/qix/taperave /lizi/conspire /qix/necro /qix/taperave Transcript of a tape recorded Tue night /Wed morn , around 9 Dec 1992, transcribed that evening. SIDE I testing, testing... Okay. For lack of anything better to do, and to fill in the next seven hours or so, I'm going to sit here and record some tapes over the top of tapes that I recorded at the ISEA afternoon.. at the Institute of Modern Art. The reason I am sitting here frustrated for another seven hours or so is because I have to wait until I can catch a bus out to Griffith to log on to the net again. I had what I thought was a very good idea this evening, and that is.. an electronic zine devoted solely to interviews conducted by email, or, in other ways through the net. First person I want to interview is Jagwire X, who interviewed Andy Hawks in one issue of Scream Baby. Hmm. ..and, just being frustrated at.. the stupidity of having something like the net which permits instantaneous communication, instantaneous performance of all sorts of things, and the reality of my situation here with no computer and no phone link, having to wait hours and then having to commute for about an hour in order to get to a terminal where I can start to do things. That frustration has made me ask myself, what do I actually want to do, what sort of things do I want. One of the first things I was thinking about is this idea of moving overseas.. I've toyed lately with the idea of moving to California, simply because it's a place where so many of.. the people whose ideas I find interesting live - like, um, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Avital Ronell, FM-2030, the Extropian people - and also it's a place where a lot of social processes are happening which I find interesting, such as American rave culture and the whole "New Edge" business.. and that's made me ask myself: Where *specifically*, in the world, would you consider moving, if you were going out of Australia.. and the two places I've thought of are Berkeley and Oxford. Berkeley for all the reasons I just mentioned - and also because if you're in the United States - if *I* was in the United States I could travel overland to future events like Phenomicon. And the other place - Oxford - the only reason at all I would consider moving to Oxford is basically because that's the home of the Institute for Psychophysical Research - in other words, it's where Celia Green's group is. There's no other particular attraction at all, for me, to being in England. The fact that I would still consider Oxford against everything else in the United States is a sign of how unique I think the IPR is, I've simply never heard of a research institute anywhere else which has its apparent qualities. So.. so that - yeah well, I don't think there's a good chance I'll be moving to either of those places any time soon, at the very best what I might be able to do is duplicate my achievement of '91, perhaps get a return trip to London, in which I can visit both places again, perhaps for a bit longer this time.. But this leads me to write down on my list, "MONEY", and have a little pointer to "Drug Trials", so when I start making phone calls, like phoning Kevin Solway and phoning various other people, I should make sure to phone Clinical Sciences at the hospital. Okay. Now. As far as net access goes.. at the end of the year there's probably going to be about a one-week period where labs at all of the universities will be shut. So, during that period of time, my only form of access.. my only means of getting messages *out*, in any case.. will be through people like Jack and perhaps Kevin, perhaps Lara, who have modems. One sort of thing I could do I guess would be to set up a forward from lambada to Jack's account, the only problem is I wouldn't be able to get on to reset that and since his account disappears on December 31st.. hmm. And also in the longer term, I do think I need something better than I have now. I was thinking before, I *do* want a Unix account so I can do things like telnet and ftp and decompress and so on.. Now at Nyx, if I get shell access, as I understand it I would be able to do all those things except telnet, and if I can reach Nyx then I can telnet anyway. And my other options are, in trying to get a local Unix account, are.. buy one for $500 at Griffith, or, um, enrol at UQ again next year, part-time, in a subject which allows me to.. in a computing subject which would give me net access. A third possibility I guess would be to enrol part-time and then try and get an account at the Prentice Centre again, but this time as a student and not just as a member of the general public. I don't know whether they'd look favorably on me having grepped the password file once, though. Hmm.. and of course there's BrisNet to consider as well, but BrisNet isn't very attractive for me so long as I don't actually have my own modem and computer. I can try and save in order to get Blinky back from Lara.. If I was to buy a phone and a computer and an account at Griffith that would be almost $2000. Hmm. Okay, the question of moving overseas really is relevant even in the short term, even if only in the long-term is when I would actually be able to move, because it raises the question of how.. deeply would I want to set down roots here in Brisbane. For example I could try to aim for a situation analogous to Dayalan's in '91, that is having apartment somewhere and my own little computer terminal in it, and so on, and that could be a sort of a safe base, which I could make my.. material centre of operations. That would require a certain amount of energy invested in constructing a sort of a stable, "safe haven" here in Brisbane, whereas if my long-term future really does lie in Oxford or Berkeley, then I should perhaps consider only temporary arrangements here, with a view to only settling down once I get over there. And for what reasons does anyone ever want to settle down anywhere anyway. It's only to get what security there is, in a very simple survival sense, having a place where you can store your material possessions, and.. yeah, generally not being susceptible to things like landlords raising rent or deciding to kick you out, although as far as governments are concerned you're alwys vulnerable to that.. Now, my drive to get the texts of my favorite books online, at least.. and also, my hope of getting things like my diaries available at ftp sites or some sort of archive like that.. is part of an attempt on my part to make it possible for me to move around, and still be able to access all the things that I want to be able to access. This is where I think FM2030 would be useful. I still haven't seen "Telespheres" I don't think, the only book I saw when I was in Indiana was "Upwingers". But the idea of.. not being fixed in space, means that wherever you may happen to move you still need to be able to reach everything that you want. And as far as the serious aspect of GAIA 2000 goes, the Earth Summit in cyberspace, I think FM really has the agenda for that [garbled], because he is concerned with things like the megapolitical situation, if you want to call it that, and the sort of things which the UN would already consider to be on its agenda, but he's striving to interface those with topics which are still only being considered in futurist circles, such as the concept of a telespheral world, and a "smile-squared" agenda. So the focus there, would be on people like FM2030 and Barbara Marx Hubbard.. I think Earth Summit number one is already doing whatever anyone might be doing as far as "saving the Earth" goes, in the conventional sense.. um, that plus Greenpeace - It'd be interesting to know more about what sort of net access Greenpeace has, because they have their internal communications network which I saw a bit of, but I haven't seen evidence of a direct Greenpeace presence on the Internet. So, um, hmm.. A source of information for NGOs and the nature of their connection to the net, might be, um, various documents on the political ftp site, like the list of political addresses around the world, that might have some email addresses in it as well. And then there are also some documents that I've got on disk, under the names ECONET, PEACENET, and GLASNET. I'm not sure where I got those from, I downloaded them from somewhere when ftp from QUT was still working, and they listed organizations which were on various alternative electronic nets, around the world.. so that would be something else to add - and I still need to find out about the damn model UN, what the hell is it.. and what's its relationship toi the *real* UN? ..and for that matter, what does the real UN do with *its* net access, because it has its own domain, un.org, so perhaps - perhaps I could consider interviewing the UN rep who has been mentioned a few times when I do a "whois un.org" - I'll just write that down, "whois un.org interview". Now, well it's still only 11:30 so I'm not doing much for passing time. I hope Kelly gets back within a few days because I want to discuss with her either me moving out or us getting a phone here right now, because I'm getting tired of not having a phone, basically. In particular I wouldn't mind the opportunity to phone occasionally to, some of the people in America, perhaps like Scotto or Max More or whoever.. because, although that is very expensive, at least that way I don't have to commute. So it's expensive as far as money goes but it saves time.. I could save money as well if I did Gordon's scheme of going to Redcliffe Airport or wherever it is, and doing a sort of a phone-tapping thing, but that again requires travel to get out there. I should ask myself, can I *briefly*, or concisely, or clearly state, what "Alpha and Omega", as a project overall, is about? I remember when John Esposito was talking to me and Nathan, or before that, I was thinking that I might explain my goals with this - my ultimate goals - as being to "immanentize the Eschaton, or a reasonable facsimile thereof". So, the idea as I have explained it at various times in the past, is to have "Alpha and Omega" as a novel which exists in draft form on the Internet, which is anticopyright so anyone anywhere can print it, and the novel will describe the event at the end of the century, and it will also try to bring about the event. So the whole idea is to try to achieve the superior coordination which might make possible important things on a large scale.. but I do have to ask myself - what can.. what really significant can a mass of people achieve except in opposition to some sort of dictatorship. In terms of, an extropian sort of agenda, or even a.. something like.. I have imagined that you could try to do a paranormal-type.. or.. a paranormal experiment or an occult operation on a planetary scale, through the means of the sort of global multimedia intercontinental event that I have vaguely envisioned. Now with something like that you might want masses of people for some reason or other, but to make progress towards the singularity in a technical sense, requires discoveries, which don't come from masses of people, they come from individuals. So in that sense what is needed is a way for individuals to communicate with each other, which I guess is what CafeNet-like projects are about.. A lot of the individuals who might make technical contributions would already be in universities - but, on the other hand, the existence of things like, people making a living as programmers at home shows that there is a place for the - the what? The technical hobbyist, who is somewhat removed from the centres of their profession.. so I'm thinking here of the relationship of, say, someone who might be writing shareware in Brisbane, like Kevin - although without the philosophical aspirations as well - compared to programmers who work for large corporations or who are on university faculties, and who have access to something like the Internet in its full range. The first programmer can nevertheless come up with something which is significant and, even if it's only a small part, can still be crucial in the development of some larger system. So a similar thing will probably apply with something like nanotechnological design, so there's every reason to push for something like CafeNet, for *that* reason as well, so