Episode Description
There’s a lot of cultural clutter these days around ‘The Goddess.’ She appears everywhere, her many names are invoked free of context in a hundred thousand ways. She’s what? An empowerment tool. An archetype. A self-help course. A political symbol. Something that is invoked to bring more creative energy or material abundance into our lives. Something that, in an individualistic modern world, always seems to have a whole lot to do with us. Yet the goddess, traditionally, is much more than this. She is the animating power of the universe itself, felt in bodies, realized in states of deep conjunctive rapture, accessed through ritual protocols, alive in trees and stones and living geography, alive in song, alive in the myths and stories of her, alive in sound, alive in longing, alive in trance, alive in the states of consciousness realized by those who feel her. This devotional episode honors the goddess as the animating power of creation, drawing on her texts, her myths, her songs, and on personal experiences of journey to her sacred seats to evoke her as a living presence rather than as a conceptual abstraction. With songs and slokas from special guest Nivedita Gunturi.
Author: admin
A Debate About A.I. Plays Out on the Subway Walls
An ad campaign for a wearable A.I. companion has blanketed New York City, starting conversations and inspiring vandalism.
There is often talk of a looming takeover by artificial intelligence. But ask anyone who’s ridden the New York City subway recently, and they’ll probably tell you it’s already here. Well, kind of.
‘Dumbphones’ are getting smarter and more premium. Are they the solution for disillusioned phone addicts?
The odds are you’re reading this on your phone. You may have come here via social media, the CNN app, an email or a good old-fashioned browser. The chances are you did not open your smartphone with the intention to load this story, but here you are.
A necessity, a habit or an addiction, call it what you like: we’re all on our phones. The research and data around smartphone addiction and its negative impact on sleep, mental performance and mental health is alarming. Studies have found even when we’re not using them, if we’re in the same room as our smartphone it’s affecting our brains. Yet in less than a generation, they have become an indispensable part of our lives.
Nevertheless, plenty of people are finding ways to disconnect. Some want a digital detox to boost performance and wellbeing; some are concerned parents; others cite data privacy fears, or are choosing to wall themselves off from the attention economy. At the extreme end, some youths are turning their backs on technology and proudly defining themselves as Luddites.
Schizo Gladiator Luigi Mangione
The Schizo/Psycho War: Part 2
Cuckfucius here—welcome back to the Cyber Ascetics Collective; the breedable sissy femboy’s choice for forbidden insights into the bleeding edge intersection of philosophy, spirituality, and shitposter culture.
BTW, why do people riot over, for example, police brutality – but not over the broken healthcare?
https://cuckfucius.substack.com/p/schizo-gladiator-luigi-mangione
The Schizo/Psycho War Table of Contents:
It’s Revolution or DeathPart 3: Reclaiming the World Wherever We Stand
The third and final installment of the series seeks to bring the lessons learned in the first two episodes home. This segment features an interview with Peter Gelderloos in which he describes his experience working to build transformative infrastructure in Catalunya.
Not all of us are so lucky to live near a large and organized movement like those described in part two, and that’s ok. For us to be truly organized as a global community, we need do work wherever we are. As Neto reminds us in part two, “We need to start from where we’re standing and from a reality that we recognize.” There are no answers, only strategies. This video seeks to provide guidance to anarchists just getting started organizing around the climate crisis. Different strategies work in different locales, social conditions and contexts.
Peter shares three urgent suggestions for those looking to organize around these issues:
Urgent Suggestion #1: A complete and Total Rejection of All the Institutions Responsible for This Disaster
Relying on those responsible for this crisis to save us is the worst thing we can do. It’s time to act collectively outside of the state and capital’s stranglehold over our lives to try to carve out spaces and networks that will give us the best possible chances of survival. Relying on nonprofits, elections, or authoritarian left movements has failed time and time again. We cannot afford to continue to misplace our trust in institutions that will not save us.
Urgent Suggestion #2: Pick a Project of Transformative Survival
The hour is seriously late. The sooner we get involved in organizing for survival, the better. If people in the territories you reside in are already working towards similar goals, it may be better to join them than to try and build a movement from the ground up. Sometimes we need to create new projects where there is a need for them and people willing to get them going. Building our collective autonomy may not appear to be directly related to our chances at surviving the climate crises, but it is! Any time we build our collective power outside of the state and capital we build power that is combative to the institutions that created this disaster, and that gives us the means to survive it.
Urgent Suggestion #3: Connect your project to a revolutionary web of solidarity
The climate crisis is a worldwide issue. We need to have a global response. Networks of people organizing around these issues exist all over around the world. We need to build an international web of solidarity and the more connections a web has, the stronger it will be.
