Month: December 2011

sinidentidades:

The Pentagon Is Offering Free Military Hardware To Every Police Department In The U.S.

The U.S. military has some of the most advanced killing equipment in the world that allows it to invade almost wherever it likes at will.

We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the “1033 Program” that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Banksy (via thechocolatebrigade)

I will never stop loving this quote.

(via thedaysarenotfullenough)

The phrase “security” does not refer to the security of the population; rather to the security of the “principle architects of policy”—in [Adam] Smith’s day “merchants and manufacturers,” in ours megacorporations and great financial institutions, nourished by the states they largely dominate.

Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (via theworldofsleepers)

Where can I learn more about your path? Chaos magick, is it? I’m interested in learning about all kinds of pools and schools of magick and I haven’t come across your practice. Mind sending me a few links, books, etc. to learn a bit more? Also what got you into practicing the specific craft that you practice?

Chaos magick can be difficult to summarize. In essence, chaos magick is way to approach magick rather than a specific system. Two resources come to mind that helped me immensely.

First, a lecture given by the father of the movement, named Peter J. Carroll, called General Considerations on the Philosophy and Practice of Magick. You can find it in three parts on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2pMNS81-hE&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL5E65F76C2B347A10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPI8mzItB58&feature=BFa&list=PL5E65F76C2B347A10&lf=results_video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNEjdqUZDHA&feature=BFa&list=PL5E65F76C2B347A10&lf=results_video

Second, check out his book Liber Null and Psychonaut. The book remains in print and can easily be found for download as a pdf. (Though complete versions can be elusive for some reason when downloading it.) Since 1987, Liber Null remains the basic primer for those wishing to learn about chaos magick.

I turned to chaos magick after my continued frustration with the sources for ceremonial magick. I find the forms and conventions of ceremonial magick highly effective, but despise the usual sources (Golden Dawn, Crowley), for being moribund in Judaic-Christian symbolism and theology. Most hermetic practices insist on a devotion to their way of doing things, often designed to inflate the egos of the magicians in charge of their particular society. Chaos magick allowed me to tap into the resources created by these magicians, without being enslaved by them.

Let me know if you would like more resources or have other questions.