those people can also contribute to the collaborations which will bring into being new generations of software and of hardware. Hmm. But to return to "Alpha and Omega" - so, the idea is.. Well, I could compare it to something like "The Book of the SubGenius", which has this fictional aspect, but certainly you can lead a SubGenius lifestyle, even if "Bob" isn't a real person, simply by making yourself a "Bobby" for one thing, or more creatively by creating your own SubGenius spinoff. But either way, Ivan Stang clearly has dreams or schemes of.. a TV revolution - he says somewhere in "High Weirdness by Mail", that "Not only will the Revolution be televised, but it will *be* the television show!" So I think he's.. he's plotting something like, what if Bob Black were head of network programming on CNN - something like that - inundating the world with artistically contrived messages in order to, break the hold of the Conspiracy on our minds, so to speak. So he's conspiring or plotting, or he's trying to bring about the means for him to get in that sort of position; I don't know whether he'll get there or not, or how high a profile "Bob" will have in 1998... But "Alpha and Omega" is similar to that in that it is trying to set a very specific time - the 24-hour period at the end of 2000 - in which something significant could happen, if people managed to coordinate their efforts beforehand. Now, the actual event that might happen could be any number of things. I listed these in part 6 of the Scriptures, as I will be putting them out shortly, but.. but the possibilities, even the mundane possibilities, are very very broad - and so that's why the input of others is so crucial at this point.. because what I've managed to dream up, is a framework, which I think is more detailed than any previous.. attempt of this nature, in terms of setting a Date with Destiny. But at the same time the specifics of what is to take place have been left entirely up in the air, simply because I can't quite decide myself what I would want. So, it's like I'm creating a framework which other people will be able to come along and inhabit. And my specific ideas for what I would like to happen on that date, have generally revolved around something to do with GAIA 2000, that's the sort of thing towards which I might actually work, in an organizational sense. My other projects - the ones which have to do with, conceptual progress I guess, research - I don't believe can be assigned a date in that fashion, that simply has to be an ongoing thing. So in a sense, this is - I'm partly anxious to try and get at least a first stage of "Alpha and Omega" out of the way, so that I can concentrate on research again. But, the fact that I thought of the ideas and that noone else is going to bring them to at least that first stage of fruition means that I have a responsibility to try and, crystallize "Alpha and Omega" enough for other people to understand what it is that I'm on about, there. Okay, so thinking it through a bit, my current agenda maybe could be divided into the Research part and the Organizational part. The Research part encompasses philosophy, science, and perhaps at some future date something like magick. Um, that's the part where I'm trying to find, what is real, why is it here, what are the limits of possibility. The other part, the Organizational part.. is currently all within "Alpha and Omega", in a sense. That's the part.. that's the future role which I can imagine myself playing, in a sort of a futurist-activist sense.. trying - agitating for things like life extension research and the construction of telespheral infrastructures. Something like Li Po, in the draft of a draft of "Alpha and Omega" I guess. So, what should I be doing now. I have a list of dozens of things to do on the net, little things like trying to get talk.psychedelic going, interviews with various people and so on.. Actually this seems a germane moment to go off on a little digression about the problem of this perspective of urgency. I've acquired from Celia Green, and the same idea is in Kevin Solway and I guess in a few other places as well, that given the brief amount of time that I may have, and the possible positive returns that may exist given sufficient effort, then I ought always to be thinking of stripping unnecessary activity from my life. So, to a certain extent this happens all the time simply as you get bored with things, but this means actually making sacrifices, making decisions, prioritizing as Rez would say.. deciding to forego certain things which might otherwise be pleasurable in the interests of pursuing some more important goal. So for example, something I used to think about when I was 16 or 17 and I was thinking about trying to end death, and the idea of some sort of global campaign to do that. And I was thinking, here I am, 16 or 17, or 18 or 19 later on, and millions of people around the world are still dying every day, and I'm not directly doing this thing, of being an anti-death activist. Should I be, somehow, doing something more, trying to think of a way to do something more than simply talking about the idea with the occasional person? And, hmm.. I just had a thought a while ago, that if the world requires such urgency then, somehow that says that it isn't perfect, from my perspective anyway, or some - what's the relevance of this point, there's this idea that there is no hope for anything, which I mentioned briefly on leri-list recently, and which I see in Kevin Solway as well, and which is also in "Schismatrix" for that matter, although it is not the ultimate philosophy [there] and that's one of the things I want to ask Bruce Sterling about.. The proposition that the Regal puts forward in one of his short stories, that "the emptiness of the Kosmos is absolute and in time it kills us all. That's pure terror but it's also pure freedom." And the other idea that "Futility is freedom". So the idea is that no enterprise succeeds from the perspective of eternity. Or, to put it in Celia-Green language perhaps, that we are doomed to finitude in all of our enterprises, which I think is what that would amount to. So, for example, Terence McKenna I think is, or in his wilder moments anyway, envisions 2012 as being an entry into an eternal state of being - roaming in the fields of the imagination, however you want to put it. The point is that he.. yeah, McKenna is another person with this same idea, on a cosmic scale, he's saying that there is an opportunity for us, as a planet or as a species, to enter into an eternal condition, but that it is not a foregone conclusion. That it will require "cognitive activity", he says somewhere is the essence of what is required - we have to understand our situation, or else we cannot pass the death of the species in the way that an individual who doesn't understand the nature of consciousness presumably has trouble at the moment of death, assuming that there is some sort of passage to another state of being which opens, which again is one of McKenna's propositions in the essay I transcribed. Whereas, the posthuman philosophy which the Regal puts forward in Bruce Sterling's story, is one of ultimate despair and freedom arising from that despair - you can do anything you want, because it's all hopeless anyway in an ultimate sense. So, to my mind the attraction of the second philosophy - the only attraction that I can see - is the freedom of action that it implies, because if nothing matters in an ultimate sense - so in other words there is no ultimate payoff possible for any [course of] action - then you really are free to do whatever you want. On the other hand, the attraction of the point of view which says that there *is* something to strive for with an infinite payoff, is that it opens the possibility of an infinite payoff. Of course there are philosophies as well which would say that there's an infinite payoff for everyone, I guess, and that's not just philosophies in the sense of possible philosophies, but I think that some brands of Buddhism.. or at least - probably Buddhism, at least, say that everyone achieves Enlightenment ultimately. Exactly what Enlightenment is and whether it's desirable and whether it's an infinite payoff of sorts is a valid question, but, placing it in that category for the moment, that is an example of a world-view in which it doesn't matter what you do and you still get everything in the end, or everything worth wanting in any case. If the world is like that, then it really doens't matter what I do and there's a happy ending to it all.. The cases that I'm considering, or.. that I want to think about more, are the ones where there is an infinite payoff for the right path being taken, but it's not a certain outcome, and the one where there is no infinite payoff at all. Now to actually decide whether the world falls into either of those categories falls into my Research agenda - the limits of possibility in particular. I would like to be able to get some idea of possible epistemologies - what are the ways which the world might be? because at present I feel as if I don't even have a single adequate ontology or candidate metaphysics which does justice to everything, and that the main sticking point in that as always is the mind. Because material things existing in space can be conceived of in geometric or other mathematical ways whereas the content of thought is..ore puzzling. That is not to say that it is ncecessarily beyond mathematical modelling, but simply that I don't feel the same clarity of perception when I contemplate thought or my own thought, or models for that thought, as I do when contemplating potential models for material reality, or matter, or physics. So, the relevant fields might be phenomenology, or semantics, or some things arising out of cognitive science, but I definitely want to see something which either accounts for the mind and relates it to the physical paradigms, or subsumes the physical paradigms - because that's always a possibility, that someone could advance a philosophy or a metaphysics in which the concepts of physics as we know it are somehow secondary to the account of mind given. That could be perhaps a pantheistic sort of philosophy in which mind is omnipresent, the sort of thing which is described in "The Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker, or it could come out of a philosophy arising out of esotericism, if I understood them better I might be able to judge that question better, in which the world as we see it is held to be entirely the product of magickal operations, most of them performed.. not consciously, or not.. with.. the thought that they are magickal operations. A similar outlook would be the one mentioned by Charles McCreery in one of his books, where he says that it seems perfectly possible that you could have a world in which you have discarnate entities, or at least not incarnate in the sense that we are, having minds and then bodies, which possess the capabilities of psychokinesis or materialization or similar things, that they collectively create a world, and then for some reason repress the knowledge of these abilities in themselves, or perhaps use the abilities without being conscious of those abilities as.. or in the fashion that I just described them, so it was just something that we did - we brought the world into being or the mind brought the world and us into being, and only now through us is it looking around and saying, What is this? How did it come to be here? This is a bit like the idea I outlined in trying to understand one of Rez's posts on leri.. Okay, a note for the future: whatever form my living arrangements take place in the further future - whether I'm mostly here in Brisbane or mostly in oxford or Berkeley or whether I'm some sort of global nomad - I know that I can do my best work on the net, in the sense that whatever it is that my talents are I've been able to exercise them more fully in the past two months of net activity, than I ever have in any other medium I've ever had access to. So this means that it's important for me to have a proper Unix account somewhere which I can have access to, so that i can do things beyond sending mail and reading and posting news, which makes validation of the Nyx account important, because