SOME ELECTRONIC DRUGS

HOPKINS SCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN IN MUSHROOMS CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE

2012-02-08T18:09:00.000-08:00

HOPKINS SCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN IN MUSHROOMS CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE

Johns Hopkins Medicine
Media Relations and Public Affairs
Media Contact: Eric Vohr
410-955-8665; evohr1@jhmi.edu
July 11, 2006

Rigorous study hailed as landmark
Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in “sacred mushrooms” can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.
The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.
The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown.
An account of the study, accompanied by an editorial and four experts’ commentaries, appears online today in the journal Psychopharmacology.

Cited as “landmark” in the commentary by former National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) director, Charles Schuster, the research marks a new systematic approach to studying certain hallucinogenic compounds that, in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.”
“A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
All of the study’s authors caution about substantial risks of taking psilocybin under conditions not appropriately supervised. “Even in this study, where we greatly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, about a third of subjects reported significant fear, with some also reporting transient feelings of paranoia,” says Griffiths. “Under unmonitored conditions, it’s not hard to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior.”
The researchers’ message isn’t just that psilocybin can produce mystical experiences. “I had a healthy skepticism going into this,” says Griffiths, “and that finding alone was a surprise.” But, as important, he says, “is that, under very defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what’s called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person. It’s an early step in what we hope will be a large body of scientific work that will ultimately help people.”
The authors acknowledge the unusual nature of the work, treading, as it does, a fine line between neuroscience and areas most would consider outside science’s realm. “But establishing the basic science here is necessary,” says Griffiths, “to take advantage of the possible benefits psilocybin can bring to our understanding of how thought, emotion, and ultimately behavior are grounded in biology.”
Griffiths is quick to emphasize the scientific intent of the study. “We’re just measuring what can be observed,” he says; “We’re not entering into ‘Does God exist or not exist.’ This work can’t and won’t go there.”
In the study, more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a “full mystical experience” as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.
Two months later, 79 percent of subjects reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction compared with those given a placebo at the same test session. A majority said their mood, attitudes and behaviors had changed for the better. Structured interviews with family members, friends and co-workers generally confirmed the subjects’ remarks. Results of a year-long followup are being readied for publication.
Psychological tests and subjects’ own reports showed no harm to study participants, though some admitted extreme anxiety or other unpleasant effects in the hours following the psilocybin capsule. The drug has not been observed to be addictive or physically toxic in animal studies or human populations. “In this regard,” says Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist, “it contrasts with MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines or alcohol.”
The study isn’t the first with psilocybin, the researchers say, though some of the earlier ones, done elsewhere, had notably less rigorous design, were less thorough in measuring outcomes or lacked longer-term follow-up.
In the present work, 36 healthy, well-educated volunteers-most of them middle-aged-with no family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder were selected. All had active spiritual practices. “We thought a familiarity with spiritual practice would give them a framework for interpreting their experiences and that they’d be less likely to be confused or troubled by them,” Griffiths says. All gave informed consent to the study approved by Hopkins’ institutional review board.
Each of thirty of the subjects attended two separate 8-hour drug sessions, at two month intervals. On one they received psilocybin, on another, methylphenidate (Ritalin), the active placebo.
In designing the study, researchers had to overcome or at least, greatly minimize two hurdles: the risk of adverse side-effects and the likelihood that the expectations of getting the test drug or the placebo would influence subjects’ perceptions.
To lessen the former, each subject met several times, before drug sessions began, with a reassuring “monitor,” a medical professional experienced in observing drug study participants. Monitors stayed with them during the capsule-taking sessions. Actual trials took place in a room outfitted like a comfortable, slightly upscale living room, with soft music and indirect, non-laboratory lighting. Heart rate and blood pressure were measured throughout.
The researchers countered “expectancy” by having both monitors and subjects “blinded” to what substance would be given. For ethical reasons, subjects were told about hallucinogens’ possible effects, butalso learned they could, instead, get other substances-weak or strong-that might change perception or consciousness. Most important, a third “red herring” group of six subjects had two blinded placebo sessions, then were told they’d receive psilocybin at a third. This tactic-questionnaires later verified-kept participants and monitors in the dark at the first two sessions about each capsule’s contents.
Nine established questionnaires and a new, specially createdfollowup survey were used to rate experiences at appropriate times in the study. They included those that differentiate effects of psychoactive drugs, that detect altered states of consciousness, that rate mystical experiences and assess changes in outlook.
The study, Griffiths adds, has advanced understanding of hallucinogen abuse.

As for where the work could lead, the team is planning a trial of patients suffering from advanced cancer-related depression or anxiety, following up suggestive research several decades ago. They’re also designing studies to test a role for psilocybin in treating drug dependence.
The study was funded by grants from NIDA and the Council on Spiritual Practices.
Una McCann, M.D., William Richards, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and Robert Jesse of the Council on Spiritual Practices, San Francisco, were co-researchers.
The commentaries on this study that appear in this issue of Psychopharmacology are available at: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/GriffithsCommentaries.pdf
and include remarks by:
*Hopkins neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience, Solomon Snyder, M.D.
*Former NIDA head Charles Schuster, Ph.D., now Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Wayne State University School of Medicine
*Herbert Kleber, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a former deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
*David Nichols, Ph.D., with the Purdue University School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
*Harriet de Wit, Ph.D., at the University of Chicago Department of Psychiatry. DeWit is the editor of Psychopharmacology.

Related links: Q&A is with Roland Griffiths, the study’s lead researcher:http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/GriffithspsilocybinQ

Psychopharmacology:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/GriffithsPsilocybin.pdf

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press_releases/2006/07_11_06.html

Radiation-Loving Fungi Can Remove Toxic Waste

2012-02-05T14:49:00.000-08:00

Radiation-Loving Fungi Can Remove Toxic Waste

By Reid Schram
Epoch Times Staff Created: October 2, 2011 Last Updated: October 5, 2011

Related articles: Science » Inspiring Discoveries

Gomphidius glutinosus is a common woodland mushroom that concentrates radioactive cesium-137 to over 10,000 times background levels. (Bernd Haynold/Wikimedia Commons)

When Russian scientists sent a robot into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 2007, the last thing they expected to find was life. Inside the most radioactive areas of the breached core was a group of common fungi collectively referred to as "black mold" growing on the reactor walls.
These molds were growing in one of the most hostile environments on the planet, with radiation levels high enough to give a lethal dose in minutes. But these fungi weren’t just growing, they were thriving.
A researcher at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Arturo Casadevall, investigated these resistant molds and helped to identify several distinct species.
They all shared one very interesting characteristic—they all contained the skin pigment melanin.
Perhaps the most interesting was a common species of black mold, Cryptococcus neoformans. This fungus does not normally contain melanin, but when exposed to radiation levels 500 times higher than background radiation, it would start producing melanin within 20 to 40 minutes.

Cryptococcus and other species grow faster in high radiation environments then their counterparts do at normal amounts of radiation. Casadevall’s work led to the discovery that the fungi use melanin to capture energy given off by ionizing radiation, rather like plants use chlorophyll to capture sunlight.

The radiation levels here on Earth have historically been much higher than they are today. Large amounts of highly melanized fungal spores have been found in early Cretaceous period deposits, a time when a massive global plant and animal die-out occurred.

One suggested cause of this mass extinction is that the Earth’s protective magnetic field became weakened or overwhelmed. This would have allowed excessive cosmic and solar radiation into our atmosphere for most life forms to survive.

But what would have been a bane for the majority of life on Earth would have been a boon for melanin-containing fungi.

Radiation-loving mushrooms, scientifically referred to as "radiotrophic fungi," have many potential applications. In 1987, at the Chernobyl disaster site, highly contaminated graphite used to cool the reactor was observed being decomposed by a yet unknown species of fungi.
Various species of fungi are also capable of concentrating different heavy metals. After the Chernobyl meltdown, mushroom hunters all over Europe were advised not to pick and eat certain species of fungi because they could be concentrating radioactive fallout.

Gomphidius glutinosus is a common woodland mushroom that concentrates radioactive cesium-137 to over 10,000 times background levels. An area that has been contaminated with deadly cesium, like the area surrounding the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, could have spores from this species of fungi spread on it, and then later when the radioactive mushroom caps appeared, they could be collected and properly disposed of.

Using fungi to clean up radioactive or other types of waste is an emerging technique known as mycoremediation, and promises to be far less expensive than other competing methods.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/radiation-loving-fungi-can-remove-toxic-waste-62299.html

Muscarinic Antagonistic

2012-02-05T07:10:00.000-08:00

Muscarinic receptors, or mAChRs, are acetylcholine receptors that form G protein-coupled in the plasma membranes of certain neurons^[1] and other cells. They play several roles, including acting as the main end-receptor stimulated by acetylcholine released from postganglionic fibers in the parasympathetic nervous system.
Muscarinic receptors were named as such because they are more sensitive to muscarine than to nicotine.^[2] Their counterparts are nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), receptor ion channels that are also important in the autonomic nervous system. Many drugs and other substances (for example pilocarpine and scopolamine) manipulate these two distinct receptors by acting as selective agonists or antagonists.^[3]

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscarinic_acetylcholine_receptor}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscarine

Muscarine was first isolated from Amanita muscaria in 1869. It was the first parasympathomimetic substance ever studied and causes profound activation of the peripheral parasympathetic nervous system that may end in convulsions and death. Being a quaternary amine, muscarine is less completely absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract than tertiary amines, but it does cross the blood brain barrier.^[2] Muscarinic agonists activate muscarinic receptors while nicotinic agonists activate nicotin receptors. Both are direct-acting cholinomimetics; they produce their effects by binding to and activating cholinergic receptors. Final proof of the structure was given by Jellinek (61) in 1957 with the help of X-ray diffraction analysis. These new findings set into motion research not only on the pharmacology of muscarine, but also on that of muscarine-like substances that are structurally related to acetylcholine.

Pharmacratic Inquisition FULL DOCU'

2012-02-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

This documentary features comprehensive coverage and study of AMANITA MUSCARIA (The fly agaric) among other entheogens, symbolic alchemy and psychedelic mysticism. Featuring a synthesis of work done by John Allegro, R. Gordon Wasson, Carl Ruck, James Arthur, Mike Crowley, and others. My interest in Amanita Muscaria, Shamanism and altered states of consciousness begun when I read Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson, who, I might add, remained skeptical about the many 'magic mushroom theories' about religion proposed by the above researchers, but, in a more broad sense he showed that evidence suggests that humans have been dosing their own nervous systems with psychedelic compounds for over 30'000 years. He also wrote a book dedicated to drugs, sex and Magick:

Olympic Games Anti-doping Lab Unveiled | Cyclingnews.com

2012-01-19T19:10:00.000-08:00

This shit makes me laugh and crawl around on the floor looking for my football. I mean, GlaxosmithKlein gets hired to do the drug-testing at the London 2012 Olympics. What next, the CIA hired for security?

Olympic Games Anti-doping Lab Unveiled | Cyclingnews.com

Trialogue #17: Cannabis Trialogue (Terence McKenna, R. Sheldrake, R. Abr...

2012-01-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

Chinese researchers identify insect host species of a famous Tibetan medicinal fungus

2012-01-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

Chinese researchers identify insect host species of a famous Tibetan medicinal fungus

FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES 2011

28c3: The coming war on general computation

2011-12-29T04:41:00.000-08:00

Can Ecstasy Help Treat Autism? by David J Brown

2011-12-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

Can Ecstasy Help Treat Autism?

Many people who suffer from autism have reported lasting improvements after taking MDMA or “ecstasy,” and clinical research into MDMA as a possible treatment for this perplexing medical disorder is now on the horizon.

ByDavid Jay Brown

Autism is a largely mysterious neurodevelopmental disorder that usually manifests in children before the age of 3 as delays in their ability to socially interact and communicate.

There are actually several types of autism, which are referred to as “autism spectrum disorders.” All these disorders are characterized by varying degrees of impairment in communication skills and social interactions, and by restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior.

Autistic children usually appear to completely lack interest in other people and seem to have enormous difficulty learning basic social skills. Signs of the disorder are often apparent in the first few months of life, as many autistic children seem indifferent to other people, not making eye contact or participating in social interactions that healthy children naturally engage in.

In recent years, there has been a large increase in the number of diagnosed cases of autism throughout the world. The reasons for this are heavily debated by physicians, researchers and parents with autistic children. The U.S. Center for Disease Control estimates that the prevalence of autism disorders to be somewhere between one out of every 500 births to one out of every 166 births.

Conventional medicine has little to offer people suffering from autism, and the standard medical treatments are largely ineffective.

The standard treatment for autism generally involves a combination of therapies, including occupational and physical therapy, behavior modification, communication therapy, dietary modifications and a wide array of powerful but largely ineffective medications, including antidepressants, tranquilizers, stimulants and antipsychotic medications.

Most people with autism undergoing traditional therapies show little improvement, and new treatments are desperately needed.

One promising new avenue of research that may one day provide treatment for adult autism involves the use of the psychedelic drug MDMA, or “ecstasy,” within the context of a psychotherapeutic setting, which has been shown to produce lasting feelings of empathy in some people.

Many people who have used MDMA report increased sociability and strong feelings of empathy that last long after the psychoactive effect of the substance wears off. There has been substantial interest in using MDMA as a possible treatment for less severe cases of adult autism, because two of the hallmarks of the disorder are an inability to communicate socially and a lack of empathy.

David Jentsch at the UCLA Center for Autism found that MDMA enhanced the transmission of a key neurochemical in the brain called “vasopressin,” which is known to help mediate sociability. In another study, by G.J. Dumont and colleagues at Radboud University in the Netherlands, researchers found that MDMA increases levels of oxytocin, a hormone associated with feelings of love and bonding.

The Santa Cruz-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has also gathered together numerous anecdotal reports from people with a high-functioning form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, who have found MDMA to be helpful in their learning to cope more effectively in social situations, and enough reports have now been compiled to warrant further investigation.

A number of people with high-functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome have reported improvements after taking MDMA outside of research contexts. MDMA shows promise for treating autism spectrum disorders, as the effects of MDMA that increase empathy and enhance communication are precisely the abilities that autism tends to degrade.

MAPS is reviewing proposals from autism researchers for a pilot study using MDMA as a possible treatment for Asperger's syndrome and autism spectrum disorders. MAPS will offer a grant of $10,000 for protocol development expenses to run this pilot study.

If you or someone you know has heard of MDMA having either positive or negative effects on symptoms of autism spectrum disorders or Asperger’s syndrome, MAPS would like to hear from you. Please contact MAPS Lead Clinical Research Associate Berra Yazar-Klosinski, Ph.D., at berra@maps.org, if you have any information about this.

To learn more about the research, go to the MAPS website.
If you enjoy my column, and want to learn more about psychedelic and cannabis culture, “like” my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter.
To read more of my columns on Santa Cruz Patch, go here.

Please share any thoughts that you may have about treating autism or about using MDMA to as a treatment for psychiatric disorders.Tell us in the comments.

http://santacruz.patch.com/articles/can-ecstasy-help-to-treat-autism

ALSO PLEASE see

MAVERICKS OF THE MIND:

Fly Agaric in the Express.co.uk 21/12/2011

2011-12-20T16:44:00.000-08:00

"Various species live in marriages of convenience with their hosts. The classic red-topped toadstool of fairy tales, the poisonous fly agaric, attaches itself to the roots of birch trees and feeds on their sugars. In return its roots gather up minerals and pass them to the tree, dramatically extending the reach of its own roots."

"And there are more fungi than you might think with about 14,000 species on the British list. Esher Common in Surrey is the Mecca of fungi, boasting about 3,100 species. But you can easily find 100 in an ordinary suburban garden."

"Research four years ago by Professor Alan Gange and his dad Edward suggested that the fruiting season is getting longer with many fungi now fruiting twice a year. And each year about 25 new species are found in Britain, says Kew senior researcher Dr Martyn Ainsworth, including some from the tropics."

http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/287237/John-Ingham

MDMA interview with Dr. A. Shulgin

2011-08-19T05:43:00.000-07:00

News has broke around the world (Aug. 19th 2011) that a new modified form of MDMA has proved helpful in fighting some forms of cancer, specifically those cancers associated with blood. Great News. But the news articles are very brief and without the depth I expected.

So here's a sober minded interview with Alexander Shulgin, a very wise and tuned in gentleman.

Love, steve fly

http://www.mdma.net/alexander-shulgin/mdma.html

Q. Is there any chance of that actually changing for MDMA?

A. Might the law change in the area of MDMA? Only with difficulty. Unfortunately, the whole legal system as it addresses the drug and drug-use situation has moved away from what originally was a medical or a public health concern. Now it embraces not only power and control, but money. I'm trying to estimate the size of the industry - that is, the 'war on drugs' industry - that has been built up, that is associated with, connected to, and benefits from this particular war. Now that we've lost communism as an enemy, what do we do with our large military? We find ways for it to be used in socially responsible enforcement of law. You have seizure laws. Property can be seized if that property is somehow associated with drug use. You have industries like the prison industry. I've heard that in California alone, four billion dollars a year is invested in the prison industry, in some 30 or 40 prisons. This is a big industry and it's growing. You have people who make spectrophotometers that are back ordered. Fifty-thousand dollar spectrophotometers are back ordered because the demand for testing urine samples is so great, that they can't supply them fast enough to the analytical laboratories where they're hiring chemists to run these assays. This is a big industry! You have the investment of the State Department which now can enter countries more and more - South American countries, European countries, because they are the sources of drugs. And therefore, it can enter and influence the politics of those countries. And the vehicle for getting into foreign politics is 'the drug' and 'the drug war'. http://www.mdma.net/alexander-shulgin/mdma.html

generation F*cked: Maria Hampton , 11 Aug 2011

2011-08-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behavior – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/71/generation-fcked.html#.TkUBK3x3FtB.facebook

Double-dutch Coffeeshop news-speak and Global news ambiguity.

2011-07-02T07:07:00.000-07:00

Double-dutch Coffeeshop news-speak and Global news ambiguity.

I don't know about you dear reader, but I don't get my information (news) from the mainstream newspaper any longer, I get it from individual experienced bloggers (from many fields) from wikipedia, and mostly I get my news from my network of friends.

Friends often provide the extra turn of phrase or primary observation that make the information being communicated fluid, plus the fact that often you can smell your friends and see their facial expression, gestures and human imperfections.

During the months of May and June this year (2011) I have been repeatedly asked the question (will the coffeesshops be closing to foreign tourists?) while at work behind the 'weed counter' at coffeeshop 420, Amsterdam. My answer has always been an optimistic 'NO' due to my interpretation of events which results in the possible adoption of the 'weed pass' (private 'Dutch' members only card) in some of the Dutch boarder towns such as Mastricht, but not here in Amsterdam.

The International newswire, however, contrary to my own thoughts on the matter, tends to paint a cut and dried answer to the questions surrounding the new 'weed pass' proposal by imploying meaningless and ambiguous terminology (drug tourism, drugs, organized crime), and then repeating them over and over again across the global newswire, as if the editors at these useless 'disinformation' operations (news media corporations) are in fact nothing more than Zombie's, infected with the beaureacratic stench of the tabloid press and only capable of producing redundant predictable! communications. (see AP, Newscorp, Reuters, CNN etc,. BBC?)

I have noticed a serious inbalance and unfair interpretation in most but not all news stories concerning 'some drugs' (i.e Cannabis, LSD, magic mushrooms, DMT) but mostly surrounding Cannabis. This media imbalance strikes me between the eyes almost every day as the fact of living and working in a place where almost everybody smokes Cannabis on a regular basis and lives a trouble free and happy life, whereas if you turn to the newspapers and the Government sanctioned reports about Cannabis, especially in Europe these days (America seems to be on a somewhat upward spiral toward intelligent Cannabis liberation) then, if taken literally you may go seek immediate medical help after buying a bullet proof vest.

For me, living here in Amsterdam and working within the Cannabis culture for over four years I have grown to be very sceptical and critical of the news-media, but decided to generally ignore them and their stories and just get on with my own thing, me, my friends and the Global Village, but now I feel an urge to respond and in doing so entertain some new ideas I have about information.

Information equals surprise, predictability leads to less information. I believe this equation is the final call for the corporate controlled news media and their henchment, if they do not change their redundant methods of communication they will die a fast heat death in the entropic vapours of the digital age. Excuse me, they evapourated already, we are now living in the age of wikileaks and anonymous, upon a new playing field or battle field where surprise = information.

In the context of Dutch coffeeshops and international news then, I will simply quote some of the articles to give examples of how almost everything proposed in the 'is' state, on deeper thinking and research into the process, in fact, is not. And LO! begins the Punch and Judy show, right up front at the media circus. A RAW source once stated the fact that the 'war on drugs' cannot be a war on drugs, if it were they would be busting in the doors of every phamacy and drug store in town, therefore to remove a line of semantic distortion we should more correctly refer to 'the war on some drugs'. As simple and as easy as this seems (to just add the word 'some') hardly any news journalists pay tribute and continue with the 'cut and dry' either/or (two valued logic) that went out of style with Hitler.

There are then at least two areas of focus. The first is the actual situations and events or speech associated with the news item, the second is the language or language-trappings associated with the communication of the news item. The message and the media.

