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FOUNDER OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS SAID LSD EXPERIENCE COULD HELP ADDICTS STAY CLEAN
Posted in: Addictions, Alcoholism, Mental health, Psychedelics.	Leave a comment
John Vibes, The Free Thought Project
There are countless people throughout the US and throughout the world who have been steered away from a life of drug or alcohol addiction after a spiritual experience with a psychedelic drug. In fact, Bill Wilson, the co-founder of the alcoholics anonymous program, actually considered promoting LSD as a tool for alcoholics to shake their addiction. Wilson was a close associate with many early adopters of LSD and took numerous trips in controlled, scientific settings while he was involved with the AA program.
Wilson believed that LSD was not a cure-all for mental problems and diseases such as addiction, but he felt that it could be a catalyst towards understanding one's own life and changing direction.
"I don't believe [LSD] has any miraculous property of transforming spiritually and emotionally sick people into healthy ones overnight. It can set up a shining goal on the positive side, after all, it is only a temporary ego-reducer. The vision and insights given by LSD could create a large incentive – at least in a considerable number of people," Wilson reportedly said after his first LSD trip in 1956.
In a later letter to Gerald Heard, one of his associates in the LSD scene, Wilson wrote, "I am certain that the LSD experiment has helped me very much. I find myself with a heightened color perception and an appreciation of beauty almost destroyed by my years of depression."
Despite his confidence in the experience and the substance, Wilson was forced to stay relatively quiet about his experiments because he feared legal punishment and professional embarrassment. After rumors of his involvement in the LSD scene had begun to spread, Wilson asked the scientists that he was working with to omit his name in the records of their experiments.
Wilson feared becoming a pariah in the movement that he helped create because many people involved in AA were attached to the idea that all mind-altering chemicals are dangerous and should be avoided.
According to a paper called Pass It On, which was published by AA World Services in 1984, the movement was entirely opposed to his views on LSD.
"As word of Bill's activities reached the fellowship there were inevitable repercussions. Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance. LSD was then totally unfamiliar, poorly researched, and entirely experimental – and Bill was taking it," the report read.
One of the ideas that permeate AA culture is that any mind-altering substance whatsoever is dangerous and could trigger a relapse back into alcohol addiction. However, this view was obviously not shared by AA founder Bill Wilson, who understood that different substances have different effects on people and that it is possible to have a safe spiritual experience on a mind-altering drug without slipping back into a life of addiction.
One of the most in-depth studies into Wilson's LSD use and his connection with that realm is a book called Distilled Spirits by Don Lattin. The book features a number of thinkers, including Wilson, who both studied, and struggled with mind-altering substances. The research collected many letters that were written between Wilson and his associates in the LSD scene, giving a glimpse into the thoughts that he was so apprehensive to make public.
John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can purchase his books, or get your own book published at his website www.JohnVibes.com.
A single dose of 5-MeO-DMT produces rapid and persistent improvements in life satisfaction and psychopathological symptoms
Posted in: Depression, DMT, Mental health, Psychedelics.	Leave a comment
http://www.psypost.org
By ERIC W. DOLAN
(Photo credit: BurningMax)
A single inhalation of the psychedelic drug 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is associated with sustained improvements in satisfaction with life, mindfulness, and a reduction of psychopathological symptoms, according to preliminary research published in Psychopharmacology.
"5-MeO-DMT is a lesser known psychedelic compared to, for example, ayahuasca and psilocybin — and thus very limited research exists," explained study author Malin Uthaug (@malin.uthaug), a PhD candidate at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
5-MeO-DMT occurs naturally in the venom of some toads and in a variety of plants species. It can also be produced synthetically.
"Essentially, I saw this as a niche area, and brought it upon myself to investigate its effect and therapeutic potential further as part of my doctorate work at Maastricht University. This specific article summarizes the first study I did on the topic, but there are more to come," Uthaug said.
In the study, 42 participants completed a battery of psychology tests before inhaling vapor from dried toad secretion containing 5-MeO-DMT. The participants completed the tests again about 24 hours later and 24 participants completed the tests yet again at a 4-week follow-up assessment.
"This study was a so-called 'naturalistic observational study.' This means that as a researcher, I simply observed what was occurring at sessions where toad secretion containing 5-MeO-DMT was administered to participants by facilitators, and distributed questionnaires to the participants," Uthaug explained.
"Although there are limitations with this design (no placebo-control, participant bias, etc), it has an advantage in the sense that it allows researchers to get a better look at drug effects than what the current legality status of psychedelics permit."
The researchers found that subjective ratings of life satisfaction, depression, anxiety, and mindfulness improved on the day after the session, and this effect persisted for four weeks. The findings are in line with a previous survey of 362 adults, which found that approximately 80& of respondents reported improvements in anxiety and depression after using 5-MeO-DMT.
But there also does not appear to be anything particularly special about toad venom compared to synthetic 5-MeO-DMT.
"Another important take-away from the study is that 5-MeO-DMT is the main compound in the toad secretion as demonstrated by our lab-analysis," Uthaug said.
"This finding, as well as the outlined ethical and ecological consideration of toad secretion use, make a clear and strong argument for the discontinuation of toad secretion as a means of obtaining and consuming 5-MeO-DMT. In other words, 'save a toad – exploit a chemist.'"
Previous research has indicated that 5-MeO-DMT has a relatively safe profile of use and is predominantly used for spiritual exploration. But there is still much to learn about the psychedelic drug.
"The results of the present study are in no way conclusive, and more research is warranted to investigate 5-MeO-DMT further. The rest of our studies on 5-MeO-DMT (from my dissertation as well as other collaborations) are yet to be published, and include one study outlining the effects of 5-MeO-DMT on biomarkers (salivary cortisol and IL-6), and another comparing the effects and experiences following vaporization or intramuscular injection," Uthaug told PsyPost.
"These will all amplify the current literature, but future clinical research and safety assessment of 5-MeO-DMT, specifically through the intramuscular route, is highly warranted before a clinical trial can commence."
Uthaug also noted that some facilitators of 5-MeO-DMT face serious allegations of malpractice.
"Additionally, none of the facilitators have the necessary expertise (clinical background) to properly hold a safe space where altered states of consciousness can be entered, nor to screen for contraindications in participants that are included in a session," she said. "This is dangerous as it puts people at unnecessary risk for having an unpleasant and even traumatic experience, which can impact them as well as those around them negatively."
The study, "A single inhalation of vapor from dried toad secretion containing 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) in a naturalistic setting is related to sustained enhancement of satisfaction with life, mindfulness-related capacities, and a decrement of psychopathological symptoms", was authored by M. V. Uthaug, R. Lancelotta, K. van Oorsouw, K. P. C. Kuypers, N. Mason, J. RakA. Šuláková, R. Jurok, M. Maryška, M. Kuchař, T. Páleníček, J. Riba, and J. G. Ramaekers.
Humanity is Not Sleeping; It's in an Induced Coma
Posted in: Caitlin Johnstone, Elites, Evolution, Politics, Psychedelics, Utopia.	1 Comment
themindunleashed.com
Spiritual guru-type guy is wrong. Humanity is not sleeping. Humanity is in an induced coma.
(CJ Opinion) — In the late 1960s, the sudden widespread availability of psychedelics combined with the circulation of eastern philosophy to the west to begin a radical transformation of human consciousness. Our species, desperate to transcend the residual trauma from two world wars and the existential terror of the nuclear age, began moving into a wildly unprecedented relationship with its capacity for abstract thought.
