This breaks my heart. If we are going to use Burner culture for good in the world, it should be to combat people like this. Yes, Second Amendment. And all the other Amendments. Yes, Constitution of the United States of America. Yes, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yes, Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (thanks Burner Barlow!)

But, seriously? She shot a frikkin lion? Come on Burning Man Project, take your tens of millions, take your biggest Regional being Afrika Burn, take your social engineering and PR blitzes, and do something useful and meaningful. Take the Playa to the Planet. Stop this. Not just this one fool, but everyone everywhere who would even entertain the thought of doing this.

From the Daily Telegraph:

TV presenter causes outrage after posing with lion she killed

An American television presenter has prompted outrage by boasting online that she had killed a lion in South Africa

Melissa Bachman after her “Incredible day in South Africa” Photo: TWITTER

 

Melissa Bachman, a keen hunter who makes programmes on the American outdoors, posted a photograph on Facebook and Twitter of her holding a rifle and smiling beside the corpse of a male lion.

“Incredible day in South Africa,” the self-styled “hardcore huntress” said of her pursuits at the Maroi Conservancy, adding: “Stalked inside 60-yards on this beautiful male lion … what a hunt!”

A furious online reaction led Bachman to deactivate her Facebook and Twitter pages within hours. It also prompted an online petition asking the South African government to bar her from returning.

“She is an absolute contradiction to the culture of conservation this country prides itself on,” said Elan Burman of Cape Town, the author of the petition, which quickly gathered 3,000 signatures.

“You, lady, are what is wrong with the world,” said Richard Robinson of Maryland, who was among the signatories. “Take with no consequences. Shoot, kill, consume, destroy.

“You didn’t kill a lion, you stood behind a machine and pulled a little trigger, you pathetic, sad excuse of a human.”

While the African lion is rated “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, it is not officially an endangered species. “The main threats to lions are indiscriminate killing,” said the organisation.

The photograph was in keeping with Ms Bachman’s past activities. Her official website displays pictures of her posing beside dead alligators, turkeys and bears among other quarry.

She was axed as a contestant on the National Geographic programme Ultimate Survival Alaska last year after 13,000 people signed a petition protesting against the inclusion of a “heartless trophy hunter”. Ms Bachman could not be contacted for comment on Friday.

Ricky Gervais, the British comedian, shared Ms Bachman’s comment “what a hunt!” on his own Twitter feed, adding: “Spot the typo”.

I don’t even need to spot the fucken typo. A cunt’s a cunt, and this is one of the worst possible cunts I’ve ever come across in my life. I hope for her sake that our paths never cross, I don’t care how many guns she has.

If there’s anything Burners can do against this, let’s do it. Forget Leave No Trace, a better principle is THE EARTH AND ALL HER CHILDREN ARE SACRED.

Call me a Pagan tree hugging Gaia worshipper if thou wilt.

I’ll leave you with a photo my brother took today in Australia. Happy Steve Irwin Day. This planet needs our love and our support and our help.

Crocodile cloud on Crocodile Hunter day. Photo by Muzza/the Universe

by Whatsblem the Pro

Stay out of Riyadh, Halcyon!

Two Saudi Arabian men were arrested yesterday by the mutawa – officers of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – in the city of Riyadh, and charged with “indulging in exotic practices and offending public order.”

Their crime: offering free hugs to random strangers.

The mutawa enforce sharia law, which dictates prayers five times a day, shames and punishes people for “immodest dress,” and maintains heavy restrictions on the activities of women in particular.

Abdulrahman al-Khayyal and his unnamed friend were inspired by a viral video made by another super-huggable Saudi, Bandr al-Swed, whose YouTube video garnered almost 1.5 million views. The video drew al-Khayyal’s attention to the global Free Hugs Campaign. After recruiting his unnamed friend, al-Khayyal led the way to one of Riyadh’s busiest commercial zones and the duo began working the street in front of some of the toniest shops in town, showing a makeshift “FREE HUGS” sign to strangers passing by.

The BBC reports that al-Khayyal and his friend were required to sign a pledge that they would refrain from offering hugs to strangers again.

The mutawa religious police – sometimes called the ‘mutaween’ (and why not?) – have also condemned the use of Twitter, saying that anyone who uses it is “a fool” who “has lost this world and his afterlife.” While that certainly may be true, the religious police organization has been heavily criticized for much more serious mutaweenery: In 2002, when a school caught fire in Mecca while classes were in session, the religious police caused the deaths of fifteen schoolgirls by preventing them from leaving. One witness told the BBC that he saw three of the mutaweener policemen “beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya.”

The abaya is a black robe required by sharia law for female modesty in public.

The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the mutaween actively prevented other men from trying to help the girls, telling the would-be rescuers that “it is sinful to approach them.”

According to the father of one of the dead girls, the school watchman refused to open the gates to let the girls out, on orders of the mutawa religious police.

Jessica Gentile over at Vice magazine brings us a tale from Canadian DJ Blondtron, who tells us she arrived at Cargo Cult for her first Burn, and managed to have the most fun at Burning Man out of the 70,000 there, or anyone who had come before. Quite a claim!

When I read that Vancouver DJ/Producer Blondtron had just gotten back from Burning Man and she was really upset with “people from LA that just didn’t know how to have fun” I literally ran to the closest Internet machine so I could to ask her about it. When I asked her if she knew I was going to quote her on that she said, “What the fuck do I care? I would rather suck a white-guy-with-dreadlocks’ dick than ever see those fucking morons again.” Before I could type “LOL” she said “let me get my vodka.”

It’s not a secret that Canadians know how to party. Every time I try to drink with a Canadian I come close to dying. But really when I say “party” I’m not referring to boring old drugs and alcohol—they just really know how to have fun. I’m not sure if it is all of the outdoor sports up there, or the fact that they have better healthcare so they can afford to do stupid shit and hurt themselves, but every time I’ve raged with our fine Northern friends it’s been unforgettable.

Canada also has very good DJs. Blondtron is not only a skilled DJ, but she is absolutely the life of the party, has the funniest Instagram account ever, and had more fun at Burning Man than anyone else. I have spent some weekends with her in the past, and at points I often can’t decided whether I want to punch her or hug her or both. It depends on the day or where we are, but she is always keeping it real, so I knew she would tell me everything I needed to know about the perfect Burning Man experience. 

THUMP: Start from the beginning.
Blondtron: Okay, so the first day we arrive and are super tired and I park my van on the outskirts of our camp, “Brack Frag”—whatever the fuck that is. I was invited by a friend to stay there and it’s run by a super cool dude who just so happens to know way too many people that are douchebags. It’s a pretty dialed camp with lots of generators and showers and shit. So I wanted to camp there because it was my first Burn and I had no idea how to be super prepared. There were probably about 30 people there at peak time.

Does everyone pitch in and pay for it or does someone just set up a camp out of the goodness of their heart?
People are supposed to throw in a little bit of money to cover storage for the year but he really doesnt ask people to give him money. But you can be rad and helpful and give him money of course.

So when everyone arrives there at first are they like, “YEAH WE DID IT LET’S RAGE?”
Fuck if I know. We went on a tear and started butt-luging tequila.

Butt Luging?
You know luging? The Olympic Sport?

Guess not. I should Google it.
You can make an ice luge for vodka. But you can also pour tequila down your ass crack over someone’s face.

Oh sweet, so there were some good first impressions then.
No, this happened up on the Thunderdome, which was the fucking best. It’s a giant geodesic dome and they play techno viking metal. I got lowered into the dome by my ankles. It was rad. My legs got all cut up from the guy’s spiky jacket. But then we went to Capitol Wreckids, which was a big stage there—this kid Chris B from LA was Djing there. Chris Brown; Such an unfortunate name. I am going through my friends photo album right now so I can piece all of this together. But yeah, the first night in my camp was fun. I helped set up the trash and the recycling area, we did some acid and got to know eachother, whatever, you know, not that bad.
Then Tuesday Major Lazer shows up. Then all of a sudden the camp is dead silent and everyone is just on their phones, and worried about wi-fi usage and all that.

You told me everyone got annoyed with you because people were eating bacon out of your butt.
OK so the butt-tequila lounge was happening and this guy was walking around with a giant bag of bacon so then it became tequila-butt bacon-butt. Then it was like, “Who can I get to eat bacon out of my butt on the dancefloor?” And it’s Burning Man so the answer is lots. But then it’s like, “Well, where do we go from here?” So the next day my friend Christina and I were like, “Let’s hide things in our pussy and party and then remember what we put in there and have a big laugh about it.” Wow, it sounds so fucked up when I write it in words, but our group of friends is fucking nuts.

So each night it became a funny thing. Mini-Gherkins, candy, a flashlight, and then all of a sudden hours later you’re standing in the middle of the desert laughing so hard and Christina gets a look on her face that’s like “OMG” and it’s because she laughed so hard that a Gherkin had fallen out of her lady garden.

Jesus Christ! If you were freaking people out at Burning Man I am not really sure where to direct you.
It just all seemed so normal. And it’s not like we were doing it in the middle of the camp.
Your Twitter bio says “Set Your Pussy Free”
Exactly. Burning man is like that. The guys a couple of camps down had a slinky dinky limbo. They just had a slinky attached at wither end to two guys’ dicks and you had to limbo under it.

Wow!
Yeah that’s the whole thing. Every clever pun you have ever thought you were so great for coming up with not only exists there but there is an entire camp of it. And being too cool seriously gets you nowhere there. You will miss everything. If you see something awesome and you want to do it you have to do it in that moment or you won’t see it again. “Oh we’ll go roller disco later.” Nope!

“Hey they are casting butts. Let’s do it.” YUP! And then you park your bike and cover your butt in coconut oil and lie down on a cushion with your friends and 20 minutes later you are the proud owner of your glutes as art. But if you don’t stop you miss it all. The whole mentality of like, showing up to the club not too early, and standing in or near the dj booth, or checking to see if cool people laugh just gets you nowhere there. I did some crazy shit. Even for me. Like Stevie Nicks love dart kinda stuff.

Did you hear any music that blew your mind? It sounds strangely not about that.
I was perpetually disappointed with the music. Just too glitchy and trancey for me. The best music I heard all weekend was at the Dr. Bronners foam tank. The Dr. Bronners camp wins Burning Man forever.

They have a camp? What?
They have a big tent. And the best music. So you go in and you get naked and you’re all dusty and dirty with a bunch of other naked people and there’s this big plexi glass chamber that looks like a gas chamber and it had metal grates on the top and on the bottom and a super hot naked dude that looks like Jesus—WWJDM: When Will Jesus Do Me—is herding all the naked people into this gas chamber of joy. Then all these people with hoses start hyping you and getting you to dance and when you dance enough they spray you with magical lavendar Dr. Bronner foam and you just get covered in it, and everyone is like blissfully laughing and screaming. I was scared to open my eyes because I thought it would sting so I was just bouncing off all of these foamy naked people in a big tank. Then I rubbed my eyes and opened them and it didn’t sting at all and I have never seen any group of people so happy in my life. It was awesome. It was like when you show a puppy snow, but the puppy is actually a fucking guy with a hemp necklace.

So you were basically in a giant town of weird.
It really was like a big city. I went to the temple and had a big cry. And I am totally happy in my life and never feel like I needed to go to a temple. But that’s what is so rad. It’s just important to feel human and when I went there I could feel it before I could see it. It’s so heavy in the air I’ve never felt anything like that except for the few times in Berlin when I was at the wall or something. I couldn’t even go near it for the first few minutes, but then I did and started reading little shrines they’ve made and it’s so weird because it’s so personal and I felt like I was reading someone’s diary or a personal love letter.

With Burning Man it’s just rad because that is what it’s all about, well to me anyways, it’s about letting go of that energy, like a shirt you don’t wear but you have great memories of wearing it and it just sits in your drawer. Or all of your dad’s shirts in a box, or your wedding dress, you know? 

And the temple burning is so crazy. People just sit around in silence. Everyone cries. Everyone! Some of my friends brought their mom’s ashes. It’s just cool to be eating bacon out of your friend’s butt and then jumping in foam with strangers and then crying in silence. It’s fucking perfect. We were in line for eights hours to leave and we all had a potluck. Everyone pooled their food together and there was a team of people carrying around a buffet table of Ding Dongs and tofu salad and tequila.

I swear everyone did not suck at my camp. Some people were not that sucky. I just forget that my best friend is a stripper and I was raised on an Island.

I got really into this whole not-having-attachment thing. Everyone I met and partied with or had sex with on a segway I just walked away from because, what are going to talk about? I mean do you really want to know what this magical girl covered in gold sparkles wearing a crown of Barbie doll heads is like in real life? Probably not. Just like I don’t care about your boring doctor life, or if you financed this whole camp. You can’t care about who people are when you are there because it will just ruin the whole thing. That’s why I just got upset with that whole LA crew—this is the one place you can truly live and the whole concept is to not have attachment.

Do you have any advice for first time burners?
DO: light a cigarette in your butt then make someone in the crowd take it and smoke it.

