuminatus! online reading: "Bavarians, Beethoven and Bloodshed." You gotta read the hoax letter.

Chad Nelson on "Libertarianism As Direct Experience." Includes discussion of RAW's SNAFU principle. It's posted at the Center for a Stateless Society website; I mentioned to Chad that the center's political principles often seem pretty close to what RAW espoused. "Yea, I agree with c4ss aligning pretty closely with RAW's politics.  A lot of Benjamin Tucker influence.  Wish there was more of that amongst libertarians," he replied. I need to get around to reading Benjamin Tucker.

One of the perks for the Cosmic Trigger crowd funding. (See Saturday's post.)

PQ on Joseph Campbell on how to read Finnegans Wake.

Response to Michael Kinsley from Glenn Greenwald.

Is that angel holding a hot dog? Via John Merritt. (John believes the others are holding mustard and ketchup jars. But shouldn't the angel hold the hot dog rather than the bun?)

NASA releases free ebook on communicating with aliens.

Cosmic Trigger crowd funding campaign launches

As previously announced, the Cosmic Trigger play crowd funding campaign began on May 23, at Indiegogo. (The details came in too late to make yesterday's post.)

I went to the site and contributed  23 pounds after the campaign began. There are many different levels for donations, all the way from one pound to 23,000 pounds, and many different perks of interest to Robert Anton Wilson fans, including artwork and books signed by the likes of John Higgs and Adam Gorightly. The page also has a list of the folks who are involved in the production, with short bios for each.

The official Cosmic Trigger play website is here; it also has a link to the crowd funding campaign. Lots of other information on the site, including confirmed cast members. Oliver Senton has been cast as Robert Anton Wilson.

The 23 Enigma and the Law of Fives on NPR

My day job is that I'm a reporter for the Sandusky Register newspaper. Yesterday, May 22, I interviewed a lady in Sandusky named Mary Perry. The trigger for the story was that the next day, May 23, would be the 20th anniversary of her heart transplant.

Well, she had to have it sometime.

But when I was sitting in her living room, she suddenly remarked, "23 is kind of a good number for me and a bad number for me." Then she told me about all the events in her life connected with 23: The birth of her mother, the birth of her son, the death of her son and other events. I asked her if she'd ever heard of the 23 Enigma, and she said no.

Today, as I drove to work, I listened to a podcast of "This American Life." The specific podcast was "No Coincidence, No Story." It did not occur to me I was listening to the broadcast on the 23rd day of the fifth month. I have a backlog of "This American Life" podcasts on my smartphone, and I have been listening to them every day, clearing away the backlog and freeing up space for a library audiobook I want to download soon.

It's a great episode of my favorite podcast, filled with crazy coincidences, but what I wanted to mention was this: The show's guest narrator, Sarah Koenig (filling in for Ira Glass) mentions a family that was at a Thanksgiving dinner and realized that six of them have names with 23 letters. Later on, referring to another story, Koenig says, "Coming up, don't lift that manhole cover. That's 23 letters, by the way."

Elsewhere in the podcast, Koenig explains the title of the show, which comes from a Chinese phrase from a friend of hers. The Chinese phrase has five words, as Koenig explains when she tells one of the people she is interviewing: "I have five words for you, Jeff." So the title of the show on coincidences conforms to the Law of Fives.

When I came to work, my phone was flashing, so the first thing I did was check my voicemails. The second message came from Mary Perry's daughter. Transcript: "It was just kind of a weird thing. Me and my mom were talking tonight and we remembered that there was also another lady waiting for a heart transplant that had the exact same name as my Mom except for  her middle name was different.  Her middle name was Louise. It was Mary Louise Perry. And she died one or two nights before Mom got her heart. And she was also Dr. Bott-Silverman's patient.  It was just a weird thing that she had the exact same name except for her middle name. "

More privacy news

A couple of followups to Sunday's post on keeping your privacy online, and then I'll try to shut up about the subject, at least for  a few days:

(1) Version 1.0 of TAILS has been released. This is version of Linux, designed to run from a USB stick or a live disk, that is designed to protect your privacy on the Internet. It's been used by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Bruce Schneier, etc. I use it quite a bit. You can read about TAILS in Wired and at Gizmodo. Computerworld has a detailed writeup.

