Shulgin profiled in NYT

Cheesy free registration required

Article in Yesterday's NY Times Magazine about one of our favorite currently operating Alchemists-

"Shulgin is in the former camp. There's a story he likes to tell about the past 100 years: ''At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two psychedelic compounds known to Western science: cannabis and mescaline. A little over 50 years later -- with LSD, psilocybin, psilocin, TMA, several compounds based on DMT and various other isomers -- the number was up to almost 20. By 2000, there were well over 200. So you see, the growth is exponential.'' When I asked him whether that meant that by 2050 we'll be up to 2,000, he smiled and said, ''The way it's building up now, we may have well over that number.''

The point is clear enough: the continuing explosion in options for chemical mind-manifestation is as natural as the passage of time. But what Shulgin's narrative leaves out is the fact that most of this supposedly inexorable diversification took place in a lab in his backyard. For 40 years, working in plain sight of the law and publishing his results, Shulgin has been a one-man psychopharmacological research sector. (Timothy Leary called him one of the century's most important scientists.)"

Super Old-School punk zine online

Wow! this is cool!

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

A nonprofit organization that sponsors scientific research designed to develop psychedelics and marijuana into F.D.A. - approved prescription medicines. And after you expand your mind, come down and buy a few books to fill it back up a bit.

Security, Privacy, & Anonymity for Autonomy

useful website on computer security.

In The Wake - A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization

well... that about says it. what more can I say? When it comes down to the shit, the wire, the fan, whatever, there will be some who are more prepared than others. The rest is up to you.

George Draffan's End of the World Website

Co-Author of Strangely Like War with Derrick Jensen, radical realist on the edge. Anti-Corporate Pro-Environmental Solid Research. Good site. Check it out.

Warrenellis.com : Portland Bike Ensemble

The essential soundtrack to your unmedicated paranoid episodes.
Warren Ellis has a plug/link for the Portland Bike Ensemble on his blog recently, which is extremely cool, 'cause they are playing at Last Word on the 25th
so check the link and if you like what you hear, maybe we will see you on Tuesday.

Ananova - Police hunt poo protesters

Police in Germany are hunting pranksters who have been sticking miniature US flags into piles of dog poo in public parks. Josef Oettl, parks administrator for Bayreuth, said: "This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be 2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been claimed during that time."

Your literate laugh for the day

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R.U. Sirius on Monsanto's Intellectual Property

Founder of the Revolution Party on the recent Wired story on Monsanto

What are the implications of a corporate bio-agribusiness leader trying to apply Microsoft type controls over the “software” that grows food? The application of intellectual property lawas to induce intentional scarcity in the area of food strikes me as a potential crime against humanity that – taken to its logical extreme – threatens to make Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” look like a vegan picnic.

The Yes Men

These are the guys who created gwbush.com, a parody of georgewbush.com. They have also impersonated the WTO as a way of raising awareness about the nature of "free trade" and the damage it does to developing countries. (don't call them third world; they hate that.)

Although, I wanna know where the fuck the second world is? Huh? First...Third...what the fuck about the second? WTF?

RR

Brion Gysin's Dream Machine in NY Times

Dreamachine enthusiasts - whose ranks have swelled recently thanks to chat forums and a book published last year - claim that it promotes a trancelike serenity, intensifies creativity and insight and even uncovers suppressed memories. Ms. Chapman's Dreamachine is one of more than a thousand that have been manufactured since the early 90's by a California composer and conductor named David Woodard. One is on display this month at the Clair Obscur Gallery in Los Angeles along with an exhibit of photographs of Burroughs taken by John Aes-Nihil, an underground filmmaker, and the premiere at the gallery of his film, "William Burroughs in the Dreamachine." Burroughs, along with other figures from the Beat Generation like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, was fascinated, even at times obsessed by the Dreamachine, which was invented in 1959 by their fellow Beats Brion Gysin, an artist, and Ian Sommerville, a math student at Cambridge. Mr. Leary called it "the most sophisticated neurophenomenological device ever designed"; Mr. Burroughs experimented with it for nearly four decades. (The film shows him using his Dreamachines at his home in Lawrence, Kan., shortly before his death in 1997).

