I dug up a old book of mine “Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories. Mostly by Robert Anton Wilson”, 1994 ISBN 1-886404-00-3. A collection of some of the newsletters that Robert Anton Wilson and his wife used to send out.

First a letter about Vitamin C. The viewpoints expressed here I have only recently understood and are obviously “out there” in the populace. They are not the sole reserve of “quacks” like Dr Rath … far from it.

More on Vitamin C

Dear Editor:

Dr. Linus Pauling’s work on peace and Vitamin C may not
be so divergent as might be thought. Vitamin C has so many
functions in the metabolic factory of the body that to live
without almost surplus amounts of it is to live with a body that
is ill, in almost as many ways as are possible. Every major
organ system is serviced by Vitamin C, including the nervous
system and the brain, and it is little wonder that tension,
irritability, low frustration tolerance, poor impulse control and
madness in many forms and degrees can and do result from
insuiiicient amounts of C.

Dr. Irvine Stone, a long time friend of Dr. Pauling and
author of The Healing Factor: Vitamin C Against Disease,
believed that almost all humans were suffering from
“hypoascorbemia” (lack of suficient Vitamin C) and that many
of mankind’s chronic ills were caused by this condition. In my
own experience as an orthomolecular psychiatrist, almost all of
my depressed and angry patients benefited to some degree by
so-called “mega” doses of Vitamin C. This is not to say that
Vitamin C is a cure-all, and by itself it doesn’t usually cure
depression, but as an adjunct it is indispensable.

A warring world is not reflecting the well-being of healthy
citizens; rather, the pathology of the citizens is manifesting
through war. People are manipulated through their fear and
tension into bellicose anger by leaders who are themselves
driven by fear or greed or both.

Frequently the medical profession assists in this scenario
via monopolized support for medical mystification, thereby
perpetuating everybody’s fear and sense of helplessness, and it
may have been this attitude which has made Dr. Pauling
“controversial” rather than being lauded for the truly great man
that he is.

Robert R. Newport, MD

Santa Cruz, CA

( Chapter 2, page 25 )

Here is some more …

1994 Update

The dispute over Vitamin C (and other non-allopathic herbs,
vitamins and nutrients) has grown even more heated in recent
years.

In 1992, the FDA raided the office of Dr. Jonathan Wright-
a fully qualified MD with his degree from the University of
Michigan Medical School-and terrorized the staff with drawn
guns and other terror tactics similar to the Gestapo or the Drug
Enforcement Administration. (For further details on this raid,
see Trajectories #12, Spring 1993.) The FDA has not yet charged
Dr. Wright with any crime; his offense consists of using chiefly
non-allopathic methods in treating his patients. Dr. Wright,
however, has filed suit against them.

The FDA currently sponsors legislation that would permit
such raids, and suppress most “alternative medicine”-leaving
physicians like Dr. Wright unable to sue even in the most
terroristic raids, and depriving many of us of vitamins and
herbs that we believe have helped heal illnesses or prevented
illnesses before they start.

Opposing the FDA’s power-grab, Sen. Orrin Hatch has
sponsored Senate Bill S 784, which would prevent the FDA from
forcing one type of medical theory on the whole country. S 784
would guarantee in law our liberty to choose. You can add your
name to a nationwide petition supporting S 784 by writing to
Bonnie Miller, Box 528, Gainesville, VA 22065.

Meanwhile, the largest-ever study of Vitamin C, involving
11,348 men followed over a ten-year period concludes that “Men
whose Vitamin C intake was the highest…had a 42% lower risk
of death irom heart disease, and a 35% lower risk of death from
any cause.” (Epidemiology, Enstrom: 194-202, 1992.)
Under current FDA rules no manufacturer or seller of
Vitamin C may mention this study to a prospective customer-
but, amusingly, most history books still erroneously claim that
the Holy Inquisition ended in 1819.

Some paranoid persons of Left and Right claim to find
significance and complicity in the fact that the same few rich
men seem to serve part of their lives as officers of the FDA and
part as executives of the major pharmaceutical companies.
Often, these men switch back and forth several times between
selling expensive (and often dangerous) drugs for Eli Lilly and
its competitors, and policing and working toward a total ban on
cheap and totally harmless drugs for the FDA. We must not
think about this, of course, or we might become “paranoid” also.
Remember the magic banishing ritual: “Coincidence!
Coincidence! Coincidence!” Repeat this word often enough and
it banishes all data that makes you nervous…

Meanwhile, the Surgeon Genera1’s office reports for 1990,
the last year on which we have complete figures, that 360,000
Americans died from tobacco (a subject of no interest to
the FDA), 130,000 from alcohol (another unimportant subject)
and 18,675 from the hard prescription drugs approved by the
FDA. (A statistic you should forget as soon as possible unless
you want to get very, very nervous, and even a little paranoid,
yourself).