(2) A new webmail service called ProtonMail that's supposed to make encrypted email easy has just gone into public beta. It now has a waiting list — the servers got overwhelmed by new users — but you can sign up to get an invite when more accounts become available. I want to try it, but I didn't find out about it in time, so I'll have to wait like everyone else.

Wednesday links

New Left historian Gabriel Kolko has  died. Jesse Walker comments. Kolko is featured in Jeff Riggenbach's Why American History Is Not What They Say, which I blogged about.

Adam Gorightly on Discordianism in Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon. Adam's new Historia Discordia book is about to be released; more on that soon.

Jesse Walker, in Slate,  on the limitations into research into paranoia and conspiracy theories.

The NSA is recording every phone call in the Bahamas.

Sean Ono Lennon playlist of 62 psychedelic classics.

Takedown of latest Salon hit piece.

What drives this blog (well, one thing)

As I pursue the quixotic project of blogging Illuminatus! 10 pages at a time with  y'alls help, I wanted to refer to the same edition that everyone else uses. (My personal library has the original three 1970s mass market paperbacks). So I checked out a copy via the Sandusky Library from Cleveland Public Library, using CLEVNET, a local library consortium.

I've reached my maximum number of renewals, so I have to give it back. No problem, I thought. I would just check out a copy from the local branch library where I live, Berea, Ohio. It's part of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, a metropolitan library system in Cleveland that has 27 branches. Sari Feldman, the library's executive director, has just been elected the president of the American Library Association.

Except that when I ran a search online in the library catalog, I made an unpleasant discovery. The library system did not have a copy of Illuminatus! In fact, it did not have anything by Robert Anton Wilson or Robert Shea.

The effort to secure a place for RAW in the literary canon obviously has a long way to go. It's part of the reason why I blog.

Illuminatus Online Reading Group, Week 13

Diogenes searches for an honest man. Painting attributed to JHW Tischbein. 

(This week: Page 124 "Simon parked the car and held the door open" to Page 134 "his old impudent grin flashed wickedly.")

There are many famous stories told about Diogenes the Cynic, the Greek philosopher who helped launch the Cynics, the ancient Greek philosophical movement that Simon Moon ties to the anti-Illuminati movement of the Justified Ancients of Mummu.

Some of Diogenes' interactions were with some of the age's most famous people. Alexander the Great came calling one day when the philosopher was sunning himself. Alexander asked if there was anything he could do for the great thinker. Yes, Diogenes said -- move out of the way, so I can continue to enjoy the sun. Alexander remarked that if he were not Alexander, he would like to be Diogenes — a remarkably fatuous remark, given the conqueror's vast appetite for taking control of large areas of land and killing remarkably large numbers of people. (If you like Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, you'll love Alexander). Diogenes remarked that if he weren't Diogenes, he'd like to be Diogenes, too.

Plato once provided a definition of man as a creature without feathers who walks on two legs. Diogenes responded by plucking a chicken and bringing it to one of Plato's classes as an example of Plato's men. The definition of man was changed to add "broad flat nails," but the sense that the definition had been fatally punctured has echoed through the ages.

Even if you don't follow classical culture closely, you have probably heard the story about Diogenes carrying a lamp with him everywhere he went, even during the day. When he was asked what the lamp was for, he explained it was to try to find an honest man.

Simon Moon gives the Cynics as an example of one of the groups in which the Justified Ancients of Mummu sought to resist the Illuminati. Diogenes certainly rebelled against many of the strictures of society; he said that nothing that was not shameful when done in private would be shameful if done in public, too. Cynicism means "dog like," and it was applied to Diogenes (and his followers) for his "shameless" lifestyle, says British classical scholar John L. Moles in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary*. Compare with Simon Moon talking (page 64) "We won't be human beings, the way apes are apes and dogs are dogs, until we fuck where and when we want to, like any other mammal. Fucking in the streets isn't just a tactic to blow minds; it's recapturing our own bodies." Shades of the Beatles' "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"

 Professor Moles, who wrote the entries for "Diogenes," "Cynics" and "Crates," in the 3rd O.C.D., explicitly links "hard" cynicism to anarchism in his Cynicism piece ("The Roman authorities inevitably clashed with 'hard' Cynics (qua anarchists)," p. 418.

