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-Nathan H. Fox

Eliphas Levi’s Pentagram – figure of the microcosm and the magical formula of man.

“… Ah, how do all my senses leap at this sight! I feel the young and sacred pleasure of life quivering in my nerves and veins. Was it a God who traced this sign which stills the vertigo of my soul, fills my poor heart with joy, and, in a mysterious rapture, unveils the forces of Nature around me? Am I myself a God? All is so clear to me: I behold in these simple line the revelation of active Nature to my soul. I realise for the first time the truth of the wise man’s words: The world of spirits is not closed! Thy sense is obtuse, thy heart is dead! Arise! Bathe, O adept of science, thy breast, still enveloped by an unearthly veil, in the splendours of the dawning day!”
-Faust, Part i.sc.i.

Born in 1810, Eliphas Levi was the son of a Parisian shoemaker. Attending the seminary of Saint Sulpice in hopes of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood, Levi became steadfastly intrigued by the occult secrets of the Rosicrucian Order and countless lost esoteric philosophies, departing from his early Church influence full-bore. Levi left a mark on the world of metaphysical literature by publishing “Dogme de la Haute Magie,” translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite and titled Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. Though Levi died in 1875, by the time of this work’s translation in 1910, Aleister Crowley’s explorations into the alternatives to late-Victorian Romanticism and Counter-Enlightenment seemed to overshadow Levi’s brief but important literary legacy.

What Levi wrote about was once punishable by death. Later retitled by Crowley as simply Magick, Levi’s systems of ceremonial magic drew from esoteric religious data interwoven with figurative images of faraway lands, crumbling stone tablets, and a cryptic concealment of truth from the general public. But like any keen occultist determined to keep up with spiritual trends of his time, Aleister Crowley later claimed himself to be Levi-reincarnate. As egotistical and assertive as Crowley behaved at times, even he acknowledged a great debt was to be owed to Levi.

Occultism thrives not off some bizarre notion that an illuminated hierarchy of government manipulators gets together in California to burn effigies before the owl Molech (See: Jeremiah 32:35), but is instead a revitalization of the arcane, a continuation of symbolic associations picked up where once off they were left, and is readily defined by colorful literary patchworks of immense semantic diversity and creativeness.

One of occultism’s important sectors is Chemistry’s elder brother alchemy, from the Greek khēmia or khēmeia, meaning the “art of transmuting metals.” Attempting to pick up where such mediaeval ideas were left off in Paris a generation earlier, Levi’s works were published in lieu of the dying Age of Enlightenment, a cultural movement prompted by European intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Enlightenment sought to place reason and scientific argument above the old and domineering oppressiveness of faith-based and superstitious claims. Spirits, hidden power behind symbol, and even alchemy were dismissed as quirky derailments of potentially bright scientific figures. Though such great minds as Spinoza (1632-1677), Newton (1643-1727), and the American Revolution’s prodigal spark Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846) rose from this movement, societies quickly broke from the drab, snobbishly exclusive and generally incomprehensible objective realities set forth by Enlightenment thinkers. Instead of embracing the French aristocracy’s promotions of science, Europe trended toward the integration of emotion into the equations of apprehending truth to the universe. This shift in emphasis away from reality as an indomitable and greatly misunderstood clump of matter bound by finite laws and dictated in secretive Parisian enclaves gave rise to Romanticism’s Counter-Enlightenment movement. Levi would become one this latter-day movement’s major figures.

Libertarianism would be nothing today without the help of French salons, typically owned by private hosts whom welcomed minds like Voltaire (1694-1778) and Rousseau (1712-1778), initially manifest in writing as Diderot’s Encyclopédie to which the great thinkers of this period contributed with great vigor. But what had happened to the French Enlightenment and that which became Romanticism occurred by the initially subtle invasion of these thinkers’ German counterparts. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) who both Goethe and Kierkegaard revered as the “finest mind of his time,” alongside the ferocity and vindictiveness of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) marked the contemporary signal fire Levi only stoked with a uniquely individual brevity and daring.

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment shared a common goal. Both aimed to obliterate the incessant powers held over the heads of the people by the Church while redefining for the common individual any importance and responsibility to a state. Counter-Enlightenment’s precursor Romanticism which flourished between 1800 and 1850 pushed the individual toward an examination of the sublimity of untamed nature, an identification with real emotion and an immediate culmination of that which was observed. And thus the alchemical mixtures of Enlightenment and Romanticism gave rise to many great and terrible things; from a highly personalized archaeology of ideas and a revitalization of lost cultures; to fascism, communism, and the terrible World Wars, little about this chemical combination seemed solute.

As I will not expound at length much about Aleister Crowley, my archives contain an extensive article about this immensely important figure of occultism (found here). His brief mention however is critical; without him, Levi’s legacy might never be what it is today.

Though Margaret Drabble explains that Romanticism existed in Europe between a wider range, “roughly between 1770 and 1848,” the world was ill prepared for the catharsis of World War II which Romanticism only contributed to by reckless instigation on the part of its nationalist contributors. Though Crowley stands as the only person of European descent to be found guilty in the court of law for the supposed practice of “Black Magic” since the Salem Witch Trials, Levi found himself in prison for the publication of L’Evangile du Peuple (“The Gospel of the People”, 1840), and Le Testament de la Liberté (“The Testament of Liberty”).

What separates Levi and Crowley from the pack of Romanticism’s bizarre esoteric offspring is their resentment toward growing discrimination found within their societies. Whether to do with bisexuality or the libertine abandonment of individual submission to all statehood, both of which Crowley embraced wholeheartedly, or Levi’s journey through the limbo between Catholicism and mystical ceremony, our two magical figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aid greatly in the revitalization of one of humanity’s earliest and most important symbols.

Visible in the immediate center of the above image, the pentagram is rich with history and implied meaning. This five-pointed star parallels similarly with the six-pointed Star of David, a simple hexagram constructed of an upright and downward facing triangle superimposed upon the other. The esoteric research of Levi and Crowley brought about highly sophisticated weaves of the heptagram as seen above. But beneath the intricacies of sigils and seals of great technicality is the pentagram, the key to occultism’s branch of study referred to as ‘Sacred Geometry.’

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s pentagram, from Libri tres de occulta philosophia – the sun and moon as the center; five planets about its edge (1486-1535)

Though greatly defamed by many modern offshoots of Christianity, Heather Child and Dorothy Colles’ 1971 work Christian Symbols: Ancient and Modern notes that the pentagram was an early Christian expression of the five senses, the pious’ orderly engagement with the blasphemous phenomenal world. For the Christian’s pagan predecessors, the pentagram represented a particular order about reality artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Agrippa portrayed almost obsessively.

A depiction of Hypatia, a pagan and professor of astronomy at Alexandria who posited the Earth revolved around the sun. Brutally dismembered by a Christian mob in AD 415

The man who created the image above is Khan Amore. He is a Romanian novelist inspired (apparently and like many of us with any good sense) by Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos. Though the novel Amore produced pertains to Hypatia in a fictional context, his notes for were used for a free online course in Greek Mythology. His deified glorification of Hypatia through mathematical systems of symmetry (phi) represents a man’s heart enthralled by the pentagonal beauty of five-sided geometry, the “ideal” human form. Like Christ, if he were any more real a man than Hypatia was woman, then we may most certainly look to her torso’s extensions through neoromantic lenses. With the head at the apex, the four limbs of the human body correspond to the remaining distributive angles of the pentagram. The above image grants a rather intimate portrayal of this ‘perfect’ five-limbed shape.

Da Vinci Vitruve Luc Viatour (c. 1490)

Though there are nine visible extensions of Leonardo’s Vitruvian body, his portrayal of the ideal sex, that of man instead, is an echo of personal attraction to the sexual simile, another inherent association with the upright pentagram, displaying the following bodily gestures: resting, extensional and obtuse/acute flexion of the ideal human male frame; only the most natural sort.

However, in the earliest Sumerian depictions of the pentagram (c. 3000 BC), the shape is explained by the presence of two points up (also depicted in Levi and Crowley’s pentagrams), rather than the downward limbs for the base as is apparent in Vitruve luc Viatour. Though not as diametrically obvious as some Sensationalist Theist thinkers might attest to in their infallible courts before God, the directions of our miscreant pentagram may be reversed. And discovered is little fuss about their differences.