Deaths from Vitamin C that year total 0.00-zero, zed,
none-curious1y, the very same number as deaths from
marijuana, another drug from which our government wishes to
protect us…
(Surgeon General’s statistics quoted from Grey Areas, Fall
1992 and Southern New Jersey Libertarian, July 1993.)

( Chapter 2, page 26 )

From the disgusting corrupt power of the “Health Industry” – just the same as the Church in the middle ages masquerading under a “religious argument” while taking everything that their “flock” had to spare to finance their perversely rich lifestyles – we move to that other “debate” we have going about Global Warming. All I hear are linear arguments parroted by so many people … where are the truly interesting and well researched approaches … like this …

The Global Energy Grid:

1. Coming Soon?

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers will hold a
conference on Buckminster Fuller’s proposed Global Energy
Grid in Anchorage, Alaska, early next year, and Peter Meisen,
leading proponent of the Grid, has been invited by the Soviet
Union to discuss the Grid at their January conference on “The
New Relationship: Joint Projects for the Third Millennium.”
The ASME conference in Anchorage will include Americans,
Russians, Japanese and Europeans from both the areas of
science and finance, and probably represents the greatest single
step toward achieving the Global Energy Grid since Fuller first
proposed the idea in 1969.

Alaska has been chosen for the meeting because experts
agree that integrating the American / Canadian / Soviet electrical
networks across the Bering Straits seems the most logical first
step in constructing the World Grid.

The first inklings of the Grid came to Fuller in the 1920s,
when he observed that electrical networks were growing larger
at an accelerating rate. Calculating the growth factor, he
predicted that networks of 1,500 miles would appear by 1960.
(They actually appeared in 1961.) Fuller did not develop the idea
further until after the 1,500-mile networks existed, but then he
began envisioning a world electric network, and by 1969 had a
practical proposal he felt ready to talk about. (Bucky had an
almost religious aversion to proposing new technologies until he
had all the details clear in his head and could demonstrate their
working principles operationally-an inner discipline unknown
to the critics who liked to dismiss him as “Utopian”.)
Basically, Fu1ler’s World Grid envisions the hook-up of all
existing electrical networks into one synergetic system, as in the
map on the next page.

Dr. Fuller’s Dymaxion Map with global energy grid system
A dymaxion map has minimal land mass distortion
and displays the world not as a separate East-West world,
but as a connected North-South island.

In such a Grid, he realized, the normal peaks and valleys of
electrical usage (“peaks” in the daylight hours when most people
work; “valleys” at night) could average out to maximum cost-
effectiveness for each member nation-a massive win/win
situation. This would at least double the energy available to all
humans, thereby fulfilling his principle that Design Science
should “advantage all without disadvantaging any.”
In other words, a world-wide electric grid would allow poor
countries to sell electricity to rich countries during the night
and buy electricity during the day. Or it would allow any area
anywhere to sell electricity during any “valley” (period of low
usage) to any other area that suddenly required more kilowatts
than normal-any unexpected “peak.” The sociological and
ecological results that might result from this, as Fuller
calculated them, seemed so promising that he announced, “The
global grid is the World Game’s highest priority objective.”

In the 1970s, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
expressed keen interest in Fuller’s Grid, and the Soviet
Academy, after investigation, pronounced the idea “feasible and
desirable.” Fuller devoted his last years chiefly to publicizing
and popularizing the plan-an uphill battle in a world where
many literary intellectuals oppose all technology, and the “cold
war” made plans for global cooperation seem unlikely to
succeed.

