OVO

This review of OVO 20: JUVEN(a/i)LIA by Trevor Blake was written by Ferdinand Bardamu, and appeared at his blog In Mala Fide in November 2011.

This is a best-of collection of articles and artwork from OVO, a zine founded and edited by friend of the blog Trevor Blake, “a public record of [his] interests and inquiries.” It’s interesting, it’s weird, and I don’t entirely know what to make of it. I guess it’s because I’m too young to appreciate it – I was barely out of diapers when Trevor was printing up the early editions of OVO on his pal’s company’s copiers in the eighties. To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to.

Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects. They include “Holding Games for Ransom,” about how one tabletop game creator found a way to keep online piracy from cutting into his profits; “A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey,” a stream-of-consciousness tale beginning with white guilt and ending with madness; and “23 Sperm Stories 23,” the longest article in the book, on just about every aspect of sperm, from its discovery, its function, and its future. Of particular interest to us in the manosphere are “Warbucks Intra-Family Communique” and “Becoming More Free” by Ernest Mann. The former is a satirical article on the emptiness and mindlessness of American consumerism; the latter is on how Mann unplugged himself from the Matrix of American culture:

I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.

But the real prize is Trevor’s own writings, comprising the second half of the book. They include book reviews (including an exhaustive review of one of my favorites, L.A. Rollins’ Myth of Natural Rights), interviews with such diverse individuals as a bulimia sufferer and an expert on out-of-body experiences/bilocation, and my favorite, “Trajectory Through Anarchism,” in which Trevor tracks the evolution of his political beliefs:

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist. But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

Like The eXile, OVO 20 comes in a 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, to fit artwork and cartoons on the pages – I was particularly amused by “Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm.” One minor issue I have with the design is that all paragraphs in OVO 20 are punctuated with bullet points. I suppose they’re there to make the book look distinctive, but I found them mildly distracting, fooling my eyes into thinking I was reading a series of lists instead of articles.

Still, if you want to take an excursion into the bizarre and come back a little more enlightened, OV0 20 is a fun and informative read. If you’re still not convinced, Trevor maintains a free online archive of all OVO articles here. He also has some words of wisdom for aspiring writers and publishers:

…First and most important, get busy. Your time is already diminished by work and mortality, and neither of those situations is going to improve. Keep a printed copy of what you make and write down the date of when you made it. Large bodies of work and the pleasure they bring are made a few small pieces at a time. Learn about the history of what interests you. Novelty is rare and not always of value for being novel. Your friends are not being documented right now and you are the one who can do a good job with that. Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance and error better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances as you are willing to take the lumps for.

But most of all, get busy.

Everything has already been said about photography. We have it here in 1911 but even now we can see how it may have been a big mistake.

The Byzantine Iconoclasts were no mere smashers of idols – their arguments ran deep, subtle & profound. They claimed that the Image colonizes the Imagination – other people’s magic overcomes your own personal magic & imprints itself on your soul. Only the Imagination free of such (mis)representation can truly be called autonomous & capable of poiesis, the creative act. To depict the sacred (& all things are potentially sacred) is to degrade it & thus to blaspheme. Only the Eye of the Heart can actually see.

Many Sufis would agree with these sentiments, as would many Jewish & Protestant mystics. The more accurate & scientific the representation the more it lies & blasphemes. “Abstract” art is more moral than any form of realism. Music & architecture, which are simply themselves (ideally), are considered permissible, although Islam suspects even music of threatening the soul’s integrity. But painting & sculpture & especially photography must surely be damned. Looking itself is a compromised or even guilty pleasure, lacking the intimacy of touch or smell or even hearing – too akin to “pure reason” – to cruel.

Against these arguments however we might assert the possibility of Hermetic Imagery – which (as Giordano Bruno or Athanasius Kircher would say) can allow us to free ourselves from the Image through the Image.

Certain symbols, Emblems, hieroglyphs or works of art can liberate the Imagination rather than “enchain” it. These images stimulate your own creativity rather than stifle or suffocate it under their beauty or shock-value or subliminal potency etc.

In the Renaissance this theory of art was called “Egyptian,” thanks to a fortuitous misunderstanding of the ancient hieroglyphs (ie that they were “magic”). Cagliostro was pushing the same notion in the late 19th Century. I believe we need such a theory in order to redeem our various arts – to save them from merely forming new chains, like advertising or propaganda.

Does this argument rescue photography from its own special hell? Maybe not. But maybe there’s something to be said for a touch of damnation. Maybe photography is a vice, like pornography, but then perhaps it could be a magical vice.

If we must have photography in 1911 let it be slow, clumsy, alchemical, rare – somehow still innocent of theory – not so much a spectral doubling but rather Magic Lanterns, a kind of stained glass, primitive & luminous, posed & formal, static, sepia-toned, nostalgic & slightly comical.

ACME, you remember, was the company that made all those safes for Coyote to drop on the Roadrunner. If only it were that simple.

Everyone simply can’t go “back to 1911″ – there wouldn’t be enough energy there to support our wasteful habits. The last viable population density must’ve occurred, in fact, around 1911. After that – the crowd. The utopian reversionism I’m proposing, I guess, is only possible for a self-chosen elite.

Petroleum was a rare commodity in 1911 – like whale oil today. Stoves burned wood – a renewable resource. Plant an acorn, reap a cord of fixed sunlight. I’m not saying everyone should to it now. I’m saying that we – carefree luddites – will burned wood in our ornate victorian stoves, while everyone else poisons themselves with petrol & electricity.

The alchemists tell us that not all forms of heat are simply the same calories delivered by different tech. The heat of a brooding hen, heat of a manure pile, heat of a woodstove – & the heat of a nuclear reactor disaster – are qualitatively different, not just quantitatively.

Woodfire has been used since the cave people discovered fire. It comes from heaven (as lightning) – it warms the Zoroastrian temple in Persia, the Vedic sacrifice in India, the Celtic bonfire on May Day, the outdoor barbecue invented by buccaneers on Hispaniola. Woodfire is basic everyday magic. It transforms food alchemically. It alchemizes the domestic hearth. It engenders visions. It is the body of the djinn.

Frankly we no longer care very deeply about the end of the world. It’s too late for “everyone” to go on gulping down oil & shitting out pollution. The only solution to the energy crisis is voluntary poverty, as Ivan Illich used to say – so the secret is to learn to enjoy it.

Frenchfry oil, wind power, solar panels, nuclear power plants – none of them will allow the whole world to go on sucking up oil & other forms of dead energy like us Americans in 2011 – like it’s “going out of style” (which it is) – so let’s just do without it, & revert to 1911, comrades. Abandon the suckers to their doomsday scenarios (Rapture, Global Warming, Peak Oil, band, whimper), & stoke up your ACME woodstove with aromatic pine, & sit around it all winter with the complete works of Balzac, Scott, Dumas, Stevenson, Proust. Roast some apples. Simmer your poppy-head tea. Dream on.

The years between the death of Nietzche (& Queen Victoria) & 1914 constitute a dawn of Modernism that never happened into day. Instead it was smashed to nihil by the one long war (1914 – 1989) of the ghastly XXth Century. The liberté libre of trends like Symbolism, Expressionism, anarchism / socialism, lebensreform, Cosmicism etc. turned into the cynicism of dada, the fascism of Futurism & so on. Hope seemed dead.

L. Broadmoor III (who circa 1975 first turned me on to the idea of “living in 1911″) wanted to be an ordinary person in rural America (but with decayed millionaires as neighbors, hence his choice of Dutchess Co.) – he read only books published in or before 1911 that were truly popular at the time, such as novels with happy endings by long-forgotten lady novelists. In the 1970s you could buy old books like that for 25¢ a pound, yellowing & crumbling. Many by now must’ve disappeared completely.

I understand this “taste” or rather discipline as that of the spiritual dandy: an impenetrable cool of exotic ordinariness & secret impeccability. In effect one’s life becomes one’s art – completely. I could never aspire to such bodhisattvahood: fundamentally I’m simply not that serious. In fact neither was Broadmoor: he gave up 1911 & went into Reichean therapy. But still I take 1911 as a kind of metaphor or ideal double for my art, & to a certain extent my life as well. I’ve lived for 20 years now with no TV or other people’s cars – I pay people to use the internet for me (to buy books!) – & so on. I just don’t want to own the fucking things. I admire the Anabaptists for refusing electricity & infernal combustion in their homes. But you need communitas to live in that manner. You need place.

Even reading & writing is contaminated with Civilization’s technopathologies. Oral / aural culture would constitute the Luddite ideal. But as an isolated individual & lifelong print addict I can’t give up books – that necessary poison – like certain drugs… “Life in 1911″ requires books just as it might ideally include cheap & legal laudanum or tincture of Indian hemp.

Charles Fourier praised the Pigeon Post. It seemed quite modern in 1830, “utterly modern” as Rimbaud would say. In 1911 we’re allowed telegraph & even telephone, but our hearts still go into writing & receiving letters – handwritten, private, mysteriously brought to yr very door by unseen hand for only pennies per message, the money having been transformed into beautiful stamps. None of these pleasures are afforded by electromagnetic CommTech, which eliminates everything (including privacy) except text & image.

Imagine perfumed letters sealed with red wax & heraldic imagery, letters like Prince Genji used to write, or Proust, who could send little blue notes by pneumatic post anywhere in Paris. Think of mail-order degrees in Rosicrucianism. Yes, the POST – under the sign of Hermes – is sheer magic.

If only I could find a working mimeograph machine (or even better a roneograph, the kind that printed only in purple) (they had one in my high school in the 1950s) I’d certainly publish these manifestos on it. At least I can still use a manual typewriter, another surrealist-looking machine we enjoy here in “1911.”

June 14 2011

Recorded music realizes a dream of pure magic – but at the same time the end & even death of music itself. A Blakean paradox or mystical dialectic: every phenomenon had a “good” & a “bad” (in some rough sense), an Emanation & a Spectre. When I worked in radio (on WBIA-FM, The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade) & played rembetica, Ottoman marching bands, Irish music composed by supernatural beings (the Tuatha De Danaan, aka the faeries), Anglican church music from the 15-20th Century, etc., I & my listeners (I hope) experienced the first Emanational aspect of recording – its magic.

But as the MUZAK company understood, recorded music eventually loses its presence – and in its state of absence or deprivation it becomes a potent subliminal form of anxiety, often alleviated by a shopping spree or food binge – perfect capitalist behavior.

Thus music becomes background – in expensive restaurants one is expected to listen (but not pay attention) to music appropriate to a honkytonk whorehouse: rock’n'roll, which should be a highly presentational dionysiac experience – becomes aural vanilla for jaded yuppies. Youth buys its latest “rebellion” from the world of commercial greed & adult condescension called the Music Industry. With headphones & computers everyone composes a soundtrack for their own stupid boring movie, their life as “student” or wage slave & consumer – music as anodyne for the constant immiseration (as the Sits used to say) of Too-Late Kapitalismo.

Finally – recording replaces our own voices with dumbness. We let stars sing for us – we let machines come between us & the divine musician within us. Music attains Spectral status. It haunts us with its own non-presence reduced to residual noise pollution.

I had to give up radio (both as producer & consumer) & get rid of all recorded music in my sphere of influence (basically my house) in order to preserve my relation to music. I don’t dare sing in the street (as everyone did until about 1979) and there is no amateur communal music anymore (recording killed it) – no “music bees” so to speak. Music now lacks all sociality except the ersatz of mass consumption to hear live music sometimes. Usually now when I hear any decent live music I burst into tears. I give it my attention – a process that produces a kind of high or rausch.

If we have to hear a recording let it be a 1911-style shellac disc or even wax cylinder, cranked up by hand, not electricity – a magic music box to baffle the dog with its master’s voice – a cabinet of aural marvels. If we have to be haunted by music’s non-presence (every recording is the tombstone of a live performance) let it be by one of these (see above) graceful ear-shaped or seashell-shaped machines, a Surrealist’s delight (Leonora Carrington’s “ear trumpets”) or Spirit Trumpet for a charlatanesque medium…

OVO 20 JUVEN(a/i)LIA

112 pages, 8.5 x 11, $10.00

The best of OVO 1987 – 2011. Walter Alter, Dmitry Babenko, Hakim Bey, Trevor Blake, Johnny Brainwash, Chris C. Cilla, Cunnichant Night Owl, Mike Diana, Yael Ruth Dragwyla, James Ellis, Karen Elliot, Feral Faun, Klint Finley, Richard Ford, Chris Gross, Mike Gunderloy, Ginger Hutton, Ian MacEwan, Ernest Mann, Melissa, Thom Metzger, Jennifer Murrian, PM, Gerry Reith, James V. Scianna, Stuart Swezey, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, V. Vale.

