Topics

(according to Ray Cadaster)

http://copybot.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/the-50-most-interesting-articles-on-wikipedia/

Can you beat these? post your most interesting links ITT

I hate the word "Evangelism". It carries the connotation of every preachy, condescending, holier than thou, fundamental, dogmatic zealot.



THAT BEING SAID

There are probably less than a thousand of us in the world. And by "us" I mean people who identify, at least in part, with Eris. A lot of you would never call yourselves a Discordian outright, but let's be straight, all of us are Discordians.

But yeah, there aren't that many of "us"

but I think that's largely a product of exposure




can you imagine what it'd be like if there were like ten thousand of us?

            and they were all out pranking and jaking together
            spreading the HORRIBLE TRUTH     ?


oh, the things we could do! The FUN we could have!



The INFORMATION AGE is in full swing. If we could Organize ourselves a little, (gasp!) I don't think it would be hard to clue people in that they've been Discordians all along. There's scads of people out there who are hip to Frequency-23, they just don't know it yet. Our zen-lunatic irreligion actually has quite a bit to offer to the confused post-moderns of the early 21st century.

So let's talk about RECRUITMENT, whatever it means to you. How to spread the Good Word without becoming the preachy fucks we hate so much in other religions.

Would the world be better if there were more Discordians? Not fucking likely! But it sure would be more "Discordian".


I am starting a cabal right now, a group of people who play a game where we expand the Discordian Society.

http://23ae.com/format/discordiancode/code13.html

I've always thought these things were kind of dumb, and pick sort of arbitrary ways to define yourself, but



my code is:


DPROF c++ a- P++ E- F+ R$++ tv-- b+ OM9 RAW+ DC- e++ h+ r% r* K++

[build a better Discordian Society.]

The idea, as it develops, is to build a better Discordian Society.

There are hundreds of pages of great content here at PD. There is enough knowledge here to jump start any newcomer Discordian into a full on double-Illuminati OMF Operative. There is energy which can electrify someone into new, radical kinds of action. This place is proof that a Discordian Society is a bit more tangible than some scrawlings in the margins of a 1959 funnybook. We have posters, pranks, activities, new ideas, old ideas with new paint, rants, sermons, parables, and a cracked out sense of humor you can only find in mental wards.

But one day, it's not gonna be here. One day, you and I are going to flounce from this community, leaving our legacies smoking behind us.

So we have to operationalize this knowledge. We have to distill and crystallize PD. We have to make an entry point, where the uninitiated can get all crazy hard for Eris and her children.



Where are you going with this, Cramulus?

In this thread, we will be posting our personal "best of" contributions to PD.

I want you to dig up the great stuff you've created and given to this community, and link to it here.

You can also nominate other people's work. If you've read a really great rant which made you stand up out of your chair and go RAH, please link to it here.


Eventually, we'll be taking these items and cross-posting them to a wiki, blog, putting then on flyers, or otherwise distributing them.

For this reason, it's best to link to individual posts. It's very difficult to crystallize an entire thread into an article. It can be done, but we haven't figured out how best to do it. (If you'd like, feel free to try your hand at this process, the more attempts we make, the better we'll get.)

http://www.bearotic.com/2009/11/12/bearforce1-bear-band-breaks-up/

Today the management of Bearforce1 announced that the bear band has disbanded. The band’s web site reflected the news with the graphic below. It looks like this year won’t be a beary hairy Christmas.

[So here's what I propose:]

For those of you that don't know what it is, lemme relate the history of the place, as I know it.


23ae is a Discordian blog once run by Prince MuChao. You may remember him if you've read the Apocrypha Discordia.

It is, in my estimation, the most popular "Discordian" blog. It gets tons of hits from random Discordians who are not currently connected to this Discordian Society. When I was a young pinealist, I read every single goddamn thing on 23ae. It houses some good material, and a lot of fluff. It's where I first met Ratatosk, Broken AI, Dr Jon Swabey, The Other Anonymous, and the infamous Rev. Uncle BadTouch.

Prince MuChao never did much to moderate the site, he let everybody post pretty much whatever they wanted. That's how the place has a reputation (around these parts) for being what we would call "pinealist". But to be fair, it's hard to generalize about the users and content of the site. It's dead as a doornail right now, so there's nothing to generalize about.

Prince MuChao became frustrated with the place and backed off. He's a ghost now, only responding to about 1 out of 10 emails. Luckily, some people (myself included) have admin powers over there. I've continued to keep it warm, making sure I have something on the front page at any given time. I think I represent about 50-75% of the posts in the last year or so.

The other posts are either Uncle BadTouch posting info from his monthly snoozeletters, or DrJon posting about Discordian Holydays. It's fairly innocuous.

In the last six months the site has gone pretty much dead. There's about one post per month, and a half dozen comments.


So here's what I propose:

We can very easily transform 23ae into what we want it to be. All it would take is one post every few weeks or so to maintain a presence on the site. I guarentee that this will generate more attention for whatever it is we post about.

So what do we want to turn it into?

That's a damn good question! I'd love to hear what you guys think.


Disclaimer

I know Uncle BadTouch posts there. I know a lot of you don't like the site. I want this discussion to remain focused on how we can make 23ae a useful vector for us. We can't scare Uncle BadTouch off the entire internet, and to be honest I don't think his minimal presence there is really important. Focusing on him, or the alleged "pinealism" over there is a distraction, let's move past it.


What I think

-23ae could be a good vector to post "best-of" output from our forum. There are a lot of ideas here which will be wasted (in some sense) if they never leave the forum. So let's get the word out about horrormirth, activitism, KYFMS, etc etc. The apple talk dialogues, some of the rants in OKM, that sort of stuff could be x-posted with minimal effort. Though -- that was our plan with the pd blog, and look what happened to that! (I think we're up to zero posts in six months)

-it's (potentially) a great way to get participation in other missions. letter writing campaigns, omgasm, and intermittens come to mind.

