C-Realm Podcast

KMO welcomes Jan Irvan, host of the Gnostic Media Podcast, and Jarett Sanchez, host of The Next Step Podcast, back to the C-Realm to discuss the Trivium, the bedrock of classical liberal arts education which prepares young minds to be effective critical thinkers and self-directed learners. Jarett helps KMO summarize an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers about how the Trivium mirrors and takes advantage of the stages of childhood cognitive development, and Jan describes why the Trivium is now reserved for elites and systematically denied to the children of the proletariat in compulsory public schooling as a means of social control.   Music by ALLFLAWS.

KMO and Olga continue the conversation with Jay Smith and Jeff Wilburn. This week the topic moves from race in the Peak Oil narrative to the prospects for atheistic rational materialism in a post-petroleum milieu. The same fossil fuel windfall that has allowed industry to replace the work of human and animal muscles with machines and thus allowed for the emancipation of millions of people from forced labor has also allowed a flowering of scientific rationalism and an atheistic worldview. Might some of the moral progress of recent centuries prove ephemeral in the wake of Peak Oil? The consolation of religion appeals to humans in times of uncertainty and hardship. So what are the prospects for science and atheism in the context of the industrial collapse and population contraction?   Music by The Weal and the Woe.   The Sam Harris clips come from here and here.

KMO welcomes Jay Smith and Jeff Wilburn to the C-Realm to reflect upon the Age of Limits conference. Jay and Jeff, along with their girlfriends, accounted for most of the African-American conference-goers, and this leads to a discussion of how the on-going Peak Oil conversation is one carried out primarily by whites and, to some extent, aims to preserve white privilege and assumes that whites must take the leadership role in deciding how best to address the challenges of the coming long emergency. Both Jay and Jeff initially found the work of James Howard Kunstler to be valuable but later came to chafe at Jim's seemingly dismissive attitude about black culture and the supposed failure of African-Americans to assimilate into mainstream society. Music by Monstah Black.         Rock Star Written by: Reginald Ellis Crump a.k.a Monstah Black I’ve woken up every morning with a new breed attitude, Stuck like glue Running through the dark corridors in my head Seen the fire in my eyes, Wonder why I’m such a voodoo chile And people hate as I walk by I’m rubber your glue, What you say to me bounces off and it sticks to you I’m fire and your ice I don’t give a damn what you think I am, Your nightmare, A pretty Man A NEWROMANTICAFROGYPSYPUNKFUNKDISCOGLAMROCKSTAR I’ve seen the look of evil, staring down the alley I’ve felt the hatred from the high school sweethearts of yesterday I’ve got the look from prom queens, Aching just to look this way Hungry football stars, Without the balls to admit they like my sway. A NEWROMANTICAFROGYPSYPUNKFUNKDISCOGLAMROCKSTAR I fell in love with a new threshold today, reached beyond the super power Intake breath until it fades away, eternal wilting flower I crossed my legs and batted my eyes, in hope to defeat the norm I painted my skull scarlet red to invoke a punk rock storm A NEWROMANTICAFROGYPSYPUNKFUNKDISCOGLAMROCKSTAR There’s a tiny man squatting in my corner, named Spectacle Deep in the doldrums of my Vanity Laughing as he cast his spells, sipping Champagne and living Glamorously Ripping things to piece and pretending he lives in Madagascar He smells like Hendrix riffs in a dark abandoned punk rock bar A NEWROMANTICAFROGYPSYPUNKFUNKDISCOGLAMROCKSTAR

KMO talks with Jonathan Moll about the spread of ideas, religion, the potential benefits and pitfalls of psychedelic plants and chemicals and the harms that the Drug War does to civil society and to the ability of people raised on prohibitionist propaganda to think clearly and behave like adults. The show begins and ends with reference to the irresponsible and opportunistic comments made to the news media by Armando Aguilar,  president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, in which he conflates MDPV (sometimes sold legally as "Bath Salts") with LSD and asserts that the assailant in the recent cannibalistic assault there acted under the influence of "a new form of LSD." Music by Andrew Woods.

KMO and the Lovely Olga K talk with Peter Bebergal about psychedelics, drug addiction, magical thinking, paranoia, fate, and spirituality. Peter's book, Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood deals with all of these issues, and Peter had a much rougher time growing up in the 80's than did KMO, even though their interests and cultural touchstones were so similar. They both had a group of friends who fancied that they could contact the divine by altering their consciousness with psychedelics, they both endured the paranoia of living in a culture that criminalizes such exploration, but Peter's path lead him through much darker territory. Music by Weal and Woe.

KMO and Olga welcome Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile and the Observatory Gallery at Proteus Gowanus and Peter Bebergal, author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss the intersection of magickal ritual, religious tradition, psychedelic exploration, and the thirst for gnosis. KMO summarizes arguments from Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman, and Olga, acting as proxy for the regular C-Realm listeners likely to be bewildered by this conversation, asks for clarification at key moments.  This conversation continues in Psychonautica 084. Music by Not Waving But Drowning. Cover art painting by Arik Roper. Both Pam Grossman and Peter Bebergal have recently appeared as guests on the Expanding Mind radio show/podcast with Erik Davis.  

