Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak, 1984. Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak, 1984.

One of Apple cofounder Steve Jobss most audacious marketing triumphs is rarely mentioned in the paeans to his genius that remain a staple of business content farms. In 1982, Jobs offered to donate a computer to every K12 school in America, provided Congress pass a bill giving Apple substantial tax write-offs for the donations. When he arrived in Washington, DC, to lobby for what became known as the Apple Bill, the 28-year-old CEO looked more like a summer intern than the head of a $600-million-a-year corporation, according to The Washington Post, but he already showed signs of his famous arrogance. He barraged the legislators with white papers and proclaimed that they would be crazy not to take us up on this. Jobs knew the strength of his hand: A mania for computer literacy was sweeping the nation as an answer to the competitive threats of globalization and the reescalation of the Cold Wars technology and space races. Yet even as preparing students for the Information Age became a national priority, the Reagan eras budget cuts meant that few schools could afford a brand-new $2,400 Apple II computer.Ad Policy Books in Review

The Apple Bill passed the House overwhelmingly but then died in the Senate after a bureaucratic snafu for which Jobs forever blamed Republican Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, then chair of the Finance Committee. Yet all was not lost: A similar bill passed in California, and Apple flooded its home state with almost 10,000 computers. Apples success in California gave it a leg up in the lucrative education market as states around the country began to computerize their classrooms. But education was not radically transformed, unless you count a spike in The Oregon Trailrelated deaths from dysentery. If anything, those who have studied the rapid introduction of computers into classrooms in the 1980s and 90s tend to conclude that it exacerbated inequities. Elite students and schools zoomed smoothly into cyberspace, while poorer schools fell further behind, bogged down by a lack of training and resources.

A young, charismatic geek hawks his wares using bold promises of social progress but actually makes things worse and gets extremely rich in the processtoday it is easy to see the story of the Apple Bill as a stand-in for the history of the digital revolution as a whole. The growing concern about the role that technology plays in our lives and society is fueled in no small part by a growing realization that we have been duped. We were told that computerizing everything would lead to greater prosperity, personal empowerment, collective understanding, even the ability to transcend the limits of the physical realm and create a big, beautiful global brain made out of electrons. Instead, our extreme dependence on technology seems to have mainly enriched and empowered a handful of tech companies at the expense of everyone else. The panic over Facebooks impact on democracy sparked by Donald Trumps election in a haze of fake news and Russian bots felt like the national version of the personal anxiety that seizes many of us when we find ourselves snapping away from our phone for what seems like the 1,000th time in an hour and contemplating how our lives are being stolen by a screen. We are stuck in a really bad system.

This realization has led to a justifiable anger and derision aimed at the architects of this system. Silicon Valley executives and engineers are taken to task every week in the op-ed pages of our largest newspapers. We are told that their irresponsibility and greed have undermined our freedom and degraded our democratic institutions. While it is gratifying to see tech billionaires get a (very small) portion of their comeuppance, we often forget that until very recently, Silicon Valley was hailed by almost everyone as creating the path toward a brilliant future. Perhaps we should pause and contemplate how this situation came to be, lest we make the same mistakes again. The story of how Silicon Valley ended up at the center of the American dream in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as well as the ambiguous reality behind its own techno-utopian dreams, is the subject of Margaret OMaras sweeping new history, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. In it, she puts Silicon Valley into the context of a larger story about postwar Americas economic and social transformations, highlighting its connections with the mainstream rather than the cultural quirks and business practices that set it apart. The Code urges us to consider Silicon Valleys shortcomings as Americas shortcomings, even if it fails to interrogate them as deeply as our current crisisand the role that technology played in bringing it aboutseems to warrant.

Silicon Valley entered the public consciousness in the 1970s as something of a charmed place. The first recorded mention of Silicon Valley was in a 1971 article by a writer for a technology newspaper reporting on the regions semiconductor industry, which was booming despite the economic doldrums that had descended on most of the country. As the Rust Belt foundered and Detroit crumbled, Silicon Valley soared to heights barely conveyed by the metrics that OMara rattles off in the opening pages of The Code: Three billion smartphones. Two billion social media users. Two trillion-dollar companies and the richest people in the history of humanity. Many people have attempted to divine the secret of Silicon Valleys success. The consensus became that the Valley had pioneered a form of quicksilver entrepreneurialism perfectly suited to the Information Age. It was fast, flexible, meritocratic, and open to new ways of doing things. It allowed brilliant young people to turn crazy ideas into world-changing companies practically overnight. Silicon Valley came to represent the innovative power of capitalism freed from the clutches of uptight men in midcentury business suits, bestowed upon the masses by a new, appealing folk hero: the cherub-faced start-up founder hacking away in his dorm room.

The Code both bolsters and revises this story. On the one hand, OMara, a historian at the University of Washington, is clearly enamored with tales of entrepreneurial derring-do. From the traitorous eight who broke dramatically from the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to start Fairchild Semiconductor and create the modern silicon transistor to the well-documented story of Facebooks founding, the major milestones of Silicon Valley history are told in heroic terms that can seem gratingly out of touch, given what we know about how it all turned out. In her portrayal of Silicon Valleys tech titans, OMara emphasizes virtuous qualities like determination, ingenuity, and humanistic concern, while hints of darker motives are studiously ignored. We learn that a visionary and relentless Jeff Bezos continued to drive a beat-up Honda Accord even as he became a billionaire, but his reported remark to an Amazon sales team that they ought to treat small publishers the way a lion treats a sickly gazelle is apparently not deemed worthy of the historical record. But at the same time, OMara helps us understand why Silicon Valleys economic dominance cant be chalked up solely to the grit and smarts of entrepreneurs battling it out in the free market. At every stage of its development, she shows how the booming tech industry was aided and abetted by a wide swath of American society both inside and outside the Valley. Marketing gurus shaped the tech companies images, educators evangelized for technology in schools, best-selling futurists preached personalized tech as a means toward personal liberation. What emerges in The Code is less the story of a tribe of misfits working against the grain than the simultaneous alignment of the countrys political, cultural, and technical elites around the view that Silicon Valley held the key to the future.

Above all, OMara highlights the profound role that the US government played in Silicon Valleys rise. At the end of World War II, the region was still the sleepy, sun-drenched Santa Clara Valley, home to farms and orchards, an upstart Stanford University, and a scattering of small electronics and aerospace firms. Then came the space and arms races, given new urgency in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, which suggested a serious Soviet advantage. Millions of dollars in government funding flooded technology companies and universities around the country. An outsize portion went to Northern Californias burgeoning tech industry, thanks in large part to Stanfords far-sighted provost Frederick Terman, who reshaped the university into a hub for engineering and the applied sciences.Current Issue

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Stanford and the surrounding area became a hive of government R&D during these years, as IBM and Lockheed Martin opened local outposts and the first native start-ups hit the ground. While these early companies relied on what OMara calls the Valleys ecosystem of fresh-faced engineers seeking freedom and sunshine in California, venture capitalists sniffing out a profitable new industry, and lawyers, construction companies, and real estate agents jumping to serve their somewhat quirky ways, she makes it clear that the lifeblood pumping through it all was government money. Fairchild Semiconductors biggest clients for its new silicon chips were NASA, which put them in the Apollo rockets, and the Defense Department, which stuck them in Minuteman nuclear missiles. The brains of all of todays devices have their origin in the United States drive to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

But the role of public funding in the creation of Silicon Valley is not the big government success story a good liberal might be tempted to consider it. As OMara points out, during the Cold War American leaders deliberately pushed public funds to private industry rather than government programs because they thought the market was the best way to spur technological progress while avoiding the specter of centralized planning, which had come to smack of communist tyranny. In the years that followed, this belief in the market as the means to achieve the goals of liberal democracy spread to nearly every aspect of life and society, from public education and health care to social justice, solidifying into the creed we now call neoliberalism. As the role of the state was eclipsed by the market, Silicon Valleyfull of brilliant entrepreneurs devising technologies that promised to revolutionize everything they touchedwas well positioned to step into the void.

The earliest start-up founders hardly seemed eager to assume the mantle of social visionary that their successors, todays flashy celebrity technologists, happily take up. They were buttoned-down engineers who reflected the cool practicality of their major government and corporate clients. As the 1960s wore on, they were increasingly out of touch. Amid the tumult of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, the major concern in Silicon Valleys manicured technology parks was a Johnson-era drop in military spending. The relatively few techies who were political at the time were conservative.

