His name might not be familiar to many, but his songs are sung by
millions around the world. Today, we take a journey through the life and
work of Yip Harburg, the Broadway lyricist who wrote such hits as
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and who put the music into The Wizard
of Oz. Born into poverty on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Harburg
always included a strong social and political component to his work,
fighting racism and poverty. A lifelong socialist, Harburg was
blacklisted and hounded throughout much of his life. We speak with
Harburg’s son, Ernie Harburg, about the music and politics of his
father. Then we take an in-depth look at The Wizard of Oz, and hear a
medley of Harburg’s Broadway songs and the politics of the times in
which they were created.
Democracy Now!
Monday, November 26, 2012
A Tribute to Blacklisted Lyricist Yip Harburg: The Man Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz
Anonymous Op4RedHack
Greetings Citizens of the world, this is Anonymous.
It has come
to our attention that the Turkish government want to prosecute a hacker
group called Redhack, they are accused of being a "terror organisation."
Prosecutors will demand up to 24 years imprisonment for people who have
no connection to Redhack.
They opposed and carried out actions
against rapes, out of date milk distributed to school children, which
resulted in 100's being poisoned, and the country being prostituted to
the capitalists. They opposed child pornography, internet censorship,
and brutal government opposition. Lately, they have been viciously
attacked by the Fascist Turkish State because they share information
which already belongs to the people. The most significant of these
attacks is the one that has been levied against innocent people who have
no link to Redhack. These people, who have shared information on social
media about these actions, are now held for ransom, solely in order to
demonise Redhack and cut their support.
Redhack openly declared
that Duygu Kerimoglu, Ugur Cihan Okutulmus and AllaatinKaragenc are not
their members. Nor are the seven others, on bail.
We implore the
public to give their support to these innocent people. We call on all
hacktivists, activists, freedom defenders, human rights organisation to
demand an end to the restraints imposed on these three innocent people
on remand, and the seven others on bail.
No matter how dark it
may seem, no matter how alone and abandoned you may feel know that over 9
thousands of us in Anonymous are with you and working tirelessly around
the clock to bring you every assistance. To the people of Turkey and
Redhack, know that Anonymous stands with you in this fight.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
IRC: =[]= irc.anonops.com channel #Op4RedHack || WebChat http://webchat.anonops.com channel #Op4RedHack =[]=
For more intel: http://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/?p=7766
Paste: http://pastehtml.com/view/cjcuz1107.rtxt
Friday, October 5, 2012
Americans in Pakistan Meet Families of Victims Obama Says Don't Exist
David Swanson reports for War Is A Crime.org:
Thirty-two U.S. peace activists, including 6 members of Veterans For
Peace are taking part in a peace delegation to Pakistan organized by the
anti-war group Code Pink.
See video: http://vimeo.com/50666774
Wednesday the delegation met with U.S. Charge d'Affaires Richard
Hoagland. U.S. peace activist Robert Naiman asked about reports of
secondary attacks on rescuers of drone victims. Ambassador Hoagland
denied that rescuers are targeted, but not that strikes are launched on
the same location just struck minutes before.
Hoagland also said that he agreed with President Obama that the
number of civilian deaths was near zero, but later seemed to contradict
himself when he said that number he believed was accurate was in "two
digits." When asked to be more specific as to whether that number was
closer to 10 or 99, he declined.
VFP President Leah Bolger asked: "Since you know exactly where we
intend to go, presumably the CIA and the DoD know as well, so can you
guarantee us that there will be no drone strikes in the area while we
are there?" He then gave a 100% guarantee that there would be no
strikes on the group. Bolger followed up with: "So if we just position
Americans throughout the region, can we guarantee the safety of the
Pakistanis as well?"
He replied that most of the "militants" in the
area are foreigners -- not Pakistanis -- and that they come in and take
over. He said that the local people would be very pleased to have them
go.
