Wikipedia | An entheogen ("God inside us,"[4] en εν- "in, within," theo θεος- "god, divine," -gen γενος "creates, generates"), in the strict sense, is a psychoactive substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context.
Yeah PK Dick's characters keep zoning out and seeing ancient Rome around them, which sounds pretty much right to me. I dunno if I'm with you on the entheogens though, broski.
Aight then, you tell me what was going on in the mysteries, across time, cultures, languages, and a fairly sizeable geography - that bound all of these up together in a continuous skein of dying god symbolism, values, and praxis?
micro-magnet |Common
to all eukaryotic cells, these filaments are primarily structural in
function and are an important component of the cytoskeleton, along with
microtubules and often the intermediate filaments. Microfilaments range
from 5 to 9 nanometers in diameter and are designed to bear large
amounts of tension. In association with myosin, microfilaments
help to generate the forces used in cellular contraction and basic cell
movements. The filaments also enable a dividing cell to pinch off into
two cells and are involved in amoeboid movements of certain types of
cells.
Microfilaments are solid rods made of a protein known as actin. When it is first produced by the cell, actin appears in a globular form (G-actin;
see Figure 1). In microfilaments, however, which are also often
referred to as actin filaments, long polymerized chains of the molecules
are intertwined in a helix, creating a filamentous form of the protein (F-actin).
All of the subunits that compose a microfilament are connected in such
a way that they have the same orientation. Due to this fact, each
microfilament exhibits polarity, the two ends of the filament
being distinctly different. This polarity affects the growth rate of
microfilaments, one end (termed the plus end) typically assembling and
disassembling faster than the other (the minus end).
Unlike microtubules, which typically extend out from the centrosome
of a cell, microfilaments are typically nucleated at the plasma
membrane. Therefore, the periphery (edges) of a cell generally contains
the highest concentration of microfilaments. A number of external
factors and a group of special proteins influence microfilament
characteristics, however, and enable them to make rapid changes if
needed, even if the filaments must be completely disassembled in one
region of the cell and reassembled somewhere else. When found directly
beneath the plasma membrane, microfilaments are considered part of the
cell cortex, which regulates the shape and movement of the cell's
surface. Consequently, microfilaments play a key role in development
of various cell surface projections (as illustrated in Figure 2),
including filopodia, lamellipodia, and stereocilia.
Illustrated
in Figure 2 is a fluorescence digital image of an Indian Muntjac deer
skin fibroblast cell stained with fluorescent probes targeting the
nucleus (blue) and the actin cytoskeletal network (green).
Individually, microfilaments are relatively flexible. In the cells of
living organisms, however, the actin filaments are usually organized
into larger, much stronger structures by various accessory proteins.
The exact structural form that a group of microfilaments assumes depends
on their primary function and the particular proteins that bind them
together. For instance, in the core of surface protrusions called microspikes, microfilaments are organized into tight parallel bundles by the bundling protein fimbrin. Bundles of the filaments are less tightly packed together, however, when they are bound by alpha-actinin
or are associated with fibroblast stress fibers (the parallel green
fibers in Figure 2). Notably, the microfilament connections created by
some cross-linking proteins result in a web-like network or gel form
rather than filament bundles.
Over the course of evolutionary history of the cell, actin has
remained relatively unchanged. This, along with the fact that all
eukaryotic cells heavily depend upon the integrity of their actin
filaments in order to be able to survive the many stresses they are
faced with in their environment, makes actin an excellent target for
organisms seeking to injure cells. Accordingly, many plants, which are
unable to physically avoid predators that might want to eat them or harm
them in some other way, produce toxins that affect cellular actin and
microfilaments as a defensive mechanism. The death cap mushroom, for
example, produces a substance called phalloidin that binds to and stabilizes actin filaments, which can be fatal to cells.
14:49: Since the rise of western monotheism the human
experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were
unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that
we're getting from the impact of human culture on the earth that we are a
major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of
the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the
planet... A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary
constants of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic
world,...a world based on ideas...downloaded out of the human
imagination and concretized in three dimensional space... 29:29:
Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination
of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and
builds a model of the future and then suspends the perceiving organism
in this magical moment called the now where the past is coordinated for
the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it "driving with
the rear-view mirror" and the only thing good about it is it's better
than driving with no mirror at all. 36:10: Reality is accelerating
towards an unimaginable Omega Point. We are the inheritors of immense
momentum in our social systems, our philosophical and scientific and
technological approaches to the world. Because we're driving the
historical vehicle with a rear-view mirror it appears to us that we're
headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. It
appears that we are destroying the earth, polluting the atmosphere,
wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a
future, so forth and so on.