Things started to change in the 1970s. The 60s made a belated arrival in the Valley as a younger generation of geeks steeped in countercultural values began to apply them to the development of computer technology. The weight of Silicon Valleys culture shifted from the conservative suits to long-haired techno-utopians with dreams of radically reorganizing society through technology. This shift was perhaps best embodied by Lee Felsenstein, a former self-described child radical who cut his teeth running communications operations for anti-war and civil rights protests before going on to develop the Tom Swift Terminal, one of the earliest personal computers. Felsenstein believed that giving everyday people access to computers could liberate them from the crushing hierarchy of modern industrial society by breaking the monopoly on information held by corporations and government bureaucracies. To change the rules, change the tools, he liked to say. Whereas Silicon Valley had traditionally developed tools for the Man, these techies wanted to make tools to undermine him. They created a loose-knit network of hobbyist groups, drop-in computer centers, and DIY publications to share knowledge and work toward the ideal of personal liberation through technology. Their dreams seemed increasingly achievable as computers shrank from massive, room-filling mainframes to the smaller-room-filling minicomputers to, finally, in 1975, the first commercially viable personal computer, the Altair.

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Yet as OMara shows, the techno-utopians did not ultimately constitute such a radical break from the past. While their calls to democratize computing may have echoed Marxist cries to seize the means of production, most were capitalists at heart. To advance the personal computer revolution, they founded start-ups, trade magazines, and business forums, relying on funding from venture capital funds often with roots in the old money elite. Jobs became the most celebrated entrepreneur of the era by embodying the discordant figures of both the cowboy capitalist and the touchy-feely hippie, an image crafted in large part by the marketing guru Regis McKenna. Silicon Valley soon became an industry that looked a lot like those that had come before. It was nearly as white and male as they were. Its engineers worked soul-crushing hours and blew off steam with boozy pool parties. And its most successful company, Microsoft, clawed its way to the top through ruthless monopolistic tactics.

Perhaps the strongest case against the supposed subversiveness of the personal computer pioneers is how quickly they were embraced by those in power. As profits rose and spectacular IPOs seized headlines throughout the 1980s, Silicon Valley was championed by the rising stars of supply-side economics, who hitched their drive for tax cuts and deregulation to techs venture-capital-fueled rocket ship. The groundwork was laid in 1978, when the Valleys venture capitalists formed an alliance with the Republicans to kill then-President Jimmy Carters proposed increase in the capital gains tax. They beta-tested Reaganomics by advancing the dubious argument that millionaires making slightly less money on their investments might stifle technological innovation by limiting the supply of capital available to start-ups. And they carried the day.

As president, Ronald Reagan doubled down with tax cuts and wild technophilia. In a truly trippy speech to students at Moscow State University in 1988, he hailed the transcendent possibilities of the new economy epitomized by Silicon Valley, predicting a future in which human innovation increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. Meanwhile, the market-friendly New Democrats embraced the tech industry so enthusiastically that they became known, to their chagrin, as Atari Democrats. The media turned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs into international celebrities with flattering profiles and cover storiesliving proof that the mix of technological innovation, risk taking, corporate social responsibility, and lack of regulation that defined Silicon Valley in the popular imagination was the template for unending growth and prosperity, even in an era of deindustrialization and globalization.

The near-universal celebration of Silicon Valley as an avatar of free-market capitalism in the 1980s helped ensure that the market would guide the Internets development in the 1990s, as it became the cutting-edge technology that promised to change everything. The Internet began as an academic resource, first as ARPANET, funded and overseen by the Department of Defense, and later as the National Science Foundations NSFNET. And while Al Gore didnt invent the Internet, he did spearhead the push to privatize it: As the Clinton administrations technology czar, he helped develop its landmark National Information Infrastructure (NII) plan, which emphasized the role of private industry and the importance of telecommunications deregulation in constructing Americas information superhighway. Not surprisingly, Gore would later do a little-known turn as a venture capitalist with the prestigious Valley firm Kleiner Perkins, becoming very wealthy in the process. In response to his NII plan, the advocacy group Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility warned of a possible corporate takeover of the Internet. An imaginative view of the risks of an NII designed without sufficient attention to public-interest needs can be found in the modern genre of dystopian fiction known as cyberpunk, they wrote. Cyberpunk novelists depict a world in which a handful of multinational corporations have seized control, not only of the physical world, but of the virtual world of cyberspace. Who can deny that todays commercial Internet has largely fulfilled this cyberpunk nightmare? Someone should ask Gore what he thinks.

Despite offering evidence to the contrary, OMara narrates her tale of Silicon Valleys rise as, ultimately, a success story. At the end of the book, we see it as the envy of other states around the country and other countries around the world, an exuberantly capitalist, slightly anarchic tech ecosystem that had evolved over several generations. Throughout the book, she highlights the many issues that have sparked increasing public consternation with Big Tech of late, from its lack of diversity to its stupendous concentration of wealth, but these are framed in the end as unfortunate side effects of the headlong rush to create a new and brilliant future. She hardly mentions the revelations by the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden of the US governments chilling capacity to siphon users most intimate information from Silicon Valleys platforms and the voraciousness with which it has done so. Nor does she grapple with Uber, which built its multibillion-dollar leviathan on the backs of meagerly paid drivers. The fact that in order to carry out almost anything online we must subject ourselves to a hypercommodified hellscape of targeted advertising and algorithmic sorting does not appear to be a huge cause for concern. But these and many other aspects of our digital landscape have made me wonder if a technical complex born out of Cold War militarism and mainstreamed in a free-market frenzy might not be fundamentally always at odds with human flourishing. OMara suggests at the end of her book that Silicon Valleys flaws might be redeemed by a new, more enlightened, and more diverse generation of techies. But havent we heard this story before?

If there is a larger lesson to learn from The Code, it is that technology cannot be separated from the social and political contexts in which it is created. The major currents in society shape and guide the creation of a system that appears to spring from the minds of its inventors alone. Militarism and unbridled capitalism remain among the most powerful forces in the United States, and to my mind, there is no reason to believe that a new generation of techies might resist them any more effectively than the previous ones. The question of fixing Silicon Valley is inseparable from the question of fixing the system of postwar American capitalism, of which it is perhaps the purest expression. Some believe that the problems we see are bugs that might be fixed with a patch. Others think the code is so bad at its core that a radical rewrite is the only answer. Although The Code was written for people in the first group, it offers an important lesson for those of us in the second: Silicon Valley is as much a symptom as it is a cause of our current crisis. Resisting its bad influence on society will ultimately prove meaningless if we cannot also formulate a vision of a better worldone with a more humane relationship to technologyto counteract it. And, alas, there is no app for that.

Continued here:
How Silicon Valley Broke the Economy - The Nation

by Khadija Sharife and Mark Anderson

16October 2019

Regiments Capital, a boutique South African securities investment firm, earned more than 891 million rand ($58.7 million) in shares by taking advantage of a government initiative designed to mitigate the inequality of 50 years of apartheid, an OCCRP investigation reveals.

Regiments has already been implicated in several schemes that allowed the controversial Gupta family to siphon money out of state-owned entities.

The relationship between the Guptas and Regiments began in 2012 when Salim Essa, a key associate of the family, started a discussion with the investment firm on how to capture 775 million rand ($52.6 million) over a period of two months from state-owned companies.

Essa would go on to take half of Regiments profits from the schemes. He eventually founded another firm, Trillian, where he and another Regiments director scored billions in public contracts.

The United States Treasury included Salim Essa in a sanctions order on three of the Gupta brothers that was issued on Oct. 10.

Read more OCCRP reporting about the Guptas business activities and influence in South Africa.

Regiments may even have had the Guptas in mind when they conspired with a former executive at South Africas state investment firm to make lucrative deals under the auspices of the countrys post-apartheid Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program.

The program was intended to reduce inequality for South Africas disenfranchised black citizens by getting big white-owned companies to sell stakes in businesses at a massive discount to eligible black partners. Companies could gain political clout through this process, while the new investors, who often had close ties to the ruling African National Congress, acquired valuable assets at little or no cost.

On their own, neither Regiments nor its co-founder, Eric Wood, who is not black, would have easily qualified to participate in the empowerment program. So Wood forged a partnership with Tshepo Mahloele at the time a key official at the state-owned Public Investment Corp (PIC) that allowed them to form a new Black Economic Empowerment entity: a consortium of influential political and business insiders who manipulated the initiative to buy shares in one of the countrys largest banks at a secret cut-rate price.

To artificially prop up the shares market value despite this hidden deal, the consortium obtained hundreds of millions in financing from a state investment fund that covered the difference. Then, as the market value of the shares rose, the consortium arranged to sell them to the PIC at a profit. It then tried to create yet another empowerment entity to buy them back for yet more profit. Altogether, Regiments holds shares worth 891 million rand ($58.7 million) from its BEE deals.

Supporters of President Cyril Ramaphosa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) celebrate election results at a rally in Johannesburg in May. Ramaphosa campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, promising to crack down on graft within the ANC. Credit: Mike Hutchings/Reuters

The PIC is Africas largest fund, overseeing 2 trillion rand ($131 billion) in assets, and is meant to manage government investments, including the pensions of public employees. The fund owns significant stakes in many of South Africas most valuable companies and controls over 10 percent of the market capitalization of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The consortium hijacked these funds for their private gain.