Up or Down

Pythagorus referred to the single-point upright pentagram as Hugieia, meaning “health.” The variation with two legs up is Pentemychos, “of five sanctuaries,” most likely referring to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; one of the earliest Western myths associated with creation as it coincides with Chronos, time whose seed arose from quintine and the reflection of the universe as the ‘innermost fifth integument of the ovum sac,’ what the Hindus call the Brahmanda or “world egg,” also referred to as the Hiranyangarbha, the “golden fetus.” Unlike the West’s typically well defined boundaries, directionally most Hindus’ iconography detailing the mythological inception of the cosmos trends toward circular and elliptical representations of gods, i.e. stellar bodies. As it challenged Kepler to explore the mysteries through superimposed geometrical objects in the form of mobiles, earlier thinkers were simply confined to two dimensional shapes to express depth they witnessed all around them. This of course would be true if not for architecture.

Jacob Bryant’s Orphic Egg; the serpent heads for the fifth pass about the apex of the shape.

On the surface, the use of the upside down pentagram is paralleled with the base of the shape being elevated to the apex, that the highest expression of the pentagram is best represented by a firm foundation. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Tuscan architecture involves a compositional element much like Western musical theory. The foundation must be firm and considerations of point and counterpoint are to be brought into consideration. Though it is difficult to make a definite anthropological statement as to why the pentagram is sometimes reversed (upside down), Levi again assists us with an understanding as to some of its earliest and rebellious uses:

“The flaming star, which, when turned upside down, is the hierolgyphic [sic] sign of the goat of, Black Magic whose head may be drawn in the star, the two horns at the top, the ears to the right and left, the beard at the bottom. It is the sign of antagonism and fatality. It is the goat of lust attacking the heavens with its horns.” – Levi, The Key of the Mysteries, source found here.

The Sikhs are among those known for ritual goat slaughter. Called jhatka sacrifice, it is only practiced by such denominations of Sikhism as the Hazuri and the Nihangs. But the superimposed goat head has become a symbol commonly associated with Satanism and Luciferianism as the sheep is primarily Christian, representing purity, whereas the goat who consumes about anything remotely edible (or not) is as impure as the Levitican swine. Thus to sacrifice an impure entity is to make a sacrifice to the impure.

The goat, Pan; dead and beheaded (here) after losing a musical duel with Apollo.

The goat Pan is symbolic of Heathen love as the goat contradicted the nature of the sheep in the early Christian minds. Pan engages in a musical duel with Apollo and the loser is to be declared a ‘dead god.’ Both come to a draw in their trading of licks and lines, Pan with his flute and Apollo with his guitar-like Zither, so a new condition was added to the equation to make the challenge more formidable. Both players had to reverse the direction of their instruments and then perform a song. Apollo with a stringed instrument did this easily. Pan’s flute however could not be played upside down. Thus, the mythos of Pan’s loss to Apollo is most easily associated with the inverted Pentagram. Though Pan was declared the only true “dead god” in the Pantheon, he still had a wide impact on both morally positive and negative characters throughout the early epics. He was no more harm than he was good. Neopaganism sought to revitalize Pan’s archaic implications.

Another group who utilizes the inverted pentagram is that of the Free Masons. Crowley, who independently researched the hidden arcana of the Masons indicated this inversion represents spirit’s descent into matter, i.e. bringing that which is not of this world into this world. Preceding his research into Free Masonry, Crowley was involved in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a sort of occult fraternity into which he was granted acceptance at Trinity Cambridge. This group contradicted Crowley’s later findings by indicating the reversed pentagram establishes the material world’s victory over the spiritual world.

Five isosceles triangles represent the emblem of the Order of the Eastern Star. This branch of Free Masonry was formed in 1850 and accepts both men and women. The poignant base may be interpreted as directness as the foundation of the order, rather than some elevation of the material base to the apex as has been seen in classical Greek architecture.

Even in astronomy, Venus’ tract around the sun occurs thirteen times to Earth’s eight, forming a pentagonal association. Little else of the history of the pentagram exists in the past. Rather, it is unfolding in the present.

Neopagans and Wiccans employ the circumscribed pentagram (a pentagram with a circle about it) as a protective barrier against unwarranted spiritual entities. It also usually faces upward.

Circumscribed Pentagram

Modern Satanists with inspiration from Anton LaVey employ a concept called Pentagonal Revisionism to outline five points occultism’s modern bad-boy developed, despite the fact there was anything secretive about his order making his group more cultish than occult. Regardless of his classification within the New Thought spectrum, LaVey’s Revisionism entailed five dogmas: 1. Stratification, that no one is protected from his own stupidity; 2. Strict taxation of all churches (meaning implied); 3. No allowance of religious concepts integrated into law (implied); 4. Development of an artificial human (or humanesque) assistant that thereby every human may have power over another human; and 5. the opportunity to live anywhere (in any environment). Clearly, LaVey’s ideas set forth in 1988 were a bit odd, even outrageous. Similar to Hubbard however was the use of brief investigations into old history mixed with new terminology for a new product altogether.

Very clearly, one cannot associate the likes of the Victorian religious rebel of Aleister Crowley with the modern Satanist Anton LaVey by use of the pentagram alone. Crowley was highly secretive and suggestive, captivating his audiences of intellectuals and worldly freethinkers over the course of years. LaVey on the other hand, attracted rock-star deviants and odd-ball Californians looking for some hip new thing. Little of Crowley’s delicate research is ever reflected by LaVey’s writings. Perhaps one should consult Marilyn Manson to better understand LaVey’s aims, as he was designated the leader of the Church of Satan after LaVey’s death. Nevertheless, accusations of sacrifice never left groups associating themselves with an inverted pentagram and the issue remains mostly misunderstood to this day.

If you have any other questions about the pentagram or other occult symbolism, feel free to leave a comment; there is a lot more to the story of such symbols and much more research to be conducted on topics such as these. Though astronomers and other scientific minds like Tesla, who embraced Vendantic philosophy wholeheartedly, or Euclid and Pythagorus, Kepler and Newton, Paine and Rousseau whom rebelled against some foundation of accepted scientific or spiritual belief, endless variations of such symbols can bring great inspiration to neo-enlightenment and romantic thinkers alike.

13:8 ratio of Venus’ revolution about the sun to that of Earth; forming a pentagonal figure.

-Nathan H. Fox

Where is the line with you? At what point do you feel free enough to unleash internet rage unto others? Does your aggression on the internet lead to an increased sense of inhibition in the real world?

An old study out of the University of Illinois asserts that there is no link between video game violence and real world expression of harm unto others. Dmitri Williams and his team found that little violence from the game-world of his subjects translated to phenomenal reality.

But is this true for a social media platform like Facebook?

See, I love to get revved up by religious and political argument. In fact, I like to get downright nasty. I think it’s a great thing to do. Why? It has to do with a little thing called ‘performance under pressure.’

When someone really gets on my internet-nerves, I like to employ sarcastic wit, a little googling here or there to clarify what the hell they might be talking about and what I might miss if I replied too quickly, etc. But where is the line for downright nasty berating? Does it have a place?

I think it does.

Sometimes, we need to just let our hair down, say f*ck it, and let our fingers fly. Frankly, not everyone is altogether up to date on this whole internet thing anyway, so our sudden jolts and volleys against newb social media posts might be just the thing to get the ‘ol hotkey vocabulary working (i.e., how to switch to a new window real quick to look up what in the hell a hotkey is for instance).

Come to find out, being angry on the internet can really help with fundamental computing skills. Faster typing. Check. Application multitasking. Check. Sheer adrenal thrill. Check and double check.

I’ve seen some weird things go on with Facebook posts. People will take a screenshot (command+shift+3 or some unknown F-key for poor windows folks), highlight certain comments they find hilarious, offensive, perverse, etc., and then either censor the name of the poster or wholly target them by magnifying the user’s name. Wow. Creative. Then what? They post this as a new picture filled with commentary and more crap a human with any degree of time management skills could sanely deal with.

