Skilluminati Research

A Simple Question About Violence

Posted May 08, 2008 13 comments

While I'm working on the next round of material (for a number of sites) I would like to pose a question to the folks who've been commenting so far. Frank discussion of weapons and personal security is of course "dangerous," in terms of both potential consquences for myself and the potential applications of this information.

However, I'm also of the opinion that Western culture is very much full of shit when it comes to violence. I could write a separate essay on how violence can be simultaneously morally wrong and acceptable entertainment. I find it hard to reconcile how violence can be forbidden for citizens and compulsory for soldiers, or how violence can be admirable when practiced by our military, yet despicable when practiced by others.

I think it's a white luxury to even discuss "whether or not" we should be using violence, when fireams and explosives are a fact of life for the majority of the humans on Earth. We are a planet at war, but yet most of us with Internets will never be touched by it. I have been told that Ghandi's name does not come up very often in Palestine, but I've never been there.

So my question: how does a super-empowered free moral agent approach violence in 2012? Is violent action part of your toolkit?

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5GW Defense: John Robb on “The Resilient Community”

Posted May 01, 2008 5 comments

Let's rewind.

I've been talking about 5th Generation Warfare, but that's because I'm a hyperactive little kid who's fascinated by everything in the Universe. Here's a remarkable fact: 4GW is a problem that hasn't been solved yet.

Sure, there's a lot of written material about counter-insurgency operations, some of it truly brilliant. However, on a reality-based level, 4GW outfits are still doing billions in damage to better-armed, better-funded nations and corporations. In the face of this continuous loss, something remarkable has happened: the generals and the technocrats are sounding like damn hippies and calling for smaller, sustainable communities, energy independence and other radical cultural changes.

The important point to remember is never underestimate the motivation, patience, and creativity of an adversary! He is attacking against a defense that is naïve, arrogant, unbalanced, and fragmented. We are critically dependent on our technology, but the gap between offensive and defensive capability is huge and growing. We must find a different path.

We have to recognize that our systems are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks and find ways to defend against them.

Now, that sure sounds like Amory Lovins, especially his classic article "How to Get Real Security." But it's not: that quote is actually from James Gosler at Sandia National Laboratories. Of course, scientists are always saying weird things, so perhaps his call for rethinking the fundamental infrastructure of Western Civilization is just another voice in the wilderness. Gosler made that statement at the 2008 Unrestricted Warfare Symposium held by Johns Hopkins. The proceedings of the conference are available online, and there were some definite gems in what I read through last night.

Here's another clear-cut sign that 4GW remains an unsolved problem -- witness the palpable frustration of Philip Mudd, the "Associate Executive Assistant Director" of the FBI's National Security Branch:

What we have is an architecture of youth that is not organized in ways that we have seen in the past. They do not touch a known person; they do not touch a known cell. We cannot use known security tools. We cannot follow their phone calls because they are not calling anybody. We cannot follow who they are talking to on a computer because they are self-radicalizing on their own computer, and they are not chatting. We cannot follow them in terms of a vehicle or somebody they are meeting on the street because they are not a member of a cell. How do we stop them?

Good question, Mr. Mudd...

The Answer is: You Can't.

You can't defend strip malls, interstate commerce, nationwide electrical grids and our current system of agriculture. You can't defend the physical infrastructure of the internet and you can't defend huge borders.

As the distribution of power gets wider and deeper, old forms like nations and imperialism are no longer sustainable. As a general design rule: if it's not sustainable, it's not secure.

I'm a Vermont native -- an obscure part of the continental US, for American readers who might be unfamiliar -- and most folks there reached this conclusion about 200 years ago and have been trying to reverse the mistake of getting United to the US Federal Government. So it's remarkable that John Robb would be headed to my homeland to give a speech on "Defending Our Energy Security -Building Resilient Communities." (He'll be at the 2008 Vermont Distributed Energy Conference, if you'd like to attend.)

John Robb is a subject of controversy in 5GW circles, but more importantly, he's a really solid author and an original thinker. His last book, Brave New War, was excellent brainfood, and his blog Global Guerrillas is the best coverage on the topic I've found. So I'm obviously looking forward to his next project:

My goal with this book? I hope this book will provide readers with a useful eschatology for the current global system and a conceptual blueprint for the DIY (do-it-yourself) efforts necessary to build a Resilient Community.

The reaction the book will get? For those that completely tied to or immersed in the legacy system, this book will be a very scary read. For those that are fearless and willing to adapt in order to progress, it will become a go to reference.

You can get an early sense through his previous posts: exploring the pressures behind this transition with Transition Towns and Food and the RC, an exploration of energy independence through Microgrids, and the original brainstorm, The Resilient Community.