-is there something bigger?

[Thread:]

          GREATEST TROLL THREAD
            OF ALL TIME
              POLL



Please vote for one of the above threads. Please note that you are not voting for the most annoying USER of all time, just the most annoying THREAD. Or the best thread, depending on how you see things. Links and recaps below


This poll will run for 7 days.


Please post and tell us what exactly you find so wonderful / horrible about the thread you're voting for.

Thread: Why is the internet so fucking fascist?
Starring: I Am Not a Rhombus
Length: 47 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=14112.0
Notes: This may be where we first encountered the tempest known as I Am Not a Rhombus. It started as a discussion about whether or not people with Aspergers should be treated differently on the internet. The hand wringing did not stop for some time.


Thread: Hello again everyone! (massive TL;DR)
Starring: I Am Not a Rhombus
Length: 27 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=19300.0
Notes: The Rhombus Returns to tell us what terrible people we all are. Weighing in at 27 pages, this thread wasn't as prolonged as the original, but did get pretty out of control.

Thread:     BIP- Just call me Nigger to my face.
Starring: The lamanite
Length: 28 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=13141.msg417208#msg417208
Notes: The Lamanite was an american indian who resented being treated like a second class citizen. What he never noticed was that nobody was treating him like a second class citizen. That is, until he decided that most of us should be killed so the land can return to balance. IIRC there was another thread before this one in which he flipped out at everybody. He flounced for a bit, and then returned with this gem of a thread, accusing us of being racist for having the word "Niger" in the latin "Black Iron Prison" logo. Later in the thread, he admitted his intent was to provoke somebody into calling him nigger. Nobody ever did. He eventually left.

Thread:     A kLoKwErK kAoS
Starring: A kLoKwErK kAoS
Length: 37 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=11992.0
Notes: A Klokwerk Kaos really deserves his own hall of fame. Here is his debut thread, in which you will learn about his myspace page. You'll notice that he was sort of well received ... until about page 3 or so. His attempts to master and eventually masturbate this forum consumed everybody's attention for something like two months. Nobody's really sure when he switched gears and decided to waste everybody's time hardcore. It was at this point that the first PLEDGE was declared (not present ITT). For those who were there at the time, he remains one of the memorable trolls to ever post on PD.

Thread:     Stirring up Trouble: Why Api is anti-MLK Day
Starring: Saint Aini
Length: 24 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=14989.0
Notes: I guess this is more of a drama thread than a troll thread. In this thread, we all learned something about race relations. Namely that aini is afraid of all black people because they (apparently) want to rape her.

Thread:     SO, ARAFELIS: Trying to stir shit?
Starring: Arafelis
Length: 53 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=21100.0
Notes: I actually have no recollection of what this is about but it's 53 fucking pages long.



Thread: Pointless drama, hysteria and self-righteous whinging thread.
Starring: Daruko
Length: 28 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=16332.0
Notes: This is a split from some other thread. Actually it may be several splits. So it's a bit disjointed to read, but you do get some classic daruko spirals.

Thread: Attn: TGRR, Nigel, and Faust?
Starring: Daruko
Length: 36 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=17135.0
Notes: IIRC - Daruko dropped an imagebomb, we discussed banning him, and then all sort of hilarity ensued

Thread:     Extract of DK fail thread.
Starring: Dead Kennedy
Length: 24 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=19893.msg658009#msg658009

yo, this was like tag team idiocy.  DK really is a pro. There were multiple waves of people who dropped into that thread, debated with him for a while, then threw their hands up in the air out of frustration and left the thread. Then the next wave would come in. DK managed to keep up with all of it, frustrating and nauseating everybody that interacted with him. It really is persistence that made him such an excellent troll. And that he'd produce a wall of text each time you replied to him.

Don't forget the Taboo Soup thread from Lamanite! It was the combo of the BIP thread and the Taboo Soup thread that really made Lamanite one of our all-star trolls.

Thread:     BREAKING NEWS: Pterodactyls
Starring: Pterodactyl Handler X
Length: six pages of pure win
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=13263.msg421666#msg421666
Notes: The Pterodactyl Handler, PD's evil supervillain, appears from time to time and makes outrageous demands of the wretched forumites which inhabit this wretched forum. If they fail to comply, he bumps ancient threads of suck and fail, or otherwise ravages and terrorizes Apple Talk. Bikaaaw!

Thread:     (random links)
Starring: Slanket the Destroyer
Length: 287 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=6621.0
Notes: Some jackass came to the forum one day and started crapspamming links.

[Thread:]

TROLL HALL OF FAME NOMINATION THREAD

post links (for the lovagod don't bump) threads of epic or hilarious drama. Try to recall as much as you can to summarize what happened. Then we will discuss and vote.

at some point, somebody might put a page up on the wiki which lists this TROLL HALL OF FAME



Thread: Why is the internet so fucking fascist?
Starring: I Am Not a Rhombus
Length: 47 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=14112.0
Notes: This may be where we first encountered the tempest known as I Am Not a Rhombus. It started as a discussion about whether or not people with Aspergers should be treated differently on the internet. The hand wringing did not stop for some time.




Thread: Hello again everyone! (massive TL;DR)
Starring: I Am Not a Rhombus
Length: 27 pages
Link: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=19300.0
Notes: The Rhombus Returns to tell us what terrible people we all are. Weighing in at 27 pages, this thread wasn't as prolonged as the original, but did get pretty out of control.

: if you're doing it just to post about it here.



