vol 1 ish 1 April 1994 6666666666 666 66666666666 666 666 666 6 666666666666 66666666666 666 666 666 66 66 66 666 666 666 666 66 66 666 666 666666666 666 666666666666 6666 666 666 666 666 666 666 66666666666 666 666 666 666 666 666 6666 666 666 666 66666666666 666 666 6666 666 666 666666666666 66666666666 666 666 6666666666666 666 F _ A _ M _ Y ...a Private World E-Zine Snailmail: Box 1165 Station B, London, Ontario CANADA N5W 5K2 ed-in-chief: P.W. Casual, C.E.O, P.W.E, pwcasual@io.org contributors (whether they are aware of this or not): Mark Jr., God of Rhythm Guitar, markjr@io.org Rob Black Scott B Aleister Crowley, the Beast, beast@lowest.circle.of.hell.org COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Everything herein is anti-copyright. In Cyberspace, EVERYTHING is anti-copyright. Get used to it. +----------------------------------------------------------+ | "So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down | | with the public schools! Children must be drilled | | mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages | | would stop at the first sign of disagreement with | | the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world | | with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give | | nobody a chance to think. Standardize "amusement". | | The louder, the more cacophonous, the better! Brief | | intervals between one din and the next can be filled | | with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them | | the force of orders, to buy this or that product of | | the "Business men" who are the real power in the State. | | Men who betray their country as obvious routine." | | | +----------------------------------------------------------+ Contents: Inaugural Ye Ching Divination Slacker Poll Brevity as the Art of Banality: One-Syllable Band Names Essay: The Abolition of Work For Informational Purposes Only: Cop Radio Frequencies Glob o Quotes: Eugenics Inaugural Ye Ching Divination As many a new-age flake will attest, the birth of any new venture calls for an oracle to raise expectations & explain future failures. With this in mind I am about to use a shareware program to perform a divination. The program is caled ICHING.EXE, which I picked up in a software library in London years ago. It uses Aleister Crowley's interpretation of what has been called "the third oldest book in the world", one that survived the great book burnings under the tyrant Shih Huang Ti (the Occidental version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria). I recently uploaded this prog to the /pub/magick archives at slopoke.mlb.semi.harris.com if anyone is interested it just may be there. So here we go: Chˆn Over Tui : Fire over Water Hexagram number 54 Kuei Mei: The Marrying Maiden ------ ------ ------ ------ ------------- ------ ------ ------------- ------------- To give first younger daughters - ill course. Don't start with the carriage in front of the horse. Go to it, ye cripples! I'll hold your crutches. Blind of one eye? Be as chaste as a duchess! Now, younger sisters there's scrubbing to do! Better postpone matrimonial clutches! Think of Ti-Yi and his sisters anew! No meat on the chops, and no beans in the stew. This is a good and a bad sign. In a nutshell this can be summed up as very auspicious, but also, action can bring failure. There is a lot that can be read into this, but in keeping with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, observation affects outcome. The mere act of including this divination here renders it pie- in-the-sky. Suffice it to say, we have consecrated this E-zine in a true-to-form Age-of-Aquarius type way. Whatever goes wrong from here can henceforth be blamed entirely on the above, Heisenberg notwithstanding. Slacker Poll Ok, we've all heard the buzzword n^n times. The question is, how many people thought the word "Slacker" was original enough & inventive enough to name a band "Slacker". I know one in London, Ont. Three-piece power-pop-punk trio. They sound real cool, and have a tape coming out soon. I figure they are either the 1st or the 1001st band by this name. If you know of one, let us know at pwcasual@io.org, enough responses may well spawn an alt.bands.named.slacker newsgroup. And speaking of band names... Brevity as the Essence of Banality: One-Syllable Band Names Perhaps the most loathesome fad in music today is that of the one-syllable band name. The first 1 - 2 thousand didn't bother me, but beyond that point, every additional one that I happened across evoked painful images of 3 or 4 snot nosed dipshits sitting in a basement wearing touques and oversized sweaters grunting out new possibilities for the "perfect name". Here's some of the dumbest: Eggs Flop cub Jale Curve Blur Petch Low Moist ...and if any of you are racking your brains to cash in on this latest flavour-of-the-month, my roomate Scott B and I have compiled the following list: (To our knowledge none of these have been used) Clap Mope Thing Chord Dog Slap Trend Bile Wheeze Essay: Excerpts from THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black I originally had the entire text of the essay in here, but the size of this issue balloned to over 50K, so I edited it down. For those of you who are interested, point yer gopher to gopher.well.sf.ca.us, it's in there somewhere. No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a _ludic_ revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once re- covered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. ***** Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full _un_employment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ***** The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I pro- moting the managed, time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation. ***** But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordi- nates who -- by any