the death of "near death"

ScientificAmerican | You careen headlong into a blinding light. Around you, phantasms of people and pets lost. Clouds billow and sway, giving way to a gilded and golden entrance. You feel the air, thrusted downward by delicate wings. Everything is soothing, comforting, familiar. Heaven.

It’s a paradise that some experience during an apparent demise. The surprising consistency of heavenly visions during a “near death experience” (or NDE) indicates for many that an afterlife awaits us. Religious believers interpret these similar yet varying accounts like blind men exploring an elephant—they each feel something different (the tail is a snake and the legs are tree trunks, for example); yet all touch the same underlying reality. Skeptics point to the curious tendency for Heaven to conform to human desires, or for Heaven’s fleeting visage to be so dependent on culture or time period.

Heaven, in a theological view, has some kind of entrance. When you die, this entrance is supposed to appear—a Platform 9 ¾ for those running towards the grave. Of course, the purported way to see Heaven without having to take the final run at the platform wall is the NDE. Thrust back into popular consciousness by a surgeon claiming that “Heaven is Real,” the NDE has come under both theological and scientific scrutiny for its supposed ability to preview the great gig in the sky.

But getting to see Heaven is hell—you have to die. Or do you?

Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander claimed that “Heaven is Real”, making the cover of the now defunct Newsweek magazine. His account of Heaven was based on a series of visions he had while in a coma, suffering the ravages of a particularly vicious case of bacterial meningitis. Alexander claimed that because his neocortex was “inactivated” by this malady, his near death visions indicated an intellect apart from the grey matter, and therefore a part of us survives brain-death.

Alexander’s resplendent descriptions of the afterlife were intriguing and beautiful, but were also promoted as scientific proof. Because Alexander was a brain “scientist” (more accurately, a brain surgeon), his account carried apparent weight.

Scientifically, Alexander’s claims have been roundly criticized and, in my view, successfully refuted. Academic clinical neurologist Steve Novella removes the foundation of Alexander’s whole claim by noting that his assumption of cortex “inactivation” is flawed:

Alexander claims there is no scientific explanation for his experiences, but I just gave one. They occurred while his brain function was either on the way down or on the way back up, or both, not while there was little to no brain activity.

In another takedown of the popular article, neuroscientist Sam Harris (with characteristic sharpness) also points out this faulty premise, and notes that Alexander’s evidence for such inactivation is lacking:

The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case.

Without a scientific foundation for Alexander’s claims, skeptics suggest he had a NDE later fleshed out by confirmation bias and colored by culture. Harris concludes in a follow-up post on his blog, “I am quite sure that I’ve never seen a scientist speak in a manner more suggestive of wishful thinking. If self-deception were an Olympic sport, this is how our most gifted athletes would appear when they were in peak condition.”

literal holocaust and hell on earth...,

Crisis in the Congo: Uncovering The Truth explores the role that the United States allies, Rwanda and Uganda, have played in triggering the greatest humanitarian crisis at the dawn of the 21st century. Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

gog and magog: top lives off the yield of the bottom

ukcolumn | For those of us who, after many years of careful and detailed research, now understand the hidden machinations of global finance and who are aware of the secretive network of criminals and traitors who seek world government on their terms, this annual spectacle of corporate celebration and respectability by people who are not household names clearly masks an evil that must now be exposed quickly and effectively.

With the exception of a few thousand very powerful people, the entire world’s population, all seven billion of us, are trapped ... trapped into a criminal debt creating banking ‘system’ that has taken hundreds of years to perfect and to come to fruition. This ‘system’ results in enslavement and servitude. It creates dreadful unhappiness amongst ordinary decent people and causes wars, debt, starvation, pollution and environmental destruction. It feeds on greed, fear and division. It forces people onto the corporate treadmills of mass mindless production and mass mindless consumption. It uses lies, deception, intimidation and entrapment at all times. It is a system that is so clever and so cunning that most of the world is completely oblivious to its existence. It is a system that allows a few winners at the expense of a huge number of losers. It is a system that considers itself to be unbeatable and indestructible and is now so arrogant that it believes it can control everything and everyone on its terms. It is a system where psychopaths and sociopaths can flourish. And without question the centre of this system, the heart of this global corporate beast is the innocent sounding Square Mile known as the City of London.