I'm about to drink one of my flatmate's beers. Mooha ah hah haaaaa

and I edited your post FOR NO REASON AT ALL mwuahahahaha - 000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od8Ka7bdqvU&feature=player_embedded

He's got our number ... bad.

thought some people here might dig this:



http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=6451756

Feeling felicitous? In the mood to play a good prank involving rubber chickens, a pyramid scheme and a pogo stick? This is the scent for you.

A tenth planet kind of gal, Eris brings chaos as an element to the universe. Old Greeks and Romans would invoke her in war under the "confuse your enemies" dictum of battle...and believe me, she's only gotten more confusing over the years, right down to Eris' consistent yet oddly erratic 500+ year orbit. Although perhaps now she prefers to bemuse your enemies rather than confuse them...

From bombing weddings with golden apples (perhaps beginning that trite bouquet tradition) to rattling the teeth of a few twentieth century stoners, Eris has got some real punch to her.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet)
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/

This fragrance does its best to capture the essence of Eris, no easy task since anything completely realistic would either explode, or be so immune to friction I would have to chase it with a butterfly net. Contains tincture of apple for her favorite party-crashing fruit, dandelion because of its persistence and entropic omnipresence, black pepper and pennyroyal for their troublemaking tendencies, and a hint of violet leaf and plum wine, because of their fae and chaotic folklore.

This fragrance uses tinctures and essential oils, so yes, it DOES contain alcohol in an essential oil base.

I have called this ATTN: ACTIVITISTS, but people often mistake that for ACTIVIST, an entirely different idea





anyway
If you're into

PROJECTS
PRANKS
& ACTIVITIES

come up with ideas to update this old-ass list:

http://blackironprison.com/index.php?title=Task_List

So let's say they succeed at making the internet suck. Let's pretend the government figures out how to regulate it, de-neutralize it, restrict p2p file transfer, essentially moderate many emerging forms of communication. Let's pretend that those commercials you have to sit through before all youtube videos become ubiquitous on the net; you've gotta watch a commercial before clicking on a PD thread, ads everywhere, total corporate saturation. Everything you do gets scraped by a bot and filed into a personality profile which assists both marketers and the CIA. You have one ID which you use for e-mail, posting on all forums, surfing for porn, whatever. Anonyminity is decimated. The government is watching everything.

What's to stop people from launching a second, parallel internet? It's not like this stuff is very high tech. Couldn't someone code a means of communication which is very similar to the internet, but works differently enough that it evades internet legislation?

They say we will think of these days as the wild west of the internet.
Is there an open-source solution to keep it that way?

Here's a poster I made this morning which suggests that the local area is a hotspot for UFO sightings

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20997964/UFO-Sighting

What's with people that hate things? are they too fucking retarded to experience joy?

   

I just moved out of ghetto-ass Yonkers, back to Connecticut. Yesterday was my first day of work since the move. 8 AM. The alarm blares and I slap it. And then I laid there. For the last two years, I've been living on the same schedule. Get up in the morning, do all this morning ritual jazz, then go to work. But at this new place, I don't have a routine yet. The body lacks a program for putting on coffee and brushing my teeth and jogging to the train. There is no train. I gotta start from scratch. I found it very liberating. My mental landscape is clear. The body does not miss its autopilot, the one I will be meticulously programming over the next few weeks. I arrived at work with a heightened sense of clarity. I went through my routine day, a little bit more relaxed than usual, then went home. And then...? Thinking For Yourself? what a shmuck I am For me, the reminder of the day is that Thinking For Yourself and self awareness are also products of what you physically do with your body. Consciousness isn't just in the mind. Your awareness is spread out over everything your mind touches. Change the context and you change the mind. Or at least give it an opportunity to escape those rituals, the architecture of routine, which we love so dearly. Best, Cramulus

[GO!]

Things on the internet that you wish you could "unsee", A-Z. GO!



Anal Prolapse

The Revolution is here!

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/Adventure/index.php?title=Page_550

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/Adventure

The Adventure Wiki is overrun with spam

I'm trying to revert spambot edits, and could use a hand...

Cainad and Verbatim, DRAW STEEL

anyone else is invited to help as well. This is the digital version of cleaning up greasy sea animals after an oil spill. You basically need to go through the adventure, and if you find a page with spam on it, revert it to its last coherent version


We need to turn off the ability for anonymous users to edit it, but I have lost my login info for the wiki. Hey faust or 000, do you have a moment?

[Minutes to Go]

this is a poem by bobby gysin
it inspired burroughs

         and I like it a lot too






Minutes to Go

the hallucinated have come to tell you that yr utilities
are being shut off         dreams monitored,        thought directed,
sex is shutting down everywhere     you are being sent.

all word are taped.     agents everywhere.
marking down the live ones       to exterminate.

they are turning out the lights

no      they are not evil,     nor the devil,    but men
on a mission     with a spot of work to do.

this,     dear friends,     they intend to do on you.

you have been offered a choice      between liberty and
freedom    and   No! you can not have both.

the next step is    everyone into space    but it has been
a long dull wait      since the last tower of babel,
that first derisive visit of the      paraclete.

let's not hear that noise again      and again.

that may well be     the last word     anywhere.

this is not the beginning.     in the beginning was the word,
the word has been in for a too     long time,
you in the word and      the word in you


we are out
you are in

we have come to let you out

here and now we will show you        what you can do
with and to
the word
the words
any word
all the words

Pick a book,    any book,    cut it up
cut up
prose
poems
newspapers
magazines
the bible
the koran
the book of moroni
la-tzu
confucius
the bhagavad gita
anything
letters
business correspondence
ads
all the words

slice down the middle,     dice into sections
according to taste
chop in some bible,     pour on some Madison Avenue
prose
shuffle cards,    toss like confette
taste it like piping hot     alphabet soup

pass yr friends' letters,     yr office carbons
through any such sieve     as you may find or invent.

you will soon see     just what they really are
saying.     this is the terminal method for
finding the truth.

piece together a masterpiece     a week.
use better materials      more highly charged words.

there is no longer a need      to drum up a season of
geniuses,     be your own agent     until we deliver
the machine     in commercially reasonable quantities.

we wish to announce     that while we esteem
this to be truly     the American Way
we have no commitments     with any government
groups

the writing machine     is for everybody,
do it yourself     until the machine comes.
here is the system       according to us.

