Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

A Book Review of David Black's Acid: A New Secret History of LSD

Cue David Black's Acid: The Secret History of LSD. Those still under the impression that history is little more than the sum total of visible events will greet Black's book with incredulity: the synchronistic connections described in just one paragraph can amaze:

"For laundering, [Bill] Hitchcock used the facilities offered by the fiscal paradise of the Bahamas, where he already had a private account at the Castle Bank and Trust. This laundromat [Castle Bank and Trust] for Mafia narcotics trafficking had been co-founded by Edward Halliwell, a CIA asset involved in Air America and Civil Air Transport. These 'airlines' were agency front companies for flying heroin around the Burma Triangle to bankroll covert operations in Indo-China. He made arrangements for the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love, the Californian LSD manufacturing/trafficking organization described in Tendler and May's book of the same name] at Resorts International, a conduit for huge amounts of Mafia money, and at the Fiduciary Trust Company, an offshoot of Investors Overseas Services, headed by the notorious and crooked financier Bernie Cornfeld." (p. 18)



And what about Bernie Cornfeld? Nothing less than sugar daddy to Heidi Fleiss: you can quickly see how this nebulous web of synchronicity starts to add up.

The implications present in Black's book reach to the highest echelons of political power: not only does Black detail the complete history of the CIA's experimentation with LSD in its covert MK-ULTRA project, but we learn that John F. Kennedy's implied mistress, Mary Pinchot, was "turning on" a lot of higher-ups in Washington, D.c. with LSD supplied by Timothy Leary. When Kennedy was assassinated, Pinchot allegedly phoned Leary in a panicked state and said, 'they couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast... They've covered everything up." (p. 61). In October 1964, Pinchot was shot to death in a Georgetown apartment in what appeared to be a "professional hit."

The linchpin of Black's book, however, is the "international man of mystery" Ronald Stark. Stark's involvement with LSD trafficking began in the summer of 1969, when he approached the "hippie mafia" the Brotherhood of Eternal Love with an offer to bankroll their activities:

"In his talks with the Brotherhood, Stark impressed them with his knowledge of scams: smuggling drugs in consignments of Japanese electrical equipment, his use of business fronts in West Africa, and moving money through a maze of shell companies set up by his lawyers on various continents.

However, [Stark] projected himself as interested in a lot more than money. He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics. He intimated, for example, that he had contacts with the Tibetan freedom fighters loyal to the Dalai Lama and with the Japanese Mafia who could help smuggle LSD into Tibet and dose the Chinese occupiers... however, the Idylwild hippies could not have possibly guessed that Ron Stark operated on four continents and compartmentalized his international activities so that those he did business with - be they American hippies, Lebanese warlords, corporate lawyers, British scientists, Japanese Mafioso or Italian train-bombers - would have little knowledge of his 'other' activities. He could speak ten languages fluently and had the 'bottle' [of LSD], cunning, charm, and knowledge to pass himself off in various situations as a businessman, chemist, doctor, art collector, drug dealer, political activist and even as a Palestinian guerilla." (p. 20-21)


Ronald Stark

One of the most interesting sections of the book details Stark's involvement with the "acid gang" responsible for the production of most of the UK's LSD during the 1970's. "Operation Julie" eventually brought the gang down, but the story behind this operation is interesting in its own right. Of all of the characters in Black's book, only the "Julie" chemists Richard Kemp and Christine Bott are as intriguing as Stark: Kemp, once described as a "one in a million brainiac" by a fellow prison inmate, was a Cambridge-educated chemist and left-wing radical who hoped that LSD would inspire societal revolution. Kemp and Bott believed "...industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves." Kemp was also responsible for a dramatic breakthrough in LSD manufacture, which was responsible for the "Julie" acid being the cleanest and strongest ever seen on a large scale in the UK.


Kemp and Bott
(taken from Lee & Pratt's Operation Julie)

The web of synchronicity deepens yet again when Kemp's association with the famed DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick is revealed:

"Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD."

It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration."

Like Kemp, Stark remains an enigmatic figure throughout the book, and we never get much more than speculation as to who he actually is. Was he a CIA asset? Scion of an ultra-wealthy family? Between Stark's connections to radical groups on four continents (a mind-boggling list that includes the Weather Underground and the IRA) it is difficult to imagine that Stark was not an intelligence asset of some sort: he appeared to operate above the law. At the same time, he evidently exhibited some fuzzy political sympathies that definitely leaned in the direction of "One World Universalism." Stark's apparent tendency to latch on to "convenient" causes is all too indicative of someone operating as an agent of an Illuminati-type organization: if he did have a political agenda, it was certainly a bit more obtuse and sophisticated than anything revolving around simple "national liberation". Black also infers that Stark maintained connections to the P-2 Masonic Lodge in Italy, but the extent of his involvement is not clear.

Perhaps Stark's political orientation can be distilled from one of his few known influences: Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress:

"He saw it as a revolutionary 'handbook', every bit as inspirational as the writings of Che Guevara. Heinlein's novel, a hard-boiled political fairytale set in the year 2075, is about a penal colony on the Moon. The million inhabitants - who are housed in huge domes containing artificial atmospheres - are either Earth deportees or their descendents. They cannot return because once their bodies adapt to the Moon's gravity they can never readapt to the gravity of Earth. This lunar prison is brutally administered by a United Nations-appointed governor, who the revolutionaries try to overthrow. One of them, a character called 'the Prof', explains:

...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications.'

The conspiracy starts with three people... these three in turn recruit two other people to form three new cells. This recruitment process continues until a large network of cells is built up. The advantage of the structure is that if cell members do not know each other's sub-cells, then they cannot give them away if captured. The drawback is that if a single cadre is arrested and cannot resist interrogation, then the enemy can arrest the half-a-dozen comrades he or she knows and thus reach the sub-cells. This, it becomes possible for the authorities to break the revolutionaries' chain of command and communications.

A more sophisticated system discussed in Heinlein's book is a pyramid-of-pyramids setup - a sort of 'Internet' without the computers:

'Where vertices are common, each bloke knows one in an an adjoining cell... Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net.'

Damage can be stemmed and repaired because the cell member who discovers a breach in the network can pass warnings without having to know who receives the messages.

The notion of revolutionary organisation as an imitation of a 'natural' and 'organic' hierarchy is not new. Historically, August Blanqui, the most accomplished revolutionary conspirator in 19th century France, had very similar ideas about revolutionary organisation. In Heinlein's futuristic vision, however, the notion is given a neat twist: the conspiracy is helped by a miraculous super-computer, which is so powerful and complex that it 'wakes up' and becomes 'self-conscious'. The computer develops a sense of 'humour' about the 'stupidity' of the colonial administration, plus a 'rational will' to overthrow them.

The conspirators use the computer to set up front companies and fraudulently appropriate funds on the terrestrial stock exchanges. They then use the money to set up secret facilities for development of revolutionary war technology. In this scenario, then Big Brother's Brain, a scientific rationality, can be detached from ruling class control and harnessed to the revolution.

As a 'rational anarchist', the Prof believes that the concept of the State has no existence except as 'physicall exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.' This implies that collaboration with the state is justifiable as a disguise within the strategy of systematic deception of everyone apart from those who are required to be 'in the know' for particular functions.

Stark's keen interest in these ideas is perhaps a pointer to his modus operandi. And if he really did think of himself as a revolutionary who could make use of state agencies and capitalist technology on his own terms, he was not unique in the history of politics. In the 1840's, Pierre Proudhon, a founding father of French socialism (and opponent of Blanqui), dismissed the problem of secret police spies and provocateurs in his movement. Such actions, he claimed, were 'irrelevant' to someone such as himself: a 'new man... whose style is not the barricades but discussion, a man who could sit at a table with the chief of police each evening and take all the spies in the world into his confidence.'