Put very simply, the banking dynasties, such as the House of Rothschild, control the political processes around the world to such an extent that their network of private central banks have the right to create money completely out of thin air and then charge interest on that ‘nothingness’. The polite term is ‘Fractional Reserve Lending’ but in reality it is just simple fraud. The result is that the whole world is currently drowning in a sea of fraudulent debt.

The USA now has a National Debt of over 16 trillion dollars, whilst the UK owes its creditors over one trillion pounds. The planned contagion of spiralling and unlawful debt is now sweeping over Europe with a renewed vigour. Greece and Spain are being torn apart by appalling austerity measures to the point that civil war or military intervention are now being openly talked about on the streets. Italy is giving all the signs that its economy is now entering into very stormy waters indeed. Ireland, Portugal, France and Belgium are already in a mess and are unlikely to see their debts become more manageable. Tens of millions of people have experienced a major downturn in their quality of life, along with their prospects for a more secure and better future, as unlawful austerity measures brought in by corrupt politicians begin to bite. Even the stronger economies of Germany, The Netherlands and Luxembourg have now been downgraded by Moody’s, the Rothschild controlled credit rating agency.

why israel lost the u.n. palestine vote...,

Slate | Four days ago, the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept Palestine as a non-member observer state. The vote was 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions. Israel tried to squelch the resolution, then tried to defeat it, then scoffed that the vote meant nothing, but punished the Palestinians anyway by announcing new settlements and withholding Palestinian tax revenue. Now even the United States is ticked off. How has Israel managed to lose the vote in a landslide and alienate its friends? By blowing its credibility on ludicrous complaints.

former assistant secretary of state for africa got some splainin to do...,

foreignpolicy | Televised comments made by Amb. Susan Rice shortly after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi have dominated the debate over her probable nomination for secretary of state. This is a bit surprising, since it's clear that she played only a marginal role in the affair and appears to have just been reading from the briefing notes provided. It's also unfortunate that the "scandal" has crowded out a healthy discussion of her two-decade record as U.S. diplomat and policymaker prior to Sept. 2012 -- and drawn attention away from actions for which she bears far greater responsibility than Benghazi.

Her role in shaping U.S. policy toward Central Africa should feature high on this list. Between 1993 and 2001, she helped form U.S. responses to the Rwandan genocide, events in post-genocide Rwanda, mass violence in Burundi, and two ruinous wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

She did not get off to an auspicious start. During her first year in government, there was a vigorous debate within the Clinton administration over whether to describe the killing in Rwanda as a "genocide," a designation that would necessitate an international response under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. In a now infamous incident from that April, which was reported in her now State Department colleague Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell, Rice -- at the time still a junior official at the National Security Council -- stunned her colleagues by asking during a meeting, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional midterm] election?"

there's no tomorrow...,

the clinton plan for africa redux

A few years ago, my man T3 threw himself at the Herculean task of trying to wrap his mind around the long-term American imperial plan for Africa. In context of the currently percolating Susan Rice controversy, it's imperative that we peep game on this negroe 1% who has been providing racial mimetic cover for the long term imperial plan for Africa for a very long time.

Chinese demands for energy are driving the US to pursue new relationships in Africa. The guise of humanitarian aid must be viewed within the context of the Defense Department’s critical role in the advance of US-Africa relations. And, perhaps most disastrously, it must be borne in mind that at precisely the point when Gilead Sciences (a leader in HIV vaccination research) was making its most headway, the chairman of its board was none other than Donald Rumsfeld (more in Part V).

From Reuters (February 28, 2008):
LOS ANGELES, Feb 28 (Reuters) – A safety board has recommended that certain AIDS patients taking part in a study of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s (GSK.L: Quote, Profile, Research) Epzicom consider switching to Gilead Sciences Inc’s (GILD.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Truvada, sending Gilead’s shares up about 4 percent on Thursday.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, is comparing the two drugs in a head-to-head trial involving 1,858 patients.

The unit said on Thursday that an independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board recently found that for patients with high levels of HIV virus, treatment regimens containing Epzicom were less effective at controlling the virus than regimens containing Truvada.

The board also found that patients with high levels of HIV virus treated with Epzicom developed side effects such as body aches and high cholesterol more quickly.

Glaxo said in a statement that the NIH study did not routinely exclude patients at risk for a known reaction with Epzicom, which might have accounted for some adverse events.