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/

[$ $ $ $ $ PAID ASSISTANT $ $ $ $ $]

POSTERGASM brainstorm: certain types of posters catch everybody's attention. "In this economic climate" (Cram pauses for everybody to take a shot) everybody's on the look out for some quick cash.

Enki posted a poster he made for LARPGASM, presenting participation as some kind of moneymaking opportunity. This got me thinking about what a great hook that is - when you see these kinds of posters, you're probably feeling a sort of financial stress, and you're hoping the poster will provide a solution. So it's basically the perfect spot for a meme bomb.

Let's brainstorm some different kinds of posters that appear at a glance like moneymaking opportunities, but actually pack a different kind of punch.







off the top of my head...









$ $ $ $ $ PAID ASSISTANT $ $ $ $ $

Research cabal seeks participants for social experiment. Help cure society of its stockholm syndrome.

    What you will do:

-relax, even while working hard
-be cool to the people around you
-try out new things, discover new parts of yourself
-when you experience stress, you will not pass it on to everyone around you by acting like a stressed out cash monkey who spends every ounce of energy chasing $ $ biosurvival tickets $ $.

     You will be paid in:

-peace of mind
-a new sense of humor that puts everything in proper context
-freedom

[initial discussion summarized here:]

a tangent of the still undeveloped ARGGASM--------

initial discussion summarized here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/cramulus/index.php?title=LARPGASM
   participants: Cramulus, Verbatim, Pixie, Cainad

social networking site here: http://larpgasm.ning.com/

[DwarfWhisper32]

I don't really know what to make of this

a comment posted at 23ae

DwarfWhisper32 - Just a note to fella Holy 23's a Discordian has cited her Discordian Religion, as Legal Political Necessity Justification for her criminal act! Criminal act of sending Holy Five, crypticaly discordian coded 'rude: racially insulting' SMS's to a South African politician, at minute intervals of 23 and 32 minutes (in reference to those wonderful Minutemen Souls 32 being a reference to USMC 'article 32 hearing'). Intro OMGASM Political activism in service to the Politics of Disclosure - Litgasm Exopolitics, to President & First Lady Obama, with a liquids only hungerstrike starting 23 August, to 23 September...
8/21/2009 1:45:44 AM


link points to

http://crimeninuria.blogspot.com/2009/08/exopolitics-corr-president-first-lady.html

I was talking with everybody, and we seem like we're on the same page.

So by combining our funds, we'll all buy a plot of land somewhere. (perhaps Oregon) Then we'll all move there and begin our Discordian Commune.

We each need to bring something to the table to bring in income. Then we can live bourgeois lives like big pimpin Discordians.

A play performed in seattle, 2004.

http://scotto.org/listing.php?smlid=48





no comment, I just thought it should be posted here. It seems to be a fairly direct reading of the Principia. I haven't been able to find any videos.

Everything sucks now that Discordia is irrelevant again.

[Page 1:]

Here's a brainstorm topic. If there were a five-page booklet or pamphlet which "sells" Discordia, or at least summarizes why it's relevant to you in a very short space, what would it be about?




Here's one whack at mine:


Page 1: The Information Age has changed some fundamental stuff about society. We now assemble our identities from stuff way outside our local sphere. We call this the Strange Times, and it marks an era where "normality" is not just an illusion, not just a viscious trap laid by popular consensus, but the enemy of growth.

Page 2: Humans are, for the most part, irrational creatures. This means that it's a waste of time to try and build a rational world order - some jackass is just going to screw it up! Rather than be dismayed by this, we try to find the humor in it.

Page 3: Strife and Confusion are the essence of living in an irrational, strange time. The Ancient Greeks, who were trying to build society out of nothingness, saw Eris as the enemy. In today's context, she is the force which will dismantle bureaucracy and show us how to assemble an identity out of hilarious parts, rather than the boring grayfaced crap we see everywhere. The modern Discordians use her as a symbol for Disorder, which is ultimately a tool for balance.

Page 4: Discordians have been around since the late 50s. Their religion venerates humor and takes nothing (especially the self) seriously. They have impacted culture in numerous subtle ways.

Page 5: Having read this pamphlet, you are now a pope, able to define what is good and bad in your personal slice of the cosmos.



The pamphlet would be littered with marginalia, meme bombs, and images from the Principia. Optimally, it should be funny or surreal in a way which jars the reader.

[edit;]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/210939/THE-STORY-OF-THE-EYE-Georges-Bataille?classic_ui=1

Erotic novel from 1928. Contains NSFW text.

go to a random page and read.


One Internets will be awarded to whoever can find the best quote.


edit; link updated with a page you can actually scroll through

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT IN GASM COMMAND...

GO FORTH AND SPREAD THIS LINK

http://www.blackironprison.com/index.php?title=Jake_Day_2009



also - feedback?

- we could use a funny image. Any ideas?
- we need a few bullet points about why Reid is a great target. Stuff that will get people all worked up about him.

This thread is for discussion of Angel Tech by Antero Alli.


download: http://ifile.it/vjagfkr

This is a no-wrong-answer question, just think about it and be creative. What is the mascot of the Principia Discordia community?

can you visualize an avatar that represents this thing?