Peter Meisen, the organizer of GENI (Global Energy Network
International) and the man who will explain the Grid at the
Soviet “Joint Ventures” conference in January, has listed the
following advantages which Fuller expected to result from the
creation of the Grid:
1. Increasing everyone’s standard of living
2. Reducing fossil fuel demand and its resultant pollution
3. Relieving the population explosion
4. Reducing world hunger
5. Enhancing world trade
6. Promoting international cooperation and peace

The claim that the Grid will raise everyone’s standard of
living rests on the fact that as electrical networks have grown
larger, the average standard of living has improved measurably
in those parts of the world having such networks. Also, Fuller
and associates have shown that many chronic Third World
problems could vanish quickly if cheap energy becomes
available there, as will happen once the Grid exists.
The Grid will lower pollution levels for the following reasons:
a) We will need fewer new generating plants as areas buy
energy from adjoining areas;
b) Non-polluting energy sources, such as solar collectors
and windmills, can easily join the Grid
c) Some ecologically dangerous practices might cease-for
example, the Brazilians might cut down less forest to pay their
national debt if they can make more money selling electricity to
other members of the Grid.

The Grid will lower world population, Fuller argued, because
population has consistently shown the same pattern: it
increases steadily in agricultural economies, and it stabilizes in
industrial and post-industrial economies. (His book, Critical
Path, contains graphs showing birthrate and kilowatt hours
generated in various nations, illustrating his point: as energy
increases, birthrate always drops.) It appears that under-
developed countries overbreed because so many children die in
infancy there. (Also, industrialism always brings an upsurge of
Feminism, as documented in my GAIA articles in issues #4 and
5 of Trajectories; and Feminism always gives women a greater
sense of multiple options.)

The Grid will reduce world hunger, Fuller argued, because
of its effect on lowering population as discussed above and also
because industrialized nations do not have the massive
resource problems faced by agricultural nations.
The Grid will enhance world trade because it creates a
model of non-zero-sum or win/win economics, in contrast to
our traditional zero-sum win/lose models-models created in an
age of scarcity and surviving in an age of abundance only due to
inertia, ignorance and greed.
(For further details on win / win economics, the reader
should consult Fuller’s books and also the works of Hazel
Henderson and Barbara Marx Hubbard.)

Finally, the Grid will advance the cause of world peace by
demonstrating, on a global scale, that we will all profit more by
cooperation than we ever have from traditional imperialist
conflict and its ever-more-destructive wars. With benefits
reaped daily from the Global Grid it will not make sense for any
nation to blow up the other end of “their” energy system.
As Peter Meisen summarizes, “Electricity is the problem and
the solution.” Lack of electricity creates endless struggle
between “haves and have-nots”; adequacy of electricity will
creates a world of abundance.

Actually, the Global Energy Grid seems inevitable to many
who have studied Fuller’s proposal. As noted, networks have
steadily grown larger every decade, and 26 countries already
share grids that cross national boundaries. With the coming
unification of Europe in 1992, the thaw in the cold war, the
increasing exchange of electricity and gas between Europe and
Russia, and so on, the World Grid looks like a logical next step
and not the “Utopian dream” some called it when Fuller first
began promoting the idea 20 years ago.

( Chapter 6, pages 95-98 )

Where are these ideas ? I think that they are buried under social problems. Social anxieties and unfaced emotions. Those who challenge those blocks and make a fuss are perceived as “behaving strangely”. I believe that the Mental Health system *is* the Inquisition. We are dragging off and damaging beyond repair some of the most valuable members of our society. People who simply have some traumatic issue or are endowed with vision of things that many people “can’t see” and so regard as “mad”.

This is why I joined MindFreedom International. This is why I am starting a MindFreedom Contact Point in Lancaster.

( See Open Source Health for a previous post by me on this subject )

It took Linux, Hackers and the Open Source community a decade to make Open Source Software a legitimate and viable business practice as well as a design approach. The movement has been world changing and profound.

The last decade has seen the acceptance of those ideas by wider society outside of the area of networking and computers.

The Rath Foundation has a vision of “Health for all by 2020″ (please note, I am not a member of the Rath Foundation). How can that vision be achieved in the face of seemingly unmanageable financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry ? Open Source holds the answer. Open Source successfully faced down and won the battle against the Microsoft antitrust practices that are very similar to the practices used by the pharmaceutical industry to lock consumers into proprietary technology.