Last October, South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa established a Commission of Inquiry to probe allegations of impropriety at the PIC between 2015 and 2018. The focus of its investigation is whether senior officials, including Mahloele and his former boss, Jabu Moleketi, abused their power for personal gain. (A separate government inquest, the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, is currently probing links between the Guptas and the administration of the last president, Jacob Zuma.)

Dan Matjila, the former head of South Africa's state asset manager, the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), appears at an inquiry into alleged wrongdoing and poor investment decisions during his tenure, in July. Credit: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Partly because of manoeuvers like this, South Africas 20 years of black empowerment efforts have done little to alleviate apartheids lingering economic imbalance. Last year, the World Bank declared South Africa one of the most unequal countries in the world.

Instead, most of the benefits of high-stakes BEE deals have accrued to politically connected people like Mahloele, who already had seats at the boardroom tables of Johannesburgs affluent Sandton suburbs.

The monies subsidising these aspirant plutocrats were sourced from public funds in a country where over half its people live in poverty. Once again the poor are subsidizing the illicit lifestyle of an elite, said Hennie van Vuuren, the director of Open Secrets, an organization that promotes transparency in government in South Africa.

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, there was widespread demand in South Africa for financial reparations that would overturn the countrys legacy of inequality and allow control of the countrys wealth to spread beyond the white minority. In response, the government enacted programs like Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).

But in practice, BEE resulted in strategic investment deals that concentrated ownership in the hands of a select group of politically connected black South Africans. The deals spearheaded by Regiments and Mahloele illustrate how the countrys elite hijacked BEE for their own benefit.

"No political democracy can survive and flourish if the majority of its people remains in poverty, without land, without their basic needs being met, and without tangible prospects for a better life," the party wrote on Nov. 23, 1994 in an official government newspaper.

But it wasnt until 2001 that the BEE program was formalized by the government. The release of the BEE Commission report in the same year paved the way for new legislation that required South Africas biggest companies to prove they had sufficient black ownership and met employment quotas and career development objectives.

Following outcry that the original BEE strategy didnt benefit ordinary people, a new program, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, was announced in 2003. The legislation forced the countrys biggest companies including Anglo-American, BHP Billiton and ABSA bank to prove compliance with new quotas and ownership laws. Despite these efforts, in practice BEE has resulted in investment deals that concentrated ownership in the hands of a select group of black South Africans.

In testimony to the PIC Commission, Mahloele said he had resigned from the PIC that March (before Woods April email). But he was in a position to continue making decisions afterwards: In the previous year, the PIC had appointed him to head a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure investment fund. The fund was managed by a shelf company called Harith. Once owned by the PIC, Harith was handed over to Mahloeles control in 2007.

In April 2006, Eric Wood, then a director of Regiments, sought out an email introduction to Mahloele, who had been in charge of the PICs alternate investment arm, including a social development fund called Isibaya. This fund is intended to make investments for the public good, but since it is not listed on the stock exchange, decisions are often made at the discretion of managers like Mahloele with little oversight from the PIC.

Later that year, Capitec, currently South Africas fifth-largest bank by assets and a lender that catered to the countrys poor, held a BEE sale of around 12 percent of its shares, at a heavily discounted price of a penny per share. The offer appeared to be made accessible to just a handful of politically connected insiders, including Mahloele.

Regiments and Mahloele worked fast to take advantage of the sale. They set up a new consortium of BEE investors, carefully chosen to maximize political clout and qualify for BEE status. They included:

This consortium, which they named Coral Lagoon Investments, quickly bought all 10 million empowerment shares issued by Capitec for a penny each, a massive discount from their market value of 30 rand per share.

The extremely low price of the deal was negotiated in secret, with media reporting that the Capitec shares had been bought at their market value.

To protect Capitecs share value which would have plummeted if it became known that 10 million shares had been sold for so little the Coral Lagoon consortium members obtained 285 million rand ($18.68 million) in financing from the states Industrial Development Corp (IDC) to cover the difference. The companys share value thus reached the level the market expected.

Such usage of public funds to prop up the value of corporate shares sold through BEE schemes is not unusual in South Africa, and has contributed to public dissatisfaction with the program.

Internal documents reviewed by OCCRP show Regiments and Keabetsoe were firmly in control of the Capitec deal, with Regiments taking the lead on its financial structure and Keabetsoe appearing to handle other aspects.

According to Mahloeles testimony, he left his job at the PIC in March 2006 to focus on growing his private business ventures. That year, the duo also formed a new holding company, Ashbrook Investments 15 Ltd., and put Coral Lagoon ostensibly under its control.

The Capitec shares Coral Lagoon held were valued at 1.5 billion rand as if they really had been bought for 30 rand each. Wood and Mahloele were already profiting from the dividends, but now they sought to cash in by selling a portion of the shares to the PIC Mahleoles former employer. Using sophisticated hedging and vendor financing schemes, they earned a huge profit on the deal, enabling them to repay the 285 million rand they owed the IDC and make millions for themselves.

Regiments and Keabetso may have had access to confidential information that helped them. The two companies entered into a secret non-disclosure agreement with a third company, Circle Capital whose role, and owners, were unknown. The agreement allowed them to gain access to certain information pertaining to a listed company, apparently Capitec, though no name was given. No other shareholder was included.

According to another mysterious agreement that makes no obvious business sense, each Coral Lagoon shareholder owed Circle Capital 7 million rand; no reason was declared.

In February 2012, the PIC, through the Isibaya Fund, which had previously been run by Mahloele, purchased half of the shares in Capitec that Coral Lagoon held for 826 million rand ($54.5 million), or 156 rand per share. Since they had been purchased for just a penny a share, this was a massive windfall for the Coral Lagoon consortium, worth billions of rand, at the expense of the South African public.

Court records show that Regiments share of Capitec was ultimately valued at 891 million rand ($58.7 million), a vast increase from its original stake of 9 million rand ($600,000).

Rather than becoming a shareholder, PIC simply warehoused the shares until they could be repurchased at a lower price by a new Black Economic Empowerment company, which Regiments assumed it would also take the lead in forming.

A February 2011 letter to Capitec from top executives of Regiments and Keabetso outlined the plan. The letter said that a new black economic empowerment transaction was being structured and negotiated between the PIC, Coral Lagoon, and a new BEE company that would be even better positioned to take advantage of future black empowerment deals.

Capitecs financial director, Andre du Plessis, told reporters in 2012 that the bank was unaware of the possibility that the ANC could benefit from the transaction.

Private correspondence obtained by OCCRP indicates that Regiments may have intended the Guptas as beneficiaries of the PIC-related deals. The investment firm also tried to formalize its control over the deal, announcing that it intended to handle all legal, secretarial and accounting functions for Coral Lagoon.

But what Regiments didnt realize was that Mahloeles team had been working behind the scenes to get there first.

On May 12, 2015, Capitec suddenly announced that a new BEE company called PetraTouch (later renamed to Lebashe Investment Group) had acquired the warehoused shares at 461 rand ($30) per share. Capitecs share price plunged by 6 percent at the news, suggesting markets were not happy that the PIC had sold the shares it was holding to a new BEE group.

The sale was touted in South African media under the curious headline Capitec wants this BEE deal to be fair, implying the previous sale had not been. The story described PetraTouch as a new company led by an unknown black investor, Warren Wheatley.

Wheatley told media that the sale was not one of your old BEE transactions, and that PetraTouchs owners were not big political names and are new entrants.

Regiments seemed shocked by the move, according to private correspondence obtained by OCCRP. The firms staff frantically tried to determine how the warehoused shares had been snatched out from under them and who exactly was behind PetraTouch, a company none of them had heard of.

They soon learned that it had very close links to somebody they had heard of: their purported business partner, Tshepo Mahloele.

PetraTouch was registered at an address that Mahloele had used on other company registration forms. Another major shareholder in PetraTouch used the same address. And Fawzia Sidwell, Mahloeles personal assistant at Harith Fund Managers, another firm he founded (and which had also received PIC funding), was copied into most emails between PetraTouch and the PIC.

Even more disturbingly, several other shareholders had close ties to the chairman of the PIC, Jabu Moleketi, a powerful figure in the ANC and former deputy finance minister. They included:

Regiments staff also said that Moleketi had been a shareholder in Keabetsoe Holdings all along, allegedly making him an original member of the Coral Lagoon consortium, even as he had been leading the PIC.

It wasnt just Regiments that was in the dark. Capitec was apparently never fully informed of the identity of the shareholders behind Keabetsoe or, later, PetraTouch. If it had, as a listed banking entity it might have been required to publicly disclose information related to politically exposed persons.

This, in turn, would have exposed Moleketi and Mahloele as the lopsided beneficiaries of a deal meant to benefit and empower those dispossessed by the apartheid regime. And rather than being new entrants, the beneficiaries of the new sale appeared to be the exact same people who had already profited from the previous one.