DON’T: hand your lighter to the girl with a cigarette in her butt trying to light tequila on fire.

DO: put tootsie rolls in your vagina, forget about them, dance on your head for 4 hours, then have your friend remind you they are in there on the bike ride home, make your friends eat them to prove they are real friends, go back to camp and hook up with an artist that hates you’s tour manager, have your friend shout “TASTE THE TOOTSIE ROLLS?!” and him say, “actually yes, I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

DON’T: play the exact same set two nights in a row and yell on the mic, “Who wants a free Major Lazer bandana!?” Everything is free at Burning Man you douche canoe.

DO: light the free bandana on fire and stare blankly back at them.

Ok I am drunk now.

Blondtron is out of her fucking mind. Follow her on Twitter @blondtron

What do you think, Burners? Is she right? Did Blondtron have more fun at Burning Man than you?

Blondtron is one of those DJ’s who can’t tell you what style of music they play.

This story has been doing the rounds of the Interwebz today, after Gawker ran yet another hit piece on LA-based SnapChat CEO (and Ivy League fratboy) Evan Spiegel, whose girlfriend has photos of her running round half naked at Burning Man. Scandalous, right? It seems a few think so, among them ValleyWag, and newly self-anointed Burning Man paper of record, Business Insider.

Girlfriend Lucy Aragon is a 24-year old model and about to become a new Reality TV star, on the Bachelor. She has Burning Man front and center in her Twitter description:

Before you follow me, be advised I have no idea where I’m going. I love Christmas, Steve Jobs, FC Barça and Burning Man.

Do we have yet another billionaire Burner? More grilled cheese sandwiches and french toast to come? There is no evidence (yet) that Mr Spiegel accompanied his girlfriend to Burning Man this year, or is a Burner. But he sure sounds like a partier,  and according to one email he sent, he and his friends are “certified bros – our frat just got kicked off [Stanford's] campus”. Brogrammers, that is.

His tweets are mysteriously quiet between August 24 and September 7, when he re-emerges to post this mysterious image…

He just cashed out $10 million personally on an $800m post-money valuation Series B round, bought a Ferrari and told Facebook to go stick a $3 billion cash offer up their datehole, then followed that up by telling Larry and Sergei to go stick their $4 billion up a similar orifice…so why shouldn’t he go?

Maybe this is a sign that he did…

If you ask me, we need MORE topless models at Burning Man. Many more!

One Burner thinks that cooking, Snapchat, and Burning Man have one key thing in common: temporary art.

LA weekly has quite a lengthy story on Snapchat’s rise from Frat Boy Darling to Tech World Darling.

CNet has more details of his career and upbringing.

Yahoo Shine admires his fashion style – not just a hoodie but a cool one.

We’ll leave with a little titbit from The Onion.

Allegations of malpractice . Details still not fully public . From KOLO8 news Reno

Organizers of the annual weeklong celebration of self-expression and eclectic art known as Burning Man and a Nevada county where it is held thought they had resolved their legal dispute over the festival.

They hoped to get the blessing of a federal judge overseeing the case, and asked him to dismiss the lawsuit earlier this week. Instead, they got an earful from U.S. District Senior Judge Robert C. Jones, and threats that the lawyers in the case should either go back to law school or be disbarred.

Exactly what in the agreement between festival organizers and Pershing County lawyers prompted Jones’ criticism was unclear, though he said the agreement amounted to malpractice.

The two sides, however, believe they still have a deal. They expect a ruling from Jones next week.

My earlier post was hastily sent out from my iPhone, please forgive an initial spelling mistake, I hope you somehow managed to survive your day anyway.

Sounds like sparks were flying in the Sparks courtroom! The Judge seems like he’s part of the crew who thinks either the naked people or the children have to go from Burning Man. Here’s a bit more detail on what happened, from the Associated Press:

Is Burning Man the biggest magical ceremony in the world? For wicca magic, for Pagan religions, probably yes. Compared to religious festivals outside America, maybe not.

Yes, we know BMOrg deny that there’s any particular magical element. They deny a lot of things, take their word as gospel if you like. Many of their own statements over the years seem to contradict this position. There’s no magical element, but ritual’s important? People have a spiritual, life-changing experience? This is one of the biggest rituals there is, encapsulating many of the world’s movers and shakers, the best and brightest, laid out inside a series of circles and pentagons and pentagrams.

OK so it’s not as big as Kumbh Mela, India’s festival where worshippers bathe in the sacred Ganges river. That clocks in at  110 million people, if they had it in the bay area it would stretch from Silicon Valley to Sacramento, including the whole East Bay and most of Napa and Sonoma.

Kumbh Mela tents, 2013

Burning Man, at 5.5 square miles, about 8,000 acres of restricted land and just under 1,000 acres of residential city, is smaller even than San Francisco. It’s still the world’s biggest rave, at least in terms of land area. Biggest rave in population is Donauinselfest  in Austria – weighing in at a whopping 3.2 million people.

Black Rock City in a Martian Crater

The type of magic described by the pentagon shape, the pentagrams and circles contained within it, and by a ritual burning of a giant, man-shaped wooden effigy, is known as  wicca magic. Wicca as in “Wicker Man”, a Celtic ritual from the Druids. Humans and their dogs would be put inside a giant wooden statue of a man, and sacrificed to the god Ba’al on Labor Day, May 1, in a ritual known as The Feast of Beltane. This is also known as “black magick” or “fire magic”.

Druid magic is alive and strong in the Bay Area. All kinds of secret, often Satanic rituals go on in caves around the city – something Burning Man’s founders were well aware of, back in the Cacophony days.

The best example is Bohemian Grove, which is probably the closest party in the world to Burning Man in terms of thematic elements and ritualized structure and layout. They have theme camps, Playa (player)  names, commerce is banned, they have workshops and musical performances put on for free by the camps and shared with everyone. They have a big ritual of druid-robed lamp lighters, drumming, chanting, ringing bells. Then they set fire to a massive wooden effigy – in their case an Owl named “Dull Care”, signifiying the cult of Moloch. They party through the night with howls and music and revelry, drinking and making merry, which is worship of the Pagan gods of Bacchus, Dionysos, Pan. These cults are associated with the Ancient Mystery Schools of Babylon. Music, drums, fire, technology, and often, orgiastic sex and hallucinogenic drugs, are all mixed together for those initiated into their secret sects.

devil in disguise

The Bohemian leaders of the world mix freely at the Grove with others of their level, from different fields. Generals mix it up with Internet billionaires, wine makers, thespians, and the Grateful Dead. They burn Care at the start of their ceremony, so they can party like they don’t have one. At the end, they go back to the Default World, and all the cares on their shoulders.

Just like how Burning Man gave us Google, Second Life, and venture funds using Eminent Domain to seize peoples homes; the druids in theme camps amongst the redwoods in The Grove gave us the United Nations, the Manhattan Project, the Star Wars program, and most of our Presidents.

Richard Nixon called Bohemian Grove “the most faggy goddammed thing you can ever imagine”. We have girls at our party (and fags, and some of the girls are fags!), and you don’t have to be elite to go there – but it helps. You have to be rich enough to take a week or two off work, spend $400 for a ticket plus transport costs, and live self-sufficiently, so well in the extraordinarily harsh conditions that you actually have fun. Even to do that cheap, costs money.

We worship the Man at the end of our party. We party like we don’t have a care in the world, casting off the rules and shackles of The Man. We have a big ritual with druid robed lamp lighters, more of a Babylonian style dress perhaps, then they march to the Man, there are fire dancers, everyone sits, waiting. All the party is under the control of The Man at that moment, waiting for The Man to burn. Then, it does – the Fire God keeps everyone’s attention for at least another 20 minutes. And then? Chaos, mayhem, Yahoo!

And then we burn the “Temple”, in another, less structured fire magic ritual. Get rid of your messes. Then everyone returns, back to the real world. Back to working in slavery for The Man. Feeling like they exercised their inner rebel, and exorcised their old demons. Maybe picked up some new ones to take back with them…

This is BMOrg’s map of Black Rock City for 2013. The Pentagon is the trash fence. Note the orientation of North at the bottom. The proportions and dimensions between the trash fence and the circle are theirs, not mine. It looks to me the same proportions in the drawing as in the satellite photo above, where you can clearly see the trash fence and roads. The whole camp looks to me like it’s placed solely on the pentagram, with Center Camp aligned with the intersecting lower vertices. The city therefore grows out of the pentagon, to 2/3 of a circle 0.666%. Such an elegant and beautiful design is very unlikely to be there by coincidence.

To make a pentagram, connect the inner vertices of the Pentagon to each other. This shape makes another pentagon inside the pentagram, inverted. The pentagon and pentagram fit perfectly inside circles, which is why they are very popular in occult rituals.

My drawing might be crappy, but the lines sure do seem to line up pretty magically. The 0.666 of a circle touches the lines of the pentagram, and multiple lines cross together through center camp. The entrance to Center Camp seems to be entirely defined by the inner, reverse pentagram. The man is smack bang in the middle of one pentagon, inside an inverted pentagon that encompasses the inner playa, inside another pentagon that encompasses the entire event. The horizontal, left-right line goes straight through the Temple. This is also the top of the circle of the inner Playa. Deep Playa therefore becomes everything above that line, an uninhabited outer triangle zone.

Also note that this map is twisted 45 degrees, or 1/8 of a revolution, away from true north. The significance of this is unclear, probably to line up with the sun…although this site believes that it is to link up to a pilgrimage destination church in Europe, and a Guggenheim/Rothschild Temple in Central Park in New York.

Is Burning Man a massive occult ritual, that we’re participating in whether we’re conscious of it or not?

Maybe the pentagrams are innocent, or just coincidental. But then what about the lamp lighter ceremony with the monks, the drumming, the fire dancing, the raising of the hands of the Man, the controlled burn; thousands of people dancing around a bon(e)fire, burning a Wicker man, burning a giant effigy – these are all ritualistic elements. That ain’t no Solid Gold Dancers out there. These are all the elements of fire magic, as it has been practiced for thousands of years. At some point you have to say, OK, maybe this can’t ALL be coincidence, that maybe some of the people involved in putting this together had an interest in the occult, and chose to build the ceremony like other occult ceremonies throughout history.

Open Scroll blog has just written a lengthy, 3-part series delving into this much deeper. An important point to consider, is that whatever the individual participants think about the ritual, doesn’t really change the nature of the ritual. The nature, elements, and sheer scale of the ritual are what gives it its power. In fact, the magic is stronger if it’s so subtle that those within the spell don’t even notice it being cast on them, and with them.

This is Labor Day weekend, and once again a mass ritual known as Burning Man is taking place in Nevada with many thousands of participants. Tonight, as I post this to the blog, the burning man will be lit and wildly celebrated. Beyond the obvious “Pagan celebration” label that may be applied, when the symbol language is read and understood we see in this the intent for the ritual raising of energy within an enormous magic circle. It’s a large scale harvesting of energy as a ritual sacrifice. What I’ve just described is according to the practice of ceremonial magick, and those conclusions would be drawn by anyone who is familiar with the working of such sorcery. More may be inferred about what is being accomplished because of the consistency and redundancy of the symbolism present.

Who is the lucky target of our Burner worhsip? The Egyptian god Horus. Well, I guess we have Osiris, we had an Anubis a couple of years back, the lamp lighters are Egyptian styled, the Temple was 3 pyramids, in fact there are a lot of pyramids and Egyptian symbolism…yeah, I think it’s safe to say there is a LOT of Egyptian magick going on at Burning Man. I haven’t ever met too many actual Egyptians out there!

photo by Curious Josh

Certainly, participants may decide what Burning Man is to them, but it is what it is, despite what some might choose to believe. The organizers refuse to define it openly and media descriptions of Burning Man as an “art, music and everything-else festival” are merely superficial. The point of the ritual gathering may be derived from the symbols present and some knowledge of history. These things “decide” what the festival really is. It’s not really open to the subjective interpretations of individual participants. Their opinions do nothing to change what their participation means and accomplishes. They are involved in the worship of Horus and are actively paving the way for his return. This ritual is for the empowering of all his worshipers for engagement in spiritual warfare against the saints.

He also feels that the Illuminati could be involved. Unfortunately, Illuminati seem to be all the rage amongst the kiddies these days, with Kim Kardashian having to recently deny she’s in their gang. Rock-n-Roll has been the devil’s music for 50 years, I don’t think dubstep will bring Satan in if the Rolling Stones couldn’t.

A point of the ritual is to raise more demonic energy, harvesting it from the Burning Man participants and further from all those who give energy to it through the spawned events and even the Internet coverage on regular sites, forums, social media and video sites. There’s lots of mind-control programming going on with corrupting influences of many kinds. Here is the typical weaving together of beast and Illuminati programming symbolism, and reality. Folks role-play in their playa name alter identities. 