In Ron Stark's case, operating very much in the 20th century, political activism went far beyond discussion. Whilst he could sit at all sorts of tables, he had a certain liking for barricades as well.' (p. 149-151)

In a more base sense, the highly intelligent Stark was probably just

having quite a bit of fun: between leading his jet set lifestyle (which included a Manhattan apartment replete with original Picasso paintings), setting up front companies to facilitate the manufacture of LSD, and inhabiting a social milieu replete with the most colorful "characters" that one could imagine, his life was certainly worthy of fiction. Stark was clearly motivated by profit, but if he could justify his actions with idealism, then all the better. Idealism mixed with lucre finds its most potent expression in the drug ideologue: yes, he's helping people find God, but he's also a capitalist.

In close, Black's book comes with my highest recommendation: not only is the subject matter fascinating, but it's a first-rate piece of journalism. What follows is Black's own synopsis of the book from Lobster Magazine:

-~-~-~-~-~-~-

Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist
David Black

Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British 'microdot conspiracy' had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick 'Leapy' Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of 'Julie', Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing them by the powers-that-be. One major player he was especially interested in, New Yorker Ronald Stark, was suspected of having CIA connections.

Ron Stark (1938-84) was first convicted in 1962 for making a false job application for government service and imprisoned for parole violation. Between 1967, when his net wealth was recorded as $3000, and 1968, Stark somehow became a millionaire and moved to a flash residence in Greenwich Village. To some he claimed he to be the scion of the super-rich Whitney family; to others he was the son of a rich bi-chemist. Stark spoke of having studied biochemistry at various Ivy League universities and of having quit a top secret post at the Department of Defense during the Kennedy administration because the work 'disgusted' him. One scientist who knew Stark says he claimed to have been attached to the CIA 'mind control' project - later revealed as MKULTRA.(1)


The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various 'legit' fronts, by 1969 he had become one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD, produced at his illicit labs in Europe. Stark also plugged himself into the counter-culture. In America he hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), a Californian motorcycle gang who had transformed themselves, under the influence of LSD and the inspiration of Timothy Leary, into a registered 'church'. By 1969, the BEL had a sizeable share of the market for a less godly, but hugely lucrative business, LSD and marijuana.(2)

The BEL were short of materials and the capital investment needed to continue LSD production,when, in August 1969, Ron Stark visited their commune with a large bottle of pure liquid LSD, enough for up to ten million trips, and explained that he needed a secure outlet in the US for the LSD he was producing in Europe. He also declared his intention of facilitating the overthrow of both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people and claimed that he had a contact with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan freedom fighters and could get the Japanese mafia to smuggle LSD to dose the Chinese occupiers.(3)

The authors of Acid Dreams, Martin and Lee and Bruce Shlain, note that Ron Stark's 'fateful appearance at the Idylwild ranch', coincided with certain 'unpleasant changes'. Some of the old guard had to 'retire' after skirmishes with the law, notably Stanley Owsley, the maker of 'Orange Sunshine', his protg, Tim Skully (who had originally wanted to give acid away free), and superbrat, Bill Mellon-Hitchcock, the BEL's money-launderer. Not long after Stark turned up, BEL founder, 'Farmer John' Griggs died of poisoning in circumstances his friends regarded as suspicious.(4)


Stark in Britain
Before clinching the deal with the BEL, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute. One of these was David Solomon, an American researcher and writer on LSD and cannabis. Solomon had been working with Richard Kemp, a drop-out science student, and his partner, Dr. Christine Bott, to synthesize some powerful liquid cannabis. Solomon had also obtained a supply of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, for a shot at LSD production, and Kemp managed to make some at a makeshift lab in Liverpool.

Shortly after meeting Stark in Cambridge in Summer 1969, Solomon invited Kemp to come meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance'. Stark convened a meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on London's Pall Mall with Kemp, Simon Walton, Stark's Scots assistant, plus Solomon and his friend Paul Arnaboldi (then famous as 'Captain Bounty' in the TV chocolate ad). The Great British LSD Plot was thus hatched within weeks of Stark's first meeting with the Brotherhood in California. Stark also introduced Kemp to the Brotherhood's chemists, Nick Sand and Lester Freidman. Kemp was soon working wonders at Stark's lab in Paris and in the first run turned out a kilo of LSD.(5)

In May 1970 Kemp and Stark, with the BEL's chemists, held talks lasting four days on the future of the 'Atlantic Brotherhood'. Kemp was unhappy. He had been assigned to work on a new project to synthesize THC to make a new brand of liquid cannabis as strong as LSD and as cheap to produce. But money promised was not forthcoming, Stark discouraged visits by Kemp's partner Christine Bott, and Kemp felt 'sexually harassed' by the bi-sexual Stark. Worse, Kemp had been pulled up by British Customs during a trip with Walton from France in Stark's Ferrari to buy equipment. During a search of the car, the Customs had found documentation of a massive purchase of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, but failed to see its significance.(6)

When Stark moved his laboratory from Paris to Orleans, he claimed he had been warned about an impending raid on the lab when, 'by chance', he ran into an old pal who worked with the CIA station in London. By this time Kemp had had enough and decided to quit working with Stark. He returned to England in late 1970 and teamed up with Henry Todd, an accountant recruited by David Solomon. In mid-1971, as production began in Britain and the distribution network was being set up, Stark crossed the Channel in one last attempt to dissuade Kemp from branching out independently.(7)

When differences between the 'idealist' Kemp and the 'bread-head' Todd became unresolvable - Todd wanted to dilute the elixir to boost profts - it was decided to split into two independent networks. Todd centred his operation on the Thames Valley, while Kemp and Christine Bott moved out of London to North Wales and set up a lab with Paul Arnaboldi at Plas Llysin near Carno.(8) Amazingly, for the first half of the seventies, the British Acid Underground - thanks to to Stark's role as catalyst - happily churned out hundreds of millions of tabs to satisfied customers, without anyone in authority realising how big the business had become.


The BEL scatters
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC derivative from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.(9)

Stark had taken over Bill Mellon-Hitchock's role in the BEL of money-launderer and procurer of LSD production materials. In 1972 Stark's lawyer in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who had drawn up the charters for Stark's front companies, was investigated by IRS agents and asked about Stark's BEL connections. The DEA, who had just rolled-up much of the BEL network in the US, organised a follow-up raid on Stark's Belgian laboratory on the campus of Louvain le Neuve, near Brussels, but Stark escaped, spiriting away the BEL's investments for his own purposes.(10)


An Inspector Lee calls
In November 1974 Inspector 'Leapy' Lee,(11) who had been running Operation STUFF (Stop Unlawful Free Festivals) in Thames Valley, began to have doubts about the official view on LSD use. According to the Home Office, annual seizures of 20,000 tabs means that 'the use of LSD in Britain was restricted to a small number of people'. Lee approached the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU), who 'denied having any information which showed LSD to be a problem'. It would take Lee another three years to fully discover that 'since 1970 an illicit organization had been manufacturing around 20,000,000 tiny LSD tablets [a year] and selling them to two-thirds of the world'.(12)

After his arrest in 1977, Richard Kemp insisted that all of the links between the British networks and the BEL had been broken in 1970. 'Leapy' Lee, however, knew that Ron Stark had passed through London in Spring 1973 while on the run from US authorities and had obtained a false passport here.(13) Lee wanted to find out more but was blocked from on high; possibly, he suspected, to prevent questions arising as to why action hadn't been taken years earlier. He had learned that the Home Office drugs inspectorate had submitted a report as early as 1971 which noted the exports of tartrate to America from Britain and furthermore suggested that LSD microdots seized across the world 'originated from one common source which, in all probability, was somewhere in Britain.'