The Cynics had a huge influence on classical philosophy. Mole writes that Stoic ethics are essentially Cynic ethics, and that although Epicureans issued polemics against the Cynics, Cynic ethics were a big influence on Epicurean ethics. (Stoicism was founded by Zeno, a follower of Crates. Crates, Moles explains, "notoriously enacted Diogenes prescriptions regarding free and public sex in his relations with Hipparchia, with whom he shared a Cynic way of life." ) This seems like a good place to mention that historical novelist Richard Blake, who sets his novels in Late Antiquity, one of my obsessions, links Epicureanism to classical liberalism, i.e. libertarianism. 

 A few notes on the text:

"Lie down on the floor and keep calm....Diogenes the Cynic" pages 125-126. Alas, after combing through Internet sites and the Oxford Classical Dictionary, I've found no evidence yet that Diogenes said that. I also wrote to Richard Blake/Sean Gabb for help, as he is a classicist, and he said, "I don't think Diogenes said that, though he might have." I've written to another British classicist; if I get a response, I will update this post. [Update: John Moles, professor of Latin at Newcastle University and I believe the same person cited above, says, "Rings no bells. Idiom sounds phony. Don't believe it's authentic." Maybe John Dillinger just wasn't much of a classical scholar.]

I can say, however that Scott Piering said "Lie down on the floor and keep calm" on the KLF song, "Last Train to Trancentral."

"Mummu," page 127. Sumero-Babylonian god and embodiment of entropy, or so says Wikipedia.

"Justified Ancients of Mummu," phrase often used by the KLF. For more on the KLF, a British pop group, and how it was influenced by Robert Anton Wilson, see the very interesting book by JMR Higgs. 



"they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out the Jams' just to taunt us with old bitter memories" page 128. Kick out the Jams by the MC5 is a fairly famous rock music album and song; the Wikipedia article says that the KLF sampled the song. John Sinclair was the MC5's manager.

"Christian Crusade of Tulsa, Oklahoma" Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, Page 128, a right-wing, anti-Communist church in Tulsa which really did put out the titles described in Illuminatus! As a teenager growing up in Tulsa, I once attended a church service presided over by the founder, the Rev. Billy James Hargis, as part of a comparative religious class for my Unitarian church, so I knew the reference was real when I read Iluminatus! for the first time as a college student at the University of Oklahoma. The church also opposed sex education in the public schools. The church went into decline after two students at his American Christian College allegedly discovered, on their wedding night, that they had both had sex with Hargis.

Scotus Ergina, page 132, aka Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Irish theologian, philosopher and poet. His statement, "All things that are, are lights" was used for the title of Robert Shea's excellent historical novel, All Things Are Lights. 

"look what Beethoven did..." page 133, the Fifth Symphony is arguably the best-known masterpiece of classical music. The dramatic score certainly sounds like the work of a composer who had achieved illumination.

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," page 133. For what it's worth, John Lennon swore that he had never noticed the initials when he wrote the song and that it was inspired by a drawing by his son of a classmate named Lucy.

"Osiris is a black god." page 134. I've struggled to understand this; does it mean that Osiris is a god of death, and therefore also a god of resurrection? Somebody help me on this.

* After my wife bought the expensive third edition as my main Christmas present one year, they rushed out a fourth edition.

(Next week: Page 134, "Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit," to page 144 "to see if Danny found this 'Pat' who wrote them.")

Protecting your privacy online [UPDATED]

Julia Angwin (photo by Deborah Kopaken Cogen)

UPDATE: TrueCrypt is no longer recommended; see this article.]

[This is a reprint of an article on ProPublica by Julia Angwin, author of the new book Dragnet Nation.  Her advice on how to protect your privacy online is so good and so succinct I wanted you to see it. Please notice that I am not "pirating" the article; ProPublica allows anyone to reprint its articles if you meet its terms and conditions. -- The Mgt.]