The final twist of the knife for Regiments was the discovery that a former employee, Jonathan Loeb, who left to start his own business in 2014, had been providing financial services to PetraTouch. He had even revealed to them Regiments hedging techniques, which PetraTouch used to buy the warehoused shares without spending a dime. The new deal had been touted in the press as fairer because the consortiums members were putting their own money down, but this turned out to be untrue.

PetraTouch did not stop there. The company sought to purchase more shares of the bank from Coral Lagoon. Although the Regiments side of the consortium was miffed and declined to sell, Keabetsoe and other ANC shareholders appeared to agree.

PetraTouch made the purchase with 1.5 billion rand ($101 million) loaned by the PICs Government Employee Pension Fund, which has 1.2 million active members and more than 400,000 pensioners and beneficiaries. This amounted to nearly one percent of the PICs total investment in private companies, according to Wheatleys testimony before the PIC Commission.

In a letter Bantu Holomisa, the leader of the opposition United Democratic Movement and a fierce government critic, reportedly sent to the Commission, he alleged that Mahloele and Moleketi had used PetraTouch as a portal to access PIC funds.

A BEE cartel of executives had easy access to PIC coffers and systematically looted public pension funds, Holomisa said in April.

Moleketi said the claim that he had exploited public funds was extremely hurtful.

In an email to reporters, Capitec said: Capitec did not select the members of the Ash Brook consortium. Directors of Petratouch was [sic] involved in the Ash Brook BEE consortium which held shares in Coral Lagoon. We knew these directors from the initial Coral Lagoon BEE consortium.

Regiments did not respond to questions sent by email.

In a response to questions from OCCRP, a representative of Petratouch (now called Lebashe) wrote, Over time, additional investors, including Mr Moleketi became shareholders in the entity. Mr Mahloeles prior employment at the PIC provided no advantage to the transaction.

Speaking to the matter of politically exposed persons, the spokesperson said the companys techniques were necessary: This system, called Apartheid could be classified as unfair In order to climb out of institutionalised poverty we had to develop and utilise other resources at our disposal. Sophisticated financial engineering was used in this instance.

However, the beneficiaries of the Capitec deal, both black and white, were wealthy individuals.

Ironically, the court has ordered that the money held by Regiments in Capitec shares be used to repay Regiments vast theft from a different pension fund (as previously reported by OCCRP). Though Regiments has agreed to the deal, Eric Wood, the companys co-founder and one of the beneficiaries of the Capitec deal, has sought to block the agreement. The case is still pending.

With billions of rand in profit being made on the back of the PIC, the Commission of Inquiry has extended its scope to investigate claims by whistleblowers around the illicit activities of former PIC officials. At stake are the pension funds of thousands of retired government employees whose futures have been invested in these dodgy deals.

Michiel le Roux, a Capitec board member and shareholder, is the founder of the Millennium Trust, a funder of the Platform for the Protection of African Whistleblowers, where Sharife is a director.

See the original post:
How South Africa's Black Economic Empowerment Initiative Empowered the Powerful - OCCRP

SEVEN is a powerful documentary piece of theatre that brings the writing talents of seven award-winning playwrights to bear on the personal interviews of seven world-changing women from around the globe. It is an example of collaboration and self-empowerment by and for women that provides hope for those fighting to end gender-based violence, inequity, and oppression. Produced by L.A. Theatre Works, this play works beautifully for the style of shows that they specialize in. LATW does radio theatre, in which the cast speaks into microphones while facing the audience directly. This style emphasizes the power of the voice in theatre and storytelling, and it works wonderfully for SEVEN, which performed one night only at George Mason Universitys Center for the Arts.

Conceived by Carol Mack, one of the seven playwrights, the play was created in collaboration with Vital Voices Global Partnership. Mack, along with Ruth Margraff, Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Anna Deavere Smith, and Susan Yankowitz, have written of the moments that led to change for the following women: Hafsat Abiola-Costello, Farida Azizi, Anabella DeLeon, Mukhtar Mai, Inez McCormack, Marina Pisklakova-Parker, and Mu Sochua. (For more on SEVEN, read David Siegels DCMTA feature.)

Acting is superb across the board. Hafsat Abiola-Costello (Sarah Hollis) is a Nigerian studying at Harvard, when she hears of the murder of her mother, and later, her father. She becomes a charismatic advocate for human rights and democracy. Farida Azizi (Laila Ayad) brought medical supplies and instructions to rural women of Afghanistan despite the threats of the Taliban. Anabella DeLeon (Maritxell Carrero) earned a law degree and became a congresswoman in Guatemala despite coming from abject poverty. Mukhtar Mai (Lovelee Carroll) brought her rapists to justice in Pakistan, then went on to build schools increasing literacy. Inez McCormack (Ellis Greer) became a trade union and human rights activist, playing a critical role in the 1998 Good Friday Peace Accords in Northern Ireland. Marina Pisklakova-Parker (Shannon Holt) began a helpline for battered women on her own, which has grown to the resource center for all of Russia, coordinating over 120 organizations for the prevention of violence. Mu Sochua (Tess Lina) was sent out of Cambodia by her parents for her own safety before they were both killed. Working to stop sex-trafficking in Cambodia and Thailand, she won a seat in Parliament, and has been co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She now travels the world calling for action, as an exile who had to flee Cambodia for her own safety when the government was dissolved 2 years ago.

The play interweaves these stories artfully, thanks to Director Alexis Jacknow. There is a great deal being shared, but it is portrayed clearly, and movingly, and it is certainly inspirational. The audience was on its feet at the end of the performance.

The design aspect that stands out the most was the evocative imagery of the projections, designed by Sean Cawelti. Some projections were literal references to the dialogue, and some images evoked moods without specific interpretation. Costume Design by Carin Jacobs creates clear identification for the homelands of the plays characters. While the Sound Design by Mark Holden is generally excellent, the moments which used phone calls were often distorted enough to make understanding difficult. To be fair, the mood of the phone calls was often more important than the words themselves.

Speaking to worldwide issues, SEVEN has been translated into more than 20 languages and has been seen in 32 countries. If given the opportunity to see the production, dont miss it.

Running Time: One hour and 10 minutes, with no intermission.

SEVEN performed for one night only, October 18, 2019, at George Mason Universitys Center for the Arts, 4373 Mason Pond Drive, Fairfax, VA. Vital Voices is an international non-profit organization that empowers and champions women leaders around the world. For tickets to other shows in George Mason Universitys Great Performances Season, call the box office at 888-945-2468, or visit their calendar of events.

Read more:
Fixing World Crises: The Women of 'SEVEN' are Succeeding and Inspiring - DC Metro Theater Arts

Why have a Muskoka weekend when you can spend a few fall days in Barbies Dreamhouse? (Minus Ken, unfortunately.)

Said very real property is currently listed on Airbnb, via Mattel, and Barbie is listed as a verified host, so you know youre in good hands.

The fabulous life-size Dreamhouse will be available for booking for four guests for a one-time, two-night stay on October 23, 2019 at 11 a.m. PDT, for only US$60 a night, plus taxes and fees, to commemorate Barbie brands 60th anniversary, reads the press release. The house will offer enthusiasts the chance to experience her signature brand of hospitality, empowerment and inclusivity.

The once in a lifetime opportunity is located in the heart of Malibu, naturally, and boasts three floors with ocean views, a personal theatre, an infinity pool, a full walk-in closet, a DJ booth, etc.

Along with your stay, comes a meet-and-greet with celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkin, a makeover, fencing lessons with Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad, a cooking lesson from professional chef Gina Clarke-Helm, and a tour of the Columbia Memorial Space Center with pilot and aerospace engineer Jill Meyers.

In turn, Airbnb will make donations to charities involved with The Barbie Dream Gap Project, which is dedicated to empowering girls.

Like Barbie herself says, When you belong anywhere, you can be anything.

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You can rent Barbie's Malibu Dreamhouse on Airbnb for just US$60 a night - National Post

The following is an exclusive print story from our archives. Sami Awad comes from a long lineage of Palestinian peace activists, and he is fighting for the peace of Jesus to win out in the land he calls home.

A chosen people, a promised land, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the wall, the two-state solution, settlements, terrorism, armageddon, and two people groups who feel their very existence is on the line: to call the conflict in the Holy Land complicated is a gross understatement.

Peace in the Middle East has become an implausible saying likened to the day pigs fly. Were told its a hopeless cause and that 3,000 years of land rights and religious tension will continue until the end of time, or when Jesus returns, depending on your outlook. Fortunately for those living within the tension, there are a few people who have not given up on peace. Sami Awad is one of them.

_________

On the darkest night of his life, Sami Awad lay in an Auschwitz bunker looking at the pictures children sketched on the walls: kids playing drums, riding bicycles, and kicking balls. In a place full of evil, the children of Auschwitz drew pictures to remind themselves of innocence.