[Free] [Purchase]

Review by Ferdinand Bardamu: “To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to. Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects.”

Trevor Blake: Introduction
Mike Diana: Read OVO
Hakim Bey: Salon Apocalypse
Hakim Bey: Evil Eye
Hakim Bey: Intellectual S/M is the Fascism of the Eighties
Hakim Bey: Ringing Denunciation of Surrealism
Johnny Brainwash: Holding Games for Ransom
Gerry Reith: Letter from the Graveyard Shift
Cunnichant Night Owl: Lunalogue
Thom Metzger: The Hypmogoogoopizin’ Man
Thom Metzger: Wad Rules
Richard Ford: Bellowing Forth and Brandishing
James Ellis: Mayhem
Mike Gunderloy: The Meta-Network
James V. Scianna: A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey
Chris Cilla: Sperm Trek
Anonymous: 23 Sperm Stories 23
Mike Diana: Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm
Feral Faun: Thoughts on Experimentation
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: Lidznap
Chris Gross: Three Letters
James Ellis: Control
Klint Finley: The New Currency War
PM: Liberating Wednesday
Ernest Mann: Warbucks Intra-Family Communique
Ernest Mann: Becoming More Free
Karen Elliot: Operation Negation
Walter Alter: Little Wally’s Reader (Lights = Camera = Action / Densest? / The List of Recalibrations)
Chris Cilla: Apple / Pineapple
Review: My Struggle by Mark Mothersbaugh
Review: The Skin Horse by Nabil Shaban
Review: The Myth of Natural Rights by L. A. Rollins
Interview: Melissa
Interview: Stuart Swezey
Interview: Ginger Hutton
Interview: Yael Ruth Dragwyla
Interview: Jennifer Murrian
Interview: V. Vale
Trevor Blake: Tape Fragmentation
Trevor Blake: Magnetic Poetry
Trevor Blake: Saturn Return
Trevor Blake: New Superstition from a Dream
Trevor Blake: Mutants First
Trevor Blake: Science is Anti-Authoritarian
Trevor Blake: Tipping Points
Trevor Blake: Cursed Object
Trevor Blake: Trajectory Through Anarchism
James Ellis: Suffering
Trevor Blake: The Bonus Army
Trevor Blake: Multiple Name Identities
Trevor Blake: Co-Remoting with the Thunderous
Trevor Blake: Ecclesiastes 9:10
About the Contributors

… or assemble your own anthology from what I think of as the best few dozen articles or from all 19,000+ articles.

Fortean content in the first five years of OMNI Magazine.  Compiled October 1997, previously unpublished.

Including notations for articles relating to accupuncture, alchemy, alternative energy sources, the Amazing Randi, ancient astronauts, artificial intelligence, astral projection, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, cargo cults, cattle mutilation, communication with non-humans, creationism, cryptozoology, Dianetics, dinosaurs, dowsing, earthquakes, firewalking, Uri Geller, gravity research, hidden planets, hoaxes, hypnosis, killer clowns, kirilian photography, lake monsters, life on Mars, mind control, mystery boats, Muzak, near death experiences, Nostrodomus, parapsychology, perpetual motion, planetary alignment disasters, psychic phenomenon, pyramid power, reincarnation, the Rosicrucians, SETI, the Shroud of Turin, spontaneous human combustion, teleportation, TM, test-tube babies, the Tunguska explosion, UFOs, vampires, volcanos, voodoo, weather control, Velikovski, weird science, yellow rain and zombies.

V1#1 10/78
p 12 / letter [UFO] Melinda Moore
p 14 / letter [dowsing] Ted Kaufman
p 14 / letter [astral projection] Martha Fotinos
p 28 / The Sciene Conflict [UFO] James Oberg
p 44 / Life In Vents [czoo] ?
p 46 / Kirilian Photography [k.p.] ?
p 48 / Electricity & Weather [ e. & w.] ?
p 49 / quote ["The universe is... queerer than we can suppose."] J.B.S. Haldine
p 49 / Magnetic Sense of Sharks [czoo] Kenneth Rose
p 50 / Birds [czoo] Jeff Cox
p 63 / Listening for Life [in outer space] Alton Blakeslee
p 92 / The Turin Shroud [t.s.] Barbara Culliton
p 149 / advertisement [Project Blue Book] Blue Book Coordinator

V1#2 11/78
p 24 / Moonglows [mg] Patrick Moore
p 31 / Betty Hill [UFO] James Oberg
p 41 / Talking Bird [czoo] Barbara Ford
p 105 / Communicating with Dolphins [czoo] John Lilly
p 113 / Lifetides [para] Lyall Watson

V1#3 12/78
p 10 / letter [UFO] Barry Goldwater
p 12 / letter [UFO] Sam Piazza
p 12 / letter [UFO] Charles Labbe
p 12 / letter [UFO] Al Porterfield
p 12 / letter [UFO] R. Brown
p 12 / letter [UFO] James Irwin
p 20 / Star of the Magi [s.o.t.m.] Mark Chartrand
p 32 / Queen of the UFOs [UFO] James Oberg
p 40 / Einstein’s Brain [where is it?] ?
p 108 / PSI Burn: A Study of Psysiological Deterioration in Parapsychological Experimentation [satire] David Searles
p 146 / Man Will Never Fly [m.w.n.f. society] Lawrence Maddry

V1#4 1/79
p 8 / article [UFO] Frank Kendig
p 12 / letter [UFO] Terry Hansen
p 12 / letter [UFO] Robert Barrow
p 32 / The Coyne Incident [UFO] James Oberg
p 71 / intv: I. J. Good [weather control, UFO, more] Christopher Evans
p 117 / advertisement [Dianetics] Church of Scientology
p 125 / advertisement [Project Blue Book] Blue Book Coordinator
p 130 / letter [Velikovsky] Garry Tillery

V1#5 2/79
p 6 / article [text-tube baby hoax?] Frank Kendig
p 10 / letter [Einstein's Brain] Gerard der Leun
p 12 / letter [czoo] William Bond
p 32 / Astronomy and the Flying Saucer [UFO] James Oberg
p 39 / Flippant Earth [magnetic pole switching] ?
p 42 / More Ancient Astronauts [A.A.] ?
p 103 / Nutrition Fads and Fallacies [N.F.a.F.] Daniel Greenberg
p 110 / advertisement [Love of the Two-Armed Form] Dawn Horse Press
p 137 / letter [Betty Hill map] Charles Atterberg

V1#6 3/79
p 10 / letter [PSI Burn comments] Alan Vaughan
p 32 / UFO’s at the U.N. [UFO] James Oberg
p 117 / advertisement [Other magazine; a little of everything] Other
p 127 / advertisement [The Discovery of the Wingstars; fossils found in meteorites] Wingstar Research Society
p 137 / letter [g.r.] Peter Singelakis
p 137 / letter [w.s.] David Hargrave
p 137 / letter [all mathematics prooven wrong, mathematically] H. Murker
p 140 / next issue [static gravity hoax] ?
p 140 / next issue [loch ness] ?

V1#7 4/79
p 6 / article [parapsychologists accused of sloppiness] Frank Kendig
p 12 / letter [UFO] Ben Price
p 16 / Turning the Crank [crank science] Mark Chartrand
p 27 / New Scandal in Psychic Research? [para] Scot Morris
p 52 / First Encounter [UFO] E. Speigle
p 77 / Static Gravity [w.s. April-Fool] Christopher Priest
p 115 / advertisement [Undreamed-of Possibilities] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 121 / advertisement [Dianetics] Church of Scientology

V1#8 5/79
p 10 / letter [religious birds] Eugene Marquis
p 12 / letter [anti-gravity, incl J. R. R. Searl] Allan Grise
p 32 / * Global Disclosures [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 92 / Return to Loch Ness [czoo] J. Chesternan and M. Marten
p 117 / advertisement [Dianetics] Church of Scientology
p 125 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 128 / letter [UFO] David Travis
p 128 / letter [UFO] David Schroth
p 128 / letter [czoo: Loch Ness M.] B. Goldman
p 130 / letter [PSI Burns commentary] Charles Honorton
p 146 / The Gulibility Factor [UFO] Thomas Monteleone

V1#9 6/79
p 12 / letter [UFO] Jeff Henry
p 22 / A Hidden Earth [new planets in our solar system] Patcick Moore
p 32 / Saucer-Eyed Spies [UFO] Art Gratti
p 36 / Clarke’s 1st Law ["When a distinguished scientist says something is impossible... he is very probably wrong."] Arthur Clarke
p 40 / Ignored Prediction [earthquake] Tony Fusco
p 41 / Magic Stone [bezoar protects against arsenic poisoning] Don Fabun
p 42 / Medical Milestones [2nd heart discovered, more] K. S.
p 96 / Flight of the Dragon [czoo] Peter Dickinson
p 134 / letter [czoo] David Edelshick
p 134 / letter [cargo cults] Tully Scott
p 136 / letter [stacic gravity hoax commentary] Anthony Blokzyl
p 146 / Vampires Revamped [V as a form of rabies] Bruce Wallace

V1#10 7/79
p 10 / letter [static gravity hoax commentary] Robin Carpenter
p 10 / letter [static gravity hoax commentary] Norman Mclead
p 10 / letter [para] Gerry Erberich
p 14 / letter [U. Geller] Arthur Clarke
p 14 / letter [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 14 / letter [para] G. Dew and L. Hillshafer
p 18 / A Bit of Lunacy [moon in language and legend] Mark Chartrand
p 32 / Trance Figures [UFO] Allan Hendry
p 37 / Loch Ness Dolphins [czoo] O.D.
p 41 / Year of the Atom [nuclear hijinx] Douglass Colligan
p 41 / quote ["The most beautiful experience... is the mysterious..."] Albert Einstein
p 42 / The Earthquake Boom [e.b.] Dan Ross
p 126 / letter [UFO] John Harding
p 127 / letter [para] Vickie Lloyd
p 127 / letter [turning the crank commentary] A. Abajian
p 127 / letter [UFO] Paul Krause
p 129 / next issue [ancient astronauts evaluated] ?
p 133 / advertisement [Dianetics] Church of Scientology

V1#11 8/79
p 10 / letter [UFO] Jon Stone
p 12 / letter [para] Brenda Thomas
p 30 / UFO Over Iran [UFO] James Oberg
p 40 / UFO Tips [UFO] Terrence Dickinson
p 44 / White Dwarfs and Green Men [a. a.] Carl Sagan
p 128 / letter [a. a.] John Tran
p 128 / letter [UFO] Janice Tonietto
p 135 / letter [UFO] Philip Klass
p 135 / letter [UFO] Jeffrey Benner

V1#12 9/79
p 12 / letter [Flight of the Dragon commentary; czoo] Eugene Marquis
p 32 / True UFOs [UFO] James Oberg
p 37 / Quake Lights [earthquake lights] Tom Kovach
p 41 / Animal Trivia [weird animal facts] S. D.
p 42 / Viruses from Outer Space [v. as "messages" from o.s.] O. D.
p 112 / advertisement [What is Scientology?] Church of Scientology
p 113 / advertisement [Undreamed-of Possibilities] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 129 / advertisement [The Cycles of Heaven] Avon paperback
p 135 / advertisement [Dianetics] Church of Scientology
p 142 / letter [czoo] Jason MacCallum
p 142 / letter [cargo cults] Alan Vaughan

V2#1 10/79
p 18 / letter [vampires] Count Dracula
p 44 / Tunguska [Tunguska event] James Oberg
p 57 / Yogis [y. exhibit amazing body control] D. S.
p 58 / quote ["We think so because other people all think so... "] Henry Sidgwick
p 108 / Unseen Yeti [czoo] John Hunt
p 140 / advertisement [I am magazine] I am
p 163 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 165 / advertisement [Metascience Quarterly] Metascience
p 165 / advertisement [Nebulon Gazette] Nebulon Gazette