Privacy Tools: Encrypt What You Can

Here are some techniques that anybody can use to protect their privacy online.
by Julia Angwin
ProPublica, May 6, 2014


In the course of writing my book, Dragnet Nation, I tried various strategies to protect my privacy. In this series of book excerpts and adaptations, I distill the lessons from my privacy experiments into tips for readers.

Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the inner secrets of the NSA, he has been urging Americans to use encryption to protect themselves from rampant spying.

"Encryption does work," Snowden said, via a remote connection at the SXSW tech conference. "It is a defense against the dark arts for the digital realm."

ProPublica has written about the NSA's attempts to break encryption, but we don't know for sure how successful the spy agency has been, and security experts still recommend using these techniques.

And besides, who doesn't want to defend against the dark arts? But getting started with encryption can be daunting. Here are a few techniques that most people can use.

Encrypt the data you store. This protects your data from being read by people with access to your computer.

• Encrypt your hard drive so that if you lose your computer or you get hacked, your information will be safe. Most recent Apple Macintosh computers contain a built-in encryption system called FileVault that is simple to use. Some versions of Microsoft's Windows 7 also contain a built-in encryption system called BitLocker. Another popular solution is the free, open-source program TrueCrypt, which can either encrypt individual files or entire partitions of your computer or an external hard drive.

[Since this article was written, TrueCrypt has abruptly shut down. See this BoingBoing report.]

• Encrypt your smartphone's hard drive. Yes -- your smartphone has a hard drive much like your computer does. In fact, your phone probably contains as much --or more -- sensitive information about you as your computer does. Apple doesn't let you encrypt your smart phone's hard drive or the files on it, though the operating system will encrypt passwords and some other files if you use a passcode on your device. Apple will also let you encrypt your phone's backup files on iTunes or iCloud. You can also use Find my iPhone to remotely "wipe," or delete the data on your iPhone or iPad if it is lost or stolen. Google's Android operating system lets you encrypt your phone hard drive.

• Encrypt the data you store in the cloud. I use the SpiderOak encrypted cloud service. If an encrypted cloud service were somehow forced to hand over their servers, your data would still be safe, because it's encrypted using a key stored only on your computer. However, this also means that if you lose your password, they can't help you. The encrypted data would be unrecoverable.

Encrypt the data you transmit. The Snowden revelations have revealed that U.S. and British spy agencies are grabbing as much unencrypted data as they can find as it passes over the Internet. Encrypting your data in transit can protect it against spy agencies, as well as commercial data gatherers.

• Install HTTPS Everywhere on your Web browser. This encrypts your Web browsing sessions, protecting you from hackers and spy agencies that scoop up unencrypted traffic across the Internet. Not every site works properly with HTTPS Everywhere, though an increasing number do.

• Use encrypted texting apps with friends who install the same apps on their phones. On the iPhone, Silent Circle and Wickr offer apps for encrypted texting. On Android, the TextSecure app encrypts texts in transit and when they are stored on your device.

• Use the Off-the-Record Messaging protocol to encrypt your instant messaging conversations. You can still use your favorite instant-messaging service, such as Gchat or AIM, though you'll need to use a software client that supports the Off-the-Record protocol. On Macs, free software called Adium can enable OTR chats, and on Windows, you can use Pidgin. Once you've set up OTR and gone through a simple verification step, you can IM as you usually do. Both parties have to use OTR for the encryption to work.

• Use Gnu Privacy Guard to encrypt your email conversations. Like OTR, if you're using GPG you'll need the people you email with to use it as well in order to encrypt your conversations. I use free software called GPG Tools with Enigmail and Postbox. GPG Tools also works directly with Apple's built-in Mail program. [Using Thunderbird as your email client with the Enigmail add-on is an easy way to use GPG with any platform -- I use it with my Macintosh work computer and Ubuntu Linux home computer. In Julia Angwin's excellent book, which you should all read, she admits that she needed help to get GPG working with Postbox. I believe if she had used Thunderbird she would have figured it out herself. -- The Mgt.]

