facebook status updates, hostage edition
I’m currently in a standoff … kinda ugly, but ready for whatever.
I love u guyz and if I don’t make it out of here alive that I’m in a better place and u were all great friends.
Got a cute `Hostage’ huh
Well i was lettin this girl go but these dumb bastards made an attempt to come in after i told them not to, so i popped off a couple more shots and now were startin all over again it seems…
from the moderated comments
I watched the documentary on the Amish teens who visited Britain and I actually identified with the Amish girl and her thoughts. I was raised in So. Cal in the 60′s and though not from an overtly regligious family, I did not like way most teens acted, going after drugs and sex and dressing provocatively. I guess I was different in that I loved horses and art and was often teased by kids my age not acting like the majority (parties, dating, smoking pot, etc.) I wish more kids were raised to be self-sufficient and not just seek video games and pleasures. These young Amish were a real testimony for God.
headline of the day
Mexican police arrest drug boss “El Brad Pitt”
“I think my heart is more open to all interactions with other people,” one volunteer reported
Researchers at John Hopkins University School of Medicine have been studying the effects of psilocybin, a chemical found in some psychedelic mushrooms, that’s credited with inducing transcendental states. Now, they say, they’ve zeroed in on the perfect dosage level to produce transformative mystical and spiritual experiences that offer long-lasting life-changing benefits, while carrying little risk of negative reactions.
Looks like this may finally be gaining traction.
headline of the day, IV
David Simon Agrees to Make Sixth Season of ‘The Wire’ If U.S. Agrees to End War on Drugs
from the comments
The funny thing is, honest to god, I did think it was a documentary about the Census Bureau. I was 21 and naive and they’d only told me the title. Scott and Mark liked to put me in situations and watch. Like the time they gave me poppers. Like the times they took me dancing at the gay disco. Like the night they got me drunk for the first time in my life and I started re-arranging the paintings on the wall of a restaurant. Stuff like that.
Frijoles
It was the photo of a friend’s pot of weekend frijoles that called this to mind, and now I want to tell a story.
It’s a Texas gubernatorial anecdote. Could well be spurious, but even if so, it’s true. In the early 1970s, a white man named Preston Smith was governor of Texas. And there was this Texas member of the Black Panthers named Lee Otis Johnson, who got 30 years for possession of one joint. And then there was this one day (probably one of many) when people were demonstrating outside the Governor’s Mansion or the Capitol. And Preston Smith is said to have asked, “Why are those people hollering for beans?”
They were chanting, “Free Lee Otis! Free Lee Otis!”
Dallas
Carrollton man crashes, undresses, dies in second of two accidents in Far North Dallas
Man found dead in South Dallas pond after using drugs, talking about walking on water
(thanks, Patrick)
so certain was he of his fate that, when he heard someone breaking in, he got out of bed, went to his window and yelled, “I’m coming!”
The subtext of this longish analysis of the interplay of Mexico’s political system and drug cartels is the relationship all of it has with the United States.
It was also during the Fox administration that the US ban on assault weapons expired. Beginning in 2004, high-powered firearms could once again be purchased easily in states like Texas and Arizona, transported with little effort across the porous border and sold at inflated prices to criminals in Mexico. Not surprisingly, organized crime groups were soon running the North-to-South weapons trade as well. The Mexican government says that in the past four years it has recovered 60,000 guns traceable to dealers in the United States.
In the futile scenario of whack-a-mole that is the history of US counternarcotics efforts, the Gulf Cartel’s breakthrough came in the late 1980s, when a massive crackdown by the US government on drugs flowing through Miami led Colombian cartels to reroute much of the cocaine trade through Mexico. The Gulf Cartel emerged as one of the key middlemen between Colombian producers and American buyers, and it came to dominate the trafficking route in the three states along Mexico’s eastern border with the United States: Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Nuevo León.
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
‘Grob’s research supports an earlier study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins that found that 60 percent of subjects who took psilocybin in a controlled experiment later called the experience one of the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives’
Another example in the growing body of literature on hallucinogens and the alleviation of psychological trauma:
Grob distinguished between psilocybin and standard issue antidepressants, which he said tend to dampen or suppress psychological problems without necessarily curing them. “The response rates among people with terminal cancer to conventional medications that target symptoms of anxiety and depression are not that impressive,” he said. “Psilocybin is an entirely different mechanism. It has the potential to facilitate what’s been called a psycho-spiritual epiphany.
“And it’s important to emphasize that psilocybin may only need to be administered once within the context of ongoing psychotherapy, whereas conventional medications are generally used daily for weeks, months, even years.”