V2#11 11/79
p 10 / letter [astrology debunked] Philip Ianan
p 12 / letter [Sagan anc. astro. article commentary] Stan Stephenson
p 12 / letter [Sagan anc. astro. article commentary] Don Peterson
p 30 / Alien Metals [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 36 / Pregnant Men [p.m.] Dava Sobel
p 38 / Gay Vaccine [gay men used in hepatitis vaccine trial (AIDS
conspiracy?)] Joel Davis
p 44 / Antimatter Revealed [ws] Robert Forward
p 80 / interview: Carl Sargent [para] Christopher Evans
p 84 / Illegal Aliens [extraterrestrials and the law] Robert Freitas
p 128 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosecrucians
p 142 / advertisement [The UFO Handbook] Doubleday
p 142 / letter [para] James Bobula

V2#3 12/79
p 10 / letter [czoo: yeti] John Hunt
p 10 / letter [UFO] Giles Guthrie
p 16 / letter [UFO] John Warren
p 16 / letter [UFO] David Hofer
p 18 / letter [anc. astro] Gena Davies
p 28 / Syncronicity [s.] Bernard Dixon
p 40 / Alternatives [UFO] Robert Wilson
p 45 / quote ["Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."] Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi
p 46 / Fossil Footprints [f.f.] Alton Blakeslee
p 49 / quote ["Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they have specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed, and unreasonable as anybody else."] H. J. Eysenck
p 50 / quote ["Science has become adult; I am not sure whether scientists have."] Victor Weiskopf
p 108 / Prizes [Klass anti-UFO prize] Scot Morris
p 130 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosecrucians
p 134 / advertisement [UFO: The Documented Evidence] Methuen Publications

V2#4 1/80
p 12 / letter [Viruses from Outer Space debunked] Deborah Katz
p 28 / Death on the Range [cattle mut.] Harry Lebelson
p 40 / Urban Legends [u.l.] D. C.
p 42 / quote ["Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects"] Will Rogers
p 62 / interview: Jacques Vallee [UFO] Christopher Evans
p 88 / Talk to the Animals [signing apes] Eugene Linden
p 116 / advertisement [Mystery Stalks the Prairie; c. mut] Niagra Sales Company
p 117 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 122 / erratum [Yogi, 10/79] editor of OMNI
p 126 / letter [Dracula debunking] Andras Rozsa

V2#5 2/80
p 10 / letter [czoo: yeti] Bill Tabit
p 32 / Alone Again [UFO] James Oberg
p 41 / Wildlife Trivia [weird animal facts] S. D.
p 41 / quote ["Due to unforseen circumstances, we must postpone the Psychic Fair...] Tamara Rand Institute
p 42 / Psychic Cops [para] D. C.
p 109 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 120 / letter [Illegal Aliens commentary] Jane Morgenstern
p 120 / letter [Illegal Aliens commentary] Gabrielle Davis

V2#6 3/80
p 14 / letter [synchronicity] Sebastian Foti
p 36 / Phantom Moonlight [UFO] James Oberg
p 45 / Invisibility Lessons [TM debunking] James Randi
p 48 / Eyeball Flora [plants grow in eyeballs] S. D.
p 49 / Psychic Scoreboard [para] Joel Davis
p 128 / letter [Randi, Dixon commentary] Steven Yates
p 129 / letter [Unseen Yeti commentary] James Justus
p 132 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 141 / letter [Talk to the Animals commentary] Eugene Linden
p 146 / Thinking out Loud [para] Martin Pitt

V2#7 4/80
p 10 / letter [Talk to the Animals commentary] Edd Doerr
p 12 / advertisement [czoo: tube worms discovered with RCA camera] RCA
p 14 / letter [Talk to the Animals commentary] Jim Stone
p 14 / letter [Death on the Range commentary] Alan Bingham
p 32 / Close Encounter [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 39 / Space Oddities [weird things spotted by Brittish satellites] Douglas Colligan
p 76 / interview [James Randi] Scot Morris
p 120 / advertisement [Haiti ("Voodoo, you can feel it in the air...")] Haiti Gov’t Tourist Bureau
p 128 / advertisement [Undreamed-of Possibilities] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 130 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 131 / advertisement [two Genesis-as-science books by R. Jastrow] Warner Books
p 138 / letter [Jaques Vallee commentary] D. Anderson

V2#8 5/80
p 10 / letter [UFO] Arlan Andrews
p 20 / Galactic Germs [germs from space] Bernard Dixon
p 32 / Honest Illusions [UFO] James Oberg
p 40 / quote ["Heaven and Earth were created... Oct. 23, 4004 BC..."] John Lightfoot
p 41 / Nature Trivia [czoo] S.D.
p 41 / quote ["Rail travel... is not possible..."] Dionysys Lardner
p 137 / advertisement [Crystal Pyramid Pendant] Cosmic Connections
p 137 / advetisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 138 / letter [cattle mutilation] Rod Faust

V2#9 6/80
p 10 / letter [telepathy, interspecies communication] David Palter
p 12 / letter [TM, levitation] Roane Dantzler
p 20 / Jupiter’s Noneffect [planetary allignment disasters] John Gribbin
p 32 / The French Connection [UFO] Charles Berlitz
p 39 / Life on Mars [l.o.m.] L. D.
p 42 / quote ["Science is the topography of ignorance"] Oliver Holmes
p 122 / letter [TM, levitation] Gregory Trulen
p 124 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 130 / Save the Toad! [giant flying vampire toad hoax] Norman Spinrad

V2#10 7/80
p 10 / letter [Shroud of Turin] Sandy Shakocius
p 12 / letter [Amazing Randi, Sagan] Richard Currey
p 12 / letter [Amazing Randi] M. Stone
p 12 / letter [Amazing Randi] Immanuel Chin
p 12 / letter [Amazing Randi] Peter Schwartz
p 12 / letter [reply to above] James Randi
p 14 / letter [UFO] Ronald Berends
p 14 / letter [cattle mutilations] Michael Albers
p 24 / Ghost Story [para experiments] Morton Schatzman
p 30 / The Russian Connection [UFO] James Oberg
p 35 / Mutilation Madness [cattle mutilation] James Randi
p 125 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V2#11 8/80
p 16 / letter [planetary alignment disasters] Mary Boland
p 32 / Repeaters [UFO] James Oberg
p 36 / Blow to Creation Myth [scientific creationism] Joel Davis
p 38 / Nastiness by Degree [weather and social unrest] Peter Evans
p 39 / Narwhal Mystery [why the tooth?] Barbara Ford
p 40 / Scientists and Monsters [czoo] D. C.
p 41 / quote ["If the scientist doesn't start with a sense of mystery, he doesn't start."] Rene Dubos
p 111 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V2#12 9/80
p 10 / letter [electronic mind control] Laura Collins
p 10 / letter [giant flying vampire toads] Athens Friends of the Toads
p 10 / letter [giant flying vampire toads] Ray Hermann
p 10 / letter [giant flying vampire toads] Steve Conklin
p 10 / letter [giant flying vampire toads] Suzanne Helder
p 10 / letter [reply: giant flying vampire toad article was a hoax] editor
p 14 / letter [TM] Edd Doerr
p 14 / letter [TM] Marvin Minsky
p 18 / Sea Serpent Survey [czoo] Bernard Dixon
p 32 / Jung Ideas [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 36 / quote ["No quackery is ever rejected by the American public until a more scientific-sounding but inherently less plausible quackery is ready to take its place."] H. Mencken
p 39 / quote ["Sciene is nothing but trained and organized common sense."] Thomas Huxley
p 41 / quote ["For the people liable to be killed by earthquakes, quake prediction is certainly significant."] Gordon Taylor
p 42 / Animal Vibrations [animals and earthquakes] S.D.
p 113 / letter [Amazing Randi] C. Anderson
p 113 / reply [to above] James Randi
p 113 / letter [UFO] Mike Bucker
p 113 / letter [UFO] Peter Adams
p 113 / letter [UFO] Richard Bridges
p 120 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#1 10/80
p 10 / letter [Which is hotter, heaven or hell?] M. Eckard
p 10 / letter [Shroud of Turin] John Wagner
p 12 / letter [electronic mind control] Bill Katz
p 30 / Minnesota Attack [UFO] James Oberg
p 35 / The Creationist’ “Equal Time” [scientific creationism] Ben Bova
p 37 / ESP and the CIA [psychic spies] Judith Hooper
p 38 / quote ["Sciene is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it."] Aubery Eben
p 40 / Wildlife Tales [weird animal stories] S. D.
p 42 / quote ["Like a mutation, an idea may be recorded in the wrong time, to lie latent like a recessive gene and spring once more to life in an auspicious era."] Loren Eiseley
p 155 / UFO Unemployment Insurance [UFO] D. T.
p 155 / Astrology Defense [a. in the courts] D. T.
p 156 / Face From Space [face on Mars] Harry Lebelson
p 156 / Psychic Healer [psy healing] Allan Maurer
p 158 / Sumerian Astronauts [a. a.] ???
p 158 / quote [exerpt from "backscrewing theory of gravity"] George Gillette
p 158 / quote ["Apart from the known and the unknown, what is there?"] Harold Pinter
p 163 / letter [cattle mutilations] C. Harper
p 163 / letter [planetary alignment disasters] Terry Fischer
p 182 / Calendar [UFO, dowsing, man will never fly society meetings announced] Geoffrey Golson
p 188 / advertisement [Autobiography of a Yogi] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 188 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#2 11/80
p 10 / letter [creationism] Michael May
p 32 / More Soviet Encounters [UFO] E. Speigel
p 36 / Death on Mars [simulated life on m.] Nick Engler
p 39 / Hoku Point [ice on hands cures headaches] Allan Maurer
p 40 / Mokele-Mbembe [czoo: contemporary african dinosaurs] Douglas Colligan
p 42 / Maligned Squid [czoo: giant s. sightings] S. D.
p 121 / letter [planetary allignment disasters] Terry Fischer
p 123 / advertisement [The Necronomicon] Necronomicon
p 126 / article [volcanic prediction by Janet Cullen-Tanaka] Dick Teresi
p 134 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#3 12/80
p 36 / Target: Denmark [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 41 / Kudzu [weird k. facts] Stuart Diamond
p 41 / quote ["The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk."] H. Mencken
p 42 / Life From the Clouds [l. originated in c.] Alton Blakeslee
p 44 / quote ["Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks, but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house."] Henri Poincare
p 136 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#4 1/81 : missing, but contains perpetual motion article by James Randi

V3#5 2/81
p 12 / letter [god in science fiction] David Bowring
p 14 / letter [electronic mind control] Sidney Weinstein
p 24 / Hypnotic Witness [h. memory recovery] R. McColm
p 32 / Space Encounters [UFO] James Oberg
p 36 / Horned Wonder [czoo: mystery fossil skull] Douglas Colligan
p 37 / Chorus Girl Hypothesis [thought-transferance among birds disproven] Barbara Ford
p 42 / Killer Wave [k.w. responsible for bernumda triangle?] Tom Summer
p 45 / In Through the Out Door [subliminal mind control] Eric Lander
p 120 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#6 3/81
p 35 / Useless Animal Slaughter [vivisection] Brandon Kuker-Reines
p 40 / quote ["Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."] Winston Churchill
p 42 / quote ["The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief"] William Thompson
p 95 / Interview: Donald Symons [scientific proof: women exist to serve men!] Claire Warga
p 100 / Postmarks [stamps of the world, incl. Grenada UFO stamp] Marc Kaplan
p 140 / Washington Debate [UFO] E. Speigel and K. Ehrlich
p 144 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#7 4/81
p 12 / letter [Amazing Randi, perpetual motion] William Watkins
p 12 / letter [god in science fiction] Susan Saltiel
p 26 / The New Biofeedback [biofeedback] Bob Kall
p 35 / The Stealth Affair [stealth planes hype, debunking] Paul Nahin
p 40 / Animal Trivia [weird animal facts] Stuart Diamond
p 40 / Death Blow from Space [asteroid killed dinosaurs] Joel Davis
p 41 / quote ["Nothing is rich but the inexhaustable wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep."] Ralph Emerson
p 42 / quote ["The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide."] Ralph Emerson
p 76 / Psychic Search [psy] Stephan Schwartz
p 118 / People [Uri Geller section] Dick Teresi
p 135 / advertisement [booklet on "space aliens"] American Raelian Movement
p 140 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 141 / advertisement [The Necronomicon] Necronomicon

