A Wee Spin Through Enceladus & Saturn's (Gasp!) 61 Other Moons

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH © 2006, JOE BERGERON

The Men and Women Who Guarded America’s Nuclear Weapons Are Dying

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM MORRIS/CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY

Cartoon du Jour

COURTESY OF DAILY KOS

Politix Update: Congress Finally Is Shamed Into Helping 9/11 First Responders

How bloody tragic that the official accounting of the events before, during and after the 9/11 attacks, as inadequate as that turned out to be, was not the result of the U.S. government's thirst to uncover the truth, but because of the shaming that 9/11 widows put on George Bush and Congress.  And that renewal of the bill providing medical care and compensation to thousands of 9/11 responders was not the result of compassion at the highest levels, but another public shaming, this one led by Jon Stewart. 

After lobbying Congress since late summer, first responders who spent months working at Ground Zero following the terrorist attacks are set to finally receive lifetime medical care for illnesses as a result of their labors on what they euphemistically called The Pile.

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Reauthorization Act is included in the $1.2 trillion omnibus spending package that was to be approved today and tomorrow by the House and Senate.  Zadroga was a New York City Police officer who died at age 35 of a respiratory disease attributed to his participation in rescue and recovery operations at the World Trade Center.

"Never again will survivors and responders be forced to walk the halls of Congress, begging for their health care. Never again will they lose sleep over fear that this life-saving program will run out," declared Representative Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who pushed back against the obscene indifference to the plight of 9/11 first responders among too many people Capitol Hill. 

Despite being told by the Environmental Protection Agency that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe, many first responders developed cancers and other debilitating illnesses because of their exposure to the Ground Zero toxins.

Even with bipartisan support for the legislation, some House and Senate Republicans viewed the program as an unfunded entitlement program and sought to limit its size and duration. As it is, $680 billion, or about two thirds of  the omnibus spending package, is not covered by budget cuts or other tax offsets.  (Here's to you, Paul Ryan and John Boehner!)

The Zadroga Act foot dragging drew the wrath of comedian Jon Stewart, who had guilt-tripped Congress into originally appropriating funds for first responders in 2010 and has been their passionate advocate ever since.  Stewart reappeared on late-night television for the first time since his retirement to implore people to pressure Congress to support the Zadroga Act extension. The hashtag #WorstResponders started trending on Twitter and a fire finally was lit under recalcitrant congressfolk. 

§

As head of the EPA, Christie Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and a rising national Republican star until she was cast out of the GOP temple by the conservative priests, led the big-lie campaign that Ground Zero air was not dangerous to breath.

Whitman asserted in an upbeat September 18, 2001 press release, later found to be one of many altered by the White House as part of its all-encompassing 9/11 cover-up, that:

"We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air quality and drinking water conditions in both New York and near the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances. Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breath and their water is safe to drink."

Whitman and other environmental and health officials suspected and later were made well aware that there were an array of toxins at Ground Zero and in the surrounding area from the impact of the jetliners and collapse of the towers. These included minute shards of glass and asbestos, PCBs and other poisons.

About 70,000 people, including 5,300 first responders, have enrolled in the compensation program. More than 4,000 have cancer, many have severe pulmonary diseases, several have died and many are expected to have significantly shorter lifespans.

Whitman, who was forced out of her EPA job because she was too moderate for the anti-environment Bush administration, initially refused to testify before a House judiciary subcommittee about her post-9/11 statements before finally agreeing to appear.  At no time during her tenure as the nation's top environmental watchdog did she ever question the White House's stage management of her.  

In 2003, the EPA’s own inspector general concluded that Whitman did not have sufficient scientific information to state that the air was safe to breathe, while the cover-up of Ground Zero hazards extended well beyond the feds and included New York state and city health agencies.

The obdurate Republicans who held up the Zadroga Act renewal are, of course, shameless, but that is of a pattern.  George Bush showed no remorse for his complicity in the 9/11 attacks, having spent the entire month of August 2001 vacationing at his Texas ranch posing for photo-ops in a 10-gallon hat as he flashed his frat boy smirk, clear brush and ignored detailed warnings from his intelligence bigs that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike the U.S. by flying hijacked passenger aircraft into high-profile targets, including the World Trade Center.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Mychal Judge, a 68-year-old priest and New York Fire Department chaplain, was uptown at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  Father Mike donned his FDNY chaplain’s uniform and rushed to the towers, where he removed his fireman's helmet to administer the last rites to a firefighter and a woman who had jumped from the tower when he was struck in the back of the head and mortally wounded by a chunk of falling debris.

