Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:31 pm

Owsley and his dietary fantasies

Owsley Stanley was allegedly a major LSD chemist, producer, and distributor during the '60's.

I say "allegedly" because synthesizing, purifying, and handling LSD is quite difficult, highly complex, and requires technical information, sophisticated laboratory equipment, chemical reagents, and laboratory expertise not readily available to the casual kitchen chemist. Given his bizarre lack of understanding of even the simplest scientific concepts, amply demonstrated in his essay, in addition to his profound lack of logic, both readily seen in this critique, it seems much more likely that he was merely a front man for the real chemists, who shrewdly remained anonymous.

Put simply, Owsley was no Hoffmann, Schultes, Shulgin, Osmond, Stolaroff, Hollingshead, Ott, Grof, or even a Mason, McKenna, or Pinchbeck. He was more of a Leary: bombastic, megalomaniacal, and charismatic.


Continues at: http://ecologos.org/owsley.htm
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Joao » Wed Oct 02, 2013 3:57 am

This is a great thread. That was not a great article on why Owsley couldn't have been a good chemist.

However, I do now know where to turn if i need "a handy, free, nutritional database program (for Windoze or Linux)."

It's an intriguing suggestion, that he wasn't who his legend makes him out to be; that just wasn't a serious attempt to examine the idea.

Also, call me a CIA shill but I kind of enjoy some of Leary's ideas around expanding John Lilly's 8 circuit model, if I remember right, as found in his book The Game of Life. Leary's lighthearted and creative teaching style is also worthy of emulation, IMO.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 02, 2013 5:37 am

Joao » Wed Oct 02, 2013 2:57 am wrote:This is a great thread. That was not a great article on why Owsley couldn't have been a good chemist.

However, I do now know where to turn if i need "a handy, free, nutritional database program (for Windoze or Linux)."

It's an intriguing suggestion, that he wasn't who his legend makes him out to be; that just wasn't a serious attempt to examine the idea.

Also, call me a CIA shill but I kind of enjoy some of Leary's ideas around expanding John Lilly's 8 circuit model, if I remember right, as found in his book The Game of Life. Leary's lighthearted and creative teaching style is also worthy of emulation, IMO.


Agreed that the article on Owsley is not a great proof that he was a lousy chemist. It is really more organized on upholding a dietary view, not deep political analysis of any kind. Still, I thought the idea is worth mentioning here, at least.

As to Leary- this is the kind of question I wrestle with a lot. He may have started off in a CIA permeated research world but he sure seems like a sincere head- as do many of his associates. His awareness of spooky people in his drug dealing world is murky, probably by design. After he got out of jail, he did stay in possibly/probably spooky milieu too.

Still he seems like a good head- and the Feds sure had to go to a lot of trouble to bring him down. So I would say, yeah, question some of his ideas, reject some, change others but he is well worth checking out and not some kind of cartoon villain.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 02, 2013 8:26 am

http://boingboing.net/2013/10/01/front- ... cover.html

Front Page Detective cover: "LSD, A New Religion"

David Pescovitz at 9:55 pm Tue, Oct 1, 2013

Image

What an utterly fantastic cover for the July 1967 issue of Front Page Detective magazine, up for auction on eBay.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 02, 2013 4:06 pm

Dave MacGowan is sometimes a very frustrating writer but this is still worthwhile:

Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
Part XIV



As was the custom with big events in the mid to late-1960s, particularly in the northern California area, Altamont was drenched in acid. And as was also the custom at that time, that acid was provided free-of-charge by Mr. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, also known as The Bear. At the so-called “Human Be-In” staged in January of 1967, for example, Owsley had kindly distributed 10,000 tabs of potent LSD. For the Monterey Pop Festival just five months later, he had cooked up and distributed 14,000 tabs. For Altamont, he did likewise.

The 1960s were, you see – and you can look this up if you don’t believe me – the era of brotherly love. So if someone happened to have, say, a cache of acid with a street value of $20,000-$30,000 (a considerable amount of money in the 1960s), he was naturally expected to hand it out for free to thousands of random strangers. Of course, probably the only person who routinely had such vast stockpiles of LSD was the premier acid chemist of the hippie era, Augustus Owsley Stanley.