For the first time ever, humans began disentangling themselves from egoic consciousness on a mass scale, suddenly using thought as the useful tool it's meant to be rather than the life-dominating addiction that it had become up until that point. World leaders not only permitted this transformation but actively facilitated it, realizing from their own encounters with this new revolution that humanity relinquishing its egoic mental constrictions opened up the possibility for the creation of paradise on earth.
As we became less egocentric, our values and interests changed. This led to changes in the way we vote, in the kinds of media we chose to consume, and in the kinds of ideas which were popularized.
This set the stage for the next level of human evolution in the arrival of the internet. For the first time in history humans were able to network their minds all around the world in real time, by the thousands, then by the millions, then by the billions. Our harmonious relationship with our inner world suddenly segued smoothly into the ability to develop a harmonious relationship with our outer world, no longer confined by space and time in sharing ideas and information with each other.
With clear minds networked in a truly democratic way we were quickly able to identify and solve all the remaining problems in our world, and we saw ourselves transitioning into a collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem which gave us all a quality of life that had been unimaginable up until a few decades ago.
Now, here in 2019, all human creativity and ingenuity goes toward finding new ways to help us survive and thrive and understand. Technological innovation, once mostly stagnated in the cognitive cul-de-sacs of figuring out new ways to exploit and dominate each other and commit more efficient acts of mass military violence, is now flourishing and expanding at an exponential rate. We have indeed created Heaven on earth together.
that was just a dream I had.
It could have gone down like that. There's no reason it couldn't have. Maybe in a parallel universe it did. But, here in this timeline, it didn't.
Here in this timeline, the people in power wanted to remain in power thank you very much, even if it meant making life worse for everyone in the long run, including themselves.
Here in this timeline, we had all the medicine we needed to cure our sickness, but we were forbidden from using it.
Here in this timeline, plutocrats bought up all the media so they can tell us every day how important it is to continue bolstering the status quo, and that the only thing up for debate is what strategies we should use to do so.
Here in this timeline they got us dependent on money, and then devalued it to ensure that we're working harder and harder for less and less so we have no time to expand our consciousness of our inner or outer worlds.
Here in this timeline psychedelics were made as illegal as heroin or cocaine, and their use was stigmatized as a dangerous activity for criminals and degenerates.
Here in this timeline, control of the internet was quickly shored up by plutocratic interests and government agencies, and traffic is now directed toward authorized platforms sharing authorized narratives which bolster the status quo and manufacture consent for establishment agendas.
Here in this timeline, we had all the tools to escape this prison, but they were taken from us and replaced with more prison bars. Taken by people who were more clever than the rest of us, and who had enough money and influence to shut the whole thing down.
For some weird reason I found myself watching a spiritual guru-type guy discussing his political views on a video yesterday, and, like most spiritual guru-type people, his view of our political reality was highly malnourished. He kept talking about how all our problems are the result of humanity being deeply unconscious, and how that unconsciousness leads us to elect deeply unconscious leaders. Like "elected leaders" are the ones calling the shots. No mention of plutocrats, opaque government agencies or propaganda; the only problem, according to spiritual guru-type guy, is that we're all equally asleep at the wheel and all equally responsible for what's going on.
If our society had simply been permitted to progress along its natural trajectory at a natural pace and to use the innovations that we'd discovered in a natural way, we would all be wide awake by now. The psychedelic revolution would have continued and matured and grown into adulthood instead of being murdered in its infancy, and our exponentially increasing ability to network and share information would have coupled with our mature consciousness to build a deeply awakened society that benefits every living creature on this planet. That would have happened, and it is only because of the unnatural interference of a very few deeply unwise people that we stayed locked in the matrix, now faced with the looming threat of near term human extinction.
This is a crime against humanity which far surpasses all of the most egregious atrocities in any history book. What these people have done to us, what they have taken from us, what they have twisted us into, is an offense so profoundly evil that it cries out to the heavens for vengeance.
The good news, if there is any to be had, is that there are still more of us than there are of them, and that all the tools they took from us are still there to be used if we care enough to take them back.
A woman once had an LSD trip in which she realized the illusory nature of the separate self, seeing clearly that she'd been living in a dream world her entire life up until that point. The effects of the entheogen wore off, and she convinced herself that it was just a pleasant drug high. She made herself forget it, plunged herself into her career, got a promotion, got a husband, got a nice two-story house in the suburbs at 4.5 percent interest, got some kids, and got plenty of stress but whatever there's always wine.
Decades later, after finding nothing but suffering along her chosen life trajectory, she began thinking about that LSD trip she took way back when. She began wondering if maybe that strange, sacred experience had been real after all. If, maybe, it was the only real thing that had ever happened to her.
That's kind of where our whole species is at right now. A door opened up in the sixties which was very quickly and violently slammed shut, and now there are independent flickerings all around the world of that strange, sacred light that still shines under the crack of that door. We still have the ability to open it up again. We've only got to want it enough.
By Caitlin Johnstone | CaitlinJohnstone.com
The views in this article may not reflect editorial policy of The Mind Unleashed.
Oakland Just Decriminalized Magic Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Peyote, and Iboga
Posted by Lou on June 9, 2019
Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Decriminalization, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Psychotropic drugs.	Leave a comment
Elias Marat
(TMU) — In a vast stride forward for the nationwide movement to legalize psilocybin—or "magic" mushrooms—the Oakland City Council has voted unanimously to decriminalize natural psychedelics—including mushrooms—making the major California Bay Area city the second city in the United States to do so.The resolution orders law enforcement to immediately halt the investigation and prosecution of those who use the drugs and applies to psychedelics that derive from plants and fungi, including psilocybin mushrooms and the psychedelic plants ayahuasca, cacti and iboga. The law will not apply to synthetic drugs like LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), or other manmade chemicals.The move comes one month after voters in Denver approved the decriminalization of psilocybin mushrooms, halting the use of city resources to pursue criminal penalties for people over 21 who use or possess magic mushrooms.
Following the vote in Oakland, 100 supporters rose from their chairs, clapping and cheering for the move, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nicolle Greenheart, co-founder of Decriminalize Nature Oakland, said:
"I don't have words, I could cry … I'm thrilled. I'm glad that our communities will now have access to the healing medicines and we can start working on healing our communities."
Save the date and spread the word!!! June 4th, 2019! We will start gathering at 7pm to prepare for the final City Council vote to #DecriminalizeNature#Oakland! There is room for more than 2-300 people with overflow, let's pack the house! pic.twitter.com/0Db4xARHFt
— Decriminalize Nature (@DecrimNature) May 31, 2019
In addition to demanding that police halt the policing of the drugs, the resolution also instructs state and federal lobbyists from Oakland to push a decriminalization agenda. The resolution further calls for the Alameda County district attorney's officials to "cease prosecution of persons involved in the use of Entheogenic Plants or plant-based compounds" that are presently listed in Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act.
The resolution was championed by Councilman Noel Gallo, who introduced it after meeting with Decriminalize Nature, supporters of the use of natural psychedelics for mental health and people's wellbeing.
Gallo told the Chronicle that the move is a strong step toward legitimizing the medicinal use of the plants, explaining:
"My grandmother took care of us. She didn't go to Walgreens to heal us spiritually and physically, she did it out of plants we use as Native Americans."
The Oakland City Council listened to the testimonies of 30 people who emphatically laid out how psilocybin helped them deal with mental health disorders including depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma, according to USA Today.
During public comment, one woman said:
"I wasn't really living a life, I was so disconnected … it was hard for me to survive everyday. It has helped me reach deep inside my soul and helped cure damage that had been done to me."
Another man who explained that he struggled with heroin addiction said:
"It was the most beautiful and life-changing thing that ever happened to me."
