Jacob Sullum revives 'Guns and Dope Party' discussion

When Robert Anton Wilson founded the Guns and Dope Party, he apparently sought to use libertarian arguments to reach out to both conservatives (guns) and liberals (marijuana). 

Jacob Sullum at Reason magazine is my favorite writer on the "war on some drugs." He also writes often about gun control laws. Sullum believes that repression of drug rights and of gun rights is related. He makes his case in a new Reason article, "The Drug Exception to the Second Amendment." When I read the article, I learned that even legal medical marijuana users are banned by federal law from owning a firearm. 

His article focuses on the NRA's outrageous refusal to criticize the killing of Philandro Castile. The police officer who killed Castile for no reason was acquitted of manslaughter. 

Jim O'Shaughnessy's psychedelic investments

                                          Image from the website for Mindstate Design Labs

When I last wrote about Jim O'Shaughnessy, the Wall Street investor and investment guru, I wrote, "What would happen if a wealthy Robert Anton Wilson fan used his money to try to make the world a better place? It seems as if we are getting at least one answer to the question."

The last blog post covered grants, first two O'Shaughnessy Fellowships awarded by  O'Shaughnessy Ventures, LLC. "Dr. William Zeng will use the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship $100,000 grant to pursue open-source quantum computing," a press release says. "Nat & Martha Sharpe will use the $100,000 O'Shaughnessy Fellowship grant to study and make documentary films of alternative childhood education schools."

Here is something else interesting. O'Shaughnessy Ventures, LLC also is investing in various companies. 

One of the companies that is getting investments is Empath Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in early stage psychedelics startups. In turn, if you scroll down here, you can find information on the various companies Empath is investing in. Thirteen different companies are listed, including Mindstate Design Labs, "A psychedelic drug development company designing altered states of consciousness for mental health therapeutics," and Wavepaths, which seeks to use music for psychedelic therapy. 

Just today, O'Shaughnessy posted two of his favorite RAW quotes on Twitter. 

Prop Anon looks back on Maybe Logic Academy

Lately I have often been mentioning Prop Anon in this space, and of course with good reason: Since completing the final draft of his biography Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, expected to be out this fall, Prop has shown amazing energy in posting one article after another, much of it material that can be described as a spinoff from the biography.

One of his new pieces, "The Maybe Logic Academy- 10 years of Magic, Maybe, and RAW Mayhem," is an informal chronicle of the online school originally created as a way for Wilson to make money by teaching online classes. Prop took many of the courses and has posted many of the original class assignments.

Some highlights from the article, at least in my opinion: Prop names his favorite MLA class taught by Wilson, and links to his online collection of the class materials; Prop, a rap musician as well as a writer, gives a bit of background for his album Squat the Condos. (I've linked to Amazon to show the correct track list; you can listen to and buy the individual tracks, such as the opener "Agit-Prop," from Bandcamp.) I also didn't know Prop used to live in Hawaii, near the beach.

Update on Prop Anon's Robert Anton Wilson biography

If you missed Erik Davis' "High Weirdness," read it while you wait for the new RAW biography. See also Scott Apel's biographical essay on RAW in "Beyond Chaos and Beyond."

From Prop's email newsletter:

"Finally, Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson is undergoing its final edit with an editor that I’m very glad to have met. I have written so many drafts and redrafts of the book up until now, it feels amazing to type the words “this the final draft.” I don’t want to jinx it. However, when the scones are done the scones are done! The book’s release date is still nebulous at the moment, but I am being told by my publishers that the aim is this Fall!"

Strange Attractor Press was announced as the publisher of the book in late 2020.  RAW fans will remember that it's the publisher of High Weirdness, a notable book about RAW, Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna written by Erik Davis. If you missed it, here is my review from 2019.  The publisher would seem to be a good fit for a RAW bio. 

I'll try to stay up to date here with announcements on the RAW bio about a publication date, a cover, etc. Prop continues to post a great deal of material about RAW at his Chapel Perilous website. 

Encounter with a Pooka

The webtoon Trailer Park Warlock has an episode, "The First Law of All Magick." On Twitter, the writer and the artist for the cartoon, Matthew J. Rainwater, says, "This is a dedication (dare I say evocation) of the  works of Robert Anton Wilson.  It almost works as a standalone and gives you something of an idea of his general philosophy.  

"One of my favorites I've ever written."

You'll see discussion of topics such as "Who is the master who makes the grass green?"

The home page for Trailer Park Warlock shows 141 episodes so far. "Jake Baker, the working class warlock, struggles to make ends meet. But with the help of his friends and some down-home DIY magick, he might just keep chaos at bay, and pay his lot fees too..."

More information on Rainwater.