V3#8 5/81
p 10 / letter [subliminal mind control] Craig Waller
p 12 / letter ["right to life"] Sandra Seipke
p 36 / Mainland Mysteries [UFO] Paul Dong
p 45 / quote ["Kids get ideas about UFOs where I learned about sex: the tabloids and the sleazy press."] J. Hynek
p 45 / Whistling Air Crashes [80% pilots whistle before crash] Allan Maurer
p 50 / Psychic Fools [psy debunk experiment] Kendrick Frazier
p 93 / advertisement [books incl. Stonehenge and Mystery of the Pyramids] Natural Science Book Club
p 120 / People [incl. Tut curse debunk] Dick Teresi
p 128 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 131 / letter [hypnotic memory retreival] The Amazing Kreskin
p 131 / letter [Amazing Randi, perpetual motion] Edward Cheesbrough
p 138 / Last Word [psy] James Randi

V3#9 6/81
p 16 / letter [Sumerian Astronauts] Zecharia Sitchin
p 44 / Gossamer Wings [UFO] Daniel Cohen
p 48 / Soul Gun [kirilian search for soul] Minael Jeffries
p 50 / Mammary Madness [photos of women in stuffed bras judged "less intelligent" in study] Ellen Bilgore
p 53 / Brain? Who Needs It? [hydrocephalus students with literally no brain and 120 IQ] Judith Hooper
p 54 / quote ["There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion."] Henry Thoreau
p 129 / advertisement [Three Mile Island Creamy Mushroom Dressing] The Catalyst Company
p 134 / People [psychic tattoo consultant Jamie Summers] Dick Teresi
p 147 / Gravity Watch [g. is not a constant?] David Lynch
p 148 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#10 7/81
p 12 / letter [perpetual motion, Amazing Randi] Dave Martell
p 12 / letter [perpetual motion, Amazing Randi] Paul Nahin
p 27 / Music [Muzak] Scott Cohen
p 32 / Hoax [UFO] James Oberg
p 35 / Feminism and the Brain [men's brains are superior] Judith Hooper
p 37 / Animal Revenge [a. getting r.] Stuart Diamond
p 39 / Pet Neuroses [animal psychiatry] Douglas Colligan
p 41 / quote ["In the final analysis, randomness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder"] R. Hamming
p 42 / quote ["Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."] Oscar Wilde
p 69 / interview [Albert Hofmann] David Monagan
p 109 / advertisement [catalog incl. alternate energy, biofeedback] Edmund Scientific
p 110 / Competition ["rumors" of the choking doberman / conspiracy sort] Scot Morris
p 119 / letter [Stealth questions] John Price
p 123 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V3#11 8/81
p 10 / letter [psy. archeology] Ed Starkins
p 14 / letter [mystery spots] James Swan
p 41 / Hunger Cues [looking at food can make you fat] Stuart Diamond
p 41 / Reasonable Chimp [animal intelligence] Alton Blakeslee
p 69 / Project Tesla [Tesla research continued] ?
p 101 / letter [octopus intelligence] Linda Palter
p 108 / advertisement [UFOlarm UFO detecter] Tucker Scientific
p 108 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 116 / letter [mystery spots] Ray Hyman

V3#12 9/81
p 12 / letter [big breasts and intelligence] Paula Siddens
p 12 / letter [new religion: Random Factor Faith] Eugene Shelby
p 14 / letter [early mystery airships] Carl Baumann
p 34 / The Pine Bush Adventure [UFO] Harry Lebelson
p 45 / Half a Brain [is all we need] Douglas Colligan
p 45 / Human Tidal Waves [human rhythms & behavior linked to moon] Norbert Lempert
p 48 / quote ["A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth."] Thomas Mann
p 48 / Shock Treatment [is useless and traumatic] David Cohen
p 50 / Surprise Sight [woman born blind, corrective surgery, knew colors anyway] David Colligan
p 50 / quote ["I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, and the conclusion is false. The hundreth time I am right."] Albert Einstein
p 71 / advertisement [books incl. mysteries of pyramids, stonehenge] Natural Science Book Club
p 81 / The Healing Bran [think yourself healthy] Douglas Garr
p 127 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 133 / letter [animal IQ] Cameron Stante
p 133 / letter [creationism] N. Spencer
p 146 / Last Word [amazing collection of science quotes... they ain't so smart] Bernard Dixon

V4#1 10/81
p 12 / letter [acupuncture, Amazing Randi] K. Chan
p 12 / letter [NY White sewer pot rumor expounded] S. Wishevsky
p 14 / letter [psy slurs] Ray Hyman
p 14 / letter [psy defence] Stephan Sscwartz
p 20 / Shape Shapes Shape ["morphogenic fields" effect form & behavior] Bernard Dixon
p 26 / Man Bites Man [human bite attacks] Patrick Huyghe
p 46 / Binge Disorder [bulemia study] Douglas Colligan
p 47 / Sleep-Wake Biofeedback [b. to stay awake, go to sleep] Robert Kall
p 70 / Ghosts and Goblins [waiting for hard para evidence] ?
p 73 / Intelligent Machines [coming soon] ?
p 133 / Mobius Psi-Q Test [para test] S. Sschwartz and R. Mattei
p 169 / UFO Update [UFO] Stella Iner
p 170 / Unicorn [goat w-horn by Glory and G'zell] Harry Lebelson
p 170 / quote [about "heresy"] Isaac Asimov
p 170 / Stalking Anomalies [Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in MI] Douglas Colligan
p 170 / quote ["There is no ox so dumb as the orthodox"] George Gillette
p 170 / Mystery Ship [1976 mystery boat photo] Harry Lebelson
p 171 / Soviet Psychics [s. p.] Allan Maurer
p 171 / quote ["Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."] Albert Einstein
p 172 / Emotional Alarm Clock [hypnosic monitor] Robert Kall
p 172 / Coincidence [maybe not so rare or odd] Kendrick Frazier
p 172 / Fang Count [vampire census] Allan Maurer
p 183 / advertisement [catalog incl. biofeedback and alt. energy] Edmund Scientific
p 184 / Burroughs at the Bunker [WSB on women as "genetic mistake"] Regina Weinreich
p 192 / letter [UFO] Dean Kurath
p 196 / calendar announcement [International Fortean Organization meeting Oct. 17-18] Geoffrey Golson
p 196 / calendar announcement [International Conference on Alternative Energies Dec. 14-16] Geofrey Golson
p 205 / advertisement [The Necronomicon] Necronomicon
p 208 / Cosmic Dangers [asteroid strikes] Patrick Moore
p 212 / advertisement [Autobiography of a Yogi] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 212 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#2 11/81
p 12 / letter [Tesla] Edson Johnson
p 16 / letter [n.d.e.] Debra Shotwell
p 39 / Parent of the Apes [human/ape genetic cross] Barbara Ford
p 44 / Gay Disease [mysterious "decreased resistance"] Judith Hooper
p 80 / Witches [w.] Erica Jong
p 111 / Anti-matter [UFO] Allan Hendry
p 112 / Transsexual Reincarnation [r. as cause of t.] Allan Maurer
p 112 / Global Cryptozoology [International Society of C. established] Douglas Colligan
p 113 / Feminist Hex [witches hex trailside killer] Allan Maurer
p 114 / Magnetic People? [magnetic sense?] Carol Johmann
p 114 / Psychic Better Business Bureau [The Association of P. Practitioners established] Allan Maurer
p 114 / Placebo Horoscopes [prepared and placebo h. equally accurate] Kendrick Frazier
p 124 / advertisement [catalog incl. alt. energy, biofeedback] Edmund Scientific
p 147 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#3 12/81
p 10 / letter [lunar madness] Richard Ornberg
p 45 / Noisy Vegetables [plants makes noises when in need of water] Judith Hooper
p 131 / Anti-Matter [UFO] Jeff Hecht
p 132 / French Flying Saucer [built by Jean-Claude Ladrat] Philip Black
p 133 / ESP Believers [parapsychologists are] Kendrick Frazier
p 133 / Human Combustion [Jack Angel, SHC survivor] Harry Lebelson
p 133 / quote [meat and snake showers in Scientific American, 1877] ?
p 133 / UFO Ports [UFO] Margaret Sachs
p 134 / Russian Sleeptalk [Gene Sutherland speaks r. in s., hounded by parapsychologists] Mark Teich
p 161 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 161 / advertisement [catalog incl. biofeedback] Edmund Scientific