that is a free Unix account, I presume once you have shell access, which you don't have to pay for and which I should be able to reach from anywhere in the world. It's all very well to actually buy an account at Griffith or to get one as a result of being enrolled in a subject but that's not a long-term arrangement. The Griffith account only lasts a year, and the UQ account only lasts a semester. So - *get the Nyx account validated*. Another future note: one of my goals definitely is mass Internet access or mass access to whatever the world net becomes, even for people who don't buy their own hardware.. in fact that is especially an important option to take into account.. anyhow, the point is that CafeNet-style projects and communications centres projects as I originally conceived them, in the form of public communications centres, video arcades, or like computer labs transplanted to downtown urban area, would appear to be the only way, given existing accessible technologies, to achieve that. At some future point it might be possible to have a wireless mobile-phone-like connection to a portable laptop etcetera and so you might not need a walk-in place like that, but certainly at present that would require a cheapness and sophistication of technology which doesn't appear to exist, and so - not on a commercial scale anyway - and so this is the importance of emphasizing any communications-centre style project. So one thing I should consider doing is repeating my post of the first week of '92, which was the initial sort of nucleus of CafeNet, and asking again for contacts. There was the guy in Holland in particular who sent me a long list of details about a cafe he wanted to set up, but the cafes don't interest me so much, because even then it's still too much of a bother. You need somewhere like a lab where a lot of people can go. Okay.. just finishing drawing up, in nice big letters on a large piece of paper a sort of agenda for myself. In the middle I've got "A.O as project - Formal structure: 24 hours - McKenna - Leary", so that's what I was talking about before. The formal structure of "Alpha and Omega" is the specific date and structure that it provides for this attempt to.. do something. End the world. happily. And then the specifics of what I'm trying to do, partly through "Alpha and Omega", so in other words the content to put into that structure, on the Organization side I've got two sections, "GAIA 2000" and "The Posthuman Condition", which are the classic two sections of AO. And they're also two different but potentially complementary political agendas. GAIA 2000 is the Earth Summit in cyberspace, and so that's referring to ordinary New-Age aspirations, you might say.. you know, uh, no more sickness, war poverty or hunger, peace on earth, save the environment, and so on. And then the "Posthuman Condition" section is about things like Space Migration - Intelligence Increase - Life Extension, in other words trying to go beyond the human condition and the classic limitations which still exist no matter how much economic and social progress is made. So in the first section I've got "?" and "politics" and "the Last International", and, the reason I've got that there is that that sort of Discordian politics, is the most neglected political stream in a sense - probably because it's the most extreme, calling for things like the abolition of work, and so I would want somehow to highlight that possibility even if wasn't the sort of thing that I ultimately agreed with, simply to give it a better hearing. Because all the classical political strategies, whether it's violent revolution led by a vanguard, or democratization and the election of people to do stuff for you, or what have you - workers' councils', the net analogues of that are pretty easy to imagine - but they're all there - they are strategies or ideas which can be called upon, which I may actually choose to dramatize in writing "Alpha and Omega" and which may ultimately be appropriate if the whole thing goes ahead. But. Anyhow, I have down the bottom in the list of organizations, "SubGenius Foundation", "Otisian Congress". This has to do with actual organizations or associations in real life which I would consider relevant to what I'm trying to do. I mean, other people are going to work through different means - [SIDE 1 ENDS, THANK "BOB"] SIDE II - but I'm talking about looking for an organization, or an association, which might be compatible with the way I'm considering operation. And the two things which come to my mind are the SubGenius Foundation, because it has the potential to evolve into a really global grouping which still preserves as much of the Discordian spirit as is possible on such a scale; and the idea of the Congress of Weird Religions, which Mal was discussing with me today. It may fall to the Otisians to actually organize the real thing. My particular creation is the Committee of 333.. these are all just ideas I'm throwing around a bit at the moment, but, um, I think so many of the other things here, like GAIA 2000 and so on, it's just too good a joke to waste, it's just a joke, particularly the way it interfaces with Campus Crusade for Cthulhu and maybe this can link up with Scott's plans, somehow. Hmm. Anyhow, so, so.. so.. notes for the future. Other things in GAIA 2000 section: alt.save.the.earth plan. Since - oh, and I've also written "emphasis on net aspect as Real Life already exists". So the point here is that if I'm going to be working through the net - this is actually what I wrote in t15.txt in the Scriptures, that the point is to bring about a historical event in which the Internet enters real-life history, so if the point is to do something using the resources of the net, something which has been potential but which resoucres haven't been used to actually do it before, I don't want to simply try and create, say, an "online World Future Society" because a World Futurist Society already exists. What I should instead be doing is concentrating on creating online interfaces *between* say, the World Future Society and the Lindisfarne Association, things of that nature.. associations which can only link up through the means of the net. Okay, so moving on to "Posthuman Condition", I've written "5th Plateau", "Extropian Institute", "Upwingers", "SMIILE". The last three are sort of self-explanatory but the Extropian Institute I'm particularly interested in because it's the first organization which seems to have Up-Wing or posthuman aims. At present as far as I know it is mostly a mailing list and the *Extropy* magazine, so the extropian corporations or TAZs or nation-states, whatever they turn out to be, still haven't come into being, but this will certainly be a nucleus of them, in some respect. I don't know how organizationally evolved UpWingers is, I suspect that extropians may already have outpaced it actually, but that's just a supposition.. The 5th Plateau, hmm.. that might serrve to bridge the GAIA 2000 - Posthuman Condition gap, by taking Maslow's hierarchy of needs and then adding the need which I think Barbara Marx Hubbard identified and which is also identified in "The Human Evasion", the need to transcend the human condition as it is, the point once again being that politics can rearrange existing resources, it can change who orders what or even *whether* anyone orders anyone to do anything, but politics alone does not lengthen the human lifespan, or dispel ignorance about our position in the universe, or even invent a new means of production. I've also got in the Organization section "Truths during the event". Now that's referring to the possibility that - to use a specific example - suppose I became convinced that an important thing, or *the* important thing to do, was to try to communicate certain ideas, certain key memes, in the course of that event. This would mean trying to influence the entertainment or the multimedia aspect of it so that at certain critical moments, certain thoughts were communicated - so for example, I could run through "Poison for the Heart" and pick out certain aphorisms, and have them flashed up on screens at raves happening around the world, things like that. So that's another thing which could fall into the scope of Organization. It seems to me that the thing which characterizes the Organization half is that in some sense you suppose that you already know what you're doing or what you're trying to achieve, and it's a matter now of working out how to do it. So for example in GAIA 2000 you're working out how to save the world - how to keep things sustainable, and so on. The question is one of logistics in all of these - even the logstics of transcending the human condition or developing nanotechnology, the goal - of thorough control of the structure of matter at the molecular scale - is *there*, and what is needed to be developed is the logistics of how to get from here to there. Whereas if you look at the other half, the Research half, this is where the unanswered questions are, and the point of these investigations is to get a clearer picture of things, um, in case there's some new factor which invalidates, or otherwise supersedes or should be added to the ones which are already present within the organization half. So up the top I've got Philosophy first of all, and then I've written "Objectivism" and then "Nietzsche" and "Stirner", and then "foundations of Mathematics". Now Objectivism - just out of all the philosophical *systems* that I've ever heard of, is the one which makes the most sense to me. I think radical skepticism is in a sense superior to Objectivism, intellectually, in that total uncertainty seems to be the chief proposition that I can be certain about in my current state of being or state of knowledge - but that's not a system. Objectivism is a system, and as systems go, as I said it's the best I've ever heard of. I added Nietzsche and Stirner as a sort of a tribute to Solan I guess. When someone on talk.philosophy.misc asked, "Who do you think is the best philosopher?", Solan wrote Nietzsche, largely for his critical insights, he mentioned Stirner for some reason, I think from the perspective of morality, and mentioned Ayn Rand I think in terms of systematic consequences of the philosophy. Something like that. So - I should add "skepticism", there. Skepticism and Objectivism, and a note to look at Nietzsche and Stirner again. Fopundations of Mathematics, is the form of applied philosophy which interests me most, because I'm very interested in the ontological status of mathematical entities... Um, yeah, I don't even feel as if I can say very clearly what the state of affairs is there since I lack the technical knowledge of mathematics and also the.. a settled enough line of thought, or a definite angle from which to address this, since there seem to be so many approaches to that question: intuitionism, constructionism I think is another one, or, let alone more radical ideas like something analogous to, Penrose crossed with Philip K Dick, in which you might have the Platonic forms being real but emerging from the specific somehow, so that the specific exists first, and then the activities of the mind, in generalizing and perceiving mathematical forms actually brings them into being, so that the act of percxeption is actually the act of creation. This is the problem of perception, it's the general problem of reality as well.. do the things.. what things exist before we think they exist? do we bring them into being as we think about them - and that's related to the, the sort of generalized magickal possibility that I was talking about on the other side, the idea that the world is in fact totally the creation of mind and that the worldviews of the present century in which mind is an epiphenomenon of matter are in fact intellectual errors arising from the extreme, or.. the particular form that the magick has created here, the particular world that has been created here is one in which a heavy reliance upon things that are already there, so that the application of the creative faculty (assuming that such a thing is fundamental, for the purposes of this) - so that the applications of this hypothetical magickal creative faculty become rarer and rarer, and so it starts to seem as if the structure which