By the time Sami traveled to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, six decades had passed since the international horror of the Holocaust. He came to bear witness to the lives lost and to learn how fear motivated the wars atrocities. What he discovered instead was a narrative of fear living on in the hearts of people todayincluding his own.

In many ways, Samis story begins not in the bunker where he underwent a spiritual transformation. It doesnt even begin in Bethlehem where he grew up under Israeli military occupation. His story begins generations earlier, with an ancestry of peacemaking shaped by the teachings of Jesus. It was these teachings that set Sami on a journey out of fear and into love.

Samis father was raised in a Palestinian-Christian family in a diverse neighborhood in Jerusalem. For decades Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together peacefully. Then in 1948, war between an Arab coalition and the State of Israel shattered the peace. Samis grandfather was killed in this violence, shot by a sniper while raising a white flag on his roof to show that unarmed civilians lived below. The Awads buried his body in the courtyard of the house and fled.

Samis grandmother spent her life promoting peace, despite the injustice she experienced as a widow and refugee. Revenge and retaliation have no place for us as a family and in our faith, she often told her children and grandchildren.

The rest is here:
Peace in the Holy Land - Nations Media

Outlook Speakout has emerged as alively platform, for thefinest minds and brightest ideas,dictated by the optimism and anxieties of our times, says Indranil Roy, Chief Executive Officer, The Outlook Group.

Speaking at the event, Indranil Roy explained The Outlook Group's vision of encouraging women who contribute to make the life of others a little better, a little safer.

Here is the full text of his speech:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Good Evening, and welcome to the thirdedition of Outlook Speakout.

For the last 24 years, the Outlook Group has enjoyed a great reputation in the world of Indian journalism.

In the last three years, we have tried to makeOutlook SpeakOutan outspoken extension of the magazine, on stage.

I must say, we have found our corner and we are proud of it.

Outlook Speakout has emerged as alively platform, for thefinest minds and brightest ideas,dictated by the optimism and anxieties of our times.

In the last few years, sexual assault and womens empowerment movements have upended public conversation about womens issues in India and the world.

Women are waging a battle to reclaim their future: public space to workplace, the freedom to wear anything,do anything, beanything.

And people have started to listen, to the obstacles women encounter in their daily lives, both personal and professional.

As one of the most credible media groups in India,Outlook has shined a light on womens anger and efforts to get their voices off the ground #HappyToBleed or #MeToo.

We recognise and respect womens demand for a safe world. Safe from taboo, stigma, shame, ill-health, prejudice, fear and violence.

Our theme today is: Womens Vision 2022: What Women WantReclaiming The Narrative.

In its scope, it is a continuation, or the logical extension, of last years theme:Women Empowerment. As in the past. we have a refreshing galaxy of minds today to debate openly and thoroughly the great issue of the day.

While, Indian women are being felicitated, celebrated and awarded like never before by political parties and media of all stripes, The Outlook Group doesnt want to honour just a handful of powerful women.

We believe in talking about their problems and encourage women who contributein ways big and smallto making the life of others a little better, a little safer.

I thank you all for joining us in our endeavour to make a difference.

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Outlook Has Shined Light On Womens Efforts To Get Their Voices Heard: Indranil Roy, CEO Outlook - Outlook India

Photo illustration / Shutterstock.com

By C. Moon Reed (contact)

Saturday, Oct. 19, 2019 | 2 a.m.

Perhaps youre seeking answers to deep life questions. Maybe you want advice about a new crush or an old flame or you just want to have a little fun delving into the mysteries of the universe. There are many reasons to visit a psychic or spiritual adviser and no shame in doing so, but how do you find a good one? When baring your soul to a stranger, youre putting yourself in a uniquely vulnerable place, so you want to be smart about it. Just this summer, a group of Las Vegans were indicted for using the pretext of psychic readings to scam a California lawyer out of $1 million. To help readers safely navigate the psychic realms, we offer this beginners guide:

Palmistry/palm reading

Astrology

Tarot

Hypnotherapy

Reiki

Past-life regressions

Shamanic healing

Crystal healing or gazing

Mediumship

Divination

How to find a credible reader

Seek word-of-mouth recommendations. If you don't know someone who uses psychic services, look for reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google. Yes, psychics get reviews, too.

Research everything. There are a ton of options for both services and practitioners, and the internet makes it easy to figure out exactly what is right for you. Do your homework, do your due diligence, advises Melissa Akiima Eggstaff, co-founder and director of Haven Craft, an interfaith organization and church.

Check their license. The City of Las Vegas requires a person or establishment to obtain a license to practice the psychic arts.

Dont be afraid to ask questions. Whether youre quizzing your friends about their experiences or asking the practitioner themselves, its OK to ask about the process, payment, expectations and more. In fact, if a practitioner refuses to answer your questions and/or makes you feel uncomfortable, thats a sign that you may need to find somebody else.

It's OK to believe what you believe.

Positive things to look for

In-person psychic readings ($20-$50 for 15-60 minutes)

Telephone psychic readings ($25-$55 for 15-60 minutes)

Reiki sessions ($45-$125 for 30-90 minutes)

An adviser should help you restore your sense of agency and empowerment, Eggstaff says. They should be helping you find a path that guides you to make gradual and sustainable improvements to your life.

Most issues in peoples lives arent resolved with a shuffling of a tarot deck, a crystal ball or snapping your fingers, Eggstaff says. Theyre resolved one step at a time in a direction you feel comfortable walking in. If somebody else picks the direction, it doesnt work.

Eggstaff says a good counselorwhether theyre working with a tarot deck, via secular counseling or in a churchshould help you on the journey you choose, and they should never imply that they can do the work for you.

An adviser should be upfront and honest about the scope of their practice, Eggstaff says.

Red flags to avoid

Outrageous prices. You dont always get what you pay for. Sometimes expensive prices are a sign that youre being taken advantage of.

Any person holding a position of authority or expertise can use their power to manipulate the vulnerable, Eggstaff says. She adds that predators can exploit members of every community, whether its religious, cultural, spiritual or secular. Many of the tips for avoiding being exploited can be applied to situations beyond the psychic arts.

Curses. If a person tells you that youre cursed or haunted by an evil presence and they want you to pay to remove the curse, theyre likely hucksters.

Unrealistic promises. Its a clich, but if theyre promising you something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. For example, Eggstaff says, the opportunity for closure with a deceased relative is possible in the psychic arts, but if that closure comes with the promise of inheriting a fortune as long as you pay a fee right now that should ring an alarm, she adds.

Money scams. Eggstaff says scams involving money are common in many fields. Anything where theyre asking you to withdraw a large sum of money should raise some red flags.

Violations of confidentiality. It's a bad sign if an adviser shares the details or stories of other clients, Eggstaff says.

Asks for too much personal information. While an adviser will need some amount of information in order to give good counsel, Eggstaff says to watch out for someone who is just trying to extract financial and personal information from you.

Claims to control the uncontrollable. A psychic (or anybody else, for that matter) cant make your crush love you, cant convince a company to hire you, cant make you famous, etc. Nobody has the power to control someone elses free will.

Threats. Like curses, threats are a warning sign to leave immediately. Eggstaff says to watch out for very grand threatening statements that something terrible awaits unless you take certain steps now. The threats can come in the form of looming disaster or evil, injury, demons or even the wrath of God.

Cults of personality. Beware of echo chambers and yes-men, Eggstaff advises. A lot of these professional spiritual personswhether youre talking about a psychic or a priestbuild themselves little pyramids of power and place themselves up on top, she says. These power structures can lead to abuse of vulnerable people.

Local resources

Crystal Alley Emporium. Self-described largest metaphysical store in the Las Vegas Valley, with a variety of offerings, such as books, jewelry, incense, crystals, tarot cards and psychic readings. 2841 N. Green Valley Parkway, 702-434-7626, crystalalleyemporium.com

Psychic Eye Book Shops. With two shops in Southern California and three in Southern Nevada, the store has been offering mystical supplies and services since 1985. Multiple locations, pebooks.com

Enchanted Forest Reiki Center. Offers reiki sessions, psychic services, classes, yoga, meditation and a gift shop. 2280 S. Jones Blvd., 702-948-4999, enchantedforestreiki.com

Haven Craft. A nonprofit interfaith organization and church that offers education, counseling and advocacy. It recently relocated to North Carolina but is using online programs to continue serving the Las Vegas community.havencraft.org

This story appeared in Las VegasWeekly.

Original post:
How to experience the psychic arts without getting scammed - Las Vegas Sun

Let's be candid: When we talk about "inclusivity," I've seen many people roll their eyes. They see another list, another policy or another process they have to add to what they consider to be an already full to-do list.

