Carl Sagan: A Beautiful Mind

September 7-13 Edition

9/11

Russ Kick 

James Lovelock 

Carl Sagan

Moses 

LSD

Pope Pius II

9/11 changed everything. Power-trippers all over the world, especially greedy police and bureaucratic security guards in the Philippines, use it to justify harassment and extortion of decent citizens. The paranoia in the immediate aftermath was almost out of control.

The Philadelphia Inquirer revealed how the U.S. Justice Department maliciously hyped up its anti-terrorist record by arbitrarily labeling cases as terrorism.

One example is a man from Arizona who got drunk on a United Airlines flight, and then convicted for "domestic terrorism." Another case of "terrorism" is when seven Chinese sailors took over a Taiwanese fishing boat to sail to Guam to seek political asylum. 

Thanks to the expose, Republican Congressman Dan Burton asked the nonpartisan General Accounting Office to investigate. In one year, from September 30, 2001 to the same day in 2012, the Justice Department trumpeted the arrest of 288 terrorists. But a whopping 42 percent (132) had nothing to do with terrorism, according to the report by the GAO. Worse, a mindboggling 75 percent (131 out of 174) has been deceptively filed under "international terrorism." 

The Justice Department continued with its black magic, apparently indifferent to the public humiliation. In 2003, a follow-up news by the Philadelphia Inquirer showed that 41 out of 56 federal cases were labeled terrorism although they're weren't, with most of the victims Latinos and Puerto Ricans.

All the stories on this edition is taken from 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know by Russ Kick, founder of TheMemoryHole.org, a site "devoted to rescuing knowledge and freeling information." It's published by The Disinformation Company in New York (disinfo.com) Russ' personal site is MindPollen.com

I borrowed this slim volume of exposes from my buddy Harvey I. of Cagayan De Oro on July 2013, then I wrote these stories before I returned it. I first knew about The Memory Hole from a 2005 Time article about the phenomenal influence of blogs. Sadly, it's gone now because it's been hacked.

"Prescription drugs kill over 100,000 people annually" and "the insurance industry wants to genetically test all policy holders," says Kick.

 "You'll also learn about the CIA's 100,000 crimes," all "fully backed up by impeccable sources."

"Certain parties don't want you to know certain facts," he says. "That's a fact."

James Lovelock, one of the titans of the environmental movement, is the creator of the Gaia hypothesis.

The earth is a living and self-regulating organism, as he says in his 1979 seminal work GAIA: A New Look At Life On Earth.

So some people find it weird that he supports nuclear energy.

But it makes sense.

"The dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) as our main energy source are far greater and they threaten not just individuals but civilization itself," he says in his Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy. 

Radioactive wastes is a clear danger to people. But "Natural ecosystems can stand levels of continuous radiation that would be intolerable in a big city." 

The land around Chernobyl is now abundant in wildlife. He wonders if nuclear waste could be used "as an incorruptible guardian of the beautiful places of the Earth," he writes. "Who would dare cut down a forest in which was the storage place of nuclear ash?"

Astronomer and biologist Carl Sagan's 1980 classic Cosmos, a New York Times bestseller for over 70 weeks, inspired the highly successful PBS TV series that made him an icon in pop culture.

Sagan was a consultant for Cornell, MIT, RAND and NASA for the Pioneer and Voyager probes. He was awarded the Pulitzer for his Dragons of Eden. And his novel, Contact, was made into a movie with Oscar winner Jody Foster.

Given all that, who cares if Sagan smoked weed? "I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves," he recalls in Keay Davidson's biography. 

Sagan's consciousness expanded. "I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some hights," he reveals. "The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communication with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness."

When Moses first came down from Mount Si'nai, he told the people what "God spake." This is the Decalogue we have today. But those were just words.

It was only during Moses' second trip that he's carrying tablets. Then he smashed them to the ground when he saw the Israelites worshiping Baal.

So Moses goes up for the third time. Now he has a new set of tablets.

From Exodus 34:13-28 of King James, here are the real Ten Commandments:

I. Thou shalt worship no other god 

II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods 

III. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep 

IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest 

V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end 

VI. Thrice in a year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God 

VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven 

VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning 

IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God 

X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk

Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments

with Charlton Heston

The hippie drug LSD was first used in psychotherapy by mainstream doctors in 1949. It was banned in the U.S. in 1970 because of media-hyped anti-drug hysteria.

But in between, the medical benefits of LSD has appeared in hundreds of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association and various medical publications.

An estimated 40,000 people have been helped, and international symposium have been held in Princeton, London, Amsterdam and other venues in North America and Europe.

"LSD and other psychedelics function more or less as nonspecific catalysts and amplifiers of the psyche," says trans-personal psychotherapist Stanislav Grof, MD, in his seminal LSD Psychotherapy. "In the dosages used in human experimentation, the classical psychedelics, such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, do not have any specific pharmacological effects. They increase the energetic niveau in the psyche and the body which leads to manifestations of otherwise latent psychological processes." 

The patients' experiences are not medical effects "but authentic expressions of the psyche revealing its functionimg on levels not ordinarily available for observation and study," says Grof. "A person who has taken LSD does not have an 'LSD experience' but takes a journey into deep recesses of his or her own psyche."

Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds

The Beatles  

The Italian poet Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, before he became Pope Pius II, has written one of the most famous short novels during the Renaissance. Written around 1444, the English edition appeared in 1553.

Euralius, a young official under Emperor Sigismund, is the hero of The Goodli History of the Moste Noble and Beautyful Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. 

In the over-the-wall scene, Euralius and Lucres, a married woman from Siena, are "embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and wearied Venus," writes Piccolomini.

After taking off her clothes, Euralius exclaims: "I have found more, I believe, than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain!" 

The young man "stained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren't weary," writes His Holiness. "Like Athens, who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were desirous of war."

My favorite line is what's running in Euralius' mind as Lucres' husband borrows his horse: "If you ride my horse, I'll do the same thing to your wife!"

Photos courtesy of 350.org, empirestrikesblack.com, sittingnow.co.uk, ecolo.org, deviantart.net, microcosmologist.com, fanpop.com, ihgritch.files.wordpress.com, saints.sqpn.com, rollitup.org

"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."

~Aldous Huxley