Nate Cull @natecull@mastodon.social

Anyway, have some ritual incantations against the darkness which as it so happens I was just writing up.

http://natecull.org/wordpress/2019/03/08/playlist-notes-novas-4-3-movies/

Six episodes in and Legend of the Condor Heroes 2017 continues to impress me as the best TV version yet of probably *the* most famous Chinese martial arts epic ever.

If you like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, etc, then this is a great time to get on board the Jin Yong train.

Genghis Khan! The Jin-Song wars! Kung fu princesses! (multiple of) Kung fu witches! The forbidden NINE YIN BONE CLAW skill! A martial arts tournament! (of course) Romance! (multiple of) A big war!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4crHldKx6c&index=1&list=PLJIYzNjvxw8v2TkPFnjYx-xD2IqOKjbYk

That's it everyone, my timeline is now tuned (chef kiss) perfectly

@Gargron @enkiv2 @kitkat @eq

So uh hello everyone, meet my (literal) big brother @pdcull .

He's been working with at-risk teenagers in the favelas of Brazil for the last 20 years; is a certified CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) trainer and Emergency Manager; is studying for a Masters in Emergency Management with a special focus on empowering communities to develop resilience.

He has seen a bit of crap in his time (corrupt cops, drug dealers etc) so he can *probably* cope with you all.

Probably.

Be nice.

2018 PHONE FASHION TRENDS

This is a pretty strong look to be honest I think it'll be really hard to beat.

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-01/1981_01_BYTE_06-01_Hand-held_Computers#page/n39/mode/2up

https://mastodon.social/media/bphBHmCPgiNatxrx888

Museum of Artificial History

And now finally, for the first time in my life, I am able to read the 1970 psychic communication from the cosmic entity which so terrified a group of Christian fundamentalists in the 1980s - including people such as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI - that they thought it must be the literal Antichrist.

I... think they maybe got that identification kinda 180 degrees wrong.

Okay I am legit impressed with the Internet Archive's 'borrow a book' feature.

I don't know why I haven't tried it up to now... just didn't have an account on it I guess.

Also I am just not a fan of the deliberate digital manufacture of artificial scarcity, but... it beats not being able to read a book.

is this burning an eternal flaaaaaaame

I really wanna know who this musician was.

(Revelation: The Divine Fire, page viii)

The New Age is to fundamentalist Christians what climate change is to scientists. (Also the reason why FCs oppose climate science).

My thesis, when I get around to working further on writing my blog, is that there is indeed an Apocalypse / War in Heaven and the Fundamentalists, unfortunately and quite hilariously, picked the side that the actual angels aren't on.

It is a hard and scary world when you think you are fighting alone against the literal Hosts of Heaven.

The nice thing about paranoid conspiracy bloggers is that they keep you up to date with interesting new books.

Constance Cumbey, bless her heart. Doing the Lord's work even though she doesn't know it (except she thinks she is)

http://cumbey.blogspot.com/2019/01/everything-i-warned-of-in-hidden.html

and also

http://cumbey.blogspot.com/2019/01/fetzer-book-was-critical-re-entry-point.html

Two books added to my to-read list.

It's worth realising that while liberals despair that fundamentalist Christians are winning, FCs think they are *losing*. That's why they back Trump.

It seems Steiger republished Revelation: The Divine Fire in 2006

And I think it's likely still a book way ahead of its time, tying together as it does both the Jesus People and the New Age, two groups who seemed likely to converge in the 1970s but then turned into bitter enemies and shaped much of our current politics.

Now if only I could find a library that carries these kind of books.

https://www.amazon.com/Revelation-Divine-Fire-Brad-Steiger/dp/0977790479

And then we get questions like this one. What happened to the rest of the Star People series, and what happened to Francie Steiger, Brad's second wife?

https://esotericjenavi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/the-mystery-of-francie-steiger/

Because of the heavy hammer of copyright, this stuff just gets... lost in the vortex, but it''s the record of how significant chunks of our popular subculture developed.

