Articles of Agreement --What is a Pirate Crew?? pt 2

Whew that last post got a little off the track..... Pirate Crews were governed by Articles of Agreement. Traditionally, Articles of Agreement governed rules of discipline, division of stolen goods,and compensation for injured Pirates. Here's a Taste: . Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity (not an uncommon thing among them) makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment. II. Every man to be called fairly in turn, by list, on board of prizes because, (over and above their proper share) they were on these occasions allowed a shift of clothes: but if they defrauded the company to the value of a dollar in plate, jewels, or money, marooning was their punishment. If the robbery was only betwixt one another, they contented themselves with slitting the ears and nose of him that was guilty, and set him on shore, not in an uninhabited place, but somewhere, where he was sure to encounter hardships. III. No person to game at cards or dice for money. VII. To desert the ship or their quarters in battle, was punished with death or marooning. Anyway,The Thirty Second Commercial On Behalf Of Joining A Pirate Crew Goes Something Like This: Would you be more likely to experience greater satisfaction in the coming year if you had 12 other people promoting you and your talents, or with one person pulling you down? Of course you would prosper more from a group of a dozen or more like minded individuals than if you ...well...insert your own relationship story. And here's the beautiful part---It's in THEIR SELF-INTEREST to help you succeed. All Members of Ship's Crew are required to donate 10% of any INCREASEin Income, Year to Year. 33% of that income goes to the Captain (Captains). 66% is directed to Projects, mutually held assets, investments etc. I am firmly committed to radical change in my life, and I am certain that the only way to get a sufficient percentage of humanity close enough to a tipping point is to show them by example. Entering into a binding agreement with a dozen or more individuals to promote each other's interest is the most liberating thing you can do in your life. Some of us already do it. If you're in a Sufi Order, or a Real School, then you already understand. A pirate Crew is a Social Network which integrates Economic Success, Resiliency, Emergent Skills, Lower Costs and Community. What's not to LIKE??? Think of it as the Emergent New Brick in Social Organization.

The Basics -- What is a Pirate Crew ?? Part 1.

Before Elucidating the inner mysteries of the Pirate Crew, Please let me digress lightly, and touch on the subject of my previous post, which speaks to the necessity of self organized groups. Our cognitive elite have created the conditions under which we approach a TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY a point where knowledge doubles every second. Again, the TERROR OF THE SITUATION is almost overwhelming. Surrounded by corrupt systems, institutions, and a zombie army of sleeping bureaucrats...You ask yourself...What the fuck can I do? I asked myself that very question many, many times. Three years between Posts?? In spite of everything, I MEAN EVERYTHING, FUCKING EVERYTHING, you are like me and cannot do other than FIGHT the BEAST, then congratulations, the journey begins today. One aspect of today's life is the degree to which our lives are tied to an evil system. Making the decision that you no longer wish to support the BEAST is difficult, until you no longer have a choice. The most likely candidates for your PIRATE CREW will be individuals who have recently lost everything. What we need is some way of linking work, activism, spiritual practice, child rearing, social life and group buying practices together. INTEGRATE, IN OTHER WORDS!! politics is economics social capital is class consciousness IT'S ALL RELATED--STUPID!!