No one – not Ken Kesey, not Richard “Babawhateverthefuckhecalledhimself” Alpert, not even Timothy Leary – did more to ‘turn on’ the youth of the 1960s than Owsley. Leary and his cohorts may have captured the national media spotlight and created public awareness, but it was Owsley who flooded the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere with consistently high quality, inexpensive, readily available acid. By most accounts, he was never in it for the money and he routinely gave away more of his product than he sold. What then was his motive? According to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, writing in Acid Dreams, “Owsley cultivated an image as a wizard-alchemist whose intentions with LSD were priestly and magical.”

To be sure, Owsley is revered by many as something of an icon of the 1960s counterculture – a man motivated by nothing more than an altruistic desire to ‘turn on’ the world. But then again, the trio listed in the preceding paragraph are revered by many as well, so you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit hesitant to embrace Owsley as some sort of anti-hero – especially given his rather provocative background and family history.

Augustus Owsley Stanley III is the son, naturally enough, of Augustus Owsley Stanley II, who served as a military officer during World War II aboard the USS Lexington and thereafter found work in Washington, D.C. as a government attorney. He raised his son primarily in – where else? – Arlington, Virginia. Young Owsley’s grandfather was Augustus Owsley Stanley, who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903 through 1915, as the Governor of Kentucky from 1915 through 1919, and as a U.S. Senator from 1919 through 1925. Senator Stanley’s father, a minister with the Disciples of Christ, served as a judge advocate with the Confederate Army. His mother was a niece of William Owsley, who also served as a Governor of Kentucky, from 1844 through 1848, and who lent his name to Owsley County, Kentucky.

During Owsley III’s formative years, he attended the prestigious Charlotte Hall Military Academy in Maryland, but was reportedly tossed out in the ninth grade for being intoxicated. Not long after that, at the tender age of fifteen, Owsley voluntarily committed himself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.. St. Elizabeth’s, it should be noted, had a far more sinister name upon its founding in 1855: the Government Hospital for the Insane. He remained confined there for, uhmm, ‘treatment’ for the next fifteen months. During that time, his mother, in keeping with one of the recurrent themes of this saga, passed away.

Owsley apparently resumed his education following his curious confinement, but he had reportedly dropped out of school by the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, he apparently had no trouble at all gaining acceptance to the University of Virginia, which he attended for a time before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1956, at the age of twenty-one. During his military service, Owsley was an electronics specialist, working in radio intelligence and radar.

After his stint in the Air Force, Owsley set up camp in the Los Angeles area, ostensibly to study ballet. During that same time, he also worked at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was undoubtedly the primary reason for his move to LA. In 1963, Owsley moved once again, this time to Berkeley, California, which just happened to be ground-zero of the budding anti-war movement. He may or may not have briefly attended UC Berkeley, which is where he allegedly cribbed the recipe for LSD from the university library.

Owsley soon began cooking up both Methedrine and LSD in a makeshift bathroom lab near the campus of the university. On February 21, 1965, that lab was raided by state narcotics agents who seized all his lab equipment and charged Stanley with operating a meth lab. As Barry Miles recounted in Hippie, “Berkeley was awash with speed and Owsley was responsible for much of it.” Nevertheless, Owsley walked away from the raid unscathed, and, with the help of his attorney, who happened to be the vice-mayor of Berkeley, he even successfully sued to have all his lab equipment returned. He quickly put that equipment to work producing some 4,000,000 tabs of nearly pure LSD in the mid-1960s.

Also in February of 1965, Owsley and his frequent sidekicks, the Grateful Dead, moved down to the Watts area of Los Angeles, of all places, to ostensibly conduct ‘acid tests.’ The group rented a house that was conveniently located right next door to a brothel, curiously paralleling the modus operandi of various intelligence operatives who were (or had been) involved in conducting their own ‘acid tests.’ The band departed the communal dwelling in April 1965, just a few months before Watts exploded in violence that left thirty-four corpses littering the streets.