On Wednesday and Thursday the delegation met with drone victims, with
more such meetings planned for Friday. The families of the victims
related a very different story than that purported by the Charge.
Karim
Khan, described the deaths of his son and his brother in a 2009 drone
attack, as well as the damaging psychological effects of having up to
six drones circling overhead 24 hours a day. Khan's story is featured
in the book "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control," which was
written by the delegation's leader, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin.
See also this article. And this one.
The
Pakistan National Defense University (NDU) was the site on Wednesday
for a presentation by retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat Ann
Wright, a lead member of the Code Pink delegation against drones. The
delegation was invited to appear by the Dean of the Faculty of
Contemporary Studies and was attended by an enthusiastic audience of NDU
students as well as several high ranking officers.
Wright
emphasized the illegality of the U.S. drone program which violates the
sovereignty of other nations, and also allows President Obama to be the
‘judge, jury and executioner’ when he gives the go-ahead for
extrajudicial signature drone attacks.
More...
A Briefing on Iran's Nuclear Program
A briefing on Iran's Nuclear Program. From the discovery of atom power,
the utilization of this new science for the bombings of Hiroshima &
Nagasaki and the resulting "nuclear dilemma." Covering the institutions
created in answer to the nuclear dilemma: the United Nations (UN), the
"Atoms for Peace" initiative, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC). After this a look at the history of Iran's
nuclear program and the current standoff: the West's demands that Iran
cease enriching, and Iran's refusal citing its inalienable right to a
peaceful nuclear program under the NPT. And finally a look at the
intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, and a little rhetorical jab
at the end.
http://www.inceptionhouse.com
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Mr. Velile Mafani Will Throw Three Stones Through the Window of the High Court in Grahamstown Tomorrow
Former Supreme Court Justice Souter on The Danger of America's 'Pervasive Civic Ignorance'
Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter sat down with Margaret Warner and answered an audience question concerning the appropriate role of schools to produce civicly engaged students.
Pakistan: Center of the Grand Chessboard
Pagans challenge occult-related crime training
The police document mentions that two detectives per province must be experts in dealing with occult crimes. The memo says these include muti murders, curses intended to cause harm, vampirism, spiritual intimidation including “astral coercion”, rape by “tokoloshe spirits”, poltergeist phenomena, voodoo, black magic and traditional healers involved in criminal activities.
“This newly envisioned scope of investigation must be viewed with suspicion and be of concern to anyone engaged in the practice of witchcraft, traditional African religion, and other occult spiritualities, including satanism,” the SA Pagan Rights Alliance (Sapra) said.
Dead Guantanamo Prisoner On Why He Gave Up on Life
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout; Adapted: art makes me smile, jjay69, nitrodog, jfrancis)Adnan
Latif was found dead in his cell on September 10th, 2012, just a day
before the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. He was 32. Latif, a Yemeni
citizen, had been detained at Guantanamo Bay for over a decade, despite a
2010 court ruling that ordered the Obama administration to "take all
necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps to facilitate Latif's release forthwith,"
due to lack of evidence that he had committed any crime. He suffered at
the hands of the US government in ways that most people can't begin to
comprehend, and his death should be a reminder that the national shame
that is Guantanamo Bay lives on and now enjoys bipartisan support.Stories For Boys (the Occupy edit)
Prominent Canadians Release Statement Supporting Iraq War Resister Kimberly Rivera
| We the undersigned support conscientious objector Kimberly Rivera and her family who are threatened with imminent deportation from Canada on September 20. Kim deployed to Iraq in 2006 and sought asylum in Canada in 2007. She faces a court martial and up to 5 years in military prison for refusing to participate any longer in the Iraq war-a war which had no legal sanction. Kim would be separated from her four young children, two of whom were born in Canada. A felony conviction would mean a lifetime of difficulty finding employment. We call on the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney to do the right thing and allow Kimberly Rivera and her family to stay in Canada. | |
| Andy Barrie, broadcaster and Vietnam War resister | |
| Dan Bar-El, award-winning children's author | |
| Maude Barlow, author and activist | |
| Maev Beaty, actor | |
| Shirley Douglas, O.C., actor | |
| Dennis Foon, award-winning writer | |
| Richard Greenblatt, playwright/actor | |
| Ron Hawkins, musician | |
| Naomi Klein, author | |
| Ron Kovic, author, Born on the Fourth of July | |
| Avi Lewis, filmmaker | |
| Peter Showler, Director, the Refugee Forum, University of Ottawa; former chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board | |
| Jack Todd, journalist and Vietnam War resister | |
| Alexandre Trudeau, filmmaker | |
Mexican Special Forces Employed as Death Squads in Drug War, Email Records Released by WikiLeaks Reveal
So, as you have no doubt gathered by now, the National Security Council decided to really up the ante in Juarez. We expect 5,000 additional troops and up to 1,000 additional federal police. Among the new elements, there will be at least 10 specialized intelligence units, as well as special forces units from both the Army and the Air Force. One of the intelligence units will be from the Navy (not for publication).