In the continued 'war on some people who use some drugs' and the 'culture wars' waged around the globe, language seems to me the first instrument of counter-attack. Artists and poets and musicians emerge for the sport of it all, to put life and love and liberty into a vortex and create something new, to help combat the redundant forces of fixed-stereotypes and the mass medicrity permeating every aspect of modern city life.

The Hermetic forces that have helped shape the modern information explosion are still with every one of us who chooses to tune them in. And since the innovation of general relativity, general semantics and information theory, (also tied to many Hermetic principles and methodologies, somewhat Pagan in spirit, if you will) the misuse and abuse of language by mediocrities and corporate fraudsters and spooks will cease to hold it's spell over the minds of a culture. The chains of law have been broken, follow the link...

So although I like to consider myself an activist for drug peace and tolerance, I am trying to distance myself here from the content or the 'message' itself, and target the corrupted 'medium' (i.e phrases like 'drugs-tourism' and 'war on drugs') and show that the whole field of 'some drugs related' journalism seems infected with a distinct lack of relative terminology and a distinct amplification of semantic distortions. If the medium is the message then the message has also been corrupted by obsolete.

--Steve 'fly agaric 23'
Amsterdam, July 2nd, 2011.

"The only solution to get rid of the cannabis tourism in our border areas would be the introduction of cannabis outlets in Germany, Belgium, France and the UK, so they do not have to come to Dutch coffeeshops any more. --http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/201106201481/green/eco-news/dutch-cannabis-exclusion-zone-doomed-says-coffee-shop-owner.html

"Dutch to ban foreigners from pot shops.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/06/07/amsterdam.pot.shops.ban/

"However the Dutch government is keen to crack down on this kind of "drugs tourism." The Dutch executive announced earlier this year that they wanted coffee shops to become private members clubs, only open to the local market. This would mean only Dutch nationals could become members and legally purchase cannabis.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15194412,00.html

Words of praise for marijuana's spiritual properties by John Sinclair

2011-05-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

Higher Ground

Sacramental herb

Words of praise for marijuana's spiritual properties

By John Sinclair

Published: May 25, 2011

I'm crossing the English Channel on the Stena Line steamship as I write this, moving on from London to Amsterdam for the next 10 days, and then on to Italy. It was a rough April in the Motor City with one cold, gray day after another and the Tigers foundering until I left, but London was bright and sunny almost every day, and the weather should just get better from here.

England is a rough place to cop good medicine, and marijuana is considered illegal in every application — not at all what you'd call smoker-friendly. I ventured outside the city one day to visit my religious leader, the Rev. Ferre (as we'll call him) of the THC Ministry, and he made sure my medicinal needs were well taken care of.
In fact, I just sneaked my last smoke from that stash in my little cabin on the ship so I could write this column, and soon after I arrive at the Hook of Holland in the morning I'll be back at my regular stand at the 420 Café in Amsterdam, where you can always buy your weed over the counter whether you're sick or well and the price is always the same.

The THC Ministry is based in Holland and operates under the slogan, "We use cannabis religiously — and so can you!" I'm proud to be a member of the ministry, and it takes me back before the advent of socialized medicinal marijuana, when we thought perhaps the solution was to highlight the spiritual and indeed religious aspects of the sacrament as a way to escape the heavy hand of the narcotics police.

The brilliant hallucinogen called peyote had been established as a religious sacrament used for spiritual purposes by several Southwestern Native American nations, and many beatniks, hippies and fellow seekers had gained experiential knowledge of its potency as a spiritual force.

Many of us felt the same way about marijuana: that its spiritual properties and potentialities qualified weed as a religious sacrament for ritual use and equally beneficial in navigating the vicissitudes of daily life as well, much as prayer itself seems to work for the Christians and other faithful. Our daily marijuana use went well beyond the concept of recreational drugs — it was integral to our work and play in equal measure, and helped us keep our minds to the mental grindstone at all times.

Eventually, we sought to register an entirely different definition of marijuana from the orthodoxy enshrined and promoted by the forces of law and order. Not only were marijuana and associated psychedelic or euphoriant substances neither narcotics nor "dangerous drugs," they were in fact benevolent and had manifestly evident healing powers and could serve to help bring their adherents into alignment and closer harmony with the natural forces of the universe.

I can't remember exactly when, but at some point in 1969-1972 we formed the First Zenta Church of Ann Arbor, a nonprofit ecclesiastical corporation chartered by the state of Michigan that held marijuana, hashish, peyote, psilocybin and other psychoactive natural substances as sacraments central to the church and the religious and spiritual lives of the congregation.

Now these tenets we held true, plain and simple, but the underlying social idea was that members of the Church of Zenta could thenceforth rely on the constitutional doctrine of freedom of religion as their protection against conviction for possession and use of narcotics — or later, "controlled substances" — under the state's marijuana laws. Zenta members used marijuana religiously, as the THC Ministry puts it today, and were entitled to protection as religious practitioners following the basic tenets of their creed.

There were other benefits of ecclesiastical corporation: Organized religious bodies didn't pay sales or income taxes; their real estate transactions were exempt from taxation as well; and their forms of worship, however diverse or divergent from the Christian norm, were given wide latitude by the temporal government. Churches were churches, another order of being from the rest of the social order, and our church was determined to join their number and enjoy equal protection under the law of the land.

Like our other efforts to combat the narcotics laws and the incipient War on Drugs based in their idiotic assumptions — for example, as I've said many times before, marijuana was never a narcotic — the establishment of the First Church of Zenta was meant to deny and counteract the demonization of recreational drug users by the dominant social order as the first line of offense against us.

If you can create a mythology centered on the demonization of illicit drug use and the characterization of illicit drug users as dangerous criminals and enemies of conventional society, deploying ever-increasing numbers of narcotics police to stomp out this evil seems to follow.

When this tissue of horseshit (to quote William Burroughs) is stripped away and the stigma of evilness is removed, the marijuana smoker is revealed instead as a harmless seeker of spiritual truth or a suffering patient in need of medicine. These are not reasonable targets for prosecution as criminals, and the police must move back at least a few steps and sheathe the dreaded nightstick of drug law prosecution.

Now that we have legalized medical marijuana as a potential source of relief for a whole panoply of aches and pains, both physical and mental, and recommends that the state of Michigan certify the applicant as a registered medical marijuana patient, we've taken a big first step away from the reviled War on Drugs. Perhaps it's time to renew the religious argument as well.

Briefly put, we need all the help we can get i to wrest the jackboot of the War on Drugs off the necks of marijuana smokers in our society.

In closing I'd like to point out that I've completed this column upon my arrival in Amsterdam, working my way through my various obligatory stops — the 420 Café, the Cannabis College, the Hempshopper on the Singel Canal — checking in with my peeps around the Centrum and trying to honor my commitment to the paper and my readers at the same time. At the end of the month, I'll be on my way to Florence, Italy, on a personal mission, and I'll file the next column from there. Happy trails! —420 Cafe, Amsterdam

> Email John Sinclair

http://metrotimes.com/mmj/sacramental-herb-1.1151881?smsss=email&at_xt=4ddd19419190a25f%2C0

Psychedelic 'McKenna' Adventures At the edge of the Abyss (on-line course)

2011-05-22T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Brothers McKenna are widely known to the psychedelic community. Their ideas and adventures, explorations of inner (and perhaps outer) space, and their Amazonian odyssey in search of answers to the mysteries of time, history, and being have been well chronicled by Terence, who though he passed on in 2000, still haunts the Net as an avatar and articulator of a radical and highly unconventional perspective on humanity’s current precarious perch on the edge of the singularity. Even the most skeptical souls can no longer deny that our species is at the threshold of an enormous and irrevocable plunge into novelty; a plunge that will change forever our understanding of who we are as a species, and our place in the scheme of a universe that is marvelous, terrifying, beautiful and puzzling in ways that we cannot begin to comprehend.

US PRICE: $110

Early bird special, through May 20th: $90.00

To join click the image above or go to http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=1350994

or read more below...

Terence, not by choice, escaped to a hyperspatial redoubt, just as humanity crossed the threshold into the third millennium of its problematic career on this planet. His younger brother Dennis continues to grapple with the revelations and insights, perhaps delusions, that the two brothers confronted during their journey to the Amazonian rainforest in 1971 in search of exotic hallucinogens and high adventure. They found both, in spades, and it changed them, and perhaps the world, forever.

Now Dennis has determined that the time has come to tell his side of the story, and is proposing to write a book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss; the title is in recognition of the name the two brothers and their intrepid band of fellow adventurers chose for themselves, partly tongue in cheek, and partly – mostly, as they discovered – deadly serious. Dennis is using Kickstarter.com to garner the resources, and time, needed to write this work, which will be both a memoir of sorts but also a fresh examination of the revelations forced onto them at the climax of that heart-of-darkness journey. Those who may be interested can find a detailed description of this proposal on the Kickstarter web site at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862402066/the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss

The Course

This course is offered as a follow-up to the launch of the writing project and an anticipation of themes that will be explored in depth in the book, slated for release in the fall of 2012. The course will consist of four sessions, with dates set for June 5^th, 12^th, and 25^th and July 2nd. Using live video, each webinar session will be hosted by Dennis McKenna in wide-ranging conversations with key guests who are recognized leaders on the cutting edge of post-millennial thought: Daniel Pinchbeck, Ralph Abraham, Marc Pesce, Ralph Metzner, Luis Eduardo Luna and Erik Davis.

Most have also been close personal friends of Terence and Dennis over many decades; they have shared Terence and Dennis’ fascination and preoccupations with the concepts under discussion and have been key players in the development, elaboration, and expression of these ideas. Like Terence and Dennis, they lived through the social, environmental, and political changes that have characterized our ever-accelerating race toward novelty during the late 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st; in many respects, they are the people who have helped to catalyze the radical changes in global consciousness that have resulted.

Each webinar will be 90 minutes in length, with the first 60 minutes devoted to a dialog between Dennis, the host, and one or more invited guests. The format will be an informal discussion, preceded by a brief exposition outlining the main themes under consideration in that session. There will be ample opportunities for the audience to interact in real time with the host and guests following the hour-long conversation. Participants from the audience will be able to ask questions and offer their own comments and insights via live video chat, text, or email. If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course.

FEATURED GUESTS

Daniel Pinchbeck

Sunday, June 5, 3:00 p.m. EST

In this first session, the role of host and guest will be reversed. Author and commentator Daniel Pinchbeck will fill the role of host and moderator, and Dennis will be the interviewee. It will take the form of a free-wheeling retrospective look at the influences that led the brothers to forego any hopes of a normal life or careers and head to the Amazon in search of psychedelic secrets in 1971. It will be a personal reminiscence.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) and Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002). His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, ArtForum, Arthur, and many other publications. He is currently the editorial director of Reality Sandwich and a national columnist for Conscious Choice magazine. He is also the executive producer of the PostModernTimes series of interviews, directed by Joao Amorim, and is featured in Amorim's upcoming documentary, 2012: Time for Change.

Here are some of the questions he will be asking Dennis about his early years with Terence:

What were the personal, familial, and societal factors that led to their preoccupation with matters both arcane, and peculiar?
What was behind their early interest in psychedelics, transdimensional realms, consciousness exploration?
What did their baffled parents, teachers, priests and peers make of all this?

Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna

Sunday, June 12, 3:00 p.m. EST

The second session will be a conversation between Dennis and his guest, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna. Eduardo is one the closest and oldest friends of Terence and Dennis. He also happens to be one of the world’s leading experts on ayahuasca ethnography and New World psychedelic shamanism.
Eduardo was there (almost) from the start. A well-educated but distinctly un-psychedelic seminary student growing up in the tiny Colombian river community of Florencia in 1971, Eduardo’s first encounter with Terence on his way back from his second visit to La Chorrera changed his life forever. Terence was fizzing with fresh revelation when they met and was literally wild-eyed, a Messiah come back from the forest. Eduardo’s exposure to the strangest ideas in the known universe drove him to abandon his dreams of the priesthood forever and to plunge headlong into the pursuit of psychedelic shamanism. Terence and his companion traveler, the legendary Kumi, lived at Eduardo’s vinca for several months while they worked out what was to become TimeWave Zero and the first draft of the Invisible Landscape.

One of the most influential anthropologists in the field of ayahuasca research, Luis was the first to study the ayahuasca shamanism practiced by mestizo (or mixed-blood) people in the Amazon. Born and raised in the Colombian Amazon, Luis was educated in Spain and Norway, and always had a foot in both worlds. His work revealed the importance of the diet that ayahuasqueros follow, and the pivotal role played by the icaros, or magic melodies, in shamanic ceremonies. Luis has also studied the Brazilian ayahuasca churches such as Santo Daime, Uniao do Vegetal and Barquinha. He is the director of Wasiwaska, a research center for the study of psychointegrator plants, visionary arts and consciousness, in Brazil, and is the author of several books, including Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (co-authored with Rick Strassman et al.), and his much loved collaboration with the painter Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: the Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman.During this session, Eduardo and Dennis will talk about:

How the path of Eduardo's life was changed after meeting Terence McKenna
How the nature of Eduardo and Dennis's collaboration has changed through the years
The inside scoop on the psychedelic scene they were a part of--between the two of them they know where all the bodies are buried!

Ralph Abraham

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

What is TW0? And does it really describe anything? Terence proclaimed to his dying day that it was a map of the quantum structure of time, and that it could be used to predict the future; even more shocking, he claimed that its spiral structure predicted the collapse of the space/time continuum on a specific date, December 21^st, 2012. This date just happens to coincide perfectly with the predicted end of time based on the Mayan Calendar, as well as other world traditions that seem to express expectations of a major shift in the planetary world order, if not the cosmic order, on or around that date.

This is the ‘teaching’ that two bemushroomed, raving wild men walked out of the jungle proclaiming?? Dennis is not so sure, and in recent years has begun to publicly question whether it means anything, or whether it means what Terence believed it to mean. No one knows the answer, but many very intelligent people have been both baffled and fascinated by Time Wave Zero.

Ralph Abraham has been involved in the research frontier and the development of dynamical systems theory in the 1960s and 1970s. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields, such as medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, and psychotherapy. He is the author of Foundations of Mechanics with Jerrold Marsden, Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior with Christopher Shaw, Chaos, Gaia, Eros, and Chaos, Cosmos, and Creativity with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna.

Ralph Abraham will join Mark Pesce and Dennis McKenna in a lively debate about the validity of the Time Wave, which Dennis has become more skeptical about in recent years. They will discuss:

Is the TWO real?
What is the proof in favor of its existence?
Is there something about it we need to understand before 2012, in order to avert or prepare for global catastrophe?

Mark Pesce

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

Dennis and Terence disagreed on whatever it was they experienced together following the Experiment at La Chorrera. Was it a simultaneous psychotic break, a shamanic initiation, an alien abduction, or something even stranger? They honestly don’t know, and interpretations have changed over the years. What is definitely odd about the La Chorrera “Event”, whatever it may have been, was that they brought something back with them. This was the mathematical construct derived from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching that has become known as Time Wave Zero. Most psychoses or shamanic experiences do not end up yielding a mathematical tool, particularly one that purports to describe the fractal topology of time, and one that (possibly) predicts the end of the world.

Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster. In 1994 Pesce co-invented VRML, a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California’s world-famous Cinema School and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School. In 2006 Pesce founded FutureSt, a Sydney consultancy dedicated to helping clients negotiate the challenges presented by our ‘hyperconnected’ future.

In this session, Mark Pesce will discuss all things Time Wave with Ralph Abraham and Dennis:

What is TW0? And does it really describe anything?
Does it really hide the answer to our current ontological and historical dilemma?
Why does its interpretation coincide so closely with the apocalyptarian predictions of so many other cultures?

Erik Davis

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 P.M., EST

Although Terence did not live to see it, many of his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream cultural zeitgeist--a state of affairs about which he would feel quite comfortable. He predicted much of the wild changes we are witnessing during this time of global transformation. There can be little doubt that psychedelics, in permeating our culture, in opening the door once again to the rediscovery of parallel worlds and non-human intelligences, have functioned as a major catalyst of that change, and that new transformed worldview. These ideas no longer seem so strange because many people have taken psychedelics; many have confirmed for themselves what Terence and Dennis were raving about. In this session, Erik Davis joins Ralph Metzner and Dennis for a conversation about the evolution and transmission of these ideas.

Erik Davis is a North American writer, social historian, cultural critic and lecturer. He is noted for his study of the history of technology and society and his essays about the fate of the individual in the dawning posthuman era. Although significant aspects of his work include media criticism and technology criticism, his works span across other disciplines to include a larger social history of art, religion, and science, technology, and politics. His books include TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Led Zeppelin IV.

Erik will be talking to Ralph Metzner and Dennis about the following:

Is there an impending historical singularity on the horizon?
What are the possibilities for trans-human metamorphosis and plant-human symbiosis?
Has alien contact already taken place and what is the likelihood of humanity migrating into space?

Ralph Metzner

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 p.m.

Whether or not Time Wave Zero is ‘true’ or not, there is little doubt that it has evolved into a pervasive cultural meme, sharing the space with a whole universe of cultural archetypes that certainly did not exist, or at least were a lot less overt, when Terence and Dennis were growing up in that small town in Colorado in the 1950s. In the post-millennial, pre-eschatology decade of the third millennium A.D., a whole host of bizarre notions about the impending historical singularity, trans-human metamorphosis, plant-human symbiosis, the emergence of the Gaian planetary intelligence, the globalization of the human nervous system, the archaic revival, alien contact, space migration, transdimensional realities, parallel universes, and many others that would have seemed like schizophrenic delusions to earlier generations, have now become an accepted, almost mundane, component of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist. Suddenly we find ourselves living in a science-fictional universe; without even noticing it, things seem to be getting stranger and ever more bizarre at a rapidly accelerating pace.
This final session, hosted by Dennis with guests psychedelic pioneer Ralph Metzner and techno-guru Erik Davis, will explore the ways in which many of Terence's predictions about the changing nature of the world have become true.
Ralph Metzner's work has been focused on the transformations of consciousness, and as a graduate student, he worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) on the Harvard Psilocybin Projects. He co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience, and was editor of The Psychedelic Review. He is founder of the Green Earth Foundation and His books include The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, Green Psychology, and two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of Ayahuasca and Teonanácatl.
The discussion will cover various topics including:

How have Terence's ideas permeated culture?
Do psychedelics have an evolutionary function?
Can psychedelics help us transition into ahistorical time?

We could ask for no two finer minds with whom to explore these themes. At the end of this final session, you may have a glimmer of some of the answers, but we guarantee, you will have a lot more questions! And it is in that dynamic space between knowing and unknowing, that understanding and insight may flourish.

ABOUT OUR HOST

Dennis McKenna is a ethnopharmacologist focusing on the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices. He is well known for his work with his brother Terence McKenna and their ground breaking research in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and is co-founder of the Hefter Research Institute that promotes scientific research on hallucinogenic compounds.

By participating in this online course, you will receive:

Four 90-minute live video seminars with Dennis McKenna and his featured guests
30 minutes of question and answer time in each seminar
Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
Participation in a private online community with other students
Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
PDF articles about course topics from Dennis and each of the guests

We hope you join us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the lives and ideas of Terrence and Dennis!

PRICE: $110

Early bird special, through May 20th: $90.00

To join click http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=1350994

Sun Ra - Twin Stars Of Thence

2011-01-21T08:10:00.000-08:00

fly agaric, flies, Mushrooms, Reindeer and Urine: a world piss paradise

2011-01-12T02:45:00.000-08:00

An art show with live animals where visitors can sleep over and take drugs is all about changing perceptions.

WHAT could be more festive than spending a night in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs? Soma, Carsten Holler's installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to offer exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, the city's contemporary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped ''floating hotel'' - a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1000 ($A1320) a night. (There's also a raffle for free places.)

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/science-v-art-mustwee-event-20101222-195jr.html

The point of all this, beyond a theme park experience, is 'soma'. Höller has explored the history of this mythical narcotic, which apparently contained the secret to happiness, knowledge and wealth. Poets waxed lyrical about it in Hindu verse written 4,000 years ago. But the recipe has been lost. It is believed to derive from a mushroom (the fly agoria) and was at its most potent when consumed via the urine of a creature, which had eaten the mushrooms. Reindeer ate the mushrooms in their Siberian habitat, and hence their urine was prized. It induced a trance of extraordinary power and insight. Soma was liberation, and maybe it was escape.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/seductive-lure-of-carsten-hllers-living-wonderland-2171904.html

eddie jefferson - mercy, mercy, mercy

2010-12-13T10:28:00.000-08:00

Mary Lou Williams - A Fungus A Mungus

2010-12-13T02:53:00.000-08:00

'The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls' by Mark Pesce (from Future Present)

2010-12-11T04:27:00.000-08:00

Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing

http://chu51.wikispaces.com/UNEVENLY+DISTRIBUTED

http://www.sharethiscourse.org/

Unevenly Distributed:

Production Models for the 21st Century

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the
second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is
the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of
yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the
entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone
knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of
millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another
hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube
grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video,
difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of
YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television
industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure,
absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to
be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is
competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but
rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting
factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet,
even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for
how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown
so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the
real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your
deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone
from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through
limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a
hyperabundance of viewing options.

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until
recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby
the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of
choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to
the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution
channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has
occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into eversmaller
“microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that
YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences
is YouTube’s native tongue.