Owsley had been with the Dead from the band’s earliest days, as both a financial backer and as their sound engineer. He is credited with numerous electronic innovations that changed the way that live rock music was presented to the masses – and likely not in a good way, given that his work as a sound technician undoubtedly drew heavily upon his military training.

In 1967, Owsley unleashed on the Haight a particularly nasty hallucinogen known as STP. Developed by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical, STP had been tested extensively at the Edgewood Arsenal as a possible biowarfare agent before being distributed to hippies as a recreational drug. Owsley reportedly obtained the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, a former Harvard man who developed a keen interest in psychopharmacology while serving in the U.S. Navy. Shulgin worked for many years as a senior research chemist at Dow, and later worked very closely with the DEA.


http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr106.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 03, 2013 9:49 am

Image

And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.

--Aldous Huxley, 1959


Image
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:15 am

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/ ... delic.html

BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : The Psychedelic Revolutionaries



ImageThe psychedelic revolutionaries...

'White Hand Society:
The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg'


By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 12, 2010

[White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, by Peter Conners (City Lights, 2010); Paperback, 200 pp.; $16.95.]


I took LSD for the first time in 1970, and haven’t taken it since then. Three of the trips were with fugitives in the Weather Underground all of them wanted by the FBI. At that time, the clandestine organization of former members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) insisted that taking LSD was consistent with armed revolution.

To make their point, they took a break from planting bombs to help Timothy Leary, the apostle of LSD, make his escape from prison and to leave the United States for Algeria under a fake passport. It was in Algiers in 1970 that I met Leary, and took LSD with him. I actually enjoyed that acid trip, unlike the previous psychedelic experiences with the Weather Underground. Leary was irrepressible and dangerous -- an imp and a mad man.

My experiences in Algiers from 40 years ago came back to me recently while reading Peter Conners’ new book White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. Conners is a poet, a fiction writer, a book editor, and the author of a memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead.

In White Hand Society, he’s an historian and a group biographer. The individuals in the group that he profiles include not only Ginsberg, Leary, and the Weather Underground fugitives, but also many of the figures of the drug and countercultures of the 1960s, such as Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, and more. Jack Kerouac makes a brief and vivid appearance; his comments about his experiments with psychedelic drugs are well worth reading and pondering.

Conners’ main objective is to trace the connections between Ginsberg and Leary, and to show the impact they had on an era in which taking psychedelic drugs was an integral part of the rebellion and the protests of a generation. Indeed, drugs went hand in hand with the cultural revolutions of the 1960s; they were depicted as a kind of deprogramming of the institutional brainwashing that was carried out by the media and the educational system during the cold war. Moreover, drugs seemed to provide immediate gratification of pleasure.

White Hand Society is largely anecdotal, and the anecdotes, though they have mostly been told before, are well told in these pages. “White Hand Society” is the name that Leary gave to a group of his friends and associates -- and just one of a series of names he coined to create a sense of élan and mystery about himself and those around him.

Leary, Ginsberg and their associates come to life in this book, and so do the times they helped to shape. The story moves from Massachusetts to New York to California and to Europe. The sections of the book about Leary are the most vivid and the most trenchant.

Conners doesn’t advance a theory to explain Leary’s behavior or the drug culture, but he does offer a long and illuminating passage from Alternating Currents, a 1967 book by Octavio Paz, the Mexican author and Nobel-prize winner famous for Labyrinth of Solitude. It is well worth repeating here. In the absence of a theory about drugs and addiction it will do nicely.

“We are now in a position to understand the real reason for the condemnation of hallucinogens and why their use is punished,” Paz wrote. “The authorities do not behave as though they were trying to stamp out a harmful vice, but behave as though they were stamping out dissidence. Since this is a form of dissidence that is becoming more widespread, the prohibition takes on the proportion of a campaign against a spiritual contagion, against an opinion. What authorities are displaying is ideological zeal. They are punishing a heresy, not a crime.”

