Germ War

Time to head to Mother Abigail's. . . .

US Begins Building Treaty-Breaching Germ War Defence Centre

By Julian Borger

The Guardian UK

Monday 31 July 2006

Construction work has begun near Washington on a vast germ warfare laboratory intended to help protect the US against an attack with biological weapon, but critics say the laboratory's work will violate international law and its extreme secrecy will exacerbate a biological arms race.

The National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Centre (NBACC), due to be completed in 2008, will house heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists simulate potential terrorist attacks.

To do so, the centre will have to produce and stockpile the world's most lethal bacteria and viruses, which is forbidden by the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Three years before that treaty was agreed, President Richard Nixon halted the production of US biological weapons at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The same military base is the site for the new $128m (£70m), 160,000 sq ft laboratory.

The green light for its construction was given after the September 11 attacks, which coincided with a series of still-unsolved anthrax incidents that killed five people. The department of homeland security, which will run the centre, says its work is necessary to protect the country. "All the programmes we do are defensive in nature," Maureen McCarthy, director of homeland security research and development, told the Washington Post. "Our job is to ensure that the civilian population of the country is protected, and that we know what the threats are."

The biological weapons convention stipulates that the signatories must not "develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain" biological weapons, and does not distinguish between offensive and defensive intentions.

A presentation given by Lieutenant Colonel George Korch said the NBACC would be used to apply "red team operational scenarios and capabilities" - military jargon for simulating enemy attacks.

Some analysts say the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the project will heighten suspicions of US intentions and accelerate work on similar facilities around the world.

Birth

Condi's hegemonic remark (above) calls to mind The Second Coming, the iconic and oft-quoted poem by the legendary poet, dramatist, and occultist, William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast, indeed.

Race in your Face

Prophet Bob sayeth:

Until the philosophy which holds one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war

That until there is no longer first class
And second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war

That until the basic human rights are equally
Guaranteed to all, without regard to race
Dis a war

That until that day
The dream of lasting peace, world citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion
To be pursued, but never attained
Now everywhere is war, war

Scene: A party in suburban Maryland on a scorching hot day. I wander to the keg for some beerish relief. A woman, late 30s or early 40s, with a pierced tongue and tattoos, is talking Mideast politics. So naturally my ears perk up. Foam flows from the tap.

Woman: I think we should just bomb them all. Kill all of 'em [i.e. Muslims, Iraqis, brown-skinned occupants of the Mideast -- aka THEM).

Me: Really? All the women? Kids? Babies?

Woman: Those kids are gonna grow up to be just like their parents. The kids will be the ones to fly airplanes into our buildings. Fuck 'em.

Me: Hmm. Don't you think most of the people over there just want to live happy lives? You know, just make a decent living, raise their kids, live peacefully?

Woman: Not those people.

Me: Well, I can't condone killing innocent people to get rid of a few violent crazies. I couldn't point a gun at a two-year old and pull the trigger. And after all, every time we kill an innocent person we create more enemies.

Woman: I'd like to live in a perfect world, but we don't.

Me: So thousands of innocent people dying is okay? Just to get a few bad guys?

Woman (growing agitated): Most of them ain't innocent. Look at all the shit going on over there.

Me (trying in vain to elicit a shred of human compassion): Well, damn. I live in Baltimore. There are some terrible neighborhoods where people get murdered all the time. I guess some people would say it's okay to bomb Baltimore?

Woman: That's not a bad idea.

Exit me.

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa sub-human bondage
Have been toppled, utterly destroyed
Well, everywhere is war, me say war

War in the east, war in the west
War up north, war down south
War, war, rumours of war

And until that day, the African continent
Will not know peace, we Africans will fight
We find it necessary and we know we shall win
As we are confident in the victory

Of good over evil, good over evil, good over evil
Good over evil, good over evil, good over evil

I wish I could be as confident as Bob.

Gingrich: "It's WWIII."

Here comes the new Rethuglican strategy.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so.

Gingrich said in an interview Saturday that Bush should call a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.

"We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city, " Gingrich said.

Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly and to the administration from his seat on the Defense Policy Board about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

It's WWIII, dontcha know. Which side are you on?

Does anyone else detect a hard-to-conceal glee in Newt's pronouncement?

Slicing the pig

"'I understand I may have the honor of slicing the pig."

--George W. Bush

Turning the corner in psychedelic research? New study of psilocybin and mystical states

Today marks a significant milestone in psychedelic research -- the publication of a new study on psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and mystical experiences. This study is groundbreaking for several reasons, but primarily because it addresses -- with rigorous scientific and ethical protocols -- the mystical experience induced or facilitated by entheogenic substances. Similar research was sidelined by the anti-drug hysteria of the late 1960s and 70s, and has only recently been revived (thanks, in part, to the pioneering efforts of MAPS).

The full paper, from the journal Psychopharmacology, can be found here.

Coming on the heels of recent and ongoing research into the healing potential of substances like MDMA (Ecstasy) for treating severe trauma and psilocybin in end-stage cancer patients and in the treatment of cluster headaches, this is a powerful rebuttal of the lingering "just say no" attitude that lumps entheogens with heroin and cocaine. And it's a momentous step forward in understanding the neurobiology of transcendent states.

Commentary on the study can be found here. Also, see further commentary by Kleber, Nichols, Schuster, and Snyder.

Huston Smith provides a very succinct coda:

"Mystical experience seems to be as old as humankind, forming the core of many if not all of the great religious traditions. Some ancient cultures, such as classical Greece, and some contemporary small-scale cultures, have made use of psychoactive plants and chemicals to occasion such experiences. But this is the first scientific demonstration in 40 years, and the most rigorous ever, that profound mystical states can be produced safely in the laboratory. The potential is great."

Smith also issued a caution and suggested that further research on the topic include social as well as neurological variables: "In the end, it's altered traits, not altered states, that matter. 'By their fruits shall ye know them.' It's good to learn that volunteers having even this limited experience had lasting benefits. But human history suggests that without a social vessel to hold the wine of revelation, it tends to dribble away. In most cases, even the most extraordinary experiences provide lasting benefits to those who undergo them and people around them only if they become the basis of ongoing work. That's the next research question, it seems to me: What conditions of community and practice best help people to hold on to what comes to them in those moments of revelation, converting it into abiding light in their own lives?"

Further coverage:

CNN

Wapo

LA Times

Wall Street Journal

ABC News (with video clip)

New Scientist

Daily Mail

The Independent (UK)

Forbes

HealthDay

SF Gate

This is what (the rotting corpse of) democracy looks like

Is Greg Palast a prophet, or just a canny observer?

From his article from June 30th:

In Mexico this Sunday, we can expect to see the same: challenges of Obrador voters in a race, the polls say, is too close to call. Not that Mexico’s rulers need lessons from the Bush Administration on how to mess with elections.

Read his Stealing Mexico and weep as another democracy falls.

Secrets of Fatima

The apparitions of Fatima have fascinated Forteans and UFO researchers, as well as faithful Catholics, for almost a century. Linda Moulton Howe has an interview with the authors of a new book on the apparitions and the cult that grew around the three children.

Link