The council president, Rebecca Kaplan, thanked supporters of the resolution for sharing their "deep and personal and profound" stories.
An amendment to the resolution clarifies that it does not authorize the commercial sale or manufacture of the plants, possession or distribution in schools, or driving while under the influence of the psychedelic drugs.
The amendment also explains that potential users of psychedelics who are in the throes of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should first consult with a doctor before taking a dose, adding that natural psychedelics should be used in small doses for inexperienced users and "don't go solo."
The move comes as a growing body of research has laid out the benefits of magic mushrooms. Recent studies have shown how a microdose of psilocybin—far from the level needed for a full-blown trip—actually increases the creativity and empathy of participants. Advocates note that psilocybin has shown great promise in psychotherapeutic settings, shattering the decades-old stereotype of magic mushrooms as some intoxicating and hallucination-inducing party drug that drives its users insane.
Speaking before last week's public safety committee, Councilman Gallo explained:
"We want to be able to provide another medical service… to be able to help us at home and that is what this is all about … And it's nothing new. It's been happening for thousands of years in different countries, in different spiritual backgrounds."
The passage of the resolution comes amid a wave of activism supporting policy changes that would decriminalize natural psychedelics, with similar efforts advancing in the state of Iowa along with efforts to place a psilocybin legalization measure on the ballot in Oregon.
Creative Commons |
The Fake, Demonic, Meta-Reality Overlay In Which We Are Extensively Blanketed
Posted by Lou on August 7, 2018
Posted in: Ayahuasca, Demons, Psychedelics, Reality, Satanism.	Leave a comment
eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.com
Richard Sauder
A friend recently related to me that he was having brief hallucinations that kept periodically intruding on his everyday reality for a few minutes. Out of an abundance of caution, he had a neurological exam and nothing untoward turned up.
He said that he was seeing an "atrocious" reality, an extensive demonic network that maintains a false, fabricated, fake reality in order to feed off of our human energies, vampire-like.
I told him that in my opinion he should not fear that he is losing his mind, but that quite to the contrary, it sounds like, in fact, he is on the verge of finding his mind. It sounds to me like he is starting to see the monstrous, demonic, meta-reality, artificial control structure, the fake control grid, the false executable program, the diabolical veil that has been falsely inflicted on humanity and the Earth by darkly demonic powers and beings, to degrade and confuse humanity and destroy the living Earth.
In my view, my friend, and growing numbers of other people, are starting to see through the demonic control structure and actually glimpse the ghastly, hideous entities that lie behind, manipulating this reality to their debased, fiendish ends and ghoulishly feeding off of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energies for their own vile purposes.
More and more people are starting to see beyond the veil, each person in their own way, according to their own understanding, and are beginning to directly observe the gruesome horror show in all its ghastliness. That's the "hacked" meta-reality overlaying this Earth realm; it's an intrusive, reality hacking program, or reality hijacking program, an all-concealing blanket of complex, deviously interwoven deception, lies, illusions, exploitation, abuse, degradation, torture, slavery, war, slaughter, destruction, crime, corruption, and more. It's thoroughly disgusting.
This Earth realm that we have been born into, or falsely inserted or programmed into, is the grand, false hallucination.
Nothing is as it seems.
This is what ayahuasca has been showing me, again and again, ever since I first drank it in November of 2010. And I cannot keep from reflexively projectile vomiting, hurling and spewing at the sheer hideousness of it all. What has been falsely imposed on us is repulsive and grotesque beyond the power of words to describe.
My Own Recurring Dream
I have not been having any so-called "hallucinations," but what my friend recounted to me nevertheless prompted me to recall a clear dream that I have twice recently had. It's the same dream, a clear dream, and both times of exactly the same thing.
As my long-time readers know, in the last week of 2012 I was almost killed by the Amazonian shaman from whom I was learning and with whom I was staying in the eastern, jungle region of Ecuador. I was subsequently hospitalized for more than 4 months in the public hospitals in Ecuador.
The peculiar thing is that, as I have said, I have recently twice dreamed the same very clear dream: that the hospital in which I spent more than three months here in Quito, which physically exists and is well known, is in actuality a Total Recall-like reality cover to conceal the actual hospital I was really in, which [at least in the dream(s)] is also here in a Quito neighborhood, but that the entire reality that I know as "Quito" and everything that happened to me in the Ecuadorean Amazon and in the *hospital* here in Quito, is an extremely elaborate ruse that exceeds the special effects, props and casting of any big budget, Hollywood feature film, by multiple orders of magnitude..
In other words, the purport of the peculiar dream(s) is that I am immersed in the Mother of All Mind Fu*ks, for unknown purposes and to an unknown extent, and that a huge mental-social-medical-legal-shamanic scam has been run on me. If so, why?
It seems unbelievable, preposterous, way too fantastic to be true, and yet that is what ayahuasca keeps showing me: it's all fake; it's all false; all of this so-called "reality" in which we are immersed is faker and falser than can be believed. Its fakeness is unimaginable, by intentional, overwhelming design.
So what is really real?
This is a peculiar development that I did not anticipate, which raises no end of questions. The most obvious one is: just who or what is the shaman/brujo and what is his role in all of this? Have I ventured off into a false, parallel reality that has hacked or hijacked *real* reality? Have we all? I saw some E.T.s in my time in the Amazon — are they in on it? Are they in cahoots with the shaman/brujo? There were some USSA Army officers who came to the shaman's place while I was there, in the months before he almost killed me. Are the USSA Army officers part of this scenario? If so, what is their role? I was telephoned in the hospital by the USSA Embassy immediately after I had been hospitalized in the Amazon to ask how they could "help" me. Is the USSA State Department part of it? I subsequently interacted with a whole slew of attorneys, doctors, prosecutors, police officers, judges, investigators, politicians, shamans, and many other sundry people, many of whom I now have questions about.
How do they all fit in to it? What did I stumble into? What alarm bells did I ring? What does it all mean?
I used to think that I knew how the world worked and what was going on. Those illusions are now rapidly receding into the distance in life's rear view mirror.
I see tourists who come to South America to spend a few days in the Amazon. For the most part, they have absolutely no clue what the Amazon really is, or Quito for that matter!! And at this point, I have many questions about the Amazon and Quito myself.
I would add in closing that I have been vibrating, virtually on a daily basis, for more than a year and a half now. Sometimes the vibrations can be quite strong and vigorous; sometimes they are very smooth and gentle. They move around to different parts of the body, and come and go, never hurting or causing even the slightest pain or discomfort. I couldn't tell you what the vibrations mean, though they are real enough. Perhaps there is going to be a reality phase change of sorts, and I am persistently synchronizing with what is coming? I don't know, but it occurs to me to consider the possibility.
And by the way, dear reader, not to be rude or offensive, because that is not my intent, but who are you, beyond an online persona whom I have never encountered face to face? What is the depth and extent of your reality?
Any comments or feedback? Vibrations? Visions? Dreams?
If you find personal value or meaning in this or any of my other blog articles, won't you please support my continued work? Contact me at: dr.samizdat1618@gmail.com for how to donate.