I believe what is in fact going on
is that we are burning our bridges. One by one we're burning our bridges
to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa
or the canopied rainforests of 5 million years ago. We can't even go
back to the era of...200 years ago. We have burned our bridges. We are
preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape. 39:35: Nobody's in
charge. 41:16: We are central to the human drama and to the drama of
nature and process on this planet. 41:34: Every model of the
universe has a hard swallow...a place where the argument cannot hide the
fact that there's something slightly fishy about it. The hard swallow
built into science is this business about the big bang. Now let's give
this a little attention here. This is the notion that the universe, for
no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Before we dissect
this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you
believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of
something more unlikely, or less likely to be believed. I defy anyone.
It's just the limit case for unlikelihood: that the universe would
spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason....It makes no
sense. It is in fact no different than saying, "and then God said, 'Let
there be light!'".
What the philosophers of science are saying
is "give us one free miracle and we will roll from that point forward,
from the birth of time to the crack of doom. Just one free miracle and
then it will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre
equations which nobody can understand but which are so holy in this
enterprise." Well I say then if science gets one free miracle then
everybody gets one free miracle.
Counterpunch | To stabilize not just Fukushima, but Japan itself, the disastrous and irresponsible decisions taken by governments over the past half-century to pursue nuclear energy as a sacrosanct national project, have to be reversed. The immediate priority must attach to close the Fukushima and Hamaoka (and other extreme high-risk sites including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata prefecture, the world’s largest nuclear generation complex);5 to secure, stabilize, and remediate the Fukushima sites, resettling and compensation the refugee population and rebuilding shattered infrastructure; to cancel all planned and under construction reactor works (including Hamaoka Number 6 and Kaminoseki in Yamaguchi prefecture); to suspend all existing and experimental projects for uranium enrichment, plutonium accumulation, use, and fast-breeding; to stop the planned export of nuclear plants to countries such as Vietnam (personally promoted by Prime Minister Kan as late as October 2010); and to adjust public and private investment priorities to a completely different vision of energy production and consumption.
What is called for, in short, is the reversal of a half century of core national policies.6 Such a strategic decision, turning the present disaster into the opportunity to confront the key challenge of contemporary civilization, amounts to a revolutionary agenda, one only possible under the pressure of a mobilized and determined national citizenry. At this crucial juncture, how Japan goes, the world is likely follow. The challenge is fundamentally political: can Japan’s civil society accomplish the sovereignty guaranteed it under the constitution and wrest control over the levers of state from the irresponsible bureaucratic and political forces that have driven it into the present crisis?
On such a trajectory, instead of a subordinate and secondary role in the current (now stalled) global “nuclear renaissance,” and the continuing feeble presence on the world political and diplomatic stage as a US “client state,” Japan could become a world leader. It is the sort of challenge to which Japan’s best and brightest might rise, and around which its people might unite.
March 2011 is set to mark a caesura in Japanese history comparable to August 1945: the end of a particular model of state, economy and society, both marked by nuclear catastrophes that shook the world (even if the present one seems likely to be slightly muted and the meltdown kept to partial, the regional consequences may be broader, the number of people disastrously affected greater). Where the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki signalled the end-point of the path chosen by the young officers of the Kwantung Army in the 1930s, the chaos and apocalyptic apprehension of post-quake and tsunami Fukushima in 2011 is the end-point of the path chosen by senior state bureaucrats and their corporate and political collaborators in the 1950s and steadily, incrementally, reinforced ever since then. Their legacy is today’s nuclear state Japan. 1945 was a purely human-caused disaster. 2011 differs in that it was occasioned by natural disaster, but human factors hugely exacerbated it.