War on some drugs news: Oklahoma rejects fully legal pot

Marijuana growing in California. Photo by Ryan Lange on Unsplash  

  

My home state, Oklahoma, rejected fully legal marijuana in an election Tuesday. (I live in Ohio, but lived in Oklahoma for most of my life.)

Oklahoma is kind of  peculiar case, so the election is a bit hard to read. Medical marijuana in Oklahoma is so wide open, it amounts to de facto legalization. No one is denied a medical marijuana card (as opposed to Ohio for example, where only a short list of dire ailments such as cancer qualify for one). If you have never been to Oklahoma, you would not believe the number of medical marijuana businesses in the state. When I go home, I see many more marijuana shops than I see in states where it's legal.  I can see where some voters might wonder why even more shops were needed. 

Oklahoma is a weird state where codified hypocrisy is apparently the favored stance. When I was young, many alcoholic drinks were banned in bars and restaurants, although alcohol has never been hard to obtain. The laws finally changed, although there was an element of truth to the saying of Will Rogers, an Oklahoma native, that Oklahomans would vote dry so long as they could stagger to the polls. Las Vegas style gambling is banned in Oklahoma, yet the state is filled with Native American gambling casinos.

Still, as the New York Times story on the election points out, the vote in Oklahoma is part of a disturbing recent trend: "With the vote, Oklahoma joined a number of conservative states whose voters have recently decided against recreational marijuana legalization. Though Missouri approved a state constitutional amendment to allow for recreational marijuana in November, voters in other conservative states, including Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota, rejected similar proposals." 

I liked it better when proposals to legalize marijuana always seemed to win. 

Marijuana is fully legal in 21 states, which means it remains illegal for full adult use in 29, although some of those have some form of medical marijuana. The holdouts are mostly concentrated in the deep South and the Great Plains. It's really only in the former Confederacy where many people can't drive a reasonable distance to a state with legal weed. Virginia is the only Confederate state where it is legal. 

So, in other words, while there have been victories, the war on drugs still largely has a hold in the U.S., where there are more deaths from drug overdoses than ever. At Reason magazine, Jacob Sullum has once again attempted to carefully explain why the war on drugs is largely responsible for the huge number of deaths. It appears that not many people are listening. 

You can also read Sullum's take on the Oklahoma vote. 

UPDATE: I got an email from NORML today, which said that legalization is advancing in Hawaii, Delaware and Minnesota. So legalization is still advancing in the U.S, the group claims. 

R.U. Sirius at MozFest

The Mozilla Festival, a virtual festival, has been announced March 20 through 24. "MozFest is a unique hybrid: part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a better internet – and you’re invited!" the website says. 

I bring it up here because R.U. Sirius will be the leader for two sessions. One will be The R.U. Cyber? :// Mondo 2000 History Project Salon.  It will explore the origins of the Mondo 2000 magazine and cultural movement, with Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), Eleanor Dare, James Edward Marks and Marius Mateson.

More information here. 

Nutopia event March 26 features Daisy Campbell and Robert Temple

 A March 26 event for British Discordians and RAW fans, announced on Twitter: "Our next Nutopia @cockpittheatre on Mar 26 is gonna be cosmic! We're talking sentient plasma + reimagining the cosmos & our place in it w/Sirius Mystery author Prof. Robert Temple, plus @DaisyEris & Tom Baker reading cosmic origin stories. Join us!" Ticket information here. 

Robert Temple is the author of The Sirius Mystery. Temple will be in conversation with Michelle Olley. More information here. 

Wanted: Pieces by Robert Shea

Charles Henri Ford, on the cover of one of his books. 

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I plan to do a "Robert Shea Week" at this blog, sometime in May. In connection with that, I am looking for interviews with Shea, letters by Shea and essays by Shea that haven't already been posted at this blog or the official Shea website maintained by his son, Mike Shea. Mike Shea and I both have tried to preserve Shea's work, but it would be useful to have some help. You can search this website and look at the "Robert Shea Resources" links at the right side of this page, and check to see what's posted at the Shea site.

I particularly wish I could find some leads on the correspondence between the two Illuminatus! authors. In Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death, RAW wrote that he hoped someday their correspondence might be published. That would be great, except that neither man apparently took steps to preserve it. I am still hoping for a break, but their literary executors apparently have nothing to report. 

I don't read poetry as often as I read fiction or nonfiction, but I do read some, and I have a longtime interest in the American poet Charles Henri Ford,  mostly for his surrealist poems written in the 1930s and 1940s. (Most of the Ford work I like is collected in a book, Flag of Ecstasy.) Ford was pretty obscure — I would be surprised if anyone reading this blog recognized the name — but as his Wikipedia article explains, Ford apparently took his work and legacy seriously. His papers and materials about him are collected and cataloged at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, at the University of Texas, at Yale University and at the University of Delaware. There are no comparable collections of Wilson or Shea papers. 