GPG has some shortcomings — it's difficult-to-impossible to use it with the mail program built into most smartphones, and you can't use it easily with webmail like Gmail.  [Gmail works well with Thunderbird -- see the previous paragraph -- The Mgt.] (Although there are some new web-based mail programs that use GPG called Mailvelope and StartMail that I haven't had a chance to try yet.)

The most difficult part of GPG is that, unlike the encrypted texting and instant messaging programs, you have to generate a secret key and keep it somewhere secure (usually on your computer or on a USB stick). This often means you can only send GPG mail when you have your key with you. Even so, it is incredibly satisfying once you send your first message and watch it transform into a block of numbers and letters when you click "encrypt."

Clarification (May 7, 2014): This post was clarified to specify that Apple's iOS encrypts some files automatically.

A bit of peace news

Lucy Steigerwald 

While I admit to being agnostic about some of Robert Anton Wilson's political and economics opinions (I don't disagree with them, I just don't have an opinion), I have noticed that regardless of his other political evolutions, he always supported peace and civil liberties. That's why I link, on the right side of of the page, to antiwar and civil liberties groups.

In related news, Antiwar.com, the peace news and opinion site, is conducting a fund raising drive. They've been spied on by the FBI, they were recently hacked, and they can use the money. If you support peace, or if you support the notion that libertarianism should make a peace a higher priority than, say, tax cuts for millionaires, it's not a bad place to put your money. I gave them $25. I'll do better for them and my other favorite websites if/when I ever become a libertarian mogul. If you're not flush, go check out the site, anyway. It just added Lucy Steigerwald as a regular columnist. (My recent posting on Antiwar.com columnist Justin Raimondo is here, just in case you missed it and you've realized your life will be incomplete until you can read it.)

Libertarian economist David Henderson, writing for the Econlog blog, recently posted about how he had formed an informal alliance with a leftist friend for a "Let's Stop this War Before It Starts" rally against war with Russia. These kinds of alliances seem important to me.

You should consider reading Ramez Naam's 'Nexus'

Ramez Naam

Every once in awhile, your humble blogger recommends a novel that sombunall of you might be interested in. I did so last  year when I plugged Leonard Richardson's excellent Constellation Games. And now I'm doing so again be recommending a novel by another emerging science fiction writer. I read a lot of books, and Nexus by Ramez Naam is the best science fiction novel I've read in awhile.

Nexus is a substance, part drug and part nanoparticles, that essentially can be used to implant computers into the brains of its users, enhancing their abilities and allowing them to communicate wirelessly with each other. The government is against the open distribution of the stuff, of course, so the plot is a thriller, with lots of fight scenes, of the struggle between the protagonists, various interest groups, and a ruthless DEA-style organization called the ERD.

The hero is a guy named Kaden Lane, a smart nerd but not a James Bond type (his best efforts to be James Bond, taken in emergencies, tend to fall short). I'm not going to give a detailed plot summary; why take away the surprises? Please take my word for it that while Naam gives you plenty to think about, there's lots going on.

I bring the book up at this blog because I think Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary fans would be interested in a central element of the plot: When a radical "brain change" agent becomes available, who has the right to control it? Or does anyone have the right? The book explicitly invokes the War on Drugs.

And here is a section of the book, in which the hero and a Buddhist monk, who are really talking about the spread of Nexus, discuss the issue by analogy:

"Imagine," Ananda said, "a world where it took most of a lifetime to learn to speak, to learn to read or write, where many never even reached that point." 

Kade closed his eyes, tried to picture it.

"Imagine that you could show people a faster way," Ananda continued. "That in a year or two you could show them the basics of language, of literacy."

Kade imagined.

"Would you do it?" Ananda asked.

"Yes," Kade replied.

"Even though it would surely be used at times for profanity or vile speech?"

"Yes."

"Even though fools might read dangerous things written by bigger fools, might follow their instructions and hurt themselves or others?"

"Yes," Kade replied.

"Even though writing might be used to describe weapons that could be used to kill others?" Ananda asked.

"Yes," Kade said.

"Even though charismatic fascists might use the power of speech to stir people up, to incite violence, to stoke hatred, to create war?"

Kade swallowed. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I think people would use it for more good than harm."

"Is that the only reason?"