Paz’s comments make a lot of sense. They seem both timely and contemporary, though they were written before the War on Drugs, at least in its modern phrase, began in 1970 under President Richard Nixon. Indeed, Nixon and his drug warriors -- and all the drug warriors under every single American president since Nixon -- have combated illicit drugs, from LSD to marijuana and cocaine, as though they were zealots on a religious crusade. This year, on the 40th anniversary of the war on drugs, it is perhaps more obviously than ever before a campaign against a “heresy, not a crime.”

Conners does not focus on the drug warriors themselves, but on their victims -- on men like Leary who were arrested and jailed for smuggling and smoking marijuana -- and on men like Ginsberg who rushed to their defense and who called for the legalization of marijuana.

Conners does not idealize Leary. He depicts him as a showman, a self-promoter, a huckster, and a sham who also became a snitch and cooperated with the FBI in exchange for leniency and for placement in the federal witness protection program

Conners offers a quotation from Leary himself in which he defends his honor and his reputation. “I did not testify against friends,” he told a reporter for The Berkeley Barb, one of the first of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. Leary went on to say, “I didn’t testify in any manner that would lead to indictments against the Weatherpeople... The fact is that nobody has been arrested because of me, and nobody ever will be.”

Conners offers his own interpretation of that statement. “In true Leary mode, he was refashioning the whole boondoggle of busts, imprisonment, federal cooperation... as if it had been nothing more than a game,” he writes. “In Leary’s mind, he had simply worked the system.”

Of course, the fact that Leary was a con artist, a liar, and a victim of his own delusions doesn’t let the drug warriors off the hook. Indeed, the drug warriors and law enforcement officers persecuted and prosecuted Leary again and again on charges of violating the marijuana laws -- until they succeeded in sending him to prison. They did the same to hundreds of thousands of marijuana smokers year after year since 1970. In fact, there have been, in the past 40 years, more than 20,000,000 arrests for marijuana -- most of them for possession.

That Leary was arrested on marijuana charges for the first time in Laredo, Texas was ironical indeed. After all, Ginsberg had written in his epic poem "Howl" (1956) about the “angleheaded hipsters” who were “busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York.”

It was perhaps inevitable that their paths -- the path of the poet and path of the man who called himself the “high priest” -- would cross. Maybe, too, Ginsberg and "Howl" gave birth to Timothy Leary as they helped to give birth to the counterculture of the 1960s. Ginsberg certainly showed compassion for Leary, even after he snitched on friends.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were unforgiving. “Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold,” Abbie said, and Jerry Rubin added, “I know from personal experience with him over the past 10 years that he never had a firm grasp of where truth ended and fantasy began.”



[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation and is a professor at Sonoma State University.]
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 03, 2013 7:23 pm

http://cjonline.com/indepth/missilesilo ... rial.shtml

Chemist testifies in LSD trial

By Steve Fry
The Capital-Journal
3/12/03


A senior chemist for the Drug Enforcement Administration testified Tuesday that he met a man charged in an LSD conspiracy case when the alleged conspirator was a student at Harvard University.

William Leonard Pickard, 57, and Clyde Apperson, 47, are charged in U.S. District Court with conspiracy and possession of LSD with intent to distribute more than 10 grams of LSD. The two were arrested after officers seized an LSD lab from a rental truck soon after the vehicle left a converted missile base near Wamego on Nov. 6, 2000. Their trial is in its ninth week.

Roger A. Ely, senior forensic chemist at the DEA's laboratory in San Francisco, was on the witness stand most of Tuesday testifying about his relationship with Pickard.

Ely said he learned of Pickard through Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, who e-mailed to ask him if it would be OK for a Harvard University student working on a project to contact him. Pickard called a day or two later, Ely said. Ely testified that topics the two discussed included the use of the Internet to get illicit drugs, the use of encrypted messages to elude law enforcement investigators and Russian drug trafficking.

But, Ely testified, he became more careful in his dealings with Pickard and stopped initiating contact after Shulgin, a toxicologist-pharmacologist who invented 200 mind-altering chemicals including ecstasy, told him that Pickard had been arrested at an LSD laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. In that 1992 case, Pickard was convicted of possession of mescaline and possession and manufacture of LSD.