"The Internet is Killing Us"

That's from Philip Mudd again...I'll give him the last word:

CONCLUSION

In the nuclear age when the enemy was the Soviet Union, we had the luxury of imagery to look at sites, SIGINT (signal intelligence) to look at communications, HUMINT (human intelligence) to recruit sources and defectors, and international organizations like the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to watch material. Try to apply a single one of those to a 17-year-old in the United States today.

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The Language of Power II

Posted Apr 28, 2008 30 comments

When I wrote "Plain and Simple: Fuck 9/11," the title wasn't an afterthought or even a joke. Words were chosen carefully for maximum effect and sure enough, I still get an email a week about an article I wrote a year ago. It was in the context of asking 9/11 Truth activists what they expected that I raised a question I've been chewing on ever since:

Be honest with yourself: who are you asking for justice? Are you expecting the same power structure that has been running the United States of America for the past 50 years to give up because you’re right? Because you can prove mathematically that two buildings collapsed faster than they should have? Because you have thousands of pages of evidence to prove every point you’re making? Does the truth matter? Seriously. Does the truth matter? Or does power matter?

That's really the central question, and I'm not proposing it as an either-or. Both would be nice, but I'm also proposing it might be too late for that kind of hope. I've had a number of Skilluminati readers email the instant classic quote from an anonymous source, of course, in the Bush administration -- named as "a senior advisor to Bush":

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

This article emerged from some conversations I had after the first installment of The Language of Power. I was only sketching out a few points I would like to state much more clearly here.

Happiness is Slavery

Until about six months ago, I was unable to put my finger on why Barack Obama makes me uneasy.

I was having a (deeply hilarious) conversation with an Obama volunteer who stated it perfectly for me. She told me that Obama was all about how American 20-somethings were transforming -- from the Me generation to the We generation.

Skilluminati Research has nothing to do with the United States or the US military and I personally view all 195 "legitimate" nation-states on Earth as equally damaging to human progress. As Doug Stanhope puts it, nationialism is "baggage from dead people." All governments are founded on violence and maintained by exploitation.

I am very much indebted to the work of Curtis Gale Weeks, John Robb, Mark Safranski, and everyone at Dreaming 5GW and Small Wars Journal, but our language has some differences. I am unlike most 5GW bloggers in that I'm not worried about the future of the US as a global superpower. I'm writing for an audience very much like myself: post-nationalism, post-racism, post-religion human beings with no respect for authority, national borders or even the laws of physics.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Peter J. Carroll, who is himself a 5GW veteran, operating under a pseudonym and re-wiring tens of thousands of brains around the world, posed this question in terms of religion. On a planet with over 10,000 actively worshipped Gods -- none of which are currently visible, none of which can be proven to exist -- how can you be sure which Divinity to bet upon? Doesn't it make more sense to invest that faith in yourself?

With Skilluminati Research, I'm making the same argument on a political level. Why make appeals to power when you could build your own? You could be learning to weld, working out or reading a book with that valuable time. Why worry about your leaders when they can't actually control you, and don't care what you personally think, want or feel?

5GW is power.

Specifically, 5GW is dedicated individuals exercising their power to achieve their own goals at the expense of everyone who gets in their way. I think this kind of clarity is missing from the discussion because the occult dimension of power has no place in a respectable debate, from military theory to politics to history. For thousands of years, small groups of humans using ritual magick have been controlling nations, waging wars and engaging in economic and psychological warfare. One occult warfare master who does get mentioned in military circles is Hassan i Sabbah, long a muse of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson.

I'm open to the argument that I'm only engouraging a plague of lone psychopaths declaring war on the world, but my own 5GW practice is informed and indebted to D.J. Kilcullen, author of the 28 Articles, which you should probably read right now if you haven't already. Article 26 states: "Build your own solution -- only attack the enemy when he gets in the way."

As I said at the outset of this project, "my interest in 5GW (5th Generation Warfare) is rooted in it's potential for positive social and cultural change." I am investigating warfare for the same reasons I investigated psychology and marketing -- beacuse the tools of social control will be less damaging when they're widely distributed. Executives who have power over millions of other humans are inherently dangerous -- millions of humans with executive control over themselves is where we're headed this century.

The dinosaurs of governments and corporations and media conglomerates and think tanks and universities -- the old legitimate White Control System -- will not let go quietly and politely. So I think every future mutunt has a common-sense obligation to learn how to disable and disarm them as effectively as possible. This is going to be a very bumpy ride and we can all help minimize the bloodshed.

In closing I realize that I have used the word "I" far, far too often in this post. That trend shall not continue -- it's all technique from here on out.

