This is probably long overdue.  Although Brainsturbator has attracted a lot of flattering attention from the publishing industry (as well as Scientologists) for flagrant violation of copyright law, I'm still a big fan of real damn books, the kind you can carry around with you and read in the backyard.  PDF files are great, but my laptop would give me testicular cancer if I tried using it like a book. 

The classic excuse for pirating mp3s is really true, at least in my case: when I download a book I really like, I will go out and buy it.  This was true for Kevin Kelly's masterpiece Out of Control, and just this past week, that was true for Ben Mack's outstanding marketing book, Think Two Products Ahead...  If the book is important enough to be re-read and referred back to regularly -- and damn few of them are -- then it's worth investing money into getting a hard copy.

So today I'm going to sit down and write up a list of the most important and valuable books I can think of.  Feel free to chip in with your own suggestions -- in fact, I'd really appreciate it if you did.  I realize that for some people, registering with our website in order to post comments is more hassle than you want to deal with.  I am sorry for that, but it's the best system to deal with spam, plus we run a forum that's overstuffed with new data and brainfood to reward you for the hassle.  Thanks again to everyone who reads Brainsturbator -- I'm grateful for your time and your patience.

READ ON AT BRAINSTURBATOR

1. Levels of Scale.

You know, I honestly have no clue where this one came from.  Sometimes you smoke marijuana, eat a bunch of shitty food, and watch several seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force on DVD.  Sometimes, you wind up with an article that explains the entire Universe.  You just can't call it either way.

2. Nuclear Masada: An Ethical Quandary

I'm still amazed this article hasn't gotten me into trouble.  I'm basically making a case that Planet Earth would be a better place if we all had nuclear weapons -- or at least arguing that the only way to achieve true freedom is to have a couple warheads in the basement.  I'm still not sure if that's true, but it's an interesting line of thought to say the least.

3. Fumbling Towards a Science of Mass Mind Control

In retrospect I can see clearly that this article was the birth of Skilluminati Research, and the questions I explore here are still woven into more or less every single Brainsturbator article since.

4. Do You Have a Community Resistance Plan?

Brainsturbator is all about giving people antidotes to paranoia, and this is our common sense, Vermonter look at martial law and how to prepare for the Worst Case Scenarios that most NWO killers merely lose sleep over.  If you think you're gonna out-gun the United States military, this is probably not going to do you much good, but for anyone else -- everyone else -- this is a recommended read.

5. Maurice Strong: Another Hidden Ruler.

A short, potent look at one of the more curious forces at work behind the scenes of the New World Disorder -- to this day I can't get a read on this dude.  I cannot honestly tell if I really like him or really worry about him -- perhaps you'll have less moral ambiguity than me, give it a shot.

6. Brainsturbator Wants You...To Drop Outta School Now

I still get a grumpy email maybe once a week about this one, and I still stand by it.  A look at the failure by design of American education, and a call for free mutants to get themselves out of the meat grinder system.

7. BRAINSTURBATOR TO USA: WE ARE WINNING THE FIGHT

As close to a Manifesto as I have ever come, and an answer to all the Democrats and Greens and Socialists and Libertarians (and even Anarchists) who've asked me why I'm now Down With The Cause.  Hopefully that's either enough to get you interested, or fair warning to keep you away.

8. Humans Ruin Everything: Animals of War

A look at the human use of animals as weapons -- disturbing and disgusting, but very fertile ground for insights and inspiration just the same.  Probably my single favorite article so far.

9. The History of "What if We Dosed the Water"

This is a history of hallucinogenic warfare -- I was in a constant state of amazement working on this article.  I expected it to be a weird story, but I had no idea what I was in for, this is one of the more jam-packed Brainsturbator posts ever.

10. More Dirt on the Demon Box: TV Science

A look at the history, psychology and neurology behind the most powerful appliance ever.  As I've mentioned before, probably way too often, I was really surprised by the amount of negative feedback I got on this one.  Hilariously, that only managed to prove the points I made in the article.