The trial recommendation applies to about half the patients being treated with the Glaxo drug and, if translated to real world usage, could mean a 20 percent market share gain for Gilead’s Truvada and Atripla, Morgan Stanley analyst Sapna Srivastava said in a research note on Thursday.

Remember Tamiflu and the avian flu virus? That was also Gilead Sciences.

The stakes in the energy game are very high. In 2006, China’s president visited Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya. Today, the United States of America imports more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. The US has protected the House of Saud from all comers and precluded other nations from breaking up the dollar-oil peg which prevails in Saudi Arabia. No such arrangements exist on the ground in Africa…and yet – the US is proposing to establish its first military command. China’s strategy for African partnership centers on infrastructure.

Beijing plans to invest $4 billion in Nigeria’s infrastructure, including a Nigerian state-run oil refinery, a railway line and power plants. Two Chinese telecommunication companies will install rural telephone services financed by $200 million in loans from Beijing.

On the eve of Hu’s visit, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) paid $2.7 billion for a 45 percent stake in a Nigerian oil field due to start production in 2008. Last year, Nigeria agreed to provide 30,000 barrels of oil per day for five years to China’s largest state-owned oil company, PetroChina, in a deal worth $800 million.

Oil was also top of the agenda in Kenya on April 27-30. In Nairobi, the Chinese president signed an agreement for licenses to allow CNOOC to explore six possible oil blocks off the coast of Kenya. Last year, China provided $36.5 million in aid to Kenya, mainly to upgrade its power stations.

China’s deals with Nigeria and Kenya, as well as other African countries, are direct challenges to the traditional domination of the continent’s oil by American and European companies. (See Western concern at China’s growing involvement in Africa)

China’s energy diplomacy was spelled out by Yang Peidong, a foreign ministry consultant, in a recent edition of China Economic Weekly. Beijing is now focusing on “the extension of trade and the promotion of energy, resources and technology cooperation” as the heart of China’s foreign policy, he wrote.

China’s strategy is to offer infrastructure projects to the resource-rich countries in Middle East, Africa and Latin America to facilitate, and in exchange for, the export of minerals to China. China is now the world’s sixth largest engineering contractor, with its new contracts up 24 percent to $39 billion last year. In some cases, China has also financed and even armed regimes, such as in Sudan and Zimbabwe, in order to protect its resource interests.

In comments to Reuters during Hu’s visit, former Nigerian foreign minister Bolaji Akinyemi attempted to play down possible tensions with Washington. “In the Middle East, the US regards China’s incursion with alarm, but Nigeria is more virgin territory for suitors and Washington should not be too worried,” he said.

The Bush administration, however, regards China’s moves in Africa as far from benign. Its recently published National Security Strategy openly states US concerns over China as “expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow ‘lock up’ energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up—as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era; and … supporting resource-rich countries without regard to their misrule at home or misbehaviour abroad of those regimes.”

The West has not directed itself to resolving the infrastructure crisis across the continent precisely because they are architects of that crisis.

why did israel lose europe's support in the U.N.?

ha'aretz | "We lost Europe," said a senior Foreign Ministry official. The erosion of Israeli support and shift to the Palestinians started a few days ago in France. President Francois Hollande's words at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Paris a month ago, in which he expressed doubts about the Palestinian move in the UN, disappeared as if he never spoke them.

Despite previous declarations, France announced that instead of abstaining, it would vote in favor of recognizing Palestine as a non-member state - an observer state without full membership in the United Nations.

Sixteen members of the European Union have announced their support for the Palestinian move: Spain, Cyprus, Portugal, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Malta, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and Greece all joined France in the past few days. Norway and Switzerland, which are not members of the European Union, also announced their support for the Palestinian request.

The UN General Assembly resolution recognizes Palestine within the 1967 borders as a non-member observer state. One hundred and thirty eight countries voted in favor of the resolution. Israel suffered a humiliating political defeat and found itself isolated along with the United States, Canada, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and, at best, the Czech Republic and Germany. Britain, which only a few days ago led the attempt to pressure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to withdraw his resolution, also changed its position.

The British promised they would abstain or vote against, but changed their stance and notified Israel they are leaning toward supporting the Palestinian request in the vote, if the Palestinians provide the British with a number of guarantees to restart the peace negotiations without any preconditions - as well as a Palestinian promise not to petition the International Criminal Court in The Hague against Israel. Israel hoped the British would not receive such guarantees - and abstain.