has been created, preceded the creative faculty - but of course it really could be that way, and it really could be that there is a natural order to things which determines all thoughts, actions and perceptions, in which case there really is no such thing as creation, or, let alone magick in the Crowleyan sense. Anyhow, next category after philosophy is Research, and I've got categories here for Matter and Mind under that, which is a bit redundant there.. okay, so matter is basically Physics, and what's there is "Quantum Mechanical metaphysics", "Fundamental Theory' - so in other words actually having a Theory of Everything, just in physical terms, and then - I've written "Prigoginic levels" as well, which is just a sort of vague reference to projects like the Principia Cybernetica - I should - I'll make a note of *that*, "Principia Cybernetica", "cybsys-LIST" - um, and the general attempt to work out a formal theory of emergent properties, spontaneous orders and so on. Since that could address every level of the hierarchy that seems to exist in nature at once. Then there's mind: "cognitive science, neural nets, phenomenology, semantics, methodological solipsism (knot theory)" - that's my personal.. favorite, um.. yeah, the mind is the more complex of the two in terms of planning how to address it because there seems to be much less agreement about the mode of investigation. Hmm.. Okay, continuing with research: "IPR", in a little square box. Above "Anomalous phenomena: database, typology".. I still don't know in detail the IPR's research plan, program, but I would think that it would possibly be the best in the world as far as the category of paranormal phenomena goes, given the intellectual quality of the people there and the number of years which it's been going. So I'd sort of rely on them to provide some good ideas at this point. "Magick - question mark", "Occult - question mark": sooner or ter I'm going to have a go at something here, like either, I don't know, go to some wiccan circle and see if anything happens or perform the Mass of the Phoenix on 200 grams of LSD the way that Robert Anton Wilson did - *micrograms*, that is - um.. but um, because those are the sort of things which, accoding to the philosophy of them, you cannot just approach them intellectually, you actually have to do things if you want to be a magician. "COMPLEX: Maps of everything, maps of the maps". This is saort of a general reference entry calling for the synthesis of all existing information in forms that are accessible, so this is like World Wide Web in particular. And then at the very bottom of the sheet I've got "Historical trajectory - possibilities - panspace". So, part of the reason for the philosophical investigation - metaphysics, and mathematics - is to form a clearer picture of possible worlds - that's probably related more to logic than to mathematics actually, "Logic and Kripke". But.. the idea of seeing the possible forms that the world might take is the preparatory step before deciding between them. So I want to say, okay, the world may be .. may possess an idealist metaphysics or a realist metaphysics or something else.. so then, okay, now I have range of possibilities. Now the world presents this aspect to me, is it compatible with one of these or all of these, some of them, none of them? So that's astep towards actually trying to find out the truth. Then the "historical trajectory".. this relates to the question of infinite payoff - I might actually write that in alongside this: "Infinite.. payoff". So the question there is.. multifold. The first one is: Is there an infinite payoff? of some sort. If yes, then the next question is, what do we have to do to get it? And if no, then the question is, what now; if we're necessarily finite in some respect; and - and I wonder, if we were necessarily finite, could we even know it? I wonder of knowledge of[one's] finitude, absolute knowledge of finitude - absolute knowldeg seems to imply a sort of limitlessness, because absolute knowledge would not be able to be doubted, there could be no criticism of it which could cast any doubt. So therefore if a person was capable of absolute knowledge then in that respect at least they would not be finite. Yeah. It would be somewhat ironic if that was the only respect we were not necessarily finite, and we could know it! Knowing it would be something at least. But it's also possible that we can never know any of these things.. but anyhow, so there is this question: if there is no path out of finitude, what do we do? That i think, would become more of an individual question, for me anyway.. maybe if I spent years of my life convinced that the human condition was necessarily limited in a certain way, then maybe I would start to think in social terms anyway.. because I would know that the horizons *were* limited in a certain respect. But at this stage I'm not even - I mean, even given the vagueness of the term, infinite payoff, it nonetheless suggests the idea that there is a possible trajectory to human existence which would carry it beyond the human condition as we believe it to be into some transcendent state; for example, Leary's scenario, McKenna's scenario, FM2030's scenario. And.. the meaning of "Panspace", that last entry after "Possibilities" and "Historical trajectory".. that was my term made up for something even bigger than superspace.. since superspace after all is sort of a phase space of possible geometries with a particular topology, that of.. um, or not topology, but possible 4-spaces out of general relativity whereas panspace was to be a much bigger domain, more like the class of all sets or the class of ordinals, and so the idea of translating panspace to physics or to reality, is to say that this is the range of possibilities within which we dwell, and one way of conceiving the infinite payoff is to say that it would constitute an entry into panspace. I guess I might as well jst put it as "becoming God", in that sense, but.. that would imply achieving unlimitedness in every way that you can be unlimited, whereas perhaps we can be unlimited in time but not in some other respect. So, panspace is my designation for the potentially achievable ultimate, the payoff itself, the payoff, the ultimate degree of freedom attainable would be freedom in panspace. Hmm.. Another observation which just occurred to me. This is the way .. that I always used to think and plan.. in my first year at college people would come into my room and they would be freaked out by all these flowcharts on the walls, which were talking about things of a similar magnitude, ah, you know, that in the next twenty years there would be things like artificial intelligence and space colonization and so on, and I was, and I was just trying to put them all up there next to each other so I could get an idea of the totality. And part of my depression in this year, I think is related to.. becoming preoccupied with distractions. I think the net for one is a great provider of distractions.. there's just so many things you can get lost in, like exercising your wit satirizing newbies, or inventing little in-jokes and then stretching them out. The other factors in my depression, what were they: "Bob".. Nathan.. and America. Now.. let's see. "Bob". When I was reading "The Book of the SubGenius", early on, with no one else around me - no.. contacts who knew about it - I remember I was very resentful at different times, because.. I think just because I didn't like what I was being told, or the message that I was picking up, which seemed to be saying that utterly *everything* is fucked. Hmm. So that was one. I mentioned Nathan because he I think had a viewpoint like the one that I characterized as the "Regal" one, the Posthumanist one out of "Schismatrix", the Hassan i Sabbah one, the idea that futility is freedom, that the cosmos kills us all in time, although he had a Lovecraftian sort of slant on this. And it's interesting that he may in fact have changed his mind as his concepts have evolved in recent months, he talks about "returning to the Light" and so on now. But um.. in particular "seeing the Void", whatever it was that happened the first time I took mushrooms, I was *very* depressed after that , and that was because I saw all of my integration of concepts and my experience and so on which I was planning to communicate in "Alpha and Omega", leading back to nothingness. That was what I thought I had seen, or that was the slant I came to put on it the more I thought about it in the next few days. This idea that, there is only one mind, and that the whole of the complexity of existence is its evasion of the pointlessness of that existence. I'm not even sure if that concept makes sense, that.. that a sort of an empty mind could be repelled by its own nature. But certainly there was this elemental repulsion from this state, which makes me think of Barbara Marx Hubbard talking about how in becoming a mystic, and aligning yourself with the Creative Intelligence at work in the universe, you come to introspectively identify with the creative.. *motive* or desire or drive, and I wonder whether she means having an experience like that, in which you yourself become, or face, this utterly featureless void and, are driven away from it or are recreated from it.. hmm. And then, the third thing was America. Um, or my travles in general, so I should include London as well. Because I was very depressed for a great deal of that, and that .. hmm. Possibly what I was seeing there was the reality of large urban centres, or something like that; the nature of life.. I thought of saying "animal nature", and perhaps it's true in a sense, like the guy in London was saying, that all the people are after is money, sex and drugs, that doesn't exactly facilitate the "life of the mind". So, um.. the lack of opportunities for elevation, I think that above all depressed me - I certainly wouldn't have expressed it that way to myself, but, just the circularity and evident pointlessness of what people were doing.. just seemed to be leading nowhere. And then there's Kevin Solway, aswell, who's interesting, because on the one hand he has himself a tremendous purpose, and a purpose to which he would like to call other people, in what he expresses as "the survival of wisdom". But on the other hand he does his best to destroy what he would see as false or futile hopes, not through mockery as the SubGenii would do it, but through explanation and devaluation. So the explanation comes from rendering transparent - or simply comprehensible - processes which were controlling a person, whether it's political, religious, or something to do with love. By trying to expose the inner workings - true motivations, and so on - once you've truly understood those concepts, presuming that they're accurate, they are then a part of how you view those things, and if.. if for them to operate in the way described you had to be unconscious of the mechanics of that operation, they can no longer operate in that way, because you are now conscious of it. So.. I think that some of his propositions are intended to have that consequence. So that was explanation. And the other part was devaluation, and that is the method of trying to make you feel shame or disgust at something in which you might previously have taken pleasure, I think again the foremost example is love.. Not simply the *rhetoric* which he uses to address it, say in talking about "the evil of love" or phrases like "despicable game", I don't know if he uses that specific phrase - but also in his analysis of the motives of it - and this links back to the first category of explanation, that, by say explaining something which was taken to be elevated or spiritual or a higher pursuit, and explaining it as being say just another means of achieving happiness, it is thereby devalued somewhat, and in some cases he would attempt to explain such things like religion, politics again, things into which people may have pured a lot of passion as truly debased activities which have been rationalized as exalted. Hmm. So, to a certain extent his thoughts have been at work within my own psyche, so.. So, yes, the contradiction here is this - or, I don't know if it's a contradiction, but anyhow - what.. the principal