Kensington Chronicles

I did it again. I tuned into one of those “this is how we got to this catastrophic state of affairs” radio talk shows, and a little shiver ran down my spine. Don’t get me wrong, the author, Michael Lerner is quite brilliant, and his overview of the systemic and system wide corruption in the Corn Industry is staggering…What I find interesting is the lack of emergent social structures in the face of …10 Newborn children had their umbilical cords tested after birth in the United States recently. They found 280 distinct chemicals present. 180 of those chemicals causes cancer. 217 were neurological (brain) toxins. 203 chemicals were known to cause birth defects and abnormal growth. I don’t have to mention them, but I will, if only to show the breadth and width and depth of the BAD GUYS we have to worry about. Nuclear Threat is credible. Fucking Japan is spewing the stuff forth, as we speak. West Nile Virus, Bio-Nano Technology, Wrap it up in a nice big TERRORIST Bow, and you’ve got the typical, disjointed, visually assaulted, aurally attacked , isolated, insulated individual, who, because of the cognitive dissonance commonly associated with the former, does absolutely nothing about the agreed upon, fucked up nature of our commonly shared reality. About 50% of the world has someone of the opposite sex to blame for their inertia. Having laid out in the barest fashion the catastrophic threats that loom ever present on our horizon, and having noted in passing the odd lack of fervor in opposition to so much corruption. Maybe that’s it. Because EVERYTHING I MEAN EVERYTHING (INSERT ANY LARGE PUBLIC / PRIVATE INSTITUTION ---EDUCATION—--HEALTH---DEFENSE—-CRIMINAL JUSTICE ETC. ETC.) SEEMS VENAL AND DISGUSTING

. As a late stage tactic, the Proto-Fascist Capitalists (confident in their late-game strategy) have bared their true faces, knowing that the horror of the situation would freeze most people in their tracks like a deer caught in their headlights. Seems to have worked….But Not Quite… WHAT ARE THE 5 DAILY PRACTICES THAT COULD SAVE YOU FROM ALL OF THIS?? 1. Stop watching T. V. In fact, stop reading the local paper. Try and find credible alternate sources for news analysis. 2. Meditate for 15 minutes a day. 3. Drink 2 liters of pure water per day. 4. Join a Pirate Crew 5. Join a MUSIC Group The first three should be pretty self-explanatory. The next two are a little bit trickier.

There Can Be No Revolution Without Poetry.....

Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope,sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
Ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
It starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they tsaid no,
it starts when you say WE
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

Marge Piercy (quoted in Revolution From Within--Gloria Steinem)

The Fountainhead

Piracy, Immediatism, and The Master Game

PIRACY, IMMEDIATISM, AND THE MASTER GAME

By now, you should be aware that the 'Pirate' lens of this blog is just that, a lens. The wider vista is one that opens up onto a much larger world view. This view is not meant for everyone. There are a number of incontrovertible facts that you will have to accept in order for any of what I have written to ring your bell. It would be cruel to expect a knowledge of, say, calculus from a retarded person. And as much as the practitioners of the "mean, green meme" would like to give that knowledge (and a nice quiet, mundane existence) to everyone, everywhere on the bell curve of intelligence, it just aint gonna happen.

So what are YOU after? A job? A career? or a LIFE? But I can't live without a JOB. Yes maybe, but you have to first distinguish your LIFE from the acquisition of a BUNCH OF FUCKING GADGETS!

Well, permit me to let you in on a secret. A LIFE is ONLY possible with the energy that flows from your participation in a REAL group . Like most of the ideas presented here, this flies in the face of popular myth.

As one of my heroes, Elbert Hubbard stated: " The ideas that benefit a man are seldom welcomed by him on first presentation" So what, I say. That which I KNOW to be true, I must state. (You should try it....it makes you feel better...and it helps to insulate you from the shit that the ever-present LATE-STAGE CAPITALIST MEDIA throws at you)

What are the groups that Late Stage Capitalism supports? The nuclear family for one. "The People I Know At My Job" is another. My Church Group of course. Unfortunately, as we have seen previously, the nuclear family is a cruel joke played on us. It simply doesn't have the capacity to offer any real support in our quest for the master game. Half of all marriages fail. The other half devolve into stupid transactions, barely acceptable to a REAL HUMAN BEING and kept going "for the kids". Both the nuclear family and 'the people I know from work' are already self-alienated and tied into the WORK/CONSUME/DIE STRUCTURE OF LATE-STAGE, POST MODERN CAPITALISM. (A great example of the WORK / CONSUME / DIE Structure is the first 1/2 hour of the movie 'FIGHT CLUB'

Religion is of course mostly about fundraising and crowd control. If what Jesus was REALLY TEACHING was ever allowed into popular consciousness, people would be throwing themselves out of buildings like confetti on parade day. Are you starting to GET IT? If you don't become your own meta-programmer, you run the risk of being overwhelmed by the programming offered by media (mediation). Immediatism (and its brother movement Situationalism) provides a skin thick enough (hence our beloved Rhino pictured above) to withstand the mediation of late stage capitalist society One of the purposes of IMMEDIATISM (and Piracy) is to lessen the effects of the WORK / CONSUME / DIE Paradigm.