Another shortcut to the Hatebook/Fecesbook posts-of-pure-irony-statuship is the meme. It is an image with (usually) white text above and below some picture indicating something should be understood. Example:

This is the raving lunatic from the Ancient Aliens TV show. He invariably resorts to implications that everything of ancient history and mythology has something to do with the Ancient Alien Theory which presupposes that all human advancement somehow directly correlates to extraterrestrials. Erich von Däniken, David Icke, and others have made careers around this idea that we both owe our current status as intelligent beings to aliens and should somehow fear them.

Perfect example. Within the evolving technologies of online hate, we owe it to some higher being to grant us insight into what it is we’ve probably spent too much time trying to understand. Into Nascar? You are probably a redneck who can be criticized for beating up your girlfriend, drinking beer at 7 am., etc. Want to have a deep intellectual discussion about the origin of religion? Let’s do that. Only so long as you have enough time to take flack from someone who learned English semantics from spellcheck abuse and careful editing.

Basically it comes down to this: do not resist the temptation to annihilate others through internet speech in a meaningless way. You are not a troll. You are something higher. You have a purpose. And the other person should get the point too. But what is left over if you’ve conquered a whole empire of lesser-ones?

At one point, God got bored (See: The Book of Genesis) floating on his space turtle (see: Hindu Mythology) and separated Gods from Men based on the acquisition of fire (See: Prometheus). Then, Hubbard created the E-Meter (See: Dianetics) to lead to an auditing process of the individual (See: a therapist). What we’ve carried with us inside, about every belief or theory we’ve ever given credence, can be recreated for the enjoyment of others on the internet. Inevitably, someone will become angry, hunched over their console, dripping snot onto their keyboard, experiencing what their doctors warned would be a definite case of tennis elbow.

[press enter]

Whew. What a relief. At least I got out that last quip before they could over-post against me.

[ding: new notification]

Son of a bitch. Right when I was going to get some housework done…

Oh well. Few wars were ever won in a day.

-Nathan H. Fox

Topless female activist having done to her what men in power keep doing

Does it not seem absurd when an enclave of men, some of whom are directly involved in child sex abuse coverups, decide on a new leader for a very dysmorphic and outdated religion?

Is it not strange that every president of the United States has been a man, and that any female candidate is made into an incompetent laughing stock by the press?

How can it be that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner’s first job in law involved no pay and a desk in a shared space with her boss’s secretary?

While glossy-eyed hopefuls belonging to the Catholic religion awaited the white smoke to rise from the Vatican, the world was still spinning on its relatively stable axis. The sun continued its immense fusion reactions providing the world with another day of light. So, what in the hell is wrong with this place we call Earth?

Men.

We are the problem. We have been the problem for a very long time. From the evolutionary stalemate of our earliest ancestors, we as men have muscled our way through problem solving skills, resorting to violence at the slightest sign of social resistance or lashing out at Mother Nature’s incessant limitations. Men have been granted opportunities women in similar fields had to work toward to the point of virtuosity before their applications were even given a glance.

Men were the first of the polarized sexes to write down language and make decisions for a ‘greater good.’ Men established the first records of history since women were so preoccupied raising other men and other women later used to raise men. We were the first to develop weapons and tools to kill other animals – even other humans. Now, we’ve come this far. What more do men have to contribute to the furtherance of our population?

Are we not the sex creating monies where monies do not exist? Do we not enact decisions that bring starvation and death to countries and populations around the globe? I wonder, despite these atrocities the masculine brood has put forth, what more it is we really have to contribute to any decent progress on this planet?

I believe there to be a great conspiracy. I also believe at least half of this planet is engaged in a constant denial of this conspiracy.

I had originally started this site when I was aspiring to publish my first book. It is now a year after the publication of my first and I’ve already released my second (stay tuned). A third is prepared. And though not everyone who takes a glance at my lengthy articles on Facebook purchases a copy of my book, it is understandable as to why. There are a number of reasons in fact. It might cost too much. It might not be your interest. Or, it may be your interest, you have the money, but there is some sort of spite about the fact I’ve put out a book.

I have done a great job at weeding out bullies from my “friend’s list” (cough), those people growing up who had little to do but pick on potentially bright kids like me. I get the fact some people made mistakes when they were younger. But hey, what do I really have to lose by blotting out my past through internet filters? I mean, those people who once bullied me still exist. They still bring harm to others in ways they likely don’t yet realize. Shouldn’t I go out and take revenge on them anyway? Isn’t that what any man would do?

I guess a redefinition of masculine responsibility needs to be addressed. Because there is another factor that has brought me utter living hell besides the bullying males of my upbringing. That has been the female, the wonderful and beautiful sort of human guys like me find great joy in knowing and relating to, even if we get nothing from them but humiliation and fear.

But really? Is this what such wonderful beings as females bring to guys like me? Something is not right.

Typical in American culture is a perception that we are to grow up, go to college, get a degree, and enter into a job wherefrom we may draw retirement after our time is up. And this is usually for a man, since a woman was once generally percieved as nothing more than an accessory for the male who grew up, got the degree, landed the job, etc.

But my wife is working full-time at her job and has held the job longer than I have held any occupation I’ve ever had. She is also putting in way more hours than her salary pays and sees little kickback other than terrible treatment from customers and her fellow employees. Me? I can show up to the fire department and get an occasional double-my-wife’s-pay gig. Though I’m grateful and work very hard at what I do, I’m still sad.

While battles over some man’s copyright not being honored have reached the highest courts of the United States, women by the millions are being sold off as sex slaves around the globe. We take it quite seriously when a woman drowns her kids in a bathtub due to either unknown histrionic causes or postpartum depression yet allow for verified sex offenders to fly to the magical Vatican and elect a new patriarch.

Personally, I’d choose drowning over being anally and/or orally raped by a man.

Aside from my dark liberty-or-death choices regarding sexual abuse, these things haven’t happened to me. I pride myself on being able to help others and can only really put my head into a subject like sexual abuse because I feel a violent urge to slay those whom have participated in such dealings.

But when will the violence end? What force besides the fear of imprisonment stops a guy like me from committing sheer vigilante torture and fatal belittlement of men involved in sex crimes? The answer is women.

Women have been oppressed by men because of a universally realized female power. The only way men can outweigh the balance of the feminine on Earth is to keep her at bay. Men have found themselves at countless impasses, finding themselves unable to allow the true integration of the female into the male-created society. Did we as men really make much of this society? We were all born from a woman (most of us not living in parts of California anyway). Has she not some responsibility for the terrible actions committed by my male counterparts?

No! That’s ludicrous! The era of the blame-game for women driving us insane is over, guys. We’ve screwed up. Period. It’s time to pass the torch and let the origin of our species take the reigns. Period.

Despite this disjointed diatribe, and disregarding the fact I’m no academic-level feminist, men have made too many mistakes to keep going forward with their insidious plans.

I’ve published much on the subject of Æons and periods of human history embodying a male spirit, sometimes called a yuga or age, particularly that of Osiris, the masculine patriarch of the Egyptian mythos who was resurrected with a little help from his sister, Isis. She once had her reign, but it was replaced by the male force since humanity was moving on and the epic of the gods had to be carried into a period utilizing more force and blunt material persistence.

This is not progress. Rampant materialism in this world, though we see many females falling victim(s) to its cunning allure, is caused by men. It’s our fault. I’m no latent apologetic or acolyte for the church of Hers, but let’s be honest. We’ve screwed up. Our religions? Our fault. Money? Our bad. That was us. Blatant resistance to social issues while disallowing for the spread of diversity across populations? Yup. Here you go. Have the torch, ladies. I’m damn hopeful you shall hold down the power button on the laptop of the male world and end our tyranny thusly.

[click... whewwwwwww....]

-Nathan H. Fox

In the 90′s Windows slayed the computing market with the debut of Windows 95, reinventing the way operating systems handled user data. But with a great operating system came great responsibility. Few could foresee the advent of the mighty virus, at least on any scale it could effect change unto the babes out to pasture per se, the poor unsuspecting consumers of the Personal Computer systems running Windows.

