Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Nuclear War Part 4: Nucear War Is Over?...


Nuclear war Part 4.  Part 1

"History once a Tragedy is Now A Farce" K. Marx
"In War Truth is The First Casualty" Aeshelus


The first half of the blood soaked 20th century had finally ended, with the conclusion arriving in the ghastly form of nuclear fission bomb detonations on the civilian polulations of Nagaski and Hiroshima. The unparelled devestation of World War II had finished. In it's closure WWII had earned two unique, unsurpassed and justifiably repulsive distinctions. The first observation of note, is the sickening new world record for the number of people killed during a war. 1939-1945 resulted in 50+ million deaths, their corpses left rotting across Europe, Africa and Asia. This dwarf's any of the deaths tallied up during our species curiously homicidal history of engaging in wars.

The previous World War, WW I, had less than 20 million people murdered and it did not have nuclear weapons. Predicatably in my view, the combatants were not too reluctant, but instead, often all too eager, to employ new chemical weapons, as well as the relatively new rapid fire, automatic, recoil machine gun - these are two technologies I will return to, for use in analogies for nuclear weapons, the latter will be in Part 4 (II). The former (chemical weapons) I will only breifly touch upon as it is a theme in my closing remarks on how to resolve or avoid nuclear war.

World War II also eclipses any war that has since occured. That is if we are using the grisly yard-stick of number of people slaughtered. The next war that came close to WWII was the complicated wars in the Demoncratic Republic of the Congo, peaking in the late 1990's-2000's, whose dead are estimated at some 5 million - who know's if the Hutu's fleeing Rwanda into the Cogno, after commiting their serveral hundred thousand person genocide, would have hesitated to use fusion bombs - assuming they had access to them - I for one do not know. The fact that I do not know, is frankly alarming.

The second unnerving distiction of World War II was that it was, and still is, the only war to go nuclear - it set the dangerous precedent that our species is actually capable of dropping nuclear weapons on civilian cities during a war. Needles to say this is a pathetic example of what we can do to one-another. It is offensive to both our common decency and to our shared humanity. It is a frightening lowpoint in human history, it tells us that we are capable of directly using nuclear weapons on eachother. We can only hope that the rule of "history repeating itself" will make an exception in the case of nuclear fusion weapons. The optimist and the pessimist both will reach plausible and different conclusions on whether fusion bombs will be the exception to, or another confirmamation of, this rule.




Thanks Brady. 3fs.org







Thursday, September 11, 2014

PwKHAL Part III: Mescaline Part III

PwKHAL: Mescaline Part III
Psychedelics we Have Known And Loved - Reflections on Shulgins Death and the Magic Six.

The Magic Six
1. Mescaline (3,4,5 - trimethoxyphenethylamine) 
2. DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methlyamphetamine)
3. 2C-B (2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine)
4. 2C-E (2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethylphenethylamine)
5. 2C-T-2 (2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethylthiophenethylamine)
6. 2C-T-7 (2,5-dimethoxy-4-propylthiophenethylamine)


MESCALINE THE PSYCHEDELIC
PUZZLES AND MYSTERIES. -
A SMALL DIGRESSION ON THE BROADER ISSUE OF PSYCONAUTICS

PHENETHYLAMINE:
THE ROOT OF
ALL THE MAGIC 6, AND
ALL PSYCHEDELICS
ARE HAVE THIS
EMBEDDED IN
THEIR STRUCTURE
Now that we know what makes mescaline a molecule (see mescaline part I, II )

MESCALINE WITH
PHENETHYLAMINE
BASE. 3 METHOXY
MOLECULES
MAKE IT SPECIAL
 We can begin to study the bizarre interaction that occurs when the human mind and the magic molecule that is mescaline meet. However the mind is an enormous puzzle, we do not know all it's secrets due to this complexity - yet it is this very complexity that enables us to solve the puzzle in the first place, call it an incidental paradox, or an ironic trait of being this sentient. But absurdity and oddity aside, this fact is true and one implication I find most profound is that a cosmic coincidence can evolve creatures that are a way for their brains to know about themselves...(to adapt a Sagan quote about the cosmos).

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself..."
The only mystery that even comes close in enigmacy to conscious agents studying the very process that allows their conscioussness to be studied, is found in cosmology. Questions such as "what" created the universe - pre- big bang issues?, "did "God" have a choice in creating the Universe"? - Einstein means by this quote: are there only one set of laws a universe can have or can unviverses exist in some other way, why something exists rather than nothing, whats inside a black hole, is the cosmos infinite, is the cosmos deterministic, etc - it is deterministic but the rest of the issues remain unsolved.