V4#4 1/82
p 10 / letter [mystery ship of 10/81 issue SOLVED #1] Mark Epling
p 10 / letter [mystery ship of 10/81 issue SOLVED #2] Anthony Romain
p 10 / letter [second sighting of mystery ship?] W. Krohn
p 12 / letter [phantom-limb sensations] Donald Eisner
p 12 / letter [goat-unicorn of 10/81 issue explained] Draper Kauffman
p 33 / Near Death [n. d. e.] Judith Hooper
p 35 / Whistling Ears [ears that make noise] Judith Hooper
p 37 / SETI Axed [SETI funding cut] Michael Michaud
p 39 / OM Swat Team [TM team's mere presence stops violent crime] Judith Hooper
p 40 / quote ["Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody] Stanislaw Lem
p 67 / interview [Martin Gardner] Scot Morris
p 89 / UFO Update [UFO] Lee Speigel
p 90 / Mermen and Mermaids [explained] Douglas Colligan
p 90 / quote ["That which is incapable of proof itself is no proof of anything else."] Percy Shelley
p 90 / Voodoo Traffic [Brittish motorists use v. dolls to curse cops] Allan Maurer
p 90 / quote ["We are waiting for the UFOs. We know they exist."] Grahm Parker
p 90 / Dogu Space Suits [a.a.] Madeline Lebwohl
p 91 / Sole on Fire [firewalking] Harry Lebelson
p 91 / Uri Geller, Where Are You? [Uri-bating by Randi and OMNI] ???
p 92 / Nostradamus Interpreted [by Jean de Fontbrune] Mark Teich
p 92 / quote ["An abnormal number of all reported paranormal phenomena appear to have happened to holy idiots, fools or crooks."] C. Snow
p 92 / Remembering Birth ["the fact is we do."] Marc McCutcheon
p 119 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#5 2/81
p 10 / letter [Tesla] Michael Milanovich
p 10 / letter [UFO] Allan Hendry
p 12 / letter [creationism] Les Brown
p 12 / letter [creationism] James Milton
p 12 / letter [creationism] Keith Croes
p 24 / Cheap Talk [modern myths, ala "Paul is dead"] Gary Fine
p 35 / First Earth Battalion [Army goes new age] Michelle Bekey
p 37 / quote ["The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious... "] Albert Einstein
p 38 / Ancient Recordings [in pottery] Allan Maurer
p 58 / Recollections of Death [n.d.e.] Michael Sabom
p 62 / interview [Candace Pert: sex relations hardwired in brain?] Judith Hooper
p 93 / UFO Update [UFO] Jack Thornton & Pamela Weintraub
p 94 / Raging Skeptics [pick on each other] Irving Lieberman
p 94 / King Tut’s Shroud [just like J.C.'s only we have the body too] Sandra Dorr
p 95 / Nutrition for Psychics [psy] Robert Sheaffer
p 95 / Discojet [UFO-like jet by Paul Moller] Margaret Sachs
p 95 / Killer Clowns [k. c.] Pamela Weintraub
p 96 / Modern-Day Voodoo [belief makes it work] Eric Mishara
p 96 / Time Tripping [by Association for Past-Life Research and Therapy] Margaret Sachs
p 96 / China’s Armpit Savants [psychic readings or frauds?] James Randi
p 96 / quote ["Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed form deep nonsense."] Carl Sagan
p 121 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#6 3/81
p 10 / letter [satirizing anti-choice legislation] Audrey Glickman
p 10 / letter [n.d.e.] D. Amaral
p 14 / Yellow Rain [y.r.] Douglas Starr
p 22 / Gay Origins [g. o.] Judith Hooper
p 36 / quote ["There was never an idea started that woke men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank."] Oliver Holmes
p 36 / Cruelty to Monkeys [in the name of science] Sandra Dorr
p 37 / quote ["In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data."] Carl Sagan
p 38 / Loch Ness Monsterlings [czoo] Michael Jeffries
p 40 / quote ["Science has proof without and certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof."] Ashley Montague
p 41 / Grass Intelligence [pot studies] Judith Hooper
p 45 / Cool Immortality [life extention] Roy Walford
p 75 / interview [Francis Crick: life on earth was planted by intelligence from beyond] David Rorvik
p 91 / UFO Update [UFO] Jeff Wells
p 92 / Haitian Zombies [zombies] Pablo Fenjues
p 92 / Phantom Animals [animal teleportation] Pamela Weintraub
p 93 / Haunted Personalities [some p. more condusive to h.] Dave McNary
p 94 / Dracula Revisited [tour of Ducharest] Margaret Sachs
p 94 / Demons of Brookfield [inspire multiple murderer Arne Johnson] Peter Rondinone
p 123 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#7 4/82
p 10 / letter [sound in pottery] Robert Mest
p 10 / letter [UFO] Janina Leeds
p 12 / letter [Nostradomus] Everett Bleiler
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Walter Isenhour
p 12 / letter [UFO] Steven Soter
p 36 / Music [DEVO] Michael Shore
p 51 / quote ["Ignorance is the womb of monsters."] Henry Beecher
p 52 / quote ["The wallpaper with which men of science has covered the world of reality is falling to tatters."] Henry Miller
p 101 / UFO Update [UFO] Peter Rondinone
p 102 / Voices from Beyond [on tape] Allan Maurer
p 102 / Joan of Arc: Genetic Male [j.o.a.:g.m?] Eric Mishara
p 103 / Deadly Dreams [monsters become real] Peter Rondinone
p 103 / Huge UFO [UFO] Katherine Jason
p 103 / quote [UFO] Woody Allen
p 104 / Nuclear Premonitions [n.p.] Peter Rondinone
p 104 / Champlain Monster Meeting [czoo] J. Greenwell
p 104 / ELF-Wave Antidote [extreme low frequency mind control] Eric Mishara
p 115 / advertisement [Autobiography of a Yogi] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 130 / letter [sound in pottery, Seth] Dona MacVicar
p 137 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#8 5/91
p 10 / letter [animal experimentation] Richard Snedeker
p 10 / letter [shroud] Ann Smith
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Mary Flood
p 12 / response [n.d.e.] Michael Sabom
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Jerry Stockton
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] William Reynolds
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Ira Marvin
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Bill Horne
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Michael Jackson
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] John Kogut
p 12 / letter [n.d.e.] Anthony Klotz
p 40 / Barley Cure [tribal remedies ahead of science] Sy Montgomery
p 43 / Hypnosis on Trial [h. maybe not reliable] Yvonne Baskin
p 45 / Tunguska and Ozone [t. explosion] Joel Davis
p 111 / UFO Update [UFO] Al Furst
p 112 / Past-Life Skiing [p.l.s.] Margaret Sachs
p 112 / Mummy’s Curse [Tut] Robert Sheaffer
p 112 / Examining Bent Metal [burned by Uri] D. Rogo
p 112 / quote ["Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge."] Stendhal
p 113 / The Jerusalem Cover-up [The City of David was really Edinburgh, Scotland] Pamela Weintraub
p 114 / quote ["Men are most apt to believe what they least understand."] Montaigne
p 114 / UFO World Record [UFO] Peter Rondinone
p 114 / Satellite Seances [se. by way of sa.] Rachel Basch
p 137 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 154 / Last Word [psy., para., Uri, Dowsing,] James Randi

V4#9 6/91
p 12 / letter [UFO] Travis Walton
p 12 / letter [humans were planted] Mark Baisley
p 12 / letter [humans were planted] Z. Sitchin
p 12 / letter [increase in gay men caued by favorable female wiring] Robert Hyre
p 14 / letter [gay origins] Nathan Daniels
p 14 / letter [self-contempt is the root of homosexuality] Pamela Goren
p 14 / letter [earthquake prediction] Steven Montgomery
p 14 / letter [firewalking] James Randi
p 36 / Deadly Intercourse [sperm allergy in women] Eric Mishara
p 39 / Biten by Love [psychosomatic arthritis in abused women] Charles Craig
p 41 / quote ["If triangles had a god, he would have three sides."] Clarles de Secondat
p 100 / Creationist Comics [c.ism] Bill Lee
p 109 / UFO Update [UFO] Carol Johmann
p 110 / Jesus Insurance [estate willed to Jesus] Peter Rondinone
p 110 / quote [psy.] Trevor Hall
p 110 / Time Foils ESP [psy.] Dava Sobel
p 110 / quote ["It is curious what unlikelihoods people - particularly scientists - will accept in order to 'save appearances...'"] Martyn Skinner
p 111 / Integraton [alien-inspired technology] Margaret Sachs
p 111 / Loc Ness Worms [czoo] Ivor Smullen
p 111 / quote [para] Trevor Hall
p 112 / Monster on Ice [Frank Hanson's "Big Foot Creature" exposed] Kendrick Frazier
p 112 / quote ["Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature."] St. Augustine
p 137 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#10 7/82
p 12 / letter [creation of gays] Ned Flaherty
p 14 / letter [yogis] Melvin Carter
p 14 / letter [yogis] Selene MacKenzie
p 14 / letter [yellow rain] Robert Levi
p 14 / letter [yellow rain] Timothy David
p 14 / letter [yellow rain] Fred Greene
p 35 / Good News for Lab Animals [vivisection] Douglas Starr
p 37 / Keeping Quiet about Earthquakes [predicting e.] Eric Mishara
p 39 / quote ["There are no facts, only interpretations"] Friedrich Nietzche
p 41 / Mystery Lake [unfrozen water near S. Pole] Madeleine Lebwohl
p 41 / Whole-Mind Predictions [use both halves for success] Judith Hooper
p 46 / Butterflies in the Dark [psy] Les Ericson
p 91 / UFO Update [UFO] Pamela Weintraub
p 92 / Bubbling Blood [St. Januarius miracle] Kathrine Jason
p 93 / Ghost Hunt [g. poll -- seen one?] Allan Maurer
p 93 / UFO Counseling [UFO Contact Center] Joel Davis
p 94 / Pyramid Wine [w. made in a p.] Peter Rondinone
p 94 / Hieroglyphic Hoax? [about Jewish exodus] Carol Johnmann
p 123 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#11 8/82
p 10 / letter [psi, czoo, UFO] Tom Pyzdek
p 12 / letter [astrology] Land Fleming
p 20 / Sudden Death [from fright or imagination] Patrick Huyghe
p 36 / Fetus on the Couch [personalities formed in utero] Eric Mishara
p 37 / Talking Computer for Dolphins [t.c.f.d.] Owne Davies
p 39 / Fateful Names [n. determine your future] Dava Sobel
p 91 / UFO Update [UFO] James Oberg
p 92 / Psychic Sleuths [p.s.] Marcello Truzzi
p 92 / American Triangle [Bermuda T. shifts west] Robert Sheaffer
p 93 / UFO Auto Accidents [UFO] Bethany Campbell
p 93 / Aroma Therapy [a. t.] Eric Mishara
p 94 / Suburban Pyramid [James Onan built one] Mark Teich
p 94 / quote ["The unknown always passes for the marvelous."] Tacitus
p 94 / Out-Of-Body Survey [University of Kansas findings] Tom Kovach
p 121 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V4#12 9/82
p 10 / letter [Jerusalem Cover-Up commentary] Robert Stephanos
p 10 / letter [Jerusalem Cover-Up commentary] Ken Turnbull
p 10 / letter [Randi mistake noted] Marcello Truzzi
p 22 / Foresight Saga [precog] David Loye
p 46 / quote ["When you collect the ten wisest men of the world and ask them to find the most stupid thing in existence, they will not be able to find anything stupider than astrology."] David Gilbert
p 47 / quote ["If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk."] Billy Sunday
p 53 / OOPArts [out-of-place artifacts] Robert Patton
p 99 / UFO Update [UFO] Bethany Campbell
p 100 / Big Foot Fraud [by Rant Mullens] Douglas Starr
p 100 / Pet Telepathy [psi] Owne Davies
p 101 / Living Neanderthals [crypto-anthropology?] J. Greenwell
p 102 / Messages for the Dead [carried by terminal patients] Eric Mishara
p 102 / Vampire Hall of Fame [v. museum in NY] Herny Packer
p 127 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians

V5#1 10/82
p 12 / letter [Loch Ness Worms commentary] Robert Huffman
p 14 / letter [Creationist Comics commentary] Sharon Lunsford
p 14 / letter [Creationist Comics commentary] Bill Melancon
p 14 / letter [Creationist Comics commentary] Roger Thrasher
p 49 / quote ["Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel."]
Bill Greener
p 52 / Subliminal Diet [s. tapes] Allan Maurer
p 72 / Mind Tripping [altered states lead to health] Judith Hooper
p 108 / advertisement [Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard] St. Martin’s Press
p 112 / Fetal Thought [does it exist?] ???
p 129 / interview [Karl Pribram] Judith Hooper
p 135 / advertisement [The Mastery of Life] The Rosicrucians
p 136 / Psi-Q Test 2 [psi] S. Schwartz and R. Mattei
p 151 / UFO Update [UFO] Alvin Lawson
p 152 / Bigfoot at Walla Walla [czoo] Owen Davies
p 152 / … And on Film [bigfoot, that is] Owen Davies
p 153 / The Alchemist’s Curse [a. really works] Moria Anderson
p 154 / Blond Mummy of Sinkiang [caucasian mummy from 2000 BC China] Douglass Starr
p 154 / Phantom Hitchhiker [para] Mark Teich
p 167 / advertisement [Autobiography of a Yogi] Self-Realization Fellowship
p 190 / Sun Shakes [may disprove Einstein's theory of relativity] Allan Hendry

for Ira Cohen

I
off to the beiad what ho for the Fayyum & Egyptian solitude. This yearning for renunciation out-seduces other Lesser lusts & becomes our secret vice our coenobitic luxe. Our athletic asceticism is crypto-aestheticism

our grottos

coat our grotesque bodies in mother-of-pearl we grow a few herbs nudge nudge & every day wink wink a raven arrives with a loaf of “bread.” The desert so monochromous to jaded urbanites offers auras & auroras to the

anchroritic eye

Our nothingness is a giant suck-hole

that

re-appropriates the world & our friends the devils

Little Anthony & the Temptations we succumb to every one of them

especially

the succulent succubus of dolce far niente

which the worldly call prayer.

II
Juice for Jesus

You yourself are a kind of food of love & love a kind of spiritual cannibalism – & not so totally spiritual for those whose taste in love runs to precious bodily fluids. Jesus is the juice of your genitalia your tears your underarm sweat et cetera music at best the sauce High Church Victoriana pompous as beeswax & ammonia.

Appetite

would never feed on itself if it could lick the dirt from your shoes. Real food is based on you like distant emanations from the Platonic kitchen

caviare

champagne

& other disgusting sacraments of the Libertine Gnostics

They laughed at Yeats because he never missed the dinner bell at Colle no matter how

entranced

with swans. Fools

the food of love is actually food.

III
Everyone talks about negative capability but nobody ever does anything about it

Every day

we cram ourselves with juicy disasters

planning

later to dry out our heads with whiffs of some bodhisattva’s farts

or Art

or ideology or shopping

hoping

to forget what the wise old elves always stage-whispered to me on the most radical afternoons of unreconstructed Summer

Psst! hey kid

come & eat clouds like us eat emptiness & feel the scintillating buzz the enticing somethingness of a rich

long-ago nothing that can hover in mid-air like a

dragonfly

or Jesus the water-bug.

