Geeky Stats About Magic Mushrooms
Conscious Life News
October 13, 2012
By Kevin Drum | Mother Jones
UPDATE: Here’s a follow-up post on whether magic mushrooms can bring you closer to God.
Here’s something a little offbeat for a Friday morning. A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has recently documented a safe, long-lasting way of improving both your life and your personal feelings of well-being: shrooms.
Or, more precisely, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Here’s the boring news first: ingesting psilocybin produces a mystical experience that can be quantified. “Noetic quality,” for example, increased from 19.4 on a placebo to 70.6 on the highest dose used in the study. “Transcendence of space and time” increased from 18.3 to 78.2. Etc. You probably already knew that.
Here’s the somewhat more interesting news: psilocybin can sometimes produce bad trips full of fear and anxiety, but the researchers have also figured out how to minimize this. Partly this was due to the experimental design: “The study was designed to optimize the potential for positively valued experiences by providing 8 hours of preparation, administering psilocybin in a pleasant, supportive setting, and instructing volunteers to focus explicitly on their subjective or inner experience.” They used soothing music, too. But they also tried various dosages of psilocybin on their subjects, and it turns out that nearly all of the episodes of anxiety happened at the highest dose. Crank it down one notch and you’re still likely to get most of the benefits but with significantly less chance of a bad experience.
But now for the most interesting result: psilocybin produces not only mystical experiences, but joy, happiness, and positive social effects. And it does it for a long time: in followup interviews 14 months after the study was completed, nearly all the subjects still reported positive changes in their lives, especially if they received their psilocybin in increasing dosages. (Half the study volunteers got the highest dose first and worked down, and half started with the lowest does and worked up. All volunteers also got a placebo tossed in at some point.) Here are the geeky charts you’ve been waiting for:
These effects were confirmed by interviews with friends of the volunteers who had been recruited to provide periodic feedback to the research team.
Notably, 61% of volunteers considered the psilocybin experience during either or both the [highest dosage] sessions to have been the single most spiritually significant of their lives, with 83% rating it in their top five. Consistent with this, 94% and 89% of volunteers, respectively, indicated that the experiences on those same sessions increased their well-being or life satisfaction and positively changed their behavior at least moderately.
….One month after sessions at either or both the two highest dose sessions, 94% of volunteers endorsed that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction moderately or very much, and 89% rated moderate or higher changes in positive behavior. At the 14-month follow-up, these ratings remained high. The types of behavior change most frequently cited by volunteers were better social relationships with family and others, increased physical and psychological self-care, and increased spiritual practice (Table 6). Ratings by community observers before and after the study as well as ratings by study monitors after the study were consistent with the persisting positive changes in behavior and attitudes claimed by the volunteers.
So there you have it: a genuine mystical experience with long-lasting positive effects, no reported negative effects, no known medical side effects in healthy people, and with virtually no chance of a bad experience. Does that sound like something you’d like to try?
Why Are You Attacking Alex Jones? [video]
Mark Dice
November 16, 2012
Why is Mark Dice attacking Alex Jones in his Fear Monger Friday video parodies ridiculing Jones?
Video by Mark Dice.
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Check out The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction in paperback on Amazon.com, or e-book on Kindle, Nook, or Google Play. http://www.amazon.com/Illuminati-Facts-Fiction-Mark-Dice/dp/0967346657/ref=sr…
The Lebanese Conduit For The Syrian Insurgency – Lebanese Girl [video]
108morris108
December 1, 2012
Lebanese Jihadis dying and politicians financing terrorism in Syria
Sorry for the Tech problem – My mistake (Morris)
Lebanon commemorates assasinated Intelligence Bureau chief [video]
PressTV
December 2, 2012
A ceremony was held in Northern Lebanon’s city of Tripoli to commemorate the death of the assassinated Lebanese Intelligence Bureau chief General Wissam Al Hassan. Hassan died in a car bombing that rocked central Beirut in mid October.
Press TV’s Serena Shim reports from Tripoli.
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Give us Your Guns, Get a Flu Shot
P.A.N.D.A. People Against The NDAA
December 3, 2012
Sounds like a fair trade:
The city of Worcester, Massachusetts is asking citizens to bring their weapons to the police department next weekend as part of the city’s annual “Goods for Guns Buyback Program.” In return for the guns, the city will offer gift certificates, and – a free flu shot.
Telegram.com reports:
“City residents, or residents of any other community, may bring their unwanted weapons, unloaded and wrapped in a bag, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday to the Worcester Police headquarters in Lincoln Square, or from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Dec. 8 to the Worcester Division of Public Health, 25 Meade St.”
Netherlands to abolish blasphemy law
AFP Photo / Stan Honda
Russia Today
November 30, 2012
Dutch parliament approves a motion to scrap law that made insulting God a crime. The move is welcomed by freedom of speech supporters and confirms anti-Islamists’ right to criticize religion.