Thank you for listening.

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The Language of Power

Posted Apr 23, 2008 15 comments

QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.

CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private.

His stance has remarkable implications for the future of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in a post-Bell's Theorem world. It's also a very naked statement that the only "privacy" you can expect to have ends at the surface of your skin -- everything else is exposed to the panopticon. Clothing hides nothing anymore.

Spooky action at a distance is a great single-sentence summary of 5GW. For brainfood I submit Henry Okah, David Myatt and Ronald Stark. In terms of clinical psychology, 5GW operatives are NOT SANE -- they are sociopaths, they are monomaniacs, etc. Effective 5GW is all-consuming and requires greater discipline than most humans are willing to subject themselves to.

Henry Okah ran a multinational fuel-piracy ring, which funded the purchase of huge stockpiles of weapons, which were used to arm constantly-shifting groups of mercenaries who were organized and mobilized via SMS text messaging. He's repeatedly crippled the infrastructure of Nigeria, and done over $29 billion in damage to Shell. He pulled all this off while living a respectable life in South Africa: he's since been arrested in Angola and deported to face charges in Nigeria. Read more.

David Myatt wears many masks: he's a leading neo-nazi philosopher, he's a Satanic occultist, and he's also a radical Islamic cleric. Sounds crazy and gets far stranger than that -- get to know David Myatt aka Ashton Long aka Abdul Aziz. Jeff Wells at Rigorous Intuition has the best summary and meditation on Myatt's twisted legacy: read Nine Angles of Separation.

Ronald Stark was the subject of the most entertaining article I ever did research for: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain. It was mostly guesswork, quotations and my own blend of horseshit, but characters like Stark -- or Barry Seal, or Finis Shelnutt -- are worth studying for the patchwork of connections they reveal.

Along those lines, check out the excellent Zenpundit thinkpiece, Who Would Declare War on the World?

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One Billion Earth Homeless? Is this for real?

Posted Apr 21, 2008 9 comments

If it's accurate, the situation is way worse than I thought. I feel like a total dick when I type something like that, but damn, it's true. I was startled to find this on page 287 of the super-dope book Worldchanging, which was very much worth the $20.

There are 1 billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. If current trends continute, there will be 2 billion squatters by 2030 and 3 billion (more than one third of humanity) by the midpoint of the twenty-first century.

To keep up with the influx, the world must build 96,150 homes a day - roughly 4000 homes every hour. Generally, only squatters are prepared to make this effort. Their homes start out as mud and cardboard hovels. But once they know they will not be evicted and they can exercise control over their communities, they create permanent, thriving neighborhoods.

There's a couple other gems as well:

Alone, squatters have little power. Together, they can create great things. "The problem of the urban poor can only be solved by the urban poor, not anybody else," says Jockin Arputham, head of Slum/Shack Dwellers International, a global squatter-organizing effort. "The urban poor will be the change agents of the city."

And from the "other cultures are beautifully surreal" department:

A generation ago, the tiny hamlet of Sultanbeyli on the Asian side of Istanbul was just beginning to attract immigrants from the east. Those early arrivals lived in hovels, pirated electricity, and survived without water or toilets. But as more people came, the citizens of Sultanbeyli pursued their political rights - and this has made for an amazing transformation.

In Turkey, if squatters build overnight without being caught, they cannot be evicted without being taken to court. This is why Turkey's squatter areas are known as gecekondu, meaning "it happened at night." Further, once a gecekondu community has two thousand residents, it can petition the federal government to recognize it as a legal municipality.

Today, Yahya Karakaya, Sultanbeyli's popularly elected mayor, works in an air-conditioned office on the top floor of the seven-story squatter city hall building, with a view over the city of 300,000 people who do not fear eviction.

I'm still waiting on a recently ordered copy of The Job, a collection of interviews with the late great William S. Burroughs. In it, WSB proposed selling people in the "Third World" some Authority Kits, which were basically all the fixings for an official-looking police roadblock. Uniforms, badges, decorations, letterhead, stamps: everything, for a couple hundred bucks. (And over time, much much less.) This generates incomes for indiginous people and this undermines overall trust in authority. Not saying it's a good thing, just saying that option is out there.

Also worth considering that there's already a thriving global market in "Authority Kits" -- as Mao said, power comes from the barrel of the guns which are sold by the billions, all over the Earth, every year. Official-looking, comfortably fitted police unforms are nice and all, but in actual practice all you need is a group of people who all have guns, right?

Yeesh. Welcome to the Kali Yuga, and enjoy your workweeks.

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Filed in: 5GW Project 2008