Jake Day

Let's thow one.


Who's a good target?

http://www.ncbirofl.com/

A selection of bizarre recently published papers.

They contain such great lines as: "Twenty-four dogs were divided into two equal groups, one of which wore cotton underpants and the other polyester ones. Seven dogs wearing nothing were used as controls."

"In 2 experiments, viewing very cute images (puppies and kittens)-as opposed to slightly cute images (dogs and cats)-led to superior performance on a subsequent fine-motor dexterity task (the children's game "Operation")."

and how about this title? Sex differences in Nintendo Wii performance as expected from hunter-gatherer selection

These threads are like the microblogging of irreligious propaganda.  



Five times per week, Bung Fu the Fool took the train to work.

As the locomotive pulled into the station, he contemplated stepping off the platform and bringing his life to an end under its uncaring wheels.

"You should just do it," said the stranger behind him, "I'll even push you if you'd like."

"You're probably right, my day isn't going to get any better than this," said Bung Fu as he boarded the Sisyphus Express.

                       Luckily there was a trainwreck and everybody died.

Get your tin foil hats out

Illuminati Agent Stephen Colbert may have made a move last night. Please tune your pattern-finding machinery towards this clip:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/230969/june-17-2009/the-word---bohemian-grove
       (Colbert Report June 17 2009 - The Word: Bohemian Grove)


There are obvious connections between the Illuminati and the Bohemian Grove. Last night, Stephen Colbert made a bid to join the Belezian Grove, the Bohemian Grove's recent female equivalent. This talk appears to be peppered with code...  Let's see if we can decode all of it.

Uh, is I.P. Freely here? Hey, everybody, I.P. Freely!
Wait a minute...  Listen to me you lousy bum. When I get a hold of you, you're dead. I swear I'm gonna slice your heart in half!
                                  /


Today's topic is Intellectual Property. I've been reading Ourspace by Christine Harold, and she makes some very good points about IP which I'd like to share.

Here's the basic problem: Current Copyright law is putting a serious cramp in public culture.
Here's the underlying problem: Ideas being treated like property
Here's the compromise: the creative commons and collaborative works like Intermittens

We are in a period of artistic expression characterized by re-appropriation. We live in the Empire of Signs and Signals, a culture permeated by branding and logos. Even mundane objects have identity wrapped up in them. (As I write this, I am sipping coffee out of a ceramic mug which advertises "a greener future" - choosing ceramic over paper cups isn't just a choice about the environment, it's a choice about your identity) Hip-hop relies on samples. Film and literature is made richer by referencing other cultural works. Culture Jammers are vandalizing billboards in the name of self-expression, stealing the power of the corporate imagery to strike at its own source. Hell most of the films opening this summer are reconceputalizations of old ideas. Expression and reappropriation go hand in hand these days.

And that's something that's supposed to be protected by free speech. We private citizens have the right to comment on and satirize anything we want. It's inherent to the system. This type of expression is necessary for our freedom. An artist named Dwyer, commenting on consumer culture, created this piece of art:



this is a reappropriation of the starbucks logo... This is an obvious piece of political commentary which is protected under "Fair Use" - which explicitly protects "criticism" and "comment". These are the tools through which we, as a public, are able to exert some control over the public sphere. Starbucks felt otherwise. They sued his ass sued for trademark and copyright infringement, unfair competition (??), and trademark dilution via tarnishment. This last one stuck, and will appear again, so keep your eyes peeled for it in the coming years. This is a relatively new regulation, put in place to keep corporations from having their brands watered down by other similar brands. You can't produce a line of shoes with a backwards nike swoosh, you know? But Dwyer wasn't releasing a competing brand, he was commenting on the consumer culture that starbucks propagates. But Starbucks won the case, and had Dwyer's artistic expressions pulled from the public.

This, if you ask me, is criminal. It's unconstitutional.

It's also kind of ironic, because Branding strategies inherently surrender a level of control to the public. Marketers create brands and symbols, then disseminate them freely, hoping that people integrate them into their lives. Think about that nike swoosh - the phrase "Just Do It" is a great slogan because it could mean anything to anyone. It's interpretation is personal. Likewise the "Got Milk" campaign has had great success because people can reappropriate it for anything. Marketers know that their output is going to be discussed, dissected, reassembled, talked about on the news, re contextualized by the public. In fact, they count on it. But when someone makes a comment that the corporation doesn't like, it should be protected too. Corporations shouldn't be able to just silence legitimate parody or dissent. But they have better lawyers than the artists and private citizens they're suing.

Pirates and re appropriation artists challenge the hoarding of information by recommunicating it to the public. They do not feel that the rights to certain forms of expression should be kept prisoner by private corporations. They're acting as a kind of intellectual robin hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the public.

Here's a great example of what's wrong right now: The 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extention Act was the eleventh time copyright has been extended since 1960. Disney's lawyers want exclusive control of Mickey Mouse, an image which is so ingrained in our culture that he's run for president.   All of us grew up with Mickey Mouse. Many of us have childhood memories of shaking his hand at Disney World, our families posing for a cheesy portrait wearing those stupid mouse ears. But unlike other elements of your childhood, you can't put Mickey in art. You can't write a book or movie about going to Disney World. You can't paint a portrait of Mickey Mouse. Not without Disney's permission.

It didn't always use to be like this.

Originally, Copyright was intended to inspire creativity by insuring the livelihood of artists and writers. The founding fathers of the US protected works of art under copyright for 14 years. The intent (argued by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard IP professor who participated in the above Dwyer case) was to block off that particular expression so that other artists wouldn't just keep releasing the same works over and over again. The original phrasing was that copyright should secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." All the current discourse is niggling about that word "limited". We've gone from 14 years to 70 years beyond the life of the author, 95 years in the case of a corporation as copyright holder.