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely
overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old
boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting
his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM,
surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably
taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a
television, somewhere in the background, or it might be
coming from the Web browser right in front of him.
(Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager
has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even
with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few
hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for
something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good
enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of
YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve
found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately
forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He
views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other
friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other
friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the
media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it
can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it
can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network
no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as
they’re broadcast through the airwaves, but more likely
they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded
from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses.

The broadcast network has been replaced by the social
network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the
newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item
might be something that was created at great expense for a
mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of
media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely
coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster
some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire
that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his
social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along
something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This
factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of
runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch.
Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he
takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all
of his media decisions are weighed against the values and
tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of
choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is
entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the
importance, of that media to the individual and that
individual’s social network. The mass market, with its
enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations.
Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his
mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in
the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that
was uploaded to the Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.

That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the
future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two
hundred million videos (probably much more), all available,
all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of
which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much
“there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media
distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could
compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend
some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching
anything is measured against salience: “How important is
this for me, right now?” When you weigh the latest episode of
a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only
to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that
video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him.

As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its
competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices
grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now
through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile
handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is
constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasinglyrelevant
suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his
social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets.
His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-
Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of
distribution. What no one had expected was that the
professional producers would lose control of production. The
difference between an amateur and a professional – in the
media industries – has always centered on the point that the
professional sells their work into distribution, while the
amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that selfdistribution
is more effective than professional distribution,
how do we distinguish between the professional and the
amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t
care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film
and television production and distribution can survive in this
environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the
only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion
slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred yearold
industry with many, many creative professionals. In this
environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a
live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event”
based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live
is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely
designed to support the efficient distribution of live
programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out
blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle
ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts
will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form,
both industries will continue for some years to come, and will
probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s
attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.

This future almost completely excludes “independent”
production, a vague term which basically means any
production which takes place outside of the media
megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and
TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media
landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an
audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs
has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have
long been losing economic propositions (except for the most
lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal.
National and regional funding bodies are growing
increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not
find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off,
despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the
Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to
the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that
Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but
Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy
them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder
Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production
values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent
productions; productions which cost not millions of euros,
but hundreds, and which make up for their low production
values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This
tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down;
it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the
videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but
reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era
of media hyperabundance.

What then, is to be done?


Sodtherich by CHU

Immune System Armour - Mushroom Superfood

2010-12-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

Terence McKenna - 5/5 - Riding The Range With Marshall Mcluhan

2010-12-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

Evolve The Spore

2010-11-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

Evolve and revolve to solve the Novelle’
Loose spore, spoor, spell s’poor.
Lou’s Spore  Spore of Destiny. The weir of brandy,
Spart of the Lyf Cycle cycle.

Sports Day. Sport for all.  Reproductive seed,
Ballistico Spores blowing,  Spores and cures and

cleansed pores,  Rowing a shore with oar to spore. 

Dream fish...the Net, an ‘idea’ sized catch?
Starseed Transmissions 2010.

The Intelligence in the Cherry Stone Words are

Cryptospores, fossilized messages Paragraphs in

the Zoospore, locomotion

 Swarmspore social movement, decentralized,

self-organized Natural or artificial? Thought sport?  Moving

away and outword, wayward sores float

 Dispersed verse turning a propeller in the wave crush

 Water sports thoughts awash with salt 
Growing both on the ground and Underground 

Spore Mycollegee Degree Liberty Butter

Yeasts and Leomould Bloom  The role of spores

in Decomposition of the matter?

Translove Energies compassion center lights up Eastern Market

2010-10-30T18:58:00.000-07:00

Translove Energies compassion center lights up Eastern Market

Maybe Logic Academy on BOINGBOING. Thanks Douglas Rushkoff

2010-10-16T03:22:00.000-07:00

A MaybeLogic Academy Course

Douglas Rushkoff at 9:09 AM Thursday, Oct 7, 201.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. He is the author, most recently, of Program or Be Programmed.

Robert Anton Wilson and his crew set up an online academy for him to teach James Joyce and other subjects to those of us who thrived off his learning and insights. Before he died, he began to invite others to teach courses through the Maybe Logic Academy, and the site has lived on. I was honored to be asked to teach a course based on my new book. It goes for ten weeks, and begins October 11. I'll be donating my proceeds to archive.org. Here's the pitch.

Ten weeks of study and dialogue, ten commands for a digital age. We continue to accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices work and work on us. We do not know how to program our computers, nor do we care. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another, instead. And this is a potentially grave mistake. Just as the invention of text utterly transformed human society, disconnecting us from much of what we held sacred, our migration to the digital realm will also require a new template for maintaining our humanity. In this course, Rushkoff shares the biases of digital media, and what that means for how we should use them. The course will be organized along the ten main biases of digital media - time, distance, scale, choice, complexity, identity, social, fact, sharing, and purpose - exploring how digital media is tilted towards one or the other end of each spectrum. We will then discuss how to maintain agency in the face of each of these biases.

DJ fly agaric 23 plays Jungle beats again, for you and your tube

2010-10-13T16:55:00.000-07:00

RAW Illumination: Fly Agaric 23 announces online RAW course Steve "...

2010-09-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

RAW Illumination: Fly Agaric 23 announces online RAW course

Steve "...: "Fly Agaric 23 announces online RAW course Steve 'Fly Agaric' 23 has announced a new online course, 'email to the tribe,' which will run fr..."

Over 20,000 Studies Conducted on Marijuana

2010-07-08T06:21:00.000-07:00

Posted by Paul Armentano at 9:52 am
July 6, 201

Over 20,000 Studies Conducted on Marijuana; What Is It That Scientists Do Not Yet Know?

US News & World Report recently probed the subject of cannabis science, publishing a pair of stories on the subject here and here.
Neither story particularly breaks any new ground, though the first provides some valuable — if inadvertent — insight into the prohibitionist (or at the very least, statist) mindset.
Quoted in the story is Columbia University researcher Margaret Haney. I’ve written about Haney’s clinical work with cannabis before. In particular, Haney was the lead author of a 2007 clinical trial concluding that inhaled cannabis increased daily caloric intake and body weight in HIV-positive patients in a manner that was far superior to the effects of oral THC (Marinol aka Dronabinol). The study further reported that subjects’ use of marijuana was well tolerated, and did not impair their cognitive performance.

Yet Haney’s comments in US News & World Report ring tepid at best. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“’I am not anti-marijuana, I’m not pro-marijuana. I want to understand it.’ Haney expresses frustration at what she considers wrongheaded efforts by states to legalize medical marijuana. There is too much, she says, that scientists do not know.”

Haney’s refrain is a common one, and at first glance it appears to make sense. After all, who among us doesn’t want to better understand the interactions between the marijuana plant and the human body? Yet placed in proper context this sentiment appears to be little more than a red herring. Here’s why.
Marijuana is already the most studied plant on Earth, and is arguably one of the most investigated therapeutically active substances known to man. To date, there are now over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to marijuana and its active compounds. That total includes over 2,700 separate papers published on cannabis in 2009 and another 900 published just this year alone (according to a key word search on the search engine PubMed).

And what have we learned from these 20,000+ studies? Not surprisingly, quite a lot. For starters, we know that cannabis and its active constituents are uniquely safe and effective as therapeutic compounds. Unlike most prescription or over-the-counter medications, cannabinoids are virtually non-toxic to health cells or organs, and they are incapable of causing the user to experience a fatal overdose. Unlike opiates, cannabinoids do not depress the central nervous system, and as a result they possess a virtually unparalleled safety profile. In fact, a 2008 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ) reported that cannabis-based drugs were associated with virtually no serious adverse side effects in over 30 years of investigative use.

We also know that the cannabis plant contains in excess of 60 active compounds that likely possess distinctive therapeutic properties. These include THC, THCV, CBD, THCA, CBC, and CBG, among others. In fact, a recent review by Israel’s Raphael Mechoulam of Hebrew University and colleagues identifies nearly 30 separate therapeutic effects — including anti-cancer properties, anti-diabetic properties, neuroprotection, and anti-stroke properties — in cannabinoids other than THC. Most recently, a review by researchers in Germany reported that since 2005 there have been 37 controlled studies assessing the safety and efficacy of cannabinoids, involved a total of 2,563 subjects. By contrast, most FDA-approved drugs go through far fewer trials involving far fewer subjects.

Finally, we know that Western civilization has been using cannabis as a therapeutic agent or recreational intoxicant for thousands of years with relatively few adverse consequences — either to the individual user or to society. In fact, no less than the World Health Organization commissioned a team of experts to compare the health and societal consequences of marijuana use compared to other drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, and opiates. After quantifying the harms associated with both drugs, the researchers concluded: “Overall, most of these risks (associated with marijuana) are small to moderate in size. In aggregate they are unlikely to produce public health problems comparable in scale to those currently produced by alcohol and tobacco. On existing patterns of use, cannabis poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”

That, in a nutshell, is what we ‘know’ about cannabis. I’d say that it’s ample enough information to, at the very least, cease the practice arresting people, and seriously ill patients in particular, who possess it. As for what else Dr. Haney and others of a similar mindset would still like to know — and how many additional studies would it take to provide them with that information — well, that’s anybody’s guess.

Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and the NORML Foundation.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/06/theres-been-over-20000-studies-on-marijuana-what-is-it-that-scientists-do-not-yet-know/

Politics of Psychopharmacology By Timothy Leary

2010-07-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

Politics of Psychopharmacology
By Timothy Leary

Without ritalin: a natural approach to ADD
By Samuel A. Berne

Sexs, Drugs & Magick by Robert Anton Wilson (Preface to the 2000 Edition)

2010-07-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

Sexs, Drugs & Magick
PREFACE TO THE 2000 EDITION

And the Beast said:
"By their pee shall ye judge them,
and by thy pee shall ye be judged.
And all will be divided by their pee.
And in the snow shall their names be written."
- The Book of Urinomics 1

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

Around the time he wrote this book, Robert Anton Wilson had passed the age of 40, lost the rigid right/wrong ideology he had picked up during the anti-war and anti-segregation movements of the 1960s and thought he had outgrown the dogmatic follies of his youth, achieving a middle-aged and mellow agnosticism about everything. Ten years later, as Ronald Reagan sat in the White House, Wilson reached 50 and, looking back, felt astonished at how much folly had persisted even in his 40s. As he approached 60 a few years ago, he began to realize that he still had his share of human idiocy even in his 50s. Today at 66+ (beginning to merge with him now), I can only wonder how much of the current Robert Anton Wilson literary output of palaver will embarrass me when I reach 75-80...

Nonetheless, I don't feel particularly disgraced by another printing of this book. Some of it still makes a lot of sense to me, after corrections, and I see that in the semi-fictionalized- "case histories" I have accidentally provided a son of "ideogrammic" history of the 1960s—still the most controversial decade of the century, and well worth looking at again, to learn what we can from both its wisdom and its blunders.

The major blunder I acquired from the 1960s counterculture was the notion that the Enemy (with a capital E), was ignorance and that this could be cured by education. I now feel more inclined to accept R. Buckminster Fuller's description of the four major problems confronting the world as "ignorance, fear, greed, and zoning laws." Being untypically brave (like most fools), I always underestimated the role of fear in human affairs; having simple desires, I underestimated greed; and not being an architect, I never grasped the perfidious nature of zoning laws. Above all, I failed to realize the extent to which the synergy of ignorance-fear-greed-zoning laws in maintaining the tyranny that Fuller calls MMAO (Machiavelli, Mafia, Atoms and Oil) - the banks, the mob, and the energy cartels.)

My current thinking about MMAO derives from Fuller and, in relation to the topics of this book, even more from the Sub- Genius Foundation of Dallas, TX, which refers to MMAO as "the Con."

Many think the Con is just a joke or a parody of other conspiracy theories. To such doubters, the Sub-Genius Foundation says that this is "the Time of Pee"—the time foretold, when people would be judged not by works, nor by family, nor even by looks, but by their urine.

They listen to you through your telephone without its even being off the hook, and record you through satellites that can peer down any street, anywhere...

They kick your door in any time they want to. All they have to yell is "DRUGS!" and your spouse is in jail, your kids are farmed out to the state, your car and house are suddenly theirs...

Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners...

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.

- Church of the SubGenius

The 1973 author of this book never could have imagined a State so crazily totalitarian, or a population so brainwashed into sheep-like submissiveness, that such absurdities could occur. But then, only Kafka and Orwell in their most eerie satires on bureaucracy-gone-bonkers could imagine an obscenity like our Piss Police. The State in which we live can only accurately be called Urine Nation.

How can this happen in a once-free Republic where searches of the person are forbidden except by court order after probable cause has been shown? Urine Nation, posing as the representatives of you and me, is engaged in an alleged "War on Drugs." That justifies trashing the Constitution.

Now this is, on the face of it, absurd.

1. Wars on drugs or other insensible things (objects, sub-stances) can only be carried on by lunatics. The Con cannot be accused of insanity: of ignorance, yes, and of fear, greed and zoning laws, but not of being batshit crazy. They are not making war on chemicals—or on the laws of physics, or anything of that sort. They are making war on the American people—on all of us, although only a few of us know that yet.

For instance, as you may read in Pissing Away the American Dream (Pissing Away the American Dream, edited by David Ross, Digit Press), on January 1989 the Minneapolis police smashed down the door of the home of an elderly Black couple, using "flash bang" grenades which accidentally set the house on fire and killed both old people.

The cops were looking for "drugs," but never found any. The chief of police justified the murders of two innocent citizens (and the total violation of the Fourth Amendment) by saying, "This is war."

The war is being waged against people, not chemicals, and it is people who get killed.

2. Even within the off-kilter logic of its own rhetoric, the "War on Drugs" is nonsense.

If you go out your door and drive a few blocks, they say, you will find at least one store boldly declaring that they sell DRUGS, although some say PHARMACY, which can only be deciphered by those who know Greek roots; and in these stores, hundreds of drugs are available. Nearby is a supermarket where you can buy cigarettes, containing nicotine, a drug more addictive than heroin according to former Surgeon General Koop. Next door is a BAR where you can buy dozens of varieties of C₂H₃0H, a heavily addictive substance, statistically linked to wife and child battering, divorce and violent crime.

Urine Nation, thus, is not making war on all drugs, or drug- users, but only on some. The government asserts that the drugs on their taboo list are the worst ones; skeptics like me say they are merely the ones that are either (a) cheap and effective, like herbal medicines, and/or (b) not easy to monopolize, like marijuana or (c) better than the higher priced drugs manufactured by the large pharmaceutical corporations that financially support both political parties.

The only people literally "at war" with drugs—all drugs—are the Christian Scientists. Eight of them are currently appealing their convictions for refusing to give their children the drugs ordained from on high by the Con/MMAO.

As Count Bismarck once said, "Laws are like sausages: you have much more respect for them if you haven't actually seen how they're made."

Many of the chemicals and herbs forbidden by the Con are not only harmless, but are widely believed to be beneficial. The war against the users of these substances is just as vicious as the wars against all other substances on the taboo list.

Over the past 10 years, the Food and Drug Administration has engaged in raids on alternative health companies - companies operating openly and, they thought, legally - that more and more tend toward the violence of DEA raids on suspected crack dealers. In every case, the companies were selling vitamins and herbs that a growing minority of the medical profession approves but which MMAO and the FDA do not approve.

For instance, in 1990, the FDA raided the offices of Dr. Jonathan Wright, a fully qualified physician with an M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School, terrorized the staff with drawn guns, and seized all the vitamins and herbs they could find. They never did file criminal charges against Dr. Wright for the heresy of giving his patients cheap medicines instead of expensive ones, but this raid was only one of hundreds of similar Gestapo-style operations, creating what libertarians call "a chilling effect" on scientific freedom.

As the Life Extension Foundation wrote:

. . . The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police state party line on healthcare and medicine. The FDA's purpose is not just to destroy the business and lives of their targets, but also to spread fear and terror throughout the land so that others who may be tempted to rebel against the agency will remain meek and submissive.

In the 1980s, a Fundamentalist couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver fled to a mountain top in Idaho, to get as far as possible from the U.S. government, which they considered a Zionist conspiracy. However goofy that idea was, it was the only "offense" of which the Weavers were guilty. They didn't annoy their neighbors and they didn't plot an insurrection against the government: they just tried to avoid and evade it. This alone was too much for the Feds. They sent in an informant to make friends with Randy and eventually entrap him into selling a shotgun. With that excuse, the FBI and ATF made war on the Weaver family, killing Vicki while she stood holding her baby in her arms, killing the older son, and even killing the family dog.

The Weavers sure had a lot of nutty ideas; nobody but another Fundamentalist would deny that. But maybe their idea of the nature of the current U.S. government, and its attitude toward its serfs and subjects, was a hell of a lot more accurate than the ideas you read in liberal journals.

Please visit: http://www.rawilson.com/sexdrugs.html

No Dope without Dope

2010-07-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
--Albert Einstein

I once had a band in New Orleans, 2003.
We called ourselves
The Pharmageddon Arkestra.

Dope/Hope meme splicing.
There is always dope
Keep your dope up
Dope for Tomorrow

All my dopes and dreams
Your Building my dope up now.
Land of Dope and Glory

No dope without Dope
Dopeless
Dope I’m getting through to you

Dope you are feeling better
Dope Arkensaw, home of the resident
Kid Hope

Dopes and dreams of a nation
Dopefully Dopeless.
Cape of Good Dope

Doppler Effect.
Pharmacratic Tyranny.
Tales of a hope fiend
Global pharamalogical and Digital
Con tricks unveiled.

Tales of a hope fiend

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
--Martin Luther King

Ceremonial chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers
By Thomas Stephen Szasz

The influence of the pharmaceutical industry: volume II:

Coercion as cure: a critical history of psychiatry
By Thomas Stephen Szasz

PR - a persuasive industry?: spin, public relations, and the shaping of the ...
By Trevor Morris, Simon Goldsworthy

Presentation planning and media relations for the pharmaceutical industry
By John Lidstone

J.R.R. Tolkien encyclopedia: scholarship and critical assessment
By Michael D. C. Drout

Leaglize Marijuana in Detroit NOW! and leave them kids alone.

2010-06-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

YES, of course POT should be decriminalized and legalized, for medical and non-medical purposes, the 'war on drugs' or more correctly 'The war on SOME drugs' has failed in every way, if you value 'life' and 'freedom' and 'tolerance' as success, the war on drugs is a failure.

However, if you happen to be a sado-masochistic authority type with the word of god in your ear that mankind must behave, abide by the law, pay taxes and not make any noise or complain, you may see the 'war on drugs' as a success, with all those dope fiends and criminals drug addicts locked up, away in Prison. Is this their sick dream, to lock peaceful folks away and live their 'drug free' life. With Nukes, Oil and Booze and guns forever?

Please ask yourself, and others around you, are these people so ill as to want this? to criminalize human beings for simply ingesting a plant based substance, and lock them away, or give them a criminal record, a stigma?

Do all the cops and law enforcement agents really believe in these 'harmful' and 'out dated' laws that we see enforced as prohibition policy around the world?

I think not, I feel that if we simply had access to all the information and could share the 'frustration' and the 'positive' attributes of marijuana in an 'open debate' without wildly wrongheaded political operations slurring and confusing the direct communications between scentists, researchers, lawyers, policy makers and well, the rest of humanity, not trying to take over everybody's lives with all pervasive rules and laws to coerce.

--Steve

Sound Off: Should Pot be Legalized in Detroit?

Updated: Friday, 18 Jun 2010, 10:48 AM EDT
Published : Friday, 18 Jun 2010, 10:47 AM EDT

(myFOXDetroit.com Staff Reports) - Detroit voters may actually get to vote on allowing the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

A group called the Coalition for a Safer Detroit is working to get the issue on November's ballot. The measure would allow adults over the age of 21 to possess, and we assume use, one ounce or less of pot on private property.

Tim Beck, a registered marijuana user who's leading the pot petition, joined FOX 2's Huel Perkins on Thursday to discuss the impact of the measure. Click the video player to watch the interview.

Information from the Coalition's Web site:

What is the Safer Detroit Initiative?
It is a ballot initiative sponsored by the Coalition for a Safer Detroit proposing to amend the Detroit City Code to decriminalize use or possession of an ounce or less of marijuana on private property, by anyone who has attained the age of 21 years.

Has this ever been done before?
Yes. The cities of Denver, CO, and Seattle, WA recently made use or possession of small amounts of marijuana their lowest law enforcement priority. Here in Michigan the City of Ann Arbor, made possession of small amounts of marijuana a minor "civil infraction" (like a traffic ticket) in the early 1970's. None of these jurisdictions has experienced any significant, negative consequences as a result. Marijuana is safer then alcohol. It is time we treat it accordingly.

What has been the result in these other cities?
All three are nationally recognized for their prosperity, quality of life, and educated, creative populations. Even more important, police and prosecutors in these cities have been freed up to focus on crimes with victims -- those that have a direct impact on the community, such as vandalism, auto theft, breaking and entering, and domestic violence.

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/should-pot-be-legalized-in-detroit-20100618-mr

Pot legalization on track in Detroit

Published: June 17, 2010 at 6:44 PM

DETROIT, June 17 (UPI) -- Possession of small amounts of marijuana on private property could soon be legal in Detroit, organizers of a legalization effort said.