11. DMT and Extraterrestrial Communication

This article got our humble little website one hell of a lot of attention.  I'd be willing to bet a great many of the people reading this right now first checked Brainsturbator via this piece -- it was a nice surprise to see how much it resonated with the weirdos of the world.

12. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, We Salute You

Hands down, flat out, no question, the single greatest "We Salute You" ever.

PEACE OUT EARTH HUMANS -- THERE'S A UNIVERSE MORE TO COME.

The great thing about being alive these days is the raw speed at which the paradigms shift.  If you're not too keen on current theory -- in any discipline anywhere -- don't worry, because a decade from now everything will be completely different.  This article takes a look at neurogenesis: the long-disputed, finally-proven mechanism which produces new brain cells.  If you still believe that humans only have a limited number of neurons during their life, good news: you're completely fricking wrong.  


Continue Reading  at Brainsturbator.com

The internet is a great tool --- already, we've been posed this question twice via email and we might as well try to sit down, work with crayons and legos, and really commit to a few beliefs.  A couple of our guiding principles, on paper once and for all.  This is way harder than it sounds.
At the BIPT, we don't delude ourselves about "education" or "learning".  As a teacher, there's nothing more gratifying than than that magic moment when your student "gets it."  This is why you must actively punish them for understanding.  Don't ever kid yourself into thinking teaching is even possible.  Your students will never get it -- you can trick them into getting something else, but they'd never be able to teach that to you. 

So lie to your would-be students -- they'll either get the joke that nobody really understands anything and we're all decieving ourselves to a literally unthinkable degree -- or they will hate you bitterly.  Despite everything you just read, the following is completely true.

1. We think the separation of mind and body was really dumb.

If you actually think about the logic Rene Descartes used to convince a whole culture that "mind" and "body" were somehow separate concepts, it's not compelling, conclusive, or even very coherent.  We're not clear on why it's taken centuries for anyone else to reach the same conclusion.  Observe:

"While I could pretend that I had no body, that there was no world...I could not pretend that I was not.  From the fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed I existed.  From this I recognized that I was a substance whose essence or nature is to think, and who's being requires no place and depends on no material things."

----from Discourse on Method

Before we even discuss neurology: here's a simple test.  If this logic sounds reasonable, locate a firearm, load it with ammunition, and discharge about six rounds into your head.  If you're still there thinking, congratulations! Boy, you sure proved us wrong!

Our larger point is that everything biology and neurology have taught us since ol' Descartes penned that little gem has done nothing but prove him wrong.  The "I" of conscious experience is integrally tied to, and emergent from, the physical body.  The two are inseparable --- there is, at present, no clearly defined border between the mind and body, as there is between liver and the gallbladder, or between our cells and their mitochondria.

Science cannot account for how the "I" of conscious experience arises from the brain.  This is because science is having serious problems these days --- there are a lot of good ideas floating around, and Brainsturbator Dot Com is here to float them to you, the reader.  A short list of useful thinkers: Rupert Sheldrake, Chris King, Iona Miller, Jose Delgado, Aleister Crowley, Mae-Wan Ho, John Zerzan, Hakim Bey, Ray Kurzweil, and Daniel Dennett.

2. We think that humans function on programming and have the capacity to reprogram themselves.

Your personality is not you.  Your personality is the sum of all the humans you have interacted with and taken patterns from.  We learn how to walk, talk, move, dress, and behave by modeling other humans.  This begins with your parents and their social circle, then your own peer group and teachers, your media role models, every single person on television, and everyone else you've seen or heard from the moment you were born until right about five seconds ago.  However, you can also change your personality -- through an act of will, you can alter your habits, you can alter your beliefs, you can alter how people percieve you completely.  Are you still you?

(That's not supposed to be a deep question, the answer is "Fuckin' Of Course I Am")

It is not polite or charitable to say that humans are robots.  Our culture is based on the idea of the free thinking, soveriegn individual, and our Constitution is written presupposing that as a universal truth.  But as any Buddhist knows, even achieving conscious awareness is a lot of work and takes constant, vigilant effort to maintain.  We are not born awake, that takes training and self-discipline. 