Mark Boyle: The Butlerian Jihad
Over pints of Guinness in Mark Boyle’s self-built off-grid cabin, we discuss technological creep, FOMO, FOBI, living without money or electricity, screen life versus intimacy, and precisely where we sit on the Uncle Ted Spectrum.
Paul Kingsnorth’s book ‘Against the Machine’ is published on 23rd September 2025. Pre-order details and special offers here: https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/agains…
More on Mark’s books can be found here: / 903838.mark_boyle
‘Astounding:’ Alaska researchers make alarming discovery in Arctic rivers
‘No place is spared’
Taylor Rhoades
When John McPhee and his ragtag crew first kayaked into the pristine Alaskan wilderness in 1975, they were awestruck.
The author, who chronicled his reconnaissance trip in the literary classic “Coming into the Country,” was surrounded by an abundance of untouched flora and fauna. Beneath them, Arctic grayling, chum salmon and Dolly Varden swam in “the clearest, purest water” they had ever seen.
LINK: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pristine-arctic-rivers-orange-scientists-worried-21039210.php
Abundance, Or How To Sell Tech Fascism To Liberals
Mia talks about the new Abundance movement, its ideas and how it operates as a Trojan horse for its funders Peter Thiel and the Koch Brothers.
Madness and Signification in A Mouthful of Birds
by
Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.
– Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
A Mouthful of Birds, written by Caryl Churchill and David Lan, is, to quote Helene Keyssar, “an elaborate theatrical representation of violence” (140), particularly violence enacted by women. A “pathology” of our postmodern world, violence is routinely considered a sort of contemporary “madness.” However, as suggested by Foucault, such madness in art rarely functions as a simple mimesis of the world within which that art is created; rather, it serves notice to the world that it must “acknowledge responsibility” for its history and ultimately its future (Keyssar 146). A Mouthful of Birds is no exception: Churchill and Lan use drama to construct a “dangerous history” of gender and gender roles (Keyssar 136), employing madness both to unsettle normative categories of identity and to explore the risks involved in playing within subversive space.
Madness, as Francios Boissier de Sauvages suggested in 1772, is ‘a blind surrender to our desires’ or ‘an incapacity to control or to moderate our passions” (cited in Foucault 85). Madness, in short, is an altered state of consciousness, wherein the individual becomes more mindful of his/her carnality and less attentive to restrictive social mores. As such, Foucault argues, madness threatens the Cartesian notions of reason and rationality and is the embodiment of “absolute freedom” (84). Conversely, however, madness can also be the epitome of imprisonment, for the reality of madness, as James Glass points out, is often one of ‘immense suffering, alienation, and distortion’ (xv). Madness, then, is a paradox: on the one hand, it allows for a freer agency, often subverting normative cultural forces and discourse systems. On the other hand, when too ‘disruptive’ or ‘dangerous,’ madness can also mean the loss of agency, for normative cultural forces often fall back upon the mad, incarcerating it and alienating it from society.
Equally paradoxical in terms of agency is the notion of the postmodern subject. Postmodernism incessantly questions the existence of “an ahistorical transcendent self” or autonomous being (Allen 278), arguing instead for, in Derrida=s words, a subject which is an “effect of forces” outside itself (17). Some critics have adopted this postmodern position in an attempt to understand how identity is constructed by cultural practices. Monique Wittig, for example, argues that feminism should begin with the deconstruction of the “myth of woman” as submissive, sensitive, and nurturing, a myth constructed by the patriarchy and sustained by modern psychology. Moreover, for such a deconstruction to be an effective means of protest, one must make the opposition of man and woman and the construction of that myth “brutally apparent” (31), otherwise the conflict will go unnoticed and no transformation will be possible.
What You Think You Know About the Manson Family Murders May Be Wrong
For those who consider Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter 1974 book about Charles Manson, the murders he ordered, and ensuing trial to be canon, Tom O’Neill’s new book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixtiest History of the Sixties suggests a rift in the fabric of the universe as we know it. The product of some 20 years of exhaustive, obsessive research, Chaos suggests that the case made to the court by Bugliosi, who prosecuted the case before he wrote the definitive book about it, was fraudulent and that the entire “Helter Skelter” motive, which stated that Manson attempted to kick off a race war via the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969, does not hold up to scrutiny in light of unearthed evidence. For one thing, according to O’Neill’s report, the relationship between Manson and record producer Terry Melcher (a previous resident of the house on Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent were murdered), was more involved than it was conveyed during the trial—O’Neill says he found notes from two witness interviews that placed Melcher in the presence of Manson after the murders. This information was suppressed from the trial because, O’Neill suggests, it did not square with another part of Bugliosi’s suggested motive: Manson ordered murders to scare Melcher, who had refused to record the cult leader’s music.
READ MORE: https://jezebel.com/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-manson-family-murders-1835688049