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How to Change Your Mind: Michael Pollan on How the Science of Psychedelics Illuminates Consciousness, Mortality, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Posted in: Consciousness, Depression, Mental health, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Psychiatry, Spirituality.	Leave a comment
"The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think."
http://www.brainpickings.org
By Maria Popova
"Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that," cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote in her inquiry into how our conditioned way of looking narrows the lens of our perception. Attention, after all, is the handmaiden of consciousness, and consciousness the central fact and the central mystery of our creaturely experience. From the days of Plato's cave to the birth of neuroscience, we have endeavored to fathom its nature. But it is a mystery that only seems to deepen with each increment of approach. "Our normal waking consciousness," William James wrote in his landmark 1902 treatise on spirituality, "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
Half a century after James, two new molecules punctured the filmy screen to unlatch a portal to a wholly novel universe of consciousness, shaking up our most elemental assumptions about the nature of the mind, our orientation toward mortality, and the foundations of our social, political, and cultural constructs. One of these molecules — lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD — was a triumph of twentieth-century science, somewhat accidentally synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the year physicist Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission. The other — the compound psilocin, known among the Aztecs as "flesh of the gods" — was the rediscovery of a substance produced by a humble brown mushroom, which indigenous cultures across eras and civilizations had been incorporating into their spiritual rituals since ancient times, and which the Roman Catholic Church had violently suppressed and buried during the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Together, these two molecules commenced the psychedelic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, frothing the stream of consciousness — a term James coined — into a turbulent existential rapids. Their proselytes included artists, scientists, political leaders, and ordinary people of all stripes. Their most ardent champions were the psychiatrists and physicians who lauded them as miracle drugs for salving psychic maladies as wide-ranging as anxiety, addition, and clinical depression. Their cultural consequence was likened to that of to the era's other cataclysmic disruptor: the atomic bomb.
And then — much thanks to Timothy Leary's reckless handling of his Harvard psilocybin studies that landed him in prison, where Carl Sagan sent him cosmic poetry — a landslide of moral panic and political backlash outlawed psychedelics, shut down clinical studies of their medical and psychiatric uses, and drove them into the underground. For decades, academic research into their potential for human flourishing languished and nearly perished. But a small subset of scientists, psychiatrists, and amateur explorers refused to relinquish their curiosity about that potential.
The 1990s brought a quiet groundswell of second-wave interest in psychedelics — a resurgence that culminated with a 2006 paper reporting on studies at Johns Hopkins, which had found that psilocybin had occasioned "mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and significance" for terminally ill cancer patients — experiences from which they "return with a new perspective and profound acceptance." In other words, the humble mushroom compound had helped people face the ultimate frontier of existence — their own mortality — with unparalleled equanimity. The basis of the experience, researchers found, was a sense of the dissolution of the personal ego, followed by a sense of becoming one with the universe — a notion strikingly similar to Bertrand Russell's insistence that a fulfilling life and a rewarding old age are a matter of "[making] your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."
More clinical experiments followed at UCLA, NYU, and other leading universities, demonstrating that this psilocybin-induced dissolution of the ego, extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve in our ordinary consciousness, has profound benefits in rewiring the faulty mental mechanisms responsible for disorders like alcoholism, anxiety, and depression.
Art by Bobby Baker from Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me
This renaissance of psychedelics, with its broad implications for understanding consciousness and the connection between brain and mind, treating mental illness, and recalibrating our relationship with the finitude of our existence, is what Michael Pollan explores in the revelatory How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (public library). With an eye to this renaissance and the scientists using brain-imaging technology to investigate how psychedelics may illuminate consciousness, Pollan writes:
One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain's activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the "neural correlates" of the sense of self and spiritual experience.
Pollan reflects on the psilocybin studies of cancer patients, which reignited scientific interest in psychedelics, and the profound results of subsequent studies exploring the use of psychedelics in treating mental illness, including addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder:
What was most remarkable about the results… is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable "to the birth of a first child or death of a parent." Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five "most spiritually significant experiences" of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly. The volunteers reported significant improvements in their "personal well-being, life satisfaction and positive behavior change," changes that were confirmed by their family members and friends.
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions — involving the temporary dissolution of one's ego — that may be the key to changing one's mind.
Art by Derek Dominic D'souza from Song of Two Worlds by Alan Lightman
Pollan approaches his subject as a science writer and a skeptic endowed with equal parts rigorous critical thinking and openminded curiosity. In a sentiment evocative of physicist Alan Lightman's elegant braiding of the numinous and the scientific, he echoes Carl Sagan's views on the mystery of reality and examines his own lens:
My default perspective is that of the philosophical materialist, who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens. I start from the assumption that nature is all that there is and gravitate toward scientific explanations of phenomena. That said, I'm also sensitive to the limitations of the scientific-materialist perspective and believe that nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.
Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience — something that turned on nothing more than the ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper — could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how one thought about mortality? Actually change one's mind in enduring ways?
The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room — the room of your own mind — that you had somehow never noticed before and being told by people you trusted (scientists!) that a whole other way of thinking — of being! — lay waiting on the other side. All you had to do was turn the knob and enter. Who wouldn't be curious? I might not have been looking to change my life, but the idea of learning something new about it, and of shining a fresh light on this old world, began to occupy my thoughts. Maybe there was something missing from my life, something I just hadn't named.
Art by Maurice Sendak from Kenny's Window — his forgotten first children's book.
The root of this unnamed dimension of existence, Pollan suggests, is the inevitable narrowing of perspective that takes place as we grow up and learn to navigate the world by cataloguing its elements into mental categories that often fail to hold the complexity and richness of the experiences they name — an impulse born out of our longing for absolutes in a relative world. Psychedelics break down these artificial categories and swing open the doors of perception — to borrow William Blake's famous phrase later famously appropriated by Aldous Huxley as the slogan of the first-wave psychedelic revolution — so that life can enter our consciousness in its unfiltered, unfragmented completeness. In consequence, we view the world — the inner world and the outer world — with a child's eyes.
Pollan writes:
Over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive — it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss — eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.
A century after William James examined how habit gives shape and structure to our lives, Pollan considers the other edge of the sword — how habit can constrict us in a prison of excessive structure, blinding us to the full view of reality:
Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.)
The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We're constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.
One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful — wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It's so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I'm seldom surprised. The bad thing is I'm seldom surprised.
Psychedelics, Pollan argues, eject us from our habitual consciousness to invite a pure experience of reality that calls to mind Jeanette Winterson's notion of "active surrender" and Emerson's exultation in "the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity." Pollan arrives at this conclusion not only by surveying the history of and research on psychedelics, but by conducting a series of carefully monitored experiments on himself — he travels the world to meet with mycologists, shamans, and trained facilitators, and to experience first-hand the most potent psychedelics nature and the chemistry lab have produced, from the psilocybin mushroom to LSD to the smoked venom of a desert toad.
Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
Together with his wife, Judith, he ingests a psilocybin mushroom he himself has picked from the woods of the Pacific Northwest with the mycologist Paul Stamets, author of the foundational guide to psilocybin mushrooms. Pollan reflects on the perplexity of the experience:
In a certain light at certain moments, I feel as though I had had some kind of spiritual experience. I had felt the personhood of other beings in a way I hadn't before; whatever it is that keeps us from feeling our full implication in nature had been temporarily in abeyance. There had also been, I felt, an opening of the heart, toward my parents, yes, and toward Judith, but also, weirdly, toward some of the plants and trees and birds and even the damn bugs on our property. Some of this openness has persisted. I think back on it now as an experience of wonder and immanence.
The fact that this transformation of my familiar world into something I can only describe as numinous was occasioned by the eating of a little brown mushroom that Stamets and I had found growing on the edge of a parking lot in a state park on the Pacific coast — well, that fact can be viewed in one of two ways: either as an additional wonder or as support for a more prosaic and materialist interpretation of what happened to me that August afternoon. According to one interpretation, I had had "a drug experience," plain and simple. It was a kind of waking dream, interesting and pleasurable but signifying nothing. The psilocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events that, among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired with my visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants and insects in my field of vision.