From that point on, Ely said, he talked to Pickard only about information that was in the "public domain."

Ely also testified that Pickard once prodded him on what he thought the future of "synthetic illicit substances" would be.

Pickard's defense attorney, William Work, questioned Ely at length about a series of e-mails from Pickard to Ely, who couldn't specifically identify them but said the messages appeared familiar.

Rork said the e-mails were copies that came from computer discs that had been kept in a storage locker in Massachusetts, then were sent to Pickard.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 03, 2013 8:04 pm

http://cjonline.com/indepth/missilesilo ... _lsd.shtml

Afghans, Taliban cited in LSD trial

By Steve Fry
The Capital-Journal
3/15/03

Image
William Leonard Pickard

A man facing federal charges of LSD trafficking told jurors Friday that the U.S. Customs Service instructed him in the 1990s to arrange a heroin shipment to the United States.

William Leonard Pickard also wove into his testimony in U.S. District Court talk of 9-11, Afghanistan's Taliban government and Stinger missiles.

Pickard, 57, and Clyde Apperson, 47, are charged with conspiracy and possession of LSD with intent to distribute more than 10 grams. The two were arrested after officers stopped a rental truck containing an LSD lab soon after the vehicle left a converted Wamego missile site on Nov. 6, 2000.

Pickard told jurors he tried to persuade American officials to adopt "Infrared," his code name for a plan to convince Afghan warlords to return some Stinger missiles to the United States, along with perhaps a shipment of heroin. He said the plan was that the prison sentence of Mohammed Akbar, an Afghan heroin smuggler serving time in an American prison, would be reduced in exchange for the missiles and heroin.

The contact for the heroin was to be Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, now the deputy defense minister of Afghanistan. Pickard said he discussed with the general a shipment of 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds) of heroin, about which Akbar would alert U.S. officials, who would seize the drug but not arrest anyone.

A Customs official instructed him to arrange for the heroin to be shipped to the United States, said Pickard, who was a Harvard University graduate student and research associate when "Infrared," was in the works. However, the Customs Service rejected heroin confiscation without arrests because the U.S. Department of Justice wanted the drugs and someone arrested, he said.

And the Stinger missile part of "Infrared" fell through when some unnamed American agency didn't want to participate in the deal, Pickard testified.

Pickard and Akbar met while the two were incarcerated at the U.S. Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island, Calif., where Pickard was serving a prison sentence for federal convictions of manufacturing LSD and mescaline and forgery.

A Stinger is a 35-pound, shoulder-launched missile designed to allow ground troops to shoot down low-flying planes and helicopters. The missile locks onto the heat of an aircraft's engine. In 1986, the United States gave Afghan rebels about 900 Stinger missiles when they were fighting the Soviet Union for control of Afghanistan. The Afghans shot down hundreds of Russian helicopters with the missiles.

Eventually, the Stinger missiles "fell into the hands" of the Taliban, a militia group following the strict interpretation of Islam, in 1998, according to Pickard. The Taliban had imposed a strict regime in Afghanistan and supported Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader credited with the 9-11 attacks that killed approximately 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa.

The heroin idea later surfaced again when Dostum visited the United States, Pickard testified, but he pulled back from the heroin-Stinger missiles projects in April 1997 because "I thought it was getting over my head."

Pickard, who had just graduated with a master's degree from Harvard University, said he was concerned for the safety of himself, his wife and their infant daughter. After settling his wife and daughter in San Francisco, Pickard went to Taos, N.M., to study Buddhist meditation and to write on two projects -- money laundering and the future of drugs in the next 10 to 20 years, Pickard said.

In other testimony Friday, Pickard told jurors he met the prosecution's main witness, Gordon Todd Skinner, in February 1998 at a conference of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists in San Francisco.

Skinner testified earlier in the trial, under a grant of immunity, that Pickard was the chemist who cooked millions of doses of LSD and that Apperson also was involved in the drug ring.