The Open Source approach is not applicable to all areas. For example a book or a piece of music with a bug in it; a spelling mistake, or a bad note … is not that much of a problem, and does not lend it’s self to the peer review by the thousands that built Linux and Open Source software. Books and music are also not critical activities. However a piece of software that has a bug, especially a serious one, can ruin a business or simply frustrate someone enough to the extent that they turn off their computer. There is another endeavour that is of this critical nature. In Health Care a mistake or “bug” in treatment can cause serious problems … even death. Treatments are peer reviewed at the moment to a certain extent. In “peer review” journals. But those journals often have a restricted readership and as a result current treatments are plagued with “bugs” … side effects. So Health Care is a number one candidate for the application of Open Source ideas. Having the “code” of treatment exposed to public view makes sense in the same way as it does in the software world. Problems can be fixed fast and efficiently. If a “bug” is discovered then having it exposed to as many people as possible is advantageous. At the moment this process is stymied by corporate interests who get bogged down in purely proprietary concerns often to their detriment, as we can see by looking at the regular payouts to those damaged by those treatments.

I do not take this idea lightly, and it did not come to me quickly but over many years of research. I have read the book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric S Raymond. It covers the period of the Open Source movement up to 1999. At the back of the book Raymond addresses the idea of applying Open Source ideas to other areas as you can read in the following extract.

~~~

THE CATHEDRAL AND THE BAZAAR

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

BEYOND SOFTWARE ?

The essays in this book were a beginning, but they are not an end.
There are many questions not yet resolved about open-source soft-
ware. And there are many questions about other kinds of creative
work and intellectual property that the open-source phenomenon
raises, but does not really suggest a good answer for.

I am often asked if I believe the open-source model can be use-
fully applied to other kinds of goods than software. Usually the
question is asked about music, or the content of some kinds of
books, or designs for computer and electronic hardware. Almost
as frequently I am asked whether I think the open-source model
has political implications.

I am not short of opinions about music, books, hardware, or poli-
tics. Some of those opinions do indeed touch on the ideas about
peer review, decentralization, and openness explored in this book;
the interested reader is welcome to visit my home site (ht1p://
www.tuxedo.org/~esr) and make his or her own deductions. How-
ever, I have deliberately avoided such speculation in connection
with my work as a theorist and ambassador of open source.

The principle is simple: one battle at a time. My tribe is waging a
struggle to raise the quality and reliability expectations of soft-
ware consumers and overturn the standard operating procedures
of the software industry. We face entrenched opposition with a lot
of money and mind-share and monopoly power. It’s not an easy
fight, but the logic and economics is clear; we can win and we will
win. If that is, we stay focused on that goal.

Staying focused on the goal involves not wandering down a lot of
beguiling byways. I often feel this needs emphasizing when I
address other hackers, because in the past our representatives have
shown a strong tendency to ideologize when they would have been
more effective sticking to relatively narrow, pragmatic arguments.
Yes, the success of open source does call into some question the
utility of command-and-control systems, of secrecy, of centraliza-
tion, and of certain kinds of intellectual property. It would be
almost disingenuous not to admit that it suggests (or at least har-
monizes well with) a broadly libertarian view of the proper rela-
tionship between individuals and institutions.

Having said these things, however, it seems to me for the present
more appropriate to try to avoid over-applying these ideas. A case
in point; music and most books are not like software, because they
don’t generally need to be debugged or maintained. Without that
requirement, the utility of peer review is much lower, and there-
fore, the rational incentives for some equivalent of open-sourcing
nearly vanish. I do not want to weaken the winning argument for
open-sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser.

I expect the open-source movement to have essentially won its
point about software within three to five years. Once that is
accomplished, and the results have been manifest for a while, they
will become part of the background culture of non-programmers.
At that point it will become more appropriate to try to leverage
open-source insights in wider domains.
In the meantime, even if we hackers are not making an ideologi-
cal noise about it, we will still be changing the world.

THE CATHEDRAL AND THE BAZAAR (1999), P.225

~~~

“I expect the open-source movement to have essentially won its
point about software within three to five years.”

That was written in 1999. It is now 2009. 2003 to 2005 saw the success of Linux and the first release of Ubuntu (in 2004) that has now clearly become, along with other versions of  Linux, a user friendly GUI interface for all sorts of different types of users. It has not usurped Windows but is a GUI driven OS in it’s own class. In fact it is set up to work with Windows not against it. Open Source has triumphed.