Siva Vaidhyanathan of NYU says, "Copyright law rewards works already created and limits works yet to be created, which is precisely what copyright was supposed to avoid. Copyright rewards the established at the expense of the emerging."

Lessig (who is the father of Creative Commons, btw) insists that "always and everywhere, free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; ...without them, creativity is crippled." Here, he's talking about the Commons, the body of cultural material we can draw on to express ourselves. He summarizes the case against our copyright culture here:

1. Creativity and innovation always build on the past.
2. the past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past
4. Ours is less and less a free society

In Ourspace, Harold argues that the pirates, who seek to liberate information from those who would control it, ultimately reinforce the real problem, which is the notion of ideas as property.

She thinks that the real avenue for change, the real answer to this problem, is not piracy, but the exploration of collaborative works. The Creative Commons, Open Source Software, Intermittens Magazine -- these are examples of expressions by groups of people. None of them are territorially controlling their ideas and prohibiting them from being used by others. Collaboration under the creative commons (ie copyleft) creates cultural works which others can enjoy freely - not just in the ways Disney wants you to.

[jailbreak]

This thread is for anecdotes and advice regarding jailbreak.

I'd like to hear about this room you dwell in and how you've changed it.

Are there any poignant revelations or experiences you've had? Can your experiences help others find the way out?

The jailbreak represents something different to each of us. Family, emotions, routine, money, morality, laughter... What was your cell made of? How did you realize it was a cell, something you need to escape from? What's it made of now? In short, I'd like us to illustrate different types of jailbreaks. 




Meta-thread note:

I am not volunteering myself or anyone else, but future BIP or Intermittens authors may want to grab text from this thread. Keep this in mind when responding - post which are full of quotes or links are difficult to edit for reprint!

The dadaists. Absurdism. Nonsense.

It is common to think of these things as meaningless, effete gestures at the rational order. Random nonsense is often decried as a masturbatory means of expression, satisfying the communicator but boring the communicatee. Many people have a similar distaste for "modern" art. "Anyone can draw a single dot on a canvas, how is that art?" In part, they are reacting with frustration at their inability to grasp the expression with their rational mind. In this essay I hope to illustrate the intent of much "meaningless" expression.

Specifically I'll be talking about Nonsense's role in subversion. The Jabberwocky, while a delightful piece of nonsense, was primarily written to entertain. When Marcel Duchamp flipped a urinal upside down and signed it with somebody else's name, it was intended as a middle finger to his audience. In the latter example, Duchamp's use of nonsense was rhetorical - by not building his sculpture with rational building blocks, he annexed rational discussion about it. He changed the context so drastically that his audience had to come up with new concepts to evaluate it, and itself.

We Discordians owe much to the Situationist International, a group of french intellectuals whose movement came to a dramatic climax in Paris, May 1968. The French were also riding the train of cultural revolution which swept America in the late 60s. The Situationist's elusive posterchild, Guy Debord, wrote "The Society of the Spectacle" in 1967, a manifesto which described the unique conditions of modern living. Debord argued that the shifts which occurred after the industrial revolution had transformed the laborer into the consumer. No longer forced to work in dank factories, we are now prime conspirators in our personal imprisonment and commoditization. We have become interchangeable, like the parts of a machine whose ultimate function is to build itself. The Society of the Spectacle is a means of social control, transforming any authentic experience into a commodity.

The Situationists were keenly aware of the effete nature of revolution. There is a tension which exists between the establishment and the anti-establishment, and that tension serves both sides. The counter-establishment's role is to find the authentic experience which does not exist in the commercial world. Meanwhile the Establishment's role is to capitalize on what's currently "cool". In this way, all revolutions will be subverted and integrated into products.

In short: the punks who hung out at CBGBs were paving the way for mainstream "sell-out" punk to flourish. Punk was popularized by the image of those rebels in dirty night clubs who were having "The Authentic Experience". People crave the authentic experience, it's something absent in commercial culture; no one can sell you real coolness, you have to find it through play, spontaneity, and ingenuity. Coolness is generated by whatever is not a part of consumer-culture. The Authentic Experience attracts kids like flies. The t-shirt vendors soon follow.

So isn't this kind of frustrating? Whenever the counterculture invents a new tool for cultural subversion, marketers pick it up like money on the street. It's happening at an alarming rate, too. As soon as situationist mass-pranks started to get media attention, (such as Improv-Everywhere's freeze prank) taco bell started engineering its own freeze-pranks as publicity stunts. A new genre of cooperative game, the ARG, was barely out of the womb before it was used to promote Halo 2's release. Or look at how quickly grunge came in style - the Spectacle was able to seamlessly transform ripped jeans and flannel - a look designed to look like you don't care about fashion - into a fashion statement. By creating the revolution we are arming the establishment.

The Situationists were keenly aware of this. They knew that they could not base their revolution on the rhetoric of resistance. This is where Kalle Lasn and the Adbusters will ultimately fail. Most of their anticommercial rhetoric is easily reduced to the message "Smoking is bad for you." It's reply to commercial culture is an ineffective "no." It does not provide a new starting point for us to base our lives around, it is merely a righteous poo-poohing of the establishment. As such it poses no real threat to the establishment; it is a satellite locked in orbit.

The Situationists wanted to create a revolution which could not be easily represented (and thereby contained) by the society of the spectacle. They encouraged people to return to a life of spontaneity, play, and authentic unmediated being. A world where people do not rely on currency to provide them with comfort, a world where people do not become miserable victims of the Machine.