Not quite a hallucination, "projection" is probably the psychological term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so that they appear to glisten with meaning. T. S. Eliot called these things and situations the "objective correlatives" of human emotion.
Pollan finds in the experience an affirmation of James's notion that we possess different modes of consciousness separated from our standard waking consciousness by a thin and permeable membrane. The psychedelic puncturing of that membrane, he suggests, is what people across the ages have considered "mystical experiences." But they are purely biochemical, devoid of the divine visitations ascribed to them:
I'm struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight… Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.
Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one's acceptance of the supernatural — of God, of a Beyond — but now I'm not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think.
After another psychedelic journey on the drug LSD, which left him with "a cascading dam break of love" for everyone from his wife to his grandmother to his awkward childhood music teacher, Pollan reflects on some of the things he had said during the experience, recorded by his guide, and the limitations of language in conveying the depth and dimension of the feelings stirred in him. A century after William James listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences, Pollan writes:
It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being
Psychedelics, Pollan's experience suggests, can be a potent antidote to our conditioned cynicism — that habitual narrowing and hardening of the soul, to which we resort as a maladaptive coping mechanism amid the chaos and uncertainty of life, a kind of defensive cowardice reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt's indictment that "the poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer." Half a century after psychedelics evangelist Aldous Huxley confronted our fear of the obvious with the assertion that "all great truths are obvious truths," Pollan writes:
Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious… For what after all is the sense of banality, or the ironic perspective, if not two of the sturdier defenses the adult ego deploys to keep from being overwhelmed — by our emotions, certainly, but perhaps also by our senses, which are liable at any time to astonish us with news of the sheer wonder of the world. If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled "Known," to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and "Novel," to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn't that anymore. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we've seen and felt it all before.
Pollan's reflections bear undertones of the concept of complementarity in quantum physics. But perhaps more than anything, in widening the lens of his attention to include all beings and the whole of the universe, his psychedelic experience calls to mind philosopher Simone Weil. After what she considered a point of contact with the divine — a mystical experience she had while reciting George Herbert's poem Love III — Weil wrote that "attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer, [for] it presupposes faith and love."
Art by Olivier Tallec from This Is a Poem That Heals Fish
In a passage that calls to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne's stunning description of the transcendent state between wakefulness and sleep, Pollan writes:
Because the acid had not completely dissolved my ego, I never completely lost the ability to redirect the stream of my consciousness or the awareness it was in fact mine. But the stream itself felt distinctly different, less subject to will or outside interference. It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we're poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness. The ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gentle eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended indefinitely, yet with some ability to direct your attention to this or that, as if in an especially vivid and absorbing daydream. Unlike a daydream, however, you are fully present to the contents of whatever narrative is unfolding, completely inside it and beyond the reach of distraction. I had little choice but to obey the daydream's logic, its ontological and epistemological rules, until, either by force of will or by the fresh notes of a new song, the mental channel would change and I would find myself somewhere else entirely.
Echoing Hannah Arendt's distinction between thought and cognition, in which she asserted that "thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency," Pollan adds:
For me it felt less like a drug experience… than a novel mode of cognition, falling somewhere between intellection and feeling.
Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one's self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats's "negative capability" — the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness (literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or — it comes to the same thing — widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness — that platitude — is felt, becomes flesh. Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.
Looking back on his theoretical and empirical investigation — his research on the ancient history and modern science of psychedelics; his interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, mycologists, hospice patients, and ordinary psychonauts; his own experience with a variety of these substances and his sometimes meticulous, sometimes messy field notes on the interiority of his mind under their influence — Pollan writes:
The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress. But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn't relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that's exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty… That stingy, vigilant security guard admits only the narrowest bandwidth of reality… It's really good at performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
What of the world it does admit it tends to objectify, for the ego wants to reserve the gifts of subjectivity to itself. That's why it fails to see that there is a whole world of souls and spirits out there, by which I simply mean subjectivities other than our own. It was only when the voice of my ego was quieted by psilocybin that I was able to sense that the plants in my garden had a spirit too.
Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
It is a notion evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin's conception of poetry as a means to "subjectifying the universe" — a counterpoint to the way science objectifies it. "Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates," Le Guin wrote. Perhaps psychedelics, then, are a portal to the poetic truth that resides beyond scientific fact — the kind of transcendence Rachel Carson found in beholding the marvels of bioluminescence, "one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves." Such a feeling radiates beyond the walls of the ego-bound self and into a deep sense of belonging to the whole of nature, part and particle of the universe.
The usual antonym for the word "spiritual" is "material." That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry — that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical." Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn't reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic — that is, more spiritual — idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.
One of the gifts of psychedelics is the way they reanimate the world, as if they were distributing the blessings of consciousness more widely and evenly over the landscape, in the process breaking the human monopoly on subjectivity that we moderns take as a given. To us, we are the world's only conscious subjects, with the rest of creation made up of objects; to the more egotistical among us, even other people count as objects. Psychedelic consciousness overturns that view, by granting us a wider, more generous lens through which we can glimpse the subject-hood — the spirit! — of everything, animal, vegetable, even mineral, all of it now somehow returning our gaze. Spirits, it seems, are everywhere. New rays of relation appear between us and all the world's Others.
In the remainder of the immensely fascinating How to Change Your Mind, Pollan goes on to explore the neuroscience of what actually happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, how such a temporary rewiring of the cognitive apparatus can translate into enduring psychological change and precipitate profound personal growth, and why this breaking down of "the usually firm handshake between brain and world" may be particularly palliative to those perched on the precipice of mortality. Complement it with Albert Camus on consciousness and the lacuna between truth and meaning, then revisit William James's trailblazing treatise on the limits of materialism.
There's new evidence that a 'party drug' is a rapid-fire treatment for depression
Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Alternative medicine, Antidepressant drugs, Depression, Mental health, Neuroscience, Psychedelics, Psychiatry.	Leave a comment
"A 2012 review of four preliminary studies in patients with severe depression concluded that approximately 65-70% of patients responded well to ketamine. The other 35-30% either did not have a significant response, or their relief from depression was only short-lived."
klublu/Shutterstock.com
Ketamine — used legally as an anesthetic and illegally in club settings — is emerging as a potential new treatment for some types of depression.
A new study found that ketamine was better at curbing suicidal thoughts in depressed patients than a sedative.
Researchers have called ketamine "the most important discovery in half a century."
We visited a ketamine clinic that offers 45-minute infusions of the therapy in San Francisco.
After a 45-minute infusion of ketamine, clients at a clinic in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood are not partying.
Instead, they're in a state of quiet contemplation — reclining on cushioned chairs, listening to music, or occasionally striking a tranquil yoga pose.
These clients are patients at one of ten ketamine clinics operated by Actify Neurotherapies, a network that offers the treatments to people diagnosed with severe forms of anxiety and depression. Ketamine is best known for its illegal recreational uses — it is a powerful dissociative that can induce feelings of being separated from one's own body. But it is also one of the safest and most widely used legal anesthetics. And ketamine's utility as an antidepressant has recently started to gain attention.
A new study out of Columbia University Medical Center found that ketamine worked significantly better at curbing suicidal thoughts in depressed patients than a commonly used sedative.
A spate of studies over the past several years have also suggested that ketamine may provide swift and powerful relief to people suffering from some of the hardest-to-treat forms of depression — an illness that is the leading disability worldwide. The findings have been so promising, in fact, that some researchers are calling it "the most important discovery in half a century," though other experts say more research is still needed.
The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved ketamine for the treatment of anxiety or depression, so clinics that offer it for these uses are doing so off-label. Actify Neurotherapies is one of an estimated 50 to 100 such clinics taking the same approach across the US.