… The military will surgically remove cells that had been previously identified, but for whatever reason were not taken down yet. Periods of adjustment will ensue, but the military will fill any void left in terms of territorial control, ultimately causing the competing DTOs [drug trafficking organizations] to wait/give up. [Emphasis added.]
… The first to fall will be those waging the "third war", as they are a bunch of retarded morons that have no chance against a force deployment of this size, and thrive only because of impunity.
This third war is the war being waged on the Mexican population by criminals who may or may not be involved with the cartels. Unlike the other battles, where cartel members or government forces are the primary targets and civilians are only killed as collateral damage, on this battlefront, civilians are squarely in the crosshairs.
The Police Remembered Occupy Wall Street’s One Year Anniversary!!!
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Petrodollars And The Road to World War 3
Mossad’s September Surprise
Occupy - Get Involved (#S17 1 Year Anniversary)
And we continue on: http://s17nyc.org
The Conspiracy Extends to the Musical Scale
Now imagine that he has the power to establish the tuning standard of all musical instruments throughout the Western World.
Imagine that he bases the entire scale of musical artistic creation upon a frequency which would skew vibrations towards discord.
It sounds like science fiction. Yet this is exactly what transpired in September 1939 when Rockefeller (Illuminati) financial interests dictated that the standard tuning for the note of “A” above middle C would henceforth be said to vibrate at precisely 440 cycles per second.
This unnatural standard tuning frequency, removed from the symmetry of sacred vibrations and overtones, has declared war on the subconscious mind of Western Man.
The standard tuning fork, which is set to vibrate the note “A” above middle C at 440 cycles per second, is based upon a frequency only divisible by two rather than three, which means that all of the musical notes both above and below it are affected.
Despite the apparent “sweet music” a symphony orchestra can produce, when all instruments are tuned based on the A=440Hz key frequency, they are covert weapons no matter what “music” they may be playing.
These destructive frequencies entrain the thoughts towards disruption, disharmony, disunity. Additionally, they also stimulate the controlling organ of the body — the brain — into disharmonious resonance, which ultimately creates disease and war..."
Most Afghanis have not heard of 9/11
Amazingly, in Afghanistan, where for ten years a war has been fought with 9/11 as its root cause and justification, not only do many locals claim to be oblivious to 9/11 but it appears that so are the police and even some of the translators working with the US military. "We're farmers, we're just working in our fields. We don't know anything else about the world," they shrug. With high rates of illiteracy, poverty and lack of infrastructure, many Afghans live in what is close to a media vacuum. With American troops set to start withdrawing this year, it appears that they will leave with a huge number of Afghans never having really understood why they came in the first place. For the majority of US soldiers however, it's a different story. "Some of us still have a personal vendetta with the beings that roam here. I still find it very personal."