You may not realize that you knew who Father Mike was until you reflect on the image above. Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton's photograph, one of the most gripping images to come out of that horrific day, is a modern day Pietá. Father Mike was so beloved that his death certificate bears the number 00001 -- the first official World Trade Center casualty.

Politix Update is written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his 12th since 1968.  Click HERE for an index of previous columns.  © 2015 Shaun Mullen.

A Christmas Carol: Bob's Mother & The Ghost Of Iraq Future

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER 2006)

Despite the magnitude of the deaths -- 28 here, 57 there and 210 somewhere else, 550 one week and 700 the next -- the carnage in Iraq is so predictable that it has begun to numb my senses. 

Single-malt Scotch is too expensive, so the only way that I have been able to deal with this disconnect is to pretty much stop blogging on individual incidents such as the bomb blasts in Baghdad this week (70 dead, dozens wounded on Tuesday, another 17 dead, dozens wounded today) and focus on the Big Picture.

But what about my fellow Americans, who are a pretty numb bunch to begin with?

Most are figuratively if not literally shopping at the mall, and beyond the yellow "Support the Troops' ribbons on their SUVs, the obscenity that the Iraq war has become is an abstraction. That is unless they are the very rare person who knows a war veteran or happens to stroll past an electronics store at the mall and catches a big-screen glimpse of the carnage before they avert their eyes and continue on to Victoria's Secret.

How then to punch through the national novocaine and bring home a war for which President Bush has not ever asked for sacrifice, only lip service? And continues to stubbornly state that "victory" remains America's goal?

Never mind that the carnage doesn't seem to register in the Oval Office, nor is there any rush to complete a comprehensive review of a war that the U.S. rushed into like a house on fire in the first place. Wrapping up that review will have to wait until after the New Year. In the meantime, the president will decamp to Crawford with Laura and the Twinsies for some photo-op brush clearing and a suicide bomber-free old-time family Christmas.

Is there even a faint hope that someone -- someone whose last name is not Sheehan -- can leverage what legions of gray beards have been unable to do and shock George Bush out of his dream world?

§

When I ponder this fantasy -- and it is a fantasy -- I think of Bob Layton's mother.

Bob and I attended university together. He was a Robert Redford-handsome engineering major, president of a fraternity, head of the campus ROTC detachment and engaged to marry a beauty on whom I had an unrequited crush.

Bob went off to Vietnam a freshly minted Infantry second lieutenant, where he was soon blown to smithereens. By the time he left this mortal coil, the trickle of American flag-draped pine boxes being carried out of the rectums of cargo planes to the central morgue at Dover Air Force Base had become a flood.

Bob's mother was heartbroken. But she also was angry. Angry about President Johnson's serial lies concerning the progress of the war, the changing rationales for being in Vietnam, his refusal to acknowledge and correct mistakes, and a humility-free "trust us" condescension that had taken her son from her forever.

I'll give David Halberstam, Uncle Walter Cronkite and the anti-war movement some credit, but it was Bob Layton's mother and mothers like her who ultimately turned America against the obscenity that the Vietnam war became and drove LBJ from office.

History is repeating itself in Iraq in some respects. And so this holiday season I would like to think that it my fantasy comes true through a contemporary version of that classic scene in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol when an uninvited guest pays a visit to Ebenezer Scrooge's bed chamber.

Picture the president settling into a long winter's nap when he hears the clanking chains of the Ghost of Iraq Future and then these words:

"President Bush. Oh, President Bush. Bob Layton's mother is here to see you."

If you ever visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., say hello to Bob for me.  Or better still, run your hand across his name on the granite wall.  It's on Panel 21W, Line 54.

Princess Leila's Cocaine Nail & Other 'Star Wars' Secrets Revealed

MUCH MORE HERE.

Politix Update: In Which Liberals Are Blamed For Getting It Right About The Donald

As astounding as this political season has been, and I don't include the spittle-and-venom Republican presidential debate last night in that category, I never cease to be surprised at the new ways pundits find to spin the astounding success of Donald Trump's scorched earth campaign.  And am grateful for that since I'm fast running out of ways to say the same thing but make it seem different. 

Anywho, a chap by the name of Philip Klein, who is manager of The Washington Examiner, a conservative crying towel masquerading as a newspaper, has jumped the shark, as well as saving my repetitive ass for the moment, by opining that the greatest evil that could come of Trump winning the GOP nomination is that it would validate liberals' caricature of Republicans being all about "bombast and white resentment rather than substance and principles." 

