What part of "bomb" don't you understand?

Via Greylodge:

GPOD has an excellent radio inteview of Rachel North by Jon Ronson. I highly recommend you check it out at the following link. I also second Pale Rider's comments at the bottom of the entry, about her treatment at the hands of certain conspiracy theorists.

Discordian torrents

Just so you know, thanks to the kindness of Iason Ouabache, several Discordian e-books have all been uploaded to The Pirate Bay. Naturally, all these books are Kopyleft and thus free to download or distribute as you see fit.

The full listing is:

Principia Discordia
Aeternus Ille Discordia
Apocrypha Discordia
Apotheosis Psycherotica
Black Iron Prison
Book of Eris
Condensed Chaos
Discordia - A Little Game about a Lot of Chaos
Metaclysmia Discordia
OMITTERRE LIBELLUS
Principia Entropius
Summa Discordia
Wise Book of Baloney

9/11 conspiracy theorists in retreat (avec assorted musings)

An interesting article from The Skeptic about how the ranks of 9/11 Truthers are thinning out:

Today, the 9/11 conspiracy movement is a shell of what it once was. The website masquerading as an academic journal, Journal of 9/11 Studies, has dropped from a high of six or seven articles published per issue to one....The introduction to the main hub of 9/11 denier activity, 911truth.org, welcomes its visitors with a plea that announces, “we’ve cut to the bare bones, but are still far short of our basic budget needs.” Prominent “truthers” like Mark Dice, Dylan Avery, Jimmy Walter... and Kevin Ryan have dropped into obscurity.

I can't say I'm terribly upset by all this. The 9/11 Truthers were probably the most useless and pointless fringe group in the modern world, whose only real purpose seemed to be deflecting the very real criticisms of Bush's leadership and foreign policy, by retreating into a fantasy world of unprovable and outlandish accusations.

The areas of real interest - how badly was the intelligence managed by the executive and various security organizations before 9/11, has faded into obscurity as people have debated ludicrous theories involving missiles, gold, Reichstag Fire scenarios, entirely fictitious terrorist organizations and insurance scams.

I also found the organic growth of a sceptical counter-movement to oppose the Truther's very interesting:

Staking their fortunes almost solely on Internet-based content may have been the 9/11 deniers’ biggest mistake. What seems like a perfect place for pseudoscience — the Internet is un-edited, without fact-checkers or minimum publishing standards of any kind — also became a perfect place for a rapid-response system of blogs and forums to fight back. Drawing on the freely available technical information from the NIST, FEMA, and academic journals which most colleges let their students access for free, skeptical sites like ScrewLooseChange.blogspot.com and debunking911.com are able to defuse 9/11 denier claims as they arise.

Web 2.0 may be useful after all! Now we need to get this going on the media a little more...maybe even the government as well. Government 2.0 perhaps. Its not very catchy, but instant feedback could be interesting.

This also may help explain the failure of US Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, whose internet support was huge, and yet offline was not worth mentioning. Barack Obama, by contrast, has a powerful grass-roots campaign online, but has anchored himself fairly strongly offline too. In Ron Paul's case, the online communities filtered through his policies and discovered many of the key flaws in them....by contrast, the Obama-supporting web in many cases has been used to debunk several myths and nasty rumours about him. Ron Paul's online support didn't translate into offline success and collapsed....Obama by contrast carried his offline success online and it helped him. A parable here, maybe.

Anyway, back on topic. Recently, I read an interesting little document that goes by the name of "The Creators of Loose Change Speak" by Mark Roberts. Its an interesting 98 page long document which shows the general contempt the people behind Loose Change seem to have for...well, everyone really. It pretty much convinced me that one reason behind the attempted spread of 9/11 conspiracy theories, especially this case, was the financial incentive. Because I am a kind and forgiving blogger (and more importantly, I forgot where it was hosted) I have uploaded this PDF document to Rapidshare, should anyone want to read it. Just follow the link.

Anyway, I think that's all I have to say on the topic for now. Cheers to Blairwatch for the link.