Japan’s “Hiroshima syndrome” of fear and loathing for all things nuclear meant that cooperation with US nuclear war-fighting strategy had to be kept secret, in mitsuyaku or “secret treaties,” especially in the 1960s and 1970s that have only become public in the past two years. The nuclear energy commitment, also pressed by the US, had likewise to be concealed, never submitted to electoral scrutiny, and continually subject of manipulation (extensive advertising campaigns), cover-up (especially of successive incidents), and deception (as to risk and safety levels). The extent of that too is now laid bare.
The way forward out of the current disaster remains unclear. The debate over Japan’s energy and technology future will be long and hard, but what is now clear is that Japanese democracy has to rethink the frame within which this elite was able to overrun all opposition and push the country to its present brink. The crisis is not just one of radiation, failed energy supply, possible meltdown, the death of tens of thousands, health and environmental hazard, but of governability, of democracy. Civic democracy has to find a way to seize control over the great irresponsible centers of fused state-capital monopoly and open a new path towards sustainability and responsibility. A new mode of energy generation and of socio-economic organization has to be sought. Ultimately it has to be a new vision for a sustainable society.
rt | Israel used "a new type of weapon", a senior official at the Syrian
military facility that came under attack from the Israeli Air Force told
RT.
“When the explosion happened it felt like an earthquake,”
said the source, who was present near the attack site on the
outskirts of Damascus on Sunday morning.
“Then a giant golden mushroom of fire appeared. This tells us
that Israel used depleted uranium shells.”
Depleted uranium is a by-product of the uranium enrichment
process that creates nuclear weapons, and was first used by the US
in the Gulf conflict of 1991. Unlike the radioactive materials used
in nuclear weapons, depleted uranium is not valued for its
explosiveness, but for its toughness – it is 2.5 times as dense as
steel – which allows it to penetrate heavy protection.
Countries using depleted uranium weapons insist that the
material is toxic, but not dangerously radioactive, as long as it
remains outside the body.
The source also claims the attack – if it managed to hit the
objects it targeted – served more of a political than a military
purpose.
“Several civilian factories and buildings were destroyed. The
target was just an ordinary weapons warehouse. The bombing is an
ultimatum to us – it had no strategic motivation.”
Western intelligence sources told the media that the strikes
targeted transfers of weapons from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement,
which is sympathetic to the government of Syrian President Bashar
Assad.
The official who spoke to RT denies this.
“There was no valuable equipment at the site. It was all
removed after a previous attack on the facility. The military
losses from this are negligible.”
Guardian | What was Timothy Leary really up to? We may soon know more now that the New York public library is buying 335 boxes of his papers, videotapes, letters and photographs for $900,000. Once it has spent 18 months to two years sorting them out, the collection will be available to the public.
These papers are not just the rants of this decidedly peculiar man – the 1960s drugs guru whom Richard Nixon called "the most dangerous man in America". There is correspondence with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Arthur Koestler.
Perhaps these papers will give a glimpse of great genius arising from the clash of creative minds with powerful drugs – of insights gained and mystical peaks reached. Or perhaps they will show the horrors and mental decline of drug abuse and excess.
Possibly the most interesting will be the numerous "session records", that is, descriptions of taking LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and other psychedelic drugs. These will presumably give a more realistic picture of what these poets, writers, professors and actors actually experienced at the time.
Leary's is a sad story. A professor at Harvard, he took his first mushroom trip in 1960 and declared that he learned more in the following five hours than he had done in 15 years of study and research in psychology. This experience led to the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which Leary ran along with Ralph Metzner and fellow professor Richard Alpert. It was Alpert who subsequently swapped drugs for Eastern religion and became Baba Ram Dass.
In 1962 Leary took LSD and reportedly had "the most shattering experience of his life". This new, purely synthetic drug seemed to reveal previously hidden realities and he wanted to share his discoveries with the world. Yet his own world began falling apart. Having claimed he had given LSD (which was then legal) to hundreds of Harvard students he was eventually sacked for not turning up to teach classes.
He was later convicted of possessing marijuana and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He escaped from a high security jail and fled with his wife to Algeria and then Switzerland but was finally arrested in Afghanistan and returned to prison for three more years. Once free, he devoted his undoubtedly extraordinary mind and the last 20 years of his life to virtual reality, programming and cyberculture. When dying from prostate cancer he worked with friends to document the whole messy process. He died in 1996 and a portion of his ashes was launched into space.