But this is not what inclusivity is about. Inclusivity is a representation of our behaviors, morals, ethics, personal standards and acceptance. It's our awareness of others, empathetic leadership and personal accountability. It is also a removal of cognitive bias and dissonance to an open mind. To put it simply, it's a willingness to accept.

I've coached many businesses on how to be more inclusive, ranging from large corporations struggling with programs to integrate women into a male workforce to small businesses striving to embrace inclusivity in all they do. Through this experience, I've seen that organizations tend to offer solutions that can actually perpetuate the problem they're trying to solve.

For example, if you appoint a director or make someone else responsible for engagement, I believe you're giving the board the authority to abdicate responsibility. Engagement is collective and owned by all, not one or a few. Similarly, inclusivity is behavioral and comes from a strong open culture, not an individual's responsibility by job title. When inclusivity and diversity are only owned by one person, they can become "exclusive" and fail.

Inclusivity isn't a job. It's a culture.

Inclusivity is how we should be, not only at work but also in all we do. In business, we know it can benefit the bottom line, engagement and more. If you are a leader and you consider the action of inclusivity to be unimportant, you're preventing your organization from progressing toward an open future.

Your role is to be inclusive and encourage it through your behavior, responses, actions and language. You can ensure inclusivity is achieved through consistent recognition, competence, skill, support, ideas, individuality and collaboration not isolated incidents.

Inclusivity should also be woven into the fabric of your company, including the culture, behavior, values and the very DNA that started the business. Assess how everyone behaves by looking at what influences their decisions, if they're receiving support, the challenges, failures and successes they've seen and more. Review these factors openly and honestly, and remember that equality also sits within inclusivity.

If your business is struggling to be inclusive and diverse, then your culture needs fixing. Inclusivity isn't a policy or procedure it's how you are. Inclusivity is a powerful message. Never assume inclusivity exists or has been achieved.

Below are five ways to help you make inclusivity part of your culture with responsibility for all:

1. Model inclusive behavior.

At my company, rule No. 1 is to model inclusive behavior as a leader. This takes skill, time and practice. It is a personal choice and commitment. It means you have to be self-aware, accept critique, be open, be candid and address noninclusive behavior first, both within yourself and among your team.

To model this, reflect on the values you present, and use the language you want from others. Your overall actions as a leader must directly correlate to the inclusive and noninclusive behaviors you desire.

2. Have a story.

Understand and have a clear story of your business, what it stands for, how it is and what it is. Repeat this story. Speak this story. Love and live this story. Behave according to this story. From my perspective, consistency in a clear story helps create a culture of inclusivity. Diversity, by default, is about a consistent approach to seeing a wider unbiased view. Your story has to reflect this.

3. Allow your people to act.

Empowering your team can easily become a statement or just something you consider "nice to have." But this empowerment needs to be part of your culture. Encourage your employees to make decisions. Doing so creates a culture that's open, honest and without fear. These are the building blocks of an inclusive company.

4. Remove obstacles.

Becoming more inclusive doesn't always mean you have to create separate plans and new communication methods. Sometimes, you simply need to remove any obstacles that are in the way.

Removing barriers can help the culture drive itself to a more inclusive environment. An obstacle might be someones limited belief, unbalanced bias, narrow perspective, commentary that undermines others, etc. To manage and remove these obstacles, act immediately. See it. Hear it. Be aware of it. And deal with it as soon as possible. Removing obstacles creates room for new, more inclusive beliefs, a huge cultural shift for many businesses.

5. Live it; love it; do it.

I used to have a mantra in my corporate roles, which I've since brought to my current company: "Live it; love it; do it." To me, this mantra reminds my team they are encouraged to feel a part of, contribute to, impact and influence the business. The mantra is about taking action. It also speaks to the heart, which I believe is integral to creating a sense of belonging. As a leader, your heart must be in your efforts to making your organization more inclusive. Following a mantra like mine can help.

In conclusion, avoid making inclusivity a role or checklist. When you create a culture based on inclusivity, it will never be exclusive.

See the original post:
How To Build A Culture Based On Inclusivity - Forbes

OCTOBER 19, 2019

ERIK DAVISS NEW BOOK is at once a brilliantly original study and a recap of familiar themes the author has been pondering for the past two decades. Like his pioneering 1998 debut, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, High Weirdness explores the way modern networked society tends to inspire revivals of hermetic and other occult traditions. It thus updates Daviss analysis of the convergence of contemporary occult and psychedelic subcultures in Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010). And, like his 2006 volume,The Visionary State: A Journey Through Californias Spiritual Landscape, High Weirdness shows how this epochal conjuncture of mystical worldviews, magical practices, and psychoactive lifestyles expresses a uniquely West Coast sensibility, a fusion of NorCal hippie utopianism and SoCal punk paranoia.

High Weirdness is a revised version of Daviss PhD thesis, produced under the auspices of the Program in Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism in the Department of Religion at Rice University. As Davis remarked in a 2015 LARB interview, he had long contemplated stepping back from the challenges of freelance life and shoring up the more scholarly side of my writing and research through an encounter with an academic discipline. Happily, this encounter has in no way scotched his restless, omnivorous intelligence or defused the offbeat punch of his gonzo style; indeed, it has helped him to see himself as a kind of counter-public intellectual who brings rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches to bear on some seriously weird shit. While he still views his own writing as part of the same stream of feral, fringe, psychedelically-inflected thought that is his analytic subject, he can now scrutinize these oddball perspectives using all the tools of modern philosophy, cultural studies, and comparative religion. The result can be at times a bit overwhelming as Davis struggles to synthesize a welter of theories, from William Jamess radical empiricism to Bruno Latours Actor-Network Theory to the materialist psychoanalysis of Flix Guattari (and much more) but it is never pedantic or boring.

The core of High Weirdness is a careful study of three major psychonauts Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick all of whom, under the influence of far-out fictions, esoteric doctrines, and various controlled substances, were bombarded by a series of hallucinatory visions that were arguably mystical and indubitably life-changing. Seven chapters devoted to these thinkers lives and work are bookended by a wide-ranging exordium that develops a concept of weird naturalism to account for their quasi-mystical experiences, and a coda that explores why this freaky occultural mindset should have emerged precisely when and where it did: in early 1970s California. Daviss introduction makes clear that a key historical development was the psychedelic transformation of esotericism and the occult, which spawned a countercultural zeitgeist fusing the delirious whimsies of LSD gurus with a hybrid pop-hermeticism la Aleister Crowley and a Westernized Tao out of Mircea Eliade via Alan Watts. This potent brew was laced, as the dreamy 60s gave way to the fidgety 70s, with even more outr ingredients, from the tabloid conspiracy theories of UFO cultism to the posthuman pulp metaphysics of H. P. Lovecraft.

The result, in Daviss words, was a weirding of religious experience that ushered in a consciousness culture of intense, enchanting, and liberating altered states, navigated by a restless mode of subjectivity that I call the centrifugal self. This deracinated ego, adrift amid a kaleidoscopic relativism of arcane beliefs and alternative lifestyles, was less a coherent identity than an endlessly mutating project: On the one hand, the decentered self becomes a charged vector of exploration and creative re-invention; on the other, it spins like an aimless and lonely satellite through random space. As Davis argues in his concluding chapter, this nomadic subjectivity was particularly suited to if not outright engendered by the complex and abstract behavior of networks, systems, and information ecologies that emerged as a new social paradigm during the postwar years, especially in California (here, Davis builds thoughtfully on Manuel Castellss 1996 sociological classic, The Rise of the Network Society). The quasi-mystical perception that everything in a network is potentially connected gave rise to both libertarian dreams of empowerment, including the hacker ethos of information freedom, and conspiratorial fantasies of mind control, such as the belief that a psychic mafia of paranormal researchers might be soften[ing] peoples brains telepathically.

There is thus a key ambivalence a strangely doubled gnosis at the heart of the visions Davis anatomizes: they seem to give access to higher states of reality while at the same time suggesting that this contact could be manipulative or delusional. A deep strain of doubt underlies the surface credulity: all three psychonauts reported encounters with enigmatic nonhuman intelligences they could neither shake nor entirely believe in. A cautionary counterexample is provided by another figure who didnt quite make it into Daviss mystic pantheon: neuroscientist John Lilly, who used sensory deprivation as a trigger to extra-human communication and supraself metaprogramming, but who eventually became convinced, under the dissociative influence of ketamine, that a Borg-like Solid State Intelligence was in the process of conquering all biological, carbon-based life in the universe. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick all came close to surrendering to such crippling chimeras themselves, but each was saved, finally, by a capacity for wry humor, cool pragmatism, or skeptical self-analysis. Moreover, Davis is less interested in appraising the putative truth of their mystical visions than he is in exploring the rhetorical and conceptual resources these garage philosophers marshaled to narrate and interpret their experiences, in a series of highly imaginative, curiously engaging, and boldly genre-bending texts.

