Big Think is a website devoted to giving some big brains a platform to spout off on topics meaningful to them, and hopefully to other citizens of this planet we call Earth. With a cadre of boldface names like Ricky Gervais, Robert Wright, Stephen Fry and Ray Kurzweil, Big Think aims to put its readers in touch with… well, big thinkers on topics like sustainability, religion, alternate energy sources, artificial intelligence, history, justice, cultural identity, politics and much more. It is what tends to be called a “heady brew”!

Perusing the site this morning, I watched this sincere short video with M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky—probably America’s single most important intellectual—discussing the concept of what love is. He admits at the outset that he really doesn’t know, but he takes a good stab at it anyway. Big Think does a great job at fulfilling its mission statement with articles and videos quite akin to TED conference speeches. If you like TED talks (and who doesn’t?) then Big Think is probably a site you’ll want to bookmark, pronto.

Here’s a tip: Don’t miss author Gay Talese on “getting drunk at the New York Times” in the 1960s
 
Cross posting this from Brand X

Gnostic Media just did a podcast interview with John Taylor Gatto, one of the world’s foremost critics of the educational system. Gatto was the New York State teacher of the year in 1991. He refused the award and instead used his stage time to discuss exactly how the state was paying him to damage children. His books have gone on to inform the home and alternative schooling movement, both left and right wing alike.

Continuing our education on the Trivium method, this is one of the most important and powerful interviews to date, and my guest for this week and next is John Taylor Gatto - probably the most famous school teacher in the world, and he was New York State teacher of the year when he quit on the OP Ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991.

John Taylor Gatto climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries. In 1992, he was named Secretary of Education in the Libertarian Party’s Shadow Cabinet, and he has been included in Who’s Who in America from 1996 on. In 1997, he was given the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for his contributions to the cause of liberty, and was named to the Board of Advisors of the National TV-Turnoff Week.

(Gnostic Media: Another Brick in the Wall)

(Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)

The following card game, meant to be played with a pack of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot cards, was invented by Anders Sandberg. Sandberg holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He’s a leading transhumanist and is quoted extensively in Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near.” Back in my day, however, we knew him as the guy who ran the most wicked “Mage: The Ascension” fan page on the Internet. If you know what this game is (aka “Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t enough to corrupt you brats into the occult? Here, have this.”) (aka “Nothing in this game is true, but it’s exactly the way things are”) you are already doomed. If you don’t, it’s too late to explain now.

The card game can be played by anybody without any previous knowledge of any other system, including Crowley’s deck. Looks very keen.

The game is played with a deck of tarot cards and a few ten-sided dice. There is nothing magical about the use of tarot, except that it is good for bringing up associations. I have used the Aleister Crowley Thoth deck, and would recommend it because the cards both have a rich symbolism and (in the case of the suits) written names giving helpful suggestions for their uses (four of disks is “power”, two of cups “luxury”). It can be run using other decks of course, but often the images are less helpful and the meanings more psychological. Knowing the symbolism and meanings of the cards makes the game far more entertaining and flexible, but just looking at the images can give inspiration. The knight of wands is riding a black horse and carrying a huge torch – a violent warlord. The fool is carrying a sack of coins – an opportunity to swindle.

The basic system is simple. Each player represents one group, society, organisation, person or something different. There may or may not be a GM with a final say, although it is useful (as is having somebody as a note-taker if the results are to be used later). Over the span of the game players may join or leave depending on whether their sides are removed or new sides of the story appear (temporarily removed players make good note takers). Unused players may act as “fate” or “chance”, playing cards that represent outside forces.

(Anders Sandberg: Genesis)

(Thoth Tarot Deck)

(Wiki on Mage: The Ascension)

 
Dangerous Minds pal Joseph Matheny of Alterati fame, has produced a trio of new Robert Anton Wilson related releases on audio CDs and DVD and you can get a discount by ordering all three at publisher Original Falcon and get The Insiders Guide to Robert Anton Wilson thrown into the mix for free. The DVD lecture, titled The “I” in the Triangle discusses the Western Hermetic tradition, Aleister Crowley, Jean Cocteau, extraterrestrials from Sirius and various conspiracy theories, And then there are the audio CDs, one a document of T.A.Z. A Night of Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism that took place on February 6th, 1993, the 2-disc set also features Rob “Real Astrology” Brezsny, Hakin Bey (his speech is great), physicist Nick Herbert, Joseph Matheny and Bob Wilson, who is in fine form here. The other disc is The Lost Studio Session that features a long intimate conversation with Bob.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Infinity Factory: Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge and me

 
Sad to hear this:

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favourite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California, daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Massachusetts.