But the hardest blow came from Berlin. In Jerusalem, Germany was considered a certainty to vote against the UN resolution, and the German decision not to oppose the Palestinian bid but rather to abstain shocked the top brass at the Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister's office. A top German official who took part in discussions in Berlin, however, stressed that the writing was on the wall.

The senior German official, who has requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, told Haaretz that Germany has been trying to help Israel on the Palestinian issue for a long time but Israel has not taken the necessary steps to advance the peace process. "The Israelis," he said, "did not respond in any way to our request to make a gesture on settlements."

greeks on the road to haitian hell...,

guardian | It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers' pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.

From their new home a little further on, Yiannis Chadziathanasiou and Natasa Rempati watch the ebb and flow of this traffic. So, too, do the residents of Tsagarada, the picturesque hamlet where the sound of chainsaws pierces the morning air. "Things are getting desperate," says Chadziathanasiou, who clothed Greek celebrities before he moved to the countryside. "You hear all the time of people illegally clearing forests for firewood. It's horrible if you're a green like me."

In their wellington boots and designer jeans, the couple stand out in Tsagarada. Like most middle class Europeans raised in cities, nature is a new world and one that does not come naturally to them. Until last year, both enjoyed successful careers in fashion and architecture. "But then we did our sums," said 29-year-old Rempati, whose firm had designed hospitals and metro stations before being forced to close down. "And although we were both earning good salaries, taking home around €3,500 a month, we were really squeezed. There was never a euro left over. Our heating bill alone cost €3,000 and that was before the €500 we spent on petrol and all the new taxes. We were stressed and really anxious and didn't think we could afford to go through another winter in Athens."

greeks quick to throw fists when pissed...,

reuters | For hours the leader of the Greek journalists' social security fund had been chairing a meeting about disastrous losses on retirement savings caused by the country's economic collapse. "She tried to present herself as the fund's savior and asked (members) to double contributions to 6 percent of salaries," said one of those present that night at the Titania hotel. Spanopoulou, 58, did not succeed.

When she rose to leave around midnight, enraged fund members first swore, then waded in punching, kicking and tearing at her clothes, according to witnesses. A bodyguard managed to bustle her out of the room, but another group caught her just outside the hotel and gave her a second beating. She spent the night in hospital.

It was a brutal sign of the fury many Greeks feel at the way the country's debt crisis has dashed hopes of a comfortable old age. Greece's pension funds - patchily run in the first place, say unionists and some politicians - have been savaged by austerity and the terms of the international bailout keeping the country afloat.

Workers and pensioners suffered losses of about 10 billion euros ($13 billion) just in the debt restructuring of March 2012, when the value of some Greek bonds was cut in half. That sum is equal to 4.6 percent of the country's GDP in 2011.

Many savers blame the debacle on the Bank of Greece, the country's central bank, which administers three-quarters of pension funds' surplus cash. Pensioners and politicians accuse it of failing to foresee trouble looming, or even of investing pension fund money in government bonds that it knew to be at high risk of a 'haircut' - having their value reduced.

A Reuters examination of previously unpublished data from the Bank of Greece reveals the bank invested pension fund money in 1.18 billion euros of Greek bonds after the economic crisis began.

Prokopis Pavlopoulos, a lawmaker in the ruling coalition's conservative New Democracy party and former interior minister, said: "From July 2010 it was obvious that a debt restructuring would be inevitable. While foreign banks were unloading their Greek government bonds, no one moved to tell Greek pension funds to do something, that a haircut was coming."

Spanopoulou, while deploring the violence she suffered, said: "The Bank of Greece knew about the haircut on bonds well in advance and should have informed (our) fund."

california marijuana decriminalization drops youth crime rate to record low

HuffPo | Between 2010 and 2011, California experienced a drastic 20 percent decrease in juvenile crime--bringing the underage crime rate to the lowest level since the state started keeping records in 1954.

According to a recently released study, much of that improvement can be credited to the decriminalization of marijuana.

The study, entitled "California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low" and released by the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, looked at the number of people under the age of 18 who were arrested in the state over the past eight decades. The research not only found juvenile crime to be at its lowest level ever but, in the wake of then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signing a bill reducing the punishment for possessing a small amount of marijuana from a misdemeanor to simply an infraction, the drop in rates was particularity significant.