Leary believed that psychedelic drugs, used at the right dosage, in the right company and setting and with appropriate psychological support, could provide better therapy than any conventional method, and even provoke magically rapid transformations. He explored the use of psychedelics to treat alcoholism and other addictions, and worked in prisons to use them as a means of reforming prisoners' lives. Many of his research participants reported mystical or spiritual experiences, and claimed that their drug experiences permanently changed their lives for the better.
We now know that these claims are far from crazy, and that psychedelics have tremendous potential for good as well as harm. The tragedy is that Leary's own actions contributed to the disaster of drug prohibition. On 6 October 1966, LSD was made illegal in the US and was so tightly controlled that not only were supply and possession made crimes but all of the legitimate research programmes were closed down. Not only was this extraordinary drug demonised and access denied to everyone who might have benefited from it, but also even researchers were prevented from learning anything more about it.
Arguably Leary himself was responsible for wrecking any chance that psilocybin or LSD could become respected and well-used drugs. Possibly if he hadn't got so carried away, so drunk with celebrity, and so successful at spreading the catchy meme "Turn on, tune in, drop out" we might now be living in a better world. Nothing can now wipe away those disastrous decades of prohibition, even though they may now be nearing their end, but perhaps these papers will help us better understand how it all came about.
NYTimes | You may remember a 2019 story about how Senator Amy Klobuchar once ate a salad with a comb.
According to the article, an aide purchased a salad for Klobuchar at an
airport. Later, when the senator wanted to eat her salad on the plane,
she discovered that there were no utensils available. After berating the
aide, Klobuchar retrieved a comb from her purse and (somehow) ate her
salad with it. When finished, she handed the comb to her aide with
orders to clean it.
The comb story was
part of a larger narrative about the senator’s treatment of her staff,
which Klobuchar bravely tried to spin into evidence of her exactitude.
You have to admire the effort, but the senator’s defense was useless.
Nobody came away thinking that her mistake was in having high
expectations. Her mistake was in doing something gross in front of
multiple witnesses. That image was indelible. You couldn’t read the
story without imagining the comb, a hair perhaps still caught in its
teeth, plunging into an oily airport salad. Like all disgusting stories,
it had a contaminating effect. Now the anecdote was in you, the voter.
The taste of the comb was upon your own tongue, and you had no choice
but to resent Klobuchar for putting it there.
The
episode belongs to a list of disgust-related political scandals: the
pubic hair on the Coke can, the stain on the blue Gap dress. On a recent
weekend I passed a truck in Queens with a giant bumper sticker that
said, “Any Burning or Disrespecting of the American Flag and the driver
of this truck will get out and knock you the [expletive] OUT.” This was a
perfect Haidt litmus test. A liberal might walk past the truck and
think some version of: This guy — and it’s definitely a guy — has an
anger problem. A conservative might walk past the truck and think: This
guy — and it’s definitely a guy — must really love our country. As Haidt
put it: “There are people for whom a flag is merely a piece of cloth,
but for most people, a flag is not a piece of cloth. It has a sacred
essence.” If a person views the American flag as a rectangle of fabric,
it is unfathomable to be disgusted by its hypothetical desecration. If a
person views the flag as a sacred symbol, it is unfathomable to not
feel this way.
These two types of
human — which broadly map onto “liberal” and “conservative,” or
“relatively disgust-insensitive” and “relatively disgust-sensitive” —
live in separate moral matrices. If it seems bizarre that disgust
sensitivity and politics should be so closely correlated, it’s important
to remember that disgust sensitivity is really measuring our feelings
about purity and pollution. And these, in turn, contribute to our
construction of moral systems, and it is our moral systems that guide
our political orientations.
To ward
off disgust, we enact purity rites, like rinsing the dirt from our
lettuce or “canceling” a semipublic figure who posted a racist tweet
when she was a teenager. We monitor the borders of mouth, body and
nation. In “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler described Jews as like “a maggot
in a rotting body” and “a noxious bacillus.” Another category of
humankind consistently deemed repulsive is women; to take one of several
zillion illustrations, one reason long skirts were a dominant fashion
in Western Europe for centuries, according to the fashion historian Anne
Hollander, was to conceal the bottom half of the body and by extension
its sexual organs. Mermaids aren’t just a folkloric figure but the
expression, Hollander argues, of a horrified disgust at the lower female
anatomy, which is seen as amphibiously moist and monstrous.