The potential promise of ketamine
Actify Neurotherapies' San Francisco office is a cross between clinical and therapeutic. In each treatment room, a reclining clinical chair sits facing a large window. In the corner is a chair decorated with a colorful crocheted blanket.
Erin Brodwin / Business Insider
"We're striking a balance between a clinical setting and a home setting," Steve Levine, a psychiatrist and the CEO of Actify Neurotherapies, told Business Insider.
Each two-hour visit includes 45 minutes of ketamine infusion, 45 minutes of a saline drip, and a consultation with Alison McInnes, a physician who founded a regional ketamine therapy program with Kaiser Permanente.
"Therapy and ketamine go together like peanut butter and chocolate," Levine said. "And with our approach, you have someone with an extensive background in mental health and therapy always present, and talk therapy happens before and after the infusion."
The latest research on ketamine's potential to treat depression — specifically the deadliest complication of the disorder, suicide — was published in December in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The Columbia University researchers found that ketamine did a significantly better job of curbing suicidal thoughts in depressed patients than a commonly prescribed sedative.
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Uber's Google Maps Expenditures
Uber paid Google approximately $58 million from 2016 through 2018 for its use of Google Maps, which Uber said is critical to the functionality of its platform.
"We do not believe that an alternative mapping solution exists that can provide the global functionality that we require to offer our platform in all of the markets in which we operate," its IPO prospectus states.
Uber has several agreements with Alphabet Inc. affiliates, according to its SEC filing, and from 2016 through 2018, it paid them about $631 million for marketing and advertising services, $70 million for technology infrastructure and enterprise services and about $1 million for related services.
Uber also has an agreement under which Google pays it to promote its Google Pay option on the Uber platform outside the United States – a deal that's generated $3.1 million in revenue for Uber since January 2017.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Come, sit with me………..an invitation the Lord can't resist!
When I sit down to read the Holy Bible I extend an invitation to God.
My quiet time is where I spend time listening for God's still small voice. Sometimes we have difficulty hearing the still small voice but God is calling to us. He wants us to do more than study His Word for wisdom and guidance. God wants to fellowship with us and build a relationship. This relationship will encourage and sustain you through your life when things are difficult and will continue to bless you when things seem to be going well.
Unfortunately, we have turned the task of reading the Holy Bible into an act of homework. Most Christians accept the fact we should read the Holy Bible daily. The motive can get blurred at times, I believe we should read the Holy Bible daily but not to do homework. We cannot better ourselves so we are more acceptable to God. I believe we are to seek God and the Holy Bible is a very tangible way to seek God. I sit with the right heart, open the Holy Bible and I look for God. I am not simply looking for God to find where He is in the particular story in the Holy Bible but where God is in my life and in my heart.
God has given me a presentation to share with others. My hope is for people to shift their approach from doing homework to a time where they fellowship with God through His Word.
This message can be adapted to fill your ministry need. Many Christians read the Holy Bible daily because they are supposed to. Reading the Holy Bible daily is what Christians believe they are supposed to do. I want to help people to remove the task of homework from their walk with Christ and overcome the obstacles which cause them to miss the opportunity to fellowship with God. I want to help people begin to build a stronger and more powerful relationship with God.


The peace process underway on the Korean Peninsula is taking place in spite of Washington and not because. Indeed given the military-strategic importance of South Korea to Washington's driving objective of full spectrum dominance, peace and reconciliation between North and South are about the last thing the Empire wants.
The willingness and determination of North Korea's Kim Jong-un and South Korea's President Moon Jae-in to proceed in effecting the normalisation of relations undaunted by the Trump administration's clear attempts to sabotage their efforts — issuing threats and insults against the North Korean leader, making outrageous demands of Pyongyang as a precondition to holding talks, pulling out of the first scheduled peace summit in Singapore on spurious grounds — is testament to their respective people's desire for reconciliation after decades of strife.
With neocon hawks such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley occupying key positions within the Trump administration, we have ourselves a White House which is wedded to the belief that diplomacy is for wimps, and that US hard power rather than diplomacy or even international law is the rightful arbiter of international affairs.
On the question of why Washington would be so keen to see the peace process on the Korean Peninsula collapse, the answer is simple: China. It is Beijing rather than Pyongyang occupying prime real estate in the minds of neocons and strategic planners in the US. The need to contain an economy rapidly gaining ground on its US counterpart, along with Beijing's regional and increasingly global heft and reach, strikes fear in their hearts. It poses a challenge to the Empire's hegemony, hence the strategic importance of the significant US military presence in and around the Korean Peninsula within striking distance of China.
"The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay".
The "strong presence" of which Obama boasted in 2011 comprises in 2018 close to 30,000 US troops on the Korean Peninsula, supported by multiple squadrons of fighter and fighter-bomber aircraft, along with the recently deployed THAAD anti-missile defense system. It includes a further 50,000 US troops based in and around Japan, along with a Navy carrier strike group of the US Seventh Fleet. This, of course, is without mentioning the nuclear submarines that are constantly patrolling the region.
The weight of evidence makes clear that peace and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula, rather than a welcome development after decades of conflict, tension, and strife, is the last thing Washington wants. It is a process driven exclusively by the Koreans themselves, in turn forcing the Trump administration to follow with what passes for support and endorsement. South Korea's President Moon Jae-in is deserving of special praise for his refusal thus far to kowtow to Washington, forcing the Trump administration to continue articulating public support, even while knowing that every step towards peace and reconciliation is tantamount to a weakening of wider US military and strategic objectives when it comes to the region.
In a very real sense, therefore, this peace process — leading perhaps ultimately to Korean reunification — brings closer the day of Seoul's liberation from its status as a US vassal. Until then President Moon Jae-in would be advised to treat Trump's smiling endorsement with due skepticism.
he views and opinions expressed by John Wight are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
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Hay varios ordinarios metropolitanos de la Iglesia católica que se pueden encargar de cuatro arquidiócesis con el nombre de Santiago. Estas archidiócesis son:

 Arquidiócesis de Santiago de Chile, en . Con el arzobispado de Santiago de Chile.
 Arquidiócesis de Santiago de los Caballeros, en la .
 Arquidiócesis de Santiago de Cuba, en .
 Archidiócesis de Santiago de Compostela, en .

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Welcome to the 2012 Spooktacular Paranormal Reading Challenge! I can't believe it's already been a year since the last SPRC, and I also can't believe I get to do this a second year in a row! I hope you're all as excited as I am to get some amazing paranormal books read and reviewed.
*To participate in the 2012 Spooktacular Paranormal Reading Challenge, you need to sign up HERE. I'm leaving the sign-ups open through October so that if people want to join in late, they can. Don't forget that you have to follow Ramblings of a Daydreamer to qualify for the prize at the end.
*Read and review a minimum of three (3) paranormal books between October 1st and 31st and post your reviews in the linky below. Once you've completed your three reviews, keep linking up if you have more, because every review you post gets you an extra entry for the giveaway at the end of the month. Reviews must be posted for the first time during October.
*You don't have to have a blog to participate, as long as you can post your reviews somewhere - GoodReads, Amazon, YouTube, etc. All types of books count - physical copies, ARCs, ebooks, audiobooks. Young adult and adult books count.
*Don't forget that I'm being loose with the term 'paranormal' - anything otherworldly counts.
*If you're on Twitter, be sure to use the hashtag #SPRC so we can all find each other and cheer each other on. Also, it would be awesome if you took time to visit some of the other people participating and read their reviews.
*The linky will close at 11:59pm EST on October 31st, entries will be added up, and the winner will be chosen at random and contacted a day or two afterward.
