Disclaimer: This site is *not* affiliated with AIPAC, Ahmed Chalabi, K Street, ClearChannel, or Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ. In case you were curious. Full disclosure: I have some shares of Apple and therefore I have an Apple bias. Yum. Also got a tiny bit of gold!
The United Nations should avail itself as an instrument for a "new world order of the 21st century," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday in his first address to the General Assembly. Sarkozy, who won the presidency this year on a strong reform platform to modernize France, urged the world body to embark on programmes ranging from equal wealth distribution to fighting corruption in his speech full of references to France's past revolutionary ideals.
Jacobin Commie! Yikes!! The Neo Con New World Order etc. w00000!!11!!!
The United States uses a neutron-type bomb against the main Iranian nuclear research center at Natanz, which it had already bombed conventionally and destroyed. It vows to bomb again if Iran continues to resist. Iran is defiant and fires another wave of Silkworms at U.S. ships, sinking one. Suicide bombers hit U.S. targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia and China place their nuclear forces on high alert. Pakistani militants take over parliament, aided by radical elements in the army and the intelligence service. India launches a preemptive strike against the main Pakistani nuclear centers at Wah and Multan, where the country's arsenal is believed to be concentrated. Pakistan has hidden some of its nukes elsewhere, however, and is able to strike back by bombing New Delhi. World War III has begun.
Someone said recently that this stuff with total NSA surveillance and paramilitary Blackwater insanity looks like Baron Hausmann's reorganization of Paris: the creation of new forms and institutions that aren't really helpful against Islamic terrorists, but quite useful against violent domestic insurrections. Haussmann built those big Parisian avenues so that revolt organizers couldn't blockade parts of the city. Saddam took a page from this when rebuilding Baghdad...
Seems too true. And all the damn compasses keep pointing that way. The fascist shift, the real deal.......
A big feature of the literature on decolonization is the delight leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ruhollah Khomeini took in abrogating laws bestowing 'extra-territoriality' on colonial personnel and even just civilians from the metropole, while in the subject country. Now extra-territoriality is back with a vengeance; and, of course, no colonial enterprise can be run without it. One can't have persons of the superior race hauled before a native judge; bad show, old boy, to let the wily oriental gentlemen get the upper hand that way.
The argument about whether Cheney/Bush went into Iraq over petroleum is not interesting. Of course they did, one way or another. The question is what exactly they thought they were doing about Iraq's petroleum. I would argue that they threw public resources (perhaps as much as two trillion dollars worth when all is said and done) to secure profits for private companies.
Dan Rather: the video producer, Mary Mapes, who got nailed by some kind of repackaged info bomb, thinks Dan Rather's big lawsuit is courageous. Mary Mapes: Courage for Dan Rather.
The Drugging of our children: Someone made a video, mainly about ADHD and pumping the kids' heads full of psychotropic social control agents. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's by someone named Gary Null (Google Video), who seems to have some other weird offbeat medical videos on Google Video.
AT&T going to tap the Internet & scan to catch your bad movies: Slashdot carried the story that:
Save the Internet writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the MPAA is trying to convince major ISPs to do content filtering. Now, merely wanting it is one thing, but the more important point is that 'AT&T has agreed to start filtering content at some mysterious point in the future.' We're left to wonder about the legal implications of that, but given that AT&T already has the ability to wiretap everything for the NSA, it was only a matter of time before they found a way to profit from it, too."
Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about "politically charged" opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, "they had them printed out on the table in front of me."
Blackwater looks like the TASER International Comintern: At least those shady bastards are on the map right now. They're gonna get pegged by their own Zapruder film, hopefully. Here's an overview video from Jeremy Scahill, who was really good recently on MSNBC Countdown:
Fresh economic shocks on the scale of the current credit squeeze will occur if US house prices continue to fall, one of the country’s leading housing experts warned on Wednesday. Robert Shiller, a Yale university economist, told a US congressional panel that he feared “the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression”.
Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright. The Saudis Call Bernanke's Bluff. Foreign reserve currencies quietly getting ditched. Krugman asked if this is the Wile E. Coyote moment (where he looks down and falls through the air). (On a side note, the NY Times has made its editorial stuff free again - and the old article archives going back many years. They want to sell more ads now. Sweet!)