In that one-year period, the number of arrests for violent crimes dropped by 16 percent, homicide went down by 26 percent and drug arrests decreased by nearly 50 percent.

The category of drug arrests showed decreases in every type of crime; however, the vast majority of the drop resulted from far fewer arrests for marijuana possession. In 2010, marijuana possession accounted for 64 percent of all drug arrests, and in 2011, that number decreased to only 46 percent.

California's drop in serious youth crime has decreased faster than in the rest of the nation.

irredentism - the long-term wages of piracy...,

archdruid | The topic of last week’s post, the likely fate of Israel in the twilight years of American empire, makes a good example of more than one common theme.  As I commented in that earlier discussion, Israel is one of several American client states for whom the end of our empire will also be the end of the line.  At the same time, it also highlights a major source of international tension that bids fair to bring in a bumper crop of conflict in the decades before us.

The word “irredentism” doesn’t get a lot of play in the media just now, but my readers may wish to keep it in mind; there’s every reason to think they will hear it fairly often in the future. It’s the conviction, on the part of a group of people, that they ought to regain possession of some piece of real estate that their ancestors owned at some point in the past.  It’s an understandably popular notion, and its only drawback is the awkward detail that every corner of the planet, with the exception of Antarctica and a few barren island chains here and there, is subject to more than one such claim. The corner of the Middle East currently occupied by the state of Israel has a remarkable number of irredentist claims on it, but there are parts of Europe and Asia that could match it readily—and of  course it only takes one such claim on someone else’s territory to set serious trouble in motion.

It’s common enough for Americans, if they think of irredentism at all, to think of it as somebody else’s problem. Airily superior articles in the New York Times and the like talk about Argentina’s claim to the Falklands or Bolivia’s demand for its long-lost corridor to the sea, for example, as though nothing of the sort could possibly spill out of other countries to touch the lives of Americans. I can’t think of a better example of this country’s selective blindness to its own history, because the great-grandmother of irredentist crises is taking shape right here in North America, and there’s every reason to think it will blow sky-high in the not too distant future.

That’s the third and last of the hot button topics I want to discuss as we close in on the end of the current sequence of posts on the end of American empire, and yes, I’m talking about the southern border of the United States.

Many Americans barely remember that the southwestern quarter of the United States used to be the northern half of Mexico. Most of them never learned that the Mexican War, the conflict that made that happen, was a straightforward act of piracy. (As far as I know, nobody pretended otherwise at the time—the United States in those days had not yet fallen into the habit of dressing up its acts of realpolitik in moralizing cant.)  North of the Rio Grande, if the Mexican War comes to mind at all, it’s usually brushed aside with bland insouciance: we won, you lost, get over it. South of the Rio Grande? Every man, woman and child knows all the details of that war, and they have not gotten over it. Fist tap Dale.

arab spring chickens steady coming home to roost...,

guardian | The United Nations general assembly voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to recognise Palestine as a state, in the face of opposition from Israel and the US.

The 193-member assembly voted 138 in favour of the plan, with only nine against and 41 abstentions. The scale of the defeat represented a strong and public repudiation for Israel and the US, who find themselves out of step with the rest of the world.

Thursday's vote marked a diplomatic breakthrough for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and could help his standing after weeks in which he has been sidelined by Palestinian rivals Hamas in the Gaza conflict.

Abbas, who flew from Ramallah, on the West Bank, to New York to address the general assembly, said: "The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: enough of aggression, settlements and occupation."

can israel survive?

archdruid | Yes, it’s time to talk about Israel.

By this I don’t mean that we need to go through yet another round of who-did-what-to-whom rhetoric in the shrill tones of moral absolutism that pervade the subject these days. There’s a point to discussing ethical issues surrounding the origins, conduct, and future of the nation-state of Israel, to be sure, but that discussion is already happening elsewhere, or more precisely would be happening if most of the potential participants weren’t too busy shouting past each other.  What gets misplaced in all the noise, though, is that this is not the only discussion worth having.