Adam Pletts
Almost Cut My Hair (cover)
Frisky & Mannish - The Ballad of Eileen Johnson
Eileen Johnson, housewife, 49, despairs over her son's choice to live as a woman. Bert Johnson, 52, hasn't noticed. Billy E Johnson, or "Belinda van Jön", now works at the Sparkle Glitter Club in Stockport, formerly Poco a Poco. Eileen is determined to come to terms with her son's choices.
This song depicts her struggle.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
President of Italy’s Supreme Court to Refer 9/11 Crimes To International Criminal Court
Ursula K. Le Guin: Still Battling the Powers That Be
Discussion - War Machines: Military Technologies between Civility and Authority
More...
The American Military Industrial Killing Machine
The United States committed its greatest democide during the Second World War. This was in the indiscriminate area bombing of German and Japanese cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not all American strategic bombing was of this type. Early in the war the American Air Force concentrated on precision bombing of both Germany and Japan. But as the war progressed British pressure and American bomber losses in such bombing persuaded the Americans to join the British in broadly targeting the center of urban areas. Regarding Japan, the apparent lack of success of precision bombing led to the assumption of command over the bombing by General Curtis Lemay, who was disposed to massive area bombing of Japanese cities.
Over 3 million innocent people lost their lives during the vietnam war... about 60,000 of those were american soldiers.
Civilian Victims of USA "Foreign Policy" for 17 years:
1991 - Iraq - 200,000
1992 - Somalia - 7,000
1974-1992 - Angola - 650,000 +
1986-1994 - Colombia - 20,000 +
1995-1998 - Turkey - 27,000 +
1997 - Rwanda - 6,000
1965-1997 - Indonesia - 1,000,000
1990-1997 - Iraq - 1,200,000 +
1998 - Afghanistan - 2,000 +
1986-1998 - Guatemala - 200,000
1999 - Yugoslavia - thousands
1999 - Iraq - hundreds
1991-1999 - Kuwait, Iraq - 1,620
2000-2002 - Palestinian Territories - hundreds
2001 - Afghanistan - 23,000 +
1995-2001 - Peru - unknown
2002 - Angola - unknown
2002 - Iraq - unknown
2003 - Afghanistan - 300 +
2003 - Algeria - hundreds
2003 - Iraq - 17,000 +
1976-2003 - Indonesia - 12,000 +
2003-2004 - Palestinian Territories - 1,400 +
2003-2007 - Iraq - 1,000,000 +
2006 - Palestine, Lebanon - 1,300 + (to August)
2006 - Haiti - 8,000 + (to September)
2007 - Somalia - 2,000 +
2008 - South Ossetia - 2,000 +
http://RevolutionNews.US
A Study on Ancient Indian Mathematics
We shall examine the contributions of Indian mathematics in this article, but before looking at this contribution in more detail we should say clearly that the “huge debt” is the beautiful number system invented by the Indians on which much of mathematical development has rested. Laplace put this with great clarity:-
The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. the importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.
We shall look briefly at the Indian development of the place-value decimal system of numbers later in this article and in somewhat more detail in the separate article Indian numerals. First, however, we go back to the first evidence of mathematics developing in India.
Histories of Indian mathematics used to begin by describing the geometry contained in the Sulbasutras but research into the history of Indian mathematics has shown that the essentials of this geometry were older being contained in the altar constructions described in the Vedic mythology text the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Taittiriya Samhita. Also it has been shown that the study of mathematical astronomy in India goes back to at least the third millennium BC and mathematics and geometry must have existed to support this study in these ancient times.
The first mathematics which we shall describe in this article developed in the Indus valley. The earliest known urban Indian culture was first identified in 1921 at Harappa in the Punjab and then, one year later, at Mohenjo-daro, near the Indus River in the Sindh. Both these sites are now in Pakistan but this is still covered by our term “Indian mathematics” which, in this article, refers to mathematics developed in the Indian subcontinent. The Indus civilisation (or Harappan civilisation as it is sometimes known) was based in these two cities and also in over a hundred small towns and villages. It was a civilisation which began around 2500 BC and survived until 1700 BC or later. The people were literate and used a written script containing around 500 characters which some have claimed to have deciphered but, being far from clear that this is the case, much research remains to be done before a full appreciation of the mathematical achievements of this ancient civilisation can be fully assessed.
