MKUltrée

Last week, the Telegraph circulated a story that really reignites all those old covert spook stories of secret US government experimentation.  Concensus is leaning more towards the CIA lacing grain with LSD to study its effects on a village, Pont-Saint-Esprit, in rural France one late summer day in 1951, rather than ergotism blamed on the village baker as was thought for decades.  The whole population suffered were plagued with violent hallucinations, and some did violence to themselves or were committed to mental institutions after the singular episode.  The public knows there is truth behind the CIA operations with those MK- designations.  France, however, has had its history of mania and mass-hysteria without US government interference.  In Strausbourg and then in Metz in the 1518, there were cases of seemingly enchanted dancers, where hundreds of people jived and gyrated until they collapsed from exhaustion.  The victims were compelled to keep moving against their will, and it was nothing like dated crazes like flag-pole sitting or crowding into phone booths or apparently spiking the grain supplies of other nations with mind-altering drugs

tiajuana

It is break week for my MBA programme, and I wonder what one does traditionally for spring break for an on-line course of study.  I understand the usual bastions of sophomoric excess in the States, Mexican border towns, have become far too dangerous, like tinderboxes tempting violence, ransom or murder for their US holiday-makers.  What surprised me most about this news item was not the spill over of drug violence, but that there is no limit for capacity to scare white people--I could not believe the xenophobia and frightful nationalism and ugly asides in the comment, buzzed-up section after the article.  Careless behavior should not invite violence, but peripheral violence should not justify reactionary fears and useless stereotypes.

urban legend

Slowly and without much notice, it is being revealed that the coalition of the willing fighting in Afghanistan have significantly inflated news of the taking of Marjah in Helmand Province, not a metropolitian stronghold of some 80 000 souls but rather a dusty little village with a mosque and a few shops.  This success was touted as a major turning point for the allies and was hoped to justify the prolonged effort.

what's up, buttercup?

To counter the general mood of the weather that's yet heavy and gray, H and I are trying to brighten up the place a bit with some flowers--actually, call them Narcissi, jonquils or daffodils.  I like the round-about etymology of daffodil the best: like the mythology of Narcissus, the name daffodil comes from the Greek word asphodel for the ghostly flowers that grew in the fields of the purgatory of Hades where mediocre souls grazed on them, and things were perfectly neutral and gray, like today's sky.  Maybe that's why the flowers bloom at this time of year, just before world is gob-smacked with the full force of Spring time, as an early signal that nature is about to re-awaken.