object of his attack I think is in fact the desire for happiness. That if you can kill that or extinguish that, then you are free. And that is the condition which he is aiming at, I think.. I think that would be a quality of being "fully human", in the fashion he intends that term to be understood. But. Or not, but, but okay, How does that relate to my own goals. I've taken to calling them extropian, the particular category I'm thinking of.. whether I should call them UpWing or perhaps simply posthuman, transhuman, I'm not sure, because extropian is a specific cluster of concepts.. I'll call them posthuman. Okay, what am I to make of my posthuman goals, the ones about transcending the human condition.. for example, physical immortality. Um.. now, one motivation of trying to extend one's life, is to ensure one's own future happiness. If you could be assured that you weren't going to die, that would be the anxiety of death gone. There might be further anxieties about, say, whether you were going to spend that eternity in a hell of sorts, but it is nonetheless another expression of a desire for happiness, a desire to get things the way you want them to be. So, an attack on happiness as being in general something not to strive for.. because .. now, now, what is the because? The argument seems to be that happiness, or, he says explicitly, "Happiness is the cause of suffering, and suffering is the cause of happiness". ..so that happiness is the cause of suffering, because when happiness goes away you suffer, and suffering is the cause of happiness, because when the suffering goes away, you become happy. Whereas the extropian sort of goals almost like trying to the limits of .. possible happiness. For example, make it eternal, rather than something that ends when you die. Hmm. So, if that were possible, would it invalidate the argument against happiness in the first place or is there another argument against happiness? Because I think Kevin is saying that truth - Absolute Truth - and happiness cannot coexist, because the absolute truth is that all things are transitory, but happiness .. wishes for eternity. Oh, no, that's, that's not a .. it's - so long, so long as there is still a desire for infinity, perhaps, in some respect.. this I think is where I perceive a difference between him, and Celia Green. Celia Green would appear to consider the infinite payoff still possible in a sense which might be conventionally considered positive. She does her own share of destruction of illusions, or seeking to expose true motivations and so on, but nonetheless, she still writes things like "The most exciting thing possible is actually true", which is not an outlook of *cosmic* cynicism. Whereas Kevin writes things like, "Life appears overfull of beautiful things, but is very poor underneath". So I think he would hold to this - Buddhist? - view that happiness is necessarily transitory and doomed to extinction, or even interestingness for that matter; anything in which one might take pleasure or joy.. and that because he wishes to value truth above all, and since truth and happiness cannot coexist, then he will value truth to the exclusion of - happiness or personal satisfaction. And for this reason he demands that the desire for happiness must die. Whereas, because Celia Green would not say that the infinite payoff is necessarily impossible, .. or even given her contempt for happiness as it is conventionally conceived - for example saying "happiness never sounded interesting" and so on - even seeking interestingness is a form of desire - and perhaps I should be using the word desire more often than hapiness here.. To continue: so, she is saying that truth and the realization of an infinite desire, or a core desire or any desire - the true realization, can conceivably coexist... Well, she doesn't say it, but it seems to be an implication of her open-ended approach. Kevin has an infinite aspiration of sorts, in the survival of wisdom, because he is saying there in effect that he wants wisdom to continue into eternity, so that is an infinite desire of sorts; but, wisadom here seems to be, um, the knowledge that desire is pointless and ought to be extinguished. So the desire is, to carry the knowledge that desire ought to be extinguished, into eternity.. or, to.. for that to always be present in consciousness.. that knowledge, or supposed knowledge. Now, Celia Green wants people to cultivate centralised psychology and in particular the existential perception.. which is just the awareness that existence is there, that things are real and the concomitant percpetion of total uncertainty. Now, does that amount to the same thing as, wisdom, as Kevin would conceive it? Is there a difference here? Because as I have portrayed Kevin's wisdom it has concerned mostly desire but I simply selected that aspect of it out, in particular. For example, he himself writes somewhere, that "The wise man knows nothing and is uncertain of everything, and yet ironically for this reason he knows everything". Perhaps that should read "knows everything that can be known.. by a finite being". Now.. it seems to me that, Celia Green talks of the existential percpetion as having certain consequences, and.. although she doesn't draw this connection explicitly, among those are the various despairs that she lists. ..which were, what: "The despair of urgency, the despair of significance and the despair of being itself". Now.. it took me a while to understand those. The despair of urgency is the despair that arises upon perceiving one's own apparently finite lifespan, or resources and in particular time, which causes one to be urgent about whatever it is that you're trying to do. The despair of significance is simply not knowing what's important. The despair of being itself... N ow that might be.. a perception that existence is necessarily flawed or frustrating, that in all possible worlds it must be inadeq - [TAPE RUNS OUT] necessary part of a happiness.. /lizi/condest X-NEWS: wattle alt.conspiracy: 14534 Relay-Version: VMS News - V6.0 1/9/90 VAX/VMS V5.5; site qut.edu.au Path: qut.edu.au!news.qut.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu! zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!uunet!mnemosyne.cs.du.edu!nyx!mporter Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.destroy.the.earth,alt.slack Subject: Re: Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth? Message-ID: <1992Nov9.033532.23410@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 03:35:32 GMT Sender: usenet@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu (netnews admin account) References: <1992Nov6.003254.22217@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> Organization: University of Denver, Dept. of Math & Comp. Sci. Lines: 583 Xref: wattle alt.conspiracy:14534 alt.slack:2414 I am posting, with the author's permission, a detailed response to my original "Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?" posting which I received via email; I am posting it on Usenet because I think it is a very good exposition of all the reasons to be *extremely* skeptical about the story I was told, and similar tall tales. Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 16:54:06 -0800 From: Cosma R. Shalizi To: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu Article 1049 of alt.destroy.the.earth: From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter) Subject: Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth? Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 00:32:54 GMT I started writing this article about the events of last night intending to send it off to a mailing list to which I subscribe, but I am posting it to Usenet News instead because it's not really on-topic for the list, whereas here I think it is. I am not a regular reader of alt.conspiracy or alt.destroy.the.earth, so perhaps these topics have come up here before. Anyhow, on with the story... Before I read this morning's mail I want to have a go at describing some strange things that happened last night. I was walking home from the train station and overtook a guy who had been walking along slowly ahead of me (it was about 12.30 am). He said a few things by way of talking a little, but I was thinking about net-related matters and it was damn cold anyway, so I said I wanted to keep going.. so then he pulled out a $10 note and gave it to me. This slowed me down a bit. We did end up talking for a few minutes, in the course of which he told me a bit about his life: briefly, he was born in Algeria just before the Revolution, a "pied-noir", so neither the French nor the revolutionary Algerians would accept his generation; he went to Europe as a young man - said he knew London and Paris like the back of his hand; now he was here in Australia, married with five children, and his advice to me was 'to follow your mind, not the money or the carrot'. Anyhow, after we separated, a few minutes later I ran into *another* guy, who was hurrying past until he saw me and stopped to say hello. I recognized him after a few moments: we had spoken in a cafe a few times - then he was telling me of the necessity of space colonization, so the human species doesn't have all of its eggs in one basket. We talked a bit, and then a bit longer (but it was mostly him talking and me listening), and I will have a go at summarizing what he told me: He is now homeless - but he has a list of dozens of addresses that he tries to visit every day. Basically his aim is still to try to save some fraction of the human race from extinction, but his preferred means have changed and this time I got to hear more of his worldview. He began by saying how we're all living in a sick society, citing as an example an incident within the last few days where he had seen a street kid carrying several ?ounces of pure speed, who was handing it out to anybody who wanted it. "Now how do you think that sort of stuff gets on the streets?" he asked. 1. Even if this happened, there is an exceedingly simple explanation. Selling drugs makes lots of money. Giving away free samples, as laundry-detergent makers know, can be quite effective - especially when the product is addictive. In other words, the answer to his question is, "Free enterprise at work." After a few other examples, he went on to say that this overall sickness was largely attributable to universal corruption - "the police, the government minister, the US senate". "Kids don't believe the teacher, they don't believe the minister, they don't believe their parents. If you lie to a five or six-year-old, they may not really have an idea of what a lie is just yet, but they know they're being deceived." "Overall sickness ... attributable to universal corruption?" Hogwash. I could just as plausibly say that universal corruption is attributable to society's overall sickness, or attribute both to a "degenerative virtue." ("Virtue" in the now archaic sense of "specific property.") Most five or six year olds _very well indeed_ what a lie is - certainly I and my friends did. He went on to say that a state of massive denial is near-universal - people don't want to see how bad things are, how bad they are getting, or what is just around the corner - which, he said, is nuclear Armageddon. He recounted a few stories about the way geopolitics supposedly really works; eg the Russians saying to the US, "OK, we give in, we surrender, just so we don't have to fight a war. But as the price you're going to have to support all these people that *we've* been supporting" - (I think he was talking about ex-Soviet Central Asia here) - "that's the price *you'll* have to pay for getting us to drink Coca-Cola and accept the rest of your shit." This story in re the Russians is, to be blunt, bullshit. Certainly, for a long time the US more or less implied that, if, by some miracle, Communism "withered away" in a Soviet-bloc country, then the Marshall plan would be repeated, but by the time the Cold War ended, the US was too poor to follow up on this. We sure as Hell aren't supporting Soviet Central Asia. Mind you, this was how the sharper people on the US side predicted the Cold War would end from the beginning - that the US would win because Russia would go broke first. They neglected to consider that the US might also be broke. The