Skinner told Pickard he knew people linked to a laboratory at Goddard in which a clandestine chemist produced fentanyl, a drug that had killed hundreds of drug users, Pickard said. That piqued his interest because he knew the fentanyl lab and some of its equipment had never been found, Pickard said.

Skinner said he was the heir to a family fortune linked to the production of springs and "I believed him," Pickard said, noting Skinner was staying in a $1,700 a night hotel suite.

Months later, Pickard said, Skinner invited him to view one of five converted silo bases he owned.

On Friday, jurors viewed a video of the Wamego site shot on Oct. 31, 2000, when Skinner took federal investigators through the facility.

The video showed a mix of utilitarian, industrial-type concrete rooms and lighting versus living quarters with tiled walls and floors, redwood ceilings, a domed ceiling in a shower room, several statues, large vases and a framed photograph of a pope and an American Indian in front of a statue of a nude woman.

For jurors, Friday was jersey day, and 13 of 14 jurors and alternate jurors wore a jersey of a favorite school -- seven from Kansas State University, three from The University of Kansas, one from Washburn University and one from from the University of Michigan. One flew the red and white colors of Emmett Grade School.

Testimony resumes Monday.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 03, 2013 10:23 pm

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/alex ... ard_mental

10.03.2013

ALEX JONES EXPLAINS OBAMACARE DRESSED AS A LIZARD, CONTINUES DOWNWARD MENTAL HEALTH SPIRAL

Image

Is it wrong to hold up someone who is so obviously mentally ill to mockery and then sell advertisements against it? Am I a bad person for lampooning someone clearly losing his shit for laughs and banner ads?

Nah. This kind of thing happens on Fox News all the live-long day, doesn’t it?

I think if you showed a younger Alex Jones what he would eventually come to represent, and how the general public would regard him, as they do today, “Winning” like his pal Charlie Sheen, just a sad, pathetic clown, he’d probably break down and start sobbing.

Imagine the sheer, unmitigated hell his wife must go through!

Crack is wack, but whatever Alex Jones is on should be avoided at all costs.

Maybe the Illuminati HAVE already gotten to him. I guess I wasn’t thinking, you know, enough steps ahead!




Posted by Richard Metzger
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:36 pm

Skidoo

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Oct 06, 2013 4:46 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 08, 2013 2:47 pm

I Light Your Streets

by Meridel Le Sueur


I am a crazy woman with a painted face
On the streets of Gallup
I invite men into my grave
for a little wine.
I am a painted grave
Owl woman hooting for callers in the night.
Black bats over the sun sing to me
The horned toad sleeps in my thighs


Image
Meridel Le Sueur reads at the opening of the Guild Complex, May 1989
(Nelson Peery at right, Lew Rosenbaum at left)



My grandmothers gave me songs to heal
But the white man buys me cheap without song
or word.
My dead children appear and I play with them.
Ridge of time in my grief –remembering
Who will claim the ruins?
and the graves?
the corn maiden violated
As the land?
I am a child in my eroded dust.
I remember feathers of the hummingbird
And the virgin corn laughing on the cob.
Maize defend me
Prairie wheel around me
I run beneath the guns
and the greedy eye
And hurricanes of white faces knife me.
But like fox and smoke I gleam among the thrushes
And light your streets.


from Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980 (Feminist Press)



http://chilaborarts.wordpress.com/2010/ ... m-mcgrath/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 10, 2013 10:52 am

http://electrickoolaidblogtest.wordpres ... seys-1965/

One Legendary Party: The Hell’s Angels and the Merry Pranksters Meet at Kesey’s

7 JUL

Image
Guess who’s coming to dinner.
Image via nostalgiaonwheels.blogspot.com


WARNING: This post contains descriptions of alleged sexual violence.

For the last six years or so, one party has been haunting me. It wasn’t any soiree I’d attended—this party took place on Saturday August 7, 1965 at Ken Kesey’s LSD-laced ranch in La Honda, California. It was a fete that epitomized the West Coast psychedelic movement’s embrace of drugs, music, and above all, the outlaw lifestyle. What made this party special wasn’t its mix of intellectuals—poet Allen Ginsberg and Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass) among them—and countercultural icons such as Hunter S. Thompson and Neal Cassady; it was the 15-foot-long, red white and blue sign strung up outside the ranch: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS.