But
purification rites may also be healthful (washing your hands) or
ritually significant (baptism). We will never disentangle ourselves from
the instinct to purify, even as we name different reasons for doing it:
justice, patriotism, progress, tradition, freedom, public health, God,
science. Beneath it all will be a confused omnivore, stumbling upon a
dewy mushroom in the forest — with no clue what will happen if she eats
it.
theoildrum | We evolved to favor the ‘in group’ over the ‘out group’, for
resource, defensive, and ultimately reproductive advantages. The
internet has spawned millions of ‘in-groups’ – peak oilers, tea-party
evangelizers, deflationistas, gold-bugs, Austrian economics followers,
anti-abortion activists, and myriad less controversial groups such as
‘Claremount High School Boosters", "Kerr Jar Enthusiasts", “Earthworm
Snack Creators” and the like. People gravitate towards groups they
identify with. And they usually stay there. (After all, a room full of
clowns feels a lot less clown-like).
Achieving status is a primary driver in the biological kingdom and
remains a key driver in our human social groups. But today, for the
first time in our species history, the same ‘feelings’ we get from
moving up in a real life social hierarchy can be attained cheaply and
easily online. Being the most vocal, most persuasive or most
interesting in a small group of dedicated/interested followers engenders
the same neural reward as being the head of a small business, or a
Mayor, or a high school basketball star. Our brains don’t really know
that being the head of the “Morel Foraging Society” or “Nudists for
Nader 2012” with several hundred members online is different than being
County Treasurer in real life – we receive respect, positive feedback,
deference etc. from the people in our ‘in-group’ (the fact they might be
just anonymous mushroom pickers or passionate nude people is not
relevant to our brains).
Human ethologists liken this phenomenon to 'dispersal phenotype' prevalent in nature:
Dispersal is important in biology. Often a species will produce two forms:
1) a maintenance phenotype (the outcome of genes and the structures
they produce interacting with a specific environment) that is adapted to
the environment in which it is born, and (2) a dispersal phenotype that
is programmed to move to a new area and that often has the capacity to
adapt to a new environment.
According to the present theory, humans have developed two dispersal phenotypes in the forms of the prophet and the follower.
The coordinated action of these two phenotypes would serve to disperse
us over the available habitat. This dispersal must have been aided by
the major climatic changes over the past few million years in which vast
areas of potential human habitat have repeatedly become available
because of melting of ice sheets.
The dispersal phenotypes might have evolved through selection at
the individual level, since the reproductive advantage of colonizing a
new habitat would have been enormous. They would also promote
selection between groups. Factors that promote selection at the group
level are rapid splitting of groups, small size of daughter groups,
heterogeneity (differences) of culture between groups, and reduction in
gene flow between groups. These factors are all promoted by the breaking away of prophet-led groups with new belief systems.
Cult followers have been studied and found to be high on schizotypal
traits, such as abnormal experiences and beliefs. They have not yet been
tested for the sort of selfish attitudes and behavior that characterize
free-riders. If a large cohort of people were tested for some measure
of selfishness, it is predicted that those who subsequently joined cults
would be low on such a measure. Predictions could also be made about
future cult leaders. They would be likely to be ambitious males who
were not at the top of the social hierarchy of their original group.
If part of why human groups split in general is to give more
reproductive opportunities to males in the new group, it can also be
predicted that leaders of new religious movements would be males of
reproductive age. Female cult leaders are not likely to be more fertile
as a result of having many sexual partners, but their sons might be in
an advantageous position for increased reproduction.
From THE BIOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR, Edited by Jay R. Feierman (bold added my me)
[pp. 184-186] DISPERSAL
Most people are both reasonable, and passive. Some people are either
unreasonable or assertive (or both). In a free form forum one
unreasonable or assertive person will drown out 10 or more who are
either reasonable or passive. Especially for those whose assertion or
unreasonableness in real life leads to fewer social opportunities, the
internet has been a godsend. Either anonymous or in their own name,
they can easily accumulate a following by articulating what people
already believe or like to hear. Given the self-selected audience,
there doesn’t exist the normal social checks and balances. As such, due
to the myriad different categories, those assertive and/or social
acceptance seeking souls who find their niches online dig in hard and
‘feel’ as if they are true celebrities. Combine that with the
iterations and scale that come from long time periods, little or no
barriers to entry and an apathy/lack of interest from those not spending
time on the internet and these folks have become ensconced at all sorts
of cyber guideposts on topics that cover the map. Dispersal
phenotypes.
