the vast active living intelligence system revisited (redux 4/24/13)

realitysandwich |  For most people, Philip K. Dick (hereafter known as PKD) is best known through films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, which were all based on his writings. Classic movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky also owe a great debt to PKD's work. What is not so well known is that PKD was a bit of a latter-day mystic, a man who spent the last decade or so of his life struggling to come to terms with a series of visionary experiences (not related to psychedelics) that befell him in the early 1970s. In these experiences, PKD felt as if some vast cosmic intelligence was communicating with him, as if a deity was slipping him secret information. Such was the impact of these theophanies that he chose to incorporate their thematic content into a number of novels as well as an eight-thousand-page exegesis. To the consternation of his peers, PKD began to be not a little obsessed with ideas of "divine invasion" and the like, his last books testifying to his escalating interest in theology and theistic philosophy (interestingly, his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, partly concerns the search for a sacred mushroom).

Since his death it has been speculated that PKD suffered from what is known as temporal lobe epilepsy -- a brain disorder that can lead to hallucinatory experiences -- and that this explains his mystical encounters. However, leaving aside the contentiousness of this claim, it does not deal with the burning issue of immediate mystical experience. To label an experience in order to explain it away is to avoid the very real nature of the mystical experience, however it should arise. In fact, as Huxley noted in The Doors of Perception, we should not be surprised if there is always unusual neuronal activity concurrent with a mystical experience, for, as we have seen, modified neuronal firing patterns are related to expanded forms of consciousness. Altered forms of awareness demand altered brain processes, and such a change in brain state can be achieved in many different ways, whether through psilocybin mushrooms, endogenous DMT, yoga, meditation, fasting, or spontaneous epileptic disturbances. Mystical experience is therefore not to be conveniently disposed of with a diagnostic label.

Even before his visionary experiences, PKD had long fought to discover the true nature of reality. It was his pet fascination. In a talk he delivered in the late 1970s, he admitted that for all the years he had thought about the question "what is reality?" he had gotten no further than concluding that reality was that which remained even if you stopped believing in it. Admittedly a thin definition, it is nonetheless indicative that the true nature of reality is not so easily pinned down.

PKD juggled with countless explanations for his mystical experiences. Some involved a Judeo-Christian God, others involved the Logos outlined in some of the Gnostic gospels (these are the "alternative" gospels dug up at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945), while others even opted for an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. Whatever the case, PKD was certain that he had been "contacted" by some form of advanced transcendental intelligence-cum-Other.

One of his more enduring theories concerned VALIS, which is an acronym for "vast active living intelligence system," a notion that accords well with our intelligent Other. In the semiautobiographical novel of the same name, VALIS is a hidden entity of immense power and sentience that is in the process of infiltrating our reality by establishing communication with certain individuals. These disclosures are experienced as theophany. For our purposes, the key point is that VALIS is essentially outside of our dimension, but able to penetrate our world. The question arises as to the feasibility that a superior intelligence exists in another dimension with the capacity to move across into ours. This is one of our fanciful options concerning the Other.

What's The Basis For The Claim That These ONLY Provide Structure, Support And Movement?

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.

 

The Abject Gotta Go Because They Will Fight Rather Than Eat Insects...,

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.

Short Of Individual Autarky What Kind Of Waking-Up Can There Be?

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.

Han Elite's Rapidly Deployed "Hospital" Looks a Lot Like a Prison

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

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."

Alien Intelligence: A Both/And Rather Than Either/Or Proposition

MyceliumRunning |  “I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.

 

The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.” 

 

The mycelium is the part of the mushroom you usually do not see.

 

Most of it is found distributed throughout the soil, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like structures (known as hyphae) which absorb nutrients and decompose organic materials.

 

The mycelium can be exceedingly small or may form a colony of massive proportions.

Is this the largest organism in the world? This 2,400-acre (9.7 km²) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it.

 

Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees.

 

Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique in that their mycelial mats can achieve such massive proportions.
- Paul Stamets

Mycelium Running

The mycelium has extraordinary properties suitable for bioremediation.