First hints of the Welsh connection
In Spring 1975, when evidence began to point towards an LSD supply source in Wales, Lee learned that the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit had been withholding information from him on 'a number of leads pointing to an LSD conspiracy in the United Kingdom....the information had been withheld from all drug squads except the Metropolitan.' Lee learned that a year previously Dectective Inspectors Godfrey and O'Hanlon of the CDIU had travelled to Canada to hear Kemp's former tableteer, Gerry Thomas, name Kemp, Bott and Solomon as LSD con-spirators. On returning, O'Hanlon was suspended and subsequently sentenced to eight years imprisonment for corruption. D.I. Godfrey did initiate an investigation of a trip by Solomon to Switzerland to meet Leary; but, in Lee's words, the Met then 'botched' a raid on Solomon's London home and missed some documents he had concerning Leary's secret negotiations over a contract for his book On the Run. Godfrey and CDIU lost track of Richard Kemp and Christine Bott.(14)

Lee discovered that an investigation as far back as 1971 had been getting near the truth but had collapsed when the gang under surveillance by the Thames Valley Squad and Customs were robbed of money and drugs by officers of the Met.! According to Detective Constable Martyn Pritchard of the Julie squad, the 1971 investigation did reveal enough to register suspicions 'that a big LSD factory was in business.'(15)


Cue the spooks
That the security services regarded LSD as an issue of 'national security' was confirmed when Lee began to follow leads on Ron Stark and discovered that the security services had been on the trail before him. When Lee went to see the security services about the loan of some high-tech surveillance equipment, he briefed them on 'the suspected international level of LSD trafficking and, more particularly, the probable involvement of terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof and the Angry Brigade'. Lee had noticed that the network he was investigating had 'a cell-like structure similar to that used by terrorist groups'. Lee was referring to the system of pre-arranged meetings places and dead letter-box drops in tins buried under trees to deliver the LSD to the distributors and collect payment.(16)

Lee had begun to suspect terrorist connections when, during surveillance of the Let-It-Be Commune in Wiltshire, a car used by a dealer suspected of working for the LSD network turned out to have been 'linked' in some (unspecified) way to the West German Red Army faction. A check on an associate of the distribution network in Wales showed him to be 'an associate of the Angry Brigade'. Although none of those arrested in Operation Julie were charged with political offences, the supposed 'terrorist connection' did emerge in the pre-trial press coverage. The Daily Mirror ran a piece on how Kemp and his colleagues were 'allegedly' preparing to put LSD into the water supply.(17) Documents from police files on the defendants' alleged political views were also circulated to the media. Richard Kemp, for example, was described as a 'left-wing revolutionary ... his motive for suspected acid activity: a catalyst of British revolution by youth brought on by the use of LSD'. Kemp told the police that he had supported festivals such as Windsor and Glastonbury and had given money to Release, the drugs legal help-line, and had supported 'Head politics' (but refused to name which groups).(18)

In fact the only drug dealers of an significance during this period with terrorist 'connections' of whom we know were Howard Marks - through the maverick Irish 'republican' Jim McCann - and Ron Stark. According to Tendler and May's book on the BEL, FBI reports passed on to the DEA in California and to the British police 'only showed what Stark was not, not what he actually was'. Inspector Lee's informant, 'Nancy', 'strongly suspected that Stark was involved with the CIA and had friends in the American Embassy'.(19)

In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks' name and address had turned up in the address book of arrested IRA volunteer, Dutch Doherty. (The address had been passed onto Doherty by McCann). MI6 did not appear to realise that the IRA had rejected McCann's efforts to involve them in drugs and that he was using his contacts with republican activists to boost his credibility as a smuggler.(20) Macmillan's scheme went awry when Marks decided to let McCann in on the secret of his 'deal' with MI6. (MI6's admitted involvement later sank the prosecutions of both men.) When the police learned of Marks' operation after his disappearance in 1974, they suspected that until 1973 he had been dealing with the BEL, and from then on with its remnants.

Ron Stark was not far from Marks' and McCann's scene. In 1971 McCann had taken two American journalists from the London-based 'head' magazine, Frendz, to Belfast, and, while showing them round, tried to fire-bomb Queens University and got them all arrested and charged. It was one of the Americans, Alan Marcuson, who subsequently put McCann in touch with Marks through another old Oxford friend, Graham Plinston.(21) In London, Stark, who was sniffing around radical circles, contacted the solicitor representing the American pair. He expressed some interest in McCann and promised financial support, which never came to anything.(22) Stark was thus poking his nose into the Marks-McCann operation nearly two years before MI6's Macmillan recruited Howard Marks.


The questions asked but not answered
Stark was in prison in Italy in 1977 when Macmillan was posted to the British Embassy in Rome. Macmillan would have been in an ideal position at the MI6 station there to help Lee obtain the documents seized by the Italian police when they arrested Stark in 1975.(23) But the papers didn't arrive until a year after Lee made the request, by which time his investigation was being wound up. Stark's papers included formulas for the synthesis of LSD and THC, some of which were identical to Kemp's; documents on the BEL's tartrate dealings in England; letters to Stark at his laboratory in Belgium from Charles Adams, an 'economic counsellor' at the American embassy in London; and draft letters from Stark to Wendy Hansen, American vice-counsel in Florence which discussed the possibility of a coup in Italy (for which, he said, conditions, were not yet ripe).(24)

This raises this question: if Stark, the catalyst of the British LSD explosion, was an American asset, would his agency have allowed him to break the law and endanger the national security of America's most senior partner in NATO? The answer might be 'yes' if the agency had a joint covert operation with their British counterparts - say in the area of 'counter-terrorism' - which was important enough to justify the risks. Stark was in prison in Italy from 1975-79 following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. But he rubbed shoulders in prison with leading members of the Red Brigades, while maintaining contact with secret intelligence agencies on the outside. He is suspected by some of involvement in the Moro kidnapping.

In 1979 Stark appealed against his 14 year sentence. According to the judge who granted him bail and thus allowed him to flee Italy, 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' suggested 'that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services' and had 'entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organisations operating in that area and gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups' - a statement which raises as many questions as it answers.(25)


Notes

1. Stewart Tendler and David May, Brotherhood of Eternal Love- From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia; the Story of the LSD Counterculture, Panther, London 1984 pp. 174-5; Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, Groven Weidenfeld, New York, 1985 p. 249; Martin A. Lee, 'Rasputin of LSD' in National Reporter, Fall 1988;Dick Lee and Colin Pratt, Operation Julie, W.H. Allen, London 1978 p. 71

2. Tendler and May, op. cit. pp. 174-5

3. Lee and Shlain op. cit. p. 248

4. Lee and Shlain op. cit. pp. 245-6; Tendler and May op. cit. p. 160. See also Timothy Leary's Flashbacks - an Autobiography, 1983.

5. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 350; Tendler and May op. cit. pp. 177-82. Lee and Shlain (p. 288) mistakenly credit Kemp rather than Stark with having produced the kilo Stark took to Idlywild. In fact Stark and Kemp barely met and didn't begin working together on LSD until the end of 1969.

6. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 377

7. Tendler and May op. cit .p. 186; Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 337

8. Ibid. p. 50

9. Tendler and May op. cit. p. 230

10. Ibid. pp. 171

11. For those without a detailed memory of pop trivia, a 'Leapy Lee' had one hit record in Britain around this time. Hence Lee's nickname.

12. Lee and Pratt op. cit. pp. 12-18

13. Ibid. p. 290

14. Ibid p. 47. See also Cox, Shirley and Short, The Fall of Scotland Yard, Penguin, 1977.

15. Martyn Pritchard and Ed Laxton, Busted!, Mirror Books, London, 1978

16. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 100

17. The Leveller April 1978

18. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 290.