Basically, since people believe in authority figures, and nominate their own authority figures based on their own belief systems,
it is no wonder that time and numbers has by circa 2010 amassed an
internet army of 'clowns'. We see increasingly hysterical caricatures
emerge on the internet/media that undergo some perceived status/ego
boost that they wouldn't/couldn't have gotten in normal situations. The
feedback from the true believers (of whatever tribe they communicate
to), then locks these personalities into an utterly confident belief in
their own position as an expert, and their actions become considerably
(and understandably) clownlike over time to people not in their
sub-group, especially magnified in those cases of borderline mental
illness (which I suspect are not few). I notice this dynamic in numerous
areas of discourse but its particularly prevalent in the the peak oil,
finance and climate change circles where I have spent alot of time.
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 55th 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.
slate | Glenn Greenwald's latest Snowden-fueled revelation dropped Monday in Spanish newspaper El Mundo, but the day's most interesting revelation about American spying—at least for those of us not living in Spain—comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal,
which cites unnamed U.S officials to report that the White House
ordered an end to the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
"a number of other world leaders" only after learning of the existence
of the operation this past summer.
That's noteworthy for two reasons: 1) it largely confirms that the
NSA was indeed monitoring its allies abroad as has been suggested by
Snowden's leaks/Greenwald's reporting; and 2) it also suggests that
President Obama may have gone his entire first term without being
briefed on what appears to have been a rather wide-ranging and
aggressive surveillance effort. Here's the Journal:
The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five
years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world
leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations
under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of
them. They added that the president was briefed on and approved of
broader intelligence-collection "priorities," but that those below him
make decisions about specific intelligence targets.
The senior U.S. official said that the current practice has
been for these types of surveillance decisions to be made at the agency
level. "These decisions are made at NSA," the official said. "The
president doesn't sign off on this stuff." That protocol now is under
review, the official added. ...
The administration didn't end all operations involving world
leaders following this summer's revelations because some of the
programs are producing intelligence of use to the U.S. It could not be
learned Sunday how many of the eavesdropping operations were stopped, or
who is on the list of leaders still under surveillance.
The report may give Obama at least some diplomatic cover
abroad as he attempts to smooth things over with those European allies
who have been vocal about their displeasure with the apparent
ally-on-ally spying. It will likely be greeted quite differently at
home, however, both by the president's conservative critics who have
sought to paint him as an ineffective executive, and by those
less-partisan critics who have taken specific aim at the NSA and what
they say is its unchecked power. It also raises plenty of other
questions about how much, exactly, the president knew about the NSA's
surveillance efforts before the agency sprung a Snowden-sized leak.
taiwannews | Video has surfaced allegedly shot from inside the instant
"hospital" hastily constructed in Wuhan appearing much more like a
prison than a center to care for sick patients.
On Monday (Feb. 3), Communist China claimed to have completed the
Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan to house 1,000 of the city's residents
infected with the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV). The rapid construction
of the hospital was widely trumpeted by Chinese state-run mouthpieces
and parroted by Western media outlets as an example of the Chinese
Communist Party's (CCP's) superior ability to quickly respond to crises,
while a de-emphasis was placed on the initial slow response that
arguably allowed the virus to mushroom out of control.
However, the dissident organization Himalaya Global released a video
on its Twitter page Monday which was apparently secretly filmed by a
Chinese contractor inside the new facility. The video starts with the
contractor introducing the Spartan interior of Ward 1.
The man starts out by ominously saying, "Once you are in, you can't
get out." He then asserts that patients would be better off staying at
home than checking into the new compound.
The camera then focuses on the tiny windows that he said would be
used to serve food to patients. In the background, another man can be
heard saying that "the dead will be removed from that door."
Nana, when I complete the communication tools for social networks technology project I've been working on for the past few years, I plan to retire to cultivate goats and mushrooms.
Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets' research is the Northwest's native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas.
There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet.
caitlinjohnstone | From 2021 until nuclear armageddon Biden will be sitting off to the
side mumbling to himself as his brain turns to chowder while holdovers
from the Obama administration orchestrate cold war escalations against
China in retaliation for its 2020 “election meddling”.
~
You
will never, ever hate China enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to
the US. Playing along with bullshit narrative spin hoping it will bring
your jobs back will never work. You’re just helping opaque government
agencies advance their new cold war.
~
The dumbest thing
about believing foreign countries attacked American democracy is
believing America has any democracy to attack.
~
Thought
experiment: If you looked out the window right now and saw a mushroom
cloud growing on the horizon, how would you feel about the way you’ve
been spending your mental energy lately? Be honest with yourself.
~
If
we win this thing it won’t be because conspiracy analysts showed
everyone a bunch of complex financial connections or because Marxists
put a bunch of theory in everyone’s heads, it will be because clear,
simple pointing helped everyone notice the fact that they’ve been duped.
This
fight isn’t a game of addition, it’s a game of subtraction. You’re not
trying to get the mainstream rank-and-file public to understand a bunch
of complicated new information, you’re trying to remove the blindfold so
they can see something for themselves that they kind of already
suspected was the case.
Cripple public trust in the establishment
narrative control apparatus and you remove the only obstacle that’s been
stopping the people from using the power of their numbers to force real
change. They don’t need anything new, they need to exorcise the lies
that have blinded them and stop trusting in the words of liars.
theoccupiedtimes | Various statutes including DPA 1998, RIPA 2000, ACSA 2001, and the proposed Communications Data bill
all display the state’s attempts to control the wisps of algorithms,
identities and data in the global communications databank. The right to
the city – the focus of this issue – is another aspect of the same
struggle. It is a fight for control over people as ‘subjects’, the
spaces and currents we move between and occupy and the coercive forms of
commodity and debt that shape and define our environment.
Communities are fracturing as their inhabitants are flung
to the periphery in the name of ‘regeneration’ and ‘redevelopment’. It
is plainly apparent that the intention of policymakers is to purge
central London, making it into a hub for commercial wealth. A grand
supra-geographic terrain is being mapped, ensuring the global reach of
national and supranational states of surveillance. In these physical and
digital gated communities, free spaces for different identities to meet
and create new social relations are limited. Under the guise of
‘protection’, all space in the city becomes monitored in true panopticon
style. But this is not for the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest
number’ as the proposed utility of this operation would have us believe.
Under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights,
the right to respect for private and family life, home and
correspondence exists, but not as an absolute right. It is curtailed ‘in
accordance with the law’ and ‘where necessary in a democratic society’
i.e. by the state in the interests of ‘national security’, ‘public
safety or the economic well-being of the country’, for ‘the prevention
of disorder or crime’ etc; a very broad range of vague restrictions
which are available to public authorities to curb our right to privacy. A
form of global sovereign power has emerged, which comprises the
dominant nation-states together with supranational institutions and
major capitalist corporations with increasingly unlimited access to
intelligence, and unhindered powers to usurp rights and property.
Within this global configuration, it becomes incredibly
difficult to claim any right or power, especially when you are the one
being regenerated – many residents who have fallen foul of
‘regeneration’ schemes are not given all the information they need, or
are purposely misled by public relations representatives. Some are
forcibly evicted without any meaningful redress, others face
state-sanctioned brutality when protecting their space and communities,
like those recently violently evicted from an established community on Rushcroft Road, Brixton.
There is no power for people under the market-state duopoly: people
have no right to ask how and why they are being dispossessed, how and
why they are being surveilled, or for whose benefit, for fear of
interfering with ‘business sensitivities’, revenue-generating streams or
the power of the state and its corporate partners.
Various anti-eviction and private renters groups have
sprung up in London, joining with already established similar groups - a
positive sign that an alternative to the status quo does exist, and the
numbers in the multitude are growing. Housing action groups and
dedicated campaigns continue to mushroom across the city, challenging
the spread of powerful global networks of hierarchy and division. They
are signs that an alternative network is slowly being produced whereby
difference can be expressed through collaborative means. The common can
take root and begin to shape itself.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
