#the book said that passionate communist sex IS GOOD for building new future

[youre-responsible-not-us]

THIS.

Thinking. Very HARD about it. MANIFESTING.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

World War Z was published in 2006, but takes place in 2009 at the earliest.  Late in the book, astronaut Terry Knox states that the International Space Station took over 10 years to complete; it started construction in November 1998, and Chief of Staff Karl Rove Grover Carlson says that the Republican party barely eked back into power after a disastrous 2-termer who started a “brush fire war” in the Middle East (George W. Bush).  He mentions an election year, but he doesn’t specify if it was the new president’s first or second term, so it’s either set right after 2008 or 2012.  This was written before the Nintendo Wii was announced, but one chapter mentions that people brought their GameCubes with them as they fled their homes in search of safety in the frozen Canadian wilderness.  This same chapter also mentions that they didn’t know how to pick survival gear; a park ranger finds a SpongeBob SquarePants sleeping bag frozen in the mud because its owner didn’t know the difference between a child’s indoor sleeping bag for slumber parties and a real insulated survival bag for camping.

The new president is never named, he’s just told be be pro-big business and anti-regulation, pushing a placebo zombie vaccine through the FDA to jumpstart the economy.  When shit hits the fan, he is “sedated” and his vice president takes power; we’re never told what happened to the president, whether he was bitten or had a stroke, just that he was “sedated.”  His Vice President is directly implied to be Colin Powell; he’s former military with family in Jamaica and black.  He appoints Howard Dean to be his vice president to form a bipartisan coalition; he is never referred to by name, but it is clearly supposed to be Howard Dean.  He was a rising star in the Democratic party from Vermont whose wife is a doctor and whose career imploded after he had a passionate outburst.  In 2004, Howard Dean gave a speech where he started passinately screaming about how he was gonna start sweeping state primaries and ride a wave into the White House, punctuating his point by going “HHEEUEAHHGH!!”  This was political suicide in 2004, and he was laughed out of the race.  In the book, he is referred to only as “the Whacko” because of this.  It is implied that he was Powell’s second choice for VP, his first being Barack Obama; the Whacko says that the Democrats wanted somebody else, somebody of the same skin color as the president, but that the country wasn’t ready for that.  In 2004, Obama was a candidate for senate in Illinois, so popular and so well spoken that he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention before he even won his seat; then and there, pundits already had him pegged as the first black president, they could see the writing on the walls.  The Whacko becomes president when Powell dies of stress, but he is consistently referred to only as the wartime Vice President, out of respect for his boss.

Also, the Attorney General is implied to be Rudy Giuliani; all that is said about him was that he was the mayor of New York and once tried to give himself emergency powers to stay in office after his term.  Giuliani did exactly that after 9/11.

Other real life figures mentioned in the book

Fidel Castro; a ton of Cuban Americans flee the continent and return to the island during the zombie war, and he jumpstarts the economy by putting them to work as cheap laborers and slowly integrating them back into Cuban society.  He rehabilitates his image by stepping down as dictator and democratizing the country, voting himself out of office before the “nortecubanos” could hang him for decades of war crimes.

Nelson Mendela, referred to by his birth name Rolihlahla, the father of modern South Africa, he personally invites Paul Redekker, a former apartheid era political analyst, to solve the zombie problem; in the 80s, Redekker created a plan for the white minority government in case the black majority ever rose up against them.  In real life, Mandela lowered the temperature when he was elected president, saying that revenge against the apartheid government would do more harm than good.  In the story, Mandela uses this as justification to reuse the apartheid era plan to handle the zombie outbreak instead.  Redekker is so overcome by his compassion and forgiveness that he has a mental episode and dissociates, believing himself to be a black South African.

Kim Jong-il, the dictator of North Korea, he withdraws all troops from the DMZ and shuts the entire country down.  After months of radio silence, it is revealed that the entire country’s population has vanished; all satellite imagery shows a desolate wasteland, no zombies, but no humans either. He presumably moved everyone into subterranean bunker systems where he not only control their lives as on the surface, but now their access to food, water, and air.  He presumably became the god emperor he always wanted to be; either that, or the entire tunnel complex has been overrun, turning every man woman and child in North Korea into zombies.  The South Korean government refuses to send a expedition into the North to figure out what happened, lest they open up one of the tunnels and unleash millions of zombies onto the surface.

