May 02, 2008 – Craig Barnes(51 minutes – 23.7mb)Craig Barnes is an author, essayist, playwright and international mediator. 

 His books include In Search Of The Lost Feminine, Decoding the Myths that Radically Reshaped Civilization, an analysis of the roles of women as they appear in archeology and myth before the patriarchy.

http://www.futureprimitive.org/GAIAlogues.html

 See Ivan Illich’s  Shadow Work for earlier take on all the work being done for little pay or cash 

“Bicycle Day”, 19 April, was later commemorated by acid enthusiasts because it was the first conscious “trip” and it had had – just about – a happy ending. But the doors to perception are, for some truth-seekers, booby-trapped and dangerous. When LSD was co-opted by medical staff for recreational use, two decades after Hoffman’s bike ride, users learnt the hard way how impossible it was to control the wild ride once it had started.

At Oxford in the early 1970s, we were frankly intimidated by the drug’s reputation. We all wanted to try it, but were too chicken. The word in the quad was: if you had any secret hang-ups, mental instabilities, phobias, sexual inadequacies or social insecurities (the kind that surface in dreams,) you were wise of steer clear of acid. We knew when one of us was going to try it. “Tonight,” I’d hear during dinner in hall, “Roger’s tripping for the first time. But he’ll have Will and Ollie with him, so he’ll be OK.”

I’ve always remembered Roger’s first trip (so, I’ll bet, has he). We all knew he’d be fine because he was so perfect: cool, handsome, easy-going, a hit with the girls, a dead ringer, with his corkscrewy curls, for Marc Bolan of T. Rex. And he was rich; he owned a Morgan, which he casually parked in the back quad. We knew Roger would survive the experience and bang on about it, like he banged on about his Bang and Olufsen state-of-the-art hi-fi.http://tinyurl.com/4kc8fl  

and from the NYTimes this AM

April 30, 2008

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

By CRAIG S. SMITH

PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 book “LSD: My Problem Child.”

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”

Though Dr. Hofmann’s father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. “I said that I didn’t believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world,” he said. “I had this very deep connection with nature.”

Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.

It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.

On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”

Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.

“Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,” Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.”

Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature and help curb society’s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.

But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.

After his discovery of LSD’s properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.

Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books

He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” he said, adding. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.”

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30hofmann.html?ref=world

Prints of this portrait are available (sale benefits MAPS) here.
More about Artist Brummbaer

from MAPS.ORG site

Brummbaer recently completed his second book, What’s So Wrong With Love and Peace: 1965-67. To find out more about Brummbaer’s work visit his Web site: www.brummbaer.net

And now, here comes Brummbaer to show us how to use the screen for interpersonal communication;how to embrace, fondle, cuddle, snuggle, enliven our brain-exchanges to the level of the high spiritualart of India, China, Tibet, Rome, Egypt, Venice, Berlin. He has sculpted digital pixels into tender,caressing mind inter-play things.It is always the artists who blueprint and design the spirit of a culture. The 21st Century is beginning to express itself in the shimmering electronic realities of these digital wizards.

Timothy Leary Nov. 1990 Los Angeles

   and today at 5 PM

5:00pm

Short Break

 http://www.ecocityworldsummit.org/program.htm

 See one of Soleri’s earliest Arcologies, Asteromo! One of the first space colonies ever designed, circa 1969?! fromhttp://pruned.blogspot.com/2006/02/asteromo.html

How much Virtual Water is in your shirt?

Virtual Water is a measure of all the water it takes to make the products you use. Waterfootprint.orgcalculates that a new cotton shirt uses 2,700 liters. That’s a tally of the water evaporated in irrigating and growing the cotton, and the water needed to wash away the fertilizers and dilute the chemicals used in the manufacturing process. With worldwide water shortages set to become a major humanitarian crisis this century, water waste is a serious new sin. Read More…

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/

Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable

I am convinced that we begin unsustainable resource depletion (overshoot) as soon as we use (and become dependent upon) the first unit of any non-renewable resource or renewable resource used unsustainably whose further use becomes essential to the functioning of society, such as:

THE FIRST TONNE OF COAL
THE FIRST LITRE OF OIL
THE FIRST KILOGRAM OF FISSIONABLE URANIUM
THE FIRST BARREL OF FOSSIL WATER FOR IRRIGATION — and
THE FIRST HECTARE OF FORMERLY NUTRIENT CONSERVATIVE NATIVE FOREST or GRASSLAND/PRAIRIE PLOWED

This last category of unsustainable renewable resource depletion (excessive leaching/export of plant nutrients from arable soils associated with most agricultural practice, and more recently also with harvesting of nutrient-rich forest biomass) has been looming over us, unseen, for 10,000 years. We can expect that it will catch up with us shortly because most of us are dependent on foodstuffs produced by unsustainable farming, and fiber produced by unsustainable forestry.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=154&Itemid=1

Unsustainable soil mining: past, present and future

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1

Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 4347, Arcata , California 95518 USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax).

Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.

from Juergen Schmidhuber’s site

Since age 15 or so Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber’s main scientific ambition has been to build an optimal scientist, then retire. In 2028 they will force him to retire anyway. By then he shall be able to buy hardware providing more raw computing power than his brain

Their Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century (e.g., V. Smil, Nature, July 29 1999, p 415) as it “detonated the population explosion,” driving the world’s population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.

Haber-Bosch process:

Under high temperatures and very high pressures, hydrogen and nitrogen (from thin air) are combined to produce ammonia.

Nearly one century after its invention, the process is still applied all over the world to produce 500 million tons of artificial fertilizer per year. 1% of the world’s energy supply is used for it (Science 297(1654), Sep 2002); it still sustains roughly 40% of the population (M. D. Fryzuk, Nature 427, p 498, 5 Feb 2004).

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/worldpopgrowth1.jpg

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/

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