 

It is capable of degrading pesticides and plastics, and has been shown to break down petroleum in a matter of weeks:

This, however, is only the physio-chemical dimension of the mycelium.

 

According to Paul Stamets, it also has information/consciousness associated properties:

“I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks.

 

Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.”

- Paul Stamets

Mycelium Running

The notion that fungi may participate in some form of planetary interspecies communication and/or consciousness through their mycelium may seam a bit 'far out,' but consider that mushrooms have been used to expand consciousness for countless millennia.

 

Even beyond the well-known psychedelic (literally "soul showing") properties of some species (particularly Lion's Mane) are their neuritogenic properties; that is, their ability to promote new neural cell growth and the enhancement of communication between them. The resemblance between the filamentous structures within the brain (axons; dendrites) and the fungi within the soil (mycelium) may therefore be more than accidental.

Our relationship to fungi is in fact closer than most think.

 

According to David McLaughlin, professor of plant biology at the University of Minnesota in the College of Biological Sciences, human cells are surprisingly similar to fungal cells.

 

In a 2006 Science Daily article the topic is explored further:

In 1998 scientists discovered that fungi split from animals about 1.538 billion years ago, whereas plants split from animals about 1.547 billion years ago.

 

This means fungi split from animals 9 million years after plants did, in which case fungi are actually more closely related to animals than to plants. The fact that fungi had motile cells propelled by flagella that are more like those in animals than those in plants, supports that.

- Science Daily

Could this filial bond also be why many species of fungi have such profound medicinal properties in humans?

 

your species has begun its descent down the birth canal of transformation

deoxy |  History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together.

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity: writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philisophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth, into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the micro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necesary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the de-no-ma(?) of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.

You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focussed and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history.

is there any basis for intelligent people to hope and be hopeful?

Quotes

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.

clown fest

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.

did the nsa give the Hon.Bro.Preznit the mushroom treatment?

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.

entheogens and the development of culture

psypressuk | Originally published in 2013 ‘Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience’ is a collection of essays edited by John A. Rush. Rush has previously authored the books ‘The Mushroom in Christian Art: The Identity of Jesus in the Development of Christianity’, ‘Failed God: Fractured Myth in a Fragile World’ and ‘The Twelve Gates: A Spiritual Passage through the Egyptian Books of the Dead’. This work has been published by North Atlantic Books.

 

As a collection, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience proposes that psychoactive substances have been key components in the development of both human culture and the human brain. The fourteen essays that are included in the collection are written by a number of researchers from across various disciplines, including anthropology, mycology, classics, cultural historians, psychology and biology. While, academically and perspectively, the writers often appear to be coming from altogether totally different theoretical places, with a myriad of intentions laced within them, they do share the common goal of examining the role of psychoactive substances in the history of human culture. And, as such, provides an interesting argument when taken in its totality.

The question regarding the entheogenic effect on the development of the human brain, while bolstered to some degree by the cultural chapters, is largely formulated in Michael Winkelman’s essay Altered Consciousness and Drugs in Human Evolution. Holding the position that our brains have evolved alongside, and as a result of certain plants and altered states, by way of the serotonergic and dopaminergic systems that can be stimulated by exogenous neurotransmitters—such as those found in Psilocybe mushrooms. Winkleman writes:

“The role of drugs in the evolution of human consciousness must be understood in relationship to effects on the serotonergic system and its roles in overall brain functioning. The alterations of consciousness enhance paleomammilian brain functions and their coordination and integration with the entire brain. Enhanced serotonergic mechanisms contributed to experiences of altered consciousness in humans, embodied in visionary experiences” (Rush 45)

So, the theory goes, the evolution of human consciousness has been, in part, mediated by the exogenous neurotransmitters that humans have sought out and consumed, thereby taking a hand in their own evolution. Taking the theory at face value, for the moment, this leads Winkleman to postulate that, “this expanded associational area improved the brain’s capacity to interface with a variety of other neural mechanisms, including those involved in learning, problem-solving, and memory function” (ibid.). Here, therefore, is the window into culture. From these improved brain functions, art, society and, indeed, organization generally, could develop. However, as we shall see, the remainder of the essays are less about the role of entheogens generating the capability for culture-creation in humans, but more about the role of entheogens within culture itself. Indeed, if entheogens created the capacity for culture, culture itself embarked on a process of reintegrating entheogens from the newly evolved perspective.