This article is aout UNIX commands, but it is also a little bit about how UNIX differs from something like Windows. Hopefully it will shed some light as to why Windows is highly susceptible to outside forces while the Mac OS (operating system) is more keen to disruption from the inside instead.

UNIX was first developed in 1969 by AT&T and Bell Labs, the most common form of UNIX being Darwin upon which Apple’s OS is now based. Behind the stunning visual desktop pictures, sleek hardware designs and seamless distribution of downloadable software on the AppStore is an archaic but virtually impenetrable fortress. Its name is UNIX.

UNIX works by I/O, meaning input/output. You can see these inputs and outputs on your mac by going to Utilities->Console and Utilities->Activity Monitor. These two applications are highly recommended to sit on your quick-click bar called the dock. If you have about 25 items on your dock, including the defaults like Trash, Downloads, Finder, and a few others, your computer uses about 35 MB of RAM (random access memory), the sold-state flash style memory your computer needs to multitask easily. Most computers Apple produces come with about a gigabyte of RAM. Think of your Mac’s RAM as a readily deleted and constantly overwritten iPad. Though many developers, music producers, and people working with intense graphics applications prefer several gigs of RAM above the standard their computer comes with, even with a couple of gigs, you are more than ready to yield the power of UNIX. Here’s why.

The operating system of your computer is stored on its hard drive, a spinning disc with ones and zeros etched into its surface anytime something is ‘saved,’ written or altered on your machine. The power of a MacBook Pro with its nearly 1 terabyte of disc space, which is a virtual standard, and several gigabytes of RAM make it a Ferrari compared to the Pintos of our trendy tablet devices used so commonly by about everyone at some point in the developed world. So, if my Apple computer is fine already, why should I want to learn anything else about it? The answer is simple. UNIX controls the planet.

What I mean to say is that the security of UNIX is so solid that it is in essence its own little world. Your Apple computer masks a form of computing so indomitable only the user is liable to mess it up.

What’s a user? Is that me? Well, yes – sorta. The user is the main stance from which we engage in martial combat with our UNIX system and computer’s hardware and software. The main user is something you invariably assign with a name and password when you first set your new Apple machine. From here, we need to learn a little bit about Terminal.app, which is found alongside your Console and Activity Monitor (more on these later as well) found in your Utilities folder.

Opening Terminal.app, we see a lot of things, even though it doesn’t look like a lot at first.

[username]$

If you run a server on your machine like I do, you will see something like:

server:~ [myusername]$

This represents the main user who is currently logged into the computer. Type the following command into Terminal.app to see exactly who you are as a user:

whoami [press enter]

Displayed below should be your user name. This is also represented by a little house icon visible when you open your HD on your desktop. If you look to the left under ‘favorites,’ you should see the house I’m talking about. If you click on the icon and open it, you will see all the information stored under your user directory. What in the hell is a directory you ask? An easy way to put it is that a directory is a folder. But under your user, all folders including the user itself, has certain permissions for access. The only way to access your user, for now anyway, is by having entered a password which you have assigned.

When your computer writes something to the hard drive, it has to put it somewhere. The easiest way for this to be done is by creating a directory and then writing information that is then indexed inside this folder. Indexing is essentially a process your computer goes through to create a quickly accessible list of relatable information inside a directory. In fact, you have easy access to indexing through Apple’s Spotlight, the little magnifying glass visible in the upper righthand corner of your screen. If you click on it, you can search your computer – of course limited by your user access – for files related to characters you type in the box. Wow. This seems really boring. But you are at the edge of total control over your computer. Indexing is just one hint at the power at your Apple-tinged fingertips.

Apple machines running Mac OS aren’t really susceptible to viruses because of UNIX’s indexing capabilities. When data on your hard drive has been indexed through UNIX, every single bit is essentially separate from every other bit. It is a sort of built-in virus protection software. Here’s why. Viruses usually work by overwriting information stored on the drive disguising itself as functional data. Now instead of functioning properly, a piece of software infected with a virus is broken and does all sorts of nasty little things you as a user never intended when you installed the software. But UNIX isn’t harmed by viruses because of the presence of the user. With a user comes permissions.

When you install or update a piece of software onto a Windows machine, you might see a string of numbers representing the number of files being written to the drive. Usually not really files at all, these numbers can be in the millions, usually representing millions of bits of information being written to the drive. When you update something on the Windows machine, you’ve agreed to two terms: 1. The software has permission to be written. 2. The software has permission to be overwritten.

Overwriting? Why is this a big deal? When you give something permission to be overwritten, which you might almost everyday when updating things on your Windows machine, little bits of what once was there (on the drive) can and will now be replaced by new information from the update. And lo, the virus has a door unlike anything else – because you let it.

But I don’t want viruses and I don’t because I use UNIX, right? Pretty much. This is because every single bit of information stored on a UNIX device is separate from every other piece of data. So when you call on an application to run in a UNIX environment like Mac OS’s Darwin, the program has intensely restricted permissions to run what it was installed to be. It is as though every single piece of data written to your drive on a Mac is its own little hard drive. So how on god’s green earth can an Apple computer talk to millions of tiny hard drives? The process has to do with something called sandboxing.

Until an application has proved its worth against the insurmountable power of the user, it enters a virtual test environment called a sandbox. While the user stands in a sky rise building, the application under scrutiny trudges through a sandbox where every step it takes tests its endurance. If you’ve ever tried to run through sand with a rifle and combat boots to attack a ‘user’ per se, you know it can really sap the life out of you before you can even get close enough to your opponent to open fire.

The virtual environment of the sandbox requires a lot of things out of our soldiering applications before they are allowed to run on our OS. There are signatures that it needs to sign while trudging along, checks and balances, judges like hardware it must come up against, and even a jail for those deemed unworthy to proceed any further. If you look at the activity of your Console after opening an application, you might see a line or two about the sandbox.

Sandboxing also protects your machine from outside intruders when you use the internet so long as a browser’s security permissions are up to date, i.e. that you have the most current version of a browser for instance and that your computer says its okay to run. Mail applications work the same way. Checks happen in this virtual environment so quickly, you can’t even blink your eye fast enough before everything is all good with an app. So, let’s go back to the Terminal.app and start getting a little familiar with how we can see these little directories so safely organized on our computer, nothing could possibly go wrong ;D

Type the following command in Terminal.app:

ls [press enter]

This creates a list of directories and files contained in your user directory, the most secure part of your computer. Now type:

cd Desktop

Looking at your username on the machine, there should now be a little title ‘Desktop’ before it. This means you as the user are now in the Desktop directory of your computer. Now type ‘ls’ again and hit enter. This shows the contents of your Desktop. Note, this is technically ‘in’ your Desktop rather than ‘on’ it, the latter we might think is true when we think of the top of a desk and by the fact we can see little icons ‘on’ the screen. Really, even in this visual environment we commonly use to navigate through our machine, even the Desktop is sandboxed. The higher order of our desktop can be accessed through the Finder, which is an intensely complicated type of sandbox environment we commonly mistake for our Desktop.

Now from the Terminal.app, we have managed to enter the actual directory of our Desktop which is stored in the System Library on our machine. This indicates we are technically deeper in the system than we would be by just looking at the visual ‘Desktop’ with our pretty picture of the galaxy that comes standard with newer Apple computers. But isn’t there more? Now from Terminal.app, type:

ls -a [press enter]

Wow! What did this do? This just listed all files and directories once hidden – even from the user. the ‘-a’ command basically means all and indeed we can now see all files and directories in our Desktop. Say we are a bit nervous and don’t really want to be poking around in our Desktop anymore. Let’s go back up to the user directory where we can sit from the window of the sky rise. Type:

cd [press enter]

Whew! We’re back to the safe zone. This brings us back up to the previous directory, which is our user. If you use the ‘cd’ command to go further into the Desktop, you can get back to the user standpoint by typing:

cd .. [press enter]

This takes you back up to the top of your computer’s hierarchal structure which is, true for now, the user.