…When folks revel in burning such as the mock Wall Street block in effegy, smashing, burning and destroying everything, it’s not just a carthitic experience. Some of the constructions go up in smoke as prayers with incense to their god, but others go up more particularly as a curse. That’s what the magick circle is for, with the release of the demonic energy carrying the curse into the universe. These destruction rituals are attended with directed anger. These rehearse and role play in symbol but there is in this a vital supernaturalism…

Or, it might not be just Devil Worship. It might be Catholics versus Protestants…hmmm, I think his argument is stretching a bit here…

The Black Awakening is appointed to facilitate the new order by bring this order to ashes, preparing the way for their king Horus to rise. In type, every year the idol is burned to ashes. Every year, he rises again. Sun up. Sun down. Sun up. Sun down. 

I note how the August 24th marks the anniversary of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and this is when many travel and preparations for Burning Man are completed. St. Bartholomew’s Day is observed on some Satanic and SRA calendars as a Great Sabbat and Fire festival, and noted as a large herb gathering. Burning Man is very much a fire festival. There is a metaphor biblically and otherwise where herbs represent people. Connect those dots. “The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations, followed by a wave of Roman Catholic mob violence, both directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), during the French Wars of Religion.” (Wikipedia) One or more of those groups worshiped the sun god and acted in his service. What do you know about Catholic assassins – Jesuits, Knights Templar, Knights of Malta, Knights of Columbus 

In terms of Wicca magic, Burning Man is surely the largest. Glastonbury is a bigger festival than Burning Man, but they tried to mass 1800 for their ritual magic ceremony against fracking. They billed it as “The Biggest Magical Operation Ever Carried Out on Earth“, but only 300 people showed up, Burning Man gets ten times that just girls celebrating that they can ride bikes and show their boobs at the same time!

Stephanie and I drove to Glastonbury to participate in the Warrior’s Call Pagan Anti-Fracking ritual that was scheduled for Saturday. I had been a little concerned because 1800 people had said they were coming and I was aware of the irony of having people using fossil fuels to get to Glastonbury to work a ritual designed to protect the Earth from pollution. However, sometimes it is necessary to make a strong statement, and perhaps to do powerful magic, and this Glastonbury initiative felt important. We combined it with a long overdue visit to OBOD’s Touchstone editor Penny Billington and its inimitable illustrator Arthur ZZ Birmingham/Billington.

How many of the 1800 people would actually turn up, especially when the forecast was for rain? Damh the Bard had spotted members in Australia clicking the ‘I’m coming!’ button on Facebook, so we knew some would be coming astrally, and in fact astral travel made up the bulk of participants. About 1500 flew on the wings of thought and intention, and only about 300 were there on the lower field of the Tor, just above Dion Fortune’s (now Geoffrey Ashe’s) house. But this was a good number – enough to give a real sense of solidarity and energy, without so many no-one would hear what was being said – which I had feared if 1800 had come. The police had been worried about numbers too, and had phoned us and appeared before the ritual began. But they were reassured and went away.

Some previous coverage from Burners.Me about the spiritual and occult elements of Burning Man:

Everyone’s Unique Except Me – Why I Hate Magical Thinking (by Whatsblem The Pro)

Silence, Violence, and Self Reliance (by Whatsblem the Pro)

Seeking Divine Truth at Burning Man

Prayerformances – Rave Culture as the New Manifestation of Ecstatic Trance Rituals

Finding Jesus at Burning Man - a Christian perspective

“Theater in a Crowded Fire” – Spirituality, Burning Man, and the Apocalypse - Neo-Paganism

Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow – Paganism, Wicca, Druids, Lucifer

Exploring the Other (Part III – the Sacrifice of a Ritual) – we speculate on the Occult Symbology behind “Fertility 2.0″, the ticket crisis, changing of the guard at Burning Man, and the intersection between Burners and the Occupy movement

Ghost Trancing on Sacred Lands - Native American

Burner Principles vs the 10 Native American Commandments - Native American

Burner Fundamentalism - Burning Man’s own religion

Longing for the Next Evolutionary Step - Buddhism and consciousness

It seems the Judge’s recent ruling in Burning Man’s dispute against Pershing County is causing a minor stir in the legal world. Two different legal blogs have commented on the decision.

First, from AboveTheLaw

French Vogue, 2012

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Bay Guardian brought us a 5-page story about Burning Man, written by Burner Scribe. We covered the story in The Spark of Controversy . We also highlighted the apparent hypocrisy of the BMOrg profiting from a photo shoot featuring an art car while using legal threats to stop that same art car from even saying that they’re going to be at Burning Man on their Web site, and demanding that they take down photographs of the art car at Coachella – covered in The Fishy Smell of Corporate Excess.

Well, last night a pretty high-level BMOrg insider told me that the Guardian got it wrong. Way wrong. Here’s what the original story said:

When I asked Brown about whether he paid the LLC for access and the right to use footage they filmed on the playa — something I know it has demanded of other film and photo projects — Brown paused for almost a full minute before admitting he did.

“We saw it as location fees. We’re making an investment, they’re making an investment,” he said, refusing to provide details of the agreement. “The arrangement we had with Burning Man is similar to the arrangements anyone else has had out there.”

Goodell said the LLC’s standard agreement calls for all filmmakers to either pay a set site fee or a percentage of the profits. “It’s standard in all of the agreements to pay a site fee,” Goodell said, noting that the LLC recently charged Vogue Magazine $150,000 to do a photo shoot during the event.

According to our source, that story is not accurate. In fact, Vogue offered them this much money, and BMOrg turned it down. Or perhaps, BMOrg named their price, and Vogue turned them down. Anyway, the exchange of $150,000 for a photo shoot for Vogue, apparently never happened.

The source did not want to go on record with this , but gave me permission to publish. Read into that what you will. If this is true, then it’s surprising that BMOrg didn’t try to set the record straight with an official statement.

The Pornj cone of Disorient – a beacon of high class debauchery

Vogue certainly seems to love Burning Man. They had a piece written by the lovely Disorient Burner Yvonne Force Villareal in 2009. There was a Burning Man photo shoot by David Mushegain in French Vogue in 2010. Burning Man was featured again in French Vogue in August 2012. There was also a Burning Man piece in British Vogue in 2010, and in Australian Vogue in 2011. A recent issue of Vogue has top designer Marc Jacobs naming Burning Man as his primary inspiration for his 2014 collection (fashion designer Manish Arora was also inspired by Burning Man for a collection he debuted at Paris Fashion Week in 2013).

Vogue has also just named Burning Man on it’s “New Social Calendar” of the places to be for the jet-set in 2014:

Their 767 has hammocks and California King beds in each of their bedrooms. Seats up to 50.

There are almost no jets landing at the Black Rock City airport, out of 1000+ aircraft this year. I know of one Citation CJ2 that was brought in once, and there’s usually one or two Pilatus PC-12 turboprops. Larry and Sergei’s main plane is a converted ex_Qantas Boeing 767, called “a party airplane” by their CEO Eric Schmidt. They get discounted fuel from the Pentagon and NASA, and they have their own private landing strip close to their office, at Moffett Field (at least, until their own private terminal at San Jose airport is completed!)

Google’s light attack jet – infrared detectors pick up Facebook grilled cheese sandwiches from miles away

The 3 top Google executives own 8 private jets and two helicopters between them, they also have a 757, two Gulfstream V’s, and a fighter jet. I’m pretty sure they didn’t take any of this fleet to Burning Man this year. But hey, nobody reads Vogue for the articles, do they?

let me know if you see bad boy landing at Burning Man. It would be quite the dust cloud

Personally I find Scribe to be a very credible journalist, and have difficulty believing that he could get something so important, so completely wrong. His book The Tribes of Burning Man is excellent. I know that he has recordings of the interviews he conducted for his story, and there is more that he did not yet publish.

Scribe this year wrote a piece from the Playa, saying that he was officially giving up his struggle to call for democratic leadership of Burning Man, or at least some form of representation of Burners in the decision making about our culture, as it relates to That Thing In The Desert.

this is the way it’s always going be, year after year, like a dusty Groundhog Day on acid. Only the numbers and faces of the citizens and the things we create for one another will change.

It’s perfect, right? No reason to change a thing. What God (or, rather, Larry Harvey) has created, let no burner presume to alter.

That’s an idea that most burners seem to embrace, despite the beloved pastime of veteran burners to kvetch and celebrate some storied golden age, whether it be 1986, 1996, or 2006. We all just appreciate the chance to build a city for ourselves each year and the leaders of Burning Man for giving us that opportunity, again and again.

And I’m now joining those who accept Burning Man as it is, hereby officially dropping my struggles against Larry, Maid Marian, and the rest of Black Rock City LLC board to create some form of representative or democratic leadership for the Burning Man and its culture.

It’s been a lonely and frustrating crusade anyway, so I’m happy to be done with it (as I’m sure they are). I’ve been regularly covering Burning Man for my newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, since 2004. My reportage formed the basis of my book, The Tribes of Burning Man, which came out in 2011 just as the LLC board was being torn apart by internal divisions that they resolved by deciding to turn control of Burning Man over to a new nonprofit they were creating, The Burning Man Project.

“Why not act to change the world, a world that you won’t be in? And that’s what we want to do,” Larry told a roomful of grateful burners when he announced the plan in April 2011. “We want to get out of running Burning Man. We want to move on.”

The prospects of that change in leadership seemed exciting, and I imagined a council of veteran burners representing our community’s constituent communities – artists, DPW, sound camps, volunteers, art car makers, regional leaders, maybe the biggest villages – gathering around a table to plan the future of Burning Man. It might get messy, but things worth doing usually are.  

First, I took issue with Larry’s announced plans to create secret payouts for the six board members, but nobody except Chicken John seemed to care about that. The predominant view seemed to be that they had done us all a great service and they deserved whatever it was they wanted to pay themselves.

Fine, so then I publicly questioned the hand-picked nonprofit board, which seemed chosen for their fundraising ability more than the communities they represented. Again, no resonance, so I accepted it and moved on. Maybe money was what was important in the early stages, and new leadership would come later.

And I was totally willing to just let it go and move on, until earlier this year when I watched the new documentary, “Spark: A Burning Man Story,” which concludes with the claim “the organization is transitioning into a nonprofit to ‘gift’ the event back to the community.”

So I decided to plug back into covering Burning Man to check on the status of this gift with just a year to go until Larry had said that control of the event would be transferred to the new nonprofit. But rather than relaxing their grip on the event and entrusting it to the community, I learned that they consider their leadership “more important than ever,” as Marian put it.

Not only are The Burning Man Project board members still not representative of the overall community, but they have no authority over the event, which Larry wants to continue as is “without being unduly interfered with by the nonprofit organization.”

Sure, the LLC and its various fiefdoms can unilaterally change its contracts with artists, its policy on what kinds and how many art cars to license, its ticket pricing structure, and size of the city (the max population this year jumped to 68,000 from 60,000 last year), all without any input from the community. It can cut lucrative side deals with corporations and propagandists. But we can’t have the new nonprofit board making these sorts of decisions, that would be unthinkable. 

also heard last night: General Wesley Clark did NOT arrive at Burning Man on this Black Hawk. So which bad boy was rolling with this? A Blackhawk is some serious shiznit. Last seen in the direction of Disorient

“The nonprofit is going well, and then we have to work out the terms of the relationship between the event and the nonprofit. We want the event to be protected from undue meddling and we want it to be a good fit,” Larry told me.

And when I wrote about these issues in the Guardian, where they were read by tens of thousands of people, few people seemed to care. Two articles I wrote on these issues this year got two online comments each, comparing to the 259 comments and vigorous public discussion that ensued after I wrote “Burning Man ticket fiasco creates uncertain future” in February of last year.

The lesson: as long as we can get to Black Rock City, we don’t really care who’s calling the shots. After all, it’s really all of us who create the city each year for our own enjoyment, and that’s what matters, not the six people who control the $23 million we all spent on tickets this year.

(from http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/08/23/how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-just-trust-larry)

I think we’ll let Madonna have the last word on this one…

The latest Jacked Rabbit has some interesting little morsels of information for us Burners to ponder. Specifically:

1. The “transition to a non-profit” is in the “final stages”, and it actually means “a non-profit is buying Black Rock City, LLC”.

2. The legal costs for the founders to cash out are going to be expensive, they need your help, please donate your money.

3. We can add selling calendars to the list of things BMOrg does to monetize Burner culture. T-shirts next?

4. They still haven’t worked out how much they’re going to increase the ticket prices to, although they’re “aiming” to keep them “in line” with 2013. If you want to pay more money for tickets, you can buy them in the first sale, vaguely described as occurring sometime in mid-January. Otherwise if you wait a bit longer you can pay the “normal” price. This sort of made sense when you could buy tickets as Christmas gifts, but now it just seems bizarre. BMOrg are blaming the delay on the BLM approving their 2014 permit, even though they announced in July that they had been granted a 4-year permit that would cover the event through 2016. The delay might actually be linked to the corporate restructuring maneuvers, and/or trying to increase the population even more than this year’s record 68,000.

