Ayahuasca in Ecuador

Posted on Updated on

So, the snowball is rolling, it seems. Ayahuasca in Ecuador is kicking off (although it was most likely where it all began) with a Natural Medicine Gathering, in Tena, April 11-15, 2017. That’s Easter, so a good chance to get away for some sunshine and medicine. Ayahuasca ceremonies with groups of shamans in sacred places, all organised collectively by an association of traditional, Ecuadorian healers called CYRAE. Should be good! More info here:

www.naturalmedicinegathering.com

or:
https://twitter.com/NatMedGathering
https://www.facebook.com/NaturalMedicineGathering/

aya5

Charlie Brooker talking out of his arse, init?!? More Magna Carta ignorance displayed..

Posted on

Yesterday it was some bloke called OwenJones84 – kids have strange names these days – and today some bloke called Charlie Brooker displaying deeply problematic historical ignorance. This comment to his article in The Guardian  says it all, really:

“Another ignorant Magna Carta based anti-Cameron rant. It’s good, put him down, but don’t let him drag you down with him. Get informed:

http://onthecommons.org/magazine/magna-carta-manifesto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUhV3OtOOEM

At the time of the Magna Carta – as enshrined in the Charter of the Forest – plebs, as it were, had close to something you could call full autonomy: that is, they had rights of access to and use of building materials, food surces and fuel – all of which they could clean from / collect or grow in the forest. They sustained themselves.

No dole office, just life.

That’s far more rights than plebs hold today, where most have primarily the rights to be surveilled by a totalitarian state apparatus, the right to eat shitty frozen, processed “fish” fingers, and to hand over the ownership of all their digital creations to, say, Facefuck or Twatter.

Brooker, you are talking out of your behind and that’s a shame. Sit on it and learn a bit. You are perpetuating the progressivist myth – central to the elite’s power game and the social-democractic programme of collaboration with the elite – that we are moving towards a better world, with more rights and a more rightful and comfortable existence. Nothing could be further from the truth!”

Sorry, Owen Jones, but your British history is not mine (or anyone else’s)

Posted on

Owen Jones is a political activist, an atheist and a secularist. That’s a kind of people who traditionally receive a lot of training – should we say programming? – in set thought from an early age from various institutional power settings, such as school, college, university, party, NGO and other parts of the establishment.

It’s a very frustrating environment – the activist scene – and a field of ossification. New ideas, approaches and, democracy forbid, free thought is not allowed.

Owen Jones writes in The Guardian that “Sorry, David Cameron, but your British history is not mine“, but Owen Jones has got the wrong end of (at least) one stick: the Magna Carta. Now, the Magna Carta is commonly thought of across the intellectual and leftist spectra of thought as a declaration of rights of barons et al. to do whatever they please and with time it came to be seen as nothing other than the beginning of what is nowadays called industrial capitalism. And only that.

Cameron probably sees it like that, since he wants it pushed into the minds of children in “his” realm. And Owen Jones sees it like that, he rhetorically provokes his readers, repeating a dogma he once heard in a meeting or read in an liberal, academic book, perhaps: the Magna Carta is the beginning of evil, the work of exploitative nobles. What a shame and what admission of ignorance: Owen Jones and David Cameron do indeed share views on British history: they both have false assumptions of the Magna Carta and mislead people with their rhetoric.

Why are they wrong? Simple: Charter of the Forest (Thanks Peter Linebaugh!). Further information available? Yes, of course….

Read the rest of this entry »

Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” has been released!

Posted on

Just had a quick look to see if the much awaited Linux Mint 17 Qiana has been released and although there are seemingly no announcements, or press releases, or official blog posts, declaring the release, it has been released!

Here is a link to download options: http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/stable/17/

And here are direct links for the final 32 & 64 bit Cinnamon flavoured Linux Mint 17 Qiana versions:

http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/stable/17/linuxmint-17-cinnamon-dvd-32bit.iso

http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/stable/17/linuxmint-17-cinnamon-dvd-64bit.iso

Open question to and about Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Grass and Atwood: agents of U.S. Empire or just ignorant?

Posted on

In The Guardian today we can read:

Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has said that the situation in his country “is going from bad to worse and even towards terrible” following the government’s attempts to block access to Twitter, as a phalanx of major writers, from Zadie Smith to Günter Grass, line up to state their “grave concern” about “the freedom of words” in Turkey today.

The authors, who also include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Grass and Pamuk’s fellow Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, have added their names to a joint letter from PEN International and English PEN which calls last week’s ban on Twitter “an unacceptable violation of the right to freedom of speech”. The Turkish government restricted access to the micro-blogging website, and prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan indicated the ban could be extended further, saying he would not “leave this nation at the mercy of YouTube and Facebook” and pledging to “take the necessary steps in the strongest way”.

So they are writers, but can they read? Are they in the know, or just talking out of their privileged arses, repeating stuff they picked up in their echo chambers of comfort?

Colonos invite these fine (elitist) writers to read this article, which shows that Twitter is a tool for power twats that s being used to manipulate entire population, subvert cultures, and destroy countries: US Planned Syrian Civilian Catastrophe Since 2007, including a timeline from which an excerpt is pasted here:

2009-2010: In an April 2011 AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, admitted that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to admit that the US (emphasis added) “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” AFP: “US Trains Activists to Evade Security Forces,” April 8, 2011.

2011: Posner’s US trained, funded, and equipped activists return to their respective countries across the Arab World to begin their “ripple effect.” Protests, vandalism , and arson sweep across Syria and “rooftop snipers” begin attacking both protesters and Syrian security forces, just as Western-backed movements were documented doing in Bangkok, Thailand one year earlier. With a similar gambit already unfolding in Libya, US senators begin threatening Syria with long planned and sought after military intervention. Land Destroyer: “Syria: Intervention Inevitable,” April 29, 2011.

And just the other day The Guardian also reported that funding has been awarded to research institutions exploring how false avatars – controlled by government agents – can be deployed in “social media” and discussion forums and so on, to control, distort, change, modify and do whatver else is necessary to keep the public opinion in line with the powers that be.

So, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Grass and Atwood et al: what are you? Evil or ignorant?

Russell Brand says it.

Posted on Updated on

The viral Jeremy Paxman / Newsnight interview – or is it a monologue – with Russell Brand. It feels as if the lost voices of generations are suddenly being heard. Are you listening?