19. Ibid p. 337

20. David Leigh, High Times, Heinemann, London 1984, p. 68

21. Ibid. pp. 40-50

22. Tendler and May, op. cit. p. 274

23. Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, British Intelligence and Covert Action, Brandon, Kerry, Ireland, 1983, pp. 223-5 and 258

24. Lee and Pratt op. cit p. 334; Philip Willan, The Puppet-Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, Constable, London, 199, p. 312.

25. Willan, op. cit.p. 309; Lee and Shalin op. cit. p. 281; Martin A. Lee in National Reporter, Fall 1988

[American Dream]

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. - book reviews
by Terence McKenna

Michael Taussig has subtitled his study of atrocity and vision-seeking in the Putumayo drainage of southern Colombia "A Study in Terror and Healing." The first part of this scholarly and yet intensely emotional book deals with terror, specifically the clash of cultures and cultural images that unleashed the genocide of tens of thousands of Amazonian Indians, who were humiliated, tortured, and murdered by the "civilizing" minions of the Amazon Rubber Company, which was really nothing more than a criminal cabal of British bankers and the Peruvian capitalist and mass murderer Julio Cesar Arana. The book's far longer second half deals with Taussig's own experiences with the hallucinogen yage (also known as ayahuasca), Indian healers, and the social psychology of healing and sorcery. Taussig, a native of Australia who has worked as a psychologist and is now a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, has taken a bold step by making the yage intoxication the centerpiece of his book.

By making it clear that he took yage repeatedly with his curandero friends, he hurls down a gauntlet to the pompous notion of "objective" anthropology with its faint stench of whiteman's burden. Objectivism where ecstasy and shamanism are concerned is operationally useless. If Taussig's work is emulated, then the way will be clear for an involved and even moral anthropology that is no longer enslaved by the secret fantasy of white male superiority.

From the dreaded Wikipedia:

The Devil And Commodity Fetishism



The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America is both a polemic about anthropology and an analysis of a set of seemingly magical beliefs held by rural and urban workers in Colombia and Bolivia. His polemic is that the principal concern of anthropology should be to critique Western (specifically, capitalist) culture. He further argues that people living in the periphery of the world capitalist economy have a critical vantage point on capitalism, and articulate their critiques of capitalism in terms of their own cultural idioms. He thus concludes that anthropologists should study peoples living on the periphery of the world capitalist economy as a way of gaining critical insight into the anthropologists' own culture. In short, this polemic shifts the anthropologists' object of study from that of other cultures to that of their own, and repositions the former objects of anthropological study (e.g. indigenous peoples) as valued critical thinkers.

Taussig applies this approach to two beliefs, one based on both his own field research and that of anthropologist June Nash, the second based on his own research. The first is the belief held by semi-proletarianized peasants in Colombia (with an analogous case among Bolivian tin miners) that proletarianized sugar-cane cutters can make a contract with the devil that will cause them to make a good deal of money, but that this money can be spent only on frivolous consumer goods, and that the cutter will die an early miserable death. Taussig suggests that earlier anthropologists might have argued that this belief is a hold-over from pre-capitalist culture, or serves as a levelling mechanism (ensuring that no individual become significantly wealthier than any of his or her fellows). Taussig however argues that through the devil, peasants express their recognition that capìtalism is based on the magic belief that capital is productive, when in fact capitalism breeds poverty, disease, and death. The second belief provides another example of peasants' representing their own understanding of capitalism's claim that capital is productive: the belief that some people engineer a switch that results in a peso, rather than a baby, being baptised. The consequence is that the money, alive, will return to its original owner no matter how it is spent, and bring more money back with it.



Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987)

In Michael Taussig's seminal work, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, he leads us down a path that examines the project of Colonialism as it was carried out in South America. He first creates a space of an all-too-real and present terror followed by a process of healing that we as readers are ourselves supposed to follow. Through the weaving and interlocking of literature, firsthand accounts, and his ethnographic work, Taussig creates, “a mode of perception--a way of seeing through a way of talking--figuring the world through dialogue that comes alive with sudden transformative force in the crannies of everyday life’s pauses and juxtapositions. . . . It is an irregular, quavering image of hope, this inscription on the edge of official history” (209). In both following his text and allowing ourselves to be absorbed into it as it develops, Taussig himself comes to take on the role of the shaman, and we readers the role of the patient.

Taussig introduces his subject matter in his author’s note, stating that the purpose of his text is to examine, "the politics of epistemic murk and the fiction of the real, in the creation of Indians, in the role of the myth and magic in colonial violence as much as in its healing, and in the way that healing can mobilize terror in order to subvert it . . . through the tripping up of power in its own disorderliness. That is why my subject is not the truth of being but the social being of truth, not whether facts are real but what the politics of their interpretation and representation are" (xiii, italics added). As stated above the author begins this discussion first by looking at acts of terror and the “space of death” created there. His case of terror is that of the rubber trade in the Putumayo river area of Colombia of the late 19th and early 20th century. Much of these acts of terror stemmed from British rubber barons of the time trying to impose a capitalist mode of production on an indigenous, "wild", population still living under an economy based upon a gift/exchange system. In the eyes of the British, who violently pressured the natives to extract rubber from the rubber trees of the area, the Indians, "would not work appropriately". The barons' reaction to indigenous resistance was to carry out horrific acts of terror on the minds and bodies of the local population, which Taussig thoroughly documents through providing firsthand accounts from the time. Within the “space of death” created in the Putumayo area came also the death of communal memory and objectivity. Terror resulted in a, “society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had preceded it--a death-space in the land of the living where torture's certain uncertainty fed the great machinery of the arbitrariness of power” (4).

Interestingly enough, the powerful force of healing develops from the same space created by the other powerful force of terror: “Shamanic healing . . . like the culture of terror, also develops its force from the colonially generated wildness of the epistemic murk of the space of death” (127). In his section on healing Taussig relates his ethnographic work with José García, an Indian shaman of the Putumayo, during the 1970s. Taussig is particularly compelled by the fact that many peasant colonists seek out José García to be healed. He notes that to the magic already possessed by shamans like García, “colonialism fused its own magic, the magic of primitivism” (216). Here Taussig is speaking of how the shaman has been able to harness the “mystery” and “wildness” projected onto him by Western “civilization” in his practice as a shaman. He goes on to write that this, “folding of the underworld of the conquering society into the culture of the conquered [is] not as an organic synthesis or ‘syncretism’… but as a chamber of mirrors reflecting each stream’s perception of the other” (218). In what does the healing power of wildness lie? Taussig answers this question: "Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage. . . . Wildness is the death space of signification” (219).

“So it has been through the sweep of colonial history where the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man--a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic power” (467).

[American Dream]

When you think about it, GIVING someone a motivational book and telling them to read it almost always has the opposite effect of what the book-giver intended. Management thinks, “I’m giving you this book to help motivate you to do better!” but the person sitting at the desk getting the book usually thinks, “what new bullshit is this?”



Giving someone a motivational book THEY DID NOT ASK FOR OR EXPRESS CURIOSITY IN is an insult. While I’m sure the Powers that B intended it to be helpful, it will almost always come across to the book-receiver as an indication of slack or incompetence. The not-so-subtle message is “here, you’re a lazy punk who needs to read this because frankly morale around here sucks and production is down.” Most employees would find a cash bonus of what you paid for the book far more motivating than the book itself, but I suppose that’s more fleeting than the whiz-dum that’s contained in the pages.

But lettuce look at the bigger question: why is there a perceived NEED for such books? Well, I suppose there’s a perceived need because most people hate their jobs. A person who hates their job probably doesn’t perform well, takes time off and is not as productive as a motivated employee.