IV Twelve Steps to Hell

1.
Abraham & Eggs
vaudeville duo advocating
the meltdown of monotheism
in a maelstrom sweet as treacle
Breakfast of heretics shed for me
blackpudding mushrooms kippers
rashers of bacon & lashings of tea
because it’s not what enters the mouth
that pollutes as the Borborites say
or pale Carpucrateans with their sacrament
of precious bodily fluids
but what comes out of it
language as puke

2.
The Sevenheaded Cobra demands
immediate re-paganization of the Abrahamic Traditions
or hostages will be shot
out of circus cannons & bounce
like swans in widespread nets
with Theosophical warps
& polymorphous wefts
too complex for even the most advanced
generation of military computers
to map with any degree of inaccurate
inaccessible mountain somewhere
in the almost Martian landscape
of Waziristan.

3.
Why should the Right monopolize
mystic runes groovy grafitti
skull-&-crossbones or the color black
Ice shelves of Arctic unreason
are melting melting
leaving behind
only a pair of red shoes such as
vegetarian spirits like to sport
hobgoblins haunting Europe
with nastly recrudenscence
of funkadelic thaumaturgy &
illiterate syncretism
the snakes cult to end all snake cults
return of the never quite sufficiently
repressed
in the form of goat panic terror
& shameless idolatry.

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)

Imagine that you meet someone who offered you a magic pony, a bag of candy, and to be your best friend forever. The generous stranger promised thirty times they would do these things for you within your lifetime, and then disappeared. They never came back in your life, or the lives of your children, or your children’s children, or any of your descendants for over two thousand years. Would it make sense to keep waiting for the generous stranger who made such amazing promises, or would you admit that he told a nice story but didn’t deliver the goods? Jesus said thirty times that He would establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth within the lifetime of those who saw Him speak. Two thousand years later, Christians are still making excuses for their lying Messiah.

• The great day of the LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the LORD: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly. – Zephaniah 1:14
• For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts. – Haggai 2:6-8
• But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I [Jesus] say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. – Matthew 10:23
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. – Matthew 16:28
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. – Matthew 23:36
• And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. – Matthew 24:14 [Romans 10:18 states: But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.]
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. – Matthew 24:34
• Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. – Matthew 26:64
• And he [Jesus] said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power. – Mark 9:1
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. – Mark 13:30
• And Jesus said, I am: and ye [“the high priest”] shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. – Mark 14:62
• But I [Jesus] tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God. – Luke 9:27
• Verily, verily, I [Jesus] say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. – John 5:25
• And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. – Romans 13:11-12
• But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none. -  1 Corinthians 7:29
• Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. – 1 Corinthians 10:11
• Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. – Philippians 4:5
• For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. [...] Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. -  1 Thessalonians 4:15, 17
• That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. -  2 Thessalonians 2:2
• God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. – Hebrews 1:1,2
• For then must he [Jesus] often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. – Hebrews 9:26
• For yet a little while, and he [Jesus] that shall come will come, and will not tarry. – Hebrews 10:37
• Be ye also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. – James 5:8
• Who [Jesus] verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you. – 1 Peter 1:20
• But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer. – 1 Peter 4:7
• Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many Antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. – 1 John 2:18
• Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. – 1 John 3:2
• The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John [...] Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand. – Revelation 1:1, 3
• Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown [...] Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. – Revelation 3:11, 22:7, 12
• And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. – Revelation 22:12

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)

Yael Ruth Dragwyla is a writer; a ceremonial magickian, and sometimes editor of various alternative press publications.

OVO: What are some of the varieties of non-physical travel?

YRD: The two principal kinds are the out of body (OBE) stuff, where you literally leave your body and go elsewhere, and bilocation, where your mind is in two places at the same time whether or not you manifest physically in two places at the same time. I’ve found by experience and I’ve seen this reported in the literature that sometimes you’re thinking very hard about a place, you’ll be sitting in your living room thinking about a place and people will see you walking down the street in he place that you’re drinking about. They’ll say ‘Hi’ and you just disappear. You’ve bilocated into that city because you were thinking so hard about something.  You my actually have a physical appearance if you don’t have a physical weight or anything there. Your mind is definitely there as well as in your own body, so you’re not unconscious. With out of the body stuff, you actually leave your body. I bilocate routinely when I’m doing a magickal ritual.

OVO: Is this something that anyone could experience?

YRD: Anybody can experience it and I think at least a few times in your life everybody experiences it. If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re walking along an you suddenly stumble and there’s a bad jolt as if you’ve fallen on your face and you wake up, usually that means you’ve fallen back into your body after an OBE dream. Everybody’s had at least a couple of those. Everybody’s had an experience where you’re sitting in a chair and thinking about a place and suddenly it seems almost as if you were there. Everyone almost bilocates all the time but to do it effectively an exactly the way you want to without any hitches (or come close to go anyway), special training of stuff that is already in everybody is needed. People who have been in bad accidents or who were seriously traumatized on a chronic basis as children, a lot of the filters in their brain that are normally present for the rest of us aren’t there and they will tend to have these experiences more often. Therefore they’re the ones most likely to need the training. But this is something we all do at some point.

OVO: What does the training involve?

YRD: One of the things you can do is get the traditional crystal ball or bowl of water, and you gaze into it long enough that your mind gets bored with thinking about things and gives it up while you continue to stare into this thing. You start seeing pictures, pictures in your mind’s eye. When that starts happening you can train the pictures into being where you want them to be. If you keep doing this for quite a while you’ll find yourself projecting your mind at least partially to this other place. If you’re projecting into this bowl of water and you’re in, say, Los Angeles, and you’re thinking about London, you’ll start to bilocate into London. How far you’ll get with that I don’t know. There are all sorts of books on the subject. Another technique is to get a poster of a place you’d very much like to visit and you keep it on your wall. Five minutes a day you meditate on it and pretty soon you’ll be going there in your dreams.

OVO: What is the relation between something like bilocation and modern electronic media, which has some of the same effects as those attributed to bilocation?

YRD: With modern electronic media you have to have all that junk, whereas with bilocation you can do that spontaneously and all you need is your own head. Bilocation can produce more real manifest effects and do it in a real world way than electronics. Electronics is always planted and less complex than real life is. You don’t get get to touch and smell things on TV, you just see them. With bilocation all sorts of real life things am come across. If you actually get an out of the body experience you can pick up everything from music to smells to the way something feels when you rub your hand over it.

OVO:: What about the difference between out of the body experiences and bilocation and the like and psychosis or madness? How can you tell the difference?

YRD: Psychosis is when you loose control. If you can’t stop doing it its madness. It’s as if your body were in full panic mode and everything was frightening whether it should have been or not or your thoughts endlessly drift. The person who is psychotic is in bad shape, because they’re not fully in control of themselves, their thoughts run on in ways they can’t control. They can’t maintain control over their emotions so they drift in a psychological wind. But with these properties of bilocation and OBEs, when you do them spontaneously, if you’re sound and sane you get back home again without any problems. If on top of that you have training in how to utilize these things you get there and come back and you’ve achieved something along the way, you have control over this process.

OVO: What is a way for someone to test the reality of it if someone thinks they can bilocate?

YRD: If you think you’re in a city and you’ve never been there before, try to go to a corner where there’s a street sign. Get the names of the streets, addresses, if possible names off mail boxes. When you’re awake again write all this down as quickly as possible so you don’t forget and go to a library and look it up on a map. If you can, stop and talk to somebody. Say ‘hello’ and engage them in a conversation, in which you ask them about their city. Say you’re a stranger. If they’re speaking in a foreign language that you don’t understand that’s a pretty good test of it.

OVO: Do you know of examples of that happening?

YRD: I’ve read of it in the literature. Beyond that it’s by guess and by god.

One of the things that is very hard to do in dreams and in astral projection is to look at your own hands. I’ve tried it. Raise your own hands in front of your face and look at them. If you can’t do that or if you have trouble even putting the thoughts together to do that, that may be something that tells you that you’re astral-traveling rather than in a normal waking state. If you can think about doing it you’re not in a normal dream. I’d like someday to found my own university of esoteric sciences – for real, such that eventually it would produce graduates who simultaneously have a degree in some esoteric field, like say alchemy, and at the same time in something that would get them a job, a top-level job, working, say, for the government, or cities, or environmental protection. In Kipling’s book Kim the main character says “I thank Allah for both sides of my head.” This culture does not educate both sides of the head as they did in medieval times when they had the Curriculum. The point of the Curriculum was the well-rounded man. We need to do that again but we can’t go back to the medieval way of looking at the world. We know better, so we have to go forward, to a spiritual literacy that is up-to-date with all our experiences, good and bad, in the Twentieth Century. That’s what I want to start some day, real education. Not new age bullshit but education for both sides of the head in a way that is appropriate to the late Twentieth Century and the early Twenty-First.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)

The faith-healing parents of Alayna May Wyland are fighting to get custody of their daughter back, even as they face criminal charges for their neglect of her medical needs. [...] Their daughter was taken into custody by the state in early July and sent for immediate medical treatment. At that time, neither the name of their daughter nor her condition were available. The image above was taken by the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. In it, Rebecca Wyland is holding Alayna, who has a massive growth completely covering her left eye. The growth, a hemangioma, is a mass of blood vessels. Some infants are born with them, and they are typically corrected while very small. In this case, the Wylands chose not to take their daughter to a doctor. Instead, Rebecca Wyland anointed her daughter with oil and wiped off the discharge from Alayna’s eye each time she changed the child’s diaper. At this point, the growth has begun to erode Alayna’s eye socket, and may have caused permanent damage to her eye. Both parents have been charged with first-degree criminal mistreatment, a Class C felony which may earn them each five years in prison.

Article continues.  See my previous essay Child Sacrifice in Oregon to learn more about the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City, Oregon.  Of course every good Christian knows Christianity doesn’t say that you should pray for sick people and put oil on them instead of offer them medical care. Of course every good Christian knows that Psalms 103:2-3, Matthew 10:1, Matthew 10:8, Matthew 19:26, Mark 6:13, Mark 10:27, Luke 1:37, Luke 18:27, Acts 28:8-9, and James 5:14-15 don’t exist.  Because if those verses did exist, it might turn out that the parents of Alayna May Wyland were the real ‘good Christians’ and the rest were just picking up the bits they liked from the Jesus salad bar and leaving the rest.

NASA

On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body. Six hours after landing at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining), Neil A. Armstrong took the “Small Step” into our greater future when he stepped off the Lunar Module, named “Eagle,” onto the surface of the Moon, from which he could look up and see Earth in the heavens as no one had done before him. He was shortly joined by “Buzz” Aldrin, and the two astronauts spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned 46 pounds of lunar rocks. After their historic walks on the Moon, they successfully docked with the Command Module “Columbia,” in which Michael Collins was patiently orbiting the cold but no longer lifeless Moon.

The Guardian

South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off. [...] The gang used tranquilliser guns and a helicopter to bring down the nine-year-old rhino cow. [...] Rhino horn consists of compressed keratin fibre – similar to hair – and in many Asian cultures it is a fundamental ingredient in traditional medicines.

So there you have it.  Two perspectives for what to do on 20 July.  In one, science and achievement land men on the moon.  In another, “traditional medicines” make it profitable to kill off the last female of an already endangered species.  For all the feel good grooviness of “traditional medicines,” my blood boils when I read articles like this.  There’s just no excuse to patronize “traditional medicines” any more.  We could be on our way to the stars, but instead we waste our world for super-spooky ghost cures.

Against all odds, people have found cures for some few illnesses in the ancient past.  The cures that work are very worth keeping, testing and improving upon.  But that never describes traditional medicine.  Traditional medicine has to be spoken of distinctly from medicine.  Medicine works because it works.  Traditional medicine is traditional, so it must be medicine, so it must work.  Yes, chamomile tea calms my upset tummy down almost right away.  No, rhino horns don’t do a thing for anybody.  When a cure doesn’t work, stop it.  No matter if it’s traditional, no matter if it’s a cultural, no matter if it’s a custom.  Some perspectives for what to do on 20 July are better than others.

Spitting contempt on “traditional medicines.”

“Would it not be… an anachronism to cultivate the taste for harbors, certitudes, systems?” – Gaston Bachelard

I consider the past ten years of my life to be a conscious process of experimentation – but not in the scientific sense. The scientific method is not merely to come up with an idea, test it and record the results; it is also creating a closed system in which to test the idea. This is necessary to test the certitude. In an open system certitude isn’t possible since you cannot know all the factors involved. Although I did do some experimentation of a more scientific method (dream work and magical studies), in general I have avoided this.