KMO welcomes Eric Boyd back to the program to discuss possibilities for kicking the energy can down the road with cold fusion. Friend of the C-Realm, Joe S. joins the conversation to represent the viewpoint that free energy could be bad news, as it would allow humans to continue the project of constructing global dominance hierarchies and despoiling the biosphere. KMO plays a clip of Jeremy Rifkin talking about the ideas in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Rifkin claims that advancing communications technology has allowed humans to expand the sphere of beings with whom they identify and for whom they feel empathy. With more time and energy at our disposal, might humans come to extend our empathic concern to include the entire biosphere? The conversation concludes with a discussion of the potential impact of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.  Music by Alexandre Tannous and Simon G. Powell.

KMO speaks with Professor Peter Moskos, author of Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District and In Defense of Flogging. Peter speaks against the drug war for L.E.A.P. and he opposed the drug war before, during, and after his stint as a police officer. The conversation starts off with references to the television shows The Wire and Breaking Bad and covers the slowly-changing public perception of drugs and the drug war, the drop in the crime rate, the bloated prison system in the United States, and the role of immigrants on crime rates.

KMO talks about sigil magic with Erik Davis. After playing clips of comic book authors Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, KMO asks Erik if, maybe, the real danger of results-based magic isn't so much that it does not work but that it does. Could sigil magic work only to alter the consciousness of the magician and clear away the obstacles of unworkable attitudes and belief structures, or does it put the practitioner in contact with supernatural agents and energies which might demand a high price for their cooperation? In the second half of the program, KMO talks with Cheyenna Layne Weber of the Brooklyn Food Coalition about the upcoming Brooklyn Food Conference. The episode ends with a birthday greeting from the Dopefiend and Max Freakout. Music by Southside.

KMO welcomes composer and ethnomusicologist, Alexandre Tannous, to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about music, entheogens, shamanism, and techniques for accessing alternate states of consciousness and activating the body's innate healing capacity. KMO intercuts audio clips from the movie Jim, for which Alexandre composed the score and ends with a reading from the book, Nemu's End: History, Psychology, and Poetry of the Apocalypse.   The conversation with Alexandre continues here and here. Music by Spankinhide (Available at the Ethnosuperlounge Shop)

KMO continues his conversation with Sally Erickson and describes how selling insurance contributed to his education as a podcaster. In the second half of the program, the Lovely Olga K., co-host of the Z-Realm Podcast, and Justin Ritchie, co-host of the Extraenvironmentalist Podcast, traverse a lot of conversational ground with discussions of gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Corporations undergoing catabolic collapse, New York city as an environment of plentiful energy that supports a great profusion of ecological niches, and how it is easy to dismiss all potential collapse narratives. Everything seems so stable. Music by Not Waving But Drowning.

KMO, Olga, and Justin Ritchie, co-host of the Extraenvironmentalist Podcast, talk about how people are adapting to economic decline, particularly in the increasingly wide-spread realization that a college education has morphed from a entry into the middle class into the express route to debt slavery. In the second half of the podcast, Sally Erickson, the producer of the film What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire, asks KMO to account for his refusal to sacrifice his own happiness for the sake of a respectable seat at the grown-up's table of traditional employment.   Music by Southside.

With no pre-recorded interview material, KMO fills the hour with his seat of the pants ramblings about the Adam Curtis documentary, All Watched Over by Machine of Loving Grace, the Drug War, the commune movement of the 1970s and the cynicism that springs from a naive belief in cyber-Utopias and the so-called Balance of Nature. Correction: In this episode, I read a passage from the book In Defense of Flogging and made reference to Cop In The Hood, two books by Peter Moskos. I mistakenly referred to the author as Peter Moskowitz. Music by Not Waving But Drowning with background music by Takasitar.

KMO welcomes the Archdruid, John Michael Greer, back to the C-Realm to talk about the content of his new book, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth: an introduction to spiritual ecology. JMG explains why beauty springs from limits and how New Age abundance belief systems like The Secret do not have their source in the teachings of ancient mystery schools and why the actual mystery teachings are best communicated using the language of ecology in our particular historical moment. KMO concludes the podcast with some thoughts on Mike Daisey's fall from grace. Music by Kimi Lundie.

KMO welcomes Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg to the C-Realm to map out an escape from the filter bubble. Even if you're logged out, when you do a Google search, Google's algorithms go to great lengths to figure out who you are and what you want to see. You many wonder, "Well, what's wrong with Google finding the stuff that I will be interested in?" Gabriel has a few answers to that question worth considering. Privacy concerns also motivate Gabriel, and he details some of the less-than-obvious ways that your online activity tells corporations things about you that you might prefer to keep to yourself. At the end of this episode, KMO plays some material from Jon Rappoport on the power of the imagination. Music by ALLFLAWS [ted id=1091] Eli Pariser's TED Talk.