Posts by Douglas Anarino
314: Peak Atheism
313: Peak Oil & the White “We”
KMO welcomes Jay Smith and Jeff Wilburn to the C-Realm to reflect upon the Age of Limits conference. Jay and Jeff, along with their girlfriends, accounted for most of the African-American conference-goers, and this leads to a discussion of how the on-going Peak Oil conversation is one carried out primarily by whites and, to some extent, aims to preserve white privilege and assumes that whites must take the leadership role in deciding how best to address the challenges of the coming long emergency. Both Jay and Jeff initially found the work of James Howard Kunstler to be valuable but later came to chafe at Jim’s seemingly dismissive attitude about black culture and the supposed failure of African-Americans to assimilate into mainstream society.
Music by Monstah Black.
312- Tools of Adulthood
KMO talks with Jonathan Moll about the spread of ideas, religion, the potential benefits and pitfalls of psychedelic plants and chemicals and the harms that the Drug War does to civil society and to the ability of people raised on prohibitionist propaganda to think clearly and behave like adults. The show begins and ends with reference to the irresponsible and opportunistic comments made to the news media by Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, in which he conflates MDPV (sometimes sold legally as “Bath Salts”) with LSD and asserts that the assailant in the recent cannibalistic assault there acted under the influence of “a new form of LSD.” Music by Andrew Woods.
311: There But For Gratuitous Grace
KMO and the Lovely Olga K talk with Peter Bebergal about psychedelics, drug addiction, magical thinking, paranoia, fate, and spirituality. Peter’s book, Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood deals with all of these issues, and Peter had a much rougher time growing up in the 80′s than did KMO, even though their interests and cultural touchstones were so similar. They both had a group of friends who fancied that they could contact the divine by altering their consciousness with psychedelics, they both endured the paranoia of living in a culture that criminalizes such exploration, but Peter’s path lead him through much darker territory.310: Gooey Ritual & Prickly Magick
Cover art painting by Arik Roper.
Both Pam Grossman and Peter Bebergal have recently appeared as guests on the Expanding Mind radio show/podcast with Erik Davis.