In particular, the central theme of this series of posts—the decline and fall of America’s global empire—has aspects that are easiest to see from the perspective of one of America’s more vulnerable client states.  Those aspects are not particularly moral in nature, and the stridently self-righteous arguments that fill most current discussions of Israel’s fate have nothing to contribute here.  For the moment, then, I’d like to set aside squabbles about whether the nation-state of Israel as currently constituted should survive, and ask instead whether, in the post-American world of the not too distant future, it can survive. That’s a much simpler question, and the answer is equally simple:  no.

straight piracy...,

wikipedia | The Mexican–American War, also known as the Mexican War or the U.S.–Mexican War, was an armed conflict between the United States of America and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution.

Combat operations lasted a year and a half, from spring 1846 to fall 1847. American forces quickly occupied New Mexico and California, then invaded parts of Northeastern Mexico and Northwest Mexico; meanwhile, the Pacific Squadron conducted a blockade, and took control of several garrisons on the Pacific coast further south in Baja California. Another American army captured Mexico City, and the war ended in victory of the U.S.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo specified the major consequence of the war: the forced Mexican Cession of the territories of Alta California and New Mexico to the U.S. in exchange for $15 million. In addition, the United States forgave $3.5 million of debt owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens. Mexico accepted the loss of Texas and thereafter cited the Rio Grande as its national border.

American territorial expansion to the Pacific coast had been the goal of President James K. Polk, the leader of the Democratic Party.^[4] However, the war was highly controversial in the U.S., with the Whig Party and anti-slavery elements strongly opposed. Heavy American casualties and high monetary cost were also criticized. The political aftermath of the war raised the slavery issue in the U.S., leading to intense debates that pointed to civil war; the Compromise of 1850 provided a brief respite.

In Mexico, terminology for the war include (primera) intervención estadounidense en México (United States' (First) Intervention in Mexico), invasión estadounidense a México (The United States' Invasion of Mexico), and guerra del 47 (The War of 1847).

mushroom men mashup...,

realitysandwich | I recently put my foot in it. I stepped, as they say, on a hornet's nest. All hell broke loose and verbal fury was loosed upon me. Here's what happened.

Some months ago, a chap called Jan Irvin, who runs Gnostic Media, put out a request for funds to help him pursue a project concerned with unveiling a sinister Elite/CIA/NWO conspiracy. Mind you, this was not just any old sinister Elite/CIA/NWO conspiracy. This one involved, allegedly, a vast labyrinthine PSYOPS involving psychedelic mushrooms, Gordon Wasson, Aldous Huxley, The Esalen Institute, Teilhard De Chardin, 2012 eschatology, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, and all manner of other psychedelic spokesmen and counter-culture luminaries. The gist of it is that the whole hippy psychedelic movement was stage managed by the CIA/Elite/NWO and that the malign manipulations of these ultra-powerful puppet masters stretch back further even than Albert Hofmann's infamous LSD trip bicycle ride (Irvin even thinks Hofmann's bicycle trip was a "fabrication" and "BS"). Thus, Irvin is attempting nothing less than a total rewrite of psychedelic history. Believe me, with everything being bent into an infernal conspiracy shape, it's scary bad trip stuff. Of course, one might simply dismiss all this as the lunatic fringe, yet Irvin is backed and supported by numerous fans and supporters. Indeed, he has already managed to raise 3,000 bucks to fund this latest work.

What originally got me involved were Irvin's insinuations about Gordon Wasson. Recall that Wasson was the ethnomycological scholar who published a groundbreaking article about psilocybin mushrooms in Life magazine in 1957. This article was just as significant as Aldous Huxley's 1954 book The Doors of Perception in sparking the West's interest in psychedelics. Wasson was instrumental in channeling the psilocybin mushroom's mind expanding influence from the backwaters of Mexico to the very heart of the West. If you have ever experienced "magic mushrooms," then you have Gordon Wasson to thank -- at least in part.

