Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who in 1943 accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic effects of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has died at the age of 102, Reuters reports.
Their Satanic Majesties Request is a psychedelic rock album by The Rolling Stones recorded and released in 1967. Its title is a play on the "Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires..." text that appears inside a British passport. Although, initially dismissed as a poor attempt to match The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album is now considered one of psychedelic rock's greatest albums.
Why don't we sing this song all together?
Open our minds let the pictures come
And if we close all our eyes together
Then we will see where we all come from
Pictures of us spin the circling sun
Pictures of us show that we're all one
Summer love-in summer -in
Events nationwide mark the 40th anniversary of 'Summer of Love'Events are being held around the country this summer to mark the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, when thousands of young people descended on San Francisco to experience the hippie counterculture in 1967. Here are some highlights.
Ongoing: ''Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era'' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through Sept. 16. Through light shows, album covers, posters and music, the show explores the era's cultural impact. http://www.whitney.org .
Ongoing: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Monterey International Pop Festival. Highlights include telegrams from Jemi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and The Who regarding their attendance at the festival; Paul Simon's guitar; the dress worn by Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas,and many pohotographs. The museum is in Cleveland, Ohio. http://www.rockhall.com .Various dates: Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other bands reunite for a Summer of Love 40th anniversary tour, including the Monterey Pop 40th anniversary festival at Monterey Fairgrounds, Monterey, Calif. http://www.genxentertainment.us .
Concludes today: Monterey Summer of Love Festival, featuring dozens of bands performing from the same exact stage as the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. On stage: Riders on the Storm, Robbie Krieger's & Ray Manzarek's latest version of The Doors; Electric Flag; tributes to The Mamas and the Papas, and The Who. http://www.summer67.com .American soldiers are fighting an unpopular war halfway around the world; peace groups protest and Congress is embroiled in a bitter, divisive debate.
At home, radios play the Doors, the Beatles, the Who and the Moody Blues. People flock to open-air concerts to see Eric Burdon and the Animals, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Concern grows for the environment and people feel good when they can buy organic food directly from growers.
It’s cool to get in touch with your feelings. Fashionable women wear flower power minidresses and empire-waisted tops. Jeans, of course, are everywhere. Is it 1967 or 2007? It’s both.
Forty years after the Summer of Love that signaled a seismic shift in our culture, many of the concerns and issues – even the looks – are back again.
And as for the areas where we’re not re-experiencing 1967 – the sexual revolution, the drug culture, the civil rights movement, the civil unrest – that’s because the subculture has now become the culture, says Robert J. Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
“Our entire lifestyle in the early 21st century significantly carries the genetic code of the revolutions and cultural and social changes in the late 1960s. And we don’t consider them at all revolutionary,” says Thompson.
Nineteen sixty-seven was when the journey began, but where, and when, did it end? Or has it? What really happened during those portentous few months of the Summer of Love that caused many of us to mutate physically, emotionally and spiritually? Did it really cause a seismic shift in the values, sensibilities and moralities of our culture, as many suggest? And are we still living in the afterglow of it intense culture-transforming heat?Critics on the right would also like to deep-six the buzz about a better, happier time. A psychedelic Shangri-La. As the Chicago Tribune recently noted:
"In the nation's culture wars, the 1960s are a rallying cry for conservatives who view the decade as the source of social trends they oppose, such as a high divorce rate, legalized abortion and, more recently, the drive for same-sex marriage." (Strange, you make that sound like it's a bad thing.) For Jason Fine, deputy managing editor of Rolling Stone, "A lot of what happened in the summer of '67 wasn't about politics, or even antiwar, it was much more personal. And those kinds of developments have certainly stuck around. Our attitudes about sex, drugs and spirituality are all rooted in that time. That wasn't a blip."
Of course the CIA has still not revealed what it knows about the JFK Assassination.
Editorial: CIA abuses aren't historyThe CIA calls them "the family jewels," which make the documents sound like something precious. On the contrary, they are a shameful record of decades of embarrassing missteps and outrageous abuses of power by America's spies.
The documents, released this week, provide new details on CIA activities in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them previously uncovered. They tell of assassination plots, both successful and not, of domestic wiretapping operations, the infiltration of antiwar groups and mind control experiments.