We often think of Egyptians and Babylonians as being the height of civilisation and of mathematical skills around the period of the Indus civilisation, yet V G Childe in New Light on the Most Ancient East (1952) wrote:-
India confronts Egypt and Babylonia by the 3rd millennium with a thoroughly individual and independent civilisation of her own, technically the peer of the rest. And plainly it is deeply rooted in Indian soil. The Indus civilisation represents a very perfect adjustment of human life to a specific environment. And it has endured; it is already specifically Indian and forms the basis of modern Indian culture.
We do know that the Harappans had adopted a uniform system of weights and measures. An analysis of the weights discovered suggests that they belong to two series both being decimal in nature with each decimal number multiplied and divided by two, giving for the main series ratios of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500. Several scales for the measurement of length were also discovered during excavations. One was a decimal scale based on a unit of measurement of 1.32 inches (3.35 centimetres) which has been called the “Indus inch”. Of course ten units is then 13.2 inches which is quite believable as the measure of a “foot”. A similar measure based on the length of a foot is present in other parts of Asia and beyond. Another scale was discovered when a bronze rod was found which was marked in lengths of 0.367 inches. It is certainly surprising the accuracy with which these scales are marked. Now 100 units of this measure is 36.7 inches which is the measure of a stride. Measurements of the ruins of the buildings which have been excavated show that these units of length were accurately used by the Harappans in construction.
It is unclear exactly what caused the decline in the Harappan civilisation. Historians have suggested four possible causes: a change in climatic patterns and a consequent agricultural crisis; a climatic disaster such flooding or severe drought; disease spread by epidemic; or the invasion of Indo-Aryans peoples from the north. The favourite theory used to be the last of the four, but recent opinions favour one of the first three. What is certainly true is that eventually the Indo-Aryans peoples from the north did spread over the region. This brings us to the earliest literary record of Indian culture, the Vedas which were composed in Vedic Sanskrit, between 1500 BC and 800 BC. At first these texts, consisting of hymns, spells, and ritual observations, were transmitted orally. Later the texts became written works for use of those practicing the Vedic religion.
The next mathematics of importance on the Indian subcontinent was associated with these religious texts. It consisted of the Sulbasutras which were appendices to the Vedas giving rules for constructing altars. They contained quite an amount of geometrical knowledge, but the mathematics was being developed, not for its own
sake, but purely for practical religious purposes. The mathematics contained in the these texts is studied in some detail in the separate article on the Sulbasutras.
The main Sulbasutras were composed by Baudhayana (about 800 BC), Manava (about 750 BC), Apastamba (about 600 BC), and Katyayana (about 200 BC). These men were both priests and scholars but they were not mathematicians in the modern sense. Although we have no information on these men other than the texts they wrote,
we have included them in our biographies of mathematicians. There is another scholar, who again was not a mathematician in the usual sense, who lived around this period. That was Panini who achieved remarkable results in his studies of Sanskrit grammar. Now one might reasonably ask what Sanskrit grammar has to do with mathematics. It certainly has something to do with modern theoretical computer science, for a mathematician or computer scientist working with formal language theory will recognise just how modern some of Panini’s ideas are.
See also:
The Indian Sulbasutras
All that is known of Vedic mathematics is contained in the Sulbasutras. This in itself gives us a problem, for we do not know if these people undertook mathematical investigations for their own sake, as for example the ancient Greeks did, or whether they only studied mathematics to solve problems necessary for their religious rites. Some historians have argued that mathematics, in particular geometry, must have also existed to support astronomical work being undertaken around the same period.