5. Although we’re almost a third of the way through the year between Burning Mans, they still haven’t figured out what the theme is going to be for next year.

This edition of the newsletter was strangely missing from Burning Man’s archives, you can read it at the Naughty Nomad forum though.

PRELIMINARY 2014 TICKETING INFO

We know you’ve been awaiting information about tickets for Burning Man 2014, but the plan hasn’t been finalized. Why the delay? We haven’t finalized agreements with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for the 2014 permit. 

So while we don’t have all of the details, here’s some info to help you plan:
1) There will be a Pre-Sale, but it will not happen until mid-January. As in the past, this sale will only offer the highest priced tickets.
2) The full ticketing plan for 2014 will be announced in early January on tickets.burningman.com
3) While details are still pending, our intention is to repeat the basic process and structure from 2013: all of our ticket sales will require pre-registration through the Burner Profile system, there will be a Pre-Sale, a Directed Group Sale, an Individual Sale, a late-season OMG Sale, and we will again offer the Secure Ticket Exchange Program (STEP) and our Low Income Ticket Program. We are also striving to keep ticket prices as in line with 2013 as possible. While all of this is still subject to final changes, know that this is our aim.

In December of 2012 the Pre-Sale designated a percentage of the income to the nonprofit Burning Man Project. By not having this sale in December of 2013 we’re missing the opportunity to make this useful year-end donation to the Project. The leadership of the LLC are in the final stages of negotiating and completing the transaction that will make Black Rock City, LLC a subsidiary of the Project. Now more than ever the Project needs your support. Please consider making a donation to the Project as you look at your year-end contributions. You can donate online here:  http://bit.ly/bmpdonate

…

THE BURNING MAN CALENDAR MAKES A GREAT HOLIDAY GIFT

Screw Black Friday, Saturday localwhatever, Cyber Monday and all that … put your money where your heart is. Pick up a Burning Man 2013/14 wall calendar for your gifting pleasure this holiday season (order before December 9 to be sure it gets to you in time). It includes tons of gorgeous Burning Man photography.

http://bit.ly/16bLSKa

But wait … isn’t that … COMMERCIAL? *gasp*

Not really. We make this calendar every year so YOU can have a chunk of Burning Man memories tacked to your wall throughout the year — it’s a cultural conveyance. Do we make money on it? Once all the costs are calculated, barely. So don’t feel like you have to take a shower after clicking “buy”. It’s all good.

Photo by Kim Fraczek

New York performance artist Reverend Billy Talen is an institution at Burning Man. He also takes his show on the road, throwing Cacophony Society-style protests all around the US with his Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.

Recently Chaos Chase Manhattan did not like Reverend Billy one bit, his toad-masked singers accused of making people cry and starting a riot…

From the Village Voice:

In September, longtime New York activist Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, led by choir director Nehemiah Luckett, went into a Chase Bank in Midtown and made a little music. The two led a group of eight choir members in a musical protest against mountaintop removal, a controversial form of coal-mining that Chase helps to finance. The choir sang a song, then Reverend Billy preached a sermon on Chase’s fondness for fossil fuel investments. The whole thing lasted about fifteen minutes, according to the choir, who had on fetching yellow toad hats during the performance. 

For their trouble, as we told you at the time, Luckett and Reverend Billy (real name William Talen) were charged with riot in the second degree, menacing in the third degree, unlawful assembly, and two counts of disorderly conduct. The rioting and the menacing both carried a possible punishment of one year in prison. But in a hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court Monday morning, those charges were greatly reduced. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the prosecution reviewed the footage and decided that the whole thing looked more like a musical protest than a riot.

After we reported on the charges against Reverend Billy and Luckett, the story got picked up by a whole lot of other places, including WNYC, The Guardian, Vice, Democracy Now!, and Forbes (yes, that Forbes). The Worldwide Hippies were also very upset, declaring, “You fuck with Reverend Billy, you fuck with the Worldwide Hippies!” (Noted.) A Change.org petition calling for the charges to be dropped garnered 13,900 signatures so far, and a legal defense fund for the two men has raised $15,720, or 105 percent of its goal.

photo by Daniel Tovrov

That petition was handed to the judge at this morning’s hearing. At the same time, the prosecution announced that after talking with eyewitnesses and reviewing security footage, they were amending their complaint against the two men. The new charges are criminal trespassing in the third degree, unlawful assembly, trespassing, and two counts of disorderly conduct.

In the previous complaint, the Chase branch manager, Robert Bongiorno, told David Bornstein, the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the case, that because of the people with frog hats jumping and singing and whatnot all over his bank, he “believed that the bank was being robbed, felt in fear for his physical safety, and observed at least one customer or employee inside of the bank break into tears.”

In the new complaint, Bongiorno no longer reports that he feared he was being robbed by a gang of frog-headed menaces. Instead, the complaint says, Bongiorno reports that he “observed many of the above individuals handing out yellow pieces of paper to the customers and employees in the bank.” (Those were leaflets on mountaintop removal.) At the time, he adds, “the bank was open for business and multiple customers were present inside of the bank in order to conduct business, but that Mr. Bongiorno observed that the defendants’ actions disrupted the bank’s ability to conduct business.”

The prosecution, led by ADA Bornstein, also have a new sentencing recommendation: they’d like Reverend Billy to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and perform one day of community service. For Luckett, they’ve recommended an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal (ACD). An ACD means that if Luckett stayed out of trouble for six months — no menacing of fainthearted bank managers — the case would be dismissed and sealed. The next court date for both men is February 27th.

The choir began a run of shows at Joe’s Pub earlier this month. Reverend Billy, who has a pretty robust sense of humor, told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman that the charges, upsetting though they were, hadn’t been bad for attendance.

“Well, Jesus taught us — I mean there are lots of things about Jesus that we can’t listen to, right?” he told Goodman. “But, one thing he did teach us is, if you can’t afford a press person, get arrested quickly.”

Fortunately, Reverend Billy seems to have got the charges knocked down to a day’s raking. Thanks to Burner Kevin for bringing this latest update from the Rev earlier today to our attention:

SO THE PROSECUTOR IS NOW A MUSIC CRITIC? They tell the judge that by examining the surveillance tapes they determined that our action of Sept 12 did not constitute “Riot” and “Menace” and “Unlawful Assembly” but rather a “Musical Presentation,” and so the penalty they request for the plaintiffs Nehemiah and myself zooms from one year in jail down to a single day raking leaves in front of City Hall. Goes from 2nd and 3rd degree misdemeanors and criminal record down to a couple violations and community service. So, I’m sitting in a local cafe with Savi feeling much relief. We presented the 13,500 petitions to the judge and refused to accept even the much reduced charges… It was over in ten minutes. We thank our community of singing anti-consumerists and we are very grateful to our supporters from far and wide, and our neighbors and fellow activists here in NY, and also the press people who rallied to our cause. Something obviously happened in the last several weeks over at the District Atty’s office. At a minimum – the surveillance tapes the prosecutors looked at (finally) don’t have us hopping on desks, don’t record us threatening people. The riot and the menace didn’t show up there. Who knows, maybe earth-lovers in the DA’s office, people with kids who know that the banks have to stop the fossil fuel investments… maybe they hummed along with our toad-song. Earthalujah!

The Indypendent, billed as a Free Paper for Free People, interviewed Reverend Billy at Burning Man in 2009:

He paced back and forth, blond hair bobbing as he ducked and weaved and shouted his sermon. His white suit blazed in the sunlight, a black microphone coiled around his arm as he exhorted the audience.

“Changeallujah!”

I watched them bask in his fervor, quiet but curious. “Children…” he rolled his voice into a preacher’s rhythm. “We know the wonders of Burning Man. Here we see things seen nowhere else. Here the sun and moon set at the same time.” Voices whoop as the Reverend leans forward, “I know you want to take this fire into the world of big box stores. But children, without social change, we support, every day we support the statement of the American military culture. And that statement is, ‘If you threaten me I will kill you.’ And we support this statement with our taxes. We do most of our shopping, as Americans, not at Wal-Mart but at the Pentagon!”

People nod as if his words were weights tipping scales in their minds. His hands jumped around the air, “We need to be radical Americans like we’ve been before in the Labor Movement, in the Civil Rights Movement, in the Women’s Movement.” He dabbed his face with a sweat rag. “Children the earth is sending us messages. We see it in the typhoons that rip our coastal cities. We see it in the floods that sweep away towns and the earth is saying, we must be like the typhoons, we must be like the flood.”

Eyes lit up. His mythic words opened a door into a world of primal forces that could wash away our numbness. “All the life that is not human is calling us to join it in a duet of activism,” he crooned. “Children…” his voice darkened as he stopped and held out his hand as if gently parting a veil. “Some of us are going to have to die. In every great movement our freedom was earned by those died and there is life in death…”

A strange light glowed on their faces. He made visible a terrible truth that promised us a reality more powerful than our lives. I’ve heard preachers my whole life and many have said the same thing but I read about Reverend Billy and know that his campaign for mayor has taken a toll on his body. Recently his heart skipped and jumped. He missed campaign events until medicine thinned his blood, now he’s back on-stage, inviting the silent anxiety of people to shake him again until prophetic words cascade out and the audience can see the dream they buried inside themselves.

“Gradualism has taken over the world of social activism, there isn’t a 60’s movement that hasn’t become a Starbucks flavor. The earth is saying join in, join in your survival by participating in the survival of the earth. Change-a-lujah!”

Reverend Billy was brought to Burning Man in 2003 with a $6000 grant from BRAF, and was a big hit, according to the Chronicle:

Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Starbucks are frequent sites of the Rev. Billy’s sermons.

The Rev. Billy, who lived in San Francisco for many years, is a disciple of Burning Manwho received $6,000 last year from the Black Rock Arts Foundation, the nonprofit arts funding arm, for an evangelical anti- consumerism tour of California. He is among a handful of artists to be sponsored by the organization.

He was a big hit at Burning Man in 2003, with his nightly shows denouncing consumerism and the Bush administration. He was among the first artists to be openly political in the desert.

He has used art to force people to think about their consumer choices for more than a decade.

If you’re in New York you can catch his shows at 2:30pm at Joe’s Pub on December 22, and January 12. The December 15 show is sold out.

Before Burning Man starts telling Burners how to raise funds, they should clean their own act up internally.

Burning Man’s transition to a non-profit has sure been raising some eyebrows at Burners.Me HQ. The latest we hear, from Burning Man’s Social Alchemist Bear Kittay, is that the Burning Man Project is going to be the new, non-profit entity that encapsulates all of our values. We donate our money to it, and it owns the rights to all the content we provide to it.

The party in the Black Rock desert, known as Burning Man, will continue – as a subsidiary division of the project. Right now, according to what we can piece together of Burning Man’s “almost transparent” finances, this event costs $8 million a year to put on, and brings in about $24 million in revenues. So, it should be contributing $16 million a year in tax-free donations to it’s new parent company.

Then, we have Black Rock City, LLC. Aka the BMOrg. This is currently the company with an exclusive monopoly to monetize our culture. Right now that comes mostly from photo agreements for their desert event. Presumably, in the future, the division of “The Project” that is getting the royalties from movies, albums, calendars etc will be a separate operating entity from the division that puts that one party on. In this structure the non-profit parent company would  own and monetize the Intellectual Property, not the party. The legal threats and lawsuits would be initiated by the non-profit company, not the party.

So, let’s think positive and believe BMOrg and their statements. This is being done for “us”, to preserve our culture into the future. Now that it’s going to be a non-profit, spreading Burner culture to the world, we can all participate by donating, we don’t have to even go to the party any more to save the world. Yes, we will be the new owners of our culture, through the non-profit Burning Man is planning to create for us “soon”, and our appointed representatives the 17-person Board of Directors (some of whom are married to each other, which good corporate governance suggests is a potential conflict of interest).

BMOrg’s financial statements say that the corporation itself costs $2.7 million a year to run; the “overlap”, the expenses that possibly relate to the party but also occur year round, are $10.6 million. And the non-party expenses, the “Outreach” that is going to bring Burning Man to the world, are only $264,000 – about 1% of the money they take in.

From what we know, Black Rock City LLC has about 50 full-time employees, splitting salaries of $8.6 million and eating $1.3 million of food every year (we believe most of this food is for volunteers at the event). They’ve just moved from multiple floors of an office building close to City Hall, to a new building in the hipster-friendly Mission district.

What that means, is that this organization costs $13.3 million to operate: a pretty freaking big overhead for a charity that’s raising $16 million a year. In fact, at 83 cents of every dollar being spent on overhead, that would be a new record for BMOrg. It even beats the atrocious performance of the Black Rock Arts Foundation, which despite all the millions of dollars of overhead costs that get billed to the party or the BMOrg, managed to spend 73 cents out of every dollar it raised on overheads, passing a mere 27% on to artists. Here’s the SF Chronicle writing about it:

 A combination of record ticket sales and a more efficient business helped create what [Larry Harvey] called “the nest egg we needed.” The profit, he said, will go back into the company.