From this distance documents can seem comical, but nonetheless disturbing. The CIA partnered with the mafia in repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro, and the mafia expected favors in return. Thus, we had CIA agents bugging the hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan to determine if the "Laugh-in" star was sleeping with a mob boss's girlfriend. As John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy - who approved the attempts on Castro's life - and the nation soon learned, assassination is no laughing matter.
The CIA released the documents - which remain heavily censored, indicating there are still some sins officials don't want to confess - in an attempt to score points for candor. "I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system," CIA director Michael Hayden said in releasing the documents.
He should tell that to a judge in Italy, where 25 CIA agents are being tried in absentia, charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The trial, now recessed until October pending the appeal of a ruling, is a test of the agency's "extraordinary rendition program." He should ask the more than 100 terror suspects held since 2002 in the CIA's secret prisons overseas, subjected to interrogation techniques often described as torture.
- Romanian lawmakers have pulled out of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) to protest against a Swiss investigator's report that said Bucharest hosted CIA secret prisons.
CIA Remains Secretive About Current Acts
While the CIA is lauded for releasing 700 pages documenting some of its most egregious 1950-1970 abuses, critics say the US spy agency remains secretive about its current controversial activities. "We don't know everything that's going on today. But it seems to me there's already enough evidence to conclude that things are not so different today," said David Barrett, political scientist at Villanova University, author of a 2005 book on the CIA and Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, speaking to the New York Times. -Capital Hill Blue
Documents show 30-year-old skeletons in CIA closet
Little-known documents made public Thursday detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago - wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.Much of the decades-old activities have been known for years. But Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive, said the 1975 summary memo prepared by Justice Department lawyers had never been publicly released. It sheds light on meetings in the top echelon of government that were little known by the public, he said.
Blanton pointed to more recent concerns, such as post-Sept. 11, 2001 programs that included warrantless wiretapping.
"The resonance with today's controversies is just uncanny," he said.
On the Net:
The documents can be found at: http://www.nsarchive.org
CIA Document Dump Just Confirms Kissinger's Dark Rep
The recent release by the CIA of documents concerning the agency's illegal surveillance of Americans and involvement in the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Salvador Allende of Chile, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, as well as assassinations plots against Fidel Castro, prove what authors and scholars have already concluded about the agency. Most noteworthy is the involvement of Henry Kissinger in giving the green light to Turkey's invasion of Cyprus.
The links between Kissinger and Turkey formed a long lasting relationship between Kissinger and the Israeli Lobby in the United States, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Turks, particularly the links between AIPAC and the American Turkish Council and individuals like Richard Perle, Marc Grossman, and Douglas Feith. That relationship was exposed with revelations stemming from information divulged as a result of the FBI's firing of Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds and the concentration of the Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA front company on weapons of mass destruction and the Turkish nexus to nuclear materials trafficking from the former Soviet Central Asian states.
More than 40 years after he was fatally shot in Dallas, researchers have added fresh fuel to the speculation over who was involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy by claiming the original bullet analysis was flawed and cannot rule out that a second gunman was involved.
Using new scientific techniques not available to previous researchers and analysing bullets from the same batch purportedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the team has argued that it cannot be assumed that Oswald was the only assassin involved. While they do not claim evidence to prove a second gunman participated, they say the original fragments of the bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting should be re-examined.
And they also didn't reveal what they know about UFO's.
At 4:20 in the afternoon, on April 19th, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann deliberately ingested 250 micrograms of LSD-25, a substance he had discovered during experiments with alkaloids of the fungus ergot.
Despite the vanishingly small dosage, he soon found himself stricken with dizziness, euphoria, and an inescapable compulsion to laugh. Within the hour, he could barely write or speak intelligibly, and fearing he'd poisoned himself, rode his bicycle to his nearby home, called a doctor, asked for a glass of milk and collapsed on a sofa. What happened next is best described by Hofmann himself, from his autobiographical book, LSD - My Problem Child:After a doctor arrived and examined him, finding no physical abnormalities besides extremely dilated pupils, Hofmann realized he wasn't in danger of losing his mind or dying and his experience suddenly took a turn for the better:
Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.
H/T to Access to Awareness