Operation: Mindfuck Pack

http://www.megaupload.com/es/?d=27X5LIHF 227 MB download

Download mirror:

http://www.mediafire.com/?mdcyy3zlswz - Part 1
http://www.mediafire.com/?4xyydjxngwn - Part 2
http://www.mediafire.com/?2ugg32x9syb - Part 3

Titles are:


The Structure of the Mind - Ben Goertzel
The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences (1999) - Robert A Wilson and Frank C Keil
The Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology - Edited by Charles Spielberger
Putting a new spin on groups - The science of of Chaos - Bud A McClure
Billion Dollar Bunko - Simon Lovell
The Changing Images of Man by Stanford Research Institute
Derren Brown - Behind the Screen
Derren Brown - Pure Effect
Get Anyone to do Anything - David J Lieberman
Undoing Yourself - Christopher Hyatt
Theory of Power - Jeff Vail
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley
PsyOps and Ethics - Michael Aquino
Propaganda - Edward Bernays
Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson
The role of cognitive and socio-cognitive conflict in learning to reason - Katiuscia Sacco and Monica Bucciarelli
Secret Incunabula.org paper - Joesph Matheny (?)
Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord
Stealth Marketing - Jay Abraham
Strategic Information Warfare (RAND corporation) - Roger C Molander, Andrew S Riddle, Peter A Wilson
The Strategic Game of ? And ? - Unknown
The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold - Robert Levine
The Selfish Meme - Kate Distin
The Advertised Mind - Erik du Plessis
The Art of Memetics - Wes Unruh and Edward Wilson
The Authoritarians - Bob Altemeyer
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures - Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson
The Psychology of Entertainment Media - Edited by L. J. Shrum
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Think Two Products Ahead - Ben Mack
This Is Not A Game (extract) - Dave Szulborski


All these books are pretty heavy on psychology, NLP and marketing, and are low on actual pranks and tricks. The idea is more to condition your mind to think about how other people think, then exploit that knowledge.

Our Brazilian friends

It might not be evident or obvious to everyone, but apparently there is a fair following of Discordianism in Brazil. While we have only had a few pass through on PD.com, Google searches etc, as well as their own testimony would seem to back this up.

So if you're fluent in Portuguese, or have a decent translation engine and want to check out some talent from the Southern Hemisphere, I would suggest Schrödinger's 1001 Cats, Rev Cekemp's Orkutcidio (you may recall Rev Cekemp is also responsible for the Portuguese translation of the Black Iron Prison) and the downloadable Discordia Brasilias, which I have mirrored here.

Anyway, just bringing that to your attention.

Japan first country to ban filesharing

Japan has decided to beat France and the United Kingdom (both who have similar proposals) to become the first country to ban file sharers from the internet.

Oddly the agreement to do so has not come from the Japanese Government, but from Japan’s four internet service provider organizations after pressure (not surprisingly) from the record and movie industries. According to Torrent Freak, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. File sharers will initially receive a warning for a first offense, then be disconnected for subsequent offenses, eventually be disconnected from the internet permanently (it wasn’t clear whether the agreement is a three strikes proposal).

The process will formally commence in April and will primarily target users of Winny, the most popular file sharing network in Japan.

(via Techcrunch)

Needless to say, I'm not impressed, and I very much doubt this "special detection software" can tell the difference between a legitimately downloaded file from a P2P network, and an illegal one. Consider for example the latest NIN's album, available for free download. Not to mention it puts copyright holders in charge of investigating infringements. I can't see that going wrong at all, oh no....

On a related topic, Matt Mason, the author of The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism has an interiew which you can download here (mp3).

Books for the masses!

Found these while lurking around the comments section of the excellent Rigorous Intuition blog. I only found the archives yesterday, but its already becoming one of my favourite conspiracy blogs, both intelligent and informative, without jumping to conclusions.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to share, and so I present you with the download links. Books seem to be an assortment of classic conspiracy theorism, the occult, ritual magick (early 20th to present) social engineering and a few other areas, including RAW's Illuminati Papers. Like I've said before, I may not necessarily agree with all of them, but I won't turn away from the offer of free and interesting reading.

Odd Books Link 1
Odd Books Link 2
Odd Books Link 3
Odd Books Link 4


Download should come roughly to about 40 MB total. Enjoy.