Howard Zinn, author of ‘People’s History’ and left-wing historian, dies at 87 in California

Recently seen (via, uh, the William Burroughs re-tweet bot), the mother load… Check out this HUGE online archive of audio of lectures given by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others at Naropa Institute in the 1970s. Naropa is developing an online browser of the material, but for the moment, it’s ALL on Scribd.

The Naropa University Archive Project is preserving and providing access to over 5000 hours of recordings made at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The library was developed under the auspices of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (the university’s Department of Writing and Poetics) founded in 1974 by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. It contains readings, lectures, performances, seminars, panels and workshops conducted at Naropa by many of the leading figures of the U.S.literary avant-garde.

The collection represents several generations of artists who have contributed to aesthetic and cultural change in the postmodern era. The Naropa University Archive Project seeks to enhance appreciation and understanding of post-World War II American literature and its role in social change, cultural criticism, and the literary arts through widespread dissemination of the actual voices of the poets and writers of this period. Current interest in Oriental religions, environmentalism, political activism, ethnic studies, and women’s consciousness is directly indebted to the work of these New American Poets, writers and musicians.

Funding for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Save America’s Treasures, the GRAMMY Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Collaborative Digitization Program, and private donors. If this collection is important to you please help us preserve it with your donations.

(Scribd: Naropa Archives)

 
In his 60+ years on Earth, Mick Farren has worn many hats. He’s one of the founders of the “underground” press in Britain, he was the doorman at the psychedelic UFO Club (where Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine got their starts), a political activist, a well-respected science fiction novelist, a TV and media columnist, a poet, and, not least, he was the lead singer of the proto-punk band, The Deviants. His autobiography Give the Anarchist a Cigarette is an indispensable volume in any library about the ‘60s and ‘70s. In short, the man is a counterculture legend, and one of the last of the “gonzo” journalists.

Saturday night, Farren will be reading at La Luz de Jesus Gallery from his recently published anthologyZones of Chaos (which features an introduction by sci-fi great Michael Moorcock) accompanied by fellow Deviant, guitarist Andy Colquhoun.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd, Saturday, Jan. 23, 2009, 6 ?��Ǩ��� 9 p.m., (323) 666-7667
 

 
You’ll never have to fear your cellphone running out of juice again as long as you’re near a 7-Eleven or a vending machine, thanks to brilliant London-based designer Daizi Zheng. But maybe “juice” is the wrong word; Zheng has produced a cellphone that runs on Coca-Cola. Or Mountain Dew or Pepsi or whatever sugary, fizzy beverage you happen to have handy. Yes, you read correctly, this is a cellphone that runs on soda. It’s the call that refreshes!

As Zheng explained to Tree Hugger:

“Through my research, I found that phone battery as a power source, it is expensive, consuming valuable resources on manufacturing, presenting a disposal problem and harmful to the environment. The concept is using bio battery to replace the traditional battery to create a pollution free environment. Bio battery is an ecologically friendly energy generates electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar) and utilizes enzymes as the catalyst. By using bio battery as the power source of the phone, it only needs a pack of sugary drink and it generates water and oxygen while the battery dies out. Bio battery has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium batteries and it could be fully biodegradable.”

Three to four times longer than a lithium battery? Sounds good to us. Now all Zheng has to do is come up with a way to run a cellphone on booze, for a sort of unholy cellphone/hip flask hybrid.
 

 
Cross posting this from Brand X

Jeff VanderMeer chimes in on Jaron Lanier’s new book, the short essay version of which apparently sobered some people up a few weeks ago when it was published in the New York Times. Nooo! The Illuminati have turned against the web! What next, oh evolutionary mandate… don’t… don’t… DON’T TAKE MY DRUUGS

Even as I?��Ǩ�Ѣve embraced much of what new/social media has to offer, I also strongly recommend, in Booklife and in my lecture for MIT, thinking about what you?��Ǩ�Ѣre doing and remembering the importance of balance. In particular, these points:

(1) New media tools like Facebook and Twitter are exactly that?��Ǩ���tools. They are not strategies. Just getting on Facebook, creating a blog is not a strategy or a plan. I can?��Ǩ�Ѣt repeat that enough.

(2) It?��Ǩ�Ѣs when you mistake the tools for a strategy that you begin to not only become tactical and reactive but also limited in your thinking because of the limitations of the tools.

(3) The most successful writers in the future will be the ones that stop responding in Pavlovian fashion to our current need for that little food pellet in the form of a response to a Blog entry, Twitter line or a Facebook status message.

(Jeff VanderMeer on Jaron Lanier)

(Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto)

(Jeff VanderMeer: Finch)

 
Entrepreneur and computer engineer John Lee, in Sonoma, Calif., thinks the medical marijuana business has reached a tipping point in terms of its social (and legal) acceptance, and his 5-month-old start-up, PlainView Systems, wants to be the Amazon.com of the burgeoning industry.