Some of it will also go to the festival’s nonprofit arm, the Black Rock Arts Foundation. The charitable organization, which was founded in 2001 after Harvey loaned it $30,000 in cash according to tax documents, is dedicated to providing grants to artists who “promote and support community-based interactive art.”

But in an analysis of the organization’s tax filings by Charity Navigator, a New Jersey-based nonprofit watchdog group, the Black Rock Arts Foundation earned an “exceptionally poor” rating. The analyst found errors in reporting, a low revenue-to-grant ratio that showed artists receive on average 27 cents for every $1 spent – less than half the industry standard – and a conflict of interest involving David Best, a local artist best known for his intricate temples that rise at Burning Man.

Sandra Miniutti, an analyst at Charity Navigator who reviewed the filings at the request of The Chronicle, said donors to the foundation should be concerned by its poor practices.

“This is not a financially healthy organization,” Miniutti said. “If I were a donor, I’d think long and hard before I sent money their way.”

It seems somewhat unusual to create a new charity, and then “loan it” money. Why not donate? Was there interest involved? Does the charity still have this, or other outstanding liabilities to insiders? What sort of loans have gone between the existing organizations and the new charity? As a donor to a number of charities, these are all things that would cause me concern. We do not yet have any clarity on how the relationship between The Project and The Event will be managed in this new structure; the last interview of note was Scribe’s in the Chronicle earlier this year, which made it seem like even the founders weren’t sure. When in doubt, get it out! Since profit is no longer the motive behind Burning Man, will we finally get financial transparency?

Looking forward into the future, how big does this overlap have to be? Surely, some of the expenses that go on during the year, are needed for the party? Well, maybe so. And some, maybe not. I question, if the expense is really needed for the party, then why not account for it with the other party expenses?

I’m speculating here, so if anyone has more concrete information about the new operating plan and org structure, please share. I like charities that use most of the money they raise for the causes they support. A new, lean, focused organization, taking $16 million a year in profits from the annual spectacle Burners create for them, and using that to spread Burner culture and values could be a real positive force for the world. Just another charity, that takes our donations as “Gifts” and then spends the money  on fancy offices, travel, and entertainment for its workers – well, the world has enough of those already.

Dear Burners. Thank you for reading this blog. I started it in February last year, in the midst of BMOrg’s ticket lottery scandal. It seemed like the Burner community wasn’t being fed the truth, and so we wrote about that. And time proved us to be right – to the displeasure of some at BMOrg.

Anderson Mobile Estates

When I go to Burning Man, I stay in an RV. It’s a cheap one I bought off eBay, because the Playa is hard on equipment. I’ve been to Burning Man in larger RVs. I am one of those hated “Plug-n-Play campers“, to some. In fact, the haters don’t even know half of it.

I realized that some of the opinions I was expressing here, were maybe not reflective of the whole Burning Man community. So what – it’s my blog, I have First Amendment rights like Burning Man keeps suing for…I should be allowed to express my opinion. But as this blog became more popular, I started to wonder if I was unduly influencing the crowd with my own personal, biased, opinions – that were not reflective of the majority.

So I invited another writer to come and contribute to this blog – Whatsblem The Pro. He had a large community discussing Burning Man on the Internet, an event (like Black Rock City, LLC’s hostile takeover of the Cacophony society-spawned event) that is shrouded in the fog of war and mists of history. To me, he was someone who comes from the other end of the spectrum of Burners: he is not flying family members to the Burn in private planes, he is not spending thousands to support different art cars, he is slogging away unpaid to make Burning Man art installations that we all get to share in.

Maybe I did the wrong thing. Maybe I invited the wrong author. If there are other voices in the Burning Man community who want to be heard, please speak up – there’s no time like the present! I hope everyone can understand that I invited another voice in, to present another perspective, NOT because I agree with that perspective.

I feel that it has been interesting and useful, over the last year or so, to have a couple of different voices and viewpoints about Burner culture, and the question of if BMOrg (or it’s new, still undefined, successor) is the best steward of our culture going forward… for centuries. Maybe I’m wrong, I know we’ve created some controversial opinions here. Despite what some think, we don’t exist just to bash BMOrg at every turn. We bash them when they fuck up – don’t blame the messenger!

I would like to thank Whatsblem for everything that he has brought to this blog. But, the time has come to clear confusion, and CLEARLY part ways. Burners.Me is now large enough in audience, that people are starting to get quite concerned about things that are written here. Recently, as editor I have had to step in and tone a few things down – just for the sake of reasonable civil discourse. Life is too short, and this is a frikking hobby to me. I want the opinions expressed on my blog, to be opinions I agree with, or even if I disagree, whoever is stating their viewpoint has to provide at least some evidence to back their accusations up.

Lately I have sensed some confusion about “who is behind Burners.Me”. Even Whatsblem has been telling me, “everyone thinks I run this blog”. He is in Reno, and I can’t speak to what people in Reno think and say. Let me clear this up: it’s me, BurnersXXX, aka Zos. You can email me at zos@zos.org . I started this blog and I have NOTHING to do with Burning Man. We are NOT pretending to be part of Burning Man in any way, I have strived to make this clear from the start. I am sharing my opinions, you don’t have to agree, you can come and share your own, please do!

If you wonder why I am not “less” anonymous, it is purely due to my real world life. Those within the bubble of Burning Man see it as unequivocally amazing. Those in the real world, the non-Burners, will understand that for many “Burning Man” is a curse word, not a blessing. “Burning Man”‘s culture has become totally commodified under BMOrg’s stewardship, and it’s a global brand name…and yet, despite their unprecedented (for a rave) media blitz, the rest of the world has NO CLUE about the 10 Principles, and thinks ONLY “drug/sex/orgy” about this party “Festival of Freedom”. Any Burner has had to deal with expressing this disconnect between Defaultia and Our Home.

Thank you all for staying with me this far. I hope I can continue to provide you some entertainment and information in the future: if you keep reading, I promise you the tone will be different. I know there are many readers here who are with Whatsblems “Steal This Movie” view of the world, over my “let rich people come and bring people who get paid to be part of their crew” view. Am I wrong, and others right? No, obviously…why the fuck would I bother to write this, other than I believe in what I am saying?

Since the beginning of my writings here, I have tried to present a balanced perspective, despite what the naysayers have to (nay)say, backed up with facts and links and references. I might not be neutral, but I’m no spammer or slanderer. It’s a shame I even have to state that, but BMOrg pretends to be a lot of things they’re not, and they employ gang-stalking tactics like “shunning” and info-wars tactics like “trolls and shills” to enforce their role in our lives. In the end, this is a dictatorship run in secrecy, with lies under their belt. Burners under The Man have less rights than US Citizens under the Constitution.

I encourage everyone else in the Burner community who have opinions and insider knowledge to come and share with us. We welcome it, just as we welcome Whatsblem the Pro to continue participating in this discussion with his perspective too. In particular I would like to thank Pico, A Balanced Perspective, Nomad, Bob from BMIR, Matt (or was it Mark) with the inside rave story, and everyone else who has taken the time to give us detailed comments that added to our collective conversation. I started this blog to express my opinions, but my own opinions have definitely changed over time, based on some of the well-made arguments I’ve read here.

What will my blog Burners.Me look like in the future? Who knows, I may never post again! If I do, it will be less of the snark you may have seen in the past, and more about the positive thinking and ideas for the future. I don’t believe 100% in science, since there are more than a few things that science can’t explain or prove…and I don’t believe that Burning Man is scientific. Disprove me if you can! I do believe 100% in magic, it has always worked for me, even when science has let me down. I believe that Burning Man is magic.

I’m going home to renew my US visa. Hopefully you guys will let me back in! Wish me luck please, fellow Burners. If not, I’ll still be writing this blog. More than 25% of Burners are not from the US, this is a global phenomenon now. This post is literally my last act in the United States, possibly forever.

Burn on Burners, happy holidays, happy Hannukah, merry Christmas, happy new year! See you on the flip side.

Scribe got the scoop of the year this year, with the news that Burning Man is charging $150,000 for Vogue photo shoots, and profiting from DVD and soundtrack sales from their movie Spark: A Burning Man story. Then he decided he was going to just shut up and enjoy the Burn, trusting that Larry and Marian would do the right thing by all Burners. He still cares though, and took to his paper’s blog to point out to us that the latest BMOrg announcement of “What’s Up With The Burning Man Project?” is a disappointment:

In a series of stories earlier this year, I outlined how the board that controls Burning Man doesn’t appear to be “relinquishing our control” over the event, as founder Larry Harvey announced would be happening in 2014. And if you want more proof of his bait-and-switch, check out this new blog post by spokesperson Will Chase on the Burning Man Project. Far from taking over the $23 million business, the new entity seems to have less going on that its predecessor off-shoot,Black Rock Arts Foundation. As I previous wrote, I’ve moved on, but I thought you’d enjoy the links anyway.

photo by Peter Talbot

What is actually up? Well, if you donate your own money, you can help fund the “Founders” travelling around the world giving lectures:

Burning Man Project received its 501c3 status as a charitable organization in May 2012, has been getting its administrative house in order and is starting to make things happen. We’re wading into deeper waters now, taking on projects on a variety of topics. We wanted to take a minute to highlight a few of the recent ones.

 

New York City Symposium on Burning Man, Technology, Religion and the Future

In November, the Burning Man Project joined Columbia University’s Department of Religion and Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life to present a free forum on Burning Man, technology, religion and the future, featuring panelists Larry Harvey (founder of Burning Man), John Perry Barlow (founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Peter Hirshberg (disruptive cultures and technology expert). Dr. David Kittay of Columbia’s Department of Religion moderated a lively conversation about Burning Man as a philosophical movement, its history, and its predicted global applications.

More than 300 turned out for the two hour-long discussion and Q&A session.

I met Dr Kittay at his first Burn, just a couple of years ago. It’s unclear to me exactly what role he, Barlow, and Hirshberg play in the Burning Man story as “Founders”. But, donate anyway.

We’re looking to offer traveling symposia like this in more cities around the world as part of the Project’s education programming. They’re an ideal way to share the wisdom of Burner values with the academic community and beyond.

“Share the wisdom of Burner values with the academic community”? Well, if you really think that’s the same as “taking Burning Man to the world”, donate.

Youth Education Spaceship (Y.E.S.) Project

Burning Man Project collaborated Black Rock Arts Foundation, Black Rock City, The Crucible, Exploratorium, and Maker Faire to work with Burner artist Dana Albany and kids from San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Hunters Point neighborhoods to build a 12′ diameter 10′ high space ship from repurposed and found objects.

Y.E.S. is a mobile spaceship classroom and collaborative art project that gave the kids experience creating and exhibiting their creation, which has gone on tour to Burning Man, the Exploratorium, Hunter’s Point Open Studios, and Maker Faire in San Mateo.

A bunch of kids re-cycled some existing materials to build an art car – cool. Please donate so Burning Man can take the Art Car to other cities. Of course, if you want to take your own art car to other cities, Do Not Use The Words Burning Man. 

I checked out this spaceship at Burning Man this year, I thought it was great. If I was going to kick money into a spaceship though, it would probably be my own art car that I would fund myself to bring to Burning Man. It’s hard to see how funding someone else’s art car to go to non-BM events, helps bring Burner culture to the world and makes the world a better place.

Crowdfunding: Trends in the Sharing Economy

Earlier this month, Burning Man Project hosted a free panel discussion on trends in the sharing economy. Crowdfunding and the sharing economy reflect our principles of gifting, communal effort, civic responsibility and decommodification, and we brought together Kate Drane from Indiegogo, Daniel Miller fromFundrise, and Harry Pottash from Kiva to talk about the future of crowdfunding.

More than 50 people turned out to discuss the state of crowdfunding, the challenges they’ve faced, and new ideas on how this movement can be used to empower underprivileged projects through the democratization of fundraising.

50 people went to a panel discussion that has nothing to do with Burning Man. Crowdfunding is not Gifting or Decommodification. The topic, Crowd Funding, was recently heartily bashed on Burning Man’s official blog (unofficially, according to the author). Please donate to Burning Man’s not-so-new charity, so that people from Indiegogo can put on more panel discussions.

Really, BMOrg? After 3 years, this is it? This is your vision for how the big rave called Burning Man is going to help the world? Reinvest the profits back into Black Rock Solar and be done with it. Let Burners save their hard-earned money to spend on costumes, art cars, and art projects that we bring for free to increase the monetization potential of your party.

This year saw an unprecedented show of force at Burning Man by “The Man”. Federal and local cops teamed up. Sniffer dogs were brought in from the US/Mexico border, people were intercepted as far away as Southern California and had their careers ruined without a trial, and DPW volunteers were harassed before the event even began.

People had their vehicles searched for minor infractions like bicycles obstructing the view of the license plate. This often led to a K-9 search, whether through consent or otherwise. All it takes is for a dog to indicate suspicion, for the police to have probable cause to violate your Fourth Amendment rights search your vehicle.