Martin Scorsese, mentioned in passing only as “Marty,” a friend of world famous film director Roy Elliot, who himself is a thinly veiled pastiche of Steven Spielberg.  Interestingly enough, the audio book features Martin Scorsese doing the voice of the conartist who created the placebo vaccine

One chapter has a ton of vapid celebrities hole together in a fortified mansion on Long Island, and takes great care to show each of them getting torn apart not by zombies but by regular people who storm the facility because they were stupid enough to broadcast their location on reality television.  A redneck with a “Get’er Done” hat (Larry the Cable Guy) and some bald guy with diamond earrings (Howie Mandel) blow themselves up with a grenade.  Rival political commentators, an annoying guy who talks about feminization of western society and a leathery blonde (Bill Maher and Ann Coulter) have end-of-the-world viking sex as the facility burns to the ground.  A dumb starlet (Paris Hilton) is killed by one of her handlers and her little rat dog escapes on foot.  A radio shock jock (Howard Stern) actually survives the war and restarts his show.

Michael Stipe of REM joins the army to fight the zombies

Another war veteran mentions how his brother used to have a bunch of Mel Brooks’ old comedy skits on vinyl record, and how he and his squad acted out the “Boy meets Girl” puppet skit with some human skulls.  Mel Brooks is author and narrator Max Brooks’ father.

Queen Elizabeth II, refuses to evacuate England when the island is overrun by zombies.  She intends to remain in Buckingham Palace “for the duration,” mirroring the fact that her parents refused to evacuate to Canada during World War II.

Vladimir Putin declares himself Tsar of the Holy Russian Empire, an ultra-orthodox religious state that has armed priests execute political dissidents under the guise of mercy killing people who have been bitten by zombies.

Yang Liwei, the first “taikonaut” (Chinese astronaut) has a space station named after him

While the main conflict is about government responses to the zombie pandemic, we see glimpses of a greater war torn planet.

A major plot line involves a Chinese Civil War which sees the entire communist politburo nuked out of existence by a rebel sub commander, as well as an attempted “scorched space policy” where the government planned to blow up their space station with scuttling charges to cause a cascade of space debris to encircle the Earth and prevent any other countries from launching missions in the future (this is known as Kessler Syndrome in real life, and was featured as the inciting incident of the 2013 movie Gravity).  The People’s Republic becomes the United Federation.

Iran and Pakistan destroy each other in nuclear war; everyone thought it would be India and Pakistan, but they had very close diplomatic infrastructure in place to prevent such a catastrophe; Pakistan helped Iran build a nuclear arsenal, but as millions of refugees fled from India through Pakistan to the east, Iran had to blow up some Pakistani bridges to stem the flow of zombies, which led to a border war and eventually total nuclear retaliation.

Floridians flee to Cuba, Wisconsinites flee to Canada, the federal government flees to Hawaii.  Everything east of the Rockies is abandoned and ruled by warlords until the government sorts itself out and mounts an expedition to clear the continent of zombies by literally marching an unbroken line of soldiers stretching from Canada to Mexico across the wasteland to the Atlantic.

Israel withdraws from Gaza and the West Bank to become super isolationist, building a wall around the entire country to stop the zombies getting in (they were the first country to respond to the pandemic, and the most successful), but the religious right rebels against the secular left in a civil war that sees Jerusalem ceded to a unified Palestine.

It is an amazing, multifaceted story with so much going on that nobody recognizes.  It was written as a response to the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror.  It’s about a geopolitical shift, a change in the status quo, a disaster from which the world never recovers; America before 9/11 was a very different place than American after 9/11.  Iraq and Afghanistan changed everything, and we’re still feeling their effects to this day; the story uses the zombie apocalypse as the next big international disaster the world must adapt to.  World War Z is World War III with zombies, and I think it would do a lot better if it were published today, now that we’ve had several decades to respond to the fall of the Soviet Union and the endless wars in the Middle East and a global pandemic.

[johndrakesecretagent]