Soviet government couldn't even keep itself fed, much less make deals with the US. For me the most interesting geopolitical story he told was his version of China 1989. The US began by trying to entice China, with things like aerospace technology transfer, and later exchange student programs, all carefully calculated to try to spread the American system. "Several thousand exchange students were sent to China, and there were no restrictions on what they could take - sports cars, flashy clothes - and of course your ordinary Chinese hasn't seen anything like this..." (This is all meant to suggest what he said of course - it's not a word-for-word quote, I didn't have a tape recorder running.) Essentially, their presence was such a stimulus to the Chinese students, who in turn were a stimulus to the urban workers, that the 1949 "democracy movement" turns out to have been the result of American conspiracy. So *then*, the Chinese government "made a really heavy decision: they sent in the tanks, and they shot their own children, in order to send the message, that they were prepared to use the bomb." (ie "if they were prepared to do that to their own children, what would they do to America?") This action apparently reined in the interference of the American government in China. Urk. Taking "sports cars" from the US to _China_? _Exchange students_? No. What happened was that, following the power struggles after Mao's death, the Chinese leadership fell to people who recogn- ized that capitalism is a very good way indeed of industrializing - after all, it grew up with it. So they set up parts of the economy as more or less capitalist, and it worked. People got richer. Rich people - especially rich, young, highly educated people - tend to demand a voice in the government. You may have noticed that many of the Tiananmen protesters carried placards of Mao - lots of them were people who believed the rhetoric about a _people's_ republic, etc. The message the Chinese government sent was to its own people: Dissent and be crushed. In re the exchange students: Many more Chinese students went and studied in the West than Westerns went to China. On their return, these may well have had some ideological influence - but the 1989 movement was not brought on by Americans flashing their Levis and trolling in their Pontiacs. (The idea that "the average Chinese" has never seen anything like a motor car is so incredibly wrong-headed and patronizing that I won't bother to comment.) Later on he briefly praised the virtues of Chinese civilization - "4000 years; America is just 200 years old, it's just a little brat", and "they've never invaded or raped and plundered another people, they've been nonaggressive for four thousand years"; he even advised me to go to the library today and read some books on Chinese history. He then contrasted East with West, saying "the fucking American government, it's out of control..." 5. China has a fascinating civilization and history. He doesn't know squat about it. 4,000 years is _barely_ defensible if you count illiterate villagers with semi-interesting pots as civilized. Try more like 3,500 - whereas Europe, dating from Crete, can claim at least 4,500. But that, and the fact that "American civilization," as opposed to a subspecies of Europe, doesn't exist, is a tangent. The main point is that Chinese culture originated in a region much smaller than the present main-land China, and it spread by the usual methods - invasion, rape and plunder. The classical age of Chinese philosophy was the Warring States period (c. -700 (memory fades) to -221). During this time China was, in fact, a bunch of warring feudal states, the rulers of which filled their time much as rulers always have - with depravity, taxation, war and general cruelty to commoners. Chinese schools of philosophy - at least the ones which prospered - all claimed to have ways out of the chaos. The school whih got itself put into practice was the Legalists, who were, after Plato, the second group of people to elaborate a totalitarian ideology. It delivered what it promised, and unified China as a vast prison-camp. There was a revolt, a brief relapse into anarchy, and what emerged was the Han empire. This based it- self on a mixture of Confucianism and as much Legalism as it could get away with. Chinese history is a succession of dynasties, between which it was divided into squabbling principalities that set their people to killing each other with as much gusto as any other section of the human race. As to their not being imperialistic, it is worth noting that (as always, through the usual methods) the Tang dynasty ruled, in addition to modern China (not including Tibet) modern Indo-China, Korea, and so much of Central Asia that Li Po, the second greatest poet of the dynasty, was in all probability born in Afghanistan. It took the trauma of the Mongols to turn the Chinese even temp- orarily isolationist. No doubt they will recover from this fairly soon. As to the East vs. the West - modern Europe (including its colonies, such as the Americas and Oz) is the spoiled grand-child of old Asia. It owes a lot to China and India and Mesopotamia and Egypt and Persia. But it has definitely made its own, unique contributions: modern science and its application to technology; the ideals of representative democracy, the secular state and toleration; the creation of truly global civilization. Some other ideas, which I consider truly and deeply bad, it must take the blame for: nation- alism and Marxism, for instance. But the fact is that not one of the older nations is as it was. The Islamic world today, for in- stance, is not the unified empire from which the West learned mathematics, science, philosophy and even theology, but a fragmented bunch of dirt-poor countries wasting themselves in ridiculous and bloody quarrels, and a handful of oil principalities maintained by the West. China today, certainly, is _not_ the China that was. I don't know how clear all this sounds, but anyhow, his essential allegation is that there is an inner core of extremely powerful people in America who are planning to launch the missiles soon (when he mentioned this he would look at his watch, and say things like, "I hope we have at least two years" - I don't know why he looked to the watch, perhaps for dramatic emphasis). For the love of Cthulhu, WHY??? If the US launches, everyone else with nukes launches too - AT US!!! Power-hungry people are not usually thrilled by the prospect of ruling of radioactive rubble while watching their thyroids swell. And why not know, why wait two years? Why not wait eight? Or have done it the moment Ronnie came into office? (Of course, I can here the answer: "I don't know why they set their time-table like they do...") He told me that because of a 50-year secrecy act of some sort, you can't find out, say, who the first 300 people in the CIA were, since it is held to be a matter of national security. Again, false. The political appointees - Director, Assistant Directors, etc., are matters of public record - they are appointed by the President and confirmed (or not confirmed) by the Senate. Requests for the "first three hundred people in the CIA" under the Freedom of Information Act _might_ be turned down on the grounds of national security. For a wonder, he's right about the 50 year limit on this - but as the CIA was founded in 1947, if he can hold out five more years, he can know for certain. Since it _was_ so long ago, they might give the names to him anyhow. Definitely they couldn't hide behind the national security clauses for the first 300 in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor agency of the CIA, since that _was_ founded more than fifty years ago. (This is where he gave me a recap of Oliver North's appearance before the US Senate - saying how North had said he was ordered to do what he did, but he couldn't say who gave him his orders, since he would then be executed for treason, and so the Senate agreed because North was thus following the letter of the law stating that you can't divulge these names.) This is false - utterly, utterly false. North claimed that some of his orders came from his immediate superior, Admiral Pointdexter; others he refused to say. He didn't have to say he'd be shot for treason if he revealed them, for two reasons: A. The fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives any person the right to refuse to testify if testifying would incriminate him, and B. The Congress (not just the Senate) granted North immunity to prosecution on the basis of his testimony _before_ he began to testify. Certainly, no Senator with half a brain _approved_ of North's actions, or his hiding them. Sen. Inoyue (?sp?) compared him to the defendants at Nuremberg. I can say all this with utter certainty, because, like anyone else with half a brain in this country (not many, alas) I watched the hearings as they were broadcast. Unless your friend cares to claim those were all a show, the real hearings were quite different, and he just _happened_ to find out about them... And presumably it is these people who are the only ones who have the capacity to launch the missiles - and I think he assumes that they intend to do so because he can't see any other reason for continuing to produce them. And the fact that nobody even *knows* who the power-wielders are - he said - was why he was looking for schemes to make a safe haven for part of humanity to make it through a nuclear apocalypse, rather than trying to avert the missile-firing altogether. "Presumably," indeed. The only person with missile-launching capability in the US is the President - though I've no doubt there are some fall-back arrangements in case he's in Washington when it gets vaporized. Of course, the elaborate apparatus of cyphered codes and keys and all _could_ just be a ruse, but he hasn't given us any reason to think so. There are two reasons the bombs keep getting made. First, the military budget in this country is a gigantic - if not terribly productive - jobs program. There are communities, and definitely companies, whose livelihoods depend on new bombs, new missiles, new bombers and new submarines. Until someone finds a way to effectively convert them to civilian production, any US government which makes serious cuts in "defense" risks loosing the next election ignominously. Second, bombs are made of radiocative materials. They decay. Fifty, even twenty year old nukes aren't reliably usable, and must be replaced, if arsenals are to be kept up to strength. (Personally, I see _no_ reason not to let them wither away, but...) He used the phrase "the serpent's head" a few times, as in "You have to find the serpent's head and chop it off, At least he knows his Mao: "Though a serpent be a thousand (meters?) long, to kill it one need only chop of the head." (Quoting from memory, and no doubt distorting it.) if you want to do it that way." This is either ungrammatical or meaningless. He said thousands of people around the world were trying to find out who these top people were, but "they went underground 20 years ago... And these are really ruthless people. They shot their own president on TV, after all!" "20 years ago" means 1972 or thereabout. Kennedy - he was bound to show up here, wasn't he? - was shot in 1963, i.e., they were "above ground" when they orchestrated the assassination of the President. This seems improbable. So does their date of disappearence - a cabal running the US could _never_ afford to be visible; certainly if they could have managed this for the first 25 years (counting from the start of the CIA), there was no reason for them to hide in the age of Nixon. I am pretty sure he said at one point that he knew seven people who had been shot dead in the course of such investigations (as he was talking, he was contantly looking around us to see if anyone was approaching). Whether these seven were people he knew personally, I'm not sure. Indeed. I briefly mentioned the Internet, saying "couldn't you reach all these millions of people you say you can't work out how to reach, by putting your information out there". In trying to explain the net, I said that it was a computer network linking mostly universities all over the world. He said, in effect, that it was still probably not