I was quite stunned when I saw all these hidden files by using the ‘ls -a’ command and figured I might as well see what’s been hidden by default from even me, the user. To enable the view of hidden files and directories in your OS’s visual environment, you can type the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE [press enter]

Since you’ve just changed the sandbox of the Finder, you need to kill it, i.e. bring the hurricane through to take out the sand so the water can bring some new fresh sand back in. Type:

killall Finder [press enter]

Oh my god! Haven’t I just destroyed my finder? Not at all. Finder starts itself back up as an automated process. This process is one way the computer keeps itself really safe so you can roam around freely in its environment without disturbing the locals with drunken computerness.

If at any point you get annoyed with seeing all these nonsensical file and folder names, you can always undo it by typing:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE [press enter]
killall Finder [press enter]

Okay, so what the hell does this really teach us about UNIX and how Apple works? In the last and somewhat advanced Terminal command, we’ve managed to modify a specific file called ‘com.apple.finder’ contained in your System Folder. Since our modern computers work with ones and zeros, we have to feed it some sort of logic it can understand. We fed it the ‘defaults,’ ‘write,’ ‘AppleShowAllFiles,’ and ‘TRUE (or FALSE)’ commands to modify permissions of something called ‘com.apple.finder.’ We also actually modified some text inside the com.apple.finder file written into your System. Since this is just an article on how to better understand why UNIX is a computing fortress, I would not suggest poking around in the file (if you manage to find it) in the visual environment until some independent research has been done. So, let’s move on. In Terminal.app, type:

mkdir test [press enter]

You’ve created (made) a directory (dir) called ‘test’ within your user directory. Now, let’s play inside our new directory and make a file from scratch. Type:

ls [press enter] {this helps us see that the directory is here}
cd test [press enter]

Now ‘test’ is visible before our username indicating that our user cleared the sandbox and has permission to alter the contents and present state of the directory. Now type:

pico new [press enter]

Pico is an archaic word processor of sorts with immense programing capabilities. It stands for ‘Pine Composer’ and was one of the first highly safeguarded pieces of software in existence. No one was allowed to alter its code and distribute it. No one. Thus anyone who wanted to have a new word processor in UNIX had to write one from the ground up. And it couldn’t look a thing like pico.

In pico, type something like “hello” or some strings of text like you would in Pages.app or Word. Now we need to save it. Press the following keys:

control+x followed by the ‘y’ key to verify you want to save it. You have been prompted to give pico permission to write your file. So, it follows up with what you want to name it – for real this time. When you see ‘File Name to Write:’ followed by the name ‘new’ at the bottom, you can go ahead and press enter at which time you will be brought back to your Terminal.app environment. Through pico, you can almost truly overwrite something in UNIX, but this is about the only way you can do so without writing zeros over your hard drive, something we will talk about now. Then, we will go back to our directory and file and see how much abuse we can get away with these.

One of the most beautiful insights into UNIX came to me when I had a bunch of files in my trash and went to empty it. There might have been 1,250 files or so and after having clicked the ‘okay’ button to allow a ‘secure empty of the trash,’ an hour later my trash was empty! What in the hell?! What is this secure empty nonsense and why did I have to wait so damn long for it to work? Meanwhile while the empty was going on, my hard drive was out of control, the fan was spinning like mad, and I thought the thing was going to burst into flames! There must be a bug, I thought.

Your Mac OS is installed on your computer at the head of the drive, starting at the smallest ring around the CD shaped object. After the Mac OS has been installed on that drive, it needs to consume the remaining free space ahead of it, i.e. unused disc space, for a process called ‘journaling.’ Every change made to System files is recorded in the journal environment. This process of journaling on the drive also helps data loss from power surges and corrupted files we may or may not have installed intentionally. The only bad thing about the Mac Extended Journaling format Apple’s OS defaults to is that it makes for great difficulty when trying to have multiple operating systems on the drive. When Mac journals your drive from the beginning, it makes UNIX the head of the show and only through some delicate tricks I’ll address in another article can you have two or more operating systems. But back to our sandboxed journaled UNIX fortress.

From Terminal.app, type: cd [press enter]. Now, let’s slay our newly made directory in battle. Type:

rmdir test [press enter]

What we’ve tried to do is destroy our newly made directory by using the ‘rmdir’ command. Buy alas, we’ve created a file inside of it, so we cannot be granted permission to do this. We tried to fight as a user from the sandbox in a sense. So let’s try sneaking into the palace and assassinating the king preventing the destruction of his kingdom. Type:

cd test [press enter]
ls [press enter] *to see the file we made, which is assumably called ‘new’
rm new [press enter]
ls [press enter]

Kapow! We slayed the entity stopping us from burning down the kingdom, the directory we called ‘test.’ Now, let’s burn it down! Type:

cd [press enter]
rmdir test [press enter]

Victory over the oppressors! We have conqured the king and his kingdom. The directory ‘test’ and the file ‘new’ are now wiped from the machine, never to be given a presence again. We can see that this is true by typing:

ls -a

And lo, test hath been slain! With these few commands we’ve learned, particularly ‘rmdir’ and ‘rm,’ we now wield a great deal of responsibility. These commands destroy data, overwriting them with zeros. They are gone. For good. But what is with this trash thing we came up against earlier? Why was it that with my old PowerPC I could simply empty the trash and not have any problems with the time it took for the stuff to go away? Secure emptying is a lot like what we did to our itty-bitty files, but now we need to understand how the computer behaves with the visual environment as opposed to the Terminal.app environment.

Let’s find a huge file we don’t want on our computer, place it in the trash, and go to Terminal.app. Now type the following VERY CAREFULLY, taking note to include all characters displayed as lowercase or uppercase. Again, this is a WARNING that this process is highly specified and potentially dangerous. But what it does is closes off the most ordinary access to a file by ‘deleting’ it very quickly. The following command is very useful if you want to delete things in your Trash very quickly and move on with your day. Later, we will clean up the mess of potentially recoverable data with another clever application in the Utilities. To delete things in the trash rather quickly, type:

sudo rm -Rf ~/.Trash/* [press enter, type your password, and press enter]

Kapow! The trash is empty. But again, with great power comes great responsibility. I would suggest research into the ‘sudo’ command and the potential it can bring. If you typed the Trash command as shown above and need to delete the Trash again but are worried about not typing it correctly, you can press the ‘up’ arrow key in Terminal.app to recall the commands you had entered previously.

Another very useful sudo command comes in handy when reindexing your hard drive. UNIX is very particular about how it calls up data. One of the easiest methods the accurate recall can happen is by a process called indexing. Your drive essentially creates a hierarchal structure upon which it relies to grab exactly what needs to be computed and when. Over time, your hard drive might have a thing or two that is out of place or no longer exists on the drive. Indexing or rather re-indexing the drive may help free up some of your CPU for other processes. First, rename your Macintosh HD to just HD. In Terminal.app, try the following command (which works from 10.6 and up with maybe a slight variation here and there):

sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/HD/ [press enter] [type password]

This will erase the old index files stored on the disk and prepare the drive for the new indexing process which usually happens after a restart. If you look in the upper right hand corner of the screen, your spotlight should have a small dot expanding and contracting. Click it once and see how much time is required for the indexing to happen. Usually it doesn’t take that long but is known to from thirty minutes and up to several hours.

Though this has been an exhaustive article about UNIX, the world is now your oyster. But let’s get a few things straight. You are about the only force capable of corrupting the functionality of your UNIX machine, that is until someone has access to your username and password – at which point they could theoretically log on to your machine as you and appear to in fact be you. But what about all that old information we deleted from our incessant torrenting sessions, perhaps having kicked the habit and altogether desiring the ‘thirteenth’ step in their addiction-rehab program. To totally wipe any old data from your machine that has been deleted through our sudo trash commands and others not deemed ‘secure’ open:

Utilities->Disk Utilities.app, click on HD (or whatever HD has been named, beneath the higher hard drive icon in the list), click the ‘erase’ tab, and look for the ‘Erase Free Space…’ button. Now, this is a process recommended for a period of about half of one day or more, but scroll the small arrow over to the rightmost position. This will perform an erasure of the supposedly blank space on your drive making it totally blank by writing zeros. If you just have a few hours to spare, you can do a single pass erasure (fastest, leftmost arrow position) but this won’t guarantee that the FBI, when they kick down the door, won’t have a thing or two to base a case around your sorry ass.

