Radical media, politics and culture.

Advice From Dr. Laura

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who dispenses advice to
people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an
observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to
Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The
following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a east coast
resident, which was posted on the Internet.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I
have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that
knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend
the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that
Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do
need
some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific
laws and how to follow them:


"Art, Truth and Politics"

Harold Pinter

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,
nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily
either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the
exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as
a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?


Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search
for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The
search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the
dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems
to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so.
But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to
be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each
other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other,
tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the
truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is
lost.

The Ibogaine Alternative

Paul DeRienzo

Imagine a drug that could eliminate a scourge that impacts the lives of more than three million Americans and more than a million western Europeans — drug addiction — with one pill.


Ibogaine was isolated from the root-bark of a plant known as Tabernanthe iboga that grows in a forested area of West Africa in Cameroon and Gabon. In Africa the plant is central to a religion known as Bwiti, one of the most resilient indigenous belief system in Africa. An initiate into the religion must eat the iboga root to induce intense visions and to "meet their ancestors."

Bernie Roddy writes:

"Notes on Creative Property"
Bernie Roddy

According to a popular theory of property, you ought to receive the results of your labor, and those results are new property, your profits. For people who create things that can be sold such as movies, scripts, programs, or music, it makes sense to insist that any beneficiary of its sale be someone who invests labor toward the item’s creation, or perhaps toward its distribution. But someone who invests capital does not invest labor. Stockholders in a company do not have a claim to profits generated by new creations. An entrepreneur often does contribute labor, as does an artist. Both might persuade someone to provide capital, but any commitment to return some profit is not backed up by this conception of property. At best, it is based on a contractual relationship.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Canada's Prince of Darkness:
Michael Ignatieff,
Or Thomas Friedman in Striped Trousers, Silk Stockings and Garters"

John Chuckman

If Michael Ignatieff is anything, it's connected, and I do not mean just to the relatively small establishment of Canada, I mean connected to the shadowy godfathers of world empire. Ignatieff has a rich career in America where truly loyal service, whether by natural or adopted sons, is always handsomely rewarded.


Another Canadian, David Frum, made it all the way to the White House with his custom-tailored scribbling. So too such a genuinely dangerous American as Pat Buchanan. How does a man like Thomas Friedman pick up prizes writing advertising copy for the Pentagon? As I said, loyalty is handsomely rewarded.


David Frum and Pat Buchanan both fell from grace, but there is little danger of Ignatieff's doing so. He almost perceptibly pants and gasps when he applies words to the imperial splendor of which he stands in awe.

In the wake of the U.S. media’s typical barrage of lies and obfuscations regarding the November wave of riots in France, we thought your readers would be interested in this illuminating declaration which we just received from the Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement. For the Chicago Surrealist Group, Franklin Rosemont

"Warning Lights"

A Surrealist Statement on the Recent Riots in France

Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement

For three weeks, in the ghettos of the poor suburbs, euphemistically named “sensitive neighborhoods,” on the outskirts of the outskirts, thousands of cars were burned, public utilities devastated, troops of police deliberately attacked.


There is nothing new about what sparked these incidents: the absurd death of two adolescents seized by panic, in the course of “normal police behavior.” Comparable police blunders also occurred in the past, and nearly always lootings and burnings were the inevitable response. But such incidents were localized.


Nor is there is anything new in the methods employed or the visible targets: For many years now, notably in Alsace, cars are burned on New Year's Eve or at the time of more obscure commemorations. And for a long time schools have been vandalized by schoolboys expelled from school; buses or police cars stoned; passengers methodically robbed in public transport.


What is new today is the immediate extension of this violence, its rapid spread to the provinces, well beyond the borders of a spontaneous and unpremeditated movement.

Solve et Coagula writes:

"Gnosticism"
Interview with Tobias Churton by Richard Smoley, New Dawn

Tobias Churton is one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism. He first became interested in the Gnostics while reading for a degree in theology at the University of Oxford in the 1970s.


Soon after leaving, he became interested in exploring these ideas for television. “I’d got it into my head that there had never been any religious television – only programmes about religion,” he later recalled. “I had written a paper on the subject which recommended a new kind of television for this most neglected area, something on the lines of television, a kind of programme which would enter into the very nature of the religious experience and not simply observe it.”


Churton got his opportunity in the mid-1980s, when he produced a series on the Gnostics for British television. To accompany his series, he wrote his first book, The Gnostics, a history of this elusive esoteric movement from early Christianity to modern manifestations in such figures as Giordano Bruno and William Blake, and even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Nabat writes:

"Much-Too-Late Capitalism and Its Discontents"
Nabat


When the voracious appetite of capital is whetted, it searches for its primitive accumulation.(1) The state-capitalist regimes of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union in particular, mocked the corpses of Marx and Engels in order for their states to conform to the ruling bureaucrats’ real needs, which were the same needs as any newly industrializing (read: capitalist) nation: to colonize a people or class as primitive accumulation (in this particular historical example, primitive “socialist” accumulation).


The Russian peasantry, especially under Stalin but even during the rein of Lenin and Trotsky, made a good candidate for this process of brutal usurpation and forced collectivization. The labor of the peasantry and working class are usurped by the bureaucratic caste in power, whose class interests are both disguised by and personified in the figure of the Commissar or Chairman. As the whole illusory community is wrapped up in the fairytale of resolving the contradictions of capitalism – what cannot be resolved (class society) by even the most clever or capable, is strengthened beyond the wildest dreams of the players involved.

State power by its very nature is not based on transparency – relationships of domination, authority, and submission are not real, human relations. The official line of the state-capitalist regime is that of a “united people” still warding off the remnants of reaction. In reality, this is just a rallying cry for the continual maintenance of a society based on misery and alienation, a pseudo-community. It differs in no essential respects from American jingoism, a veritable “Support Our Troops” sticker forever branded on the national psyche.

"The End Of Copyright"

Ernest Adams
Gamasutra

I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of a major era in world
history. It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but the age of copyright
is drawing to a close. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but
it's inevitable. And I say this as the author of two books and over 75 columns
like this one, all copyrighted.

"Overgrowing the Government" Campaign

Marc Emery and the British Columbia Marijuana Party

The BCMP needs your help. The ongoing struggle against the extradition of the BC Three (Marc Emery, Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams) is of critical importance to the future of cannabis policy reform in Canada. With your help, we can win the fight and Canada can become an example of tolerant, compassionate and fact-based cannabis policy. Please help us Overgrow the Government!
What YOU Can Do To Free the BC Three

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