Now, the conventional view of Wasson is that there was indeed a connection with dodgy mischief-makers -- in this case the thin-tied, shade-wearing CIA. But this connection was minor and indirect. The conventional view, which has been well documented, is that the CIA got an agent to infiltrate one of Wasson's mushroom hunting trips to Mexico. Here is what I wrote about it in my book The Psilocybin Solution:

"In his book The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate,' John Marks tells us of the CIA's covert involvement with our hero Wasson. In its relentless and arguably psychotic search for ever-more effective weaponry, the CIA had, by the 1950s, initiated a massive twenty-five million dollar long-term program called MKULTRA. True to its suspicious-sounding name, Project MKULTRA involved finding chemical and biological materials for use in "mind kontrol" and other psychological unpleasantries. Despite the morally questionable nature of such an unsavory federal project, its dogmatic pursuit meant that it was soon to pick up on rumors of sacred Mexican mushrooms. After learning of Wasson's 1955 experiences with the mushroom, an unscrupulous chemist named James Moore immediately began to work undercover for the conspiratorial agency. Presumably dollars changed hands surreptitiously. At any rate, in 1956, Moore craftily wrote to Wasson informing him that he knew of a foundation willing to finance another Mexican trip in order that he and Wasson bring back some of the legendary mushrooms. Moore innocently claimed that, as a chemist, he simply wanted to study the chemical structure of the mushroom's active constituents. The foundation was the CIA-backed Geschwickter Fund for Medical Research, and they were offering a two-thousand dollar grant. Would Wasson be interested?

Understandably, Wasson took the bait, and so it came to pass that the CIA's secret quest for the sacred mushroom became Subproject 58 of the MKULTRA program, possibly representing the most crass approach to psilocybin to date. It was as if the CIA were lobbing stones at angels. Fittingly, it transpired that the double-dealing Moore was well out of his comfort zone in Mexico and loathed the entire episode. Wasson later recalled that Moore had absolutely no empathy for what was going on. Whereas Wasson was sensitive to the customs of the native Mexican Indians and respectful of their cultural beliefs about the mushroom, Moore was there merely as a CIA pawn.

Once again, all those who were in Wasson's party took part in a mushroom ceremony hosted by the shaman Maria Sabina, though it was Moore alone who had a bad experience. Despite this, Moore was still able to bring back some of the fungi to the United States in the hope of isolating the active ingredient. Thankfully, however, he was beaten in his pharmaceutical pursuit by Roger Heim, an eminent French mycologist and coworker of Wasson, who managed to grow a supply of the mushroom from spore prints that he had taken in Mexico. Heim sent his newly cultivated samples to Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, and it was Hofmann, a highly distinguished chemist who had originally synthesized LSD, who, in 1958, first isolated and then named the entheogenic alkaloid within the mushroom. Psilocybin was thus officially born, a name devoid of the weaponry connotations the CIA would invariably have conferred upon the substance had they successfully isolated it first."

The thing to bear in mind is that Wasson did not know that he was being duped by the CIA. It is also worth driving home the point that all these events took place during the paranoid anti-Communist McCarthyism Cold War era of the 1950s, when the CIA had an active interest in mind control drugs for use in espionage. However, things never worked out that well for the CIA, as psilocybin cannot be used as a mind control "truth drug." As users will know, psychedelic drugs are more like de-conditioning agents that can make one challenge orthodoxy and cultural control structures. Indeed, that is probably one principal reason why psilocybin has been demonized and illegalized by the authorities. If you wish to control someone and extract information, or get them to do your dirty espionage work or whatever, then the psilocybin mushroom is not a tool for your arsenal.

living memory historical dustup on the entheogenic fringe...,

gnosticmedia | This episode is a presentation given by me, my first solo show, titled “Magic Mushrooms and the Psychedelic Revolution: Beginning a New History” – or “The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms” and is being released on Sunday, May 13, 2012.

Today is the 55^th anniversary since the publication of the May 13, 1957, Life magazine article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom, published by Gordon Wasson, which is what is largely considered to have launched the psychedelic revolution.

Today we’re going to toss out the last 55 years of academic history regarding the discovery of magic mushrooms, the beginnings of the field of ethnomycology, and this major event in launching the psychedelic revolution; and we’re going to start a new history – one based on truth and verifiable facts rather than legends and myths.

Six years in the making, this episode exposes one of the largest coverups in modern academic history – something that may one day be regarded as large as the Piltdown Hoax. We’re going to reveal how the psychedelic revolution was launched by the CFR, CIA and the elite, and how R. Gordon Wasson, the so called discoverer of magic mushrooms, and the founder of the field of ethnomycology, was himself a government asset, a friend of Edward Bernays – the father of propaganda, and is one of the key figures for launching one of the largest mind control operations in history – information never before revealed until today. 