For anyone unfamiliar with this line of thought, start with this essay by Howard Bloom. 

For anyone interested in how to take control of their own "programming" (just a metaphor) we recommend the following: Prometheus Rising, by Robert Anton Wilson.  Undoing Yourself, by Dr. Christopher Hyatt.  LSD Psychotherapy, by Stanislav Grof.  Monsters and Magical Sticks, by Stephen Heller. And in the interest of total overkill for dedicated autodidacts, here is the Complete Works of Milton Erikson

Again, those are not amazon links, those are the complete books in pdf format.  Information is free and Brainsturbator loves you.

3. We think that there is some serious shit on the horizon.

We are not committed to any dates, because the past millenium has seen a failed prophecy every month or so, and because we have personally survived over 100 Ends of The World by our own count.  No nuclear winter, no comets, no solar flares, no pole reversal, no Y2K, no Rapture, no Armageddon, just the same breed of parasite, manipulating fear and ignorance.  The same holds true of politics - short of studying up on the business and science of oil and doing a global tour to assess the world's actual supply, it's hard to make a call on peak oil.  Many intelligent people question the official story of what happened on 9/11, but nearly everyone who has definitive answers about what happened that day is retarded.

Despite all that, it's hard to deny that we stand at a point without precedent in human history.  Our population size, our technological power, our increasing interconnection, are all at levels our parents only dreamed of, and our grandparents cannot even understand.  Few people have noted that this upward trend is reflected in our bodies as well --- in all forms of athletic performance, world records go up every year.  Anyone who has watched the X Games for the past five years has a clear sense of what we're talking about --- tricks considered impossible two years ago are becoming commonplace now.

The Singulary is only a human guess, and so is the ETA of 2012.  And yes, the Mayans who made those calendars were also humans, guessing.  Humans are very strange creatures: their solutions are frequently amazing, but somehow their explanations are almost always utterly wrong.  Humans have made most of their greatest innovations by accident and random chance.  The science establishment which has leveled entire cities and poisoned the planet have yet to explain why placebos work just as well as any presciption drug on the market.So keep an open mind, but definitely be prepared. 

As to how you prepare for the unknown, we don't know, either.

Got an email question about "every level of scale", a phrase we used in the last post on Chris King. This is an explanation, but we don't claim it to be definitive....or even authoritative.  This is just the measurement system that we use here at the BIPT.  Here are alternate perspectives from wikipedia, from math world, and a very interesting read from The Sustainable Scale Project  

BIPT Levels of Scale

Universal

The sum total of everything.  There could be any number of "levels" between our supercluster and the sum total of everything -- this is just a guess based on what we know.  The limits of the Universe remain unknown.

We have not found an outside -- a final boundary.  As far as we look, there are only more stars.

We have not found an inside -- an ultimate building-block of reality.  The deeper we peek into molecules and atoms, the more tiny components (and "empty space") we find.

Supercluster

We live in the midst of Virgo Supercluster --- the vast collection of galaxies that contains the Milky Way.  The gravitational center of this cluster is the supermassive star Sagittarius A*.

Galactic

CLICK TO ENLARGEImage from a recent and excellent paper by Jacques Vallee: "Metastudy on the Spiral Structure of our Galaxy". Jaques is the only guy we trust on UFOs, which is hilarious, because he admits to being sworn to secrecy on a number of topics by the government and has a fairly shady past.

Solar

We recommend the free software program Celestia, which allows you to explore the solar system in 3-D.  It is at first frustrating to navigate, because it's easy to get lost even inside the inner solar system.  The space between planets is so vast that your landmarks disappear completely, blending in with the stars which surround you.  Our solar system, just like an atom, is mostly empty space.

Also, if you dig Celestia, check out the huge amount of expansion packs you can beef it up with.