"And because I think it's just good. It's just good for people to be able to communicate more easily. It's just good for people to be smarter, to be more connected, to have access to more of each others' thoughts."

Compare that, if you would, to the Robert Anton Wilson quote in the link, above, to my Constellation Games review.

I should add that the book says all the right things (i.e., things I agree with) about free speech, government lying, freedom of the Internet, and so on.

Cory Doctorow reviewed the book for Boing Boing.  Naam has a website and a Twitter account. 

Nexus is a finalist for the Prometheus Award, along with its sequel, Crux.  (I am a member of the group that picks the award.) The final ballot is generally a strong collection of novels (although I didn't like the Sarah Hoyt book), but I'll be surprised and disappointed if Naam doesn't win the award.

UPDATE: Reason Magazine ran an interesting excerpt from the novel. 

A biography of Owsley Stanley

Oswley Stanley, the LSD chemist and San Francisco sound engineer, was one of the more interesting folks to come out of the 1960s counterculture in California. Michael Johnson has a very interesting review of a new book about him.

Today's interesting synchronicity news

In a couple of interesting bits of synchronicity, recent news reports are tracking subjects covered this week on this blog.

The folks at Harvard have succeeded in using public pressure to get a student group to cancel a planned "satanic black mass," Bloomberg news reports.

This blog, of course, just covered an apparently similar ritual in Illuminatus! A sentence from the Bloomberg report: "The school’s administration had worked with students to ensure that no consecrated host, the sacramental wafer that’s been blessed by a priest and is used in the Eucharist ceremony, would be used to re-enact the black mass." A couple of sentences  from Illuminatus! (page 118), "Padre Pederastia handed him the Host. 'I stole this from the church myself,' he whispered."

The whole Bloomberg story is worth reading; check out the priest representing the church that backed the Inquisition lecturing the rest of us on what a college campus should permit. There's a lot of the usual double talk about preserving freedom of inquiry from the college president, Drew Faust (love that last name), who had planned to attend a Catholic church to protest the black mass. Maybe she can look for female priests while she's there.

My informant for the Bloomberg News piece, John Merritt, also pointed me to the news that Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart has died. Information about her is here. 

She was an important figure in the Church of All Worlds, the religion inspired by Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert Anton Wilson was intimately involved with those folks and published many articles in the group's journal, Green Egg, some of which you can read by clicking links on the right side of this page. Carole Cusack's  book Invented Religions, mentioned in yesterday's blog post, has an excellent chapter on the Church of All Worlds.

Speaking of Stranger, Oz Fritz mentioned the book in his recent post on his blog on Aleister Crowley: 

 Crowley apparently had direct experience with followers misunderstanding his tantric teachings particularly in reference to the Agape Lodge that operated in Los Angeles around the end of his life. As recounted in The Unknown God by Martin Starr, Crowley basically fired the head of the Lodge, Wilfred Smith.  Though I don't recall the specific reason he gave, he must have obviously thought that Smith wasn't doing a good job.  It seems the Lodge may have turned into a bit of a love cult with Smith placing emphasis more on sexual conquest and endurance than on the postbiological activities, voyages, or magick it's meant to fuel.

Further evidence for this supposition might be found in the science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein had visited the Lodge, attending at least one party there, and was friends with Jack Parsons who took over the leadership of the Agape Lodge when Smith departed.  Plausible rumor has it that Heinlein got the assignment to write a popular account of Crowley's teachings.  I call it plausible because Stranger does read as an excellent presentation of Crowley's basic gist with the added benefit of only indirectly referring to him once with the mention of The Book of the Law thus avoiding the association of these liberating ideas with his sinister reputation.  In Stranger, Heinlein seems to satirize, ridicule and skewer the whole love cult aspect of the new religion presented by the central protagonist  Valentine Michael Smith.  I suggest that this may have been a commentary on the Agape Lodge. 

Apropos of this, did you see John Merritt's comment in yesterday's blog post? "One other thing: the June publication of the last volume of Bill Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein is undoubtedly going to cause a lot of speculation about the origins and meaning of Stranger in a Strange Land to be irrelevant. It should be interesting….. "