Month: March 2012

virus from outerspace: “Be Careful, Some One Might Mistake You For A Thelemite.”

virus from outerspace: “Be Careful, Some One Might Mistake You For A Thelemite.”

chaosgarden:

Chaotes have been both saluted and berated for their operating system of paradigm shifting. For some people who aren’t too experienced in Chaos Magick, whether or not they intend to practice it, this means one is trading short term goals for an authentic search for knowledge….

Private Morality Is Not The Problem: It’s The Boardroom, Not The Bedroom

Private Morality Is Not The Problem: It’s The Boardroom, Not The Bedroom

Republicans have morality upside down. Santorum, Gingrich, and even Romney are barnstorming across the land condemning gay marriage, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, access to contraception, and the wall separating church and state.

But America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.

There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It’s located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump. It’s found in Wall Street fraud, exorbitant pay of top executives, financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.” – Robert Reich

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (via cyberspacecowboy)

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before. They are transcripts, types – the archtypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual – that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy – are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears,

Quoted at the beginning of The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft.

(via qaneh-bosem)

Polite people are not supposed to remember the reaction when Kennedy tried to organize collective action against Cuba in 1961: Mexico could not go along, a diplomat explained, because “if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.” Here we take a more sober view of threats to the national security.

Noam Chomsky (via americawakiewakie)