Also also, a good page to bookmark is spaceweather dot com, a good tool for keeping track of what's going on outside the ionosphere.  Since there's a fairly strong correlation between solar flare radiation hitting Earth and a spike in human violence, it never hurts to have a little outside knowledge.

Global

The God's-eye view of all human affairs.  Wiki of course has a richly informative page on our Earth, and David Wilcock also has a most interesting perspective on the matter.

Relevant Sciences: Economics, Geology, Archaeology, Meteorology.

Normal

Yes, that image is deliberately provokative.  Not surprisingly, as we move closer to the daily reality of human life, these arbitrary measurements get more controversial.

This level of scale was at first difficult to name.  National borders not only vary in size, they are completely meaningless hallucenations --- a useless place to start.  "Normal" refers to culturally homogenous zones.  When middle-class Americans travel to Switzerland, they feel less disoriented than they would in Hong Kong or in Argentina.

Adolf Hitler is pictured above for two reasons: 1) He was attempted to create a new culture that would span all of Europe and eventually the globe, and 2) because what he did truly was normal, in the sickest possible sense.  Genocide is nothing new.  Genocide has not stopped since the Holocaust of World War Two.  Genocide is a direct consequence of cultural norms being different enough to allow humans to view other humans as disposable animals.  The genocide which founded the United States of America functioned on precisely the same principle.

Sadly, recent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur make it clear that even very slight differences are more than enough to trigger human brutality --- people with nearly identical genotypes and thousands of years of geographic proximity will still turn on one another overnight.

We included Hitler because it must be remembered that although Hitler was a monster, he was not an anomaly.  He was not unique.  Most of all, he was not inhuman.  All of Germany was not behind Hitler, just as all of the United States are not behind Bush.  But enough were behind Hitler to create a much more dangerous situation --- the majority was scared into silence and impotence.  There will always be true believers, but they are only able to create a Holocaust when the majority enables them to.

This is the "norm" --- projecting enough opinions on every TV station to make us think that if we speak out we'll be shouted down.  To make us feel like we're crazy for thinking our country has been taken over by criminal psychopaths.  To make us look behind our backs and think before we speak.  The invisible hand of conformity.

Relevant Sciences: Psychology, Biology, Comparative Theology, Media Studies.

Local

This is whereabouts you live.  Unique to every human.  All the faces are white in the image above because we are from Vermont and that's where the photo was taken.

Relevant Sciences: Municipal Engineering, Conflict Resolution, Agriculture, City Planning.

Social

Your peer group is one of the most-studied systems in the modern world.  There exists an entire district of the city of New York --- popularly known as Madison Avenue --- strictly devoted to the multi-billion dollar industry of advertising.  Understanding how you and your friend interact is a puzzle for some of the highest-paid assholes on the planet.

Although our technology is unparalleled and our art is beyond anything in the animal kingdom, our social interactions have barely changed at all.  We still use mating rituals, we still establish a "pecking order" of group dominance, we still size one another up when we meet, we still play power games.  We're not fundamentally much different from other primates, aside from clothing and cell phones.

Relevant Sciences: Psyschology, Biology, Neurology, Evolution.

Personal

The single most important level of scale, because it's us.  It is here, on this level of scale, that we percieve all other levels of scale.  All of our telescopes end at the same interface: a human eye, which is so finely tuned it can detect individual photons of light.

The entire universe that we percieve and take for granted is constructed in the folds of the grey matter above.

One of our favorite models is that of "perceptual cybernetics", which divides the sum of all human existence into three distinct parts:

Phy is the name assigned to the electromagnetic signals and "solid matter" which make up the world we experience.

f/x is the name assigned to the actual organs of perception which allow us humans to percieve all this.

Psi is the name assigned to the mysterious "internal conscious experience", the mind which percieves and then acts.