Update on the new RAW book about Crowley

The planned new Hilaritas book of Robert Anton Wilson writing about Aleister Crowley, built around the discovery of a long unpublished RAW essay about Crowley, seems to be advancing.

In a post at the Hilaritas Press website, Rasa reveals the name of the planned new book, and announces an effort to find suitable cover art.

The title of the new book will be Lion of Light: Robert Anton Wilson on Aleister Crowley.

Rasa writes,

"We tried various AI attempts at making an “Aleister Crowley Lion of Light,” but none of them seemed good enough – all of them are posted here. Some were very odd. A couple were hilarious. One made RAW into Larry of the Three Stooges, and RAW really would have preferred to be modeled after Moe, if anyone. A couple of the images were not bad. One, the one featured here at the top of this page, seems closest to what we are looking for, but even that one seems lackluster to us. 

"If any one of you clever folk out there want to create your own attempt at a Crowley Lion of Light, we’d love to see what you come up with. If it’s really great, we’ll use it on the cover, giving you credit in the book’s front matter, and of course sending you a copy of the finished book."

More at the announcement, including how to submit an image. 

My earlier post gives some background on the book. 

                                                           Another rejected cover image. 

Ross Douthat on whether we are becoming a magical culture

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat, a right tilting but often interesting columnist in the New York Times, has a piece out  suggesting that some of the magical concerns of Robert Anton Wilson and his fans are becoming a mainstream part of the culture. "The Return of the Magicians" ran Thursday, and my link should get you behind the firewall. The first graph:

"In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself writing columns that touch on the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, the mystery of unidentified flying objects haunting American skies and the enthusiasm in certain circles for taking mind-altering substances that yield a feeling, illusory or not, of contact with supernatural-seeming entities." Douthat then suggests a few sentences later, "there is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own."

On Twitter, Joseph Matheny writes, "It's like the author of this story is on my Substack chat, LOL. Probably not, but it's an example of ideas arising when it's their time." And J.F. Martel writes, "We better pick up the pace, @weirdstudies. The normies are catching up." (See Martel's bio, he has a weird studies podcast). 

Coming up: Robert Shea Week/All Things Are Lights

Robert Shea. (Photo from official website).

Back in 2020, I did a "Robert Shea Week" to highlight information about Robert Anton Wilson's writing partner for Illuminatus! I see Robert Shea as an interesting writer and interesting figure in his own right; I don't want him to be forgotten or overlooked. Hence my posts about him and the "Robert Shea Resources" links at the right side of the page.

I want to do another Robert Shea Week. I am still working on ideas for it, but I am looking at doing it in May.

And for one of the upcoming blog posts, I want to discuss All Things Are Lights, Shea's historical novel set during the Middle Ages. It is my favorite Shea novel (so far; I want to finish reading all of his work) and it was the favorite of writer Patricia Monaghan, who was married to Shea when he died back in 1994. Here is a post where I talk about it a bit in connection to Illuminatus!

So I want to re-read All Things Are Lights, and invite everyone else who follows the blog to read it, and I'll post about it as one of my posts for Robert Shea Week, and anybody who chose to read it, or who remembers it, can comment. This won't be an online reading group in the sense of spending weeks on it, bit by bit, but I will be inviting discussion in a single blog post, in the comments.

Mike Shea, Robert Shea's son, has released the text of the book under the Creative Commons license. As I understand it, if you want to option it for a movie, you still have to pay him, but if you just want to read it, you can find a free digital edition. The official Shea website, which Mike Shea maintains, has a link to the Kindle edition ($5, I bought a copy) but also to a free version in HTML. And if you just want to read it for free, there are various other places to get a copy, such as at the Internet Archive. If you download an Epub version, you can read it on your phone with various ereaders, and Amazon now supports Epub for its Kindles. If you prefer print, you should be able to hunt up a used copy somewhere. 

And if anyone has a suggestion on what else I can do for Robert Shea Week, please offer it. I have some of my own ideas, but any suggestions would be welcome. See the link above for what I posted the last time. 

Wednesday links

                                  Source. But  I saw it from an RT from Dr. Richard Waterloo. 

Latest Joseph Matheny Substack. 

 Celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 

A question about the war in Ukraine. (Update: Comment from RAW Semantics on Twitter.) And a statement from the Libertarian Party of Russia. 

On Scott Adams. 

Why music schools are your best friend if you like classical music. (From me). 

The libertarian case for basic income.