How does the dog know? Was it really drugs it smelled, or the half-eaten Carl’s Junior in the back? The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Luckily for Burners, we’re not the only ones who think so. A challenge is being mounted in Nevada courts about the legality and effectiveness of sniffer dogs – by members of the police. Glad to hear there are still some good guys out there who take their vow to “Protect and Serve” the citizens seriously.

From Lawrence Mower (Lawn Mower?), Brian Haynes and Ed Vogel at the Las Vegas Review Journal:

In 2010, a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis set out to test the reliability of drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs.

The team assembled 18 police dogs and their handlers and gave them a routine task: go through a room and sniff out the drugs and explosives.

But there was a twist. The room was clean. No drugs, no explosives. In order to pass the test, the handlers and their dogs had to go through the room and detect nothing. But of 144 runs, that happened only 21 times, for a failure rate of 85 percent.

Although drug-sniffing dogs are supposed to find drugs on their own, the researchers concluded that they were influenced by their handlers, and that’s what led to such a high failure rate.

The reliability of drug dogs and their handlers is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in state district court by two Nevada Highway Patrol K-9 troopers and a consultant, who claim that the Metropolitan Police Department’s police dogs, and eventually NHP’s own dogs, were “trick ponies” that responded to their handlers’ cues, and therefore routinely violated citizens’ rights to lawful search under the Fourth Amendment.

The lawsuit goes on to make a number of other accusations in its 104-page complaint: that the Metropolitan Police Department is a racketeering organization, that money seized by motorists was misappropriated by the Department of Public Safety, that the two troopers were subjected to harassment and intimidation by their agency.

But what has defense attorneys and civil advocates taking notice are the allegations of illegal searches, which could call into question the seizure of millions of dollars from motorists on Nevada highways and jeopardize an untold number of criminal cases stemming from those stops.

Washoe County Public Defender Jeremy Bosler said the lawsuit’s allegations are “definitely an issue of concern throughout the state.”…

…The U.S. Supreme Court has given police “probable cause” to search your vehicle if a police dog detects drugs, typically by sitting, digging or barking. That is an extraordinary power – officers working without dogs need “a reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime” for such searches. Mere suspicion is not enough, and criminal cases resulting from searches that don’t meet the “probable cause” standard can be, and are, tossed out in court.

Is the dog trained to find the drugs, or just to give “indications of suspicion” to those their handlers are suspicious of? Well, the dog can’t speak…just sniff. So we can never know. It sure sounds like a scam to me, and it sounds like these officers believe that too.

Not to mention that this type of work is incredibly difficult and cruel to the dogs, who are forced into a life of drug abuse and addiction just to prosecute these victimless crimes. Their thousands of times heightened sense of smell means the effects of them detecting hundreds of drugs a day are much more than if the humans were snorting sniffing them.

The troopers’ lawsuit also claims that the troopers witnessed Las Vegas police handlers abusing their dogs.

“In certain incidents they resort to hanging and then kicking the dog to get it to release,” the lawsuit states. “Trooper Moonin has personally witnessed a Metro handler take his dog behind a car after missing a significant drug seizure and brutally kick his dog repeatedly.” The abuses – of the dogs and the law – are a result of poor training by Las Vegas police, according to the lawsuit. 

If the dogs find anything, they get rewarded. So of course they want to pretend they found something:

Las Vegas police trained their dogs to be “trick ponies” that would respond to handlers’ cues when searching for drugs. That caused the dogs to become more interested in getting treats or toys when searching for drugs, they claim. The Highway Patrol dogs, on the other hand, were not rewarded when they signaled for drugs.

You would think that a challenge so significant to the rights granted by the Constitution of the United States would have a strong scientific backing. Instead, there is a dearth of supportive science from field use of this canine technology.

Despite the wide legal latitude police dogs are given, there are few studies showing how success­ful, or un­successful, they are at finding drugs in the field. But what does exist casts doubt on their reliability. About a month after the results of the UC Davis experiment were released, the Chicago Tribune published a study looking into three years of drug searches by suburban Illinois police departments. The study revealed that when dogs “alerted” officers to drugs, they were right 44 percent of the time. For Hispanic drivers, the rate was only 27 percent. 

Police told the Tribune that when drugs weren’t found, the dogs were detecting drug residue that was left in the vehicles. But that explanation is bogus, according to Lawrence Myers, an Auburn University professor who has studied police dogs for 30 years. While residual odors can cause false alerts, Myers said, too many dog handlers often use it as an excuse, making it all but impossible to assess accurately the reliability of the dog’s nose or the validity of a search.

“Frankly, many times it’s a search warrant on a leash,” Myers said of the drug-sniffing police dog.

Even if the dogs don’t find any drugs, the citizens can still face a world of hurt:

When police dogs signal for drugs, there can be con­sequences even when no drugs are found. Police can seize money they find in the car if they believe the money has ties to drugs. The legal standard is weak, lawyers say, and citizens who want their money back have to go through the court system, which can be costly. They often cite the 2009 case of a 22-year-old Indiana man pulled over for an unsafe lane change on an Indiana interstate.  The man, who had won $50,000 from a car accident settle­ment, was found with $17,500 that he later claimed was for the purchase of a new car for his aunt. A drug dog alerted to drugs in his car – twice – and police seized his money. No drugs were ever found, and Indiana authorities held his money for more than a year.

If you were involved in a K-9 incident related to Burning Man, you might want to make sure that your lawyer knows about this challenge, and the UC Davis and other studies. Even if the officers involved are disgruntled with the department they accuse as corrupt (in Nevada? Surely not! Everything in Vegas is legit, it wasn’t founded by mobsters or anything)… the idea that an animal is communicating accurately with humans beyond any reasonable doubt, and not influenced by training seems ludicrous to me. Even more frightening is the idea that they could find no drugs, but take your money/property anyway.

We will see in 2014 if Burning Man’s recent attempted deal with Pershing County means the cops will back off on the sniffer dogs and leave us free to burn in peace in this remote, isolated wilderness, our Temporary Autonomous Zone that is unavailable to passers-by and innocent “civilians”. Is the crime of one Burner with a joint worse for society, than the crime of police manipulating the justice system for their own ends? Why are Burners being locked up, while Wall Street crooks walk free?

…well, kind of. Being Burning Man, of course, it can’t be straightforward; they have to invent some cockamamie scheme and pretend that they’re not selling merchandise. Technically if you make a donation of $150, the not-for-profit subsidiary entitled the Burning Man Project will “gift” you a scarf. How they came up with the $150 price tag is anyone’s guess – it sounds a little on the high side to me, and beyond the reach of most of the hipsters who would want to wear it. Their description of the “donate for merchandise” process seems to pave the way for more  merchandise sales gifting in the future…

Burning Man Project is offering an awesome grey cotton scarf to thank $150 donors to its end-of-year fundraising campaign. It’s a really soft, cuddly, stretchy, organic cotton fabric lovingly screened with the BMP skyline logo.

It’s versatile, unisex, machine washable. Its heathered, dark grey color navigates the line between goth/fashion editor/Gate, Perimeter and Exodus basic black and smoky/sultry/ashes-of-the-Man-at-Sunday-sunrise charcoal. You can wear it as a turban, a dust mask, a shawl, a sarong, a belt, or wrap it around your neck. As scarves go, it’s pretty great. But it’s mostly great because it’s a thank you GIFT for a crucial $150 donation. The scarf is 18 x 80 inches.

Burning Man Project’s purpose is to bring the lessons and values of the playa to the larger world. Through events, discussions, demonstration projects, and a growing platform of online learning, we are gearing up to share the Burner ethos with the broadest possible audience. All of this takes funding beyond the price of tickets to Black Rock City. So we are embarking on a new era, asking the Burner community to join us on this year-round adventure. We are inviting your involvement in making Burning Man Project into a worldwide force for participation, inclusion, and expression. And yes, we are asking for your donation.

So what does all of that have to do with a scarf? This is the first time we have used a gift as part of a donation campaign. We are treading lightly, understanding that the topic of money has special significance for the Burner community. But we need to function as a nonprofit to do this work in the world. And we want to show you our appreciation, so you can show the world you want this venture — and adventure — to succeed.

So accept our invitation, make a donation of $150, and let us gift you a scarf (or 2014 calendar, if you prefer.) Make a donation of any size, and receive our tremendous thanks and enthusiasm.Here’s the link.  

What does your $150 donation do to make the world a better place? So far it seems like you’re providing travel for the Burning Man founders, helping them host a panel discussion in their offices, and shipping an art car  around. “Worldwide force” indeed. 2013 ticket sales were $25.9 million (assuming that the mysteriously missing 7,000 tickets from their official page went for $380). Ice sales were at least $1 million on top of that – not to mention calendars, coffees, fine art, photo shoots, movie and soundtrack royalties, and the additional money donated to Black Rock Arts Foundation with our ticket purchases. It seems that just isn’t enough funding for them to deliver on their mission of global inclusion, hence the expansion into other forms of merchandise as an incentive for us to hand over even more cash to them.

What’s the point of all this pretending? BMOrg sells merchandise. Big deal. It’s a highly commodified money-making machine, we all know it, and their protestations to the contrary aren’t fooling anyone. Now can we buy t-shirts, please? Or, even better, can fashion designers make licensed merchandise and pay BMOrg royalties?

On another note, Robot Heart goggles are going for $100 on the aftermarket.

Maybe BMOrg thought that selling gifting scarves for $150 wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the Burner community. Comments to our recent post Burning Man Project Now Selling Merchandise suggest otherwise. Predictably, the BMOrg cyber-army came out of the woodwork to try to deflect the heat from their beloved masters, by attacking our credibility. An ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy, where the attacker personally insults or tries to discredit their opponent, rather than making arguments with verifiable facts, references, or logic.

Rather than continuing this debate in the comments to that post, let’s give it some more prominence for those who give a shit and wish to participate in the discussion. If you don’t care, you don’t have to read – the majority of content on this site is not critical of Burning Man, there’s 759 other posts here that you can check out. If you want to attack our credibility though, you better read this, and come back with some data (or point out some errors in ours) to add to the conversation. Warning: a lot of maths coming up!

To recap: I said I think it’s fine if they want to sell merchandise, the whole thing has become a massive money-making machine. A giant crowdsourced party, where they get all the music for free, 99% of the art for free, all of the art cars for free. They get to promote the hell out of it in every mainstream media outlet you can think of, and tell stories that “it’s not about money”, “it’s all for charity”, “it’s helping the world” and so on to make themselves look good. All on the back of the time, effort, and expenditure of Burners who trek across the world and across the desert to make this party what it is. We Burners are not even allowed to use the words Burning Man or photos of the event to raise funds to bring art, camps, and art cars there. Once there, Burning Man can and will profit endlessly from them.

What I have a problem with, is expressed well by Burner Jim in this comment:

Maybe Burning Man can get past the quasi hippie socialism mirage that it’s mired in and promote the freedom of true free market capitalism. The smoke and mirrors of Burning Man LLC is the true problem, not the free exchange of goods and services using money. Just like the capitalism of Wall Street isn’t the problem, it’s the fascism.

You can’t build an empire of altruism on falsehoods, tricks, and propaganda. Or, maybe you can – because it seems like they have – but you shouldn’t.

“There are only two things sold at Burning Man: ice and coffee” is a myth. They sell gasoline to the art cars, they sell propane. You can buy honey wagon “pump-n-dump” services for your RV. One year, they bussed me and a bunch of other suckers potential investors out from First Camp to pitch a real estate deal. Only one company has the monopoly on propane sales on the Playa, you’re not allowed to arrange your own supply. There is no information publicly available about how big the gasoline and propane sales are. They don’t tell us anything about the dollar value of ice sales either, we’ve had to infer it from their information that they sold 2, 140, 000 lbs of ice last year.

Here’s some of the case against us:

Boring said:

this site sells drama. Nothing against you doing that but when you post things like BM had a million in ice sales to make it appear they profit from this, and that is not true, one can see your slant is not for truth but drama.

Frosty the Snowman said:

Perhaps the fact that ice sales benefit local charities is not as widely known as Boring assumes. Presumably you’ll revise your story accordingly. http://www.burningman.com/participate/ice.html

Boring said:

That profits from ice and coffee sales go to local charities has always been the case and for BurnersXXX to not know this shows the lack of facts in the financials he totes. Same as Vogue paying to take photos on the plays, a statement never corrected by Scribe.

Why should Scribe correct Maid Marian’s statement? Was it false? Or did he just misquote her? I know he still has recordings of those interviews, though I haven’t personally heard them. To me, the fact that he hasn’t published a retraction, and we have no evidence that BMOrg ever asked for one, is indication that her statement is true.

According to the official Burning Man FAQ, profits from coffee sales go to the coffee staff, not local charities:

Profits from the café go directly to the commissary to sustain the onsite nutritional needs of our kick-ass staff

This is just one example of the apparent double counting in their financial reports, which claim a $1.3 million food spend AND account for the costs of the commissary separately (lumping them in with the ice and merchandise costs).