My avoidance of scientific method in my experimentation is due largely to the fact that my life experiment is aimed at a breaking out of character armor and social conditioning, to increasingly become my passions and desires – which is to say to become the marvelous breaking forth in the world. This process is a process of opening up and so I cannot help but outgrow a closed system.

Among specific aspects of exploration that I have done, I have attempted, with some success, to increase my sensual awareness, to truly experience consciously what I was seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling. I did this while living in an urban environment. My method was simple – to note every experience mentally and let myself fully feel what it made me feel.

Unfortunately, the very success of this experiment was disastrous, because it left me feeling very depressed and under constant sensory attack. I finally had to leave San Francisco for a less hectic place and recuperate.

It was about a year later that I began my experiments in dream work. These were truly scientific in method in that I was working through a specific system (one which combined Senoi dream work and modern psychological methods) and recording the details, using specific questions aimed toward making the dreams useful and giving the dreamer dream control. I had always been a fairly active, intense dreamer so this was not a difficult project for me. I tended, while conducting the experiment, to remember four to six dreams a night. Over the course of the experiment (which lasted about a month) two things happened to my dreams. First, I began to have more control, until I was able to always determine the outcome of the dream in my favor; and second, my dreams became increasingly mundane, reflecting fairly accurately problems I was dealing with in the immediate present. So this experiment was successful in terms of what it was supposed to do – it made my dreams useful and gave me control. But in the process, it took the adventure, excitement and wonder out of my dreams. So l stopped the experiment, eventually even ceasing to write down my dreams.

I still tend to have some control in my dreams, and an awareness that I am dreaming, but fortunately my dreams have largely lost their usefulness and the sense of wonder and adventure have increased. The most important lesson I feel I’ve learned (though only gradually) from this experiment is the very real opposition between utility and the marvelous.

My other major “scientific” experiment was my exploration into ritual magick. I had become involved in a relationship that was very unhealthy for me, and much of the headway I have made in throwing off character armor and conditioning seemed to have been lost. In my frustration, I turned to a system. Combining aspects of A. O. Spare, Crowley and some modern chaos magick, and using tarot and a few other tools – as well as a lot of my own imagination – I created my own version of chaos magick. My purpose was to call forth energy of chaos within me in order to break down my conditioning. Although in the midst of some rituals I would feel ecstatic and my one act of practical magick seemed to work, all in all, this experiment was a failure. I did not become more loose, more free or more happy. I was not more capable of living my desires. In general, the opposite happened. And I think this was inevitable. The ritual form is a closed system and a closed system ultimately becomes a prison. Ritual could only close me in more. A few years earlier, I had been involved with a series of group “rituals” which were, in act, not rituals at all but ecstatic free play encompassing improvisational music, dancing, howling and just plain fun. These free-form play times, which always ended in a feast, were where I truly experienced wonder and ecstasy and the energy of my wildness. During these play times, I experienced flight, lycanthropic changes and similar truly marvelous events. So it is clear to me now that open, free play, not closed systematic ritual, is the way to break down conditioning and open to the marvelous.

As to the act of practical magick that seemed to work, as I will show it manifests more the failure of my attempt at practical magick than its success. I was becoming increasingly aware that I was involved in an unhealthy relationship. Had my rituals been breaking down character armor as I wished, I would have easily been able to break off this relationship as a simple, direct act of will. But I wasn’t able to do this, so instead I did a ritual to an end. Within a month the relationship shattered with a vehemence that was truly shocking. Strangely enough, that split did more good for me than the rituals I had been doing.

I am still recovering from the steps backwards brought on by my unhealthy relationship and my failed experiment in ritual magick, but I continue to experiment non-scientifically. I have spent the last year wandering, seeking to break with attitudes that can develop when one gets too settled into a “normal” social existence. I am seeking to relate more freely – as a desiring, passionate being, a fluid, constantly changing being – rather than as a static set of social roles and habits. It’s hard, but I’ve learned that it doesn’t free me to replace one set of conditioning with another. So for me, no more scientific experiments, whose closed systems could never reflect real life, but rather the open experimentation aimed at the breaking down of all systems. No doubt it can lead to madness – I’ve felt close to that many times – but, to paraphrase Bachelard, “If, in any experiment, one does not risk one’s reason, that experiment is not worthwhile attempting.”

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

BBC: Pakistani Couple Charged with ‘Occult Killing’ of Baby

A couple in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi have been charged with murdering their baby daughter as part of an alleged “black magic” ritual. Officers found the body of the four-month-old girl buried in the couple’s house, a court heard. Doctors say it had been there for about four days. They believe the couple were planning to murder their second daughter, a girl of three, who police found tied up.

Telegraph: Saudi ‘Sorcerer’ Who Raped 100 Sentenced to Death

He first drew them in by saying he could cast love spells, but then surreptitiously filmed their meeting and used his work for extortion and to rape them

Sky News: Russian Orthodox Believers Hospitalised After Drinking Holy Water

Those affected, including 48 children, are being treated in hospital for acute intestinal pain after drinking water from wells around a local church last week.

Seattle Times: Accused Killer Scattered Body Parts, Prosecutors Say

Christensen told police the text message was evidence Harlan had broken a “Wiccan blood oath” she’d made to break off a relationship with the other man, prosecutors allege.

Yahoo! News: Motivational Speaker Charged in Sweat Lodge Deaths

About halfway through the two-hour ceremony, some began feeling ill, vomiting and collapsing inside the 415-square-foot structure. Despite that, Ray urged participants to push past their physical weaknesses and chided those who wanted to leave, authorities and participants have said. Two people – Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, N.Y., and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee – passed out inside the sweat lodge and died that night at a hospital. Liz Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minn., slipped into a coma and died a week later. Eighteen others were hospitalized.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Witch-Hunt Victim Recounts Torture Ordeal

Those who beat, punched and kicked Kalli Biswokarma, 47, accused her of casting evil spells on a schoolteacher who had fallen ill in the village of Pyutar, 40 kilometres south of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

The Boston Globe: Haiti Calls Upon Voodoo Priests for Help

Beauvoir said the priests are counting among their own people, so they expect accurate numbers. He is confident the religious and scientific perspectives will not clash. In a nation where government barely functions, and where more than half the population of 9 million is believed to practice voodoo in some form, the assistance of these priests is considered critical to better assess the situation. The priests in Haiti dispense unofficial justice and cater to religious needs.

BBC: Voodoo Religion’s Role in Helping Haiti’s Quake Victims

“Some Christian communities do not want to give food to voodoo followers”

7online.com: Mom, Grandma Charged in Child Voodoo Burning

A mother and grandmother in Queens were charged Thursday with performing a voodoo ritual that left a 6-year-old girl – scarred for life. Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said 29-year-old Marie Lauradin and 70-year-old Sylvenie Thessier allegedly used an accelerant to set fire to the child, who suffered life-threatening injuries during the incident in February.

BBC: Child Sorcery in DR Congo

12 year-old, Henri, which is not his real name, points at a large fresh looking scar on his midriff. “People accused me of sorcery and my mother believed them,” he says. “Look, here on my stomach. She tried to kill me with a knife. It really hurt and I cannot understand why my mother did it.”

BBC: Indian Children ‘Sacrifice’ Probe

Five children poisoned to death in a village in India may have been “sacrificed”, police say. They say that the children were killed in Maharashtra state by a childless couple in a suspected black magic ritual to enable them to conceive.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: 12 Children Die During Bad Luck Ceremony

Twenty-five children were rescued with minor injuries but 12 others – all below the age of 12 – were swept away in strong currents. The children were watching a ritual ceremony to dispel misfortune after a measles outbreak in the area. The adults were throwing offerings in the form of chickens into the river when the bridge collapsed, the official said.

All articles continue at links. Part three of a series, see also [1][2].  Magick is disappointing at best, murderous at worse.  No outcome can be known before an experiment is made.  Experiments that seem foolish may yield wonderful results.  But when outcomes are known then ignored in favor of conviction or passion (magick, religion, superstition) then the worst sort of outcomes will become normal.   For example, if one child sacrifice didn’t work then try two.  Meanwhile genuine solutions to problems (measles vaccines) or acceptance of situations that perhaps cannot be changed or are not so terrible (lack of love) are cast aside.  Magick might disappoint but make people feel better for trying.  Reason and compassion disappoint less and make people feel better for trying.  Where people are guided by reason and compassion, they do not elect for child sacrifice.  The number of people sacrificing children is small, but it would grow smaller still were the ‘nice’ magickians around them to be less satisfied with their disappointments in magick and turn to other pursuits.  Without the camouflage of the mean, the extreme withers.

Telegraph, Battle to save tigers intensifies with only 3,200 left on Earth:
The threat is compounded by the market for their body parts, which are deemed to hold medicinal properties in some cultures.

The Guardian, Martin Robbins on Christian and Islamist extremists in Nigeria:
On 29 July, Christian witch-hunters accused of torturing and killing local children attacked and beat campaigners for child protection at a public meeting in Calabar, Nigeria. The same week, hundreds of members of the Islamist group Boko Haram were killed in suicide attacks on police stations across the north of the country.

Gawker, Teabagger Worried His Magic Prayers Made God Kill Sen. Inhofe:
A panicked teabagger called up C-SPAN in tears today, worried that he accidentally killed Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe by praying for Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd to die.

BBC, Zulu king wins South Africa bull-killing case:
A bull-killing ritual can go ahead on Saturday after a court ruled against an animal rights group which tried to have the practice banned in South Africa. ARA claimed that the killing took some 40 minutes and involved dozens of men trampling on the beast as they tried to break its neck.

ESPN, Dominic Raynor: World Cup to be “blessed” with slaughtered cows:
“We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast,” Trust chairman Zolani Mkiva said. “We sacrifice the cow for this great achievement and we call on our ancestors to bless, to grace, to ensure that all goes well.”

Yahoo! News, 10,000 E. African albinos in hiding after killings:
The mistaken belief that albino body parts have magical powers has driven thousands of Africa’s albinos into hiding, fearful of losing their lives and limbs to unscrupulous dealers who can make up to $75,000 selling a complete dismembered set.

BBC, Albino victim evicted from safe-house:
One year ago, Mariam Staford Bandaba, an albino woman living in Tanzania, was viciously attacked by a machete-wielding gang who tried to kill her and sell her remains for witchcraft. She escaped with her life, but only just. The attackers chopped off one of her hands – the other had to be amputated in hospital, where she spent weeks recovering from her horrific injuries.

LA Times, Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches:
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files. Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Guardian, Stepfather confesses to sticking 42 needles into boy’s body:
The stepfather of a two-year-old boy found with 42 needles in his body has confessed to jabbing them into him as part of a religious ritual, Brazilian police said today. Roberto Carlos Magalhaes claimed that a woman who went into a trance commanded him to stick the needles into the boy’s body, a police inspector, Helder Fernandes Santana, said.

All articles continue at links.  Superstition can be fun, and may be unavoidable.  But superstitions that lead to nonsense and brutality such as the above should have no sympathy from anyone.  It just does not matter if these are ancient traditions, or deeply-held convictions, or bring mental relief to practitioners.  These people should be shunned, at the very least.

For centuries Great Britain has served as a safe haven for refugees from political persecution. The reason Britain has been so attractive is its long tradition of political tolerance. This is history Britain ought to be proud of, even if it has been abused by people such as Karl Marx.  What made Britain unique was that the British public was tolerant of larger issues such as politics and religion while remaining decidedly intolerant of petty issues. The curtain-twitching disapproval of “alternative lifestyles” remained strong in Britain until the 60s generation rebelled against such moral sternness. While Britain in the 50s was a repressive society in many ways that many could not accept, just because Britain has a proud tradition of tolerance, it does not mean that intolerance does not have its own advantages.

To see what a society looks like when tolerance goes wild, observers only have to look at southern Europe or much of the third world. China shows what a socially tolerant society looks like. While China is not tolerant of political differences, the people are generally tolerant of behaviours that would not be acceptable in Britain. In China, smoking, talking loudly, using mobile phones in theatres or restaurants is perfectly normal behaviour. This is extended to a nearly complete indifference to public spaces and to other people that comes as a surprise to any newly arrived visitor to the People’s Republic. Driving in China is usually a shock even to those used to third world traffic as other drivers simply ignore anything not a direct danger to themselves.  As an example of the problems of excessive tolerance just compare the status of larger social issues such as crypto-science. While anyone in Britain who makes dubious claims for medical treatments can expect both the wrath of the authorities and public disapproval, in most of the rest of the world tolerance is extended to those claiming they can cure cancer or HIV with herbs.