Potheads, let’s face it, have never been known for being the most organized people, and many of them have the business instincts of a T-shirt seller at a Phish concert. For some dispensary owners, the ever-shifting rules, regulations and decrees set forth by the various municipalities in the state are confusing. So too are the changing accounting standards that are required of the industry.

Sensing an opportunity, Lee and his team at PlainView have created a business-to-business turnkey solution to the day-to-day managerial and bookkeeping needs of California’s cannabis culture. But it’s not just a stoner version of QuickBooks. PlainView has created an online marketplace for marijuana growers to interface with the dispensaries. The idea is to keep everything totally transparent ?��Ǩ��� hence the name PlainView ?��Ǩ��� and for all parties to have organized receipts and records, which they will be increasingly called upon to provide to state and federal tax collectors.

It’s a smart idea, and one whose time has clearly arrived. The state of California’s cannabis yield is worth an estimated $14 billion ?��Ǩ��� forget corn; pot is by far the state’s largest cash crop ?��Ǩ��� and there is news about cannabis legalization daily. To grab just a sliver of that market share could be valuable indeed. Lee told CNN, “Just in the state of California alone, according to my calculations, medical cannabis is a $200 million market. As that market grows, we want to have a small but significant part of it.”

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Wonderful short essay from Christopher Hitchens, writing about British novelist J.G. Ballard on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

From The Atlantic:

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively ?��Ǩ?�straight?��Ǩ�� novel, Empire of the Sun, and the resulting movie by Steven Spielberg. Some of his devotees were depressed by the literalness of the subject matter, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of being 13 years old and an inmate in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. It?��Ǩ�Ѣs not possible to read that book, however, and fail to see the germinal effect that experience had on Ballard the man. To see a once-thriving city reduced to beggary and emptiness, to live one day at a time in point of food and medicine, to see an old European order brutally and efficiently overturned, to notice the utterly casual way in which human life can be snuffed out, and to see war machines wheeling and diving in the overcast sky: such an education! Don?��Ǩ�Ѣt forget, either, that young Ballard was ecstatic at the news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an emotion that makes him practically unique among postwar literati. Included in this collection is a very strong 1977 story, ?��Ǩ?�The Dead Time,?��Ǩ�� a sort of curtain-raiser to Empire?��Ǩ���Ballard?��Ǩ�Ѣs own preferred name for his book?��Ǩ���in which a young man released from Japanese captivity drives a truckload of cadavers across a stricken landscape and ends up feeding a scrap of his own torn flesh to a ravenous child.

Readers of Ballard?��Ǩ�Ѣs memoir, Miracles of Life” title=“Miracles of Life”>Miracles of Life (a book with a slightly but not entirely misleading title) will soon enough discern that he built on his wartime Shanghai traumas in three related ways. As a teenager in post-war England he came across first Freud, and second the surrealists. He describes the two encounters as devastating in that they taught him what he already knew: religion is abject nonsense, human beings positively enjoy inflicting cruelty, and our species is prone to, and can coexist with, the most grotesque absurdities. What could have been more natural, then, than that Ballard the student should devote himself to classes in anatomy, spending quality time with corpses, some of whom, in life, had been dedicated professors in the department. An astonishing number of his shorter works follow the inspiration of Crash, also filmed, this time by David Cronenberg, in morbid and almost loving accounts of ?��Ǩ?�wound profiles,?��Ǩ�� gashes, fractures, and other inflictions on the flesh and bones. Fascinated by the possibility of death in traffic, and rather riveted by the murder of John Kennedy, Ballard produced a themed series titled The Atrocity Exhibition, here partially collected, where collisions and ejaculations and celebrities are brought together in a vigorously stirred mix of Eros and Thanatos. His antic use of this never-failing formula got him briefly disowned by his American publisher and was claimed by Ballard as ?��Ǩ?�pornographic science fiction,?��Ǩ�� but if you can read ?��Ǩ?�The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race?��Ǩ�� or ?��Ǩ?�Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan?��Ǩ�� in search of sexual gratification, you must be jaded by disorders undreamed-of by this reviewer. Both stories, however, succeed in being deadpan funny.

 
The Catastrophist

Thank you Alex Burns!

 
“I do not have a single constructive proposal.”

This is hilarious. It’s poetry, too. This man is a genius. Give him his own TV show!