I’ve come across depictions of this party in so many places that it’s practically a historic event. Hunter Thompson described it in Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, Tom Wolfe gave it a giddy portrayal in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and even Ginsberg immortalized it in a poem. Most recently, Seth Rosenfeld gave it an entirely new context in Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (check out an excellent analysis of this book apropos to today’s surveillance fiasco on Sammy Scoops’ blog).

Rosenfeld points out that this party—during which the tie-dyed psychedelic community and the swastika-sporting motorcycle gang effectively coexisted without any fatalities—came only two months before the Angels gave an unequivocal beatdown to a members of the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) as they attempted to peacefully march into Oakland in protest of the war. The parade was led by “a chanting, cymbal-clanging Ginsberg,” but all the ohms in the world weren’t going to stop the Angels, whom the FBI allegedly allowed to commence attacking protesters before police intervened. Rosenfeld reports that it took a subsequent LSD-fueled meeting between Ginsberg, Kesey, and Hell’s Angels leader Sonny Barger to get the Angels off the VDC’s back.

The Angels’ pro-Vietnam stance may seem at odds with the group’s anti-establishment ethos and self-exiling behavior, but as Thompson puts it:

Their political views are limited to the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. They are blind to the irony of their role … knight errants of a faith from which they have already been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up or croaked if the politicians they think they agree with ever come to power.

Given this, and the subsequent tensions with the VDC, it seems odd that the Hell’s Angels/Merry Pranksters party at La Honda is portrayed as such a celebratory event—particularly in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Coming across the party in Subversives inspired me to take a closer look back at other accounts of the event. One aspect stood out like a sore thumb: the portrayals (or nonportrayals) of an alleged gang rape that took place at the party.

The incident is absent from Rosenfeld’s account (it is arguably irrelevant to his book), but also from Ginsberg’s poem, which ends on this deceptively serene note: “children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks. / And 4 police cars parked outside the painted / gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.” But Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid both portray the incident, and in such stark similarity that it seems apparent that Wolfe lifted Thompson’s notes (I assume with permission—there’s no indication that Wolfe was even at the party and Thompson certainly was).

Thompson chooses to describe the incident four chapters before even mentioning the Prankster party, in a chapter devoted to the concept of rape in the world of the Hell’s Angels. However, Thompson’s incident most certainly happened at the Prankster party, as evidenced in chapter 17 of Hell’s Angels—“I keep a crumpled yellow note from that night [...] Pretty girl about twenty-five lying on wooden floor [...] red and white dress pushed up around her chest [...] girl jerking and moaning, not fighting, clinging, seems drunk, incoherent, not knowing, drowning…” When compared with chapter 13 of Electric Kool Aid, which describes a girl with “her red and white dress pushed up around her chest,” the two stories are virtually identical, right down to the woman’s ex-husband getting in on the action, but only after the girl “asks him to kiss her.”

The incident is brushed off in Electric Kool Aid, with Wolfe writing “but that is her movie, it truly is, and we have gone with the flow.” Thompson, however, delves a bit deeper. “It was not a particularly sexual scene,” he writes, “The impression I had at the time was one of vengeance. The atmosphere in the room was harsh and brittle, almost hysterical.” Afterward, the girl “rested for a while and then wandered around the party in a blank sort of way and danced with several people.” She was later “taken back for another session.” After that, Thompson “saw her trying to dance with her ex-husband, but all she could do was hang on his neck and sway back and forth. She didn’t even seem to hear the music.”

“What would a jury make of that one?” Thompson wonders. In this day and age, it’s pretty clear what a jury would make of that one. But Thompson goes on to employ the logic as popular 50 years ago as it is today: “If the girl was raped why didn’t she protest or ask somebody for help?” He later goes on to answer his own question: “The girl had several chances to leave the party and call the police, but that was out of the question. Girls who get turned out at Hell’s Angels parties don’t think of police in terms of protection.” The police, as we know in all accounts, were amassed right outside the party, their red lights casting a psychedelic glow on the scene. At the end of the chapter, Thompson concludes that the Angels are rapists, though only in a more “obvious” way than the plundering capitalists of 20th-century America.