In fact in China belief in the benefits of Chinese herbal medicines is extremely common, despite a noticeably lack of evidence to support such views. This extends up and down the social scale with the most educated Chinese often also being the most credulous towards such claims. Qian Xuesen, the American-educated founder of China’s rocket programme, for instance, was also a strong supporter of various Qigong groups, including Falun Gong before it was banned.  This tolerant attitude may well have played a part in China’s lack of an industrial revolution. For while British tolerance has not allowed the persecution of heretics in recent times, that has not been extended to their ideas. British scientists have inherited the Christian tradition of intolerance and that has driven technological progress. [...]

As the British have become more tolerant of petty transgressions it is no surprise that such behaviours have increased. Litter is much more common than it was 50 years ago, as is antisocial behaviour in general. However, this increasing tolerance extends from the housing estates to the Houses of Parliament. Behaviour that would have led to resignation half a century ago is now viewed with benign tolerance. Civil servants are not dismissed no matter how badly they manage public projects; politicians no longer resign no matter how badly they have behaved.

None of this is inevitable. Litter is not unavoidable and should not be tolerated. The waste of billions of pounds in badly designed IT projects is not a fact of nature but a blot on society we choose to accept rather than challenge. We can find our inner Inquisitor and we should express disapproval of behaviour that we do not need to tolerate. Britain can be the tidy, clean and safe place it was 50 years ago if only we, as a society, have the will to embrace intolerance for antisocial behaviour.

[Article continues.]

Two years ago (24 November 2007) I wrote about Mamie Manneh. Manneh was accused of illegally importing monkey meat “for religious ceremonies.”  Her lawyer wanted the charges dismissed “because they impinge on the importer’s right to freedom of religion,” that “bushmeat has spiritual significance and Ms. Manneh’s actions were protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” “From her baptism in Liberia to Christmas years later in her adopted New York City, Mamie Manneh never lost the longing to celebrate religious rituals by eating monkey meat.”  Here is what I had to say about that…

Mamie Manneh is an attempted murderer who illegally imported the remains of endangered species into the USA for the purpose of eating them. Handling and consuming this animal can lead to some of the most nightmarish diseases known to humanity. Only spongiform encephalopathy and religion can soften the mind enough to cause a person to hold Mamie’s ‘culture’ or ‘sincere beliefs’ worthy of consideration in this regard. It’s easy to look around and see that no one around you is eating monkey and that almost anyone you ask would be horrified at the idea. It’s easy to not lie to customs. It’s easy to not run over people in cars. It’s easy to not have nine kids that you can’t take care of because you’re in prison for trying to kill a woman. I wish it was easy for judges to laugh and scowl and toss her superstitions out of the courtroom. But that would mean tossing out superstitions that are in better favor with the majority, such as Christianity and Judaism and Islam. How much better it would be if the Constitution of the United States were in effect, and there was no establishment of religion in America.

Time marches on.  In the past two years Manneh has had two more children, bringing the total to eleven.  And for her crime?  A crime Jane Goodall wrote could have “grave consequences on public health?”  A crime which could cause outbreaks of Ebola, measles, tuberculosis and retroviruses similar to HIV among even those who do not eat monkey meat as part of their superstition?  Probation.

Once again, religion is the get-out-of-jail free card.  You can chew off part of a baby’s penis, causing the baby to get herpes which leads to the baby’s death, then another, then another, and get… a warning.  You can neglect your child until they die of curable diseases… but if you are able to demonstrate you mumbled magic spells to an invisible monster that lives in the sky while you watched your child die and did nothing, you can get a reduced sentence.

Spitting contempt is all these morally retarded creeps deserve, and it’s all I have for them.  How much worse, though, that they are given leniency in court.

Olivia Lang, Hindu Sacrifice of 250,000 Animals Begins:

The government, which donated £36,500 to the event, has shown no sign of discontinuing the centuries-old tradition. An attempt by the previous government to cut the budget for animal sacrifice provoked street protests. Chandan Dev Chaudhary, a Hindu priest, said he was pleased with the festival’s high turnout and insisted tradition had to be kept. “The goddess needs blood,” he said. “Then that person can make his wishes come true.”

BBC, Taking the Global Pulse of Healthcare:

Rahul Bose, a community worker in West Bengal tells a story [...] “There was this lady who came to my house at eight in the morning,” he says. “She had been bitten by a snake at four in the morning, but since there were no male members in the house, she was not able to leave the house. When I took her to the hospital, the doctors delayed treatment for two hours and so she died in my car.” Cultural attitudes towards women in rural areas, as well as problems of distances from health centres both prove major challenges for improving health.

Robin Hanson, Social Science Cuts Religiosity:

A new NBER paper compares college majors for their effect on student religiosity. Majoring in biological sciences, engineering, or vocational areas all increase religiosity about the same relative to not going to college. Majoring in education encourages religion even more, while majoring in physical science has about the same effect as no college. Majoring in humanities reduces religiosity relative to no college, and majoring in social science reduces it the most.

Jeanna Bryner, Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States:

U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests. The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn’t successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise. Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health. However, the results don’t say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

Alex DeMetrick, Trial Postponed For Cult Members In Baby’s Death:

Home video of Javon Thompson and his mother Ria Ramkissoon doesn’t hint at the dark future awaiting them, when they became swept up in the religious cult of Queen Antoinettte. Authorities say cult members starved 1-year-old Javon Thompson because the boy did not say “Amen” after meals. His body was packed in a suitcase and taken to Philadelphia, where it was abandoned in a storage room.

Jennifer Viegas, Superstitious Beliefs Cemented Before Birth:

The propensity to believe in paranormal phenomena and superstitions appears to arise in the womb, suggests new research. The findings, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, further indicate that a reduced ability for analytical thinking may correspond with increased intuitive thinking, which has been associated with a belief in extrasensory perception (ESP), ghosts, telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. Author Martin Voracek claims his new study’s determinations “suggest (there are) biologically based, prenatally programmed influences on paranormal and superstitious beliefs.” [...] Prior research had determined that relative finger length, also known as digit ratio, can be a marker for individual differences affected by hormones. Men tend to have ring fingers that are slightly longer than their index fingers. In women, these fingers are usually about the same length, or the index digit is slightly longer. In some cases, however, women exhibit a digit ratio more associated with men, while men may exhibit the ratio associated more with women. The ratio is “a putative marker of prenatal androgen exposure, with paranormal as well as negative and positive superstitious beliefs,” Voracek explained, mentioning that exposure to testosterone and other male sex hormones in the womb are thought to underlie the observed differences. Voracek found that “higher feminized” digit ratio in men correlated with stronger paranormal and superstitious beliefs, “even when controlled for age, education, adult height and weight, and birth length and weight.” “Shorter feminized” digit ratios in women also correlated with a greater likelihood of superstitious beliefs, as did a woman’s lighter weight at birth. For both sexes, shorter body length at birth was associated with later beliefs in superstitions and the paranormal. The findings help to support the conclusions of Kia Aarnio and Marjaana Lindeman, both University of Helsinki psychologists who have extensively studied the propensity for paranormal and superstitious beliefs. They found that women are much more likely to have such beliefs, which the researchers attribute to “higher intuitiveness and lower analytical thinking.”

All articles continue at links. “The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous… Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame… True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force… But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them… He has no right to preach them without challenge.”- H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, September 14, 1925.

The 1st Session of the 111TH Congress has passed H. R. 3962 Affordable Health Care for America Act, or ‘A bill to provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.’  Earlier versions of this bill would have provided tax funding for magic spells (aka prayer).  Fortunately this section has been removed.  Prayer is a consistently dis-proven means of medical care and so to use tax funding in this way would have been a waste.  Further, to force all Americans (who may not be superstitious, or who may favor a different set of superstitions) to pay for the magic spells of some Americans is an establishment of religion, expressly forbidden by the United States Constitution.  My comments below are restricted to where superstition appears to remain in the bill.  It is entirely possible I do not correctly understand the bill, as I am not especially skilled at reading legal documents.  And this bill may not become law, or change in the process of becoming law.

from Abortion threatens House health care bill:

The issue of abortion threatened to derail House Democrats’ health care bill Friday unless staunchly anti-abortion Democrats and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops succeeded in their effort to get strict abortion limitations into the measure. [...] Now House leaders are not only negotiating with fellow lawmakers, but also with representatives from the bishops’ organization, Democratic sources said.  “It’s come to this,” said one bewildered senior Democratic lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.  [...] Several Democrats, including Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pennsylvania, said they are in touch with their Catholic bishops back home. Altmire said he must have the approval of his bishop in Pittsburgh before he can vote yes.

Rep. Altmire, if he has been quoted accurately, has disqualified himself from further public service.  Those who elected him did not do so as a proxy for the Roman Catholic Church.  Rep. Altmire is free to consult anyone he wishes in his decision making process.  But to require the approval of representives of a foreign nation before proceeding is counter to the goals and responsibilities of his office.

H. R. 3962 includes the following:

Religious Conscience Exemption. (A) IN GENERAL. — Subsection (a) shall not apply to any individual (and any qualifying child residing with such individual) for any period if such individual has in effect an exemption which certifies that such individual is a member of a recognized religious sect or division thereof described in section 1402(g)(1) and an adherent of established tenets or teachings of such sect or division as described in such section.

It appears to read that a person can exempt themselves from mandatory insurance if that person “is a member of a recognized religious sect or division thereof.”  What, then, is a recognized religious sect?  What religious sects are not recognized?  Any decision by the State to answer these questions will be an establishment of religion, expressly forbidden by the United States Constitution.  I have been unable to locate section 1402(g)(1) referred to here.  And what is it that Religious Conscience Exemption makes a person exempt from? That would be Section 501…

Tax on Individuals Without Acceptable Health Care Coverage. In the case of any individualwho does not meet the requirements of subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of — (1) the taxpayer’s modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year, over (2) the amount of gross income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer.

Declare yourself a member of a state-established superstition and you can pay less taxes.  Who wouldn’t?  All it costs is the integrity of the United States Constitution.

H. R. 3962 also includes the following:

Training Models — In carrying out the education and training programs required by this section, the Secretary, in consultation with Indian Tribes, Tribal Organizations, Indian behavioral health experts, and Indian alcohol and substance abuse prevention experts, shall develop and provide community-based training models. Such models shall address — (1) the elevated risk of alcohol and behavioral health problems faced by children of alcoholics; (2) the cultural, spiritual, and multigenerational aspects of behavioral health problem prevention and recovery; and (3) community-based and multidisciplinary strategies, including Systems of Care, for preventing and treating behavioral health problems.

United States tax dollars should not pay for the ‘spiritual’ care of any nation.

There are at least two laws being discussed to change health care and insurance in the United States.

S.1679 Affordable Health Choices Act (Placed on Calendar in Senate) reads in part:

The essential benefits provided for in subparagraph (A) shall include a requirement that there be non-discrimination in health care in a manner that, with respect to an individual who is eligible for medical or surgical care under a qualified health plan offered through a Gateway, prohibits the Administrator of the Gateway, or a qualified health plan offered through the Gateway, from denying such individual benefits for religious or spiritual health care, except that such religious or spiritual health care shall be an expense eligible for deduction as a medical care expense as determined by Internal Revenue Service Rulings interpreting section 213(d) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as of January 1, 2009.

H.R.3200 – America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 reads in part:

Sec. 125. Prohibition of discrimination in health care services based on religious or spiritual content.

Alternative medicine, Christian Science, the healing powers of prayer, Scientology auditing, exorcisms and more will get federal funding if these proposals become law.  If any kind of medical care gets federal funding I’d prefer it be evidence-based.  When you have to pay taxes and the taxes pay for this kind of nonsense, it isn’t alternative medicine any more.

Followup:
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, Healthcare provision seeks to embrace prayer treatments [November 3, 2009]