The blasphemy law is no longer relevant in the 21st century, a majority of Dutch parties stated. This law has not been in use for more than half a century, Dutch MPs added.
Liberal parties’ predominance in the current Dutch parliament has made the repeal of the 1930s law possible, with the same motion blocked by Christian political party’s allies back in 2008.
The issue was brought to the attention of the parliament following the 2011 Geert Wilders case.
Wilders, a far-right anti-Islam MP, was acquitted after facing trial on charges of inciting hatred and discriminations against Muslims. The judge ruled Wilders’ comparisons of Islam to fascism “acceptable,” allowing further criticism despite it insulting Muslims.
The blasphemy law abolition was welcomed by freedom rights activists across the globe as a victory.However the decision was dubbed as a “painful loss of a moral anchor and a symptom of a spiritual crisis” by Dutch Christian SGP party, media reported.
It is still illegal to insult police officers or the country’s monarch under the Dutch law.
Many European countries still have blasphemy laws restricting freedom of expression, rights activists say. Others have replaced such laws with more general legislation criminalizing religious hatred.
The UK has annulled its blasphemy law, replacing it with the Racial and Religious Hatred Act in 2007. The new law implies a prison term of up to seven years and an unlimited fine for the intention of stirring up religious hatred.
Ireland stood out by introducing a new blasphemy law in 2010, instead of abolishing it. The recent Irish Defamation Act makes “publication or utterance of blasphemous matter” punishable by a fine of up to €25,000.
Although such laws have not been invoked for decades in most of Europe, there remain some countries where charges on grounds of religious hatred have often been exercised.
In Poland causing offense to religious feelings is considered a crime, even though there is no separate blasphemy law as such. Several cases of people charged with violating the Polish criminal code for religious offence have attracted media attention over the last decade.
In 2008 a Finnish court sentenced the far right activist Seppo Lehto, to two years and fourth months in jail for defamation, inciting ethnic hatred and religious blasphemy against Islam.
US Considers Directly Arming Syrian Rebels
by Jason Ditz
Global Research
November 29, 2012
Antiwar.com 28 November 2012
In July, Syrian rebel lobbyists reported that the Obama Administration had told them they would not be able to intervene in a serious way until after the November election. The vote’s over and now the meddling can begin in earnest.
That’s the message from US officials tonight, who say the president is now considering several options for deeper intervention into the ever worsening civil war, including the possibility of directly arming certain rebel factions.
Up until now the US has just been playing the role of facilitator, with the CIA smuggling other nations’ arms into Syria for them throughvarious intermediaries. Officials say no decision has been made yet on whether or not to move directly into arms supplying.
If the decision is made, it will make the question of which factions to arm all the more difficult, as the US at present maintains at least a level of deniability in its current smuggling. With various groups vying to be the Western-friendly “umbrella,” and myriad secular and Islamist factions on the ground, it will be an uphill battle for the US to convince the world it isn’t arming terrorists.
Related content:
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NY Times Scrubs Mention Of CIA Arming Syrian Rebels
In an article about France urging Syrian rebels to form a provisional government, the New York Times scrubbed a passage which revealed that the CIA was helping funnel arms to rebel groups that have aligned themselves with Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Version three of the story, posted at 19:45:05 UTC yesterday and entitled France Says It Would Recognize Provisional Syrian Government, included the line, ” American intelligence agents have helped funnel arms to rebel groups.”
However, fifteen minutes later the revelation that the CIA was arming the rebels was removed and replaced with the words, “American intelligence agents have helped to identify the rebel groups that receive arms.”
Copies of the two different versions of the article can be viewed here.… -
Sudan: Israel arming Darfur rebels
Israel has supplied a rebel group involved in the Darfur conflict in Sudan with a considerable amount of weaponry, a new report says.
The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) has received considerably heavy military logistical support from Israel, Sudan’s state media reported on Sunday.… -
CIA Arming Syrian Insurgents
On June 21, The New York Times headlined “CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” saying:
Operating covertly from southern Turkey, CIA operatives are “decid(ing) which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.”
Weapons supplied include “automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition, (and) antitank weapons….”
They’re smuggled across Turkey’s border through “a shadowy network of intermediaries….”
They’re also entering through Lebanon.…
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France arming Libyan rebels in violation of UN resolution
France has become the first country openly to admit it has supplied the Libyan rebels with weapons – a measure banned by the UN Security Council. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has labeled the move as a major violation of the UN resolution.…
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British Special Forces Training Syrian Rebels
Several articles in the British media confirm that British Special Forces are training Syrian rebels.
The underlying pattern is similar to that of Libya where British SAS were on the ground prior to the launching of NATO’s military intervention.
These reports confirm unequivocally foreign interference in the affairs of a sovereign state.…
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