On a more funny note: Chinese buy into conspiracy theory. yes the hokey tale of the Rothschilds has become a hit Chinese book, read by all apparatchiks, nomenclatura and bureaucrats of note!
Discrediting the North American Union: Reason Magazine calls NAU agenda "a Xenophobic Fantasy". I wish. I found these weird MnDOT documents, there is a real something big out there. Of that much I am certain, and it has Minnesota manifestations.
How about those loose nukes: Simple Error My Ass, says Larry Johnson, a former CIA guy.
Gingrich said: "I can't imagine why they put up with this. I mean, either General Petraeus is wrong and the military spokesman's wrong or the current policies we have are stunningly ineffective. ... We should finance the students. We should finance a Radio Free Iran. We should covertly sabotage the only gasoline refinery in the country. We should be prepared, once the gasoline refinery's down, to stop all of the gasoline tankers and communicate to the Iranian government, that, if they want to move equipment into Iran - into Iraq - they're gonna have to walk."
What was legal beagle Greta's response to this bloodthirsty, illegal and immoral suggestion?
She said, "That actually seems rather simple and easy to do." The sheer insanity of this is mind-boggling.
Gingrich's open call for sabotage of Iran's gas industry lends more credence to my theory that Iran's natural gas infrastructure, including recent construction on a pipeline to India, is the real target of the Bush administration, not the nuclear plants.
That's why they've over-hyped the nuclear issue. Seek the money to find the hidden agenda. The target is gas, not the atom.
Iran's Ahmadinejad, public enemy No. 1? shorter: "Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war" by Juan Cole.
Some crazy freakin' conservatives have a song about how much God hates America right now. This kind of masochism is how they are starting debates now. WHY SHOULD GOD BLESS AMERICA?!? These people WANT to KNOW!
Over the weekend I got a pretty rough (and intensely visual) migraine while I was finishing the Politics in Minnesota legislator profiles. I called up a friend of mine who has an interest in biochemistry, asking if they have figured out what the heck a migraine actually is. I certainly attribute this migraine to too much coffee and cigarettes, since when I moderate these substances I don't get the damn things. I rarely have cigs except when things are stressful.
Anyhow this led me to take a look at biochemical websites, and - gasp - the structures of illegal drugs. My friend told me that since migraines are somehow related to serotonin, the prescription migraine medication Imitrex (sumatriptan) is actually a somewhat altered psychedelic mushroom variant.
I went to go check this out. This Canadian website had a ton of useful biochem info for Imitrex (and everything else), including receptors, gene sequences and various genetic racial differences in affected alleles.
Indeed we can see that big Pharma wanted to use the weirder serotonin receptors activated by hallucinogens like mushrooms: Imitrex is the first image. The second two are the major components of magic mushrooms via Erowid, and finally serotonin:
Indeed, my very basic chemistry knowledge indicates that everything except the red sprong is the same between mushrooms and Imitrex. Actually i think the N-S-02 structure isn't even that different from psilocybin. (wikipedia notes that Imitrex can give you heart attacks because its main purpose is vasoconstriction of dilated arteries)
While it is certainly not well-understood why mushrooms generate hallucinations, it's believed they activate certain odd serotonin receptors - perhaps the same ones that thrash around when I get a migraine. The visual effects of a migraine - the "halos" of shimmering incongruence that made it impossible for me to read the computer screen for a full 36 hours - are perhaps not that different than the wobbly weird look of intense mushroom trips.
In 1918, Arthur Stoll isolated ergotamine, which was introduced by Sandoz (now Novartis) under the trade name Gynergen in 1921 and marketed as a safer and more reliable form of the medieval midwife's nostrum. Controlled trials in the 1930s showed it to be effective in relieving migraine headache.
Also during the 1930s, two U.S. chemists succeeded in identifying the common nucleus of the ergot drugs, which they named lysergic acid. With this information, it became feasible to synthesize the ergot compounds, a project undertaken by Albert Hofmann in Stoll's laboratory at Sandoz, among others (2). In 1935, Sandoz chemists succeeded in synthesizing ergonovine, which was developed as methylergonovine (Methergine) and widely used to control postpartum hemorrhage. Further efforts to isolate the various alkaloids occurring naturally in ergot led to the development of a preparation of ergoloid mesylates (Hydergine) for treating dementia. In 1943, Hofmann synthesized dihydroergotamine (DHE), marketed for the treatment of blood pressure and later shown to be highly effective for migraine.