Thanks for tuning in folks! I hope you’ve enjoyed this lengthy but potentially helpful article about how to better understand your Apple computer. Have a great day!

-Nathan H. Fox

Many people looking to retrofit their old but still functioning PowerBook G4s with Linux Yellow Dog 6.X have probably noticed after installing their OS that the system does not recognize the wifi hardware already built in to their computer. Well, here’s an easy fix and one that requires a few simple things:

1. Ethernet cable connecting your computer to your router or network

2. Developer Tools (installed) that came with your .iso

3. The ability to type

Once your machine is connected to the internet, click on ‘Terminal’ in your menu bar. Next, you need to assume the root role by typing the following (after which you will be asked for your password):

su – [press enter]

[type your password and press enter]

Then, you need to find out what firmware version of the Airport Extreme card you have. You can do so by typing the following from the root (which should now have # before anything you type):

lspci | grep -i broadcom [press enter]

I got a readout as follows, which most with one of the old G4 12’ laptops should have:

0001:10:12.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)

The important number to look for follows the letters BCM. In this case, my firmware is the 4306 model and I need to download the appropriate drivers for them. So how does this happen? Easy.

From your terminal, you can use the ‘wget’ command to download the appropriate software giving you the ability to install the driver. If you have the same driver as me, from your root (#) you can type the following commands:

wget http://bues.ch/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2 [press enter]

tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2 [press enter]
cd b43-fwcutter-011 [press enter]
make [press enter]

This will display a string of information indicating that a binary executable named b43-fwcutter has been created. Now, you need to launch it. Type:

cd ..

We’re almost done! Now we are going back to the web from our root (#) and getting some stuff to extract the Broadcom proprietary drivers. Type:

wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 [enter]

tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 [enter]

b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “/lib/firmware” broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Last, go to your Wicd Network Manager from your menu. Main -> Applications -> Internet -> Wicd Network Manager (Network Manager). Make sure to hit REFRESH and your wireless network should appear. If it is encrypted, you need to hit the little > arrow, click Advanced Settings, checkbox Encryption, select the type of encryption (usually WPA1/2 (Passphrase) for most home users), and enter the key. Hit, OK and you are probably on the Internet with your wireless!

Congratulations!

Things to try if this didn’t work:

If you do not have the same driver as me appear after the ‘lspci | grep -i broadcom’ procedure, you can browse the following website: http://bues.ch/b43/fwcutter and try to locate which firmware might be associated with your Wireless Extreme. But in most cases, most of the smaller PowerBooks used the BCM4306. If you have a larger screened model, you might need to do some Google investigation as to which driver you need.

If you did not install the driver tools with the initial OS installation, you can use the following command:

yum groupinstall “Development Tools” [press enter]

If your computer doesn’t seem to recognize the wifi network after all these steps, you may need to simply change its permissions by typing the following:

chmod 755 b43

I can only think of a few other reasons why none of the following would have worked. They are as follow:

The source or site from where you tried to retrieve the fwcutter files from earlier could be down or doesnt exist anymore. That’s okay. Just go to google and enter ‘broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5‘ and the autofill will likely show you what else you were thinking of typing. BAM! Find a working site with a downloadable driver/fwcutter software and replace the link above in the first ‘wget‘ command with the direct link to the file you need.
If none of this stuff worked, I’d try ebay and see if you can’t get a couple hundred bucks out of your machine. Else, you can always try another operating system like Lubuntu or an old version of 10.4.x since Mac OS 10.5 won’t even show you how much battery life you have left [thus the reason why I did this for my wife’s computer in the first place]. Yet, you might have similar problems as these, but with possibly easier fixes (or not).

Regardless, I’ll try to post the (L)Ubuntu fix for the wireless drivers later since the code is very similar and might actually use the exact commands… I’ll do a Lubuntu X.x partition in a bit and let you know! Stay tuned! Meanwhile, enjoy your wifi if it worked and feel free to read some articles to do with completely unrelated material (as computers)

-Nathan H. Fox

Lift smoking bans. The cigarette kind. Make it obvious the effects on longterm exposure to secondhand smoke. Deviate from present location if smoke found to be too uncomfortable. Again. We get it. Some people just like to party.

In Denver, when amendment 64 passes lifting the prohibitory ban on recreational marijuana, otherwise lawful citizens could be ticketed or arrested for public intoxication – and smoking a cigarette. While questioned as a possible suspect with a criminal intent due to an encounter with an officer during an investigation, an officer may be more likely to believe there is possible marijuana use or po(t)ssession involved. Wherein smoking bans impose mandated sections in the state legislator, no one can smoke anywhere until alcohol is treated as marijuana’s equal “dirty little sister.”

Will there be night life style marijuana bars where people risk having to sleep quietly in a bed somewhere till morning?

“Mary Jane” implies existence should be made assuredly legal by state statutory mandate – by law, we must live. Water and sunlight are used for most grow operations while intensified renderings of the plant continue to crop up, extremists trying to keep up with the edge of the “underground criminal trade” by producing super hybridized plants. It appears more people are learning about genetics, reproductive biology of plants, rendering of photon optimization in “grow optics,” i.e. lights and power conductivity, under their own volition.

Yet and still, this is all too sophisticated. Lift smoking bans. Cigarettes being just one of several gateway drugs of choice for many, cigarettes and marijuana are hardly related to crimes as heinous as tragedies involving people in automobile accidents or caching out some snack food brand at a particular grocery store upon the very exposure to a television commercial trying to develop a product catered to turn profit in the midst of a downturned world economy.

Now, could the heads of compulsive drinkers here in this nation swell to enormous and oft-liquified proportions, whilst the lungs die in sorrowful and regretful loneliness, cancer riddling their surfaces in painfully vivd detail revealed just before exiting this world? Of course! But does your retirement plan protect you against rich people playing golf in the Caiman Islands, even this amidst a time when flying a private jet becomes more economical? Does not working oneself to classifiably legal death, giving every ounce of languidness for nothing but fiscal bickering in politics, lead to anywhere but hell?

Duly noted is that the state may never allow politics the job of paving the road to heaven either.

In the laws of the state and federal jurisdictions, the people must allow some degree of conflict to be present. Without this present condition of material existence here and now, the universe can not ever reflect upon it’s own perfection, just as a state can not say such a statement to freed assurance by mere reflection alone is anything but religious sentiment having no logical political context.

Health risks are associated with the consumption of the tobacco plant. A little more technical and stemming from the litigation jargon of the thirties, the conservatism of the present Western hemisphere is no longer a useful mechanism in deregulating systems effecting change in the rights of a state’s citizens without their due representation as a state. Many of the peoples of this nation, The United States of America, have come to associate marijuana as a simple plant, the “green giver,” and that it is really just a medicine. Redefine the use of marijuana.

To maintain a healthy enough populous, keep the medicines away from those without need for them. Let the rest of the people party. For it IS, that we have spoken.

=

Ask what YOU can do to fight the front on retiring too early. We need YOU to lift smoking bans.

Nathan H. Fox

Many of my fans I’ve connected with tend to be in some form of agreement with what I have to say. This is a basic and intuitive response to a person with whom we find ourselves sharing a common interest, philosophy, religious tenet, or economic/political outlook. Now I encourage skepticism, even downright criticism for what it is that is too firmly established, at least that which appears to be as such. In other words, there are conspiracies about the most ordinary things we can imagine and it is only natural to challenge their importance – for or against us. From fluoride in toothpaste, to the JFK assassination, it is only a matter of time before someone out there agrees with what you believe. And despite the omission of reason or sound logic in some argumentative instances, you could even be right.

But what kind of conspiracy theorist are you? Here is a list of some of my favorites. I’ve given them their own labels. Let’s see if you fall into one of these categories!