Here’s what it says about him on WIkipedia:

Koichi Toyama (?������?�����?��ł��?��?�Ǩ, Toyama K?֬�ichi?, , born July 26, 1970) is a Japanese street musician, an “anarchist-fascist”] political activist who was a candidate for the governor of Tokyo in 2007. He was born in Kagoshima Prefecture, and lives in Fukuoka. He gained notoriety with his fervent election speech, which was posted on the American based website YouTube. Out of fourteen candidates in the election, Toyama placed eighth with 15,059 votes (0.27 percent of total votes cast).

Described by the announcer as an “Extreme Left Anti-Establishment” figure, Koichi began his controversial statement by denouncing Japan as a “horrible nation” and rejecting any possibility for reforms. Declaring most of the voters to be his “enemies”, Koichi calls upon a minority to rise up. He closes his speech by calling for the overthrow of the Japanese Government and making an obscene gesture toward the camera.

Another Koichi video, from 2008, saw him giving a monologue in which he claims as the United States has a global hegemony, it is an injustice that despite being a citizen of what he calls one of America’s “51st states” (“America”, he claims “literally encompasses the entire world”), he is not eligible to vote, let alone stand as a candidate, in the election.

 
Here is his official website.

Thank you Lucien Conrad!

Second installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is here.

 
Tantalizing short excerpt from The Harvard Psychedelic Club over at The Daily Beast.  Don Lattin’s new book looks at the moment in time when Dr. TImothy Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass), Huston Smith, and lifestyle guru Andrew Weil (then a student) crossed paths at Harvard in the early 1960s setting off a revolution in consciousness that is still felt today. It’s fascinating to see Leary’s influence on culture beginning to become rehabilitated a decade after his passing. His legacy is difficult to ascertain, to be sure, but the man had a huge, huge effect on so many people’s lives—whether directly or indirectly via the fact that LSD use became widespread, you cannot untangle Leary from that fact. He certainly had a huge influence on me. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!

From the book:

Weil and Winston had both read The Doors of Perception, Huxley?��Ǩ�Ѣs book about the insights the British writer gleaned from his 1953 mescaline trip. They walked into Leary?��Ǩ�Ѣs little office on Divinity Avenue eager to fly off on their own mystical journey.

They were a bit nervous when they sat down, but Leary soon put them at ease with his soft-spoken charm.

?��Ǩ?�Yes,?��Ǩ�� Leary said, ?��Ǩ?�Huxley was the trailblazer. You know, I didn?��Ǩ�Ѣt have a clue as to the potential of this research until I had my own experience with psilocybin mushrooms over the summer. At its core, you have to understand that this is not an intellectual exercise. It is experiential. It is, and I?��Ǩ�Ѣm almost embarrassed to say it, religious. But it is more than religious. It is exhilarating. It shows us that the human brain possesses infinite potentialities. It can operate in space-time dimensions that we never dreamed even existed. I feel like I?��Ǩ�Ѣve awakened from a long ontological sleep.?��Ǩ��

Weil and Winston were on the edge of their seats.

?��Ǩ?�Anyway,?��Ǩ�� Leary continued, ?��Ǩ?�the research is pretty straightforward. Our subjects take a controlled dose of synthesized psilocybin. We make sure they are in a safe and comfortable setting. We?��Ǩ�Ѣre trying to get people from all walks of life, not just graduate students. We?��Ǩ�Ѣre giving this stuff to priests and prisoners and everyone in between. They do a session about once a month and are expected to write up a two-to three-page report describing the experience. Between sessions, we get together and discuss whatever insights we?��Ǩ�Ѣve gleaned from all this. Now, I assume neither of you have had any experience with these substances.?��Ǩ��

?��Ǩ?�No, sir, we have not,?��Ǩ�� Weil replied. ?��Ǩ?�But we are ready, willing, and able.?��Ǩ��

?��Ǩ?�I can see that,?��Ǩ�� Leary said. ?��Ǩ?�But I think we may have a little problem. How old are you boys??��Ǩ��

?��Ǩ?�Eighteen.?��Ǩ��

?��Ǩ?�That?��Ǩ�Ѣs what I was afraid of. You see, our agreement with the university does not allow us to use undergraduates in this research.?��Ǩ��

 
Another recent publication that might be of interest: Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties

 
Remember “The Big Guy”? Mike from Brooklyn (AKA The Kid from Brooklyn and The Big Guy) is an outspoken senior citizen with a penchant for the “F” word who makes his home-pundit videos in his bathrobe (or shirtless) and puts them up on YouTube. Not saying I’m endorsing, necessarily, everything that Mike has to say (he likes Sarah Palin and is vociferously anti-Muslim), but very often he’s bust-a-gut funny and he’s more liberal than you might think at first glance. Here are a few better examples of Mike’s zany, boisterous and LOUD home-punditry.
 

 
Thank you Jesse Merlin!