Migraine drugs
In the course of Hofmann's trial-and-error synthesis of lysergic acid derivatives, the 25th compound, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), failed to show any therapeutic promise in early testing on animals. In 1943, five years after it was first synthesized and tested, Hofmann decided to synthesize LSD-25 again for further testing. While completing the synthesis, he was overcome by strange sensations, which later developed into mild euphoria accompanied by pleasant visual hallucinations.
Surmising that he had somehow absorbed or ingested some of his newly synthesized compound, Hofmann proceeded to test the substance on himself by taking what he believed to be a minuscule dose--0.25 mg--and was rapidly plunged into what can only be described as a very bad trip. Like the natural ergot from which it was derived, LSD proved to be too potent, risky, and unpredictable to have a medical application.
In the course of exploring the ergot family, Sandoz chemists went on to discover yet another important antimigraine drug, methysergide (Sansert). Used for daily preventive therapy rather than abortive treatment of migraine, methysergide is a serotonin antagonist, whereas ergotamine is a serotonin agonist. Interestingly, "unworldly feelings" or hallucinations are among methysergide's possible side effects (3).
Likewise, it is interesting to survey and compare the chemical structures of amphetamine, methamphetamine and MDMA (ecstasy), morphine, heroin, ketamine, and all the other favorites. I thought it was kind of funny that esoteric drugs like salvia divinorum's active parts actually look really weird. So let's survey a few.
And here's MDMA - ecstasy - which essentially has a speed half (on the right) glued to a hallucinogen half.
DXM and Ketamine: dextromethorphan hydrobromide, a cough suppressant that provokes nasty hallucinations at high levels, and burns holes in your brain called Olney's Lesions. Ketamine is a more powerful (and apparently related) disassociative and anasthetic:
THC: Tetrahydrocannabinols / Tetrahydro-6,6,9-trimethyl-3-pentyl-6H-dibenzo[b,d]pyran-1-ol, which of course have many strange and therapeutic neurotransmitter effects that medical researchers aren't allowed to determine (thanks, schedule One):
Let's get into Opiates: (Please!) It's interesting that heroin was invented to let the painkiller part of the molecule slip through the lipid barrier. Lipids - ie fat membranes - slow down non-lipid-soluble drugs. First is codeine, then heroin.
I don't write this to celebrate these substances, as of course many of them have destroyed many lives. Namely alcohol and tobacco, mostly. But we don't usually think about the chemistry of drugs, and even though it's hard to visualize, these materials really do work on the atomic level. It's funny how some carbon rings are more political than others, and of course it's funny that cutting-edge pharmacological research basically just recuts mushrooms to treat migraines.
Submitted by Chairman Mao on Sat, 2006-10-07 12:58
Fourteen years ago, when I was first introduced to the mind focusing chemical Methylphenidate, there wasn't a whole lot known about it's long term effects. It had been around for quite a while, but users tended to shift substances after an extended period of time. At age 7 my prescribed dose was 5mgs twice a day, which was and is not very much. Over the years my dose steadily increased until my maximum dose of 40mgs time-released at age 19. However, the reccomended introducion dose has risen to 18mgs time released for seven year old, with a maximum dose of 54mgs for the 6-12yr old range, and 72mgs maximum for the 13-17yrs old range. Twelve milligrams over the previous maximum dosage.
Rxlist.com
:"
There is no body of evidence available from controlled trials to indicate how long the patient with ADHD should be treated with CONCERTA®. It is generally agreed, however, that pharmacological treatment of ADHD may be needed for extended periods.
Recent comments
7 hours 25 min ago
1 day 6 hours ago
4 days 14 hours ago
4 days 16 hours ago
6 days 3 hours ago
1 week 3 days ago
2 weeks 23 hours ago
2 weeks 1 day ago
2 weeks 1 day ago
3 weeks 5 days ago