Famous computer hacker Adrian Lamo faces a possible five years in prison for refusing to give a blood sample to the federal government to add to its genetic database.
Apparently he was willing to give them a DNA sample by means of hair and fingernail clippings, but “they will only accept blood” according to his public defender. I’m sure they have some reason, but it does evoke kind of creepy conspiratorial occultic blood sacrifice overtones, doesn’t it?
I never knew this, but in 2004, the FBI expanded it’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, to include not just violent criminals and sex offenders (who typically leave DNA traces), but also “from all newly convicted federal felons, including drug offenders and white-collar criminals.” The name of the act? Hilarious horrible ironic Orwellian name:
The Justice for All Act.
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I’m as much of a paranoid conspiracy theorist as the next Jeff Wells fan, but in this instance I have to go with the simpler explanation (since I actually know a little about it). Hair and nail clippings don’t have sufficient amounts of genetic material to run a full scan of the genome. In fact, the actual hair and nail, which is composed of keratin, don’t have any information at all: it’s the small amount of dead tissue that adheres to the sample that contains all the information.
Yeah, I was being pretty tongue in cheek with that blood sacrifice remark. But I think the point still stands that requiring a DNA database is a pretty creepy step to begin with - especially for non-violen offenders.
Here’s another improbable conspiracy theory: they are studying these people’s genetic sequences in the hopes of finding and manipulating “criminal genes”
When I moused-over the link to the Justice For All Act, and saw the URL in my status bar, I thought it said “fascists” (it’s actually “factshts”). Freaky.
But then, when I drive through McDonald’s and see the word “condiments” I always see “condoms” at first glance.
Who says it’s improbable? I’m in the business of looking for cancer-causing (or cancer-enabling) genes (for the purposes of screening and pharmaceutical development, just to keep things clear to fellow Boucherites). I would be shocked to find out somebody was not looking for “criminal genes”.
Yeah in a way, it sort of sounds like they wanted the guys DNA so they could make some kind of super-hacker…
Dude. That is creepy and crazy. But I’m not surprised (what a world we live in if those practices aren’t shocking, eh?)
I don’t know what else to say but that makes me think of genetic engineering, eugenics, and other totalitarian practices. Which leads me to a question for Tim. I was reading an article from your archives about totalitarianism (a very good article, btw). I wanted to add a comment about self-censorship. It that not possible, since it’s now archived? Too bad.
What if: What if the gov’t egregore has grown so big for its britches than now it’s about to break on through, shuck off its “I’m only imaginary” status, then start demanding “sacrifices” in the form of “Ov” to charge its sigilistic nature? Like Jeff Wells said, DNA is a low-level laser–what if the government is creating a giant occult-fueld laser-based Doomsday device? I mean, what with projects named “Tiamat,” and “IAO” its not a far cry.
Sorry for the brain-damaged impish sci-fi scenario, but hey, I didn’t invent this world.
I’m totally with you Null. I’m reaching a point where - whether it’s factually true or not - I am ready to accept the most outlandish paranoid occult sci-fi explanations for what’s going on right now. I almost feel like pursuing the “truth” of that would be more worthwhile (or at least as worthwhile) as any other more mundane explanations. It’s kind of like, if we push harder and farther than where we think they’re at right now, we’ll inadvertently stumble over the real root of the matter. Who’s with me? Is it time to start pumping out the most absurdist paranoid impossible theories we can think of in an effort to uncover the mythological truth behind all this shit, or is that just going to “muddy the waters” for serious conspiracy investigators - who seem to be multiplying and yet still getting nowhere of much substance?
Yeah, in seriousness, I’m beginning to suspect that the more noise we get, the more signal. I’m just starting to look into information theory, and my understanding of it is heavily influenced by, of all things, the Star Ruby, but there’s a degree to which people voicing ideas seem to mimic, holographically, the structure of neurons–even random firing, if it connects to another cell, yields a “true” result, you just have to be willing to get the “result” back. And I am about 60% serious about my propositions. Somebody sitting in a DNA bank has got to be thinking, at least one night, about how he’s stuck in something that bears a resemblence to a sacrifical altar.
This kind of reminds me of a lot of the thinking, at least in the gnostic-affiliates, spawned by Jeff Wells work. While on this plane, it mostly just looks like a a couple of lone psychos, some of whom are powerful people, maybe we can say that to our spiritual faculties, it appears like one giant black magick world war. I’m not saying either interpretation is invalid.