Entheogen discourse is primarily driven by historical analysis, and particularly the religious use of mushrooms within human culture, and while this is also very true of this collection, a number of other substances are discussed, which are worth mentioning first. Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen, both having written extensively on drugs and the bible, offer a chapter entitled Cannabis and the Hebrew Bible, which makes use of Sula Benet’s identification of kaneh bosm—an anointing oil used as an initiatory rite—with cannabis.

the fight for control over people as subjects...,

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.

iran is the end-game...,

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.”

the vast active living intelligence system revisited

realitysandwich |  For most people, Philip K. Dick (hereafter known as PKD) is best known through films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, which were all based on his writings. Classic movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky also owe a great debt to PKD's work. What is not so well known is that PKD was a bit of a latter-day mystic, a man who spent the last decade or so of his life struggling to come to terms with a series of visionary experiences (not related to psychedelics) that befell him in the early 1970s. In these experiences, PKD felt as if some vast cosmic intelligence was communicating with him, as if a deity was slipping him secret information. Such was the impact of these theophanies that he chose to incorporate their thematic content into a number of novels as well as an eight-thousand-page exegesis. To the consternation of his peers, PKD began to be not a little obsessed with ideas of "divine invasion" and the like, his last books testifying to his escalating interest in theology and theistic philosophy (interestingly, his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, partly concerns the search for a sacred mushroom).

Since his death it has been speculated that PKD suffered from what is known as temporal lobe epilepsy -- a brain disorder that can lead to hallucinatory experiences -- and that this explains his mystical encounters. However, leaving aside the contentiousness of this claim, it does not deal with the burning issue of immediate mystical experience. To label an experience in order to explain it away is to avoid the very real nature of the mystical experience, however it should arise. In fact, as Huxley noted in The Doors of Perception, we should not be surprised if there is always unusual neuronal activity concurrent with a mystical experience, for, as we have seen, modified neuronal firing patterns are related to expanded forms of consciousness. Altered forms of awareness demand altered brain processes, and such a change in brain state can be achieved in many different ways, whether through psilocybin mushrooms, endogenous DMT, yoga, meditation, fasting, or spontaneous epileptic disturbances. Mystical experience is therefore not to be conveniently disposed of with a diagnostic label.

Even before his visionary experiences, PKD had long fought to discover the true nature of reality. It was his pet fascination. In a talk he delivered in the late 1970s, he admitted that for all the years he had thought about the question "what is reality?" he had gotten no further than concluding that reality was that which remained even if you stopped believing in it. Admittedly a thin definition, it is nonetheless indicative that the true nature of reality is not so easily pinned down.

PKD juggled with countless explanations for his mystical experiences. Some involved a Judeo-Christian God, others involved the Logos outlined in some of the Gnostic gospels (these are the "alternative" gospels dug up at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945), while others even opted for an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. Whatever the case, PKD was certain that he had been "contacted" by some form of advanced transcendental intelligence-cum-Other.

One of his more enduring theories concerned VALIS, which is an acronym for "vast active living intelligence system," a notion that accords well with our intelligent Other. In the semiautobiographical novel of the same name, VALIS is a hidden entity of immense power and sentience that is in the process of infiltrating our reality by establishing communication with certain individuals. These disclosures are experienced as theophany. For our purposes, the key point is that VALIS is essentially outside of our dimension, but able to penetrate our world. The question arises as to the feasibility that a superior intelligence exists in another dimension with the capacity to move across into ours. This is one of our fanciful options concerning the Other.

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.

spores...,

"I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.

Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our starswarm are heir to." From Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide

it suits israel that we never forget nuclear iran...,

The Independent | Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.

Given the nature of the theocratic regime, the repulsive suppression of its post-election opponents in 2009, not to mention its massive pools of oil, every attempt to inject common sense into the story also has to carry a medical health warning: no, of course Iran is not a nice place. But ...

