“a third of the participants in the study described the psilocybin experience as the single most significant experience of their lives and about three-quarters ranked it in the top 5″.
Pretty remarkable stuff. Even more remarkable is that a year later, the experience has “stuck:”
“Even at the 14-month follow-up, 58 percent of 36 volunteers rated the experience on the psilocybin session as among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives and 67 percent rated it among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives..”
And I’m again pleased to see the mainstream press giving it fair, non-hysterical coverage here and here. [Thanks, Chris.]
Now, we all know Americans’ waistlines aren’t shrinking - but the products they buy in the store are. The main thing that bugs me about this is that companies are again making a calculation based on consumer stupidity. The idea is, people will notice higher prices on the package, but they won’t notice that the package is shrinking. A Tropicana spinster prefers to describe it as a “value-added redesign.” Sigh.
Carlin was inspirational to me, in some ways, as a teen. He had a biting wit and was more a social commentator than comedian. I saw him live a couple of times - once at the University of Maine where he autographed a dollar bill for me. The fact that it took me several months to spend that money was as much about my respect for him as my flat-broke-ness.
One of my favorite Carlin rants is here - Carlin on Politicians - and I’ll miss that penetrating side of him. He could make us laugh so hard that our guts hurt, and not always because what he said was funny, exactly - but because it was so sadly true. In his later years, I was sad to see him move more toward aimless anger and jokes about death and poop, but I suppose that’s how things go.
He died at Saint John’s in Santa Monica - just a mile or two from my place - at the age of 71.
“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us .. as all the [global debt] chickens come home to roost… [the US Federal Reserve] is in panic mode. The massive credibility chasms down which the Fed and maybe even the ECB will plummet when they fail to hike rates in the face of higher inflation will combine to give us a big sell-off in risky assets… economic weakness is spreading and the latest data on consumer demand and confidence are dire.”
The latest polls say that 84% of Americans now believe the country is on the “wrong track”. And, over at Housing Panic, some choice words:
“HousingPANIC would also like to salute the 62,040,610 suckers who voted for Bush in 2004. Sure, Kerry was a mediocre candidate. Sure, you hate those fags. Sure, Osama is a scary dude. But good god, how could you have been so reckless with your vote? How could you have been taken for such a fool?”
Christina Martinez, who lives in Whittier and works at retailer Fred Segal in West Hollywood, spends about $80 a week on gasoline. She told the Los Angeles Times, “It’s frustrating that even during election season I’m only thinking of politics in terms of who will get me lower gas prices.”
It’s frustrating for more reasons than you know, Christina. First, it’s frustrating that you, like many Americans, don’t have the depth to understand that the President has very little to do with such things, but market forces do instead. Second, that as you head into an election, you - again, like many Americans - toss more important questions aside (ones over which a President might actually have some influence.)