enough - that you could tell all the college students the truth, and people would just panic Of course. I saw this coming, too. There's never anything sensible and construcive you can do against Them, and people are such insecure and feeble little sheep that a conspiracy theory (!!!) will send them raving off into the night. ("You'll probably start to panic when you realize how bad thngs are", he warned me at the beginning; and indeed I was shivering violently throughout a lot of the conversation, but I think that was because I was standing there in the cold in just shirt, shorts and thongs.) Glad to see you, at least, had a firm grip on reality... "The students might try to start a revolution, but in that case the people who run the show would just go ahead with their plans now, rather than later." Indeed - why _not_ now, rather than later? Why wait? So there can be a few million more people in the Third World to kill? "On the bases where they have these weapons stationed, once they're getting ready to launch, those places are completely sealed off - no communications from the outside world. They wouldn't know what was going on." No. They are in communication with the NATO command centers - places like NORAD and SAC and so forth. This is essential - command _must_ be able to give orders and get feedback, and for this reason we can say that the same is true of the Russians and Chinese. This is why he emphasized the necessity of finding "the head of the serpent" - if you knew who the conspirators were, and got the names to the right people, they could perhaps stage a coup and head the thing off. But he saw no way of finding out who they were. When I said, well isn't it better to give it a go, rather than say, I can't stop the bombs from going off, I'll try to save a few at least; he said no - if people are gong to die, you should let them die peacefully, rather than have them spend their last days in panic and terror. How considerate of him. So he goes and talks about this horrible conspiracy to a person who just explained to him that he can reach nearly every technogeek on the planet... After all, when "5000" bombs went off it would be "like the planet passing through the sun" Wrong. Bombs are big, destructive things, but _anything_ humans can do at this point pales to insignificance beside, say, a big solar flare. If we were to somehow drop the planet into the Sun, the atmo- sphere would go, as would the oceans, soil and rock would melt if not vaporize, etc. If every nuclear bomb were to explode simultaneously with every reactor melting down, we wouldn't get anywhere near there. From the alt.destroy.the.earth point of view, this is a crying shame, but it is true. - "all the oxygen in the atmosphere being destroyed". This is, as we say in the trade, lizardshit. Oxygen - and every other kind of atom - would have some interesting things done to it in the immediate vicinity of a blast, but even a few miles away the chances of it getting "transmuted" are very, very low. You'd have to worry much more about getting engulfed in a firestorm - and no, the bombs would not set off enough fires to burn up all the oxygen. I had to this point not expressed any criticisms of what he had said, simply in order to find out what he might say, but the idea that after such an event everything would be over and done with stuck me as absurd. "It might be over quickly in the major population centres, where the bombs go off directly overhead, but if you're outside..." It is absurd. You're right. (You had me worried, though, Mitch...) In any case, I didn't get much of a chance to argue this, because at this point *another* guy happened along, who overheard us talking about bombs, and said "You have more to worry about than atomic bombs these days... There's the electromagnetic bomb." When I asked him what that might be, he said it "used" electromagnetic radiation to "turn one atom into another". "It's a bit like alchemy." I asked him for details, and he said "It changes the number of electrons that the atom can hold... You happen to have run into a drunken physicist." There isn't an electromagnetic bomb. There certainly can't be one that does what he described. Electromagnetism is the force that holds the electrons in the atom, and governs interactions between atoms, but the number of electrons an atom can hold is determined solely by the number of protons in its nucleus, and is, in fact, equal to the number of protons in its nucleus. This number gets changed in one of three ways: A. Radiocative decay, B. Nuclear fission or C. Nuclear fusion. Electromagnetism is so much weaker than the intra-nuclear forces as to make it impossible to change nuclei with it. If this person was a physicist, it was either only in the sense an incompetent hack like Fritjof Capra can be considered a physicist, or he making fun of you and your friend to the point where he probably ruptured his lungs laughing afterwards. (I have serious problems restraining my sarcasm - no real offense intended. May I recommend J. Trefil's _From Atoms to Quarks_ as a nice, non-technical intro- duction to the wonderful world of atomic and subatomic physics? It got me interested in this business in the first place...) Now this "electromagnetic bomb" idea might be defended by the usual "Oh, that's the _old_ theory. In my new one it is clear that-" But it so happens that the current theory of electromagnetism, quantum electrodynamics, is the single most successful theory in physics today. There is a wonderful and not at all technical explication of it by one of its founders: R. Feynmann's _QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter_. The evidence needed to abandon it would have to be compelling indeed - and it's not forthcoming. The first guy said, "Oh well, I don't want to hear about it if there's something even worse, Typical. it doesn't change our situation..." and said something about the importance of dealing with the conspiracy behind the weapons machine. The second guy said, "Oh well, if you're talking about conspiracies, the military-industrial complex isn't the *real* one", and I said, "So what is? The Committee of 300?" but it turned out he just meant the Masons. "You don't get anywhere in US politics without being a Mason. In re the Masons: crap. (The first guy had already said that *they* have lookouts everywhere, in the fof organizations which are backing or banking the group which is planning to use the bombs: such groups include the Illuminati, the Masons, the Roman Catholic Church...) Of coure. Just how far back does this merry little cabal go, and what were they planning to do _before_ nukes were invented? This couldn't, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, predate the discovery of the nucleus in 190-something. (THE ILLUMINATI???) At this point I coldn't stand the cold any more and didn't want to pursue any of these matters right there and then, partly because I wasn't sure *where* I would want to start asking for clarifications, justifications, etc. So I simply got the second guy's number (I haven't yet phoned him; it's now only 9 am); and I may well run into the first guy again, if I keep my eyes open. Okay. I have basically attempted to describe what I heard without inserting too many critical comments. About the only factor I haven't mentioned so far, I think, is that the first guy also said a few times that he thought the whole thing was probably Satanic ("this is the devil's planet now"), which I guess means that he has an outlook similar to that expressed in (for example) the Australian book "The Cosmic Conspiracy", which alleges that human geopolitics is a battleground for cosmic forces of Good and Evil (not a rare claim, actually). Indeed. This is probably one of the most blatant and disgusting forms of human _hubris_ - the idea that a bunch of plains apes are the focus of the Power That Be, who have nothing better to do than intervene in our sensely and bloody quarrels. It was marginally defensible to to hold such views in the time of Augustine; by the time of Hegel and Marx it had become embarassing to persons of sense; today it is probably pathological. (N.B. people holding such views _never_ think the world is in the hands of Good at the moment.) Anyhow, if you inhabit a reality-tunnel anywhere near that of consensus reality, you can probably think of lots of reasons not to believe this world-picture. I know I can think of all sorts of arguments against the idea of a (possibly satanic) conspiracy to bring about a nuclear apocalypse. "Reality-tunnel" seems altogether appropriate for such world-views as his: Narrow, blinkered and dark. But, I also recognize that my major motivation in thinking up counter-arguments is simply that I do not *want* to believe in such a conspiracy, since to put it mildly it makes life somewhat more difficult. True enough, but that doesn't invalidate the arguments. The fact that geometry originated in measuring land for taxation purposes does not make geometry invalid for anarchists or objectors to taxation. Your friend's statements of fact have proven either false, dubious on the basis of other evidence, or simply lunatic. What future for extropian hopes such as indefinite life extension wheneverything's gong to go up in a few years anyway? And the problem is, how can anyone who is *not* a member of the hypothetical conspiracy prove that the conspiracy is *not* there, unless they actually are part of the "inner core"? Proving such negatives is indeed difficult. But consider this: How can you prove that invisible, intangible pink furry gremlins that feed on petroleum aren't what _really_ make cars go, and that they live in the cylinders of the engine? Is there any reason to believe in this conspiracy? No. Is there reason to think this conspiracy is a piece of paranoid raving? Yes. Would it be rational to believe in it? Only if you have a preference for more rather than less falsehood and insanity. You can remove the part about Satanism and still retain the idea of a conspiracy whose aim is global genocide. This idea I have actually seen expressed before, It's not _that_ uncommon. At least a few science fiction novels on this theme, besides the usual paranoid screeds... in the final chapter of "High Weirdness by Mail", of all places. In stark contrast to the cuttingly sarcastic reviews which make up 90% of the rest of the book, that whole last chapter is devoted to excerpts from a newsletter called "Further Connections" put out by Waves Forest (PO Box 768, Monterey CA 93940, USA). Here are Ivan Stang's comments: "One of the Robin Hoods of suppressed data. Anyone who wants to seriously look into the possibility that major scientific breakthroughs ARE being hidden by THEM owe it to themselves to send for his info, which includes listings and addresses for many fringe research groups not covered in this book. Not funny at all... horrifying, yes; outlandish-sounding, HELL yes; but funny, no. Very persuasive, sobering, almost poetic essay/rants with attached bibliographies on the various technologies and metaphysical discoveries. Be prepared, however, for some real shocks to your programming. $4 should cover expenses for the first mailing, which contains more than 400 sources. A penny a source, folks. You gonna pass it up? *Huh, boy?