The city council's internal operations committee decided Wednesday against amending the proposed ordinance, the Detroit Free Press reported. The last step is election commission approval of the language for the November ballot.

The ordinance would allow anyone 21 or older to possess less than an ounce of marijuana on private property without fear of arrest. Medical marijuana for registered users has been legal in Detroit since a 2004 referendum.

Tim Beck, a registered medical marijuana user, spearheaded the effort to get the legalization ordinance on the ballot. He argues police will be able to focus on "crimes with actual victims."

Dennis Mazurek, an assistant corporation counsel, told the city council committee the ordinance conflicts with Michigan state law, which take precedence. But Beck is confident of victory.

"It's going to win -- I have no doubt of that," he said.

Med Grow's Nick Tennant with a marijuana plant at his school

Roy Ritchie for TIME

This is what a medical-marijuana class looks like. Twenty-five or so students — men, women, young, middle-aged — listen attentively as an instructor holds up a leafy green plant and runs down the list of nutrients it needs. Nitrogen: stimulates leaf and stem growth. Magnesium: helps leaf structure. Phosphorous: aids in the germination of seeds. Michigan's Med Grow Cannabis College is one of several unaccredited schools to have sprung up in the 14 states and the District of Columbia that have legalized medical use of marijuana. Many of its students suffer from chronic pain. Others are looking to supply those in need of relief. (See pictures of cannabis conventions.)

The Med Grow campus sits across the street from a KFC in Southfield, a relatively prosperous suburb of Detroit. Nearly one-fifth of its 90 or so students are former auto-industry workers. These recent enrollees — and the more than 1,000 people who have completed courses at Med Grow since it opened in September — are betting that studying such topics as bloom cycles and advanced pruning techniques will help them succeed in what may be one of the few growth industries in Michigan, home of the nation's highest unemployment rate: 14%. With medical marijuana fetching as much as $500 for 1 oz. (28 g), providing it to a mere five patients could generate $10,000 a month in sales.

Six-week courses at Med Grow cost $475, and the school is planning to open campuses in Colorado and New Jersey within roughly the next year. Meanwhile, the nation's first marijuana school, the three-year-old Oaksterdam University, has expanded from Oakland, Calif., to locations in Los Angeles and one in Flint, Mich., and may open more. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Great American Pot Smoke-Out.")

But as Med Grow founder Nick Tennant can attest, it's not easy being a leader of an emerging industry. Tennant, a very lean, very blond 24-year-old, grew up in the Detroit suburb of Warren and watched the auto-detailing business he started after high school founder along with the region's economy. Then, in 2008, a surprising majority of Michigan voters approved a measure to allow people with cancer, Crohn's disease, AIDS and other ailments to apply for state-issued cards to grow or obtain marijuana. He recalls thinking, "You could sit there and watch the industry evolve or step into the game."

So he wrote up a business plan for a marijuana-growers school and approached his car-detailing clients as potential investors. Many thought it was a joke, but enough took him seriously. He declines to say how much money he raised.

The next step was finding a landlord. One told him flatly, "I don't want to take on the risk." To which Tennant replied, "If you want to let your building sit vacant, go for it." He eventually settled on 5,000 sq. ft. (465 sq m) in an office building in Southfield, a half hour's drive north of downtown Detroit.

The first thing you notice when you walk into Med Grow is the pungent smell of marijuana. One of the school's two grow rooms showcases a single massive marijuana plant that, in terms of height and canopy, is about the size of a kitchen table.

Watch TIME's video "An L.A. Medical Marijuana Odyssey."

See pictures of stoner cinema.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1997455,00.html

ELECTRONIC REEFER?

2010-06-17T03:12:00.000-07:00

An electronic cigarette, also known as an e-cigarette or personal vaporizer, is a battery-powered device that provides inhaled doses of nicotine by way of a vaporized solution. It is an alternative to smoked tobacco products, such as cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. In addition to purported nicotine delivery,^[1] this vapor also provides a flavor and physical sensation similar to that of inhaled tobacco smoke, while no smoke or combustion is actually involved in its operation.

An electronic cigarette takes the form of some manner of elongated tube, though many are designed to resemble the outward appearance of real smoking products, like cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Another common design is the "pen-style", so named for its visual resemblance to a ballpoint pen. Most electronic cigarettes are reusable devices with replaceable and refillable parts. A number of disposable electronic cigarettes have also been developed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette

Terence McKenna on Skepticism, Culture and Aliens (1-3)

2010-06-17T03:05:00.000-07:00

Terence Mckenna.

Terence McKenna by Robert Venosa

2010-06-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

Terence McKenna by Robert Venosa

Time for the monkeys to move into hyperspace!
"Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered.
Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored."
—Terence McKenna
One of the principle philosophical underpinnings for our assumption of 2012 being a planetary tipping point comes from our years of working with the late Terence McKenna. In 1996 we presented the Terence McKenna Prophets Conference Timewave Zero tour of America beginning at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York then moving across the country, ending at UCLA in Los Angeles . Combine fractal mathematics with the I-Ching into a computer program created with a giant punch card computer at Berkeley in the 1960s, and you come up with a graph of history measuring novelty (new things and events) vs. habit (nothing new). From this you come to a Zero Point on December 21, 2012, which as we know happens to also be the end of the Mayan long-count. Interesting.

YOU CAN GET A BETTER GRASP OF THIS BY GOING TO
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtnV25LWFQ8&feature=related.
So, back in the 90s we brought together for an exciting weekend workshop on Maui, Hawaii Terence McKenna and leading fiction author and close friend of our's and McKenna’s, Tom Robbins. Participants came from around the world for this one time mind boggling event, which we agreed not to record. But here is some of what Tom Robbins wrote about McKenna in the forward to McKenna’s book The Archaic Revival which is reminiscent of the Maui gathering

“Our problems today are more complex and more threatening than at any time in history. Sadly, we cannot even begin to solve those problems, because our reality orientations are lower than a snowman’s blood pressure. We squint at existence through thick veils of personal and societal ignorance, overlaid with still more opaque sheets of disinformation, thoughtfully provided by the state, the church, and big business (often one and the same). The difference between us and Helen Keller is that she knew she was deaf and blind.

“Radical problems call for radical solutions. Conventional politicians are too softheaded to create radical solutions and too fainthearted to implement them if they could, whereas political revolutionaries, no matter how well meaning, ultimately offer only bloodshed followed by another round of repression.

“To truly alter conditions, we must alter ourselves—philosophically, psychologically, and perhaps, biologically. The first step in those alterations will consist mainly of cutting away the veils in order that we see ourselves for that transgalactic Other that we really are and always have been. Terence the Tailor has got the sharpest shears in town. And he’s open Sundays and holidays. Once the veils are severed, we, each of us, can finally start to attend to our self-directed mutagensis.

“The flying saucer is warming up its linguistic engines. The mushroom is shoving its broadcasting transmitter through the forest door. Time for the monkeys to move into hyperspace! It’s going to be a weird, wild trip, but, guided by the archaic, Gaia-given gyroscope, we can commence the journey in a state of excitement and hope. With his uniquely secular brand of eschatological euphoria, Terence McKenna is inviting us to a Doomsday we can live with. Be there or be square.”
—Tom Robbins

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING
From the Grasslands to the Starship by Terence McKenna

2012 TIPPING POINT - The Prophets Conference Vancouver
23-25 July 2010

Conference Information: www.greatmystery.org/events/vancouver2012.html
In-Depth Post-Conference Workshops 26-27 JULY 2010
Exhibitor Information: www.greatmystery.org/events/vancouver2012register.html
Download an Event Flyer to share with friends Color or Black/White.

The purpose of this GROUNDBREAKING conference is to explore a radically different, more optimistic interpretation of the Mayan prophecy – as referring to the end of the world as we have known it. In addition to predicting a physical destruction of the material world, the Mayan prophecy might refer to death and rebirth and a mass inner transformation of humanity. The conference brings together JOSE ARGUELLES, FLORDEMAYO, ANDREW HARVEY, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, JOHN MAJOR JENKINS, JOHN KIMMEY, JOHN PERKINS, DANIEL PINCHBECK, LLYN ROBERTS, RICHARD TARNAS, and MIGUEL ANGEL VERGARA and in the beautiful setting of Vancouver, Canada. Following the conference will be in-depth post-conference workshops. We hope you can join us for this powerful and inspiring event.

ADDITIONAL WRITINGS
Closing Of The Cycle : The Last Days and What Is To Be Done by Jose Arguelles
Guardians of the Light by John Perkins
The Revolution that the Divine Mother is Preparing by Andrew Harvey
Reflections on John Kimmey by Hannah Janulewicz
The Dalai Lama and The Economic Hitman by John Perkins
Our Crisis Is The Birth Of A Cocreative Universal Humanity by Barbara Marx Hubbard
Our Moment in History as an Initiation for Humanity by Richard Tarnas
The Hinge Of A Transition In Our Species’ Awareness by Daniel Pinchbeck
Gazing Into The Cosmic Center December 21, 2012 by John Major Jenkins
An Alliance of Prayer, Education and Healing for Our Mother Earth by Flordemayo
2012 Planetary Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard
A Radioactive Nuisance to All Those in Power by Andrew Harvey
1000 Days to Zero Point 2012 by Jose Arguelles
The Eternal Fire of Transformation by John Major Jenkins
Planetary Whole System Design Science by Jose Arguelles
Sacred Activism and the Birth of the Divine Humanity by Andrew Harvey
Something Monumental Is Going To Happen by Mayan elder Flordemayo
This Is It by John Eesawu Kimmey
2012 and Other Indigenous Prophecies for Transformation by Llyn Roberts
How Do We Get Ready for 2012? by Barbara Marx Hubbard
It Happened In Cancun a preview for Vancouver
2012 : The Primal World Ensouled - Richard Tarnas
The True Meaning of 2012 by John Perkins

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http://www.greatmystery.org/

Robert Anton Wilson & Marijuana Brownies.

2010-06-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.rawilson.com/sexdrugs.html

Sexs, Drugs and Magick by ROBERT ANTON WILSON
PREFACE TO THE 2000 EDITION

And the Beast said:
"By their pee shall ye judge them,
and by thy pee shall ye be judged.
And all will be divided by their pee.
And in the snow shall their names be written."
- The Book of Urinomics 1

My current thinking about MMAO derives from Fuller and, in relation to the topics of this book, even more from the Sub- Genius Foundation of Dallas, TX, which refers to MMAO as "the Con."

They listen to you through your telephone without its even being off the hook, and record you through satellites that can peer down any street, anywhere...
They kick your door in any time they want to. All they have to yell is "DRUGS!" and your spouse is in jail, your kids are farmed out to the state, your car and house are suddenly theirs...
Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners...
For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.
- Church of the SubGenius

Now this is, on the face of it, absurd.

1. Wars on drugs or other insensible things (objects, sub-stances) can only be carried on by lunatics. The Con cannot be accused of insanity: of ignorance, yes, and of fear, greed and zoning laws, but not of being batshit crazy. They are not making war on chemicals—or on the laws of physics, or anything of that sort. They are making war on the American people—on all of us, although only a few of us know that yet.

The cops were looking for "drugs," but never found any. The chief of police justified the murders of two innocent citizens (and the total violation of the Fourth Amendment) by saying, "This is war."

The war is being waged against people, not chemicals, and it is people who get killed.

2. Even within the off-kilter logic of its own rhetoric, the "War on Drugs" is nonsense.

Urine Nation, thus, is not making war on all drugs, or drug- users, but only on some. The government asserts that the drugs on their taboo list are the worst ones; skeptics like me say they are merely the ones that are either (a) cheap and effective, like herbal medicines, and/or (b) not easy to monopolize, like marijuana or (c) better than the higher priced drugs manufactured by the large pharmaceutical corporations that financially support both political parties.

As Count Bismarck once said, "Laws are like sausages: you have much more respect for them if you haven't actually seen how they're made."

As the Life Extension Foundation wrote:

. . . The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police state party line on healthcare and medicine. The FDA's purpose is not just to destroy the business and lives of their targets, but also to spread fear and terror throughout the land so that others who may be tempted to rebel against the agency will remain meek and submissive.

Medi Pot Bust People's trust, L.A LAW style.

2010-06-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

But first, Paul Krassner:

"It is the day of reckoning for a vast majority of medical marijuana dispensaries that will be out of compliance with a new city law that takes effect Monday. More than 400 of the 583 pot shops in the city are expected to be outlawed by the ordinance, which only allows the 130 or so surviving marijuana establishments that registered with the city before its 2007 ordinance to stay open. --http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/marijuana/medical-marijuana-closures/

City prosecutors release list of 439 medical marijuana dispensaries that must close
June 8, 2010 | 11:32 am
The Los Angeles City Attorney's office on Tuesday released a list of 439 marijuana dispensaries that have been ordered to shut their doors after a new city council ordinance went into effect beginning this week.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/city-prosecutors-release-list-of-439-dispensaries-ordered-to-shut.html

"A city ordinance is shutting down 439 medical marijuana dispensaries across the Los Angeles area, according to the L.A. Times. The restrictions come after a boom in the number of locations over the past two and a half years.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/06/08/why-is-los-angeles-shuttering-marijuana-dispenseries/

Sharing drugs as 'atoms' and sharing drugs as 'bits'

2010-05-30T09:25:00.000-07:00

As I have said before, I feel that the new rulings on file sharing and digital rights in Britain reflect the same zero-tollerance and uniformed 'fascist' dictatorial methods of making responsible, informed policy based up the best and most up to date research in our Zero sum game.

Preferably data gained using human subjects and social data fields, reaching back to the long history of human drug interfacing, not results from tests on Rats and a small groups of test-subjects from Oxford and Cambridge breeding programs.

The Digital Economy Bill has defined another 'war' with the culture of 'self owning ones' by threatening to punish shared digitalis.

My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I've written about fascism and my fear of it.
Statement of 1975 quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1981) vol. 8, part 1

"Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose published work during his lifetime was almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature of drug abuse, paranoia and schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.^[4]

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick}

New rules on illegal filesharing: three strikes and you're blacklisted

Friday 28 May 2010.

Persistant filesharers now run the risk of being added to a 'copyright infringement' blacklist, under new rules being put into place by Ofcom following the Digital Economy Act.

Now that the Digital Economy Bill (as was) has passed into law, and the new coalition government has announced that it has no plans to repeal it, the responsibility rests with Ofcom to draft a code of practice enforcing it. The code of practice will be subject to consultation before being finalised, but at present Ofcom is working on a proposal which would force ISPs to keep records of people accused of illegal filesharing. After three such accusations, details of that user will be placed on a blacklist. Once blacklisted, user identities can then be applied for via court order by any copyright holder making a piracy allegation; allowing legal proceedings to be launched against the accused.

Each accusation of filesharing will result in a warning letter being sent out, and Ofcom is hoping that these letters will be sufficient to 'significantly reduce' copyright infringement; although if after a year no significant reduction is seen the regulator will consider more stringent measures such as temporary disconnection.

ISPs will have to keep details of filesharing accusations for a period of one year from the time that they are made, so that three accusations in a twelve month period will trigger the blacklisting. There is also a procedure for anyone believing they have been falsely accused to contest the accusation anonymously via a tribunal; which could result in rights holders and ISPs being forced to pay damages.

At present the requirement to keep tabs on filesharing accusations won't apply to ISPs with fewer than 400,000 customers, or mobile broadband providers.

McLuhan's TETRAD of MEDIA EFFECTS (Cyber-neuropsychology)

2010-05-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

Tetrad of media effects

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to:navigation, search

A blank tetrad diagram

Generally speaking, a tetrad is any set of four things. In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium^[1]) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

What does the medium enhance?
What does the medium make obsolete?
What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.^[2]

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.^[3]

Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

Liberal Cannabis Party Hash Egg

2010-05-30T09:10:00.000-07:00

"What we haven't tried, is the Dutch system. The Liberal Democrat system, of allowing adults in the UK to make an educated choice over whether they decide to use alcohol, or cannabis.
Lets face facts here. Its a choice 4 million take every single day and regardless of how the law stands.
Cannabis use at a personal level has been decriminalised for 30 years in the Netherlands, and in that time they have constantly languished at the BOTTOM of the league for European drug addicts, and contrary to the best efforts of the United Nations "bookery cookery ".

Furthermore, they have no problems with drug factories setting up in residential areas because if the locals want to buy cannabis they can simply head down to their local "government licensed" premises and buy it, paying tax as they do. --http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/20080207151/cannabis-news/no-evidence-for-cannabis-reclass-nick-clegg-mp.html

CANNABIS CULTURE - UK's Liberal Democrats, polling higher than ever in the lead-up to a federal election, want to remove criminal penalties for cannabis possession and allow Dutch-style cannabis cafés.
Internal party policy documents leaked to the UK's Daily Mail suggest permitting possession, social supply to adults and cultivation for personal use. The release of the documents follows an internal party vote to make it "no longer a crime for the occupier or manager of premises to permit someone to use cannabis on those premises."

According to the Daily Mail, "cafe owners could allow customers to smoke the drug outside or buy ‘hash brownies’ and vaporised cannabis." --http://cannabisculture.com/v2/content/2010/05/04/Liberal-Democrats-Want-Legalize-Cannabis-UK

From wikipedia: HARM REDUCTION.

Harm reduction (or Harm minimisation) refers to a range of public health policies designed to reduce the harmful consequences associated with recreational drug use and other high risk activities. Harm reduction is put forward as an useful perspective alongside the more conventional approaches of demand and supply reduction.^[1]

Many advocates argue that prohibitionist laws criminalize people for suffering from a disease and cause harm, for example by obliging drug addicts to obtain drugs of unknown purity from unreliable criminal sources at high prices, increasing the risk of overdose and death.^[2] While its critics are concerned that tolerating risky or illegal behaviour sends a message to the community that these behaviours are acceptable.

Firey Tongues

2010-05-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

John Sinclair Radio Show #325 (Firey Tongues 2010)

John Sinclair Radio Show #325

lar420

Published: May 26, 2010

Posted in: John Sinclair Radio Show

Tags: amsterdam, Baden Prince jr., Eddie Woods, Fly Agaric Studio, Hans Plompp, Jim Christy, john sinclair, John Sinclair & His Blues Scholars, Jordan Zinovich, Kain the Poet, radio free, Radio Free Amsterdam, Raymond Wiley, Robert Priest, Ruigood, Steve Fly, Steve Fly Agaric, Ted Jackson, The John Sinclair Foundation, Thelonious Monk, Vurige Tongen, Wayne Kramer

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
Virije Tongen, Ruigoord
Sunday, May 23, 2010 @ 5:00-6:00 pm [20-1021]
Amsterdam, NL.

Today Steve the Fly, Raymond Wiley & I took the 82 bus west to Ruigoord, the venerable alternative art & cultural community just outside of town, where I participated in the Vurige Tongen (Fiery Tongues) poetry festival with MC Hans Plomp and poets Jordan Zinovich, Jim Christy, Baden Prince jr., Ted Jackson, Robert Priest, Kain the Poet, and Eddie Woods, whose readings were crudely recorded by the Fly and edited for this episode of the radio show, interspersed with pertinent recordings by Thelonious Monk and a single cut by John Sinclair & His Blues Scholars featuring Wayne Kramer.

Playlist 325

[01] Opening Music: Thelonious Monk: Epistrophy
[02] John Sinclair Intro & Opening Comments with Steve Fly Agaric
[03] John Sinclair & His Blue Scholars: Cow
[04] Intro > Ted Jackson: Birthday Poem
[05] Ted Jackson: Van Gogh
[06] Thelonious Monk: Thelonious
[07] John Sinclair Conversation with Raymond Wiley
[08] Thelonious Monk: Rhythm-A-Ning (fragment) > Hans Plomp Intro >
[09] John Sinclair: a monk suite for ruigoord
[10] Thelonious Monk: Well You Needn’t
[11] Robert Priest: Reading the Bible Backwards
[12] Robert Priest: Conversation with John Sinclair, Steve Fly & Raymond Wiley
[13] Thelonious Monk: In Walked Bud
[14] Hans Plomp Intro > Kain the Poet: The Fear of Isolation
[15] Eddie Woods: For Roberto Valenza
[16] Closing Music: Thelonious Monk: Epistrophy

Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Recorded by Steve Fly Agaric at Vurige Tongen, Ruigood, Amsterdam
Produced, edited & assembled by John Sinclair at Fly Agaric Studio,
Amsterdam, May 24, 2010

Remixed & re-edited by John Sinclair at Fly Agaric Studio, May 26, 2010
Annotations corrected May 27, 2010 with special thanks to Eddie Woods
Posted by Larry Hayden
Executive Producer: Larry Hayden
Special thanks to Hans Plomp, Ted Jackson, Steve Fly & Raymond Wiley
© 2010 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Why can’t our politicians come clean on drugs?

2010-05-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

Why can’t our politicians come clean on drugs?

m lift..... May Day revellers leap from bridge.....

Brown vows to 'fight to the end'..... Cameron dismisses Lib Dem deal talk..... Lib Dems 'positive rallying point'..... Blears confirms immigrant claims..... Bank holiday downpours predicted..... Neighbours describe stabbing death..... Greek crowds mount austerity demo..... Naked celebration for artist Lowry..... Party revellers rescued from lift..... May Day revellers leap from bridge.....