If you only knew….
Seriously, I work in belly of the beast. Nobody I know consciously thinks about this as human sacrifice. But the square mile I work in has more resected human tissue stored in freezers than you can possibly imagine. But we use it only for Good….
Before I’d even heard of Jeff Wells I had assumed that this was a huge cosmic battle. You know, Paradise Lost, Atlantis, what have you: the Empire never ended… Finn, again…
Why did the French aristocrats develop such a strong interest in Satanic masses, possession, and the occult in general? Why did the torture at Abu Ghraib have such a ritual aspect? Why about the Nazis? Skull and Bones? The seemingly implacable turn towards the gruesome in industrial science?
There are horizontal explanations for all these things, yet the patterns are clear. What is lacking is any sensical causal explanation that doesn’t immediately lead to the terminal point of horizontal conspiracy theory: the secret all-powerful one-world government, immediately rejected by most as implausible. A vertical conspiracy theory, however, could accomodate metaphysical speculation without resorting to the deus ex machina cop-out of THEM.
Imagine the ritual, specifically the archetypal dark ritual, given the thread subject, as a particular region in the 4d spacetime phase space. Just imagine a big 4d grid of bits, which turn on and off according to some ruleset like a cellular automata. The ritual occupies a region of possible states. It is an attractor in the sense of dynamical systems: any number of paths can lead to it, but these paths will tend to fall into a predictible orbit, an archetypal pattern. There may be multiple attractors.
(This is an analogy, not how I actually believe the universe to function.)
The numinous ritual has, in retrospect, a clear sense of “having to have happened that way.” As though the possibilities of multiplicity narrow until the the conditioned is left behind, only the manifested aspect of the unconditioned remains, and there is nothing left but to plunge forward.
In this model, it will be noted that ritual attractors are not derivable from the rules of the dynamical system, and vice-versa. It may also be noted that even in a postivistic mechanical worldview, such attractors would not be surprising features of the universe at all, the surprising part would be the degree to which they influence us and our culture.
prnsqlr, are you saying that “black magick” is an attractor in the manifold of space/time/consciousness? That’s a very interesting idea, and would explain quite a lot.
In fact, it’s probably consistent with the idea of original sin.
It’s also consistent with a comment that I almost posted on this thread before I stopped myself due to the sheer geekiness of it. I tend to think about this stuff in mathematical analogies; I imagine free-will as having to do with a local Euclidean coordinate system upon a very complicated manifold of space/time/consciousness. In the local coordinate system, a soul has an opportunity to move in several directions that are oriented “towards” or “away from” “Evil”. I don’t believe in Good and Evil in a cosmic sense, in the same way that Euclidean directions don’t make sense over a global manifold. But in a local Euclidean coordinate system, directions make sense, and in a local area of space/time/consciousness there is always (or at least often) a choice to be made that can be described as “good” or “evil”. According to your conjecture, this can be thought of as moving “towards” or “away from” the attractor you just described.
Very interesting….
I wouldn’t say that solely black magic is an attractor, but that “ritual” time, where archetypal patterns are re-enacted, would, from the perspective of dynamical systems, bear a strong resemblance to attractors. This would include “good” magical scenarios, too, wherein every aspect of the scenario moves so *perfectly* that you feel as though the entire universe, in all its history, has conspired to bring you to that point.
I like that characterization of good/evil as a local coordinate system for the subjective consciousness, usable for local orientation, but not necessarily globally applicable.
I didn’t mean to imply that “black magic” (which could perhaps better be labelled as a will to power) was the only attractor. But it’s a fairly strong one, especially in this realm of consciousness-space.
In many respects, every single one of us feels the tug. Every one of us has a part inside that wants to be a tyrant (those of us who are honest withourselves will recognize this). Past a certain point, when we are far enough gone in our appetite for power, it is natural to turn to the supernatural and make deals with forces more powerful than we. And if you’re already caught in the grip of the will to power attractor, it’s unlikely that these forces will be ones that move you away from the attractor. Hence, black magick, ritual sacrifice, etc.
It’s the human drama.
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[...] Also, if people have ideas for what categories to use to organize all these twisted tales, by all means jot them down here (on this post). And if you’re into this sort of thing, you can also view these two older posts which also half-inspired me to take up this project. [...]