1. The Political Conspiracy Theorist

In 44 BC, the Liberatores conspired against Julius Caesar to win back their classical Roman Republic. Since then, almost every government in the world has experienced some form of conspiracy aimed to overthrow its current position of power. In modern times, with access to immense amounts of data, it is no wonder why there appears to be a veiled function occurring behind the guise of our most public political leaders. The Political Conspiracy Theorist is someone who researches, records, or creates a conspiracy surrounding politics. It is usually specific, per se, a fascist dictatorship attempting to overthrow the US government in 1933, while still general enough to remain inclusive; there must be more room for more problems. Within political conspiracies, there must also be specific names for parties involved (even if just certain individuals) while indicating their reach and influence upon current events is far beyond the normal scope of the ordinary citizen, even more so than the theorist proposing a coverup. The Political Conspiracy Theorist is therefore a person highly influenced by politics with a general feeling that individual liberty is at stake because of the actions and intentions of politicians. Generally this type of theorist desires for the overthrow of a static power, one that appears to remain constant despite social ebbs and flows, rather than infiltrating and dismantling the system from within. Eventually, it is the Political Conspiracy Theorist who hunkers down in the desert with a surplus of ammo, canned food, but who still manages to drive their truck to the Wal Mart and watch an episode of CSI: Miami now and again. Yet inevitably, the Political Conspiracy Theorist tends to fit the profile of the age-old political assassin or public shooting assailant.

2. The New Age Conspiracy Theorist

David Icke’s 533 page work The Biggest Secret(1999) is revered by many conspiracy junkies as the “Rosetta Stone” of works on the subject of mysterious human influences romping throughout the world. That is, only if you include some extra-terrestrial reptiles in this group of influences. Icke visited a psychic in 1990 who informed him as to his purpose on this planet, to heal and allow the spirit world to pass messages to him that he would then communicate to others. In March of 1991, Icke held a press conference to inform the world he was a “Son of the Godhead,” basically a prophet for the coming maladies of the earth: tidal waves and earthquakes would be set upon us and cause widespread catastrophe and international upheaval. But it was Professor emeritus of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs’ Michael Burkun (1938 -) who coined Icke as a “New Age” Conspiracy Theorist. This was because Icke went so far as to propose that some people, mostly in political leadership roles, were actually reptiles called, “Reptoids.” They had the ability to disguise themselves as whoever they desired to be and their motivations for visiting our planet were inherently malicious. The Reptoids desired for only our destruction, our resources, and our very souls. Though Icke was actually quite involved politically, specifically marked by his associations with the Green Party, it was his mystical experience near an ancient burial site in Peru that proved far more important than simple political insights he’d conceived thus far. Within the New Age Conspiracy Theorist, we have a mix of potent spiritual ideas drawn from mysticism, Eastern and Western esoterica, and other more fruity blends of contemporary channeling and crystal gazing. The New Age Conspiracy Theorist is typically non-violent and is usually the last on the list to be isolated as a real-world threat by governments. Usually the New Age Conspiracy Theorist does not have much time to record information about the imposing doom broadcasted to them by the spirit world, because they must keep their hands shaped in a certain way amidst meditation ;D but don’t put it past them to publish; many are actually quite prolific in what is at the least categorizable as fiction.

3. The Economic Conspiracy Theorist

The earth is tending toward “one currency,” a scanner or barcode keeps track of our position and spending, or perhaps there is a small computer chip imbedded in our bodies that allows us to collect food in the line down at the shelter? The Economic Conspiracy Theorist is similar to the previous two in many ways. They usually believe some political conspiracy exists alongside some spiritual prophecy on the brink of fulfillment and that everything is tied to money. Money is usually equated to a dark force, something that inevitably turns out to be the anti-life one is otherwise guaranteed through piety. The Economic Conspiracy Theorist tends to be poor to middle-class and lacks the expressive capabilities of the previous two. This person is at an inherent disadvantage by limiting the destruction of the world to money due to the presence of natural disasters, wide-scale industrial accidents, war, and famine – all of which require money to be undone. Thus, the link to a spiritual or religious prophecy is necessary to connect the dots and avoid the formation of an aluminum hat. The Economic Conspiracy Theorist comes in a variety of forms; whether a modern-day eco-terrorist who wants America and the rest of the world to turn off the lights, burn the paper money, and barter/trade for everything, or a biblically fueled factory worker out of work who somehow manages to keep their robust internet connection, utilizing it to foretell the signs of the end-times as they relate to the “One World Government” and “One World Currency” used to implement, be warned. They are out there.

4. The Genius Conspiracy Theorist

This guy or gal can put all the pieces together, utilize the skills of expression without the need to channel anything, or just plain troll your sorry-ass. The Genius Conspiracy Theorist is typically light on the political edges while trying to address the “real issues” at hand: lack of food to Africa, why the cure for AIDS hasn’t been “publicized,” and just how the governments should go about addressing the real issues of global warming. The Genius Conspiracy Theorist advocates a push toward space colonies since the human race can’t last forever on what few resources we have left to pull from the ground. Plus the sun will burn out (and not “blow up.” Duh!) They know the move to space is the solution because we haven’t moved fast enough toward wind and solar energy to become truly self-sufficient and pilot our earth away from the dying sun. We could call this person a scientific optimist, in that by pursuing the fields of research into energy and space travel, we could cure the human race of all known problems currently holding us back from advancement. There would be little use for government, money, or religion. Technologies of the future bring to the Genius Conspiracy Theorist what Jesus Christ does for many Christians. But how does the Genius spend his time if he/she is not out there producing the next amazing revolution in technology? You can most assuredly find them on Facebook.

5. The Town Crier Conspiracy Theorist

Hear ye! Hear ye! Yup, that’s right. The Town Crier Conspiracy Theorist belts out the most current conspiracy updates available to him or her. They have little insight into the issues themselves but still feel a necessity when it comes to getting the word out to the public. The Town Crier Conspiracy Theorist feels compelled to inform but also expects the message to be carried on, else they begin a loop of redundant broadcasts the moment they feel their viral outlook isn’t spreading fast enough. The Town Crier Conspiracy Theorist also has little time for serious in-depth research due to overwhelming ADD, hurrying about the world to conclude mundane tasks only to return to their workstations and reflect upon their expressive impact. This person also enjoys the use of “memes” and other images that provoke a satirical or somehow implied meaning that “everyone should just get.” ERMERGERD.

6. The Niche Conspiracy Theorist

This person has targeted a very special area of humanity or animal kingdom and decided somewhere along their lifespan that the source of our suffering existed there. Take the music industry for example. Utilizing copyright laws, record companies are forming their own rogue governments on islands in unknown locations throughout the world. Eye witness accounts from viewers of the B. Smalls rap videos indicate that such luxurious islands exist where executives from around the musical world gather to exchange bling, booze, and bitches – that is if you are a Niche Conspiracy Theorist. They are different from the Economic and Political Conspiracy Theorists because their thinking is typically not grounded in the larger governmental or economic structures present and obvious throughout mainstream media. The problem is deeper and much more specific. In fact, autonomy is what the Niche Conspiracy Theorist fears most. Lacking the eloquence of the Genius or stark images of the Town Crier, if this thing causing all these problems is left unchecked for long enough, the whole world could collapse into itself. All established systems of human endeavor will end… It’s the music industry, man!

7. The Aluminum Foil Conspiracy Theorist

This person is just batshit crazy. There is no excuse other than one that is medical, perhaps genetic. But since they have blackened the windows with newspapers, spread thin lines of cat food around the house to see if the aliens are broadcasting (think of the parakeet in the mineshaft), and are now preparing to interpret the static on the television, we can say it is time for the Aluminum Foil Conspiracy Theorist to be unveiled. It was first revealed by Julian Huxley in 1927 that the fictional protagonist of his story The Tissue-Culture King could block the effects of telepathy by fashioning “caps of metal foil.” Ideally, to block AM signal transmission from the government, the amount of electromagnetic shielding offered by the Aluminum Foil Cap is not enough, but must be bolstered by a full-body jumpsuit of the stuff. So unless one of them has decided to venture into the world to find food or discover an unknown territory up the street from you (your house), don’t expect to encounter the Aluminum Foil Conspiracy Theorist anytime soon.