The first and in many ways the least interesting figure Davis discusses is McKenna, a modern techno-shaman who, when he wasnt hymning the ethno-botanical (if not extraterrestrial) powers of psilocybin mushrooms, was claiming to have discovered a fractal math underlying the I Ching that, when read alongside the patterns of the Mayan calendar, forecast an imminent global apocalypse. (McKenna died in 2000 and so was not around to see the failure of his prediction or of the big-budget film based upon it, Roland Emmerichs silly 2009 spectacle, 2012.) While all three of Daviss psychonauts were a bit sketchy and egotistical, willing to shade the facts in the service of a good story (Davis defends them, fondly but cogently, as bullshit artists), it is McKenna alone who comes across to me at least as a flamboyant fraud. Like Wilson and Dick, he was a voracious autodidact, and he could vent his weird fund of erudition a compound of pulp sci-fi, McLuhanist media babble, half-digested Buddhism, and drug lore in intense and witty raps of cannabis-fueled eloquence. (In later years, he became, like his friend and fellow con man Timothy Leary, a fixture on the college lecture circuit, and budding bohemians can readily access his loopy musings online.)

Davis does his best to argue for McKenna as a genuine counterculture intellectual, a psychedelic alchemist who used DMT, magic mushrooms, and other potent substances as metabolic triggers for extra-dimensional experiences. A less generous way to put it is that he was a drug nut not that theres anything wrong with that, but his motives, frankly, come across as more shallow and self-serving than the other two pop-mystics Davis groups him with, whose drug use was more incidental to their visions and who, for all their nascent messianism, never really fancied themselves as gurus.

That said, McKenna was, of the three, the most ardently and admirably peripatetic: rather than waiting for enlightenment to arrive, he actively hunted it down. Davis chronicles his youthful 1971 foray, accompanied by brother Dennis, into the Amazon jungle in search of indigenous psychoactives rare plants and fungi that put Terence in touch with a higher intelligence, either posthuman or nonhuman, which he dubbed the Logos (for his part, Dennis was either transformed into an oracle or had a gibbering breakdown in later years, he wasnt quite sure himself). The brothers Experiment at La Chorrera led to two co-authored books: The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (1975), which ambitiously constructs a syncretic folk science of New Age shamanism, and the flipped-out, psy-phi Magic Mushroom Growers Guide (1976), in which the drug, personified as an alien ambassador, peddles a dreamy fantasy of cosmic symbiosis. (Ever the huckster, Terence had returned to the States with a hoard of psilocybin spore-prints that he marketed to avid heads under his Lux Natura brand.) Caveat emptor.

The second psychonaut to whom Davis introduces us Robert Anton Wilson was, I think, an altogether more intriguing cat. Born in 1932, he was 14 years older than McKenna and thus had been compelled to carve out a social niche for himself before the 60s made hippie entrepreneurialism a feasible option. A modestly successful freelance journalist, he served, for much of the 1960s, as associate editor for Playboy magazine, where he was in charge along with his friend and colleague Robert Shea of the letters Forum, which the duo remodeled into a clearinghouse for [] alternative views, from right-wing libertarianism to psychosexual anarchism. A bookish pothead with a pronounced trickster streak, Wilson proposed to Shea that they consider the worldviews animating the missives they received as all equally valid, a hypothesis that fed into a lengthy manuscript the pair drafted between 1969 and 1971, eventually published in three volumes as The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975).

The apotheosis of 1970s conspiracy culture, a cross between the pomo delirium of Thomas Pynchon and the earnest hysteria of a Xerox pamphleteer, the trilogy is a bracing tabloid bath of satiric paranoia that I seem to like rather better than Davis does (he claims to find its blend of pulp indulgence and ironic, avant-garde affectation off-putting). Davis is interested in Illuminatus! primarily as a gateway drug that leads to Wilsons later work, as well as for what it reveals about the Discordians, a real-world group of social and spiritual pranksters with whom Wilson was closely associated. Davis warmly defends Discordianism as more than a parody religion; it is rather, he claims, a life-affirming neo-paganism that forges a deep link between anti-state politics and the esoteric imagination. Certainly, its impish ironies are vastly more entertaining than McKennas mycelial metaphysics.

In his later solo effort, Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), Wilson started to weave the raw material of the trilogy into a more personal, meditative brief for pluralistic psychedelic pragmatism. After leaving Playboy in 1971, the author finally took the plunge into the swirling currents of acid evangelism and pseudo-liberatory eroticism; he joined a small coven in Mendocino, performed rites of Crowleyan and Tantric sex magic, used a tape machine for consciousness re-programming, and generally let his freak flag fly. After a few years of this bizarro diet, Wilsons innate skepticism began to fray in the face of hypnotic patterns of synchronicity and visionary trances that seemed to channel transmissions from higher dimensional intelligences [in] the star system Sirius. The author had entered what he called the Chapel Perilous: either he was truly experiencing an epochal brain change that gave him access to astral realms, or he was being seduced by madness into scripting his own life as a four-dimensional coincidence-hologram.

Happily, this great satirist of conspiracy theory managed to shake off the grip of the hallucinatory schemes in which he had trapped himself, surfacing as a kind of bemused agnostic armed with the practical counter-magic of reason itself. Much of his later writing was devoted to constructing an elaborate but highly playful personal mythology (he remained active well into the 1990s, including penning a sometime column for the pop-hacktivist journal, Mondo 2000). This dialectic of development is considerably more arresting and provocative than anything McKenna put himself through; indeed, as Davis argues, Cosmic Trigger was a major attempt both to communicate the pathological extremes of extraordinary experience and to rescue its author from mysteries whose infectious charisma is nonetheless sustained, and even broadcast, through the act of writing itself. (The book is still in print from Hilaritas Press, but I would personally much rather locate a copy of the authors ultra-rare hippie porn novel The Sex Magicians [1973], which Davis describes as a goofy romp that draws as much from Playboy as from the sleazy excesses of underground comix.)

The final section, on Philip K. Dick, stands out for three reasons. First, it is longer by half than the previous parts, thus suggesting that Davis considers Dick to be a more complex and/or interesting figure than the other two psychonauts. Second, it focuses on someone who had a long career as a celebrated SF writer before his early 70s mystical encounters turned him into a purple sage; he thus had greater narrative skills and generic resources to draw upon when fashioning accounts of his otherworldly exploits. (He was also, quite simply, smarter than either McKenna or Wilson that is to say, more learned, as opposed to just well read.) Finally, this section is the only one that doesnt feature a collaborator, a doting brother or Playboy buddy; instead, Dick had to struggle through his perplexing cosmic baptism more or less alone (though Davis does explore the network of friends and correspondents he regularly bounced ideas off of). As a result, these chapters are more sober and contemplative in tone, and the experience of reading them can be both painful and profound, especially if you are already a fan, like me, of their subjects body of work.

On the one hand, its unfortunate that the wild spiritual ride Dick endured during the final decade of his life, which has generated a host of subcultural responses ranging from a Tarot deck to an R. Crumb comic, has somewhat eclipsed or, rather, subsumed his specifically literary achievements. On the other hand, if it werent for the interest generated by the authors purported brush with extrahuman otherness, his work might well have slipped down the memory hole that has engulfed so many of his genre contemporaries. Instead, Dicks fiction is widely available in editions that are often now shelved with Literature instead of SF in bookstores, and 13 of his best novels have been enshrined in a three-volume set from the Library of America, under the editorship of avid Dickhead Jonathan Lethem. It was also Lethem, along with scholar-editor Pamela Jackson, who persuaded Houghton Mifflin, in 2011, to publish a thousand-page curation of fragments from Dicks Exegesis a personal journal the author began keeping in the wake of the theophanic irruption that scrambled his life in early 1974.

In a 2012 LARB review of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, I attempted to summarize the authors experiences:

Recovering from oral surgery in February 1974, pumped full of Darvon, lithium, and massive quantities of megavitamins, he began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations initially sparked by a Christian girls fish-icon necklace but eventually taking the form of a pink laser shooting highly coded information into his opened mind during a series of hypnogogic visitations. Over time, the intrepid author developed an elaborate vocabulary to describe the transfiguring effects of these extraterrestrial dispatches. According to this private argot, on 2-3-74 [i.e., in February and March of 1974] Dick underwent a powerful anamnesis, stimulated by mystical contact with VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System, sometimes also called Zebra or, more simply, God), that unshackled his genetic memory, permitting him to see through the Black Iron Prison of our world into the macrometasomacosmos, the morphological realm of the Platonic Eidos, in the process revealing himself to be a homoplasmate, an incarnation of the Gnostic Logos subsisting in orthogonal time.