*" (I have sent away for this mailing myself; no response so far.) Some technological innovations might well be surpressed. But as a test, when this mailing arrives, see if there are any references to the "gasoline pill" story. If so, Mr. Forest (or Ms. Forest) is one of those wonderful, gullible cranks this country produces so well... And some words from Waves Forest: Imagine you are among only a few hundred masters of a whole planet's resources, with five billion slaves surronding you, many in bad shape because you've mishandled some resources, many others starting to wake up to the situation. In your attempts to strengthen your psition you have seriously mistreated a lot of them, or hired others to do so, and you are slowly losing the struggle to keep the extent of your crimes and cruelties a secret. If you were in such a position, would it feel safe to share with all citizens the advanced technolgies developed in your top-secret "defense" laboratories? Some of these discoveries could free mankind from dependence on your resource monopolies, and provide tools for a mass uprising and overthrow of your regimes. Why would the defense laboratories work on such things _in_the_first_ place_? Fortuitous (?sp) discoveries are not as common in science as the mythology makes them out to be - and notice that now, mind you, you have to rope in hundreds or thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians into the conspiracy. Not just ones working on, say, refinements in bomb technology, but alternate energy sources, advanced communications, etc., etc. When a man does something his fellows would strongly object to, and decides to keep the misdeed a secret, he mentally withdraws somewhat from the others, because now he has to watch himself to make sure doesn't mention what he did. More misdeeds bring on further withdrawal. The intensity of the misdeeds and the secrecy surrounding them can increase to astonishing proprtions. It has actually reached the point where certain very powerful men, to ensure their presonal safety and the perpetuation of their empires, plan to kill off two thirds of the world's population and overtly enslave the rest. Since most of the general public just somehow doesn't feel right about genocide, the blatant exterminations of the '30s and '40s have been replaced by artificially induced wars, plagues, accidents, and "natural" disasters. What's a naturally induced war? An example of a artificially induced plague? (Forest says "AIDS," then we shouldn't worry because Their genetic engineers are incompetent - it's hard to catch and takes years to kill. If you really want a planet-killer, look to the pneumonic plague or influenza. I worked out a scheme for that once, and would be happy to send you the details.) Now, about those natural disasters... Earhquakes can be induced artificially by precise placement and timing of nuclear "tests". The shock waves sprad out over the globe, then recombine at various harmonic intervals around the sphere to deliver a strong jolt at the desired location within forty-eight hours of the initial blast. The physics of this is so utterly horrible I'm at a loss for words... There's not enough energy in bombs, the shock waves don't "recombine at various harmonic intervals" and they definitely don't delay 48 hrs. This seems like a descendant of Tesla's shake-the-earth-to-bits scheme... So there it is again, the idea that "certain very powerful men... plan to kill off two thirds of the world's population and overtly enslave the rest." Hell, I recall a similar idea - although the motivation here was a religious/occult hope of achieving immortality - on the part of the Saures in "Illuminatus!" This is very different from blowing the world to smithereens with nukes. I find it less incredible (in the litteral sense, i.e., unbelievable) but by no stretch of the imagination persuasive. As you point out, it is not an uncommon idea, certainly not in the fringe culture - which includes thee and me and he. So what I want to know is this. Where did this idea originate? Does anyone know more about Waves Forest, about the secret 600 at the top of the CIA, about the logistical problems of organizing such a conspiracy, of what forms this idea has taken, who communicates it, who argues against it? I know nothing about Waves Forest; the secret 600 at the top of the CIA are, to the best of my knowledge, the creation of his fevered brain; the logistical problems are immense - the cabal must be at once everyhwere, omnipotent, omniscient, indiscoverable and its goals and structure intimately known to the conspiracy theorist. This is a tall order to fill. PS: If the "first guy" of my story is in fact wholly correct, and some member of the Conspiracy reads this post, then according to the argument he gave the bombs will be set off now rather than later... If the conspiracy can't prevent a homeless religious fanatic (i.e., someone who litterally believes in Satan) from finding out about its existence, goals and methods, and can't keep a stray technogeek & known extropian from spreading the news across the Net, what CAN they accomplish. PPS: I have just recalled another anecdote from the same guy's monologue. He said he approached a few US sailors (on shore leave here, I presume) with a similar set of claims and ideas, and asked what they thought of it; and one guy said, "Well, if I was to give you my opinion I would probably agree, and probably so wold my friends, but we can't give you opinions because when we join the Navy we sign a little piece of paper that forbids us from expressing political opinions, and we'll get shot for treason if we violate that paper..." This is one claim (amongst many!) of which I am sceptical - can anyone confirm or deny this? I can imagine a courtmartial, dishonourable discharge, etc - but execution? Sailors on shore leave are not noted for sobriety or seriousness. Some people humor cranks like your friend, others tell them they are lunatics. This depends on how violent-seeming the crank is, how entertaining the rant, etc. Which is more likely: That They are known to every grunt in the Navy, or that some drunken sailors were having fun with a semi-entertaining lunatic? Government employees are restricted in their expression of political opinions - a bizarre and senseless piece of law, but there nonetheless. (They can vote, but not volunteer for campgains, donate more than nom- inal sums, etc.) The penalties are not, of course, execution for treason, but getting fired - in the military, a dishonorable discharge, I suppose. (My mother is a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health & an ex-Trotskyite - every four years the law gets her _extremely_ upset...). BTW, in the United States "treason" is defined in the Constitution, and consists _solely_ of providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the repbulic, punishable not by execution but by imprisonment - admittedly for a fairly lengthy number of years. Your friend might mean simply "get shot" when he says "get shot for treason," but it does little to bolster my confidence in his accuracy as to fact. \qix\necro Newsgroups: alt.horror.cthulhu,alt.necromicon Subject: NecroMicon FAQ Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 05:13:09 GMT The alt.necromicon F.A.Q. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. What is the NecroMicon? The NecroMicon (literally, "The Book of Dead Mice") is a near-legendary text, also known as "Al As-if". It was written in Damascus in 730 A.D. by Abdul Alhirra (known irreverently in the modern West as: "Bill the Cat"), of whom little is known, other than that he travelled widely and may have been the originator of the "Ackankar" cult. Q. Where may the NecroMicon be found? Unfortunately, the original Arab text has been lost, and only fragments remain of the various translations that were attempted. The most notable such translation was the work of an otherwise unknown cleric called "the mysterious Wormius"; we even know of his name only through tertiary sources (for example, the fine historical researches of Dr Phileus Sadowsky). Most likely Wormius encountered Alhirra in the course of an inspection of booty brought back from the Crusades. It is believed that the exiled cabalist Ignatz Eliezer carried a copy of Wormius' translation with him to Prague, where he met Dr John-D, the famous English magician and rapper (best known in this regard for introducing the magickal cry "IAO!" to rap, the modern form of which is "Yo!"). John-D in turn translated Wormius into Enochian, encoded the result with a complex multivalent substitution cipher, and sold the new manuscript to Rudolf II of Bavaria, as the work of Roger Bacon. Over the centuries many scholars of the occult puzzled over John-D's handiwork; perhaps the most notorious of these was Adam Weishaupt, who as a young man was fascinated by the mysterious "illuminated manuscript". Rudolf's collection was broken up with the passage of time, with his collection of rare manuscripts making its way to the venerable Jorge's famous library in Italy. It survived the fire that destroyed Jorge's abbey and took his life, and along with the other remaining fragments of Jorge's collection was stored at a Jesuit college for many years. In 1912 it was discovered there by Wilfred Voynich, a Polish scientist and lover of rare books. He was also the son-in-law of George Boole, the logician, and he may have had the impression that the manuscript contained certain ideas of Bacon's that anticipated modern combinatorics. Ever since then there has been a global effort to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, as it is now known. A history of this effort can be found in "The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma", by Mary D'Empirio (ADA 070 618; US Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service, Washington DC, 1978). Several times solutions have been announced, but all have been found wanting. The text of the manuscript itself is available via anonymous ftp from rand.org (192.5.14.33) (/pub/jim/voynich.tar.Z). Q. What is the content of the NecroMicon? The book is generally agreed to have contained Alhirra's metaphysical speculations. "Bill the Cat" appears to have outlined a baroque cosmology in which our world is one of many "fabricated" worlds, made for various purposes. Alhirra's philosophy is not unusual for its time in possessing teleological elements, but what truly sets it apart is that the purpose of our world is seen to be the performance of a giant *calculation* (ironic, given Voynich's likely presumptions about the manuscript's content, mentioned above). In this respect he is remarkably modern (see, for example, Edward Fredkin's recent attempts to view the universe as a computational process). From the modern viewpoint, Alhirra subsequently diminishes the attractiveness of his thought by then introducing his pet obsessions - cryptozoology and numerology. He believed that the overseers of this vast computation (the "Archons" or "Sysadmins", in occult jargon), although originating in another dimension ("the spaces between"), had incarnated in a form visible to us - as *mice*. (Hence the book's title.) He believed that their centre of operations was "an alien city in a cold land to the north" - presumably the Antarctic. Alhirra had several visions of this city from space, perhaps while scrying (these visions later formed the basis of the "Piri Reis" map); he described the city's physical environment, and its flora and fauna, in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that the NecroMicon is also sometimes known as "The Penguin Opus". Alhirra also attached great significance to the number 42, suggesting that this number somehow lay at the heart of the planetary entelechy, but never explaining why. It is a frequent observation that 42 is twice 21, the number of characters in John-D's Enochian alphabet, but otherwise no one know what "Bill" meant by this. Colin Low has written that Alhirra's scrying technique involved the use of "an incense composed of olibanum, storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish", and it has been surmised that the NecroMicon was not meant to be understood except by individuals who had ingested certain rare psychedelic plants. (For more on this line of thought, see ethnopharmacologist Terence McKenna's article on the Voynich manuscript in Issue #7 of "Gnosis" magazine, and the scene in Wilson and Shea's "Illuminatus!" in which Weishaupt attempts to fathom the NecroMicon.) Alhirra himself may have been unhinged by his exploration of consciousness. He is said to have written that to free oneself from "the click of the mouse" (an unclear phrase, apparently referring to the means of their alleged control) one must become "like that cat, dwelling in the midpoint between Something and Nothing, which is neither alive nor dead." Perhaps this is similar to the sentiment that one should be "in the world, but not of it." In any case, Alhirra is said to have met his end while standing on a chair, literally frightened to death by his invisible persecutors; his last words were, "Ia! Cthulhu ack-phffftagn..." Q. What about the Necronomicon? A. A modern superstition, in my opinion, but there are some people on alt.horror.cthulhu who take it seriously.