Let's take the Israeli version which, despite constant proof that Israel's intelligence services are about as efficient as Syria's, goes on being trumpeted by its friends in the West, none more subservient than Western journalists. The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.

In fact, we don't know that Iran really is building a nuclear weapon. And after Iraq, it's amazing that the old weapons of mass destruction details are popping with the same frequency as all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal. Not to mention the date problem. When did all this start? The Shah. The old boy wanted nuclear power. He even said he wanted a bomb because "the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs" and no one objected. Europeans rushed to supply the dictator's wish. Siemens – not Russia – built the Bushehr nuclear facility.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini, Scourge of the West, Apostle of Shia Revolution, etc, took over Iran in 1979, he ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was "the work of the Devil". Only when Saddam invaded Iran – with our Western encouragement – and started using poison gas against the Iranians (chemical components arriving from the West, of course) was Khomeini persuaded to reopen it.

All this has been deleted from the historical record; it was the black-turbaned mullahs who started the nuclear project, along with the crackpot Ahmadinejad. And Israel might have to destroy this terror-weapon to secure its own survival, to ensure the West's survival, for democracy, etc, etc.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad – here again, I quote Netanyahu – is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel's own nuclear warheads – all too real and now numbering almost 300 – disappear from the story.

merry christmas!

PsychologyToday | In Holland, children are taught that Santa Claus-and his African slave-come from Madrid on a ship that docks in Rotterdam. In this respect (and perhaps only in this respect), I'm glad I wasn't raised in Holland. As a kid, I loved to lie awake the night before Christmas, imagining Santa and his reindeer flying to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania from the North Pole, with something special just for me. To imagine him coming up to Holland on a slow ship from Spain just doesn't have the same magical quality.

When I discovered that the whole Santa story was a hoax, I remember feeling proud that the adults had let me in on their conspiracy (which I now had to keep from my little sister), but disappointed as well. Years later, when I began to study the differences in the way people in different cultures construct and perceive what they consider to be reality, I was reminded of this embittered pride I'd felt as a child. The entire trajectory of emotional and intellectual growth in the Western mind seems to be a movement away from mystery, while indigenous people tend to see themselves moving ever closer to realms of mystery as they age.

A typical American Indian adolescent, for example, would be introduced to adulthood in a ceremony involving solitude, introspection, attention to dreams and visions, altered states of consciousness, and perhaps the use of sacred plants. We tend to educate our children in precisely the opposite direction, toward being "well-adjusted" and focused on the practical realities and responsibilities of adulthood. "Stop dreaming," we tell them, "Prepare to work." While our lives seem to be flowing ever further away from the magical realities that Santa Claus represents, our ancestors' lives likely flowed in the opposite direction. In indigenous societies, it is the old who have the most intimate knowledge of the mysteries of life, not the children. Since it is the old who most immediately face death, there must be a not-insignificant measure of comfort in having gained a sense of intimacy with other, soon to be occupied realms.

In any case, who is this Santa character, and where did he really come from? In most traditions, Santa has the following characteristics:
- He comes from the North Pole;
- He dresses in red and white;
- He has a long, white beard;
- He somehow knows if you've been good or bad;
- He enters the house through the chimney;
- He puts the gifts under the Christmas tree (a pine) and/or in stockings hung by the fireplace;
- And, perhaps most spectacularly, he rides a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

This all seems rather innocent and arbitrary - unless you know something about people like the Sami, Koryak and other reindeer-herding people who live in the far north of Europe and Siberia. Clearly, the Christmas tradition has roots in many different places and times: Christianity, pagan winter solstice celebrations, old Germanic mythologies, etc. But these aspects of Santa mythology seem to come directly from these reindeer-based cultures.

The key to understanding Santa is Amanita muscaria - the well-known red and white mushroom with a long history of shamanic use from Western Europe to Siberia. I am convinced that Santa is essentially a shaman that has quietly yet forcefully entered into the consciousness of Western culture, like a mushroom nudging up through parking lot asphalt. Fist tap Dale.

messed up the man's whole hustle...,

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.