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Still the definition of Bad Ass
image via magedesign.com


Of the two-day long party, Wolfe admits that “Everybody, Angels and Pranksters, had a righteous time and no heads were broken.” He again brings up the gang bang, but again asserts that “the girl was a volunteer. It was her movie.” He chalks the whole party up as a victory for Kesey, who had managed to turn La Honda into “an intellectual tourist attraction”—a place for intellectuals to come face to face with “real life,” a concept seemingly out of reach for the ivory tower crowd. It’s true that the Angels represented everything Kesey preached; they were authentically “out front,” spontaneous, anti-authoritarian, and most assuredly outlaws. In many ways, the Angels were the id of Kesey’s Prankster movement, and though taming them with free booze and LSD made for a neat party trick, there’s no denying that the men were quite dangerous.

The fact that the “only” violence that occurred at the party was of a sexual nature—in Thompson’s words, an act of “vengeance”—only underlines the problematic nature of Kesey’s psychedelic movement. At its core, the movement preached unrestrained self-indulgence within a (let’s face it) male-dominated hierarchy. Although Wolfe portrays Kesey’s mistress Mountain Girl as number one on the female Prankster hierarchy, she is still subservient to Kesey and eventually ends up pregnant and left behind during Kesey’s flight to Mexico. And though she imitates Kesey’s disarming charm in her bold dialogues with the Angels, we never get to hear her thoughts on the gang bang incident. Wolfe glosses over Thompson’s hesitations about the woman’s state of mind, and that’s that.

Wolfe also chooses not to address the tensions that arose between the Angels, the Pranksters, and the VDC just weeks later, but it’s clear that the Angels-Prankster synthesis had begun to decay just as soon as it came together. Even under Kesey’s “control,” the Angels were as wild and depraved as ever, dragging some of the Pranksters down with them. “One or two of the non-Angel guests finally joined in,” Thompson admits of the rape.

In hindsight, the Angels/Prankster party is memorable not just for its debauchery, amusingly incongruous cast of characters, or its sexual deviances. It can indeed be seen as a microcosm of an unsustainable social movement, one that marginalized and even silenced female voices in favor of reckless, hedonistic bravado.

And yet, it took an undeniable bravery to reach out to the Angels, a group known only for the unspeakable havoc they wreak wherever they go. The party represented a commendable crossing of socioeconomic boundaries, even if the results weren’t as idyllic as some would have believed. It was a unique social experiment, albeit one that foreshadowed the psychedelic movement’s downfall, if not the terror at Altamont. Many countercultural fanatics, myself included, would have given anything to be a fly on the wall at La Honda as Allen Ginsberg sang Hare krishna at a bunch of hulking Angels in full Nazi regalia. Still, I don’t think I’ll be inviting any motorcycle hoodlums to my next house party.


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I might invite this guy, though.
Image via eskimo.com
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 10, 2013 2:04 pm

http://boingboing.net/2013/10/10/delusi ... -real.html

Delusions that could be real, but they're not
David Pescovitz at 10:32 am Thu, Oct 10, 2013

Last year, Joshua Brady of Matoaca, Virgina convinced a man named Herson Torres to rob banks in the Washington, DC area. Brady said that he was a CIA agent and this was part of an undercover operation to audit bank security. Brady wasn't actually a CIA agent though. He just thought he was. And as George Costanza once said, "It's not a lie if you believe it." BB pal Jon Ronson tells Brady's story for This American Life. In this terrific piece, Jon delves into delusional disorder, a rare psychiatric condition usually characterized by delusions that are within the realm of possibility. It's like something from a Philip K. Dick novel where reality is in the eye and mind of the beholder, until it isn't.


"You Can't Handle The Truth" (This American Life)


Ronson learned about Brady's bizarre tale from Tom Schoenberg's excellent Businessweek article, "In Virginia's Fairfax County, Robbing Banks for the CIA"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.
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