Kerry Thornley in his Zenarchist Manifesto, writes about the "hippies" before that word became popularized:

Although we sometimes called ourselves hip or hipsters or hippies or flower children, at that time those were just names among many that seemed occasionally fitting. As a social entity we were not yet stereotyped. Between a hard-bopping hipster and a gent le flower child there was a distinction, and neither label stretched to include us all.

Usually we called ourselves heads. Pot heads, acid heads, or both. Bohemians, Beatniks, mutants, freaks and groovy people were names used with due caution. For in those days what we called ourselves was not to obscure what we were, and what we were was op en to experience.

Becoming hung up on avoiding names, of course, can be as misleading as being named, classified and forgotten. We were not making an effort in either direction. We intended, however, to avoid abstractions that short-circuit thought. An unborn face entailed a naked mind.

Zen is called Zen, but when the monk asks the master, "What is Zen?" he does not receive a definition but a whack on the head, or a mundane remark, or a seemingly unrelated story. Although such responses might baffle the student, they did not en courage him to glibly pigeon-hole the Doctrine.

"That which presently characterizes our public life is boredom. The French are bored .... Youth is bored ... General De Gaulle is bored."

In May 1968, the Situationists were catalysts for a revolution which would consume Paris. Similar to the WTO riots of Seattle, the streets were filled with rioters, protesting the pervasiveness and inhumanity of inauthentic consumer culture. They were armed, in part, with Situationist slogans. These pithy semantic kernels were not intended as a rational argument against the system. Like our "One Line Meme Bombs", they were an attempt to transform the minds of those who followed them without relying on conventional rhetoric. It is in this fertile soil that the absurd is most powerful.

My shadow is my graffiti

We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated,
suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.

We must remain "unadapted."

The Greil Marcus describes the situationist slogan style: "A blindside paradox of dead rhetoric and ordinary language floated just this side of non sequitur, the declarative statement turning into a question as you heard it: What does this mean?"  As Christine Harold writes in Ourspace,

Debord once detourned a familiar image of Stalin by "placing a barebreasted woman on his forehead with the caption 'The Universe Turns on the Tips of Breasts.'" Such alteration is an effort to undermine the authoritative political portrait -- in this case, Stalin's. Further, the alteration reorganizes the image in a way that not only interrupts the original meaning but creates a new meaning, or opens up potentials for new meanings. The nonsensical phrasing is not incidental - the situationists did not necessarily want to offer a clear prescription for how to read their message. Rather, they sought to force viewers to grapple with the detourned artifacts and, hopefully, to derive from those artifacts meanings or responses of their own.

(emphasis mine)

Debord thought that a detournment, a subversive modification of an existing meme, is "less effective the more it approaches a rational reply." To engage in a conversation with the mainstream is only inviting your own subversion. Debord himself tried to avoid becoming the charismatic figurehead for the Situationists. He wrote under pen names, avoided public attention, and lived in obscurity. He did not want his face on Che Guevara style T-shirts. He did not want to be a reactionary - doing so only reinforces one's subordinate role.  A critique of culture must come as a distraction, not centered on the original.

The Discordians might characterize this as a push for "creative disorder" over "destructive disorder". Nonsense is not an attempt to overthrow the establishment through resistance, it is an pointer to of some of the last authentic experiences which cannot be subverted.

I'm not sure if I've posted this before. I wrote this in 2006-ish, during a period of isolation and insanity. (I was working from home writing professional LARPs, to give you and idea of the weird world I lived in) So without further ado, here are four very short stories about Mr. Oliver Tuppence, a magical flying pair of sunglasses.

[NOTE PROJECT NAME SUBJECT TO CHANGE WHEN WE COME UP WITH A SLICKER CODE NAME]

This is a multi phase plan which will generate and send weirdness by mail to random people in America. After the infrastructure is set up, it will run autonomously for all time, requiring no effort or upkeep from us.

This requires a wee little bit o botwork from you tech nerds, if you're hip to it.









--Golden Apple Corps develops weirdness-by-mail.
There are two types: Letters, and postcards.

All the files for this weirdness (images, pdfs, text files) will be tagged via delicious with [RWHMGASM] (which should really confuse RWHN). _{NOTE PROJECT NAME SUBJECT TO CHANGE WHEN WE COME UP WITH A SLICKER CODE NAME}.

--we set up a paypal account and teach the bot how to check it

--the bot also gets an e-mail address and an account with POSTFUL. This allows it to send snail mail whenever it can pull a buck (for a letter / PDF) or 52 cents (for a postcard).

--When we turn it on, and there's a few bucks in the account, the bot will pick a random address. It will generate weirdness by mail based on stuff tagged via delicious (this allows us to change/modify the set later very easily). Then it will mail a letter to that address. The return address is an office in California, there's almost no way to trace it back to us.






So how do we get money in the kitty to fuel this weirdness bot?

Well obviously it can take donations. If you donate five bucks to it, you're guaranteed that you just made three or four people's days a little bit weirder. But that's not self-sustaining. So...

We generate some sort of media or product that people would want to buy. It might be a communal-property resource that we already have. For example we can use lulu or magcloud to sell hard copies of the Black Iron Prison, postergasm packs, or a new project. The profit goes into the paypal account, which is in turn fuels the bot to drop surreal moments into random stranger's lives.




here's a diagram:

please add your thoughts to: http://discordia.wikia.com/wiki/Pinealist


The intent is to create a page that we can show to people when someone like minuspace or smokingoat spams the board with nonsense
--and then thinks we're being too stuffy when we don't appreciate it


but:
it shouldn't come off like "You must bow to the social pressure of your peers, n00b!"