<< I had a revelation to share with Phil: The essence of The Divine Fire had been given to me in 1969 during a late night encounter with a hooded, monk-like entity. To silence my inquisitive--and startled--mind, the mysterious visitor had placed me into a deep sleep, but in the morning I arose with the complete outline of Revelation: The Divine Fire in my awakened consciousness. >>

<< When The Star People was published in February 1981, I included a number of anonymous quotes from Phil, attributing them to a "well-known science fiction writer's" take on what seemed to be a global phenomenon of men and women experiencing the awakening of their own DNA memory packets of somehow coming from the "stars. >>

<< Although Dick said that he did read the book and that he did receive the requisite information and comfort that he was promised during the vision, he was reluctant to contact me until he read of my research with those individuals whom I had given the name of Star People. Dick said that he was about to publish a novel (Valis, 1981) that would advance numerous similar concepts. >>

<< At that time, he told me, he was shown in a vision, “more properly, an inner hologram,” the cover of my book, Revelation: The Divine Fire (Prentice-Hall, 1973). A feminine voice told him that this book would help him to understand what was occurring to him. He was also told by the voice to get in touch with me. >>

<< .. and who have now been activated by DNA memory to fulfill a mission in assisting others in their spiritual and evolutionary advancement.

Sometime after the book's publication, I received a letter from Philip K. Dick, who told me that he suspected that he was such an individual as those whom I had profiled in the book. He had first realized this in 1974 when his own “DNA memory packet” began to fire within his psyche. >>

PKD's famous 'pink light'.

See, this is why Brad Steiger is someone who should be a LOT better documented

http://mysterious-america.com/philipdick-brads.html

<< In my book Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the Transformation of Man [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976], I introduced the concept of the Star People, individuals who feel that they bear within their genes awareness acquired by extraterrestrial interaction with humans in prehistoric or ancient times..

And this fear took deepest root in Texas and carried on beyond evangelical Christianity into TV (The X Files) and the Texas game scene of the 1990s (with Deus Ex a prime vector, but you see echoes of the Philadelphia Experiment mythos in Doom and then Half-Life, Tom Bearden's Leary-influenced visions in System Shock 2, etc) and from there to Silicon Valley and

well

now we have the people who control all the world's computers seriously considering Nazism because of this sort of fear.

One very direct way it influenced us is that books like Gods of Aquarius (1976) and The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), with their vision of an imminent convergence of some kind of machine-assisted cybernetic mystical socialism, SCARED THE CRAP OUT OF writers like Constance Cumbey (The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, 1983) who then convinced churches that New Agers were conspiring to take over the world. And this fear powered pretty much the entire rise of the Christian Right that we now inherit.

Anyway:

This is just a tiny sample of the stuff I want to see carefully footnoted, referenced, and available to the public.

Because this stuff is in our cultural bloodstream and it's been giving us weird dreams for decades and it's now being deliberately weaponised as conspiracy memes on social media, which ARE available to everyone while academic research (even if they notice) is locked away behind paywalls.

We probably should be thinking carefully about how this stuff influenced us.

See, actually just by reading the chapter titles, here I can pretty much tell you that Brad Steiger did NOT invent the word 'Starseed' (as Wikipedia will misinform you). The phrase 'Starseed Signals' here means that he's quoting Timothy Leary. So Leary is probably the origin of that *word*, if not the connotations attached to it by later (1980s) New Agers.

Also I wonder how much of Deus Ex's Helios was influenced by this chapter in Gods of Aquarius:

Tom Bearden was probably crazy but - like Timothy Leary and Andrija Puharich, he was a fun kind of crazy. Also (like Puharich) a little worryingly close to people with the authority to launch missiles.

But you wouldn't know about any of this underbrush to the US military if you relied on public libraries and professional academics, who you might think might be paid to keep track of some of this stuff and what it's doing to our heads. Or to missile-launch-authorising people's heads.