OK, but then let’s peel back the next layer o’ the onion and ask WHY do people hate their jobs so much that they NEED motivational books?? Well, we could make a whole LIST of reasons to answer that, and since the answer is obvious, let’s ask a related question instead: if the real reason people are unmotivated is because their jobs suck, then why is the answer to give them motivational books they didn’t ask for?



Well, one thing I learned from being a teacher is that when the wheels are falling off, most managers generally focus on something inconsequential—the equivalent of arguing about what colour the radio knobs should be when the car’s engine is on fire and the brakes have gone and you’re going downhill towards a ravine.

Of course, in most cases the problem is that the machine was ALREADY BROKEN even before management was hired, and there’s little they can actually DO to change things...

http://twist-o-lemon.blogspot.com/2010/11/three-steps-forwards-two-steps-back.html
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See also:

The Five Personality Types of Change

[American Dream]

http://www.laurakkerr.com/blog/2011/05/ ... ic-stress/

Capitalism Exploits the Body’s Response to Traumatic Stress

Posted on May 20, 2011


The Great Recession, like financial disasters before it, has taken its toll on bodies and psyches as much as it has on bank accounts and lifestyles. For many the suffering has been devastating. Suicides, family violence, stress-related diseases, and mental disorders increased during the crisis, which for many is ongoing. Yet even during the best of times global capitalism’s dependency on social hierarchies—coupled with its unpredictable cycles of growth and retraction—raises anxiety, sometimes to the level of traumatic stress.

For decades researchers have documented the physical stress caused by social hierarchies. For example, Nancy Adler discovered our perceived socioeconomic status is a good a predictor of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and levels of stress hormones circulating in the body. Irrespective of how secure a person’s circumstances, a subjective interpretation of oneself as having low social status contributes to stress-related diseases. Consequently, a poor Appalachian miner in the affluent United States experiences more status-related stress than a relatively poorer member of an African community where the majority of people endure the same level of financial hardship. Countries with the highest levels of economic inequality have the greatest number of people with stress-related diseases.

Capitalism’s capricious economic cycles also contribute to stress. The body responds to the possibility of threats with agitated alertness, especially when there is a coinciding belief that an action may be necessary to avoid being hurt. In trauma lingo, we refer to this as a state of hypervigilance, or the need to continually scan the environment for the possibility that past threats will reemerge and once again endanger one’s survival. The latest round of globalization almost demands hypervigilance in order to anticipate potential job loss and devaluing retirement accounts, or worse—the decimation of entire market sectors and local economies.

For the most financially precarious (an ever-widening sector of the population), capitalism creates a state similar to the experience of psychological domination that can occur when people are held in captivity. Psychological domination is more likely when 1) the threat is unpredictable and 2) there are periods of relative safety amid the chaos and abuse. Psychologist Judith Herman observed, “The ultimate effect of [psychological domination] is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance.” Does that sound familiar? Do you have a love-hate relationship with capitalism—loving the relative convenience of fulfilling material desires while hating being caught in an endless cycle of making money in order to survive? (By the way, hunter-gatherers have on average a sixteen-hour workweek.) Certainly the psychological impact of capitalism in no way reaches the severity of a person who’s basic right to freedom has been taken away. Rather, my argument is that capitalism exploits the body’s natural defenses for surviving traumatic circumstances.

In his book On Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail also makes a connection between global capitalism, social hierarchies, and the body’s reaction to threats. Smail argues capitalism exploits the body’s survival responses (i.e., freeze, fight, flight, and submission) by creating the conditions of psychological domination as well as providing relief from the feelings of powerlessness that capitalism and social hierarchies engender. According to Smail, capitalism generates stress through its unpredictability and hierarchical power structures, but it also alleviates stress by producing an economy organized around the production and circulation of addictive substances and practices.

Smail notes that, from its inception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, global capitalism has been organized around creating and feeding addictions. The first imports to Europe from Africa, the Arab World, and the Americas were coffee, sugar, chocolate, tobacco and “spirits”—all mood-altering substances. During this time, the term “addiction” gained its modern meaning as a self-inflicted behavior rather than the state of being indebted to another (e.g., serfdom) that previously distinguished the addict. With this shift in understanding of addiction, also came a new organization of society away from a focus on managing external forms of control to a focus on internal ways of responding to dominance by self-medicating its effects.

Today, the use of addictive substances and activities to regulate stress is so common it is difficult to demarcate between what counts as recreational use of substances and what constitutes lifestyle maintenance. Addictions are a widespread way of managing feelings of agitation and overwhelm, which for many are habitual responses to the pressure of trying to make a living in the current global economy. Typically when we anticipate danger, the body either becomes so activated that it enters a state of extreme agitation (referred to as “hyperarousal”) or it moves towards a state of shut down, freezing in response to feeling profoundly overwhelmed (called “hypoarousal”). Addictive substances and activities are now everyday methods for escaping such states—a role religion has also served, especially in the preindustrial world.

Capitalism is not the only social system that exploits the body’s natural response to power and dominance. All societies must contend with the human capacity for dealing with power dynamics and the stress they can cause the body. Status is integrally associated with power and is present in all forms of society, even those such as the Intuit, Navajo Indians, and !Kung San, which are all noted for their egalitarian social structures. What differs is how the quest for status is dealt with. In smaller, egalitarian societies, the quest for status and power is systematically undermined, whether through derogatory remarks to the one who boasts about his successful hunt, or the isolation of those who attempt to bully others into submission. However, capitalism differs from egalitarian societies in its exploitation of the body’s response to traumatic stress—creating the conditions for traumatic responses (and their alleviation) rather than avoiding them. Whereas egalitarian societies respond to power and status by trying to mitigate its effects, global capitalism depends on activating traumatic stress responses in order to keep the system functioning.

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[American Dream]

The Boodle Boys

RA Kris Millegan

________________________________________________

The Charmer, China Trade Clipper Ship launched 1854


The Charmer was built in Newburyport, Massachusetts by Geo. W. Jackman for Bush & Wildes of Boston.

Hon’ble John’s Band
"When we sold the Heathen nations rum and opium in rolls,
And the Missionaries went along to save their sinful souls."
The Old Clipper Days
--Julian S. Cutler


Col. WH Russell in his later years

William H. Russell (Skull &Bones; co-founder-1833) cousin Samuel Russell formally established Russell & Co. on January 1, 1824 for the purpose of acquiring opium and smuggling it to China. Russell & Co. merged with the number one US trader, the J. & T.H. Perkins "Boston Concern" in 1829. By the mid-1830s the opium trade had become "the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in the world." Russell & Co. and the Scotch firm Jardine-Matheson, then the world's largest opium dealer working together were known as the "Combination." George HW Bush (S&B 1948) was born in Milton, Massachusetts not far from the historic home of Robert Bennett Forbes, a Russell partner. Many great American, European and Chinese family fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade. Yes, they sold porcelain, tea, silks and other items at home in the US, but they "needed" the trade in opium for silver to pay for the desired goods and—opium smuggling returned "handsome" profits


Samuel Russell of Middleton, Connecticut

Opium smuggling didn’t just make money. At times, opium was money. Opium built empires and had a hand in financing much of the world’s infrastructure.