Heavy, man: half of Californians wanted cannabis taxed to relieve the state deficit

Why can’t our politicians come clean on drugs?

Simon Jenkins
27.04.10

What is the single most curable evil afflicting community life in London? The answer is the criminalisation of drug use under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

It blights half the capital's youth at some stage or other. It hovers as a black cloud over every neighbourhood, pub and street corner. It causes crime and gangland disorder. It packs the courts and fills the prisons. It costs billions of pounds in personal loss and public spending.

Needless to say, not one party in the current General Election is prepared to discuss it. As a result, London is about to be taught a lesson in social policy by, of all places, America.

contin....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_1971

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_UK_election

Wikipedia and understanding the WAR ON SOME DRUGS.

2010-04-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_on_concepts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Against_Prohibition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Drug_Control_Programme

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_National_Drug_Control_Policy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_On_Some_Drugs

Early drug laws

Perhaps the earliest recorded example is the prohibition of the use of alcohol under Islamic law (Sharia), which is usually attributed to passages in the Qur'an dating from the 7th century. Like other Sharia laws, alcohol prohibition is enforced by Mutaween, the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Some Muslim scholars^[who?] assert that this prohibition actually addresses only the abuse of alcohol, but they do not have sufficient numbers or authority to override the familiar total prohibition. Although Islamic law is often interpreted as prohibiting all intoxicants (not only alcohol), the ancient practice of hashish smoking has continued throughout the history of Islam, against varying degrees of resistance. A major campaign against hashish-eating Sufis was conducted in Egypt in the 11th and 12th centuries resulting among other things in the burning of fields of cannabis.

Though the prohibition of illegal drugs was established under Islamic law, particularly against the use of hashish as a recreational drug, classical jurists of medieval Islamic jurisprudence medicinal and therapeutic purposes, and agreed that its "medical use, even if it leads to mental derangement, remains exempt" from punishment. In the 14th century, the Islamic scholar Az-Zarkashi spoke of "the permissibility of its use for medical purposes if it is established that it is beneficial."^[1] According to Mary Lynn Mathre, "In this legal distinction between the intoxicant and the medical uses of cannabis, medieval Muslim theologians were far ahead of present-day American law."^[1] accepted the use of hashish for

Religious intolerance was a motivation for drug prohibition in Christian Europe. In a move interpreted as support for the efforts of the Spanish Inquisition against the Arabs, in a 1484 fiat Pope Innocent VIII banned the use of cannabis. The persecution of heretics in the form of witch hunts also gathered momentum around this time, and frequently targeted users of medicinal and hallucinogenic herbs. The Inquisition proceeded apace in Meso-America and South America, where peyote (péyotl), ololiúqui, toloáche, teonanácatl and other sacred plants of the Mexican devil. culture were prohibited as works of the

In Northern Europe, the Protestants were also responsible for passing drug laws motivated by religious intolerance, according to Stephen Harrod Buhner. Buhner argues that the 1516 Reinheitsgebot, which stipulates that beer may only contain water, barley and hops was a "reflection of Protestant irritation about 'drugs' and the Catholic Church". Unlike the typically nuts blends widely used at the time (e.g. gruit), hops cause sedation and reduce libido. The exclusive use of hops had been compulsory in France since 1268.

A serious gap in Buhner's approach, though, is that Protestant Reformation was—largely involuntarily—kickstarted by Martin Luther in 1517, that is the year after the Reinheitsgebot Catholic Church, merely focusing on Indulgences turned into a full-scale revolt against Papal power from 1521 on (after the Diet of Worms) because he was unexpectedly backed by German princes such as Frederick III, Elector of Saxony who strongly objected to the Catholic Church meddling in their affairs and finances. Those princes had been seeking ways to undermine Papal Rome's influence and fundraising on their territories for quite some time when the Reformation actually started. Local monopolies on gruit being a cash cow for many a monastic community, they were an obvious target to undermine their financial power. Which means edicts to impose hops instead of gruit in beer were probably politically motivated, and also explains why many of those edicts did indeed come long before the Reformation even started. edict (for one year only, and in a part of Germany that never switched to Protestantism), and two centuries and a half after hops became compulsory in France. Besides the religious motivation there was also a political one: Martin Luther's criticism of the

Coffee almost followed the same fate as cannabis as its use spread from Ethiopia through the Middle East to Europe. Coffee, regarded as a Muslim drink, was prohibited to Orthodox Christians in its native Ethiopia until as late as 1889; it is now considered a national drink of Ethiopia for people of all faiths. In the Ottoman Empire, Murad IV attempted to prohibit coffee drinking to Muslims as haraam, arguing that it was an intoxicant, but this ruling was soon overturned after his death.^[2] The introduction of coffee in Europe from Muslim Turkey Pope Clement VIII sanctioned its use in 1600, declaring that it was "so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it." Its early association in Europe with rebellious political activities led to its banning in England, among other places.^[3] prompted calls for it to be banned as the devil's work, though

In late Qing Imperial China, opium imported by the British East India Company was vastly consumed by all social classes in Southern China. Between 1821 and 1837 imports of the drug increased fivefold. The Chinese government attempted to end this trade, on public health First Opium War). China was defeated and the war ended with the Treaty of Nanking, which protected foreign opium traders from Chinese law. A related American treaty promised to end the smuggling of opium by Americans. It took until the next Opium War for the trade to be legalized. The resulting trade purportedly set into motion a chain of events that would lead to the massive Taiping Rebellion. grounds. The effort was initially successful with the destruction of all British opium stock in May 1839. However, to protect this trade, the British declared war on China ( --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_On_Some_Drugs

Zero degrees of separation: The social Network, what is to be done.

2010-04-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

Zero degrees of separation: The social Network, what is to be done.

All over the internet new connections and being made at an ever increasing daily rate, group and swarm intelligence is swarming, grouping and the world is awakening or birthing itself into a new level of coherence. A new game emerges each day when we wake from our nightsleep, with new rules and players, and we navigate the field, searching for meaningful games to play and share with others.

We are blown to atoms, bits and genes in the information age, like the Hadron super-collider, identity has been blown into ambiguity, everybody and everything fission fusion collusion. Here Comes Everybody’ wrote Joyce, and now we are all thrust into the palace halls of the 1000 narrators searching for the author, looking for the plot to pick up the thread, to check that one is living and writing, not reading and dead, some said that these voices are schizophrenia and/or hallucination, and helped to brainwash the Human nations with psychiatric double speak keeping mum about MK Ultra.

Everybody will feel ripped to the tits now the World Wide Web is awake and turning over the ages of mankind at ever greater speeds, bootstrapping itself into higher dimensions, doing more with less, hyper-intelligent computing.

I feel we need a new set of standards, ark, listen to me, I never thought I would say this but there we have it. Steve.

Digital Economy Bill begins passage through Commons (LABYRINTH)

2010-04-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

Digital Economy Bill begins passage through Commons

On 6 April 2010, MPs began deliberations at second reading on the Digital Economy Bill, which seeks to tackle online piracy and illegal file-sharing by enforcing internet bans for persistent offenders.

It also provides for the digital switchover of radio by 2015 and modernisation of mobile and wireless broadband connections.

A clause allowing ministers wide-ranging powers to amend copyright law to respond to future technological changes was removed as the bill underwent scrutiny in the House of Lords.

Peers voted to replace it with new arrangements allowing websites containing "substantial" amounts of copyright material to be blocked.

This has proved controversial with internet companies, consumer rights campaigners and academics who fear it could "threaten freedom of speech and the open internet".

MPs expressed concern that there was not enough time left to scrutinise the bill fully before Parliament is dissolved for the general election.

Seventh UK Drug Adviser Quits in Drugs Row

2010-04-03T16:57:00.000-07:00

Seventh Drug Adviser Quits in Drugs Row

April 3, 2010 by henryhunter · 2 Comments

[Translate]

Yet another member of the British Governments drug advisory board have quit because media and political pressure put on the control, or lack thereof, of drugs in the UK.
The exodus began months ago when the head of the committee, Professor David Nutt was publicly villainized by the Government and media for claiming that marijuana was illegal for political and not scientific reasons and that you have more chance of dying riding a horse than you do taking ecstasy. He was followed by four of his colleagues and then in the last week two more has jumped ship.

Mephedrone

The reason for the two new departures is the imminent ban of a drug called mephedrone, and while the Government and media would have the public believe that dozens of people have died because they took the drug, the actual figure of people who have actually been proven to have died from taking the drug is rather low and less exaggerated… It’s one. One person. Not 25.
The drug will apparently be banned by the end of April, and it is certainly curious that the ban comes not from the drug advisers, but from politicians. What can be deduced from this, I guess, would be that either Gordon Brown or his friends regularly take drugs and are in the best position to decide which are safe for us, or there is absolutely no scientific basis for the banning of illegal drugs in the UK. If the advisers would rather quit their job than go along with the Governments decisions, it says a lot for the laws, and the supposed science behind it.
The Liberal Democrat Party home affairs spokesperson Chris Huhne announced that the only way to have science fact introduced, finally, into the drug argument would be to make the ACMD (Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs) completely separate from Government.
It may seem like a good idea to some people, the banning of mephedrone and the continual banning of other drugs, but they would be wrong. A substance of any sort cannot be banned without scientific evidence to support it. You need only look at the drugs that are not only legal but advertised as everyday consumer products… You had a bad day at work? Don’t worry, you can stop by the pub on the way home and drink yourself stupid. Finding it hard to get motivated in the morning? Have a coffee that will get you going, and don’t stress, nothing goes with coffee like a nice chemical filled cigarette. Enjoy these drugs, these drugs, along with the chemical ones that apparently cure all sorts of ailments physical or mental are fine, just don’t take the ones that the Government say are illegal. Because they are fun. And your Government don’t want you having fun, when you could be working, or reproducing.
It reminds me of the last time I took magic mushrooms, which are now as illegal as heroin in the UK, me and my cousin watched Fortress starring Christopher Lambert, then went into a field near his house, and then I woke up covered in highlighter pen which looked really good under his UV light. The story has no point, except that I had a great time. And that is the point. I can legally buy a drug that makes a lot of people violent and angry and incapable of speech… But I can’t buy or consume drugs that make me realize that Fortress starring Christopher Lambert is a great film.

The fact that so many have quit, two of them being the head of the committee, suggests to me that the drug laws in this country are not being made by people who know what they are talking about… That is never going to work, and their knee-jerk reaction to drugs that they seem to be just hearing about is turning millions of children into criminals overnight because the trickledown effect is like a poisoned river. The Government makes something up, the papers print it, and the parents absorb selective parts of it and then demand the drug be banned. Whereas people should be given the chance to educate children correctly on drugs, instead of constant fear mongering. People have always taken drugs, illegal or otherwise, and just because the papers make you believe that drug use is a brand new thing that directly involves your child, doesn’t mean you have to accept it… Read what the people who actually know what they are talking about… Well, if the Government would stop firing them or making them quit then you could maybe have a chance at scientific information.
http://worldnewsvine.com/2010/04/seventh-drug-adviser-quits-in-drugs-row/comment-page-1/

C = Blog2

2010-03-24T18:17:00.000-07:00

where

C is the channel capacity in bits per second;

B is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz (passband bandwidth in case of a modulated signal);

S is the total received signal power over the bandwidth (in case of a modulated signal, often denoted C, i.e. modulated carrier), measured in watt or volt²;

N is the total noise or interference power over the bandwidth, measured in watt or volt²; and

S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the communication signal to the Gaussian noise interference expressed as a linear power ratio (not as logarithmic decibels).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem

MOTHER JONES and some drugs.

2010-03-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2009/07/totally-wasted

LSD Spooks and me.

2010-03-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

In 1953 LSD was used at Powick hospital in the UK by one 'Ronald Sandison', who's book about these sessions can be found by a google books search. (Sandison does not seem all bad, with a background in Jungian' psychoanalysis and a willingness, at least, to explore the unconscious, his own and that of others).

When I discovered how the Government abused these drugs throughout the 1950's I become all the more thankful that for a moment there some cats let the Geni' out the bottle for a while in the 1960's and turned this particular psychological weapon into a new game and 'bliss bomb' to turn on and boot up the massholes.

I found 'The Secret History of Acid' an informative read, and first discovered the Powick' LSD scenario in this gripping and well researched book.

Sandison used to work with John Rawlings Rees in the 1940's in London. "Rees became first president of the World Federation for Mental Health"

Rees interviewed Rudolph Hess, along with Maj' Frank Foley of the XX Bureau.

Foley lived a stones throw from Powick during the years of the Sandison LSD experiments (approx. 1953-58), in a small town called Stourbridge. (That is mentioned in both Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and The Cantos of Ezra Pound.

Edward Elgar had a long association with Powick, being bandmaster their in 1879.

...drums please...

Thank GOD for Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kessey, Leary, RAW and the 'psychedelic culture shock' that swept across the world and transformed humanity with new art and new synthesis. Plus John Lennon was a fan of LSD and a popular example of the creative, poetic use of the substance in the right set and setting.

A century of psychiatry, psychotherapy and group analysis:
By Ronald Sandison

LSD in the NEWS 2010:

How LSD changed Cary Grant's Private life.
CIA's LSD made a French Village Mad (or more mad than the CIA?)
MK-ULTRA and the NEW YORK subway system.
New Zealand say's NO to LSD law change
Brotherhood Of Eternal Love (Book Review)

I LOVE ACID.

John Sinclair's long strange trip is taking another twist

2010-03-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

The big push
A planned 'compassion center' could test medical pot law

MT Photo: Travis R. Wright

Holice P. Wood and John Sinclair

MT Photo: Curt Guyette

Third Coast’s Ypsi “compassion center.”

SEE ALSO

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By Curt Guyette

John Sinclair's long strange trip is taking another twist

Arrested in 1969 for giving two joints to an undercover narc, the poet, writer and political activist paid a heavy price for assuming a high profile in the counterculture of the 1960s. Sentenced to 10 years, he served 29 months in prison — attracting widespread attention and a slew of high-profile supporters, most famously the late John Lennon — before the Michigan Supreme Court heard his appeal and ruled the state's marijuana law was unconstitutional.

Now, at an age when most people have retired, he's about to join the vanguard again, preparing to help push the envelope of the state's medical marijuana law as he and a group of fellow travelers prepare to open what will be Detroit's first "compassion center."

Planned for the city's Eastern Market, the center is envisioned to become a place where patients can buy and consume pot in the company of others — without having to worry about getting hauled away in handcuffs.

"A place of fellowship," is how Sinclair describes the vision. "A place where people can get their medicine, relax, enjoy music. You have to have good music."

A few years ago, such a plan might have been written off as some stoner pipe dream. But when 63 percent of Michigan's voters passed the ballot measure known as Prop. 1 in 2008, the seeds of change were planted. The law allowed individuals with a doctor's recommendation to legally grow and buy pot. It also said that registered caregivers, who could have as many as five patients, could grow up to 12 plants for each patient.

Nearly a year after the state officially began accepting applications from prospective patients, businesses associated with medical marijuana are budding everywhere.

There are doctors' clinics that specialize in writing the recommendations necessary to obtain a patient card issued by the state's Department of Community Health. There are entrepreneurs who will teach neophytes how to successfully tend cannabis crops. Some carpenters and plumbers are beginning to specialize in building "grow rooms" and installing indoor irrigation systems, creating jobs for skilled tradesmen hard hit by the collapse of the housing market. Business is booming for garden shops that sell grow lights and other supplies indoor operations need. Publications like the Michigan Medical Marijuana Magazine — a glossy monthly packed with ads — are springing up. Flip through this or any recent issue of Metro Times and you'll see an abundance of the same type of ads.

In a state with a 15 percent unemployment rate, the law has been a financial blessing to many. From a business perspective, it represents a market that is expanding at a mind-boggling pace.

To date, according to the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH), 20,665 applications have been received since April 6, 2009, with nearly 11,000 patient cards being issued. Nearly 4,700 caregivers have been registered as well. But those numbers don't fully convey the deluge of interest in recent months. Six months ago, the department was receiving 400 applications a week from prospective caregivers and patients; that number is now at 1,000 a week. Instead of processing these applications within 20 days, as the law proscribes, it is taking about five times that long.

What is quickly becoming a significant issue is how authorities will deal with dispensary-like operations where patients can go to purchase pot from people who aren't their designated caregivers. Earlier this year, Ypsilanti's Third Coast Seed Co. became the first enterprise to openly establish a members-only club where medical marijuana is sold.

The reason that's just now happening, at least in part, is that the law Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved doesn't directly address such an enterprise.

Certain aspects of that law are clearly spelled out. If you are a patient who has received a doctor's recommendation, then you can legally possess as much as 2.5 ounces of marijuana. You can grow as many as 12 plants at a time to provide your own medicine, or you can obtain it elsewhere — from another patient, from your designated caregiver, or from an illegal dealer. It doesn't matter. The law was crafted with the idea that legitimate patients should have no obstacles standing between them and their medicine.

The law is also clear about core aspects regarding caregivers. They can grow as many as 12 plants for each patient, and can have up to five patients. If a caregiver also is a patient, that means they can have as many as 72 plants growing at any one time. With each plant producing an ounce or more of the potent bud that gets smoked, growers planting the maximum number of plants allowed under the law can realistically expect to harvest several pounds every few months.

With medical-grade marijuana selling for between $200 and $400 when bought by the ounce, and as much as $650 an ounce when sold in gram-sized increments, which is the way it is done at Third Coast, there is clearly money to be made.

As many people are quick to point out, though, much more involved than just money.

Above all else are the patients — people whose very real suffering compelled Michigan voters to join what is now a total of 14 states in recognizing that marijuana serves a legitimate medicinal purpose.

But along with the true patients, there are recreational users who are taking advantage of the new law to grow or buy weed without breaking the law. Along with specific qualifying conditions specified in the law — debilitating afflictions such as cancer, MS and AIDS — there is the catchall of "chronic pain" that, with a bit of effort, allows those determined enough to obtain a card to succeed with the assistance of a compliant doctor.

There's also the fact that the law contains what have been described as "gray areas" that have yet to be tested in court. The most significant of these involve the idea that caregivers can, at a price, provide excess product to other caregivers and patients can sell to other patients. Both of those concepts are key to legally operating the kind of cooperative venture planned for Detroit.

Also likely to be tested in court are efforts by some jurisdictions to pass preemptive ordinances that will keep businesses like the one already existing in Ypsilanti and the one being planned for Detroit from opening in their communities.

And then there are people such as Sinclair and Wood, longtime smokers who see passage of the law as a significant step forward, a step they have happily embraced, but still one that falls short of the desired goal of having pot legalized.

There is still much sorting out to be done. But that isn't stopping people from taking the leap into a future that isn't completely certain.

One of them is a guy we'll call Sam.

In from the cold

Sam doesn't want his real name used for a straightforward reason: For the past three decades he's been growing pot illegally.

In that regard, it was a matter of a family tradition rolling forward. His father grew pot, and, although he tried to dissuade Sam from following in his footsteps, the son did what teenagers often do and ignored Dad's advice.

He'd taken up gardening while still a kid, and found he had a knack for it. At one point he realized that if he could grow tomatoes, he could also produce the pot he began smoking as a teenager.

He eventually became what he calls a "guerilla grower," sneaking onto the farms of southeastern Michigan under the cover of night to plant his illegal crop. It was a risky business, transporting his seedlings to rural locales and then returning monthly to tend them.

"I'd do it between 3 and 4:30 a.m." he says. "Nobody — and I mean nobody — is up at that time."

There was always the risk of getting caught. And with that risk came stress, but there was also an undeniable thrill that came from sneaking through fields in the dead of night.

The time came, though, when all that risk taking caught up with him. Police raided his home, seizing four of his vehicles and "most of the contents of my house." He was charged with felony drug trafficking, but the charges were eventually dropped when a judge learned that the raid on his house was conducted without a warrant. Still, his freedom came at a cost of about $15,000 in lawyers' fees.

Now in his 40s, Sam lives in the metro Detroit area, where he runs a small business. He doesn't want to be any more specific than that. Years of trying to stay below law enforcement's radar have made him a wary man.

Until recently, he says, he had never even typed the word "marijuana" into his computer's search engine, afraid that doing so might draw the attention of some government agency that could be monitoring Web traffic.

Even so, he's taking the risk of talking with a reporter because he wants people to understand — even though he knows it is difficult for nonsmokers to comprehend — that it was never all about the money. He truly enjoys the growing of pot, and then enjoying the fruits of his labor. Not just the mind-altering effects, but also savoring its smell and flavor, the way wine connoisseurs relish sipping a vintage cabernet.

Which is why, even after the expense of fighting the felony arrest and having his property seized, and after a couple of drug-related misdemeanor arrests — he continued his guerrilla forays into fields under the cover of dark.

Early on in his career, he says, 100 percent of his income came from growing and selling pot. After his bust he scaled operations way back, but continued to grow enough for himself and a small, tight-knit circle of friends.

As Sam talks, sitting on the kitchen table is a quart-size mason jar filled with the bud that he has grown. A half-smoked joint sits nearby. His modest home is infused with the incense-like fragrance of smoked weed.

With hair that drops down to his chest when not pulled back in a ponytail, he has the air of a '60s flower child. He's proud of his skill as a grower, and of the high quality of the aromatic bud that he produces.

