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C-Realm Podcast
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Enjoy! — KMO
I’ll clean this up later, but for now, here’s the raw and unorganized info including segments that I scripted but lacked the gumption to read on the air with my messed up back.
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy (book)
ISBN: 0060129018
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Paperback) ISBN: 1556524838
Who Killed the Electric Car? (video)
Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)
Starring: Phyllis Diller, Colette Divine Director: Chris Paine Rating
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/
Link to Fraser Clark’s Stanford talk
http://www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts/FraserClark/045-FrazierClarkStanford1996.mp3
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (Hardcover)
by James Lovelock, J. E. Lovelock, Crispin Tickell
ISBN: 046504168X
Link to William Irwin Thompson essay from which I took the long quote that I read to Lorenzo:
http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/Weirdness/thompson
Lorenzo was being rather generous when he suggested that we cross-pollinate our audiences. Right now, my audience numbers in the hundreds while tens of thousands of people download podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon. Still, if this podcast did serve as your introduction to Lorenzo and the Psychedelic Salon, know that I have posted links to some of my favorite of Lorenzo’s podcasts in the show notes for this episode which you can find on my blog: kmo.livejournal.com, and I would definitely encourage you to follow some of those links and give the Psychedelic Salon a listen. You’ll find some adaptive memes there.
Next up on the C-Realm Podcast we have an interview with one of the more thoughtful and prolific of the people on my Live Journal friends list. Outside of discussions of civil liberties in the United States, my next guest and I rarely see eye-to-eye. I know him only by his LiveJournal user name, Prester_Scott. I called him to get his advice on getting started with a project that I’ve had on my to-do list for a number of years now but never really got around to tackling, i.e. getting armed and trained in the use of firearms. The C-Realm Podcast doesn’t present the best of venues for delivering the specifics of which hardware to buy or what training regimen to follow, so I’ve collected the big picture and philosophical portions of our conversation and patched them together to craft the interview you’re about to hear.
Know that I’ve made some splices here that may not jump out at you. I’ve minimized my own contributions to the conversation in order to transform a recorded phone conversation into something more closely related to a prepared lecture from Prester_Scott. In some sense, this interview has become a work of fiction. In piecing together statements that Prester_Scott did himself put together I may have inadvertently added some implication or connotation that the speaker himself did not intend. So if anything in the coming interview pushes your buttons, I would encourage you to provide some feedback and to do it in the form of a paraphrasing of what you thought you heard and a question about whether that’s actually what he meant to say or imply.
You might think of my editing as a layer of added noise between speaker and listener. In a noisy environment, it pays to doublecheck your interpretation and to seek clarification before throwing down the gauntlet. As always, you can send your comments, queries, and shout outs to kmo@c-realm.com, or leave a comment either on my blog or on the PodOmatic page for the C-Realm Podcast. And without further qualification or solicitation, let’s get into the interview with Prester_Scott.
And at the end of the show I’d meant to read the following:
Well, we’ve come to the end of another C-Realm Podcast. While it may seem as though we are experiencing rapid change right now; a rapid increase in the connections between us, a rapid shifting of geopolitical relationships and power structures, accelerating cultural and technological evolution, it seems to me, and perhaps to many of you as well, like we are merely picking up the early perturbations of much larger and more profound transformation. With the right predictive models or perhaps with a sufficiently attuned intuitive sensibility, some of us are noticing that we are living in the shadow of something as yet unseen but which looms large on the near horizon.
For the some, the coming transformation provides fuel for momentary or occasional intellectual recreation. For others, like me, it serves as an over-arching meta-narrative which colors most every aspect of life. In Time and the Art of Being, author Robert Gurdin wrote:
[insert quote]
My LiveJournal friend, Mungojelly, whom I hope to have as a guest on a future show, put it another way. In a comment to one of my blog entries he wrote:
[insert deer monologing on headlights quote]
I’m hoping that the change on the horizon includes a quantum leap in human consciousness, a shrugging off of our current resource allocation strategies based on dog-eat-dog competition and the accumulation of enormous fortunes by a tiny minority: fortunes derived from investment rather than from the diligent and creative application of personal and co-operative effort. I hope that we can free ourselves from usurious tribute systems imposed on those of us struggling to maintain our economic buoyancy. I hope that the coming singularity, whatever form it may take, acts as a sort of psychic smelling salt that wakes us from our us vs. them narcosis and insatiable ego-gratification pathologies.
I hope that we find the intellect and the heart to push further into the territory of non-zero-sum collaborative effort.
Most of all, I hope never to face the choice of taking the life of a desperate human being or seeing my family suffer as the result of my inaction. As much as I hope for a genuinely kinder and gentler society, I place no faith in the idea that benevolent cyber-deities will emerge from the academic, military, and corporate research projects that propel the emergence of potential post-human minds. I place even less faith in human government, and I will not strike a Hobbsian bargain with Leviathan.
I do count myself as a member of a civilization, a civilization which may yet transform and redeem itself, and yes, the era of rugged individualism has passed. We can’t run away, and we can’t realistically expect to decouple our individual survival from the survival of the human species. As Lorenzo reminds us, even the dyed-in-the-cammo survivalists have to come into town to buy bullets and freeze-dried eats.
Thomas Jefferson warned that those who make non-violent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. The tiny minority who have conspired to pervert electoral politics with inputs of money so staggering that only corporations and a tiny handful of humans can meaningfully participate have done everything in their power to prevent a non-violent re-organization of society, but that doesn’t mean they have succeeded. They have only insured that electoral politics will not provide the means for that transformation. We cannot vote our way to peace, sustainability, and justice, but other avenues present themselves. They may have the money, but we have the spirit, the creativity, the numbers, and the means to co-ordinate our efforts and collaboratively effect the necessary transformation.
But those of limited imagination and a decidedly zero-sum mentality will gravitate to violence as a first resort, and they will not use much discrimination in directing that violence, particularly if the flood of cheap calories made possible by unsustainable chemical farming techniques should falter. I’m not suggesting that you bury a cache of assault rifles in your back yard, particularly if doing so would drive you deeper into debt-slavery. I’m not even telling you to buy a handgun. As of this writing, I remain completely unarmed, but I view this as a situation in need of remedy.
I’d meant to end this show on a hopeful note, but my thoughts have taken a different path, so I will leave you with a quote from Jake Sapiens who in the late 90’s wrote the following:
The capacity of humans to self-destruct, even to knowingly
self-destruct never ceases to amaze me. My amazement at
this is only surpassed by my amazement at the capacity of
humans to renew and exceed themselves.-Jake Sapiens
Thank you, Jake. And thank you, all of you, who listen to this podcast and who share it with kindred spirits. I hope you’ll join me again next week for another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. Stay well.
