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We are teh Borgs!

From “Obama: All US Troops Will Leave Iraq by Year’s End. The War is Over“

Ok, so just in time for thousands of currently-peaceful OWS protesters to be hitting the streets of America in non-violent expression of their disgust with corporate America’s involvement in government, the “war” in Iraq ends and 50,000 US troops will be coming home.

50,000 combat veterans with specialized training and direct combat experience in urban guerrilla warfare.

How convenient is that?

Expect the “National Guard” to be deployed. Hopefully it’s just paranoia, and that will never happen, and it won’t get any worse for us than it did for the hippies. Hope for that.

But prepare for the worst.

The way I see it, the 1% has a couple of factions. The Warren Buffet/Starbucks faction that supports higher taxes (because they STILL make more in profit in a year than the 99% make their whole lives) and job creation because it’s a nice way to spend their money and it shows the 1% are Americans too. The Others are the old school Hawks, who believe they earned their money, worked hard for it, and by God, they aren’t going to give up a penny just because the lazy unwashed rabble are protesting that life is hard.

The problem is, the Hawks have the law on their side. They wrote most of it, buying or renting senators and congressmen (on both sides of the aisle) to vote it into law. The Government is legally required to defend them from rioting mobs.

So in your magical preparations, take these things into account.

And be careful with your magic. There are things called “unintended consequences” that you have to manage and mitigate.

In fact, if you’re new to this whole political magic thing, please don’t go running in binding everything the social media funny posters say are evil. One guy I know mentioned “binding congress.” I don’t know what he meant by that, but imo, congress is already bound, bound to corporations, self interest, greed, and ideology. I’d rather see them freed from that, freed to govern, empowered in righteousness (the real kind), graced with wisdom, inspired to brilliance. Wouldn’t it be awesome if for once in history, the day was saved by about 535 Americans governing for the common good?

Be careful. Don’t make things worse. Just because someone made an image and posted it to FaceBook doesn’t mean it’s right, true, or even applicable in your personal politics. Do some research, find out what the reality is, so you can target your focused changes at things that will make it better for everyone.

Not only am I missing awesome live theater in Prague, the green love of Amsterdam, all of Ireland, and the birthplace of The Doctor, I’m also apparently missing out on a pretty cool Dia de los Muertes celebration next Saturday in Glastonbury.

If you’re a European looking for something to do, check it out. Scarlet Imprint and Hadean Press will be represented at booths, and Jake Stratton-Kent will be speaking, among others.

I gotta see if there’s something going on in Baltimore I can participate in.

You ever have one of those things that you really meant to do all week, but then forgot because other shit came up, and then it was late and you hadn’t done what you really meant to do on time?

Well, for my readers in the Prague vicinity, I meant to tell you about a play you should really go check out. One of our Gentlemen for Jupiter is involved in the production, and from what I’ve seen of his work it’s going to be brilliant. He’s done stage adaptations of Lovecraft’s work in the past, so … you can imagine.

Here’s the plug that I meant to publish all fucking week long. The last show is Saturday night, I think. So hopefully you get this before you make plans for tonight, you Eastern European readers, and make every effort to attend.

Blood, Love and Rhetoric present “The Caretaker” – Pinter’s dark and poignant drama about life on the lunatic fringes of a collapsing society – an evening of menace, suspense, violence, terror and torture.

Re-imagined by Blood, Love and Rhetoric, “The Caretaker” is transported to a 2012 post-holocaust London. Thursday sold out but tickets still available for Friday (21st) at 7pm and 9pm or Saturday (22nd) at 5pm and 8pm. email blrtheatre@gmail.com for more information. Looking forward to seeing you at the show.

Michael Cecchettelli, author of Crossed Keys, has recently released Mardukite Magick, an ebook covering a technique for Working the 50 Names of Marduk in harmony with the Jupiter current. It’s available at his blog, another thing you should check out.

This book is quick and to the point, and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s everything a book about magic should be, in my opinion. It provides the basics of what you need to know, and then it jumps right into the magical rites. It forms the framework, and then it fleshes it out to the point where you can start filling in the details on your own.

This is not as much a book about Marduk as it is a book that puts you in contact with Marduk so you can find out about him first hand. That’s awesome. It reminds me a lot of my own Modern Angelic Grimoire, in that it provides a quick and easy reference guide to everything you need to get started, tells a little about personal experiences, but is mostly focused on getting you in touch with the entities so you can get on with doing the Work yourself.

And I really love the tone Michael has in his writings. He’s got this formal informality about his writing that is both authoritative and yet approachable at the same time. In this book, he focuses on the traditional Sumerian sources for his information, and the ritual format and style flows readily and easily. This approach doesn’t take a lot of specialized tools, and the rites themselves are fun. Just reading through them, I felt the Jupiter Current Michael is tapping begin to flow.

My favorite part is the table at the end with the traditional 50 names of Marduk and the description of each. It’s chock full of goodness and insight into the many facets of this Jovian deity. I found things in there that I will be incorporating into my own Work that I hadn’t thought of, like how there’s a facet of the Jupiter current that sustains all things all the time, an ongoing maintenance that I hadn’t thought about before.

All in all, this book provides the information you need to establish a Working relationship with the Jupiter Current through the God Marduk, and the details you need to develop that relationship over time. I can easily see a magician immersing themselves in this system for years, and still only just scratching the surface of its potential.

Eventually.

Remember when Clinton went on Arsenio Hall and played the sax?

Remember when your biggest fashion conundrum was resolved entirely by figuring out which flannel shirt smelled the least bad?