Joseph Choonara - Permanent Revolution
The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
Colonel Dunlap's Coup
A fictionalized essay that has been circulating within the Pentagon offers a blunt warning on several fronts.
by Thomas E. Ricks
It is the year 2012. The American military has carried out a successful coup d'etat. Jailed and awaiting execution for resistance to the coup, a retired military officer writes to an old comrade, explaining how the coup came about.
So begins a treatise entered last year in the National Defense University's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategy Essay Competition. Titled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012," and written by an active-duty Air Force officer, the essay went on to be selected as one of two winners of the competition. The author, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap, was honored by General Colin Powell at the awards ceremony.
Looking back from a vantage point supposedly twenty years in the future, Dunlap writes that after years of being handed the tough jobs the rest of the government seemed incapable of handling, the military simply decided to step in and run the show. Like all science fiction, Dunlap's essay is really about the present. His coup entices the reader to his real subject: the worrisome drift of the U.S. military into civilian affairs.
"Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other," Dunlap's condemned prisoner warns, "it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution. We made a terrible mistake when we allowed the armed forces to be diverted from its original purpose." The prisoner sees a kind of inevitability to the coup. Amid rising crime, failing schools, a stagnant economy, and a gridlocked political system, the can-do U.S. military stood out in a no-solution society. Having remade themselves in the aftermath of Vietnam, the armed forces emerged from the Gulf War as "America's most--and perhaps only--trusted arm of government."
More...
See also:
American coup d'etat: Military thinkers discuss the unthinkable
Martial Law
TrineDay Releases The Most Dangerous Book in the World
Investigative researcher-author S.K. Bain has not only gone outside the box, he has exposed a much bigger and stranger box than anyone has posited before, taking the reader inside the minds of the power-mad psychopaths responsible for the "New Pearl Harbor."
Humanity in War
Saturday, September 8, 2012
A Virus Called Fear- Student Documentary Short
A Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking student documentary short. Written and directed by Ben Fama Jr.
Honey Bee Blues
From the native bush and orchards of Australia to the industrial farmlands of the United States and the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Honeybee Blues is a scientific detective story that tells a 21st century cautionary tale.
The European honeybee, or Apis mellifera, is used for commercial honey production and by a global pollination industry worth up to $100 billion. Without it we would lose a third of the worlds food supply.
But honeybees are under threat from all directions. Industrial agriculture and habitat destruction have taken a toll but the biggest threat is a deadly parasitic mite which Anderson discovered and called Varroa destructor. It has decimated bee populations everywhere except Australia which is now the only country that still has European honeybees living in the wild. While in Papua New Guinea, Anderson discovers another lethal mite, Varroa jacobsoni, that adds to the threat to the worlds honeybees.
Denis Anderson believes the solution to eradicating the Varroa mite lies in the genes of the honeybee. He is trying to switch off the honeybee gene that tells the Varroa mite to reproduce. If he succeeds, he could save the last of the worlds wild European honeybees from extinction.
The film features observational sequences and interviews with biosecurity officers, bee exporters, pollinators and honey producers.
Combining macro photography of the insect world, a lively blues soundtrack and animation sequences, Honeybee Blues tracks the incredible journey of the worlds oldest domesticated animal and its predators around the globe.
David Icke: Non-Human Entities Enslave Us, But We Have The Power To Be Free
David Icke on the Vinny Eastwood Show out of New Zealand. 05 Sep 2012
http://davidicke.com
http://thevinnyeastwoodshow।com
MK-ULTRA Violence - Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture
Imagine being trapped in a small room. Your hands covered in gloves, your sight blocked by translucent glasses, and your head covered by a pillow. You cannot touch, taste, see, smell, or feel. You are totally deprived of your senses. This is the imagery of torture in foreign wars, of espionage blockbusters, of terrible nightmares. It seems hardly something that would occur in Montreal. But it did occur, right here at McGill.
Today, many journalists, doctors, and the general public see the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital as the cradle of modern torture, a cradle built and rocked by Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation –– an experimentation that destroyed their lives and changed the course of psychological torture forever.