I want to note that the text on the page is not "MY" opinion, it's what I gauge as the general opinion of people here. But I might be wrong, so

thoughts on the current page?
&&& please edit!

believe it or not, I actually learned about this via the OMGASM mission feed

http://www.myspace.com/thefigureheadexperiment




from what I can tell, it's a part of POSTERGASM focusing on these little sticker heads

We are participants in the phenomenon known as The Figurehead.

The main objective of The Figurehead Experiment is to spread The Figurehead throughout the planet through use of both digital and analog media, culture jamming, marketing, and word of mouth. The Figurehead has been seen on every continent, in places as far as: Japan, France, Guam, Iraq, Scotland, Australia, Italy and all over America. The Figurehead Experiment encourages others to join the project by either spreading the image themselves, or by using The Figurehead as a template to make their own creations.

The Figurehead is an example of iconography. Iconography is the use of traditional or conventional images or symbols associated with a subject, especially a religious or legendary subject.

The Figurehead Experiment is an extension of OM, or Operation Mindfuck. Operation Mindfuck, is any movement that is believed to bring about social change through disrupting normal thought and procedure thus forcing the victim to question the parameters of one's own reality. The Figurehead has no words, no meaning associated with it. Therefore one must decide for themselves what The Figurehead is (or isn't).

The Figurehead that can be spoken of is not the true Figurehead.

The Figurehead is a belief system, an experience, and it exists for better or worse regardless of marketing. Marketing can and should support it, enhance it and promote it, but the organization itself has to live it.

We believe that any image of The Figurehead is sacred. All forms of defilement done to any image of The Figurehead (intentional or not), are actually seen as involvement in The Figurehead Experiment itself. All people have different reactions to The Figurehead. The more intense reactions including anger and even fear, are not only expected but embraced.

The Figurehead Experiment does not conduct, promote, or endorse any acts of violence or destruction. Furthermore, The Figurehead Experiment feels that personal property should never be vandalized, disrespected, or otherwise abused. Such acts upset the public's already misunderstood view of our art and the work of other artists like ourselves.

more pix: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=291227532&albumId=1055869

The myspace has the digital image file for the sticker head. He encourages you to download it, edit it, and send it back to him. They even have a flickr stream in case you put some up.


I love seeing other Discordians starting GASMs!

This is like the One Line Meme Bomb thread... just post quick ideas, maybe a few of 'em will be awesome.

It's challenging to come up with plotlines that haven't been raped to death yet!


I started off brainstorming "movie ideas", but movies are very large... some of these might work better as short stories or sketches or something.



Computer Animated sperm undertake a magical journey on their way to personhood. This is a suspense drama because although all the sperm are on the same team, they're also in competition. Oh, and the sperm's personalities are modeled after the Ninja Turtles.



A guy working at a beer factory discovers a flaw he can use to get a truck full of free keg beer every weekend. He then goes on road trips, getting into crazy adventures and being the life of the party. But how can he go back to his boring factory job after having such bad ass weekends?



A guy is given three wishes. One wish later, he's the last man on earth. Still tons of women, though!



A ex-hippie scientist tries to invent the next LSD and accidentally invents a drug that gives him telepathy. Rather than keeping this a secret, he markets the hell out of it. Soon, nearly everybody in the country is a telepath. They try to outlaw the drug, but court rooms are now a total mess. Eventually it's taken back off the market, but now nobody can cope with not being able to read minds. So instead of building a better, happier world with LSD, he inadvertently turns it into a paranoid asylum.



In a world where you can learn new things by plugging hardware into your brain, disinformation trolling becomes a method of warfare. Fifty years later, the world is in a coma of disinformation. Everybody in the world holds wildly innacurate beliefs. An team of hackers / information scientists tries to liberate humanity from the blanket of delusion they've been living under. This is, of course, considered terrorism.

[ETA:]

ATTN: TAOISTS, ZENARCHISTS, EASTERN-THOUGHT SPAGS

This project is an attempt to re-translate the Tao Te Ching with a zenarchist/discordian bent. Anyone that enjoys this stuff is welcome to help. In the end, it'll be published as a Kopyleft PDF.

the project is taking place here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/cramulus/index.php?title=Sacred_Chao_Te_Ching

if you edit, please make a login so we know who we're talking to.



ETA:
PDF HERE: http://www.scribd.com/doc/34652650/Chao-te-Ching

http://discordia.wikia.com/wiki/Discordipedia

This is the wikia community linked from wikipedia. That means, to many people, this is the "official" Discordian wiki.

I am suggesting that we should make sure we're represented in that sphere.


Right now it's very pineal. I've started to add pointers to our projects. For example, I've fixed their Stephen Colbert and Operation Mindfuck pages. I added an Intermittens page.


To some extent we can mirror stuff that we've already written.

We need articles on the Black Iron Prison... and what else?

-pages on our in-jokes and other spaggotry?

-C&P rants, essays, etc?

-fictional profiles written about each other?

[[Original Post]]

PRESENTING....


INTERMITTENS ISSUE 6: LESSER POOP



see here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/14660538/Intermittens-6-Lesser-Poop



[Original Post]



Lesser Poop is a "Bathroom Reader" edition of Intermittens. It focuses on short submissions which you can enjoy during a brief shitting sitting. It's the perfect issue to leave in the bathrooms of coffee houses, bars, doctor's offices, etc.

Especially crude, stupid, or idiotic submissions are preferred. I am aiming for about 20-25 pages of low brow content. I may do some interviews, but I probably won't be running longer, more serious pieces. Think about stuff which would be fun to read while you're on the can.

In case you missed it, the title is a reference to this page of the PD: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/6.php


Calling Dibbs on these threads:
Very Short Stories
Awful Jokes Thread
Exercises to Mindfuck Yourself



Try out intermitten.org's brand new super powers by submitting stuff here. (you'll need a login)

1. Words like "dickballs" creep into your spoken vocabulary