The other purpose is to provide the SPACE (or slack) in which to achieve AWAKENING.

The wide domain of happiness has never been mapped; but sorrow has been surveyed and known in every part.

Take 'modern psychology' (please). Deterministic rat-running-fucks. Robert S. de Ropp, author of "The Master Game" makes the distinction between what is called 'Mental Illness' by the deterministic-rat-running-fucks and what it really is:

"It has been stated by Thomas Szasz that what people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem but GAMES WORTH PLAYING. He who cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to ACCIDIE, defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins, but now regarded as a symptom of sickness. ACCIDIE is a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment.....Such a state of mind, Szasz tells us, is a prelude to what is loosely called 'mental illness' which, though Szazs defines this illness as a myth, nevertheless fills half the beds in hospitals, and makes multitudes of people a burden to themselves and to society" ACCIDIE is the reason people turn to drugs, to anti-social behavior, to crime. It is the necessary byproduct of Kapitalism, and one of its driving forces. Just wait...your local paper will soon have news of new court-house building projects, new jails, more cops...

There you go...what is thought of by our medical establishment as a precursor to mental illness is in fact the first stage of REAL MENTAL (AND EMOTIONAL) FITNESS!!! Now, on to Immediatism.

As Hakim Bey states:

"To be "to busy" for the Immediatist project is to miss the very essence of Immediatism. To struggle to come together every Monday night (or whatever) in the teeth of the gale of busyness, or family, or invitations to stupid parties-that struggle is already Immediatism itself. Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group which is not your spouse-and kids, or 'the guys from work' or your fucking 12-Step Program--and you have already achieved virtually everything Immediatism yearns for. An actual Project will arise almost spontaneously out of this successful slap-in-the-face of the social norm of alienated boredom. Outwardly, of course, the Project will seem to be the group's purpose, its motive for coming together, -- but in fact the opposite is true. WE'RE NOT KIDDING OR INDULGING IN HYPERBOLE WHEN WE INSIST THAT MEETING FACE-TO-FACE IS ALREADY 'THE REVOLUTION' ...

Of course it will be horribly difficult--why else would we have spent the last decade trying to construct our 'Bohemia in the Mail' (or internet) if it were easy to have it in some quatier latin or rural commune? The Rat-Bastard Capitalist scum who are telling you to 'reach out and touch someone' or 'be there' (or Just Do It) (where--alone in front of a fucking television set) ----these Lovecrafty Vampires are trying to turn you in to a scrunched-up blood-drained pathetic little cog in the death-machine of the human soul...Fight Them!--by meeting with your friends, not to consume or produce, but to ENJOY FRIENDSHIP--and you will have triumphed (at least for a moment) over the most pernicious conspiracy in EuroAmerican society today--the conspiracy to turn YOU INTO A LIVING CORPSE GALVANIZED BY PROSTHESIS AND THE TERROR OF SCARCITY -- TO TURN YOU INTO A SPOOK HAUNTING YOUR OWN BRAIN. THIS IS NOT A PRETTY MATTER!! THIS IS A QUESTION OF FAILURE OR TRIUMPH!!

In fact, it is a question of LIFE OR DEATH. OF YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL.

Life games reflect life aims. And the games men choose to play indicate not only their type, but also their level of inner development. Do you really want to hang around with a bunch of retards?

I have no desire left to 'save' the human race. Neither should you. Saving yourselves is a big enough task.

What does the Pirate model of living offer? Everything that Post Modern Capitalism doesn't.

Thus endeth the lesson. (until I revise it)

Even Better!!!! Turn OFF YOUR TV'S