Anyway, I see no need to revise our stories – only to provide further details supporting them. These guys are missing the point. The WHOLE THING IS SUPPOSED TO GO TO CHARITIES NOW. They sell ice, they sell coffees, they sell scarves. So that they can donate to charity.

The “financials I tote” (tout?) are THEIR financials, FFS. Any “lack of facts” is because they’re not providing the facts: these are murky financials, not open, transparent accounts.

Is the Burning Man Project in charge of ice sales now, or is that a different set of books again? They say “all proceeds from ice sales go to local charities”, where is the accounting for that then? Why do they shy away from telling us about these good deeds, in specific terms instead of vague statements? What does “proceeds” mean: revenues? Profits? How is the ratio of ice sales:ice donations calculated? Is the only cost the ice, or does Arctica have to contribute to DPW, BLM, or anyone else? I don’t know, and they’re not telling.

The Afterburn reports have a whole section on ice sales. The only firm data is that in  2012  $13,000 in tips were donated to Burners Without Borders to help polar bears (WTF?!?) I can find no information about Burners Without Borders helping polar bears at all, let alone an accounting of how much of 2012′s $13,000 the charity actually passed through to the polar bears. http://www.burnerswithoutborders.org/projects-home

In a 2010 blog report, the now ousted old-timer Andie Grace shed some light on Burning Man’s sharing with charities:

Every year since 2003, Burning Man has used proceeds from ice sales at the event to make year-end donations to various charitable, art and service organizations in Northern Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area. For 2010, we worked to increase the total dollar amount of our donations, committing a total of $159,850 for the year. 

…Below is a list of charitable donation recipients for 2010: 

Note that #1 and #2 on the list are their own charities. No information is given on how much of the pie was sliced up for each recipient. There are 45 charities listed, making an average donation to each one of  $3552.

There is almost no information available about how much ice was sold in 2010, or any other year. In fact, bizarrely, the Afterburn ice reports for 2009 and 2010 are almost word-for-word identical – including the exact size of tips given to the cent, and warnings about specific safety incidents that gave them concern for “that year”. The 2011 report claims that 32 trucks of ice were emptied in 2010. 2011 was 43 trucks. From digging back all the way to the 2006 Afterburn Artica report, we learn that each truck is 21.15 tons of ice.

For 2013, we get our ice information from a posting on Facebook by Jennifer Spitfyre:

“Factoid for the day.. We at Arctica sold 2.14 million pounds of ice at Burning Man this year! Every single pound of that was hand carried by BRC volunteers from ice truck to BRC citizen’s hands! Big increase from last year where we sold 1.68 million pounds of ice!”…that’s 1070 tons of ice.”

Information about the price and dimensions of ice sales is not readily available either. Why all the secrets, BMOrg? Ice can be bought in single 5 lb bags, or a “6 for the price of 5″ discount. In 2009 the prices were $3 and $15 respectively, if anyone has updated figures from 2013 (or can confirm that prices and bag sizes stayed fixed) please let us know. 

But, working on the assumption (for the sake of simplicity in argument) that all the ice sales were $15, for 6 x 5 lb bags of ice…yields $1,070,000 in ice sales. That’s (2,140,000 / 30) * 15, for those who care to follow my workings.

Let’s work this out a little further. 2010′s 32 trucks brought in 676.8 tons of ice, or 1,353,600 lbs. This netted donations of $159,850 (reported as $168,000 in the 2010 Afterburn report – the extra $8,150 of donations must have been in addition to the ice donations). Applying the same ratio, ie (2,140,000/1,353,600) * 159,850, 2013′s 2.14 million lbs should have led to a year-end donation to the community of $252,717. If the same 45 charities get the money, their share should now be up to $5,615 each.

How does $1 million of ice sales, end up as a quarter of a million in ice-related donations? I mean, I know it costs a lot to send each 80,000 lb semi-trailer of ice to the desert, but 75% overhead? It’s not like you’re paying the same for ice at Burning Man as you do at your local grocery store, ice is (understandably) expensive out there!

all these people are waiting in line to conduct commerce

From the 2012 financials, the cost of ALL the coffees, ice, and merchandise was $369,132 (yes, it’s not just us saying “the Burning Man Project sells merchandise”, it’s right there in their own financial report). However, this doesn’t add up, because the amount of ice sold should be way more than this. Using the same calculation above with Arctica’s 2012 numbers, (1,680,000 / 30) * 15 gives us $840,000 in ice sales – netting $470,868 (after Arctica covers all their own costs, plus all the merchandising costs, and the costs of center camp). In 2012 the line item “Donations to local Nevada schools and organizations” is $238,976 – presumably, this is the donations from ice sales, and doesn’t include Black Rock Solar or BRAF’s activities. There’s a missing $231,892 for 2012! Maybe a lot of the ice brought in melted before it could be sold. A lot, being 27.6% of all the ice. Or maybe certain camps get their ice comped.

$238,976 in donations, compared with our estimate of 2012 revenues of $24, 045, 986, is slightly less than 1%. Meaning that 99% of all the money they take in is eaten up in salaries, travel costs, food, costumes…and profits.

I’m not making these numbers up. I’m going to a lot of effort to piece together a picture from their own published information. I shouldn’t have to do that, if it’s a non-profit they should be transparent. No-one is paying me for all  my time to do this: that’s why it really pisses me off when people say “BurnersXXX doesn’t know what he’s talking about”, “BurnersXXX should read the Afterburn reports” etc. You haters should read the fucking reports!

Burner Timothynh pointed us to Guidestar.org, a site that measures the performance of non-profits. Here’s what it has to say about the Burning Man Project:

I’ve ordered Guidestar’s detailed report on BRAF, which shares many directors with the Burning Man Project; look for us to dig deeper into this in a future post.

We questioned the Vogue photo shoot story originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian in this post here, after a high-level insider raised some doubts with me at a private function. After that, I personally asked Maid Marian to correct the details, and as yet she hasn’t – which indicates to me that the story is true, or perhaps the true story is BMOrg asked for the $150k and Vogue balked.

Yet again, BMOrg-allied online shills and trolls have come onto this site to attack our credibility, with weak ad hominem attacks instead of actual facts, numbers, or logical arguments. Maybe our detractors never got paid any money from BMOrg in their lives, but they sure do seem to be taking their side here. This is just a smoke screen to deflect our readers away from the real issue: the lack of transparency or activity from this 2-year old “new” charity, and the increasing commodification, commercialization, and mainstream media mass marketing of crowd-sourced Burner culture by BMOrg.

Is it OK to violate the principle of Decommodification, if it’s in the name of charity? Is that what these guys are trying to say? If so, then why can’t others also do that? Is this a case of “the ends justify the means”…with the “ends” here being the nebulous Burning Man Project motto of “Creative catalyst for culture in the world”? Or is it more a case of “one rule for the rulers, and one for the masses”?

I’m trying to say the Ten Principles are as whack as crack, and hamstrung by hypocrisy. The world’s “Largest Leave No Trace Event” burns a mind-blowing amount of fossil fuels, and leaves hundreds of miles of highway littered with trash afterwards. “Radical Inclusion” doesn’t extend to “Upper Class” people who want to enable those who can’t afford it, to attend the event by working for it in a role that suits their talents. “Gifting” is supposed to be unconditional, without expectation of anything in return: and yet, donate $150, they gift you a scarf. “Civic responsibility” doesn’t include providing open accounts to all the donors to the charity – supposedly, everyone who buys a ticket is now a supporter of the Burning Man Project, although so far, ticket purchases are not tax-deductible donations to an IRS-registered charity.

The Ten Principles were originally published to be a suggestion for Regional events, now they are becoming a cult-like doctrine to be used to brainwash people around the world who’ve never even been to the party. Larry Harvey repeatedly says “this event has never been anti-commercial”, and we’ve never claimed that it should be either. It’s clearly commercial, massively so. The problem is two-fold: one, the “smoke and mirrors” trying to pretend they’re not something which they so obviously are; and two, they want to be the ONLY ones who can ever make any money from it. It’s all taking and very little giving.

The non-profit Burning Man Project wants to help the world by spreading culture, and how do they do that? Shutting down others with nasty legal letters falsely claiming ownership of things that aren’t theirs, doing what they can to assimilate the “global” ecosystem into their borg only; and at the same time expanding their revenue streams in seemingly every direction at once. This is more the behavior of a for-profit business than a non-profit. As Burner David pointed out in the comments on this post in our Facebook group, over the last few years Burning Man has tried to clean out the “dead wood” accumulated over nearly 30 years of volunteer labor, and replace them with professional management. That’s fine, but the professional management needs to get the spirit of Burning Man, particularly now that the non-profit Burning Man Project owns the party and everything else. The party is created by the Burners: all the art, all the gifting, all the music. That’s how it has grown over decades to be the “counter-culture phenomenon” that it is today. The efficiency of the Burning Man charities to date has been less than stellar (if you don’t believe me, check out the Wall Street Journal). I, for one, don’t want to donate my charity dollars to an organization that is going to spend the money on lawsuits against Burners trying to raise money to bring art to share with everyone, at events exclusively monetized by them.

Here’s an idea for the Burning Man founders: forget this “transition” crap, just take this thing public. Donate 10% of revenues to charities. Provide audited quarterly accounts, let us know where the money has been spent. License the brand to regionals, to clothing designers, to artists. Make as much money as you possibly can, so that you can donate as much as you possibly can. Reap the rewards for your labors, and let the community share in that too.

I can predict the responses now…“if you don’t like it, start your own”!

[thanks Nomad Traveler for this pic!]

They’ve finally announced 2014′s theme: “Caravansary“

For countless centuries, travelers along the Silk Route crossed paths in caravansaries, a network of oases and sanctuaries that dotted the 4,000-mile road from Europe to East Asia. These bustling caravan stops offered more than just shelter from the desert wilderness; they were vital centers of cultural exchange, bringing together traders, pilgrims, monks, nomads, traveling entertainers, and wild-eyed adventurers from all points of the compass to share their stories around a common fire. Though fueled by mercantilism, their legacy to us is a grand commerce of ideas — a swirling exchange of languages, legends, technologies, philosophies and art that helped shape nearly every aspect of our modern world.

This year we will create a caravansary that occupies the crossroads of a dreamland: a bazaar of the bizarre wherein treasures of every sort, from every land and age, flow in and out to be flaunted, lost, exploited and discovered. This is not a tourist destination, but a home for travelers who come here bearing gifts….Anyone may pose as ‘merchant’ here, and anyone may play a ‘customer’, but nothing in this strange emporium shall have a purchase price — no quid, no pro, no quo — no trade at all will be allowed in this ambiguous arcade

…et cetera, et cetera. You can read more about it on the official site.

So the theme is “commerce and trade”, with an Arabian Nights twist. At the same time, they are revamping their marketplace – related? We’re assuming that trade will continue as always with coffee and beverage sales in Center Camp, ice and so on.

Personally, I liked Cargo Cult a lot better. What is this throw-back to the ancient Silk Road going to mean? A lot of people dressed up as sheikhs? Camel art cars? Hookahs?

Here’s what the Man is going to look like, seems like it’ll be bigger and burnier than ever

(Design by Larry Harvey and Don Clarke, illustration by Andrew Johnstone and Jim Pire)

Now, on to tickets. The $400,000-odd ticketing contract has been taken away from Inticketing, and given to Ticketfly. They are charged with implementing what looks like essentially the same ticket price tiers as last year – 3,000 early bird tickets for $650, 15,000 invitation-only VIP tickets at $380, 38,000 regular tickets at $380, 1,000 last minute tickets at $380, 4000 low-income tickets at $190. This adds up to 61,000 – same as last year, where the population was capped at 68,000. Are there an additional 7,000 free tickets handed out? I doubt it. These are probably gate or insider sales. Yes, yes, I know “there’s no gate sales”, but I also know that the official line from BMOrg is not always the same thing as the truth – and I know more than a few people who purchased tickets at the gate in 2013.

Unless you’re on the World’s Biggest Guest List, you’ll still need to create a Burner profile, log on to register, then log on at a later date to purchase. The point of this system is not clear, I remember it being a real pain in the ass trying to get in at exactly noon PST from Envision in Costa Rica. It is certainly not an easy system for the global travelling caravansary of Burners that they’re trying to promote.

The most significant change is that if you’re bringing a vehicle, you’ll need a vehicle pass, which costs $40 plus “applicable fees” – since they don’t just say “taxes”, presumably there are going to be other expenses added on top of these ticket and pass prices. Vehicle passes have been capped at 35,000; each person can buy up to two, but if you buy one of the 3,000 early bird tickets, you can buy 4.

Leaving the unknown additional costs to one side, BMOrg just made themselves another $1.4 million. Thankfully they managed to keep the ticket prices the same.

It is not clear whether you can only purchase 1 vehicle pass per ticket, they’ve said nothing so far to indicate that, but some online have speculated it.

Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, January 22 for the first tranche of tickets at $650 each. If you’re so keen to go, or so afraid to miss out, that you want to pay almost double for your tickets, you will need to register between January 16 (noon) and January 20 (noon). Once registered, you will be able to log on after January 22 to purchase.

After that there will be a “Directed Group sale” of 15,000 tickets at $380. If you’re on the World’s Biggest Guest List, you will be invited to log on from February 16. Yes, it’s invitation-only for these tickets, and they don’t have to muck around with the “register then log in on a different day to purchase” shenanigans that the rest of us must endure.

Regular punters, who just want to get a ticket to Burning Man, can register to get tickets between February 20-23, and then log on after noon PST on February 26.

Low income ticket purchasers will just have to wait their turn, there’s no information about when they’ll be allowed to purchase tickets. The STEP system will be implemented, so that if you buy tickets and don’t need them, you can lose money on them by recycling them through BMOrg (encouraged) rather than making money by selling them on the secondary market (you’re bad if you do this).

Here’s the official justification of the Vehicle Pass from the Jacked Rabbit:

Traffic is the greatest impediment to the growth and sustainability of Black Rock City. Burning Man is under pressure from the Bureau of Land Management and Nevada Department of Transportation to reduce the number of cars entering the event. Highways 447 and 34 are at max capacity during the event and we’re being asked to pay for road damage caused by participant vehicles. Road travel represents 60% of the carbon emissions related to the event.

And the #1 challenge experienced by participants last year? Entry and Exodus.

Clearly, it’s critical we address the traffic issue — and we can only solve this problem by working together as a community.

We conducted a poll on the biggest issues to Burners last year. The Top 10 issues were:

Cops – too many and too much (24%)

Rape Kits on the Playa (14%)

People in plug-n-play camps (11%)

Too many people (7%)

Bicycle theft (7%)

Too much dubstep (6%)

BMOrg not helping artists raise money (5%)

Not enough gifting (5%)

Too many rules (4%)

Too many virgins (4%)

Exodus/entry problems/waiting times came in as part of “other”, with a total of 27 votes – not enough to make the top 10.

The idea of limiting carbon emissions is a noble one. I believe the motivation is more likely to be a deal cut with the authorities, along the lines of “if you cap the number of vehicles on our roads, that reduces the concerns in our community about traffic, litter, and accidents; so we’ll let you have more people total”. Meaning they can sell more tickets. If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you’ve probably been assessed for street repairs before. The more houses and hotels you have, the bigger the bill. Capping the number of vehicle passes seems like a way to cap the street repairs bill for BMOrg.

Note that the wording says “all vehicles driving into Black Rock City will now be required to have a Vehicle Pass”. This means it’s not just for Burner cars. Trailers bringing art cars, art installations, camp equipment and supplies will all have to have passes. In previous years there have been 15,000+ early access passes. Before Burning Man starts, there are literally thousands of trucks coming in and out with deliveries. The passes that go to these service vehicles, are passes that won’t go to Burners. It seems that they’ve taken their Gate count of an average of 1.9 people per car, and calculated from last year’s population of 68,000 that 35,000 should pretty much cover it. 68,000/1.9 = 35,789, so only 789 extra people have to carpool, right? Well what about the delivery vehicles? And what about people who buy 2 car passes but only need 1? 

Here’s our prediction: this new system is going to lead to 2012 lottery-style chaos. The 3000 people rich and stupid enough to pay $650 for $380 tickets, are able to buy 4 vehicle passes each. Which, it seems likely, they will all do, thinking to help out friends who are going to need them. I mean, if you’ve got an extra $270 each to pay for the same tickets, you probably have a spare $160 on top of that too. So that’s 12,000 vehicle passes gone, or more than a third of the total allotment.

Then, the VIP, invitation-only ticket sale will start . Since almost all of these people are part of a theme camp, they will all buy the maximum number of vehicle passes (2 each), knowing that everyone in their camp is going to need them, particularly build crews and delivery vehicles. If you’re on this VIP guest list, there’s a good chance that you’re a regular Burner and will have an RV. There’ll only be 23,000 passes left at this point, so 3,500 of the 15,000 won’t be able to get vehicle passes. Theme camps won’t know if they’ll be able to get their delivery vehicles in, trucks pulling art cars and large art works, and so on.

By the time regular customers come to buy tickets, on February 26, there will be much concern in the community about getting vehicle passes. If my previous assumptions were wrong, and the vehicle passes didn’t already sell out, they will now be gone in minutes. Seconds, even. Most of the 38,000 people trying to secure tickets at this point, won’t be able to get vehicle passes. If the system says “you can get a ticket, but not a vehicle pass”, they might pause to consider the logistical implications of this. The chaos and confusion will lead to a lot of half-completed database transactions, which in turn will melt down the system.

Planning your trip to Burning Man is going to be much harder, if you can’t take a vehicle. It’s one thing to say “everyone should just ride share”, it’s another to say “you can buy a ticket, but you can’t get your RV in”. 

And what about the heavy-handed police presence? What happens if you offer someone to share a ride in your vehicle, and they have drugs? Are you supposed to search all their bags before you let them in? The cops are usually focused on the driver in these situations. If it’s someone else’s bag, then probably that person AND the driver are going to get in trouble. The driver is an accessory to the trafficking.

It’s not easy to get to Burning Man without a motorized vehicle. Even if you can get to Reno, there’s still hours of driving on empty desert roads ahead of you. If you’re coming from San Francisco, Burning Man is 342 miles away (550 kilometers). You want to ride share, everyone’s going to need to be ready on time, and want to go at the same time as you. One thing I’ve learned from millions of miles of road trips in dozens of countries and states, is that the more people you add to a vehicle, the more time your journey takes. Bathroom breaks, photo stops, and general dicking around. That’s why I prefer to travel with a smaller group.

A quarter of the Burners are from a different country, for these punters planning ride share is much harder than for people who live in the Bay Area or Reno. Sure, they can get one of the many buses, but it’s not easy to travel around the world with tent, coolers, camping gear, etc. They need to rent a car at the very least and buy that stuff on the way; or, more likely, they want to rent an RV and sleep in that.

photo by Michael Macor

There are also a lot of Burners coming from other States, many of whom are used to driving with their bikes, costumes, and the rest of their gear. They probably plan on meeting up with their friends once they get to the Burn, not rendezvouing beforehand. A giant parking lot of cars is going to accumulate somewhere, probably Reno, as these people meet up with their friends to rideshare in – this will be rich picking grounds for criminals.

Last year, Lightning in a Bottle moved to a new location in Temecula, near San Diego. They brought in a system of selling RV passes. The RV passes sold out in about 3 minutes. Because of this, I wasn’t going to go, until pressure from friends at the last minute convinced me to look on Craigslist. I was able to buy an RV pass on the secondary market, for more than  double the original price.

I predict the same thing will happen here: these vehicle passes will go for a lot of money on Craigslist, Stubhub, eBay, and everywhere else black market sales occur. BMOrg insiders will all secure all the vehicle passes they can get their grubby little hands on, in order to make money for themselves re-selling them at a premium. Everyone who knows a BMOrg insider, will be hitting them up for tickets and vehicle passes, so they’re assured of a nice cashflow stream.

The rest of the community, finding that vehicle passes have “sold out”, will realize planning a trip to Burning Man has become an order of magnitude harder. And will probably lose interesting in going, or decide to skip a year. By the time the event comes round, what has been billed all year as a “sold out event” will turn out to be down in population from the year before.

That’s my prediction, I’d be happy if I’m proven wrong and everything goes smoothly. What do you think about the new vehicle pass system, Burners?

we be jammin’!

The latest JRS announces Burning Man’s new FAQ for Vehicle Passes. Unfortunately, it raises more questions than it answers.

Usually, FAQ’s are there to make it easier for the user; they achieve this by putting all the frequently asked questions and answers in one place, so you can quickly get the information you need. Burning Man’s one is more like a library, you have to dig into each individual question to get the answer, and the answers seem to be conflicting in some cases. They also provide another FAQ about this in a different section of their web site, with different information again.

We’ve been through them all, to try to piece together a clear picture of what the rules actually are. Here are some of the issues we see:

What is a Vehicle Pass?

This says “In 2014 every vehicle entering Black Rock City will be required to have a Vehicle Pass”. The wording is different from the FAQ on their blog (which is another FAQ in a different section of their web site, with different information), which says:

Q. Do I have to pay for a Vehicle Pass for my Mutant Vehicle?
A. If you are bringing your Mutant Vehicle in on a trailer, you do not need to have a Vehicle Pass for it. If you are driving it in, you need a Pass. Each stand-alone vehicle that drives through the gate must have a Vehicle Pass.

This is much more clear. Every vehicle that DRIVES in needs the pass – except, jumping back to yet another section of these sprawling FAQs, motorcycles. Art cars don’t need one if they’re on a trailer, they will still need to register with the Department of Mutant Vehicles though.

The blog FAQ, however, says the jury’s still out on motorcycles:

Q. Do motorcycles have to pay for a Vehicle Pass?
A. To be determined, but not at this time.

Why is there a limit to the number of vehicle passes?

Without any limit on the number of passes the program would be pretty much meaningless.  We must make some real progress on addressing the traffic issue and we need everyone to be part of the solution.

The program appears to be relatively meaningless anyway, since it is capping the number of vehicles at about what last year’s was, and doing nothing to prevent single-occupancy vehicles. Not only that, later in this edition of their vehicle pass FAQ’s, they say:

Based on demand, we may also have a separate late-season Vehicle Pass only sale.

…which seems to be leaving the door open for more vehicle passes in an “OMG! Vehicle Pass sale” if the program causes problems. A good thing for Burners, if people are screaming that they can’t get to the event because they have 4 people who want to go in one vehicle, but none of them can get a pass.

As for everyone being part of the solution, we’ve seen lots of great ideas from Burners online, such as offering vehicles with 3 or more passengers in for free, or a discount; or making high polluting RVs or single-occupancy vehicles pay more. The main problem with these ideas seems to be a financial one, rather than to do with their practicality.

Back to the “other” FAQ:

Q. Why not have an HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane for cars with multiple passengers?
A. An HOV lane is under consideration but comes with its own logistical challenges (like having a way to prevent low occupancy vehicles from using the lane). 

…so, as many Burners have pointed out in the online discussions about this, their vehicle pass system does not prevent low/single occupancy vehicles in any way.

Q. Why not just charge a larger fee for RVs?
A. The issue isn’t the size or type of the vehicle but the number of vehicles using roads leading to the event — regardless of what kind of vehicle you drive, it’s another vehicle creating traffic and doing damage to the roads. We need all participants to examine how they get to and from the playa and work together to reduce traffic on the highways. Other large events have a footprint shortage. For now, we don’t. It’s our roadways that are limited.

This spells it out. There’s no shortage of room for Burners at the event, only a limit to size from the highways. They really are not concerned with emissions, or encouraging ride sharing. They just want an easy way for them to cap the number of vehicles (and make another million or two by doing so)…so that the population cap can increase. It appears the roadways being full is now the main impediment to them selling more tickets. As Maid Marian said in 2012, “the desert could accomodate 100,000 people”. It’s just the roads that can’t. 40,000 more tickets would be another $15,200,000 to this “non” profit – without any additional costs, this would go straight to their bottom line.

What about people with Low-Income Tickets? Confusingly, we have a couple of different answers for them to choose from:

If you have been accepted to the Low Income Ticket Program you will be given the option of purchasing a Vehicle Pass when you pay for your ticket

and

If you are awarded a Low Income ticket and need a vehicle pass, you may purchase one at the box office when you pick up your Low Income ticket at will call.

This seems to be two different answers to a single question. And it raises another point: they’ll be selling vehicle passes at the gate. It’d be awfully tempting for someone to let a few more in…who’s counting the counters? The vehicles are off the road at that point, sending them back onto the road would just make the situation worse. Much worse! Each additional 2500 vehicle passes is another $100,000…cash.

What about the big question? Can you buy more vehicle passes than tickets? Well, they haven’t done anything to clear up their confusing language, and they don’t directly address it, but reading between the lines, it appears that – as we predicted – yes, you can.

you may buy up to as many Vehicle Passes as the maximum allowable number of tickets you may purchase in any given sale, i.e. in the Pre-Sale the ticket limit is up to four (4) per person, hence you could buy up to four (4) Vehicle Passes, and in all other sales the ticket limit is up to two (2) per person and you may buy up to two (2) Vehicle Passes

and

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey has given a brief interview to Britain’s The Indpendent newspaper. It’s fairly juicy, managing in a single page to combine tales of child abuse, drug addiction, and necromancy. Hey, he said it, not me!

Larry’s in the UK for the BAM! (Being A Man) festival, which runs at the Southbank Centre from Jan 31 until February 2. The Southbank Centre is on the Thames river in London, and was called “Britain’s leading arts institution” by the Daily Telegraph.

You can catch Larry’s panel discussion at 11:15am on Saturday Feb 1, it’s £12 for a day pass.

Here’s the story from The Independent (emphasis mine):