Wired News: FBI Tosses Carnivore to the Dogs

The FBI has effectively abandoned its custom-built internet surveillance technology, once known as Carnivore, designed to read e-mails and other online communications among suspected criminals, terrorists and spies, according to bureau oversight reports submitted to Congress.
Instead, the FBI said it has switched to unspecified commercial software to eavesdrop on computer traffic during such investigations and has increasingly asked internet providers to conduct wiretaps on targeted customers on the government's behalf, reimbursing companies for their costs.

NOT ONE DAMN DIME!

Protest the situation in Iraq, and the grossly expensive inauguration by not buying anything on January 20th!

Danika Dinsmore's Website

Accomplished Local Northwest Poetess. Check her out, she's well worth it.

In the 21st cent. even farmers can be pirates

Monsanto Co.'s "seed police" snared soy farmer Homan McFarling in 1999, and the company is demanding he pay it hundreds of thousands of dollars for alleged technology piracy. McFarling's sin? He saved seed from one harvest and replanted it the following season, a revered and ancient agricultural practice.
"My daddy saved seed. I saved seed," said McFarling, 62, who still grows soy on the 5,000 acre family farm in Shannon, Miss. and is fighting the agribusiness giant in court.

Wired News: Willie Nelson Bets on Biodiesel

"There is really no need going around starting wars over oil. We have it here at home. We have the necessary product, the farmers can grow it," said Nelson, who organized Farm Aid two decades ago to draw attention to the plight of American agriculture.

White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say

Check out this great follow up to US human rights issues.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

via The NY Times so free registration is required.

US gives up search for Iraq WMD

So can we just say we are sorry and go home now? I bet we could spend less by just sending checks to help the Iraqi's rebuild on their own, then by keeping the largest military presence there in the history of the conflict. Not to mention how much our presence in the Middle East just radicalizes new generations of Islamic youth. Oh, wait I forgot about the OIL!


"We have believed that there weren't any weapons since around May or June 2003. First came David Kay in September 2003 [who said] that he hadn't found any weapons and that was a big sensation - but he thought that there were programmes still," he told the BBC.

"But then came Duelfer last November [who] said that he hadn't seen any programmes, but maybe Saddam would have intended to restart the programme, and there is no evidence of that.

Mr Blix said he assumed it would be natural for the United States to now report their finding to the UN Security Council "because the US took the inspections out of the hands of the UN to undertake it themselves".

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US 'erodes' global human rights

Alright we been busy and not updating for awhile.
But there is a lot of news lately that is pissing us off, and will of course disappear in a day or two (while we get two weeks of coverage of mudslides in Cali), so expect a lot of political disaster coverage here in the next few days.

Human Rights Watch says the US can no longer claim to defend human rights abroad if it practises abuses itself.

Sen. Barbara Boxer " Why I Must Object"

Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any senator, any congressperson, any president, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 Corporation.

Take Back Your Time

TAKE BACK YOUR TIME is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment

ollapodrida: Will Eisner, comic-book legend, dies at 87

ollapodrida: Will Eisner, comic-book legend, dies at 87: "Eisner 'had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas,' he told The Associated Press in a 1998 interview. With 'The Spirit,' he was aiming for 'a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.'"
Yeah, I know I'm late with this, but let a guy mourn his heroes. And if you don't who he was, go find his Comics and Sequential Art for a glimpse of his technical side, or A Contract with God, in which he doesn't quite invent the graphic novel as we know it, but he sure as hell gives it a lot of the shape it has now. It's also the reason I'll be crying in my beer tonight, as much as I did when the Man in Black passed.

What do you believe is true even though you cann't prove it?

Haven't even begun to mine the full depths of this, but it looks really cool. 120 Scientists and other thinkers answer the above question, with replies ranging from technical and esoteric to general and surprisingly absurd.
via slashdot

Pirate Press

This is badass. Local Olympia online downloadable 'zine library, all files in PDF format. Check it out.