Wrapper for opium packet. Singapore c.1920



From Carl A Trocki’s excellent book, Opium, Empire and the Global Economy(1999):

"The trade in such drugs usually results in some form of monopoly which not only centralizes the drug traffic, but also restructures much of the affiliated social and economic terrain in the process. In particular two major effects are the creation of mass markets and the generation of enormous, in fact unprecedented, cash flows. The existence of monopoly results in the concentrated accumulation of vast pools of wealth. The accumulations of wealth created by a succession of historic drug trades have been among the primary foundations of global capitalism and the modern nation-state itself. Indeed, it may be argued that the entire rise of the west, from 1500 to 1900, depended on a series of drug trades."
<>
". . . the image of the "opium empire," a metaphor first offered by Joseph Conrad. It takes up the early history of opium and other "traditional drugs" such as tobacco and sugar and develops the paradigm of commercialized drug trades and ties that to the growth of European colonialism in the Americas and Asia . . ."
<>
". . . links between drug trades, European colonial expansion, the creation of the global capitalist system and the creation of the modern state. Drug trades destabilized existing societies not merely because they destroyed individual human beings but also, and perhaps more importantly, because they have the power to undercut the existing political economy of any state. They have created new forms of capital; and they have redistributed wealth in radically new ways."
<>
"Opium thus created a succession of new political and economic orders in Asia during the past two centuries. These included the state of the East India Company itself, the new Malay polities of island Southeast Asia, the colonial states of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia and the warlord regimes of post-Qing China as well as the Guomindang and communist states that arose out of that milieu. At the same time, the economies of the entire region were radically reoriented, or perhaps "re-occidented" would be a more appropriate word. India's opium production was brought under western control while China's domestic economy was opened to the west. Southeast Asia was first opened to western traders and then to western control. With the migration of Chinese labor, Southeast Asian economies were transformed into commodity-producing regimes focused on exporting to the industrializing western Powers. Underlying all of this, opium rearranged the domestic economies and pushed them down the path of mass consumption, which together with mass production, typified the "modern" economic order.

It is possible to suggest a hypothesis that mass consumption, as it exists in modern society, began with drug addiction. And, beyond that, addiction began with a drug-as-commodity. Something was necessary to prime the pump, as it were, to initiate the cycles of production, consumption and accumulation that we identify with capitalism. Opium was the catalyst of the consumer market, the money economy and even of capitalist production itself in nineteenth-century Asia.
<>
Opium was the tool of the capitalist classes in transforming the peasantry and in monetizing their subsistence lifestyles. Opium created pools of capital and fed the institutions that accumulated it: the banking and financial systems, the insurance systems and the transportation and information infrastructures. Those structures and that economy have, in large part, been inherited by the successor nations of the region today."


One might say, whomever controls opium—controls . . .

And it is especially profitable when its illegal, plus the corrupting side-effects that can be "played" towards . . .





(Continues at: http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boddlesboys2.html )

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

(Cross-posting to the Theophobia thread)

Forget Shorter Showers

Why personal change does not equal political change

by Derrick Jensen
Published in the July/August 2009 issue of Orion magazine



WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

[American Dream]

Changing Images of Man



You already know that I'm a big fan of information absorption from the Rand archives. Well let me introduce you to another one of my favorite watering holes of elite thought exteriorization. Always mindful of what that Northern Cali bunch have been up to, I must say that these folks have had an amazing history and they have a very large footprint indeed.

Changing Images of Man predicts an American economic collapse and a "garrison" (police) state," if the overwhelming inequities of our economic system are not corrected by powerful multinationals making more humane decisions. Alternatives to this doomsday scenario are discussed, all of which point to the need to devote all available resources towards transforming the image of man, changing man's nature, instead of altering the corrupted economic system which has brought America to this dire state. In this government study it was inappropriate to denounce the evil culprits behind all our troubles (who pull the strings on government itself), even though the task was to document and remedy the damage that they have done. Instead, they are cited as the hopeful "saviors," that we should look to for help and leadership. The hypocrisy of the hegemons! The authors admit that it is "utopian in 1974 to think of the multinational corporations as potentially among our most effective mechanisms for husbanding the earth's resources and optimizing their use for human benefit -- the current popular image of the corporation tends to be more that of the spoiler and the exploiter."

Instead of charging the people who are responsible for our situation, for manipulating our economy and our democracy to maximize their profits, the multi-national corporations and their owners were exalted as the potential saviors of mankind. The elite have consistently taken steps to dominate the world by controlling people through "humanitarian" projects which, in the end, turn out to be profit mechanisms. The "green revolution" to spread corporate farming to the Third World has been the key to globalization's destabilizing of world labor markets, in order to create populations of "refugee workers," who are willing to go anywhere to find work for slave wages. This is the cause of the wave of illegal immigration into the US from Mexico. This is part of the proof that there are powerful individuals who are using their economic power to undermine nations in a long-term scheme to gain control of nations and multiply their profits.

http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2007/12/changing-images-of-man.html

Willis Harman led one hell of an interesting life. He was born in 1918 and joined the Navy after high school -- a position that landed him on board the USS Maryland on December 7, 1941 during the Pearl Harbor attack. He survived the experience and went on to become one of the most influential unknown intellects of the past century. Of course, the reason we're discussing him at all is because he co-authored "Changing Images of Man" in 1974 -- but there's a great deal more going on in Willis Harman's unified field.

Although "Changing Images of Man" is, as a document, shockingly frank about social control and the use of science to enslave the masses, it's also a truly great book. On one hand, it's discussion of manipulating social trends and "counterculture" movements as a means of control is disturbing -- but on the other hand, all of the observations and theory discussed in the book really will make you a smarter person. The quality and level of analysis in Changing Images is the real reason we recommend it so often -- the "revelations of conspiracy" angle actually pales in comparison....but don't forget that angle is there, either.

The history of social control is full of sick monsters like Paul Hoch, Josef Mengele or Jose Delgado -- none of them are nearly as interesting or intelligent as Willis Harman...

http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/get_familiar_with_willis_harman/




The full report is viewable here: http://technoccult.net/library/changing-images.pdf

[American Dream]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 1682.story

Highway robbery? Texas police seize black motorists' cash, cars

Suit says cops force motorists, largely black, to forfeit cash and cars—or be charged with trumped-up crimes


A Texas senator aims to rein in search-and-seizure practices like those used in Tenaha, where scores have been targeted but never charged with any crime. (San Antonio Express-News photo by Lisa Sandberg / February 6, 2009)

By Howard Witt
Tribune correspondent
March 10, 2009

TENAHA, Texas— You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled highway connecting Houston with popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking and call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the town of 1,046 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this to raise money. That's all I'm going to say at this point."

But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else: highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent, aimed primarily at blacks who have done nothing wrong.

Tenaha officials "have developed an illegal 'stop and seize' practice of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching and often seizing property from apparently non-white citizens and those traveling with non-white citizens," asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.

The property seizures are not just happening in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Hispanics allege that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent state legislator, police agencies across Texas are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

"If used properly, it's a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime doesn't pay," said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."

David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly—and discovered all but one of them were black.

"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans," Guillory said. "None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable."

In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it—such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.

Once the motorists were detained, the police and the local Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering—and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions to contest the charges.

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to describe the property being seized.

Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children—a mixed-race family—were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in east Texas in April 2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they were driving in a left-turn lane.

After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said was a gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking marijuana. Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the police seized $6,037 that Boatright said the family was carrying to purchase a used car—and then threatened to turn their children, ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn't agree to sign over their right to their cash.

"It was give them the money or they were taking our kids," Boatright said. "They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we better give them our cash and get the hell out of there."

Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an attorney, Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no explanation or apology. The couple remain plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.

Except for Tenaha's mayor, none of the defendants in the lawsuit, including Shelby County District Atty. Linda Russell and two Tenaha police officers, responded to requests from the Tribune for comment about their search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined to comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

But Whitmire says he doesn't need to await the suit's outcome to try to fix what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday he introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would require police to go before a judge before attempting to seize property under the asset-forfeiture law—and ultimately Whitmire hopes to tighten the law further so that law-enforcement officials will be allowed to seize property only after a suspect is charged and convicted in a court.

"The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the profits of a bad guy's crime spree and use it for additional crime-fighting," Whitmire said. "Now it's largely being used to pay police salaries—and it's being abused because you don't even have to be a bad guy to lose your property."