Previously, on clusterflock:
Psilocybin
ibogaine for drug addiction
“It can be painful, and you can suffer, but it can also be intensely beautiful and enlightening beyond words”
if/then
Dads: The Original Hipsters
tweet of the day
headline of the day, II
54 Bags of Heroin, Pills & Loose Change Found in Woman’s Vagina
from the comments
I meant to tell you that one of the people I work with at the LGBT archives was a visual merchandiser in New York in the 70s for Macy’s I think. He said they would just get incredibly high and play dress up with the dolls, run around the store and cause trouble, giggling and giggling. He said they broke a window once and he got a Harley Davidson and made it look like it was flying out of the window but security made him take it down after about a week.
You are listening to Los Angeles
Okay. My 24/7 soundtrack. Ambient music and live LAPD police radio.
(Thank you, Mr. Ledgerwood.)
Historic Property for Sale
Old Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas.
Ten-plus bedrooms. Seven-plus bathrooms. Twenty-five thousand square feet.Three-plus acres.
Kinda pricey for the likes of us, though. Listed at $975K.
But maybe we could bargain ‘em down. The seller is described as “very motivated.”
Oh, and there’s this: “The fort sits on the banks of the Rio Grande River across from Ciudad Juarez.”
Spelled Cuidad Juarez in the listing. Indeed.
if/then
Supporters of legalized MDMA therapy believe it can be applied in couples counseling and in treatment for depression, body-image disorders, chronic pain management, and end-of-life anxiety. But many advocates think its best chance at mainstream acceptance is as a tool for people with PTSD. Later this year, Michael Mithoefer, MD, a psychiatrist in Charleston, South Carolina, will publish the long-term follow-up results of the small pilot study that Sarah first heard about six years ago. The outcome: Seventeen of 20 subjects no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD after just two or three sessions of MDMA-aided therapy led by Mithoefer and his wife, Ann, a psychiatric nurse.
“With MDMA, you not only see your fear but trust yourself to go past it,” says Marcela Ot’alora, 52, a Colorado therapist who took MDMA under a psychologist’s care in 1984 to treat PTSD stemming from an abusive relationship. “It shows you how to be kinder to yourself, and how much you’re capable of. It allows you access to a place in your mind that’s compassionate and full of love. You might have abandoned that place, but it never abandoned you.”
I was just wondering the . . . how much
“I was just growing some marijuana, and I was just wondering the… how much, you know, trouble you can get into for one plant,” Robert Michelson said in a 911 call.
“You’re growing marijuana,” the operator said, puzzled. “It depends how big the plant is.”
“It’s only a seedling,” Michelson replied.
The operator informed Michelson he could be charged for possession for having even a small amount of marijuana.
“All right. Thanks for the info,” he said, and then hung up.
Nurse Jackie
We’ve been watching the first season of Nurse Jackie. You can find out about the series here. It is streaming on Amazon’s video on demand.
headline of the day, II
Ga. Lawmaker Proposes Doing Away With Driver’s Licenses
Overcoming the Border Fence
We solved that problem during the Bronze Age:
On Friday evening, National Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system at the Naco Border Patrol Station observed several people south of the International Boundary Fence preparing a catapult and launching packages over the International Border fence, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Border Patrol agents working with the National Guard contacted Mexican authorities, who went to the location and disrupted the catapult operation. The camera showed the individuals fleeing the area before they could be intercepted by Mexican authorities.
The Mexican officials seized about 45 pounds of marijuana, a sport utility vehicle, and the catapult device.
That’s what happens when you draft your drug runners from Darkon.
“It can be painful, and you can suffer, but it can also be intensely beautiful and enlightening beyond words”
I fidget uncertainly. After 20 minutes, I wonder if we got a bad batch. And then I realize that I’m seeing Cairuna’s songs: an indigo line quivers in front of me in sync with the pace and pitch of his singing. I watch, fascinated, and fixate on what I see and hear. Another 20 minutes later, I can’t open my mouth to speak, nor can I stand. I close my eyes to dull the panic and see fragments of memories as if on old film reels, which I watch for nearly an hour. Most of them involve events I haven’t thought of in years. When I open my eyes, I see a bear walk into the room on its hind legs and sit next to me. I know there is no bear, yet I perceive the heat radiating off its body. Focusing on Cairuna’s singing, I try to relax. The bear leaves and I feel somewhat victorious, though I don’t know why.
headline of the day, IV
Officials fear bath salts are growing drug problem
Lance Armstrong does drugs.
via Bike Snob NYC