Remember when we saved the world from Y2K?

Remember when we built the internet?

Remember when we didn’t really have any hope for the future, but it was alright, because there was slack?

Where did the slack go? I’ll tell you where it went.

The 1% took all the slack.

Sure, some of us are a bit bitter and resigned still, some of us are having the same reaction I had at first to this OWS thing.

“Oh, you’re getting fucked? Welcome to my world, trapped between the boomers and Gen Y, and nobody’s ever given a shit about us, but we do everything useful anyway.”

Here, it’s put much better in this Gizmodo article: Generation X is Sick of your Bullshit.

But some of us are not putting up with it. Some of us are remembering you can’t steal slack.

And we’re taking it back.

Because this is how it happens.

Ok, so I gave everyone a heaping pile of SHIT about meeting at Starbucks to plan OWS, did I not?

Well, I was APPARENTLY a bit hasty. Check this shit out:

Here’s the idea they came up with: Americans themselves would start
lending to small businesses, with Starbucks serving as the middleman.
Starbucks would find financial institutions willing to loan to small
businesses. Starbucks customers would be able to donate money to the
effort when they bought their coffee. Those who gave $5 or more would
get a red-white-and-blue wristband, which Schultz labeled “Indivisible.”
“We are hoping it will bring back pride in the American dream,” he
says. The tag line will read: “Americans Helping Americans.”

THIS.

This is what I was talking about. Subsidize small business, I said. Get small businesses moving, and the jobs will follow. And it’s STARBUCKS, the very corp I was knocking who’s making it happen. Fuckin’ figures.

But fuck it, I support this.

Start your own online business for under $100. 

Jump into the gig economy. (Got that link off Gordon’s latest Apocalypse post, which is chock full of nougatey goodness.)

Plan on growing your business over the next year to where you are the job creator. Don’t wait for corporations to do it for you, even though apparently they aren’t all evil greedy bastards with no solutions, only ways to get more money. Don’t wait for Government to do it for you, though I’m starting to feel this weird feeling of hope that there might actually be something good that comes from all this OWS stuff. I still suspect nothing good will come of it, but … it would be nice if I’m wrong.

And then magic your Business to Success.

And while I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to use credit to expand and grow in the digital age, we now have access to it if necessary. Maybe a couple grand here or there will get you the materials you need to take things to the next level in your product line, increasing demand and allowing you to hire people. Who knows? It’s an option though, when a couple weeks ago it was not.

Do it yourself. I’ve already got one part time employee helping me out with my online business. She’s gathering materials for talismans, handling incoming orders, taking care of shipping, and doing a lot of the administration, freeing me up to concentrate on providing the occult services and writing. Business is booming. I’m telling you, it’s not only possible, it’s effective.

Things are really changing. Who knew?

Hey Magician, how’s it going?

You know how pissed everyone is that the wealthy elite control all teh monies?

How pissed would they be if they knew a handful of occultists around the world were the primary movers and shakers of this shared reality we experience?

How many magicians* actively participating in the creation of their experienced world do you think are at work today?

Based on book sales statistics for the last decade, about 1.1% of the population is interested in spirituality, self help, occult, and new age beliefs. Out of all the people interested in these topics that you know, how many of them are actually actively creating their world?

Purely as an estimate based on my personal observations in three states over the last twenty years, I’d say there are probably two competent practicing reality engineers for every fifty people who buy books about this stuff, of various paths and traditions. And that’s a generous estimate, in my opinion, as most of those folks are still figuring out how to do it, and a lot of them will get distracted for years at a time. So that’s 4% of the 1.1%.

That’s 0.044% of the population that’s actively participating in creating the world using occult means, spiritual assistance, eastern occult philosophies, or new age techniques of some kind.

And guess what most of them were focused on?

• Sex: Fuckin’ and relationships is the number one magical service requested, and most people’s first attempts at spellcraft were related to someone they wanted to fuck.
• Money: Wealth and prosperity is the number two magical service requested. Moving up through the ranks of society, getting an edge, making businesses profitable… In other words, doing everything in our power to become the 1% the OWS is railing against.

That’s right. As the great philosopher once said, “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.“**

It’s Elemental

The good news is that most of us, if we’re serious about using magic to make money, eventually realize the role money has to take if we’re going to be successful in conjuring it on demand. It becomes the servant, and not the goal. That’s the key.

And we stop trying to get to be the 1%. At least, that’s what’s happened to me. I don’t want to be at the top, I simply want to be free to pursue what I want to pursue when I want to pursue it. For years I figured that meant amassing great stockpiles of money, the interest on which I could support a decent lifestyle. In other words, becoming the 1%.

I didn’t want billions, just $4.2 million. Not a lot, really, when you think about it.

But see, that was the means to the goal, not the goal. The actual goal is to get out of the game, to play my own game by my own rules, to rule myself.

OWS is about giving more people the opportunity to achieve that goal. The grip on the wealth held by the wealthy is tight, and they are strangling the 99%, making sure they can’t get in on the deal, pushing them even further away from the end goal.

More on that later, it’s miller time.

But before I head out, I should acknowledge that I may have been wrong about Soros funding the OWS. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But we’ll see where things go when Adbusters starts rolling out their demands. It’s entirely possible their planned demands get washed under the masses they’ve organized though, at this point.

* Or sorcerers, root doctors, folk healers, shamans, masters, gurus, priests, goes, theurgists, or whatever you want to call them.

** to which Philosoraptor replies, “But didn’t Biggie say mo money mo problems?”