[American Dream]

http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/oriente/hatuey.htm

The Legend of Hatuey





In 1511, Diego Velásquez sailed from Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic) to conquer and colonize Cuba. Among his soldiers in that expedition was Hernán Cortés, who later conquered Mexico. When he arrived in Cuba, Velásquez founded the island’s first Spanish settlement at Baracoa.

Meanwhile, reports from the Indians of Hispaniola reached Cuba. Hatuey, a Taíno chief, had escaped in canoes with about four-hundred men, women and children, to warn the Cubans about what to expect from the Spaniards. He explained the need to join against their common enemy, the white men who had inflicted so much suffering on his people.

As later recorded by Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, Hatuey showed the Cubans a basket full of gold and jewels. “Here is the God the Spaniards worship,” he said, “for these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea…

“They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break…”

The Taínos of western and central Cuba could not believe the horrendous message brought by Hatuey, and few joined him.

Hatuey’s strategy against the Spaniards was to attack, guerilla fashion, and then disperse to the hills, where the Indians would regroup for the next attack. For about three months Hatuey’s tactics kept the Spaniards on the defensive, afraid to leave their fort at Baracoa.

Through a traitor, Velásquez was able to surround and capture Hatuey. On February 2, 1512, Hatuey was tied to a stake at the Spanish camp, where he was burned alive. Just before lighting the fire, a priest offered him spiritual comfort, showing him the cross and asking him to accept Jesus and go to heaven. “Are there people like you in heaven?” he asked. “There are many like me in heaven,” answered the priest. Hatuey answered that he wanted nothing to do with a God that would allow such cruelty to be unleashed in his name.

De Las Casas describes the fate of the Taínos. A village of about twenty-five hundred who welcomed the Spaniards, fed them and gave them drink, was immediately wiped out once the feast was over, “they set upon the Indians,” he wrote, “slashing, disemboweling and slaughtering them until their blood ran like a river.”

Of those sent to the mines, he said, the Spaniards “required of them tasks utterly beyond their strength, bending them to the earth with crushing burdens, harnessing them to loads which they could not drag, and with fiendish sport and mockery, hacking off their hands and feet, and mutilating their bodies in ways which will not bear description.”

Aside from being one of the first guerilla-style warriors in Cuba’s history, Hatuey is the first martyr in the struggle for Cuban independence.

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine09262003.html

September 26, 2003

Gold Warriors

The Plundering of Asia

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Gold Warriors is more than a book about Japan's "serious, sober and deliberate" plundering of Asia's treasure from 1895 until 1945, and its collusion after the war with American officials to recover and use the loot as a secret political action slush fund to promote right wing regimes: Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold is a journey into the darkest recesses of history and the human soul. Authors Peggy and Sterling Seagrave not only unravel one of the greatest crimes and cover-ups ever, they reveal something new and startling about the depths of human depravity and barbarity, and the human capacity for deceit.

The book begins in 1895 with a fascinating account of the grisly assassination of Korea's Queen Min by terrorists posing as business agents of Japanese companies. The clever coup d'etat provides Japan with official deniability, and the confusion that follows provides the Japanese with a pretext for its military occupation and plundering of Korea. Japan's brutal conquest of Korea foretells how it will achieve one victory after another in Far East Asia over the ensuing 45 years.

The next victory occurs in 1904, when tiny Japan defeats Russia and annexes Southern Manchuria. Manchuria, unlike Korea, has little gold worth stealing. But it is rich in natural resources, so the Japanese settle in for the long haul, and slowly develop Manchuria over several decades. They build roads and create industries and, more importantly, they work with corrupt warlords and Chinese gangsters associated with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Party to transform Manchuria into a vast poppy field. By 1937 the Japanese and their gangster and Kuomintang associates are responsible for 90% of the world's illicit narcotics. They turn Manchu emperor Pu Yi into an addict, and open thousands of opium dens as a way of suppressing the Chinese. When subversion and propaganda don't get the job done they commit unspeakable atrocities. In late 1937 and early 1938 the Japanese slaughter an estimated 350,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in Nanking. Tens of thousands of women and girls are raped, and many are mutilated or murdered. Nanking foretells what will happen as Japan expands its empire to include Indochina, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

It's also with the Rape of Nanking that the authors introduce the main characters in the book; the Japanese soldiers, crime lords, and officials who, by the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, realize they have bitten off more than they chew, and begin their retreat to Japan. A small inner circle becomes responsible for securing billions of dollars worth of gold, platinum, cultural artifacts and precious gems stolen over the previous 45 years. The Japanese call this operation Golden Lily, and the Seagraves do not shy away from naming those involved. They finger General Doihara, and Japan's top yakuza gangster, Kodama Yoshio, both of whom worked closely with Chinese drug smugglers in Manchuria and Shanghai. Golden Lily's overall boss is Prince Chichibu, one of Emperor Hirohito's three brothers. The Kempeitai were Golden Lily's first agents, moving 6000 metric tons of gold from Nanking to Japan in 1938. But most of the Golden Lily treasure was buried in the Philippines by General Yamashita, and it is in the Philippines that most of the action in the book takes place.

When the Seagraves claim that their lives are in danger for having written this book, they aren't kidding. This is explosive material, for they not only name the Japanese involved in Golden Lily, they name the Japanese corporations, including Nissan, Mitsui (which processed Manchurian opium into heroin in the 1930s), Mitsubishi and Sumitomo as having used American POWs as slave laborers during the war. They also name the Americans who worked with the Japanese to recover the buried loot after World War II. The Japanese had no monopoly on deceit or disregard for human suffering, and some of these Americans conspired with the Japanese to deny reparations to the POWs, sex slaves and forced laborers that survived.

The reader will learn how, in order to share in the plunder, members of General Douglas MacArthur's occupation army, along with US government officials and banks, connived to absolve Japanese corporations, war criminals and drug smugglers many prominent officials in the Post War government of responsibility for these ghastly crimes. How the Americans went about this is very interesting. To ensure his silence, General Yamashita was hanged by a military tribunal in February 1946, while his right hand man, Kojima, was tortured by a Filipino, Santa Romana, into revealing where the treasure vaults were buried in the Philippines. Romana then guided CIA officer Edward Lansdale to the loot. Lansdale did a quick inventory, and for the next 20 years supervised Romana, the unlikely front man for a number of slush funds. Thereafter the purloined gold was moved through 176 accounts in 42 banks in several countries, to people and organizations the CIA wanted to secretly support.

The Americans viewed this money as a War prize, and every American president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush has used the slush funds for various purposes. Truman, through a number of his top aides close to the Harrimans and the Rockefellers, set up the Black Eagle Trust Fund to fight communism. General MacArthur set up the Yotsuya Fund to finance Japan's yakuza underworld, and one of his aides set up the M-Fund to help reconstruct Japan and turn it into an economic powerhouse. Eisenhower used the M-Fund to help create Japan's Liberal Democratic Party in 1956, and in 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon turned over M-Fund over to Japan's Prime Minister, Kishi Nobosuke, in return for kickbacks Nixon used to help finance his presidential campaign. Carter, Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes were complicit, using Golden Lily slush fund money to buy elections in nations all around the world. George W. got into the act in March 2001, sending Navy SEAL commandos to the Philippines to recover a portion of General Yamashita's gold. Bush was privately in the market to buy some of the bullion that was being recovered. His representative was William S. Parish, his nominee as ambassador to Great Britain, and the manager of his blind trust

Most of the action in the book takes place in the Philippines, where the Japanese buried much of the Golden Lily loot in 175 vaults in and around Manila. Prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi (using the nomme de guerre, Kimsu) was in charge in Northern Luzon and gave maps to his Filipino aid, Ben, indicating where the vaults were located. Kimsu swore Ben to secrecy, but gradually the maps slipped out and in 1971, a treasure hunter named Roxas unearthed several gold bars and a Golden Buddha that, amazingly, weighed a ton. Word of the discovery reached Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and soon thereafter Roxas was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, and Marcos acquired the Golden Buddha. Marcos, notably, had been working with the CIA for years using Golden Lily assets to bribe nations to support the Vietnam War. In return for services rendered, Marcos was allowed to sell over $1 trillion in gold through Australian brokers.