And it doesn’t stop there. I’m going to provide information that shows how R. Gordon Wasson may have been one of the key players in the organization of the JFK assassination. Gordon Wasson nominates George Keenan and John Foster Dulles to the Century Club. Foreign Affairs (CFR) letter head. Gordon Wasson nominates George Keenan to the Century Club. Foreign Affairs (CFR) letter head. The entire transcript of this show is posted for download on the page to this episode on the Gnostic Media website so that you can follow along. Also included in the transcript are 70 endnotes leading to the evidence presented herein.

POP goes the student loan bubble...,

zerohedge | We'll let readers calculate on their own what a surge in 90+ day delinquency from 9% to 11% (or as footnote 2 explains: 22%) in one quarter on $1 trillion in student debt means. For those confused, read all about it in this September article: "The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: Over $120 Billion In Federal Student Loans In Default" which predicted just this.

And so it's official: Pop goes the student loan bubble, as just confirmed by the Fed.

Luckily student debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy. Oh wait. It isn't.

part of what needs to be done, and why the Hon.Bro.Preznit is incapable of doing it...,

jayhanson | The “bad news” is that “peak oil” marks the beginning of the end of capitalism and market politics because many decades of declining “net energy” [1] will result in many decades of declining economic activity. And since capitalism can’t run backwards, a new method of distributing goods and services must be found. The “good news” is that our “market system” is not efficient! Americans could be wasting something like two billion tonnes (metric tons) of oil equivalent energy each year!!

 

In order to avoid anarchy, rebellion, civil war and global nuclear conflict, Americans must force a fundamental change in our political environment. We can keep the same social structures and people, but we must totally eliminate corporate-special interests from our political environment. A careful review of the progressive assault on laissez faire constitutionalism and neoclassical economics, from the 1880s through the 1930s, explains how this can be done legally and without violence. These early progressives showed how we can save our country. All that is lacking today is the political will.

The reason that the reforms listed on this page are so important and must be implemented as the first in a series of many political reforms is because they are “constitutional politics” (politics that changes politics). The modification that I am proposing would fundamentally alter the nature of politics in America.

To achieve America 2.0, we must first separate and isolate our political system from our economic system so that government can begin to address and solve societal problems directly rather than indirectly by throwing money at corporate special interests. The second step is to retire most working American citizens with an annuity sufficient for health and happiness, as government begins to eliminate the current enormous waste of vital resources by delivering goods, and services like police and fire services are delivered today. This would allow the vast majority of adults to stay at home with their families but still receive the what they need to enjoy life—while greatly reducing natural resource consumption.

These reforms are based on the biological principle that people respond to environmental cues; change the cues and one also will change the behavior. If the voting public and political decision-makers only receive cues designed to “mitigate” (make less severe) our crisis, then all choices they make will be aimed at mitigating that crisis. The choices made by elected officials will be, by best calculations, “good” for the public. Corporations will become the public utilities that they were before 1860.

of course the Hon.Bro.Preznit knows about peak oil...,

hopedance | People say that I am hard core about some of this stuff but I know because I have been to Davos, and I’ve sat with Bill Clinton and I’ve sat with Bill Gates and I’ve sat with Tony Blair and I’ve sat with Nancy Pelosi. I’ve sat with all these people who we think are in charge, and they don’t know what to do. Take that in: they don’t know what to do! You think you’re scared? You think you’re terrified? They have the Pentagon’s intelligence, they have every major corporation’s input; Shell Oil that has done this survey and study around the peak oil problem. You think we’ve got to get on the Internet and say, “Peak oil!” because the system doesn’t know about it? They know, and they don’t know what to do. And they are terrified that if they do anything they’ll loose their positions. So they keep juggling chickens and chainsaws and hope it works out just like most of us everyday at work. That’s real, that’s real.

And so I’m hard on people, I try to tell a few jokes, you know, to make it go down easier, but I’m hard on people. But I will tell you why I am hard on people. This is real ball, this is the last chance, this is it. I’m not telling you that; You go to places like I go, and the Pentagon will tell you that. This is real ball and people, for whatever reason, need sometimes a little encouragement. You walk up to that limit of yourself and you want that limit, ‘cause that wasn’t your limit yesterday and you go Whooo! I made it, now let me start telling everybody else what to do. But the goal is over there and every step hurts and every step is challenging and every step is humbling but every step has to be taken or we’re not going to be here.