Monday, September 29, 2008

Mr. X

That One Guy continues to be on vacation. This is the second of two guest columns. The guest writers were paid as much as I am to appear on here, which incidentally is the same as the amount you pay to read it. I have to say that, especially this time, so I'm not on the hook for royalties or any other trouble reprinting an article might cause. The following article, written by Carl Sagan, appears here as it was reproduced on Dr. Lester Grinspoon's Marijuana Uses website. Enjoy.


This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in these experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.



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Monday, September 15, 2008

Corporate Socialism: I can't compete in the free market, can I have some money?

Better late than never. That One Guy is on vacation. This is the first of two guest columns. The guest writers were paid as much as I am to appear on here, which incidentally is the same as the amount you pay to read it.

This piece was written by Rob, a close personal friend of mine. It appeared in his blog “Be A Producer” on Friday August 29, 2008. For the record, I agree with him, which is why I have reprinted this article here. And now...


When did all the capitalists become socialists? GM is telling the Congress that it is “deserving” of $50 billion in government backed loans so that they can retool to build more fuel-efficient cars. They are pushing Congress to appropriate $3.75 billion to back the $25 billion in loans authorized last year. And now they want double that amount, citing the sudden jump in consumer demand for fuel efficiency.

Their problem is that the plants they currently own are too weighted towards large truck and SUV production, while demand is for smaller cars and crossover vehicles. Guess what guys, it’s called the free market. Adapt or die. There’s a reason why they can’t get a loan on their own: no investor wants to loan them all that money just to watch them go bankrupt.

The American auto industry is not deserving of government loan guarantees any more than any other industry that made such bad strategic blunders as GM and Ford have over the past decades. They put all their eggs in the gas-guzzler basket, despite having made exactly the same mistake in the 1970s.

If we, as a country, truly believe in capitalism, we let them go broke so other companies can thrive. However, if we believe in using tax money to prop up failing businesses, then we believe in corporate socialism. I’ll reiterate what I’ve said in previous posts; America is currently socialist when it comes to corporate losses and citizen profits, but it’s capitalist when it comes to corporate profits and citizen losses.

These handouts, bailouts, and tax breaks are distorting businesses and wealth in America. Companies used to have to take risks and build sustainable business models. Now they can pursue whatever stupid, short-term venture they wish since any loss they take will be buffered, if not completely covered, by taxpayers. This is why “too big to fail” is a reprehensible precedent to set. It would be ridiculous to do this for small or medium sized businesses. If your business cannot turn a profit, you lose. Start over, try again. It’s evolution, baby.

Let GM fail. It’s for the best. I know it hurts in the short term, but it is necessary for our country to move forward. I understand that this will put autoworkers out of work. It’s not just GM’s corporate executives that are pushing for this bailout, it’s also the United Automobile Workers union. Of course, Michigan’s lawmakers are all fully supportive of this bailout. And I’m guessing that Congress will eventually bend over and let them have all the money they ask for. It’s a hard coalition to beat with big-business-welfare Republicans and pro-union Democrats uniting to push this rape of the American taxpayer through congress.

I like GM. They have provided millions of jobs throughout the world for people. They are a big part of American culture. But they are also the guys who showed us what planned obsolescence really means. Years of building shitty cars across all their makes and lack of vision for more than a fiscal quarter ahead are inexcusable. If GM fails, it's because they don't understand how to run a business or build quality cars. No one in their right mind should give them a loan, and that includes the American taxpayers. The corporate executives who led the company to this point, and who are paid and compensated at order’s of magnitude more than their employees, need to admit their failings.

The falloff in truck sales has been devastating to the Detroit automakers because those vehicles historically have generated the most profit. GM’s vice chairman, Robert Lutz, on how to deal with the loss of profits from truck sales, said small cars would become considerably more expensive, filling some of the void created by the evaporation of big profits from trucks. I’m guessing that Honda or Toyota won’t be matching this increase in the price of their small cars. This means that GM’s small car will cost more, and since they are already seen as lower quality than the Asian automakers’, sales will drop to near zero. Sounds like a great idea. Here take this huge, taxpayer-backed loan.


Be A Producer - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/

This Article - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/2008/08/corporate-socialism.html

Related Reading - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/2008/07/blog-post.html

Related Reading - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/2007/11/foggy-with-chance-of-economic-collapse.html

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Monday, September 1, 2008

All the President-Elect's Men

What defines a presidential candidate? I'm sure there are many answers to that question. It could be his campaign promises and his party platform. It could be his voting record as a senator or a representative, his resume (sure, and a Libertarian might get elected President in November!), or his position on gay marriage. In this upcoming election, abortion is a hot topic, as is the war in Iraq. Apparently, other important metrics for a presidential candidate include how he speaks to his young children, what drugs he's done in the last thirty years, and who he's slept with other than his wife.

Because I like to state my opinion as if it is fact (which it is in my world), I'm going to tell you that all of the above is a bunch of equine feces. The President is a figurehead, not unlike the Queen of England. Yes, his signature is what makes a bill into a law, but do you really think he walks into the Oval Office in the morning and looks at a bunch of bills and signs them? No. A whole office building full of people has looked at that bill and told him whether or not to sign it. It's a lot like the office of a consulting engineer. A field tech did all the field work, and a junior staff level person wrote the report. A drafter prepared all the figures. A secretary formatted and bound the report. The managing engineer, the one with the authority, read it, signed it, stamped it, and took the credit. That's what the President does too.

So, back to the first question here: What defines a presidential candidate? His advisers. The Vice Presidential nominee, the cabinet, the press secretary, and even the first lady. They make the policy. The President says it out loud. He's the signatory of record. As Scott McClellan pointed out in his book, the President makes the news, not his advisers. In the Bush Administration, there are some other news makers like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, to name a few, but that's the general idea.

Here's a question for you, as food for thought. How the hell are we supposed make an informed choice for our next President when all we know are the things in the first paragraph of this article and who the VP is going to be? Wouldn't it be nice to know who's actually going to be making the decisions around here, and choose based on that information? I don't give a damn if the President smoked weed, or even if he still does. I did. I do. I don't care who he's sleeping with. How is that any of my business? That's between the President, the first lady and their marriage counselor. And frankly, a potential President's view on the war in Iraq doesn't really matter either. Like I've said before, we're in Iraq to stay until we're in charge of the oil, whether you, I or the next President likes it or not. So in order to decide who I think should be the next President, I want to see a roster. Who's on the team?

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