If I've forgotten anything or you have questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment, tweet me (@SweetMarie83), or email me irishstar_83(at)hotmail(dot)com.
Add your reviews to the linky below. Include your name and the name of the book you're reviewing - something like This Dark Endeavor (SweetMarie83).
just a confirmation: are reviews written in our own native language ( french/spanish etc) also count like last year or only english ones?
thank you a lot Marie!
thank you. it's a real pleasure to participate again!
That's fine, Miki. :-) I'm going to go check out the book right now.


Have you ever wondered what Planet Mars sounds like?
This new video by NASA features the entire trip of the Mars Opportunity Rover including real sound from the Red Planet. And it's just so damn spooky.
This video tracks the entire trip of the Mars Opportunity Rover on the red planet including a creepy sound!
But is this really the sounds of Mars? Or are these the vibrational measurements from the rover's accelerometer? In this case these sounds would not be the real sounds of Mars like if they had set up a microphone and just hit record.
And what makes it even more disappointing was that the Mars Polar Lander actually did have a microphone on it, so we could have heard the sounds from Mars if that one hadn't failed.
In the mean time discover real, crazy and spooky sounds of space here!
Eh. I imagine there would not be much sound anyway because of the thin atmosphere. If you did pick anything up, well, wind is wind.


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Learning about parallel parenting
On Behalf of Taylor Law Firm, PLLC | Apr 4, 2021 | Child Custody
When you share children with your ex-spouse after a divorce, you need to come up with some strategies for how you're going to continue to take care of them and how you should make decisions that will affect their welfare, such as where they go to school and what...
Child Custody (7)
Military Family Law (5)
What are the most common reasons to modify a child custody order?
How the Air Force is changing its approach to child custody
How is child custody determined for parents in the Air Force?
What are the statistics on the divorce rate in the United States?


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Superclasico
CLASSICS SQUAD GAME 2020
Womens Cycling Championship
Superclasico 2020
BinckBank Tour 2020
Volta a Portugal 2020
Great Big Bike Game XXII
Giro Rosa 2020
Tirreno-Adriatico 2020
Dauphine 2020
Paris-Nice 2020
Tour Down Under 2020
Mini Leagues
Mini-leagues allow you to join in a group with your friends, family and colleagues in order to easily view each other's scores and teams.
Players may join up to 5 leagues.
All teams continue in the main standings, in addition to being members of any league.
How to join a Mini League
To join an existing league, you must have already set up a team in the game (click the Enter Now link on the homepage to do this) and you will also need a League Code, which will be provided by the person who set up the league.
Once you have created a team and been given the league code, go to your team page by logging-in with your username and password, and clicking on the My Team link towards the top-right of the screen.
At the bottom of the team roster page is the Mini-League manager and click on "Join or Create New League" to go to the League Entry page.
You will then be required to enter the League Code and confirm you want to join the league.
If you wish to create a new league and generate the league code yourself, use the form below.
Create a New Mini League
Please use this form to request a new league to be formed.
You only need to use this form if you are setting up a new league. If you wish to join an existing league with a league code, do so from your team roster page. You need to create a team by hitting the Enter Now link, before joining your chosen league.
You must provide your details and a league name.
LEAGUE DETAILS
League Name:
When you submit the form, you will be shown the League Code.
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Home/News/Facebook freezes Venezuelan dictator's account for COVID misinformation
Facebook freezes Venezuelan dictator's account for COVID misinformation
YURI CORTEZ/Getty
After overseeing the political and economic collapse of his country, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has had his Facebook account frozen — for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. He has become the second world leader to have his social-media rights revoked this year, after the much-publicized Twitter and Facebook bans of President Donald Trump.
Since January Maduro has been promoting Carvativir, a Venezuelan-made liquid that he claims can cure COVID-19. Since Carvativir, which appears to be mostly herbal, has not been verified to help remedy the coronavirus, Maduro's spruiking was classified by Facebook as misinformation.
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"We removed a video posted to President Nicolas Maduro's Page for violating our policies against misinformation about COVID-19 that is likely to put people at risk for harm," a Facebook spokesperson said to CNET. "We follow guidance from the WHO that says there is currently no medication to cure the virus. Due to repeated violations of our rules, we are also freezing the page for 30 days, during which it will be read-only."
Venezuela's Ministry of Information fired back, condemning Facebook for targeting information it claims helps fight the coronavirus. "We are witnessing a digital totalitarianism exercised by supranational companies who want to impose their law on the countries of the world," Venezuela's Ministry of Information said in a statement to Reuters.
Maduro is classified by the US government as a dictator due to the country's ongoing presidential crisis, which began with a 2018 election, won by Maduro, widely believed to be illegitimate. The country's economy collapsed in the years before COVID-19, with its GDP halving between 2014 and 2019, and inflation reaching 10 million percent, making it particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. The country has officially recorded only 156,000 cases and 1,555 deaths, but those numbers have been questioned by experts. Peru, a country with a similar-sized population, has recorded 1.6 million cases.
Trumpeting the supposed Carvativir cure is "a feeble attempt by Maduro to convince parts of the Venezuelan population that his government is developing local solutions to global problems," according to Anthea McCarthy-Jones, senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales' school of business and researcher of Latin America. She applauded Facebook's action as a much needed one.
"In the past figures such as President Maduro have benefited from the inaction of these companies," she explained. "President Maduro's use of social media has been in desperate need of fact checking and moderation by third parties."
With the country's COVID-19 reporting already in doubt, Maduro in January claimed the Carvativir solution had been able to rehabilitate even the most serious cases of COVID-19 during the nine months it had been studied. "Ten drops under the tongue every four hours and the miracle is done," Maduro said at the time. "It's a powerful antiviral, very powerful, that neutralizes the coronavirus."
These claims have been questioned and contested by doctors and medical professionals, however. "The treatment claim for Carvativir's brand for COVID-19 is unsubstantiated by any clinical data," tweeted Francisco Marty, infectious diseases doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a medical facility and research center affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of medicine at Flinders University and secretary-general of the international immunomics society, sees no evidence to believe Maduro's claims.
"It seems it is not an actual drug or vaccine as the name might imply but rather is an ill-defined herbal concoction," Petrovsky said to CNET in an email. "It seems it might have some relation to Carvacrol (from which the name Carvativir seems to derived), both are described as extracts of oregano oil. … There is no published scientific basis for believing any of these have activity against clinical disease with COVID-19."
Twitter has yet to follow Facebook's move. On Sunday Maduro tweeted instructions to his 3.8 million followers, directing them to another Facebook page on which to watch his videos.
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Biden's last major hire is career diplomat Burns to run CIA
January 11, 2021 at 7:09 pm | Published in: Asia & Americas, Middle East, News, US
Former career diplomat William Burns to lead the CIA on September 19, 2016 in New York City [Ben Hider/Getty Images for Concordia Summit]
US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday tapped a former career diplomat in William Burns to lead the CIA as the Democrat raced to put a national security team in place days before his inauguration, reports Reuters.
Burns, who speaks Arabic and Russian, was ambassador to Moscow from 2005 to 2008 and led secret talks that paved the way to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal under former Democratic President Barack Obama.
The Biden administration would be keen to revive the nuclear deal abandoned by Republican President Donald Trump and also to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin for a cyber attack on US government agencies last year. The Kremlin has denied responsibility.
Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for nearly five years, would also head an agency advising Biden on where he can cooperate with China and where to confront the world's rising power.
"Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure," Biden said in a statement announcing Burns to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
READ: US hits Iran with fresh sanctions as Trump term nears end
Biden, who vowed as a candidate to pick a team of tested officials ready to serve on day one, is unlikely to have a full complement of national security officials when he takes office on January 20 because of an unusually chaotic transfer of power. Trump contested Biden's November election victory with false claims of voter fraud and delayed a normal transition.
Burns must be confirmed by the US Senate, where Biden's fellow Democrats will soon have a narrow majority.
Burns has been confirmed by the Senate for five prior jobs over 33 years and navigated tricky politically perilous assignments such as heading the State Department's Middle East division during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq without much personal controversy.
"Bill will bring fresh leadership to a CIA that has been marginalised during the Trump years," said Sir John Sawers, former head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
Democrats who will chair Congressional intelligence committees in the new Congress welcomed Burns' nomination.
"As a career diplomat under Democratic and Republican presidents, he has established himself as a smart and tested public servant who is free from political interference," said incoming Senate intelligence committee chair Mark Warner.
"I believe that our nation will be more secure and better prepared to confront the threats we face thanks to his service," said House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff.
Still, a congressional source said Burns will likely face questions about Iran's nuclear program and the 2012 attack on US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in which two American diplomats and two CIA contractors were killed. Burns was a senior State Department official at the time.
Biden has called on lawmakers to confirm his national security team as close to his inauguration as possible. Yet a push this week by congressional Democrats to impeach Trump over a violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 by his supporters could further delay action on the appointments.
Biden took months to settle on a CIA pick. One early contender, former Central Intelligence Agency deputy director Michael Morell, faced opposition for backing the use of drone strikes and torture following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
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Rihanna has a massive shoe collection and it just got bigger. RiRi added these cute Fendi Oxfords to her collection. The flats features's Fendi's signature print. Sweeties, do you love them?
First Lady Michelle Obama showed off her new look for her 49th birthday . Mrs. O is now rocking blunt bangs. Of course Lady O's hair is still bouncing and behaving. Do you love Mrs. Obama's new do? The new look is sleek and sophisticated. I think it gives FLOTUS a more refined look.


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second (s or sec)
The second (abbreviation, s or sec) is the Standard International ( SI ) unit of time. One second is the time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 (9.192631770 x 10 9 ) cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium 133 atom.
There are other expressions for the second. It is the time required for an electromagnetic field to propagate 299,792,458 meters (2.99792458 x 10 8 m) through a vacuum. This figure is sometimes rounded to 3.00 x 10 8 m, or 300,000 kilometers (3.00 x 10 5 km). One second is equal to 1/86,400 of a mean solar day. This is easy to derive from the fact that there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a mean solar day. This definition is, however, subject to limited accuracy because of irregularities in the earth's orbit around the sun.
Engineers and scientists often use smaller units than the second by attaching power-of-10 prefix multiplier s. One millisecond is 10 -3 s; one microsecond is 10 -6 s; one nanosecond is 10 -9 s; one picosecond is 10 -12 s. During these spans of time, respectively, an EM field propagates through a vacuum over distances of approximately 300 kilometers, 300 meters, 300 millimeters, and 300 micrometers.
The second is sometimes specified as a unit of angular measure, especially in astronomy and global positioning. In these contexts, it is also known as an arc second or a second of arc, and is equal to exactly 1/3600 of an angular degree or 1/1,296,000 of a circle. Sixty arc seconds comprise an arc minute; 60 arc minutes comprise an angular degree. One arc second of latitude at the earth's surface corresponds to a north-south distance of only about 31 m.
Also see Standard International ( SI ) System of Units and prefix multiplier s.
This was last updated in March 2011
Continue Reading About second (s or sec)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology provides historical context for the definition of the second.


Few weeks ago, I started the Machine Learning course on Coursera by Andrew Ng of Stanford University. The course is great, learning a lot of new concepts. Sometimes it is hard, but it is really fun learning this new topic and brushing up the old Math lessons of Linear Algebra, matrix manipulation and derivatives.
The course starts with the basics, including a primer on Linear Algebra (it is optional, but I took it anyway since it has been more than a decade when I learned it in college). At the end of each module, there is a quiz and programming assignments, which are interesting.
In addition to the content, I love the way this course is making me think hard and concentrate for long periods of time to understand the concepts and basics. This experience is very different from learning a new programming language or framework where there is a set pattern of how you learn.
In fact, I had started the course early this year, but couldn't keep up with the schedule due to work load. But this time, I am forcing myself to stick with it because I want to learn the subject as soon as I can. I am convinced that Machine Learning is the future of technology and I have to master it sooner than later. After all, as Douglas Rushkoff reminds us, I want to Program, not Be Programmed.


Ian Rubins, a prominent surgeon at Greenwich Hospital, died of a heroin overdose in 2008.
A judge in Waterbury has ordered about 200 crucial documents to be kept from the public in a lawsuit against Greenwich Hospital that alleges hospital officials allowed drug-addicted plastic surgeon Ian Rubins to operate, despite being aware of his substance abuse problems.
Judge Salvatore C. Agati ordered Monday that the documents remain confidential to those directly involved in the case.
"These specific documents shall not be disclosed to anyone beyond those designated by the court unless further ordered by this court," the order states.
The latest development in the case marks the culmination of a battle over files from Rubins' personnel file.
Diane and Scott Buchanan, a Newtown couple, filed the lawsuit in January of 2010, alleging that Diane Buchanan suffered serious complications after undergoing three cosmetic surgeries with Rubins. The Buchanans' attorney, Carey B. Reilly, has been attempting to gain access to roughly 230 documents. However, hospital attorneys have repeatedly said they do not have to release the documents, claiming attorney-client privilege, among other reasons.
Reilly said she is disappointed by the order, but will work within its constraints.
"I'm going to take these 200 documents and integrate them into all the other documents" already released, Reilly said, adding that she has a list of at least 13 people who will be deposed in the case. The list includes doctors Joel Rein, Michael Marino, Alfonso Tagliavia and Barbara Ward, hospital spokesman George Pawlush and others.
A deposition is an out-of-court pretrial discovery proceeding where lawyers interview a witness. The written transcriptions of the interview are often used later, when a case goes to trial.
"I'm looking into the ethical rules as to whether the depositions in a case like this can be disclosed," Reilly said. "Right now, all signs point to this going to trial."
The trial is slated to begin April 16, 2013.
Late last month, Agati ordered Greenwich Hospital to turn over all but 29 of the documents. Reilly has said she hopes the records, which the hospital must turn over by Nov. 28, will reveal how much hospital officials knew of Rubins' problems and when they knew it.
After receiving the order, the hospital's attorneys filed a motion to prevent the documents from being disclosed to the public.
Pawlush said last week that the case should be tried in a court of law, not the media.
Penny Q. Seaman, a lawyer who represents the hospital, did not immediately return a call for comment Tuesday.
Hospital officials have said they were aware of Rubins' drug problems since 1997, but that he completed several rehabilitation programs.
Numerous doctors observed Rubins asleep while standing up during a break between two morning surgeries on April 5, 2006, according to a state Department of Public Health investigation. Dr. Joel Rein, chief of plastic surgery at the time, told a state health investigator that he thought Rubins was under the influence of a "sedative or mind-depressing agent," according to documentation. Rubins later completed four weeks of rehab.
In a May 2007 incident, Rubins injected a syringe containing Fentanyl, a narcotic painkiller, into himself after taking it from an operating room. His medical privileges were suspended shortly thereafter.
Rubins died in 2008 from a heroin overdose.
In a separate lawsuit filed against Greenwich Hospital involving Rubins, eight women alleged unfair trade practices, but those claims were eventually stricken.