thought for the day from Dr. Bones

Greetings one and all! Dr. Bones here, Reporter of Fortune and unrepentant magical terrorist. Today, or rather should I say all this week, I'll be answering any questions you have in regards to the Occult and Anarchism. I'm an Egoist-Communist and fervant Insurrectionist as well, so feel free to throw a few of those questions at me if you'd like. Grabbing myself a beer let us propose a question: What does the Occult have to do with Anarchism? For me the quest of the Occult is one of the individual gaining understanding and power, a supremely Anarchist goal. The Occultist is aware they live in a primordial spiritual jungle, a vast and lovecraftian dimension where ancient gods and even corporate logos exert an etheric force upon the minds and bodies of all things physical. The Occultist, unlike the Mystic, doesn’t seek mere navel-gazing or mindless union with this often terrifying landscape but rather aims to directly benefit from it. Where a priest prays to god for forgiveness and grace I’m in a graveyard yelling at dead people to help me win at a blackjack game. The worldview of the Occultist is a very Gnostic one: the ancient gnostics going so far to “bind” the forces of the Zodiac so they wouldn’t be under their power. We watch for signs, omens, and are keenly aware of negative influences certain environments/beings have on humanity. Hunter S. Thompson captured the view quite well in “The Rum Diary:” “He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.” There is a strain of nihilism present here. Evil, in the sense of beings that gain sustenance from human suffering, is not some grand mistake but part of the program. There is no kind and loving father-figure constantly being outwitted by some wily devil. The world as we see it is less of an accident or a fallen paradise and more of a pressure chamber designed to enact change and growth in the individual soul for purposes perhaps too terrible to mention here. Better for now to reflect on what it IS rather than what it MEANS: "Our world (and perhaps even others) is the synthesis of the constant flux between the urge to create and destroy, between yes and no, between life and death and the intelligences behind them. Blessings and Curses, Struggle and Rest, Love and Hate, Life and Death, these things are revealed not to be mere abstractions but currents through which the spirits and gods themselves manifest. The material world, far from being a mere 'ladder to higher realms' reveals itself to be a melting pot of forces, drives, and desires; a battleground between infinite variations of intelligent influences and resonances. Behind consensus reality lies, in the words of Nietzsche, 'a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.'"(http://bit.ly/2sO60mZ) The Occultist then rebels against the natural order, rebels against her place on the totem pole in the Spiritual Ecology. She meets with strange things in the darkness, and by threats or coos she enters a relationship with spirits Stirner would have called a Union of Egoists. Both benefit, both get paid, an exchange of equals or at least beings with a shared interest. Polytheists may worship the gods, we personally prefer to cut deals with them. The Occultist desires to elevate themselves, and as such often comes into direct collision with the hierarchical world of the State and Capitalism. The Occult seems to have split into two veins: the ceremonial magic with fancy wands and other horseshit so loved by royalty and the rude yet powerful tradition of folk magic. There, with scraps and simple tools, conjurers called the very forces of creation to manifest new and better lives for themselves or others. This vein of magic is where I make my home, specifically in the The African-American and Southern tradition of Hoodoo. It is replete with spells on how to avoid the police, how to bend your boss to your will, and even how sex-workers can chase out unruly Johns. It is poor people getting ahead and proving the “laws” of caste, gender, or race are merely spooks haunting the heads of others; class warfare on a metaphysical level. Now, as more Occultists face the dystopian nightmare-realm we call “the future,” they are beginning to embrace this political nature. My book “Curse Your Boss, Hex the State, Take Back the World,”(http://bit.ly/2rUyqdB) is perhaps the first to explicitly make this case and take it much further: “You Occultists, you Witches, you Wizards and Conjurers! Do you not desire to be free? To cast off the chains of limitation and break out from this most wretched of prisons? Do you desire to no longer be tools but something greater? How can you exist, how can you stand to know that what makes you marvel and wonder is only half-formed within you? You have done well in a one-legged race: now is the time to put on both shoes. Max Stirner said, 'Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.' Do you want your magical nature, perhaps a part of you that you hold so dear, to be sublimated into the mold of Good Citizen or Good Worker? Do want to sacrifice your life, your dreams, and your passions any longer to the idea of the people and new gods above you? How much longer will you submit to their power? As the visionary group For Ourselves wrote in ‘The Right to be Greedy’: 'We are on the verge of liberation only when it can be said of each of us that he/she has become so rebellious, so irrepressible, and so unruly that she/he cannot be mastered by anything less than his/her self.' To be free we must take a hammer to the icons of the false gods, we must destroy Capitalism, State, and Society, along with all the focus-grouped illusions and morality given to us by the Media. We must divest them of all power, all sacredness, until they mean nothing to us. We must not only burn down each cobweb left by them in our minds, but cleanse ourselves from whatever negativity these plague-ridden spirits have brought into our lives. We must offer nothing but derisive laughter to the pimps and priests of this pantheon that enslaves us. Nothing should remain unwounded from our own sharp scalpel of criticism, every 'ought,' 'should,' 'must,' 'need to,' and 'duty' must be ruthlessly analyzed. If we find it implanted within us, rather than arising from our own will, we must cast it out like the infection it is. Only by divesting these gods and spooks of all psychical power, all worship, can we begin to see them for what they truly are. With the Web of Ideology in flames and the Ideological Telescope smashed to pieces, we release that power, that energy back into ourselves to be used freely as we see fit. Abandon this Spectral Cage to the petty pimps, the power hungry and the puerile peons that build it brick by brick in service to ever rotating masters. Our future lies elsewhere.”(http://bit.ly/2rUyqdB) It might be said then that the Occult is the science of bending reality to the Will, or at least enlisting intelligences that can do so for you. We have found the reality where we are owned by the State, made a commodity by Capital, and raised to be a drone by Society inimical to our spirits.. And so we must destroy them.