As this breathless litany perhaps suggests, the Exegesis is a phantasmagoric rats nest of deranged erudition, feverish guesswork, and scathing self-analysis, with Dick like Wilson in Cosmic Trigger painfully pondering whether he just might have lost his mind. In my previous review, I question[ed] whether this manuscript should have seen print at all, given its often embarrassing rambling and autodidactic fanaticism, with Dick latching onto any stray thread to spin out his cosmogonic web, and I said that it was hard to imagine that there is a widespread audience for this strange assemblage of obiter Dick-ta, even among PKDs more hardcore followers.

Daviss High Weirdness, with its three long chapters parsing Dicks unruly speculations, will very likely test that assumption. Over the course of his own career, Davis has stoutly put his shoulder to the Dickian wheel: the first glimmering of this book project was an undergraduate thesis he wrote at Yale on Philip K. Dicks Postmodern Gnosis, and he labored heroically alongside Lethem and Jackson to midwife the Exegesis, soliciting, coordinating, and in many cases drafting the books superb arsenal of annotations. While Davis does take a few nose-dives down beguiling rabbit holes in his chapters on Dick in High Weirdness, he also provides the most comprehensive and convincing account of the authors mystical experiences I have read, shrewdly navigating between the Scylla of reducing these visions to phantasms of madness or drug abuse and the Charybdis of embracing them as emanations of godhood (the excellent footnotes cite the full range of extant views, and there are a lot of them). Above all, Davis is superbly attentive to the textual nature of Dicks experiences, the way narrative retrospection and redaction both in the Exegesis and in his later published fictions worked to give shape to amorphous events usually experienced on the hazy brink of sleep. Indeed, the authors speculative frenzy in some ways simply shows Dicks plot-weaving imagination in paranoid overdrive.

I will leave it to scholars of religious studies to assess the fitness of Daviss mobilization of Neoplatonic and esoteric discourses in his analysis of Dicks supermundane visions. In terms of the sociocultural contexts Davis cites, I was particularly struck by the evidence he musters for the influence of the 1970s Jesus Movement on at least the outward symbols, if not the redemptive heart, of Dicks evolving creed; these Jesus Freaks were especially active in Orange County, a locale the author quite understandably viewed as emblematic of a foul, fallen world. Whatever the triggering phenomenon, Dick came to believe, at least some of the time, that he was still living in apostolic times, and that the intervening centuries of history were a fabulation. As Davis meticulously documents, this conviction led the author to recast his earlier novels, many of which had depicted delusory worlds manipulated by cynical puppet-masters, as looming prefigurations of the Black Iron Prison he now glimpsed all around him. Conversely, his nocturnal oracles obsessively masticated and transformed in the Exegesis came to provide the numinous fodder for a series of late-career novels, including the cryptic, metafictional VALIS (1981) and the deeply poignant Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), published shortly after the authors death. As Davis movingly puts it, Dicks final novels were more than disguised testimonies, they were also self-cures for the ravages of revelation.

The proximate cause of Dicks untimely death was a series of massive strokes, though his lifelong abuse of amphetamines was undoubtedly a contributing factor. Unlike McKenna and Wilson, Dick was not particularly fond of psychedelics, or street drugs of any kind, as his 1977 quasi-memoir of his years shepherding a crash-pad of hippie drop-outs, A Scanner Darkly, makes plain. A knowledgeable and compulsive pillhead, he preferred the quantifiable mood modulations of psychiatric scripts. By the time the Gnostic Logos came a-calling, he had already transformed himself into a kind of pharmaceutical cyborg, stuffing his face with Benzedrine tablets he kept in a jar in the refrigerator, along with doses of Stelazine to take the edge off. Davis describes the astonishing regimen in some detail, but he doesnt fully explain how this teeming pharmacopoeia fits into the counterculture scene his other psychonauts inhabited. And while he does discuss the way that amphetamine use shaped and supported the rapid-fire, immersive, and deeply personal way [] Dick wrote his [SF] books, he doesnt really speculate about its impact on the composition of the Exegesis, much less attempt to describe the way a speed-freak mythopoesis might differ from the psychedelic kind generated by a classic head such as McKenna.

Indeed, the main failing of the book, in my view, is the relative lack of comparative analysis of the three authors and their visionary worldviews. There is a bit of this work in the concluding chapter, but it seems half-hearted, with Davis toting up shared motifs like UFOs, the star system Sirius, and H. P. Lovecraft before proceeding to his anatomy of the nascent network society within which their mystic schemas emerged. Ultimately, High Weirdness displays the weaknesses of many PhD dissertations: an opening chapter choked with theoretical references is followed by a series of more or less discrete case studies, the whole capped by a too-brief conclusion that belatedly seeks to sketch some essential connections.

But I have very seldom encountered a dissertation as engaging, as insightful, or as compellingly written, much less one so clearly driven by a personal passion for its subject. High Weirdness is a richly rewarding study of three maverick talents, the occult incubi that plagued them, the ambiguous gospels they formulated, and the sun-kissed, dope-saturated milieu that cradled and nourished it all. I recommend this book very highly indeed.

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor.

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The Ravages of Revelation - lareviewofbooks

Three-year education partnership provides technology and curriculum in U.S., India and Nigeria

Palo Alto, CA, Oct. 14 /CSRwire/ - Today on International Day of the Girl, HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) and nonprofitGirl Risingannounced the launch of new curriculum and technology solutions that will equip up to ten million students and teachers. The multi-year partnership extends to communities in the United States, India and Nigeria, and is a critical component in reachingHPs goal of enabling better learning outcomes for 100 million people by 2025.

We are thrilled to once again partner with HP a company committed to social impact and at the forefront of innovation in the classroom to radically scale our efforts to ensure girls everywhere have the knowledge, skills and confidence to decide their own futures, said Christina Lowery, CEO of Girl Rising. We are devoted to this cause because it is a proven catalyst: giving girls access to education and opportunity is the most effective factor in transforming pressing global issues including health, poverty, and climate change.

HP believes that education is a fundamental human right that creates pathways to new opportunities. Today, more than 130 million girls around the world continue to lack access to education and women account for two thirds of the 750 million adults without basic literacy skills. HP will include Girl Risings teacher training modules focused on youth empowerment and life skills in HP Education Edition PCs. Targeted toward primary and secondary schools, HP will also deploy a suite of curricula and a library of content to accompany the HP School Pack, a suite of software pre-loaded onto HPs EHP Education Edition PC.

HP prides itself on bringing out the best of humanity through the power of technology, said Michele Malejki, Global Head, Social Impact Programs, HP. Girl Rising is doing groundbreaking work to empower women and girls around the world. This has never been more important, and our collaboration will equip millions of both students and teachers with the curriculum and technology they need to thrive.

With the goal to develop the next generation of female leaders, the HP Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurship (HP LIFE) a free e-learning program from the HP Foundation created to support entrepreneurship and skills development will provide additional curriculum in the three markets. HP School Packs, a suite of software for educators, will also be available for the duration of the program. HP will evaluate additional opportunities for Girl Rising content and curricula distribution, including new products and services, as well as additional partners to scale the program over the next three years.

Global education opportunities

Building on the groundbreaking work of each organization and their previous collaborations - launching the Hindi language version of Girl Rising in India in 2015, celebrating every day gender equality champions around the world throughthe Girl Rising Creative Challengein 2018, and the production and distribution ofBrave Girl Risingearlier this year- HP and Girl Rising are now scaling efforts to improve learning outcomes and gender attitudes for both boys and girls.

HP continues to advance education opportunities for women and girls around the world. Last month during UN General Assembly,HP Inc. and UN Women signed an agreementto advance education, entrepreneurship and digital learning for women and girls in five priority countries: Senegal, South Africa, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Morocco.

HPs partnership with UN Women through two UN Women initiatives Second Chance Education and African Girls Can Code possesses immense potential to both scale and address the lack of investment in women and affording them access to opportunities for career work and economic growth.

Both India and Nigeria have rapidly growing populations of young people with extreme numbers of children not in school - 41 percent of the population in Nigeria is under the age of 16, with 10.5 million out of school and India has the worlds largest population of 10-24 year-olds, 47 million of which will drop out of school by the 10th grade. The burden on education in both countries is overwhelming and new, innovative solutions are vital to advancing change.

About Girl Rising

Girl Rising (GR)s mission is to change the way the world values girls and invests in their potential. Driven by decades of research demonstrating that educating girls is one of the most effective ways to address our worlds most pressing issues including health, poverty, peace and stability and climate change, GR creates original media and creative campaigns about the universal benefits of educating girls. Working with local partners, GR reaches youth and their communities through customized curricula designed to build skills and confidence and address powerful social norms that hold girls back.

About HP

HP Inc. creates technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere. Through our portfolio of personal systems, printers and 3D printing solutions, we engineer experiences that amaze. More information about HP Inc. is available at http://www.hp.com.

Additional Resources:

Media ContactTom Suiterwww.hp.com/go/newsroomTom.Suiter@hp.com

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HP Inc. and Girl Rising Mark International Day of the Girl with Partnership to Empower 10 Million Students and Teachers - CSRwire.com