As Mark Pesce explains:

From an informational standpoint, the entire universe can be divided into three domains. The external domain - that is, everything exterior to the self - is identified by the Greek letter Phy, representing the physical universe. The internal domain - the realm of thoughts and emotions - is identified by Psi, representing the domain of the psyche. Everything between these two - the senses and affectors which mediated between the internal world and the physical universe - is represented as Fx. The precise content of each of these "islands" of information are unimportant; what is important are the interfaces that each present to the other. Both Phi and Psi must pass through Fx, and each presents an interface only to Fx. If, for example, I were to take an infrared remote control, and shine it into the audience, it's unlikely that anyone would know it. Though information is being transmitted from the device, you have no senses which can receive this information. This information is lost at the Phi/Fx interface.

For a hyper-complicated and fascinating examination of these concepts, we recommend this essay by Mark Pesce.Relevant Sciences: Neurology, Psychology, Martial Arts, Healing Arts, Psychoacoustic, Autoimmunology.

Organic

We're not too sold on this one.  Perhaps there's no need for an interval between the personal and the cellular --- so this is here as a placeholder more than anything else.

Cellular

We strongly recommend the Lewis Thomas book, The Lives of a Cell, as a useful introduction to, and meditation on, the human cell.

Cells are animals unto themselves, and it's important to remember how much of "us" is actually alien life --- from the perfectly independent mitochondria within our cells to the billions of batceria and fungus that call our bodies home.

Molecular

The molecular level of scale has been rapidly colonized by mankind in the past century.  For over 2000 years, molecules have been a matter of philosophical debate and mere speculation.  Now, in 2006, we are manufacturing technology using individual molecules.  From pharmacology advances to the frontiers of nanotechnology, the molecular level of scale is becoming a playground for the human mind ---- now we just need to make it an affordable playground.

Atomic

As we mentioned in the previous post, it's hard to miss the isomorphism between atomic orbits and planetary orbits.  It's most remarkable to see those same patterns recur at such vastly separated levels of scale.  What does it mean?  We have no clue.

QuantumSuperstring theory looks like a mistake to us.  There is certainly a level of scale --- perhaps billions more --- after quantum, but at the moment, our powers of detection end here.  It's worth noting that Quantum Tantra physicist Nick Herbert feels differently:

NICK: Oh, ultimate particles, huh? I'd be perfectly content if physics came to an end--that quarks and leptons were actually the world's fundamental particles. Some people think this, that physics is coming to an end, as far as the direction of finding fundamental particles goes. It's okay with me. I don't think that's the most interesting way to go, looking for fundamental particles. You know my real notion is that consciousness is the toughest problem, and that physics has basically taken off on the easy problems, and may even solve them. We may find all the forces and all the particles of nature-that's physic's quest--but then what? Then we have to really tackle some of these harder problems--the nature of mind, the nature of God, and bigger problems that we don't even know how to ask yet. So, actually I'm not too interested in the problem of finding fundamental particles, but my guess is, from what we know now, that we're very close to that situation.

From his interview with Mavericks of the Mind.

Think you live in a Democracy? Read this.

Paul Laffoley MySpace Gallery

Nikola Tesla MySpace -- whoever is running this is doing it up right

The Law of One --- worth reading

Planet Earth MySpace -- superdope

Nuwabu Sound Museum One

Nuwabu Sound Museum Two

Nuwabu Sound Museum Three

Nuwabu Sound Museum Four

All of the following links are to .pdf downloads that we host.  Information is free and Brainsturbator loves you.

The Cannabis Grow Bible, 4th Edition Close to everything you'd need.

The Closet Cultivator A treatise on compact, undetectable indoor grow operations.  Excellent reading.

The Big Book of Buds Sounds like the dumbest book on Earth, sure.....but as a guide to breeds of marijuana, you couldn't do much better than this.

Outdoor Marijuana Cultivation  Those of you with more land might want to use this book instead.

If you'd like some serious data about marijuana, you are not alone.  Since marijuana was rendered illegal, reputable and honest research has been hard to come by.  Here at the BIPT, we have two dynamite resources for the curious primate:

Pharacology and Toxicology of Marijuana

And here's the very best of the bunch: an exhaustive and authoritative report that was given to Congress and promptly buried.  Turns out marijuana has extensive medical use and is extremely safe!