"We are consciousness studying cosciousness itself..."
 For me the mind or consciousness is equally enthralling and just as mysterious. Maybe we are not smart enough to answer the deep questions that our own minds ask, if we are to glimpse the answer we need science and tools, one of which is psychedelic drugs to unlock new states of consciousness and change old ways of thinking.

 I suspect that the illegality of psychedelic research post 1971 has wasted decades of time that could be spent getting to know "ourselves" or our minds. As of now you can get a Phd in psychedelic science, so this is encouraging to reflect upon. If we are to open our minds and get the answers to old and new questions about the mind - and knowing that psychedelics can, have, and do help, then we need to know more than their chemical composition.

A SERENDIPITOUS BREAKTHROUGH! 
A CLEAR PATH TO THE MIND IS FOUND. 
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MESCALINES CHOSEN NEUROCHEMICAL:: SEROTONIN


LSD - OBSERVE THE
SEROTONIN BASE
STRUCTURE IMBEDDED
AT THE VERY
 BOTTOM OF THE LSD
MOLECULE. THIS
OBSERVATION LED
TO THE DISCOVERY
OF THE NEURO-
CHEMICAL SEROTONIN
A SEROTONIN MOLECULE.
- NOTICE HOW
THE LSD MOLECULE
TO THE LEFT OF THE PAGE
HASTHE BASE BENZENE
RING OF MESCALINE
 AND THE ADDED
 PENTAGON (NH) STRUCTURE
OF PSYCHEDELIC
TRYPTAMINES BUILD INTO
THE BASE OF LSD'S
CHEMISTRY
Astonishly 65 years ago, serotonin - the "main" neurochemical and the psychedelic receptor site mescaline activates - was ironically not known to have anything to do with consciouness. Serotonin was not known or even hypothesized to exist in the brain at all. In the 1940's to 1950's, we were ignorant of serotonin's importance in neurochemistry; mood, behaviour, thoughts etc.

 Until one day a revealing twist of fate put the human mind and psychedlic science together on it's current trajectory. Serotonin was theorized as a brain chemical directly as a result of the discovery of LSD - LSD effected consciounsness, this was known since 1943, the year Hoffman invented it. LSD, people noticed in the 1950's, not just effected the mind but very curiously has a serotonin molecule imbedded in it's overall molecular structure. This led to a hypothesis that serotonin, which was discovered to exist in animals, but not in the brain, may actually be a neuro-chemical influencing mood and mind. This is indeed correct. So, LSD led to the discovery of the brain neurotransmitter we call serotonin in the 1950's. Psychedelic brain science was here - and was harvesting enormous yeilds of scientific findings until it was banned globally in 1971, during the unscientific war on drugs.

Apart from the sad Nixon-led 1971 ending, we had begun a golden age of psychedelic science and a new way to study the mind had been unraveled by luck and science. One that is finally underway again as of 2014. The frontier of discovery is open once more, thanks to scientific reseach of psychedelics being allowed under strict controls - and people like Shulgin willing to lose DEA schedule 1 liscences (S1 Liscence holders can legally make any drug on Earth) in order to prove psychedelics have scientific value far greater than anyone realized. The results are promising and empirical research and promise will drive legal reform - and the empirical results are outstanding for psychedelics, as we will see. There is potential in psychoactives - but particularly certain psychedelics, this much is no longer up for debate - read the scientific literature if you are skeptical of their value to our species...

 So, we can, quite literally, understand the brain better by understanding psychoactives. For a mystery as difficult as the mind we need an illusive molecule to aid our understanding, this is where psychedelics, the magic 6 and mescaline come into our story. First we need to ask some questions about mescaline, then we can try to solve the puzzling questions of mind and mescaline using modern science. To learn about the power of mescaline we need qualitative and quantitative, it is hard to define something that is profound (except to say it is profound). We will need many fields of science to aid us in why mescaline is a "magic" molecule, we will use psychology, chemistry, pharmacology, medicine, psychopharmacology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychonautics to name a few. Mescaline, as we will see, is special in many ways and is special for many reasons. Mescaline can help us relate to ourselves and others. It can help solve the most existential questions humans can ask - and maybe help find the missing peices to the puzzles that the cosmos and the mind can throw at us.


Thanks Brady.