The national statistics on TV violence cite that the average American, by the age of 18, will have been exposed to more than 200,000 violent acts. This month I will be 27 and my number hasn’t risen significantly because I shut the thing off a while ago. But as an adult, does TV violence I’ve been exposed to even occasionally in the past, rouse my subconscious to angry action? At this point, I’m a bit skeptical whether it does. I prefer conscious expressions of violence rather than subconscious and passive ones. So since I’ve learned a bit from myself, let me get more specific as to the possible effects of TV violence on others.

Firstly, the reason I cite television rather than books or printed word as being primary media influences should be obvious; frankly, most of the younger generation – and the older for that matter – do not read except to look cooler to their friends, complete a homework assignment, or get fired up over some controversial social occurrences. This is not really sad, but to be expected. It is one of the results of passive media content mainlined to our eyes and ears almost daily over the course of years, some watching as much as 5 hours of television a day. It would be naive to think passive media absorption does not occur.

Video games may be a little different of a story. They appear to the outsider as passive, but so long as hand-eye coordination is involved, there is in fact a fundamental degree of biological connectivity that is in some way beneficial. An old study involving surgeons asked to play video games before a major operation found their hand-eye coordination improved sometimes more than 20% in pace and accuracy. With games, content becomes secondary; whether one plays violent shooters or dropping a ball into a cup matters little scientifically. With video games, the brain appears to have a mechanism to make exceptions for certain contexts of information. Killing a police officer in Grand Theft Auto may not be a “bad” thing morally, nor will it likely impact the moral centers of one’s anatomical judgement, nerve responses which usually prevent a person from waking up and randomly killing police officers. But coupled with passive TV viewing this becomes a different story altogether.

In the hours of the media absorption an average American endures, countless images coordinate with sounds and blips of fast-paced, live-streamed content. Time takes on a different dimension. Everything is now, now, and now – even “when-more?” Then, there is a reminder of historical data. Perhaps what follows is some clever foreshadowing. This doesn’t sound much different than reading a novel.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Sitting generally a few feet from the tube, one could theoretically get up from the couch and return before any “new” information was registered as “missed,” i.e. that a critical blank was not filled. This notion is important because it reminds us visual data is so easily incorporated into the brain compared to our other senses that we need not give up much time to integrate data coming in and through this sense. Sitting next to my wife when we watch movies on Netflix, I constantly look over at her to see if she is getting ever instant of what we’re seeing. Not realizing this notion of filling in the information passively actually happens, I get frustrated if I notice her look away at what I think is a critical moment. I forget that sometimes, watching TV is just a passive activity, even removed from the very content broadcasted by the thing displayed in front of us.

The old technologies of tube-TV involved a quickly moving set of tiny flashlights that hummed to the tune of red, blue, and green. A lot like an inkjet printer, different movements of light would oscillate horizontally, eventually creating vertical patterns as well. This motion, though rarely noticeable, could entrance a viewer.

A lot of the early realizations television had an effect on the brain came before the dawn of HD TVs and computer-driven video playback. If you happened to own a camcorder in the stone age of video recording technology, you probably would have noticed something strange if you filmed your TV screen while it was activated. You can see the lines, the bars, and the strange oscillation of the RGB filaments. But was there something to this motion that was masked and kept out of the public eye altogether?

I’ve always been one for conspiracy theory. I grew up with it, fascinated rather than fearful of the prospects of a one-world illuminati-driven government. Studying occultism, I started to see some grand conspiracy like the illuminati as not really all that bad. Rather, who it was that told us it was bad, now those were the real culprits. And they were on TV.

Conservative politics has a way of grabbing people with diminished intelligence. Period. It is easier for the dimwitted to accept old ways of thinking, acting, etc. than it is to be liberal and progressive, to step up and take social risks, some of which may grant the individual and/or society with a big payoff. Yet turn to a television network and watch a new show that has grabbed the attention of a “majority” of Americans. Are they not using such “liberal” tactics of risk and progressive marketing, while somehow harnessing the eyes and ears of conservative audiences?

The show 24 highlighted one man with a gun and a badge and his journey to undo all the wrongs the terrorists were trying to do to our country. It was an overly patriotic show, reminding us of the importance of social service, clandestine capabilities by the highest trained US military personnel, and the consequences of tampering with our government’s activities. Or was it? In all actuality, the shooting, running, explosions, and heavy, bloody breathing appealed to the eyes first. Sensorily, visual content depicting the survival of a mammal takes psychological priority over more grandiose ideas like patriotism, social service, etc. The brain is wired to aid us in survival. It is only when it remains active in the midst of a passive activity that some interesting effects begin to emerge.

Statistically, visual content involving an aggressor who goes unpunished for his/her activities is more likely to entice a viewer into committing a similar action than one who is imprisoned, killed, or severely maimed. The shock of a resolve appears, in this instance, to modify influencing factors on the psychology of a person engaged in a passive activity. As a specific example, take Osama Bin Laden. He was “on the run” for many years, not brought to “justice” until his execution during the Obama Administration’s first term. Before that, during the Bush Era, the man blamed for influencing/ordering the 911 attacks remained unpunished. And during this time, America found itself in a war with Iraq, a country in no way directly linked to the terroristic ideologies of Osama Bin Laden. More striking was that when the Al Qaeda leader was found, discovered was the fact he’d been living in his location – out in the open – for almost 6 years.

If anyone has done research into the 911 coverups and/or a CIA protective measure to keep Bin Laden alive, they might also realize there was some motivating factor to commit both of the aforementioned actions: 1. orchestrate an attack on our country from a government level and 2. educate the populace on the fact the man responsible for said attacks lives in caves deep within the country of Afghanistan. What is missing here?

The thing omitted thus far is how we received any information about 911, Bin Laden, or all the interpretations that have emerge 10+ years later: Television.

The tube gave us live shots and commentary of the towers crashing down, bombs over Bagdad and a notification of “Mission Accomplished,” one of the major republican blunders broadcasted live during the height of the war-hawk Bush Administration. 10+ years later, we’re still there. It is still talked about by the press. And if there should be any lull one day, a TV-jockey can always cite the ongoing conflicts overseas. The Arab Spring gives new meaning to real-time drama able to be mainlined into our subconscious. But is it changing route making it a little less effective? Yes and no.

People keen enough on the use of social media learn techniques to make themselves more noticeable. If they are smart, they should be able to correlate the fact that the news media uses similar tactics when appealing to masses. You have to put messages out there and expect some backlash, especially if you are good at presenting content. But you also have to expect downright ignorance of your overall message, something not every participant in social media has figured out; what you say is being organized on a deep biological level – whether you like it or not. Yet has the overexposure to TV media disabled certain parts of the brain from reacting to more far-reaching or specific interests, even from developing healthy interests in specific content?

The height of the Reagan Administration also saw an influx of Christian Televangelists. Any notion of the separation of church and state was chucked out the window the moment a “majority” of Americans, likely conservative Christians, saw their televised religious leaders boasting the importance of political activism, especially in the election of leaders with particular religious views. This was an example of direct – rather than subconscious – appeal to a person’s decision making. Yet it was an appeal nonetheless.

Media aims to make appeals. And whether they are subliminal, symbolic, or implying something “beyond” the obviousness of the content is entirely up to the intelligence of a viewer for any such fact of the matter to be recognized. It does not matter if one is liberal or conservative, religious or real – the fact is, television has an incredible reach beyond what most recognize. Religious propagation, political campaigning, and the mass promotion of consumerism. Despite the impact of violence in the media on the minds of America’s youth and adults alike, there is conflict. The point is indeed conflict, not simply overt violence. Conflict is needed and has to be redundant, else the “point” cannot be effectively ingrained into the psyche of a viewer. It is no longer some governmental conspiracy to brainwash masses. It is but a select few companies keen on modern marketing appeal and technique. There is such a science to it that it is taught in universities around the country.

So, whatever media source you flock to for information – political, bipartisan, religious, or secular – realize you’ve been somehow had. You’ve been hooked, yet only because of a balanced combination of genes and environmental exposure to make you this receptive. So stay keen, keep your intelligence fresh and aware, and watch closely – but not too closely. You wouldn’t want to slip up the next time Oprah promotes another book. It might start a war in your community.

Nathan H. Fox

Follow me on Twitter @TheAutisticYogi