321: Power WITH People
KMO welcomes Melanie Gold, educator and activist, to the podcast to discuss Occupy Wall Street as well as a broad range of social justice issues. KMO starts the podcast by explaining why he prefers Riane Eisler’s Dominator/Partnership terminology over talk of “Patriarchy” with it’s accompanying implication that fatherhood is an inherently violent and repressive institution. Melanie relates this idea to her chosen language in her OWS work in which she emphasizes the concept of achieving power WITH people rather than power OVER people. Melanie invokes the concept of restorative justice as a way of looking for and addressing the unmet need that motivated a desperate act rather than seeking retribution against a wrong-doer. KMO voices his frustration with his oldest son’s experience in public school, and Melanie describes why being a teacher bound by a rigid curriculum is to be oppressed. The conversation touches on the Drug War, NYC’s “stop and frisk” policy which targets young black men, and how the experience of being arrested redoubled her conviction to continue protesting. KMO concludes the podcast with clips of Chris Hedges and Webster Tarpley voice Yin and Yang views on the effectiveness of Occupy Wall Street.
320: The Coming Drug Peace
KMO welcomes journalist and author Doug Fine back to the C-Realm to talk about his new book, Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution. Doug spent a year talking with cannabis farmers, local citizens, and law enforcement in Mendocino County, California, where medical growers who want to comply with that state’s medical marijuana law can obtain permission from the Sheriff’s Department to grow up to 99 cannabis plants without fear of arrest or harassment by local law enforcement. The program has been enormously successful, and Doug describes it as a glimpse at the coming Drug Peace and a preview of how cannabis can move from the underground into the legitimate economy. Doug thinks that the market for cannabis as a psychoactive agent may end up a niche market compared to the potential of hemp for use as a biofuel feedstock. Still, the economic implications of removing the artificial price support for marijuana that prohibition provides are complex, and KMO and Doug try to tease them out for clear-headed analysis.
319: Russian Dolls
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KMO welcomes Neil Kramer back to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss his new book, The Unfoldment: The Organic Path to Clarity, Power, and Transformation. Neil describes the 7 densities of being, and KMO focuses in the 4th density and relates it to J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of the Valar in The Silmarillion. In the second half of the program, Neil details how to find locations where the energetic process of unfoldment occur more easily than in the places we normally inhabit, and he warns against an over-reliance on entheogens in spiritual practice.
Music by Southside.
318: The Loyal Opposition
KMO welcomes C. Derek Varn to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss topics related to Neopaganism, magick, the Enlightenment, technology, and Object-Oriented Ontology. Derick has published print interviews with both KMO and Keith418, the guest on C-Realm Podcast episode 317: Bind Nothing! Derek asks why anyone who enjoys the comforts and benefits of 21st Century life in the First World would feel the need to re-invent and practice ancient religions, and this leads into a discussion of familiar C-Realm themes involving technology, energy, resources limits, and the potential lure of the Peak Oil narrative as a palliative for cubicle-induced alienation. KMO ends the episode with a reading from an essay by Bodhi Paul Chefurka on the need to reduce the human population by voluntary means before Malthusian forces make the cuts for us.
317: Bind Nothing
KMO welcomes Keith418 to discuss the need for critical thinking and consistency in the contemporary occult scene and in society at large. Keith, a self-identified Thelemite refuses to summarize and spoon feed the thinking of Aleister Crowley to those unwilling or, because of an impoverished education, unable to access Crowley’s thoughts in his own words. Later, KMO talks with Michael Pope, a straight man who took a job at a gay phone sex line to fund the making of his first film. Michael has a stage show in which he tells the story of that period in his life and the lessons he took from it.
Music by Yuki Tanoguchi. See pictures of Yuki and Shen’s three wedding ceremonies here.