Cameron’s experiments, known as MK-ULTRA subproject 68, were partially funded by the CIA and the Canadian government, and are widely known for their use of LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines on patients. In the media, they were known as the “mind control” studies done at McGill and were reported as a brainwashing conspiracy from the CIA and the Canadian government. For journalists, the story was a goldmine. LSD use in a CIA experiment was an angle no sensationalist media could reject, especially in the anti-drug frenzy of the 1960s. However, these studies were much more complex than a Timothy Leary scare in la belle ville.
At its worst, the prolonged periods of sensory deprivation and induced sleep used in the experiments left many patients in a child-like mental state, even years after the experiments were finalized. Even today, remnants of Cameron’s experiments at the Allan Memorial appear in torture methods at places like Guantanamo Bay.
A Tale of Two Doctors
This story begins on June 1, 1951 at a secret meeting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Sherbrooke. The purpose of the meeting was to launch a joint American-British-Canadian effort led by the CIA to fund studies on sensory deprivation. In attendance was Dr. Donald Hebb, then director of psychology at McGill University, who received a grant of $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. It would be fifteen years after this meeting at the Ritz that Cameron would disastrously pick up where Hebb left off.
economics and #occupywallstreet
In 2008, the United States economy experienced a nearly unprecedented crisis, due to a perfect storm involving banking deregulation, complex derivatives, financial mismanagement, and larger systemic causes, including an inadequate educational system. Three years later, people rose up in protest—an organic national movement called Occupy Wall Street, its members chanting "we are the 99%" and saying that our system was broken, gamed by the wealthy and powerful.
The movement brought an entire nation's frustration with a runaway banking and financial sector, student debt, and unequal educational opportunities to the forefront of public debate. And thoughtful institutions responded, investing time and money to look into the phenomenon. On April 17th and 18th of 2012, the Rockefeller Foundation funded two panel discussions to address these urgent questions. The panels were sponsored by the New School and were held at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Moderator John Cassidy of The New Yorker perhaps summed up the issues best when he noted that the 1960s and 1970s had discredited the idea of an all-efficient government, and the 90s and zeros had done a very good job of discrediting the idea of an all-efficient market. "What's to replace both of those ideologies?" Cassidy asked. "That remains to be seen--Occupy Wall Street is obviously a part of the discussion."
Panelists included, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow; Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston; world-class international economists Jeffrey Sachs, Raghu Rajan, Carmen Reinhart, and Robin Wells; the Financial Times's Martin Wolf, and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair.
Both panels grew out of The Occupy Handbook, a compendium of articles, edited by Janet Byrne, featuring leading economists and others on the causes and implications of the Occupy movement. This video features selections from the two panel discussions as well as public remarks by contributors to the Handbook.
How Lovecraft saved role-playing games
Although some gamers may be familiar with Call of Cthulhu, many are unaware of the tremendous legacy the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired game bequeathed to the role-playing game industry.
 Courtesy Wikimedia. |
Call of Cthulhu was one of the first role-playing games to have a literary legacy. Because Chaosium publishes both the role-playing game and collections of Lovecraftian fiction, the game is treated on equal footing with the books that inspired it. Daniel Harms' Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia includes entries that span the entirety of Chaosium's catalogue, including both games and fiction and mixing the two. As a result, Chaosium's gaming supplements have helped shape the interpretation of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos to subsequent generations of gamers.
Dungeons & Dragons owes much to Call of Cthulhu. This is most evident in its monsters: Ghouls, Kuo-toa (Deep Ones), Mind Flayers (Star Spawn of Cthulhu), and Black Pudding (Shoggoth) all are directly or indirectly inspired by their Lovecraftian counterparts. ^ Jacobs, James (October 2004). "The Shadow Over D&D: H. P. Lovecraft's Influence on Dungeons & Dragons". Dragon (#324).
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