After years of hiding his guerilla growing from virtually everyone he knew, Sam is on the verge of stepping into the legal world of medical marijuana. He's applied to be both a registered patient and a caregiver. Already, he says, more people want to designate him to be a caregiver than he can legally handle.

Shoulder and knee pain qualified him for the patient card, he says. Asked if he really needs pot to deal with the problem, his answer is canny: "Not necessarily," he says, then adds, "but that doesn't necessarily mean I don't need it."

This much is certain though: "Either way, I would be smoking."

His ambiguity regarding the medical necessity of his pot smoking reveals an important fact about the effects of the law's implementation: A certain percentage of people getting their cards are doing so simply because it allows them to smoke recreationally without having to worry about getting busted.

The same can be said, at least to some extent, about people who are growers obtaining their caregiver cards, says Sam.

Under the law, for someone to qualify as a caregiver, they must first have at least one person who will go on record as their patient. Once they are legally established — and don't have much worry that their grow will be raided — they can always sell surplus product on the black market.

"I'm sure there are people who are doing that," he says.

His intent, however, is to become strictly legal. What his patients don't buy — what's referred to as "overage" — he plans to sell to operations such as the one being run by Ypsilanti's Third Coast Seed Co. and the planned compassion center Sinclair and Wood are preparing to open in Detroit.

"That ability to sell our overage, that will be like our bonus check," says Sam.

Unlike other aspects of the law, however, the ability to do so is not clearly defined.

"That's a legal theory at this point," says Detroiter Tim Beck, a marijuana activist who worked with lawyers from Lansing's prestigious Dykema law firm to craft the language in the ballot measure that voters approved in 2008.

At some point, Beck and others expect, that theory will be tested in court.

Sam realizes that coming in from the cold world of the black market — identifying himself to the state as both a smoker and a grower — carries a risk if he follows through with the plan to peddle the overage to other caregivers.

"The question," he says, "is, 'How do you stretch the money-making aspect while staying within the parameters of the law?'"

By his calculation, after overhead is deducted, he could net as much as $65,000 a year legally doing something he loves.

That number could be lower if the price of "product" comes down. There are already people selling high-grade pot for as little as $200 an ounce. But Sam is fine with that.

And though apprehensive about what the future might hold, he also feels liberated.

"I'm not sure what's going to happen, but me and some others are willing to stick our necks out and take a chance. But then again, that's something we've been doing for a long time."

Public spirit

Just how much things have already changed as a result of Prop. 1's passage was made clear on a recent Wednesday evening in Detroit.

A woman who goes by the moniker Ms. Chocolate was holding a compassion club meeting in Detroit. About 20 people were in attendance. Nearly all were there to learn about the law and what they needed to do obtain their patient cards.

What makes this meeting particularly notable is its location: the Sherwood Forest branch of the Detroit Public Library on the city's west side.

Think about that for a moment: A group of prospective pot smokers gathering to talk openly about using marijuana in a public library.

Along with providing information, Ms. Chocolate is looking to make some sales. It's not weed she's peddling, though. She has copies of the latest issue of Michigan Medical Marijuana Magazine — which features an "exclusive interview" with rapper Snoop Dogg on the cover. She informs attendees that the library has just agreed to put a copy of the publication at its magazine rack so patrons can peruse it for free. Also available in the library's reference section is a copy of a recipe book she wrote so that those who want to make marijuana-infused foods will also have that resource available to them.

Those who would like a copy to take home can purchase one from Ms. Chocolate for $15. Sales help provide her with "gas money," she says.

Over the course of 90 minutes, she covers much ground. The presentation is no-nonsense, with an emphasis on the practical. As evidenced by the cookbook, she is particularly knowledgeable about the issue of how to take medication without having to light up a joint.

She cautions those who want to try that approach to not make the mistake of having an entire meal comprised of marijuana-laced dishes.

"You don't want to have a meal of medicated meatloaf with medicated mac and cheese with medicated cornbread," she says.

She also points out that, unlike smoking, mixing medication with food results in a delayed reaction. Instead of the instant effect obtained when smoked, pot, when eaten, takes about a half hour to kick in. The upside — in addition to avoiding the harmful aspects of smoke — is that the effects can last longer.

She also explains how different strains of pot produce different results. "Indica will knock you on your butt," she says. "Sativa will keep you up. So you have to be aware of what you are using."

In that regard, choosing a knowledgeable caregiver is important. Noting that it was likely that there were a few caregivers in attendance (there were), Ms. Chocolate told the prospective patients that if someone approaches you, "Don't be too quick to sign up. You want to make sure the two of you are compatible."

Find out if they grow themselves, she says, because not all of them do. "You don't want street-grade," she warns. And beware of prospective caregivers who are just looking at patients as a source of income. "A lot of people," she says, "are only looking at this as a cash cow."

And even though these meetings are a place for patients and caregivers to hook up, any actual trading, selling or use of seeds, plant clones or medicine is absolutely forbidden.

This is, after all, a library.

"And, let's be honest," she adds. "We don't really know who is here. We don't know who might be a cop, who might be DEA."

Or, for that matter, a reporter. In this case though, that reporter announces his presence, and asks at the end how many people showed up to learn about becoming patients. The results of this quick survey, and several conversations that take place once the meeting breaks up, give some clue as to just how many people aren't looking at this law as a way to get high for fun.

Three of the people need canes to get around. Even some of the particularly fit-looking people have serious problems, several as the result of auto accidents that caused painful back and neck injuries. One after another gives testimony to the fact that they find pot a superior alternative to opiate-based prescription drugs such as Vicodin and Oxycontin.

One man, a 52-year-old former security guard who says he's still suffering the effects of an auto accident that occurred nine years ago, explains, "There's a lot of people like me who don't like to take pills. The marijuana just works better. If it wasn't for that weed, I'd be in a world of trouble."

He says he's come to this meeting because he's interested in learning how to grow his own medicine. There's also a 40-year-old former teacher — the victim of a car accident involving a drunk driver — who says he's in so much pain he can't concentrate. Prescription medicines don't do the trick. "I'm just trying to find the right way to control this pain," he says.

There is at least one caregiver here on this night. A recreational smoker, he used to grow his own pot but stopped several years ago because he found it too "paranoia-inducing."

Tall and slender, neatly dressed and well spoken, he says that he began growing again last year. "The day it became legal, I had my paperwork in," he says. He has one patient — a family member who has AIDS. He's at the meeting to "screen" potential patients.

He's looking for two or three additional patients with "legitimate health issues," he says. He's also looking for people he thinks he'll be compatible with. "That's important," he says, "because if I take someone on as a patient, that ties me to them, both legally and beyond that. I'm responsible for making sure they get their medicine."

That medicine is grown in a closet-sized space at his home in Detroit. He says his intent is to "keep the price under the street value." One thing he finds interesting since the law has been implemented is the number of "middlemen seeking to make a fast buck off of sick people."

As for himself, he has no intention of applying for a patient card. The way he sees it, the caregiver status provides enough cover to keep him protected. He's allowed to legally grow and possess the weed, so the chances of getting busted for using, he thinks, are remote.

Growing smaller

One of the reasons that caregiver has little fear of being arrested is that the Michigan law was written with the intent of keeping production limited to a small scale, says Detroit activist Beck.

The idea of maintaining a ratio of one caregiver to every five patients, and limiting the total number of plants any one person could grow to 72, was that such operations wouldn't be large enough to warrant the attention of federal drug agents.

Hard-line conservative George W. Bush was still president at the time and, no matter how many states might make medical marijuana legal, its cultivation, sale and possession remain a federal crime.

The Obama administration has promised to honor state laws, but that could change if he's voted out in a few years. Whatever the attitude of the person occupying the White House, explains Beck, the crafters of Michigan law wanted to do everything they could to limit the likelihood that black-helmeted Drug Enforcement Agency teams would be kicking down the doors of Michiganders only interested in providing medicine to a handful of patients each.

Which is why, he says, California-style dispensaries — where any card-holding patient can walk into a storefront business and purchase pot — were not included in the Michigan law.

"If nobody's making big money, then you are not going to attract the feds," explains Beck. "Some dispensaries in California are making millions of dollars. We didn't want to do anything like that so we could avoid inviting the DEA to come in and destroy the ability of people to get the medicine they need."

Instead, the crafters of the law envisioned enabling people like Cathy Hinkle, a caregiver, patient and activist who lives in the small town of Mio in Oscoda County.

Hinkle, in a phone interview, says she saw addiction to prescription drugs decimate the body and eventually kill one close family member. She saw alcohol ruin the life of another.

Collecting unemployment after being laid off from a factory job, she suffers from hepatitis C and a form of muscular dystrophy, both of which are conditions the state's medical marijuana act covers. In addition to serving as president of the Michigan Medical Marihuana Education and Defense Organization, she's also a caregiver. She says she charges patients $200 an ounce for their medicine, and bristles at the idea that some people are charging as much as $500 and ounce.

"Those people are giving the whole thing a bad name," she says. "For some people, it's all about the money."

As part of her role as an activist, she fields calls from patients who say they are illegally being harassed by cops,

"There is," she says, "a lot of ignorance out there on the part of law enforcement."

Hinkle seems like exactly the kind of person activist Beck says the law was intended to address, both as a caregiver and a patient: someone who operates on a small scale, only recovering what it costs her to produce and deliver medicine to her patients.

"The DEA doesn't have the resources to root out small medical providers," he adds. "So we intentionally created a system of small operators. In no way, shape of form was this designed for people to make big money. Just the opposite."

That's also why activists in the state's medical marijuana movement railed against proposed legislation introduced last year by state Sen. Wayne Kuipers (R-Holland). Kuipers' bill attempted to, in part, mandate that medical marijuana production be limited to 10 state-approved operations.

One problem with that is such large-scale efforts would be easy targets "if another jihadist like Bush gets elected," says Beck.

Kuipers also proposes making doctors write prescriptions for medical marijuana instead of just making recommendations, as the current law dictates. One problem with the senator's proposal in this case is that federal law prohibits doctors from prescribing pot.

As Beck notes, the Kuipers bill has virtually no chance of gaining approval because the medical marijuana law, which became a statute through the ballot process, can only be amended by a three-quarters majority in both the state House and Senate.

"That kind of majority is almost impossible to get," says Beck. "Kuipers knows that. He's just grandstanding because he's running for Congress in a conservative district and he's trying to get votes by making it look like he's tough on drugs. But he can't be serious about actually getting anything done."

While certain of the futility of Kuipers' efforts, Beck isn't so sure there'll being widespread acceptance of efforts to duplicate the Third Coast Seed Co. model.

Club cannabis

Jaime Lowell and Darrell Stavros sit around a small oval table in a second floor office at the "compassion center" they helped launch in downtown Ypsilanti at the start of this year.

The run-of-the-mill building, which looks like an old house, formerly provided office space for a mortgage company. It seems somehow fitting that one facet of the housing market collapse has been replaced by a business that appears to have the trajectory of a rocket taking off.

And the guys at the Third Coast Seed Co. have gotten in at the earliest of stages.

In terms of the business they've opened, they are doing in the open what they say 30 or 40 others are doing surreptitiously.

And what they are doing is helping provide pot to certified patients who haven't necessarily designated anyone at this private, members-only club as their caregivers.

When it's suggested that they are operating in a gray area of the law, Lowell and Stavros disagree. They say the law clearly allows the sort of patient-to-patient transfers that occur here.

Prices — posted on a menu — range from $8 to $25 a gram. At the top end, that translates to as much as $650 a pound. To critics who carp about that kind of premium price, Lowell and Stavros point out that their business comes with the kind of overhead that caregivers growing a small number of plants don't have to deal with.

On the table in the office where Lowell and Stavros sit down with a reporter, there is a scale and a label maker used to designate the small packets of weed that have names like "Super Silver Haze." Bits of bright-green pot fleck the table. Empty mason jars, which help keep product fresh and moist, line the shelves of an open closet.

But don't get the wrong impression.

"We don't have rooms full of bales of pot," says Lowell, a 42-year-old former real estate appraiser.

What they've done, Lowell explains, is create an alternative way for legally designated patients to conveniently obtain the medicine they need. It doesn't replace the patient-caregiver relationship spelled out in the law, he says. Rather, it "supplements" it.

It ends up being a situation where everybody wins. Patients get easy access to medicine. The downtown gets an economic boost in the form of increased foot traffic and a business occupying a formerly vacant building. And Lowell and Stavros get what they hope will be a viable business.

As part of that model, they rent out space in their building to what most would call a head shop but what Lowell refers to as an "alternative medical equipment" outlet, where customers can purchase hand-blown glass pipes and other paraphernalia.

A company selling grow lights has a display in the lobby. And a firm looking to specialize in providing security systems for growing operations has set up shop there as well. Everyone working in the building has a patient card, says Lowell.

Cost of becoming a member of the club is $12 a year. Lowell and Stavros don't want to say for the record how many members they've attracted so far. "We don't want to give fuel to anyone who might want to screw with us," offers Lowell by way of explanation.

Along with running their club, they also spend time visiting other municipalities, attempting to ease any concerns officials elsewhere might have about a similar operation opening in their town.

If they are right in their assertion, and this club is completely legal, then what they are doing here will be duplicated in other towns. And, in fact, that is already happening, with similar high-visibility clubs springing up in Ann Arbor, Williamston and Traverse City within the past month or so.

The flip side of that equation are municipalities such as Livonia, which in December amended a zoning ordinance to include a ban on enterprises that are contrary to local, state or federal laws. The key word there is federal, because anything having to do with the production, sale or use of marijuana is illegal. A handful of other municipalities have either considering or have passed similar ordinances.

The legal director of the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union, Michael Steinberg, says his group is keeping a close eye on the situation to make sure that these laws aren't used to keep legitimate patients from having access to the medicine as provided for in the state law.

Detroit attorney Matt Abel, who has a long career built around defending people accused of marijuana-related crimes, says his phone is ringing off the hook these days. Along with the usual types of clients, he's daily fielding calls from people seeking his consultation on how to set up marijuana-related businesses.

(The prospect that Californians will approve a ballot measure that completely legalizes pot in that state has medical marijuana growers there increasingly looking to Michigan as a new market, since, as one West Coast grower recently told Metro Times, Michigan "is considered virgin territory.")

The Third Coast model, Abel says, certainly appears to have the law on its side. Informed as it is, though, his opinion is just that — an opinion. As with attempts by some cities to pass ordinances attempting to keep marijuana-related businesses out of their towns, no one will know with complete certainty what is legal and what is not unless a case ends up in front of a judge.

That's a possibility Sinclair and Wood say they — with the help of Lowell and Stavros and others — are preparing to face as they pursue plans to open a compassion center in Detroit's Eastern Market.

Two sides of a coin

Sitting down to breakfast at a Coney Island restaurant in Eastern Market, Sinclair and Wood — who say they've been close friends for a dozen years or more — are a contrast in styles. In his early 40s, Wood, with jet-black hair pulled back in a ponytail and Jack Nicholson's expressive eyebrows, is a compact bundle of intense energy.

Sinclair, at 68, is low-key and relaxed, easily working his way through a New York Times crossword puzzle in between talking with us and digging into an omelet with double feta cheese.

As they discuss plans for their venture, Wood focuses on organizational plans, gathering together what will be — at least initially — a collective of 10 caregiver-growers who will form the heart of this enterprise. He's the nuts-and-bolts logistics guy.

Sinclair, who's spent much of his time in Amsterdam in recent years, is the philosopher.

Both have long been unapologetic pot smokers, disdainful of any law that tries to tell them what they can or cannot do when it comes to what they choose to inhale or consume.

But now Sinclair has already obtained his patient's card, and Wood is waiting for the state to process his application to become both a patient and registered caregiver.

Both also think pot should be legal, period, regardless of why someone wants to use it. But the medical marijuana law, they say, has created a giant crack in the decades-old effort to demonize weed, and they are going to take advantage of that opening.

"I've always thought of pot as medicinal," says Sinclair. "I don't know how anyone could handle the nightmare of post-industrial society without it."

There's a mischievous gleam behind the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses when he talks, saying with a grin, "I like being a patient. I might be a sick motherfucker, but I'm not a criminal any more."

Wood, on the other hand, seems more fueled by outrage over some outside force trying to dictate how he lives his life.

Both vent about what Sinclair describes as the "massive police apparatus" that has been fed by the war on drugs for the past 40 years.

And while Wood has spent hours working out the potential costs associated with their planned compassion center, Sinclair says with complete believability, "I don't look at it as a business."

This is coming from a man who spent nearly two-and-half years in a maximum security prison, vilified as a danger to society and denied bond while his case was being appealed, all because he handed a few grams' worth of plant to an undercover narcotics officer.

And yet, as they sit here, it is with the realization that they will soon be testing the limits of Michigan's medical marijuana law. Wood says he's already given a copy of his house key to a friend, with instructions on how to care for his pets and a list of people to call if he ends up getting arrested.

They have chosen the place where they are going to make their stand, in a building not far from this restaurant.

It will be a place where people can purchase and consume the medicine Michigan's voters have said they are legally entitled to use. A place where they can learn to grow that medicine for themselves. A place where they can relax and listen to music and enjoy the fellowship of other patients.

How the Detroit Police and the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office will respond isn't known. The authorities themselves don't seem to have figured out how to handle a situation they haven't yet had to confront.

"Our office has attended trainings offered by the Prosecuting Attorney's Association of Michigan on medical marijuana and related issues," Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement e-mailed to Metro Times. "We plan on participating in future trainings and then formulating a policy on this issue."

And while Worthy formulates a policy, Sinclair and Wood are forging ahead with their plan, making no apologies for expecting to get paid in return for investing themselves in this venture, and for taking the risk that comes with testing the law's limits.

"For me, as a business guy, I don't expect the payoff to be huge," says Wood. "This isn't easy money. But it's about more than just the money for us."

"When we talk about this being a compassion center," says Sinclair, "that's not just some semantic trick" to distinguish what we're doing from establishing a dispensary. "There is a true ideological side to what we are doing."

It is also, he says, about "not having to go sneak into some alley anymore if I want to smoke. [In the 1960s] I set out to challenge the law and ended up in prison for it. I went through some severe shit for smoking some weed, but I succeeded in challenging the constitutionality of the laws that were in place at that time."

This time around, he says, "We're not looking for trouble. Just the opposite. We're trying to take the trouble out of this whole thing."

"The thing is," says Wood, "there are some of us who are stepping up to define this law before someone else defines it for us."

Curt Guyette is Metro Times news editor. Contact him at 313-202-804 or cguyette@metrotimes.com.

Drug War Without End By T. P. WILKINSON

2010-03-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

Rosetta Stone and the Code of National Security

Drug War Without End

By T. P. WILKINSON

When I was a child the older daughter of my father’s best friend was reading a 1960 book by Ursula Nordstrom called The Secret Language. I remember searching for the book in the school library but failing to find it, begged Susan to lend me her copy. At that age I was convinced the book must have been about codes and I wanted to know everything I could about what people really meant when they said things, things maybe I didn’t understand. In fact the book was not about codes and I returned the book to Susan, disappointed that there were nothing but a few slang words for things at the school described in the book.

When I was a bit older my father gave me a book I haven’t forgotten either. Before I read all his Ian Fleming and Alistair McLean paperbacks, I read Stanley Lovell’s Of Spies and Stratagems, a humorous memoir by an OSS officer, telling more about the things “Wild Bill” Donovan’s boys screwed up than about what they really did. For years it shaped my conception of secret services and spying in America or by Americans. Even after years of reading about US government covert action throughout the world, I had this vision of well-meaning incompetence on the part of soldiers and bureaucrats trying their best to preserve and protect the USA.

It was not until the death of Philip Agee, probably the dean if not the patron saint of critics of the American national security apparatus, in 2008, that I felt compelled to read exposé Inside the Company. It was Agee’s memoir, followed by his book On the Run and the collection Dirty Work, which made me realise that to understand the CIA it was necessary to comprehend the secret language of national security of which it is the ultimate guardian. There is a code, if you will, an open code, at the core of the central processing unit of America’s empire. Agee was the first person to publish that code and like the Rosetta stone it has allowed the rest of us—at least those who are interested-- to read the hieroglyphics in which US foreign and domestic policy is written.

Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program and The Strength of the Wolf, has published a third volume in what might be called a "Ring" cycle to elaborate the language of America's elite in its wars for the "Rhine gold", aka "national security". Using the methods of a therapist and chronicler, Valentine begins his books with the apparently naive and inquisitive eyes and ears of a youth asking his elders "what they did in the war?" He retains a respectful tone throughout what are essentially interviews and intervenes only to provide needed background for the reader or to occasionally compare the stories of various performers in the same scene. The author only appears when it is necessary to clarify something either he or the reader is unlikely to understand or where confusion arises.

The Strength of the Pack, like its predecessor the Strength of the Wolf, takes its title from the Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Law of the Jungle". Kipling describes how the wolf and the pack complement each other. The power of one is ultimately dependent on that of the other. There is no such thing as a truly lone wolf. In Wolf, Valentine records the story of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and its origin in the internal security policies of the US government at the beginning of WWI. The demise of the FBN in 1968 coincided with an interregnum in which the so-called war on drugs was managed or mismanaged just like the war in Vietnam with which it was intricately connected. Richard Nixon's attempt to recover US control in Southeast Asia and establish political hegemony at home coincided with creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency charged with continuing the US government's pursuit of international narcotics trafficking and policing of the global drug trade. The Strength of the Pack is the story of how the legacy of Anslinger, the FBN's boss, and the contradictions between publicly proclaimed policies of interdiction and the actual policies of the national security state have created an apparatus based on hypocrisy and deceit which corrupts those who believe in genuine law enforcement and protects those who profit politically and economically from the clandestine control of the international drug markets.

