January 2008 | Page 4 of 17

MonthJanuary 2008

Scientology, Saucers, Satan and the Sea

I’ve read a couple of biographies of Jack Parsons, and I find the the idea of Parsons contacting an alien entity through the Babalon Working fascinating. IMO, he was trying to create a “Magickal Child”. An extension of oneself; a “being” that contain aspects that surpass most of those currently known to (wo)men that roam the earth at the present time. Although the idea that this “being” could be an “extraterrestrial” intrigues me, it also makes me question it that much more. (And yes, I’m familiar with Kenneth Grant and the ideas of the Typhonian OTO). Personally, I’ve always considered Aiwass (Crowley’s channeled “being”) to be an extension of Crowley’s Self and look at the “Book of The Law” as a prophecy. Take a look around you. Is not what’s written there visible and all around us right now? If you really think about it, the ideas in themselves can be interpreted in just about any way you want. Here’s an article looking at Parson’s and L.R. Hubbard’s workings in a different light:

“Well it is all fun and games for the Scientologists at the moment with the video controversy (apparently leading to hacking attacks on their site), the lurid claims of the Andrew Morton’s book and increasing hostility with the Germans. So I want to take a step back and look again at the odd links between them the occult, UFOs and the Navy, as The UFO Iconoclast(s) which makes a number of interesting statements:

Both Hubbard and Jack Parsons were interested in UFOs and that they “associated with Naval Intelligence in the late 1940s and early 1950s and both became advocates for flying saucer technology which was being studied diligently by the Navy.” This is certainly news to me and I’ll have to follow it up.
The Scientology HQ in Florida has a floor purely for the studies of flying saucers (they apparently receive secret Navy documents on this) and that there is a secret part of Scientology that deals with them (which is only available to a select few) – not that surprising considering the nature of their beliefs I suppose.
Dianetics has been used by the Navy as a training manual.
Parsons met a Venusian. Also Hubbard and Adamski swapped UFO stories in the fifties. This would be an interesting link. Adam Gorightly has pointed out some parallels between Parsons and Adamski (the latter’s encounter with a Venusian happened in the Me Desert where Hubbard and Parsons went at the end the Babalon Working, in 1952, the year of Parson’s death) but if confirmed these two both claimed to have met Venusians and they shared a close link through Hubbard.”

(via Cabinet Of Wonders)

Freakonomics looks at big pharma in the U.S.

January 27, 2008 / Fell

What Don’t We Know About the Pharmaceutical Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum

[W]e’ve gathered up some willing and able candidates – Dr. Stuart Apfel, Zola P. Horovitz, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, Ray Moynihan, and Dr. Cyril Wolf – and asked them the following question:

What’s something that most people don’t know, pro or con, about the pharmaceutical business, whether from an R&D, economic, or political perspective?

Dr. Harlan Krumholz, professor of medicine, epidemiology, and public health at Yale:

Science and the public good in a capitalist society depend on the free flow of unbiased information, but it doesn’t always work that way. Events are revealing that many pharmaceutical companies, along with their consulting academic physicians, have engaged in practices that obscure or misrepresent information about their products. Does the public realize the depth of these practices, and their implications for patient care?

Zola P. Horovitz, Ph.D, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry consultant, and member of the board of drug companies including Biocryst Pharmaceuticals, Phyton, Genaera Corporation, and Avigen:

My answer to this question is this: that the United States is subsidizing prescription drug prices for the rest of the world. Most people do not realize that when a prescription is paid for in the U.S., the payer (the patient, his or her insurance company, or the government) is subsidizing the cost of that same prescription in most countries outside the U.S. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies price their products to get a return that will support research and development to discover new products. Almost all major new drugs are discovered and developed by these companies, and most are located inside the U.S.

Dr. Cyril Wolf, practicing physician and prescription sales researcher:

The best kept secret by the retail pharmaceutical industry is the obscene profits made on generic drugs by the large chain stores. Whereas brand name drugs are all purchased, and therefore sold, for around the same price, generics are obtained for a fraction of that cost. The price at which the generics are sold is determined by the sellers, who thus have the ability to make exorbitant profits on these drugs.

Dr. Stuart Apfel, founder and president of Parallax Clinical Research and chief medical officer at Elite Pharmaceuticals:

For the majority of people, the great appeal of biomedical science is the potential benefit it presents to human beings through curing disease, extending life, and improving the quality of life. As is generally well-known, biomedical science has achieved much in extending our knowledge of the complex biological processes that make up all living organisms, including ourselves. […]

Market forces will always drive the actions of pharmaceutical companies, which are, after all, businesses like any other. However, society as a whole will benefit from greater risk taking and increased efforts to bridge the divide between laboratory science and the clinic.

Ray Moynihan, co-author of Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients:

What a lot of people may not know is that for some time now, pharmaceutical company marketing strategies have focused on promoting illness, rather than simply promoting drugs. Underpinning many of the marketing strategies of big drug companies is a very sophisticated and comprehensive plan to widen the boundaries of illness, and create an environment in which more and more formerly healthy people are defined as ‘sick.’ The strategies have many components – the most visible being TV and newspaper ads that make us think that our ailments and inconveniences are the signs and symptoms of genuine medical conditions. A sore stomach is ‘Irritable Bowel Syndrome,’ a mild sexual difficulty is ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction,’ and overactive grown-ups now have ‘Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.’