“Once that is accomplished, and the results have been manifest for a while”

Well, now it is 2009, a few years after that accomplishment in 2003 to 2005. Open Source has proved many times over that a “disorganised” group of people (often who don’t even know one another) can create wonders. Linux. Wikipedia. This is a revolution that is changing our world. To cap it all Open Source is also now an accepted business practice. Eric S Raymond met and conferenced with Wall Street and investment bankers about Open Source. Although libertarian, it is not an agenda to turn the world communist. It works with consumerism and capitalism rather than getting into conflict with them.

There is an important approach to be learnt here. Instead of fighting the Pharmaceutical companies we should be working on a new proven way of practicing Health Care that has a libertarian and a financial aspect to it. Then the investment interests that power Pharmaceutical companies can be courted in their own ball park. They don’t care if Pharma is unethical in the same way they are not concerned if the defense industry makes weapons that get used for nefarious purposes … they just want to make money; an unfortunate aspect of global capitalism that operates all around us. But that is how things are, for the moment at least. Why not court that to make the world a better place ? Just like Open Source has freed us from the Microsoft behemoth so can an “open Source” approach to Health Care free us from the financial interests in that arena. This is pragmatism. Why go on and on about lofty ideological goals that want to do away with those financial interests while there are people dying and suffering now ? Removing those interests is not going to happen, at least not any time soon. So why not take a pragmatic approach that helps as many people as possible as soon as possible ?

But it needs to be proved. Could Doctors and Hospitals run with close feedback from patients, staff, companies and the public ? There is a tacit assumption that it is only the Doctor who can understand a patients health. Yet Open Source depends on the amateur being involved for it to work. In the world of Natural Health care we see a system that is already somewhat like “Open Source” with non patented, non proprietary treatments. This is the case in India, and India recently moved to free those treatments from being patented – free from being made proprietary just like the standards that Microsoft used to patent and make obscure to lock people into their business model … before Open Source arrived.

But this is not an argument for making all Health Care “free” – free as in not paying for it. Much of it may be freely available just like a lot of software is. But in the Open Source world people live in the real world where there are financial interests who always want to elbow their way in. Why not give them a way to make money from Health Care that does not entangle them in expensive law suits and that makes Health Care safe for us as well as them ?

Barney Holmes, 2009

UPDATE (3rd June 09): Wonderful ! There is already a very similiar project called OpenSourceScience that is thinking along similair lines.

( Flickr )

Decks are in the house ! After a long absence a pair of decks have now been returned to me. What a relief.

Don’t say you weren’t warned because you were. Countless times.

So MP’s have been “revealed” as corrupt. Somehow this means we have “won” and Britain will now become the nation of perfect people that it’s always aimed to be.

Oh WAKE UP !

Poor people have known that there is rampant corruption for decades. But somehow it’s all been revealed in the last few weeks ! Ha, haaaaaaaaaa!

Don’t listen to them you idiots !

You are being taken for a ride.

The situation in this country is related to the one in Mexico. A “conquering” power elite who are 100% cock sure that they are in control. Manipulating people and public opinion is just a days work for them. They know people love stories about MP’s corruption so if that what it takes to hide the massive corruption going on in the background then that is what they use.

Believe me. This is MUCH bigger than a few MP’s expense accounts. If you believe all that then you WANT to live in a lie. A La La land. Well, good luck to you. I would not stop you from hiding and burying your head in the sand .. but ask yourself this … is today the day when you wake up ? Can you wake up ? Do your people and family need you today ? I’m not saying it would be easy but the rewards are great.

Massive Medicaid Fraud Exposed: PsychRights Calls on Members of Congress for Assistance

http://psychrights.org

More Massive Pharma Corruption Uncovered – NAMI – Drug Money Laundering is Illegal

It is they who are “mentally ill”, not us. Because they accept gross brutality as a form of treatment. They are incapable of seeing the glaring faults in their own procedures. They fail to treat people as people and listen to their problems.

No, it is not us that are “ill” …. it is those people who label healthy people as “bad”, just as the criminal labels his target with the label of victimhood.

Moreso as the links show above it is becoming clearer and clearer that these people are simply criminals. They are abusers and murders. Defrauders. Muggers and Predators preying on the weak. They have been playing a game that any criminal plays, of misdirection and deception. Anything to distract away from what they really are, and when they are finally caught they will still probably shuffle their feet and say thay have done nothing wrong. But that is the nature of criminality. See the work of “The Zero“, Andrew Vachss, attorney and novelist extraordinaire if you don’t know what I mean.