As in The Strength of the Wolf, Valentine continues his story with what appears to be the plain facts, the US government determined that there was a need to control and or prevent the trade in and consumption of narcotics and other drugs deemed dangerous. Laws are passed and agencies are created to enforce those laws. Since the original agencies and the original laws seemed to be inadequate to the ostensible tasks of drug control and interdiction, new means were sought and implemented. These in turn seem to fail as well. The “drug problem” emerges as unsolvable. The reader for whom this narrative is an article of faith will finish the Strength of the Pack with the same sense of frustration found at any middle class dining table when the subject is the adequacy of the police or just how much uniformed abuse of the poor is enough to keep those present safe in their homes and schools.

Yet at regular intervals Valentine’s interviews disrupt this complacency for the critical reader. The actors in the drama of drug law enforcement describe repeatedly their preoccupation with professional advancement, bureaucratic competition, personal rivalries and ultimately the manipulation of the drug trade. Valentine has no need to speculate about conspiracies. His respondents explain in their own words the combinations of bureaucratic scheming, confidential policy directives, PR posturing, and incestuous relations between pharmaceutical manufacturers, ambitious politicians, mercenary armies, domestic law enforcement, and ultimately the American power elite. The cast of characters Valentine has interviewed in the Pack may initially overwhelm the reader. The story is a sequel to The Strength of the Wolf but it is written in a way that is comprehensible even if one has not read Wolf. One of the pleasures of Valentine’s prose is that the interviews flow seamlessly creating one dramatic work of history. Although the book is carefully documented its evidentiary approach relies on preponderance, redundancy and an emergent coherence as the participants themselves elucidate the same historical events.

The FBN and its ultimate successor the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) emerged on the basis of fundamental assumptions about the nature of drugs and drug trafficking in the US. However, these assumptions were expressed in language peculiar to US political culture. Once drug law enforcement left the shores of North America it became more clearly an instrument of US foreign policy.

First, the focus of domestic drug law enforcement as formulated by Anslinger’s FBN was the policing of African-Americans and other racial or ethnic minorities—whereby there was no doubt that African-Americans were considered the primary target. Thus despite any and all attempts to treat addiction as a medical problem, Anslinger, the FBN and the DEA have fought successfully to criminalise addictions along race lines. Second, enforcement strategy was “supply-driven”. That meant agents were trained and deployed to make cases—create situations for arrest, trial and conviction—against suppliers and dealers. The main tactic for making cases was to pose as an intermediary and induce deals. Of course this meant that agents had to create credibility by actively participating in the market they were hired to suppress. Since the drug trade is lucrative there has always been the temptation if not the incentive for agents to personally profit from this standard case-making tactic. Hence even assuming the legitimacy of the drug enforcement objectives, the potential for corruption was endemic. What was well known at local level, namely that vice squads served to give politicians and police their cut of organised crime, acquired national scale. Federal drug enforcement officers in competing jurisdictions took their “cut” whether in political-bureaucratic advantage (e.g. competition between US Customs, IRS, and FBI) or “in trade” by siphoning off profits and confiscated drugs or simply accepting bribes.

Third, the ultimate bureaucratic conflict emerged once federal drug enforcement became international, based on the “supply-side” strategy. One of the consequences of US entry into World War I was the expansion of the federal government’s domestic intelligence (policing) apparatus. While US Army Intelligence retained much of its authority to spy on political dissidents, the increasing industrialisation catalysed by the war mobilisation created a greater threat from organised labour. Private industry had been able to suppress unionisation with its own private police and detective agencies, like Pinkerton. The rapid expansion caused by the war effort made it expeditious for the federal government to absorb the cost and responsibility for political policing. The result was the creation of the FBI. The infamous J. Edgar Hoover exploited the emerging mass media to create a popular image of most wanted criminals and the need for G-men to capture or kill them. The twin threats of spectacular criminals and communist subversives fed the FBI director’s greed for power over what became a kind of federal secret police. At almost the same time, Harry Anslinger, previously an officer in the Pennsylvania Railroad Police who married into the Mellon dynasty, seized the threat of post-war population shifts and mobilisation among African-Americans to promote the early phase of America’s war on drugs. Then the code was drugs are a problem of African-Americans and on one hand make them dangerous to whites and as the source of narcotic addiction threaten white moral and racial health. Valentine points out that although Anslinger never had the same power as Hoover he was able to maintain his fief in spite of Hoover’s jealous and vindictive designs on anyone competing with him for police power in the US. Together these two created the mainstays of US political policing—not only in the agencies they directed but, also in their abilities as propagandists. They both shaped the way Americans see threats to their security. The FBI and FBN, along with the latter’s successor the DEA, have been instrumental in creating and maintaining the illusions that a) the US is a democracy with no secret political police like in “Old Europe” or outright dictatorships, b) the police powers in the US are intended to preserve public health and safety, e.g. by the interdiction of production and traffic in harmful substances, and c) that the greatest threats to the security of Americans are substances that corrupt private morals.

Without actually pointing a finger, Valentine’s sources indicate some unpleasant truths behind these illusions: whatever democratic virtues the US may be said to have, its primary federal law enforcement agencies were formed to suppress political opposition, e.g. from organised labour, war resisters, civil rights activists, et al. Valentine documents numerous occasions when decisions by drug enforcement agencies were required to take the interests of the major pharmaceutical corporations into account. By its very strategy and tactics the case-making against drug traffickers serves to promote the threat of drugs per se more than to control or stop trade and consumption. To call drug law enforcement in the US selective is gross understatement since it has long been an unspoken rule that rich, white neighbourhoods and offenders are off limits. Finally and perhaps most devastating of all the truths Valentine documents, drug law enforcement—whether domestic or international—is subject to the control of the CIA, whose historic policy, not unlike that of the British East India Company over a century ago, has been to protect the manufacture and trade in narcotics for reasons of “national security”.

Repeatedly Valentine recounts the stories of FBN and later DEA agents prevented from making cases against drug traffickers because of direct or indirect CIA intervention. Often the mere indication that a suspect or a known trafficker was working with the CIA was sufficient to stop further enforcement action. Although Valentine actually seems to avoid this conclusion, his preponderance of testimony together with the collateral evidence he provides forces one to ask the question whether the CIA is not in fact the primary broker of the international drug market? The reader who thinks that Valentine will feed the favourite conspiracy theory will be disappointed. Valentine does not end with a rousing plea to the jury to condemn the CIA as the great evil behind international drug trafficking. Yet those who recall the late Gary Webb’s reporting about the CIA’s role in pushing drugs into Los Angeles, described in the opening chapters of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout will find testimony in Valentine’s book that adds plausibility to Webb’s claims.

When Allen Dulles, Harry Anslinger, and J. Edgar Hoover died, the government agencies each had left behind were powerful, entrenched bureaucratic institutions. These men were masters of public relations. Their aggressive personalities, all shaped by what might be called the particularly American Puritan hypocrisy, helped to create and sell the enduring myths that sustain the American vision of “national security”. This “national security” relied on the suppression of anything deemed foreign, non-white, immoral, or communist—whereby communist was rarely anything more than a catch-all term for anything nationally, racially or morally impure. Despite the legal restrictions that officially separated the CIA from domestic policing, the history of drug law enforcement as recounted by those engaged is incontrovertible testimony that these restrictions were conceptually problematic and practically a dead letter. At every turn, official action by drug enforcement officers was either compromised by cooperation with the CIA or disrupted by CIA intervention to preserve its “national security” interests both in the drug trade itself and the underground channels through which intelligence, weapons, illicit funds, etc. could flow. DEA agents, like their predecessors in the FBN, did not last long if they insisted on sincere performance of what they thought were their statutory law enforcement duties.

In 1974 Agee wrote,

“Reforms of the FBI and CIA, even removal of the President from office, cannot remove the problem. American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force—without a secret police force. The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be opposed, with its CIA, FBI and other security agencies understood as logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class’s determination to retain power and privilege.”

The “war on drugs”, like its brother, “the war on terror”, and older cousin, “the war against communism” all use essentially the same secret language. As befitting secret armies and police that must operate in the shadows, their stealth is augmented by euphemism—the mendacious words and phrases that encourage us to trust or discourage close examination. Spying, that is the violation of others’ privacy, is called intelligence. Action, whether covert or “executive”, conceals things that if done by a private person would be considered serious crimes. Neutralising infrastructure, whether it was “VC” in Vietnam or “Taliban” in Afghanistan is just another term for assassination. Making cases, the principal tactic of federal drug law enforcement, meant selectively feeding and maintaining the drug trade, within the propaganda priorities of the agency and with due regard for the “national security” interests of the Company.

Of course it would be wrong to suppose that everything the DEA or its police relatives did was deleterious to public morals, health and safety—the ostensible purpose of US drug policy. There can be no doubt that criminal activity has been pursued and prosecuted by the DEA. Valentine is careful to give credit where it is due. He treats his subject seriously and those he interviewed with utmost respect. This is not a denunciation of hundreds of agents or an attack on their character. Instead Valentine gives us a critical look at an army—a secret army, not those hallowed by endless Hollywood films or TV series. Like any modern army it is also a bureaucracy subject to the same individual and collective illnesses of any large bureaucracy. But also like all armies raised by the US elite for its own protection, it is based on myths that remain largely unchallenged today. The US drug enforcement agencies have created their own version of “the good war”, except that whereas the original “good war” was supposed to have ended in 1945, their version also promises another war without end.

T. P. Wilkinson writes and teaches politics and literature in Heinrich Heine's birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003). Currently he is working on a book called: 1959: Unbecoming American. He can be reached at beda.v@maisonneuvepress.de.

Ode to Terence McKenna.

2010-02-26T02:28:00.000-08:00

Free-for-all

FlyAgaric23

(the freeform editor for this edition)

The audio soundtrack to Maybelogic Quarterly Issue six, is taken from a compilation i made in memory of Terence Mckenna shortly after i heard news of his passing.

Recorded on the 4th of April, 2000 AD, the mix was called - RS HO TEPP RE-CON FENCE, an anagram of Prophets Conference which I was due to attend later that month, 14th-16th April 2000.

The first tune called Superstring Theory and the "New Flesh For Old" track feature fly agaric on drums. This mix was constructed with Two technics turntables and phonographic vinyl discs.

Enjoy.

DJ Fly Agaric 23
[Stephen Jams Platt]

Handsome Boy Modeling School

New Flesh For Old

Kid Koala

http://www.maybelogic.org/maybequarterly/06/0601EditorWelcome.htm

We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiousity can legitimately send its attention and where it can not. It's an essentially preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue, because what we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In fact, not a religious sensibility, the religious sensibility. Not built on some con game spun out by eunichs, but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for fifty thousand years before the advent of history, writing, priestcraft and propaganda. So it's a clarion call to recover a birthright. --TERENCE MCKENNA, Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants (1988)

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity. --TERENCE MCKENNA "New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989)

The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. There is an experience of time zero. ... The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time that is created by one's own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian universe there is no time whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become eternal, the universe is aging at a staggering rate all around one in this situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe — the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into the eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity. --TERENCE MCKENNA,"New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989);

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

Open Source Medicine - Amsterdam Blues Scholars by flyagaric23

2010-01-15T17:07:00.001-08:00

Open Source Medicine - Amsterdam Blues Scholars by flyagaric23

BLOOM AND BURST: MUSHROOM ECONOMICS

2010-01-11T06:49:00.000-08:00

Originally titled "WORD PIECE" i wrote this JULY 17’th, 2008 in Amsterdam, Netherlands after my friend Bogus Magus turned me onto the video "6 ways mushrooms can save the planet" by Paul Stamets. Like many other things i write, this "mushroom banking" article lay dormant in my laptop. So now due to the increased interest in BANKING, ECONOMICS and CREDIT i now present the article, with some re-writing and editing as BLOOM and BURST. (BOOM & BUST of mycelium entities)

This, lay readers and gentilemen, is perhaps the commonest
of all cases arising out of umbrella history in connection with the wood industries in our courts of litigation. D'Oyly Owens
holds (though Finn Magnusson of himself holds also) that so
long as there is a joint deposit account in the two names a
mutual obligation is posited. --FW, Page 575

Your words our words and their words of air-sound-sutra. Binding air-sound-power patterns. Why is money? and how did it get that way? who issues it and how? A coin for a cow? Paper for Gold. Silver? Our money > their money overnight. Who has the magic wands, and is fond of the funds? Who has the rite words and the rote blank cheque? Disorder of things and stuff, multi-ordinal terms fed like helpless worms to herds of hungry birds of pray, each day feeding after the rain storm.

Where is the source, the root and the well spring of your knowledge, our Nohledge and their Scholledge? Who issues it and how? What is a cash cow? Money exchanged for words. Language and economics cow-MING-LING. Money does not grow on trees, psychoactive mushrooms do grow on trees. The bees bring honey to each branch though. the Branch hanging over the bank, the river bank and its dependency on the moon goddess via her rising and falling water levels, bursting and then blooming river banks. In 2008 a river BANK maybe the only Bank you can trust.

Owens cites Brerfuchs and Warren,
a foreign firm, since disseized, registered as Tangos, Limited,
for the sale of certain proprietary articles. The action which was
at the instance of the trustee of the heathen church emergency
fund, suing by its trustee, a resigned civil servant, for the
payment of tithes due was heard by Judge Doyle and also by a
common jury. No question arose as to the debt for which vouchers
spoke volumes. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

And the underground fungi decomposes rotten money theory anyway, a natural fungi force consumes carbon dioxide and releases carbon monoxide. More valuable than cash? A KNU natural economic order will start with mycelium a as the ceiling limit of the fizzcool roots, and financial fibers that, maybe, in the buginning fed all the MONEY TREES. Feeding trees with funky nutrients using the process of decomposition, using calcium and lots of other magic biology.

The truly regenerative and maximum GREEN interests inherent in the fungal feeding of the planetary and inter-planetary bio-sphere make most but not all forms of banking and international financial doo-doings on this planet seem deceptive at best and damned sadistic and apocalyptic at their worst. Now we have the means to communicate more scientifically how and why mycelium networks have spread themselves throughout planet earths biosphere so we can tackle the problems related to fungal-economics (which for me fits in well with the Animal and Plant kingdoms propensity for doing more with less and maximizing their biological connectivity, collective output to the benefit of all. No dropping, carcass, seed or shell goes to waste. The whole biological world recycles itself as in a regenerative Universe, its energy freely flows between species and kingdoms).

The fund trustee, one Jucundus Fecundus Xero
Pecundus Coppercheap, counterclaimed that payment was invalid
having been tendered to creditor under cover of a crossed cheque,
signed in the ordinary course, in the name of Wieldhelm, Hurls
Cross, voucher copy provided, and drawn by the senior partner
only by whom the lodgment of the species had been effected but
in their joint names. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

Human Banking beings however seem to have a new propensity for hoarding life support to their own gene pool. Life support resources in all their forms are stolen and kept for a few special chosen people or a few International syndicates who claim divine banker child status. Hoarding at the expense of the many--the Majority of humanity on planet earth. And hoarding in contrast to the natural abundance of nature, omnidirectional distribution, maximal connectivity, cooperative banking on change and transformation of states. (Taoist economics?)

The rather simplistic idea of imitating natural systems and natures means of distribution very generally, and then abstracting these general principles to human Economic systems remains a simply floored ideology. The classic Garbage IN/Garbage OUT law springs to mind. And the GREEN economic fungal metaphor of BLOOM and BURST maybe the most eloquent and beautiful metaphor to employ in 2008, pitched against Unrestricted Global Capitalism driven by private interest and crooked double crossed intelligence tsars. (Since writing this passage, Unrestricted Global Capitalism in its most virulent form of unrestricted American Capitalism has rapidly decayed worldwide started by the housing mortgage securities market over estimating how much virtual horse-shit they can shovel at one time).

Depreciating currency imitates the fungal process of breaking down biological matter, making more room at the bottom by recycling, transforming and keeping the processes moving along. If you stay in one place too long with your savings (chemical compound interest) you will rot at the bottom of the pile, without jumping into a new state of energy by the magical trans-formative process. See transmutation, Holy Communion and the U.S Federal Bank of England.

The bank particularised, the national misery
(now almost entirely in the hands of the four chief bondholders
for value in Tangos), declined to pay the draft, though there
were ample reserves to meet the liability, whereupon the trusty
Coppercheap negociated it for and on behalf of the fund of the
thing to a client of his, a notary, from whom, on consideration, he
received in exchange legal relief as between trusthee and bethrust,
with thanks. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

The deception and trickery of the global banking fraudster gamers is also mimicked, on a global scale within fungal communities. BOOM and then DECAY. BLOOM and decomposition In fact mushroom mycelium provide nutrients for germination of most vegetation matter and some very rare Orchids; like the ones that so many Banksters are infatuated with. Penicillin and most of its synthesized drug relatives is another FUNGAL entity, claimed patented and exploited as a Global Pharmo-corp’ dream-drug. In its well known Penicillin incarnation FUNGAL intelligence has already penetrated the MONEY MAZE. Not to mention all the other medical applications and drugs synthesized from mushrooms and/or Fungal bacterium found in nature, while our melting leaders tighten restrictions on the source MUSHROOMS of the healing psychoactive varieties around the world in 2008.

But the poet with honey his mouth does not stop at that. Mushrooms and fungus being used as metaphors for a more synergetic human financial intelligence is just the sprouting TIP! of the underground fruiting body of evidence, spilling billions of its viral meme spores into earths atmosphere every second of every day for a billion years. There mush more to come.

Once the poet has sharpened his gaze, and the haze of terrestrial primate politics and economics vanishes in the life-mazing puzzle views, we can begin to revision our future, past present and perfect days, all-at-once. A galactic Fungal Languaging Entity. (FLE) A self-replicating fungal blogjects through me. A new solid banking practice has come--nourishing the sheep with the farmers profits, so that they grow strong, intelligent and have happy lives. Bah naught.

Since then the cheque, a good washable pink,
embossed D you D No 11 hundred and thirty 2, good for the figure
and face, had been circulating in the country for over thirtynine
years among holders of Pango stock, a rival concern, though not
one demonetised farthing had ever spun or fluctuated across the
counter in the semblance of hard coin or liquid cash. The jury (a
sour dozen of stout fellows all of whom were curiously named
after doyles) naturally disagreed jointly and severally, and the
belligerent judge, disagreeing with the allied jurors'
disagreement, went outside his jurisfiction altogether and ordered a
garnishee attachment to the neutral firm. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

Our collective cultural symbol systems, yours, theirs? Who issues languages and how? How did language get that way. This way to the museyroom. The trick to solid banking is to nourish the people on their children’s corpses, so they Wall street vampires say. Who would have thought that when you open a bank account they might take your son or daughter off to a foreign country to defend their elaborate symbolic betting shop?

discounted Mr Brakeforth's first of all in
exchange at nine months from date without issue and, to be strictly
literal, unbottled in corrubberation a current account of how
she had been made at sight for services rendered the
payeedrawee of unwashable blank assignations, sometimes pinkwilliams
(laughter)-- James Joyce, FW, Page 576.

REALITY? who issues it and how? J.P Perky Pat Morgan Skysoft? David Attenborough. The Pope? The Forrest's and fields and mountains and wild mushroom rich terrain of earth? The Oxford English Dictionary? Finnegans Wake? well, I banked with Dr. Robert Anton Wilson while he was incarnated here on planet Earth. Bob’s high interest rates, tragic/comic balance sheets and compassionate magic made his “Bank Of Maybe” (BOM) the model for a new, timeless, immortal banking practice. A Bank without savings. A bank with total investment in each moment, and a bank with the rare and brilliant promise to give away treasures and valuable stocks to strangers for free, in the interests of imitating natures banking practices and its maximal distribution of energy and information as defined by Buckminster Fuller and Claude Shannon respectively. The BOM even has some RAW PATATOES to show that we mean business.

jock and jarry in that little green courtinghousie for her
satisfaction and as a whole act of settlement to reamalgamate herself,
tomorrow perforce, in pardonership with the permanent suing fond
trustee, Monsignore Pepigi, under the new style of Will
Breakfast and Sparrem, as, when all his cognisances had been estreated,
he seemed to proffer the steadiest interest towards her, but this
prepoposal was ruled out on appeal by Judge Jeremy Doyler, who,
reserving judgment in a matter of courts and reversing the
findings of the lower correctional, found, beyond doubt of treuson,
fending the dissassents of the pickpackpanel, twelve as upright
judaces as ever let down their thoms, and, occupante extremum --James Joyce, FW, Page 576.

The Jury is still out on Finnegans Wake.
How about the worlds economic financial crash? WHO's ON TRIAL? Whats the CHARGE?

--Fly Agaric 23.
9th October 2008.