FOR THE FULL ANSWERS READ THE ARTICLE

Six Questions for Mark Crispin Miller, Author of ?Fooled Again?

January 27, 2008 / Klint Finley

As I point out in Fooled Again, that sort of ferocious cunning has, throughout the centuries, marked paranoid crusades of every kind. Certainly we see it in Bush/Cheney’s movement, which includes radical theocrats, neocon extremists, dedicated neo-Confederates, and other types who tend to see themselves as victims and their struggle, therefore, as defensive. In their eyes, the very people whom they’re trying to destroy are ruthless and relentless, full of hate and fury, while they themselves are innocent, outnumbered, ‘fighting back.’ In short, Bush/Cheney’s movement is projective, lividly imputing their own darkest impulses to everybody else.

Such projectivity, I argue, drove the Crusaders of the Middle Ages, and the Western efforts to annihilate the ‘savages’ on the American frontiers. Nazism also was essentially projective, as Hitler and his men consistently imputed their own wrath and vengefulness and lust for power to ‘world Jewry’-against which they were fighting, they believed, in self-defense. We see the same mentality in the Islamist, Christianist and ultra-Zionist movements; and, overwhelmingly, among the Bush Republicans, whose program, I believe, is ultimately pathological. The Bushevik is fatally obsessed with wiping out the ‘terrorist’ within himself-and, no less, the homosexual within. How many of those ranting homophobes have turned out to be cruisers in the dark? Bush/Cheney’s G.O.P. is, above all, the Party of the Closet; and therefore suicidally engaged in trying to straighten out, or murder, all those other ‘perverts’ the world over.

Full Story: Harper’s.

See also: Miller’s 2005 Harper’s article None Dare Call it Stolen.

(Thanks Gavin!)

Last two weeks best

January 27, 2008 / Klint Finley

Six Questions for Mark Crispin Miller, Author of â€˜Fooled Againâ€™

The Economist on heads of state being brought to trial for crimes while in office.

Mike Huckabee associated with white supremacist theocratic organization.

The Nation: Mike Huckabee, apocalyptic theocrat.

Putting the Ron Paul newsletters in “context.”

Why do black people spend more on conspicuous consumption than white people?

Radar Magazine on the 9/11 truth movement.

Christopher Hitchens on the toxicity of faith.

Ro b Walker on Yo Gabba Gabba.

The Luck Factor. (Googlized HTML of a PDF)

David Cronenberg on Gender.

60s Braun products compared to today’s Apple products.

10 Zen Monkeys update on Theresa Duncan.

Why do some people have good luck?

January 26, 2008 / Klint Finley

Richard Wiseman summarizes the findings presented in his book The Luck Factor for Skeptical Inquirer. This is, of course, pop psychology but I think it’s still pretty interesting:

My research revealed that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

[…]

But this is only part of the story when it comes to chance opportunities. Many of my lucky participants went to considerable lengths to introduce variety and change into their lives. Before making an important decision, one lucky participant would constantly alter his route to work. Another person described a special technique that he had developed to force him to meet different types of people. He had noticed that whenever he went to a party, he tended to talk to the same type of people. To help disrupt this routine, and make life more fun, he thinks of a color before he arrives at the party and then chooses to only speak to people wearing that color of clothing at the party! At some parties he only spoke to women in red, at another he chatted exclusively to men in black.

Full Story: Richard Wiseman (Google HTML).

Or: PDF version.

(Thanks Trevor).

The Emails that Dick Cheney Deleted

January 25, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Late last week, right after official White House spokesmen made a series of either evasive or completely false statements about the mysterious case of the vanishing, then reappearing, then perhaps no really vanished White House emails, Henry Waxman and his Oversight Committee announced some of the conclusions they had reached. Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson published an account of it on Friday in the Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat. The 2005 study – whose credibility the White House attacked this week – identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is ‘no evidence’ that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto’s assertion ‘seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us,’ Waxman said. The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush Administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records – including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions – for history and in case of any future legal demands. Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.”

(via Harper’s Magazine)

Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism

January 25, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored. “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn’t abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.”

(via WSJ)

‘Ancient Civilization . . . Broken to Pieces’

January 25, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“He works as a blacksmith in one of Baghdad’s swarming Shiite slums. But at least once a month, Abu Saif tucks a pistol into his belt, hops into a minibus taxi and speeds south. His goal: to unearth ancient treasures from thousands of archaeological sites scattered across southern Iraq. Images of Baghdad’s ransacked National Museum, custodian of a collection dating back to the beginning of civilization, provoked an international outcry in the early days of the war in 2003.

The ancient statues, intricately carved stone panels, delicate earthenware and glittering gold are now protected by locked gates and heavily armed guards. But U.S. and Iraqi experts say a tragedy on an even greater scale continues to unfold at more than 12,000 largely unguarded sites where illegal diggers like Abu Saif are chipping away at Iraq’s heritage.

“It may well be that more stuff has come out of the sites than was ever in the Iraqi museum,” said Elizabeth Stone, an archaeology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Iraqi officials say the U.S. government has supported their efforts to retrieve looted antiquities from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Islamic and other civilizations, but they do not hide their bitterness that more was not done to secure them in the first place.”

(via LA Times)