By the 1970s, rumors about General Yamashita's gold had grabbed the imagination of a number on treasure hunters and in 1975, Robert Curtis acquired copies of Kimsu's maps. Financed by far right wing John Birch Society, and working with cutthroat Ferdinand Marcos, Curtis joined with Ben and Japan's Lord Ichiwara to find the remainder of the loot. Alas, the partners were mutually untrustworthy and Curtis, like Roxas, ran into trouble. But the dangers of hunting for buried Japanese gold in the Philippines did not dissuade others, and in the mid-1980s a group of disgruntled former CIA officers and military men, including Generals John Singlaub and Robert Schweitzer, organized an expedition using former Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces personnel. One member of the team, Charles McDougald, actually recovered 325 metric tons of gold in 1987, although, as one might suspect, he found himself in trouble too.

The Seagraves conclude their exciting and excellent book by taking us down the Money Trail, and explaining, in layman's terms, how the Gold Warriors have been able to cover their tracks. Emperor Hirohito, for example, worked directly with Pope Pius XII to launder money through the Vatican bank. In another instance, Japan's Ministry of Finance produced gold certificates that were slightly different than ordinary Japanese bonds. The Seagraves interview persons defrauded in this scam, and other scams involving the Union Bank of Switzerland and Citibank.

Without descending into convoluted legalese, the Seagraves describe the devious means bankers have used to conceal the vast hordes of Nazi and Japanese gold in their possession. The Seagraves do this primarily by examining multi-million-dollar lawsuits filed by Roxas, Curtis, and Santa Romana's heirs against Citibank, the US government, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. In this way the Seagraves reveal how the banks use complex accounting methods, or claim that gold certificates are fake, or simply move gold to offshore accounts to conceal it. In every case the US government assists the banks by stonewalling, refusing to investigate, or ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests.

In one noteworthy case, attorney W.R. "Cotton" Jones walked into the Swiss Bank Corporation in New York City and asked the bank to authenticate a $25 million certificate of deposit issued by the Bank and bearing the Federal Reserve seal. Cotton was quickly arrested by the Secret Service and his certificates were confiscated. As Cotton rhetorically asks, how can a Swiss bank have a federal agency intervene on its behalf and confiscate personal possessions? What right does the Secret Service have to arrest, interrogate, intimidate, and threaten anyone on a Swiss bank's behalf, without due process of law?

The answer is obvious: the banks that maintain the US government's stolen gold are above the law, and if they stonewall long enough, anyone trying to sue them will eventually fade away. The Seagraves asked the Treasury Department, Defense Department, and the CIA for records on Yamashita's gold in 1987, but were told the records were exempt from release. During the 1990s, the records mysteriously went missing. Other records were destroyed in what the Seagraves caustically call "history laundering."

Throughout the book, the writing is descriptive and engaging. Having authored several books about the Far East, the Seagraves are experts in their field and their arguments are convincing. In fact, they have compiled so much supporting evidence that many of the documents are contained on companion CDs the reader can buy separately at the Seagraves' web site. There are two CDs, the first containing eleven files. This writer examined three of them on Lansdale, Kodama, and Golden Lily and found them utterly fascinating. The second CD contains 19 files, many concerning the various lawsuits the Seagraves have used as evidence to prove their case.

And they do more than prove their case. In the end, Gold Warriors transcends its subject matter, and its great triumph is that it tells us something new about the savage and avaricious side of human nature. The reader will walk away from this book astounded and outraged at the immensity of the fraudulent activities that the world's governments, banks, and spies are engaged in. Gold Warriors is chilling in its accumulation.

Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, and TDY. His fourth book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968, will be published in May 2004. His latest article, "Whose Homeland Security", appeared in the July 2003 issue of Penthouse Magazine.

For information about Mr. Valentine, and his books and articles, please visit his web sites at http://www.DouglasValentine.com and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine

[American Dream]

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DRUG WAR PRISONERS

[American Dream]

Free Speech For Sale


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Why does advertising use sex as an appeal to the consumer? The answer is simple: because it works. In advertising it is easy to get a man's attention by using women's bodies and associate getting the woman if he buys the product. It is playing on his instinctive rather than intellectual view of the world. The ad spends no time discussing her qualifications for sexual desire -- her mere existence is enough.




There are deeper, more subtle levels of influence that we rarely notice. Commercial and governmental powers are in each others pockets like no time before. Eleven corporations now control over 90% of all news media. Laws are tilted and public images are managed. These influences are built into our media, our news, our entertainment, advertising, in short, the daily fabric of life in America. And while there is perhaps no plot, no sinister plan to keep you from knowing the truth, the truth is: Most of what passes as news and information today is aimed at the "bottom line."

[American Dream]

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/87/relationships.html

Relationships

in Late Capitalism




It comes as no surprise that technology and consumerism have radically altered the way we interact with one another in the twilight of late capitalism. But as we crawl further down the rabbit hole toward our new reality, how exactly are we changing?

The breakdown of marriage and the implosion of the nuclear family throughout the 20th century led to the emancipation of the individual who – no longer trapped by tradition – was able to pursue a more liberated, modern approach to relationships, dating and sex.

This ongoing process of fragmentation – or rather, reorganization – recently entered a new stage: teens and twentysomethings have started to abandon dating altogether in favor of “hooking up.” Dating seems to have become too commitment-centric for modern youth. The freedom to have multiple partners rather than be tied down to one is more congruent with listing 600 people as “friends” on your Facebook profile.

While dating is on the decline, the use and acceptance of sex toys has risen sharply. Vibrator users, both men and women, are now in the majority. What was once a sign of sexual dysfunction and alienation can now be purchased at your local 7-Eleven – in the toothpaste aisle.


Japanese engineer Ta-Bo reads anime in the company of his many love dolls in his Tokyo apartment. Ta-Bo owns over a hundred love dolls,
all scattered around his apartment which he uses for sex and companionship. He claims that that unlike real women,
love dolls are low maintenance, do not nag, cost very little to please, and will never be unfaithful.


But perhaps the most telling indicator of how late capitalism is shaping human sexuality is found in the proliferation of next-generation sex dolls. Primarily produced by RealDoll (US) and HoneyDoll (Japan), these life-size, 100% silicone dolls are highly detailed, fully customizable and provide a physical experience that users find comparable to actual sex. Retailing at around $5,000, the dolls have been embraced by many single men not as only pleasurable sex toys but also as a viable alternative to human females.

In Japan HoneyDolls have become popular with single, middle-aged businessmen, who – due to long working hours and the inability to develop relationships with members of the fairer sex – find HoneyDolls provide a convenient replacement for female companionship. While the dolls are currently void of interactivity, HoneyDoll engineers are working on developing a stimulus-response system that will produce an orgasmic sound effect when you stroke the doll’s nipple “correctly.”

David Levy, former chess master, AI-engineer and author of Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, believes that these dolls will rapidly evolve into full-blown robots and that robot-human relationships will become technologically possible and socially acceptable within a mere 20 years.



Douglas Haddow

[Harvey]

Vibrator users, both men and women, are now in the majority. What was once a sign of sexual dysfunction and alienation can now be purchased at your local 7-Eleven – in the toothpaste aisle.

Seriously, don't mix vibrators and toothpaste. It's how I lost all my teeth.