Stuart Hameroff at Singularity Summit 2009

2010-01-03T18:39:00.000-08:00

Stuart Hameroff at Singularity Summit 2009 -- Neural Substrates of Consciousness and the 'Conscious Pilot' Model from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

Google Drug Books and Studies

2009-12-30T18:23:00.000-08:00

Themes from G.E. Moore: new essays in epistemology and ethics
By Susana Nuccetelli, Gary Seay

Atlas of psychiatric pharmacotherapy
By Roni Shiloh, David J. Nutt, Rafael Stryjer, Abraham Weizman

From chocolate to morphine: everything you need to know about mind-altering ...
By Andrew Weil, Winifred Rosen

“Drugs and society
By Glen R. Hanson, Peter J. Venturelli, Annette E. Fleckenstein

Living with drugs
By Michael Gossop

After Prohibition: an adult approach to drug policies in the 21st century
By Timothy Lynch

Further Weirdness with Terence Mckenna

2009-12-30T17:18:00.001-08:00

Further Weirdness with Terence

By Paul Krassner

An except from "Further Weirdness with Terence Mckenna"

For all his pursuit of mysticism, Terence Mckenna is essentially a scientist. He may have a cult following, but he is not a cult leader in the sense that he encourages challenge rather than forbids it. "A scientists job," he says, "is to prove that he is wrong. You don't get that at the ashram or up in a monastery - [mimicking what such a guru would not say]. Well, we crushed that hypothesis to smithereens." So, naturally, i had some follow-up questions for him, in person and by e.mail.

Q. I would feel incomplete if i didn't ask for your comment on the recent news story about Heaven's Gate cult.

A. Like most people, i haven't sorted out the San Diego mass suicide. I imagine that on the mainland, the soul-searching and efforts to determine everyone's collective guilt and complicity are in full cry. But from the slopes of mauna loa, it looks like simply the latest Southern California pyschodrama with attendant obligatory media jack-off. I encountered Do (then Bo) and peep in 1972. They were contemptible, power-crazed new age creepoids then, and apparently things didn't get better.

Q. During the workshop at Esalen, you talked about not knowing where the mind is. Do you think that the mind can function without the brain.?

A. I have not made up my mind on this, but think of the mind as a hyperspatially deployed organ that is ordinarily invisible. As to whether or not it can exist independent of the brain, i am not sure. If the physical world is concieved in a 4-D manifold, it is logically impossible for a physical thing, a 4 D solid, to move or otherwise change. It must be our state of consciousness which changes as we become successively aware of adjacent cross-sections of the 4 D manifold. But this makes sense only if we, the observers, are not in space-time. This would imply that our minds exist on a level beyond anything that physics can tell us about.

Q. You also mentioned how, posteschaton, we'll look back from the grave and laugh at the futility with which we struggled through life. Were you implying that you believe individual consciousness can survive after physical death?

A. Not really, only that life will show its pattern and plan when we look back on it, and that will redeem some of the weirdness of having to live it essentially without a clue.

Q. You mentioned in the workshop, in terms of the coming apocalypse, that people should do things fast. Now, i thought that doing things fast was one of the problems that brought us to this place and that the antidote would be to slow down and savour the implications of what we do. Maybe you and i are saying the same thing?

A. Well, i don't really mean do more and more things, i said more and more will happen. I think the thing to do is to eliminate foolishness, having your time vampirized. I agree with you, the goal is not to just jam in as much stuff as possible. basically one strong motivation for moving to Hawaii was just to escape the silliness, the triviality of it all, and i've discovered there was apparently no information loss. I can keep up with an O.J Simpson discussion even though i spent three minutes a week keeping track. The people who watched every day of the testimony, my God, they must be slow learners. And it's amazing how many fields you can participate in as a fully empowered player without investing much time.

As pleasant as it is, i can't hold the whole thing in my mind in the states, as we citizens of the sovereign state of Hawaii, i can look at it all and see trends and tendencies, and pontificate about it in my rain forest, and it all makes sense. Somebody said, "yeah, well, it all makes sense because you never talk to anybody else. " Probably some truth to that.

Q. At Esalen, you stated: "The technological push that has seemed so relentless and so brutal and so difficult to deflect is, in fact, we are doing the right thing, and the only question is whether we'll make it in time, and it looks like it's going to be a flash photo finish. We basically have until 2012 to figure out how to download all human DNA [and other forms of DNA] on this planet into some kind of indestructible storage mode. Then there's a chance to ride out this catastrophic wave of extinction."

Now, my question is, in view of the recent news which has placed human cloning on the boarder between science-fiction and reality, might not cloning be an answer to the question posed by the statement? How does cloning fit into your theory of the need to prepare ourselves for the apocalypse?

A. In spite of the cloning of Dolly, we still have a great deal to learn about DNA. What was remarkable about the Dolly episode was how far the research team got to understand about the cloning process and how it works. Which does not mean that it will not be applied before it is fully understood. But at this point, it is a kind of stunt. Clones are simply people with a strange family history, and who among us does not fit that description?

The interesting thing about the recent cloning news, both regarding Dolly the ewe and the two cloned monkeys, is that both fated births occured right around the same time, July-August 1996. That was a time that my timewave had long predicted would be a period when there would be some enormous scientific breakthrough.

I was very excited, therefore, by the announcement, at the time, of the discovery of the discovery of microfossils in a Martian meteorite. Now, with the news of clones, i am more convinced than ever that my prediction of a period of novelty and scientific breakthrough was correct. As for the clones themslves, i am reminded of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's distopia of clueless clones. More scary than 1984, that is for sure. And more likely, long run. So corporate, so elegant.

Q. What are your visions of alternative scenarios that are upcoming, either in December 2012 or before?

A. Well, i've spent a long time thinking about this, although i realized about a year ago that, in a sense, it's not really my issue. The funny thing is, here i have this wave, it predicts every second between here and December 12, 2012, i show it to people and their first question is, 'So what happens afterwards?" It dosen't address that. It addresses all moments before that. nevertheless, i feel the force question, and i've created a series of scenarios in ascending weirdness which answer the question.

A low weirdness answer would be, suddenly everyone begins to behave appropriately. This is kind of Buddhist, Taosit approach. Now, the interesting thing about that scenario is, the first thirty seconds of that we can predict - appropriate behavior would probably be to take your foot off your neighbor's neck. Step back from what you're doing.

And then i always imagine - for some reason, i don't know why - that everybody would take off their cloths and go outside. But after that i can't figure - thats only the first thirty seconds of appropriate behavior. Since we never had that, we can't imagine what it would be like.

Then there's the transformation-of-physics scenario, which basically says, "All boundaries dissolve." What that would probably be like, the first hour of it would be like a thousand micrograms of LSD. After that we can't imagine or predict, because again it would have so totally changed the context that you could no longer predict it.

Then there are the catastrophic scenarios that revolve around the question, "Death, where is thy sting?" And probably the most efficient of those is the planetesimal-impact scenario. A very large object strikes the earth and kills everybody, and that's it.

Q. A blunt object

A. It's a blunt solution. Sort of in that same category is the blue star in Sagittarius. And then a kind of intermediate between those two the sun will explode. That would certainly clear the disc and fulfill the whole thing. The planet vaporizes, and collectively we and all life on earth move into the shimmering capsules of the post-mortem realm, whatever that is. Novel, novel.

When i worked with the timewave, i argued strenuously that it reflects the ebb and flow of novelty, but somebody will come up with something like the release of the Sergeant Pepper album or the O.J Simpson trial, and then we see that it's lost in the noise. What the wave seems most pristinely to predict, or what parallels the wave most closely, is the evolution of technology, and i think technology is something that we haven't really understood. In a sense, technology is the alchemical journey for the condensation of the soul and the union of the spirit and matter in some kind of hyperobject.

The rise of the web has been a great boost to my fantasies along these lines, because now i can see with the Web from here to the eschaton. Apparently, it's a technology for dissolving space, time, personally and just releasing everybody into a data stream, something like the imagination. Then that's why the ultimate technological fantasy along this line of thought is what is conventionally called a time machine.

There's an interesting aspect to the time machine. The wave describes the ebb and flow of novelty in time, but then you reach a point where it's so novel that it fails beyond that point. Well, a time-traveling technology would cause such a system to fail, because it's a description of the unfolding seriality of linear events, which a time machine would disrupt.

So it may be that it isn't explosion of the sun, or the coming of the aliens, or the descent of the second person of the Trinity, it's simply that a technology is put into place that destroys linear time and, from thence forward, when you give your address you have to say not only where but when. There are some problems with this.

And then here is a slightly more interesting and woo-woo scenario. The thing that's called the grandfather paradox - somebody pointed out it's not called the father paradox because apparently you want to avoid an Oedipal situation - and it's simply the following objection: if you could travel into the past, you could kill your grandfather. If you killed your grandfather, you wouldn't exist. Therefore, you couldn't travel into the past. Therefore, time travel is impossible.

One idea i have for an end of history scenario: Time travel becomes more and more discussible, finally there are laboratories working on it, finally there is a prototype machine, finally it's possible to conceive of a test; and so on the morning of December 12, 2012, at the world Temporal Institute headquarters in the Amazon Basin, by a worldwide, high definition, three-dimensional hook up, the entire world tunes in to see the first flight into time. And the lady temponaut comes to the microphone and makes a few brief statements, hands are shaken, the champagne bottle is smashed, she climbs into her time-machine, pushes the button and disappears into the far flung reaches of the future. Now, the interesting question is, what happens next? And i have already established for myself that you can travel backwards into the past, but you can't travel further into the past than the invention of the first time machine, for the simple reason that there are no time machines before that, and if you were to take one where there are none, you get another paradox.

So what happens when the lady temponaut slips into the future? Well, i think what would happen a millisecond later is tens of thousands of time machines would arrive from all points in the future, having come back through time, of course, to witness the first flight into time. Exactly as if you could fly your beachcraft back to Kitty hawk, North Carolina, to that windy morning when the Wright brothers rolled their flyer out and fueled 'er up. And that's as far as the road goes. That's the end of the time road.

But the grandfather paradox persists. One of those time travelers from 5,000 years in the future, on their way back to the first time-travel incident, could stop and kill his grandfather, and then we have this whole problem again. So i thought about this for a long time, and i think i've found my way around it. But, as usual, at the cost of further weirdness.

Here's what would really happen if we invented a time machine of that sort. The lady temponaut pushes the button, and instead of all time machines appearing instantly in the next moment, in order to preserve the system from that paradox, what will happen is, the rest of history of the universe will occur instantly. And so that's it. I call it the God whistle.

This is because you thought you were building a time machine, and in a sense you were, but the time machine isn't what you thought it was. It caused the rest of time to happen instantaneously, and so the furthest out developments of life, matter, and technology in the universe can right up against you a millisecond after you break that barrier, and in fact you discover that traveling time is not traveling time, it's a doorway into eternity, which is all of time, and that's why it becomes more like a hyperspatial deal than a simple linear time-travel thing.

There's been a parallel development which has caused me to be more confident. We're now beginning to build this parallel world called the Wolrd Wide Web. And you can bet that long before we reach 2012, the major religions of the world will build virtual realities of their eschatological scenarios. There will be the Islamic paradise, the Christian millenium, the Buddhist shunyata - these will be channels that you tune into to see if you like it and want to join, so in a sense guaranteeing we will have a virtual singularity.

It's all very well to try to understand the end point, but recall that where we are relative to the end point is in resonance with the year 950 AD. We're like the people in 950 AD trying to understand the web, the hydrogen bomb and the catscanner. How can we? My God, we don't even have calculus yet. Newton hasn't been born yet, let alone Einstein. I mean we're running around - essentially we're primitives, is what i'm saying. We don't have tools yet to conceive of the object of 2012. We must build those tools between now and then. And good places to start are with the web, psychedelic drugs, whatever is the most cutting edge and most far out.

Q. So that saying, "May you live in interesting times," is supposed to have been a chinese curse, but if the ruling class had control of language, it would curse them, but it was a blessing to the people who made it interesting times.

A. I think it's saying the same thing as the Irish toast [heavy brogue], "May you be alive at the end of the world."

Q. Meanwhile, my Chinese fortune cookie predicted that you and i would cross paths again and also that i will enjoy another repast soon.

A. We must meet in a Chinese restaurant and save the oracle unnecessary embarrassment.

- from Further Weirdness with Terence Mckenna" Paul Krassner, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs - From Toad Slime to Ecstacy. Ten Speed Press. 2004

Paul Krassner is the author of One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist;
he publishes The Disneyland Memorial Orgy at www.paulkrassner.com.

Track:
Mackenna's Gold

ITS A LIGHT MATTER by Fly Agaric 23

2009-12-30T16:41:00.000-08:00

It's alight matter

By flyagaric23

On August 5th, 1945 a Mushroom cloud appeared over Hiroshima, illustrating humanities latest technological breakthrough in Killingry: the ability to kill more and more people in less and less time. 21st century technology can either help people to live joyously and cooperatively or force them to die quicker. The choice is ours. But the hours are not all ours. The first neurotransmitter known to science; Acetylcholine, was identified in 1914 at the breakout of the first world war by Henry Hallett Dale while doing research on heart tissue, Henry went on to win a nobel prize for his rediscovery. The devastating killingry made possible by biological nerve weapons of mass destruction, and other secret nerve agents, are partly due to their inhibition of acetylcholinesterase in the victims. Constant stimulation of the muscles glands and the central nervous system are the terrible symptoms. Popular insecticides inhibit this enzyme too and destroy targeted insects, such as fungas gnats and green fly.
On a more positive tip, Muscarine, a subdivision of Acetylcholine and a neurotransmitter in both the peripheral and central nervous system, can be used to treat Alzheimer's disease and other complications involving abnormal muscle relaxation. The stimulation of the muscle glands through Muscarine acts as an example of a drug being used intelligently and positively as a medicine to help prolong life and help the ill, rather than provoking illness and leading to the annihilation of life.
During the rainy season in the sonoran deserts in Colorado, America, people make a sacred pilgrimage to communicate with little green non-human entities. Small, soft and velvety to touch, with cute little emerald heads that are full of jewles, these holy amphibian drug dealers can each individually deliver enough psychopharmacological energy force to launch, as Ralph Metzner puts it: six to eight adult human beings, potentially, into cosmic hyperconsciousness; into the heart of creation, while returning them safely to their original human form shortly afterwards. A loving example of inter-species communication between mankind and amphibians.
Paradoxically entomology is the scientific study of insects, while etymology is the study of the origins of words. Drosophila_melanogaster is the common species of fruit fly used in genetics experiments ever since GM kicked off around 1910 AD. Most of our modern pharmacological technology and genetic advances are indebted to humble flies while various chemical discoveries are due to extracts from their toadstool namesake: fly agaric.
Italian Ethnobotonist and Ethnomycologist Giorgio Samorini came up with a brilliant new hypothesis called the Lazarus fly, published in his illuminating book; Animals and Psychedelics. This enchanting social-biological observation provides strong scientific evidence for a minded symbiotic relationship between toads, flies and fungi. Buzzillions of flies and fungus gnats throughout history have licked Amanita Muscaria and become as inebriated as Tim Finnegan, stoned, drunken, delirious meals for hungry toads, and other forest-floor foragers who may or may not have picked up this evolutionary advantage, probably tuned in while hanging around mushrooms. This strong, undiluted 70% proof of interspecies communication occuring in forests all over the natural world, illuminates an important etymological keystone; a symbiosis so ancient that it's imediate implications demand an entire scientific and poetic revolution. The buzz term in this field is zoopharmacognosy: the study, celebration and liberation of animals, bugs and plants that mindfully use themselves as inebriating medicine as a kind of novel evolutionary advantage.
Mycoremediation is a term spun by mycologist Paul Stamets and roughly translates as environmental renewal by using fungus. The relative scientific facts about mycoremediation are inspirational for all critterkind facing global meltdown and mindless industrial, global pollution. Fungi have their own kingdom of nature, yet every individual spore is a Tsar: they do not have leaders or Kings in their fungal kingdom, in contrast to human oligarchy. They charitably recycle billions of tons of natural and man made waste products for free so that plants, animals and humans benefit with furtile soils and healthy nutrients to live together happily with. In kaleidoscopic contrast we have the civilized Homo sapien species, who are without shadows of doubt, the greatest natural disaster to explode themselves on this beautiful and life sustaining free planet. Fungus; through their bioremediation are our saviors in some sense. Our shit munching little helpers in another. Literally: mothers little helpers.
Muscarine occurs inside the fetching fly agaric species of mushroom alongside some other psychopharmacological secret agents: ibotenic acid, muscazone and muscimol. Fly agaric and many other fungi in the agaric family are spread far and wide across planet earth. Due to the lack of fungal fossil records we have no specific scientific data pinpointing exactly how long these toadstools have been here, although it's safe to say longer than homo sapiens. Scientific research upon this particular species of fungus has led to many compounds used to increase longevity. Alternatively, other fly agaric extracts can dramatically paralyze biological life, much like usury paralyzes wealth by asphyxiating the natural abundance of nature, blocking her will. Some scholars such as the part time banker at J.P Morgan, and part time mycologist; Richard Gordon Wasson, have suggested that fly agarik is the mythical plant/drug/drink known widely as Soma; highly regarded in the sacred Hindu texts called the Rig Vedas.
Terence Mckenna has proposed that psylocybin containing mushrooms and not Amanita mushrooms maybe a more fitting candidate for the mighty Soma complex due to their stronger psychoactive properties. Other theories propose Soma to be an alchemical combination of various psychoactive vegetables. Thousands of years ago Soma was celebrated as the divine ambrosia of immortality. Today scientists can show how the chemical muscarine lives up to this description by providing useful medical drugs that help prolong life. The great Aldous Huxley deployed SOMA as a literary device in his novel Brave New World, Soma's function in this novel was an opiate of the masses substituting religion and other stimulants popular with Homo sapiens. This excellent distopian device scares me relatively more than Eric Blair's Big Brother and his similar critically paranoid, Nineteen Eighty Four. Although to me, both of these novels seem like fairy stories when compared with the terrifying phenomenon known worldwide as satan claus.
Spearheading the rapidly expanding field of evolutionary epistemologyThe Lazarus fly provides a stunning example of a tight biosemiotic epistemological fit; snug as a bug in a rug. An ancient motherfucking most mysterious matrix tale. An epic love story providing semiotic insights into one of the strangest sociobimaybelogical, tragic/comic romances upon spaceship earth. That's until some entity proposes superior scientific research data to challenge it.
The term to identify flies in latin is musca. Semiotics used as a method applied to fairy myth helps to refine a linguistic approach and attempts to find the 'words' of it's universal lunguage. Many people who choose to ingest psychedelicsgenerally experience a dramatically increased sense and sensibility of light, ranging from tranquil and soft star sparkles, flares, dancing multicolored flames; and the warm sense that billions of torches are searching through fiber-optic energy channels in their body. ToThunder. Lightening. Flashes of explosive photonic bombardment. From all quarters. Blinding. Fractal. Hyperspatial travel. Annihilation. Super nova neural explosions. Atomic detonation of physical boundaries. Energy flashes. Repeating visions. Safely tucked away behind the eyelids.
According to some Christian theology God muttered let there be light, and then, there was light. Bioluminescence is a relatively knu scientific term describing biological cells that emit light photons known as biophotons. Many of the brighter investigative researchers within this glowing field propose that DNA RNA is perpetually emitting these biophotons, and has been doing so since the first RNA DNA molecular poets resurrected themselves upon spaceship Earth. Because of the relatively weak broadcasting strength of these biophotons only recently has modern science and it's post-modern instrumentation rediscovered these ancient auras and properly acknowledged their universality among all RNA DNA coded critters. In the Tibetan book of the Dead there are six lights which correspond to six realms of existence - traditionally, the realm of the gods, jealous gods (asuras), humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. These lights are also known as the lower lights.
An ever growing population of anthropologists and scientists have visited and participated in ancient sacred vegetable rites and ceremonies and journeyed back to a western scientific paradigm with reality shattering alternative maps, models and novel metaphors. Brave Knu tempronauts vividly describe incredible visions; tales of serpents, jaguars, Pink river dolphins, insectoid timespace traveling anthropologists, many headed monsters with gnashing teeth, light beings, diamond encrusted dancing angels, self transforming basketball elf chemists, E.T's, ghosts of vegetation spirits, deities, superluminous skyladders leading to star systems. This dissolution of boundaries between human, animal, insect, vegetable and amphibian kingdoms into a twilight of pastiche, seems, most likely to me, that under the extra sensory perceptive conditions of certain psychopharmacological agents, the RNA DNA emitted biophotons that are contained within all life on earth suddenly appear detectable to our interacting human nervous system. We literally begin to see the photons, reflect, and then feel what's the matter. And we interpret this light according to our own individual glosses, our neuropsychological and neurosemantic belief systems. I'm doing this right now, and so are you!
The perceived fire inside of fireflies or the lightening inside of lightening bugs is known to scientists as Luciferin. Jellyfish, and Antarctic Krill also contain Luciferin. These creatures translate and amplify the light to such a degree that they appear to human and other sufficiently accomplished seeing critters, as ill with a case of the luminous. Yet, if we could increase our sensitivity to light then maybe all DNA RNA based life would appear illuminated?
Coincidently, illumination or enlightenment [the concept] often appears to critters under the influence of psychoactive compounds or what may be more poetically called entheogens [messengers of metempsychosis from within]. And God said: let there be light, but the meter remained and empty woid. flyagaric23

Track:
Quantum mechanix

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2009-12-29T03:58:00.000-08:00

JOIN THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION TODAY!

2009-12-29T02:33:00.000-08:00

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2009-12-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

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