rational/technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control. The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rote-work, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity. ***** The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better ex- planation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such signifi- cant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regi- mented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families _they_ start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it. ***** Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would _still_ make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" ***** As Bell notes, Adam Smith in _The_Wealth_of_Nations_, for all his en- thusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report _Work_in_America_, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on _Star_Trek_, "it does not compute." Workers of the world... RELAX! -------- footnote -------- This essay is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. This ASCII file version was produced by Tangerine Network. Contacts as of April 1989: Bob Black can be reached at P.O. Box 2159, Albany NY 12220. Tangerine Network can be reached at P.O. Box 547014, Orlando FL 32854. For Informational Purposes Only (heh, heh) This will be a regular feature in BLAST:famy. This issue's topic: some Canadian police radio frequencies. 2.7880 RCMP Canada Alberta, NWT 3.5930 INTERPOL worldwide 4.6325 INTERPOL worldwide 4.7650 RCMP Canada Night Freq. 4.7765 RCMP Canada 4.7850 RCMP Canada 4.7985 RCMP Canada 5.4450 RCMP Canada 6.7920 RCMP Canada 7.5000 INTERPOL Worldwide 9.2000 INTERPOL Primary 10.3900 INTERPOL Primary 14.6200 RCMP Canada 14.8175 INTERPOL Worldwide 18.3800 INTERPOL Wordwide-primary 19.1300 RCMP Canada 19.3600 INTERPOL Worldwide 21.7850 RCMP Canada 21.8075 RCMP Canada 24.1100 RCMP Canada 41.6600 RCMP Canada Mobiles for 41.820 41.8200 RCMP Hamilton 41.8600 POL Guelph Correctional Centre 41.9600 OPP London, Newcastle, Niagara Falls, Strathroy Peterborough, Windsor, Woodstock Glob o Quotes: Eugenics A nasty politcally incorrect word? Perhaps. Any method to this madness? Judge for yourself. I'm going to leave Hitler right out of this, in my book, his methods cancelled out any genuine insight he may have had into this topic. I mean even Nietzsche said we have to "do away with millions of bungled humans", but he was trying to make a point. He didn't actually go out and attempt it. Here's what other historical figures have said on the subject (people with much lower derangement-to-intelligence quotients than der Fuehrer): Thomas Malthus (1798): A mob, which is generally the growth of a redundant population goaded by a resentment for real sufferings, but totally ignorant of the quarter from which they originate, is of all monsters the most fatal to freedom. It fosters a prevailing tyranny and engenders one where it was not; and though in its dreadful fits of resentment it appears occasionally to devour its unsightly offspring; yet no sooner is the horrid deed committed, than, however unwilling it may be to propagate such a breed, it immediately groans with a new birth. Of the tendancy of mobs to produce tyranny we may not, perhaps, be long without an example in this country ... If political discontents were blended with cries of hunger, and a revolution were to take place by the instrumentality of a mob clamouring for want of food, the consequences would be unceasing carnage, a bloody career of which nothing but the establishment of some complete despotism could arrest. Count Arthur de Gobineau (1853): The word _degenerate_ when applied to a people means (as it ought to mean) that the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it no longer has the same blood in it's veins... In other words, though the nation still bears the same name given by its founders, the name no longer connotes the same [peoples]; in fact, the man of a _decadent_ time, the _degenerate_ man properly so called, is a different being... from the heroes of the great ages. Charles Darwin (1871): We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, that genius ...tends to be inherited. (I can't remember who said this but): Heredity is stored environment. Alfred Russel Wallace (1872): In one of my latest conversations with Darwin, he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Herbert Spencer (1881): Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles. Bertrand Russell (1930): The most intelligent individuals on average breed least, and do not breed enough to keep their numbers constant. Unless new incentives are discovered to induce them to breed they will soon not be sufficiently numerous to supply the intelligence needed for maintaining a highly technical and elaborate system. Further, we must expect, at any rate, for the next hundred years, that each generation will be congenitally stupider than its predecessor, and we shall become gradually incapable of weilding the science we already have. Aldous Huxley (1958): In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only overpopulating our planet, we are also, it would seem, making sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. Arthur Jensen (1985): There's no doubt that you could breed for intelligence in humans the way you breed for milk in cows or eggs in chickens. If you were to raise the average IQ just one standard deviation, you wouldn't recognize things. Magazines, newspapers, books, and television would have to become more sophisticated. Schools would have to teach differently. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++SUBSCRIPTION INFO+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ email pwcasual@io.org, in the text of your message say something along the lines of, sign me up!, and we will. Next issue due whenever we get our hands on some more doobage. Later. ...PW. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++