What is so outrageous about that statement -- okay, maybe hilarious is a better word -- is that Klein fails to grasp that liberals are spot-on correct while he and his conservative ilk are clueless.  And that while there are a lot of reasons why Republicans have used appeals to white resentment to win elections, in the end they all boil down to the fact that they work. 

And would seem to be working better than ever this election cycle as Trump rallies increasingly take on the look and feel of Nazi rallies with Trump's security guards dragging protesters from the halls as his supporters hurl curses and shout "Sieg heil!" 

The GOP has not only not tried to keep the lid on xenophobia and racist hate, but has encouraged it to the point where the groundswell of Trump's popularity and his repugnant "silent no more majority," as he calls them, have made him not the party's savior, but its worst nightmare.

THAT'S DEBATABLE

While there is a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching adults act like children, the Republican scrum in Las Vegas last night again fundamentally failed in what a presidential debate should be: An opportunity for candidates to soberly explain where they stand on the issues of the day and why you should support them.

The Democratic debates have done just that with a minimum of fact stretching and general good will, while the Republican debates have been exercises in name calling and lie telling with discussion of the issues of the day mere afterthoughts, or crass oversimplifications.  The main difference in last night's fifth and final debate before the primaries is that almost everyone threw sand at Donald Trump instead of at each other, and tried hard to dial up the hysteria. 

Terrorism and immigration reform, of course, were at center stage, but if anyone felt safer after hearing Ted "Carpet Bomb" Cruz and most of his cohorts, then I want some of what they're smoking.  If the candidates' aim was to scare the shit out of people without offering plausible alternatives to what President Obama is doing, then they succeeded. 

Jeb Bush actually had a pretty decent night, albeit probably not good enough and too late, when he rose above the warmongering and urged alliances with the Arab world to combat ISIS instead of banning Muslims from the U.S., which has become the centerpiece of Trump's campaign since he's worn out ways to bash Mexicans.  Bush called Trump a "chaos candidate," and warned him "you're not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency." 

Jeb's shots hit their mark, leaving Trump spluttering and demanding an apology (ha!), but Trump still came out on top.  Bullying and portraying Americans as losers has gotten him to where he is, and by that standard he was the hands-down winner last night. 

HIGH FLOOR, LOW CEILING

Donald Trump has moved well beyond being a factional candidate like a Howard Dean or Pat Buchanan or Herman Cain because of his impressive staying power. As in he's surged to the top of the polls and stayed there unlike those other candidates, who quickly collapsed.

But it's still too soon to say if Trump really is the front-runner for the nomination. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times well puts it, "He has a high floor but a low ceiling, and although he has weathered many controversies, the toughest days are yet to come."

Those challenges already are evident: Ted Cruz leads in Iowa; Trump is weak in polls of verified voters; he gets crushed in one-on-one matchups with Hillary Clinton, and despite his renewed commitment to not running as an independent, the number of Republicans who say they would not support him is substantial.

Concludes Cohn:  "His chances of winning -- which are real, even if not good -- depend much more on the weaknesses of his opponents than his own strengths. The good news for Trump is that the opposition is flawed enough to entertain such an outcome."

BROKERED, MY ASS

The flavor of the moment is that the Donald Trump juggernaut will force a brokered convention, and that would be the most disastrous outcome for Republicans short of Trump winning the nomination outright.  There are a number of things wrong with this view, beginning with the fact that there no longer are political brokers.  

There hasn’t been a floor fight over the Republican nomination since Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully challenged Gerald Ford in 1976, let alone any undecided first-ballot votes for a nominee from either party since 1952. This is because the brokers of smoke-filled backroom lore, the guys (and they're always guys, typically with a couple days of stubble, a dead stogie hanging from a corner of their mouth and bad body odor), went out with the Sony Walkman.  

Brokers did indeed used to keep delegates in their pockets for horse-trading, but that doesn't play in the age of sanitized, made-for-donors prime time conventions that are non-stop happy face commercials with the only drama being whether the chairwoman with the funny hat from the sovereign state of Mississippi can get her mike to work.   Even if there is the prospect of a deadlocked convention in which no candidate has a majority of delegates, party bigs will put the squeeze on enough unbound delegates to push the candidate over the top.  Guaranteed. 

But doesn't history say otherwise?  Dick Polman over at NewsWorks dredges up a quote from pollster Paul Maslin about fears of a delegate floor fight: "The party is up against an extraordinary end-game. If this guy has more convention votes than anyone else, how can we not nominate him? But how can we nominate him?"

That quote sure sounds like a Republican talking about Trump in 2015.  But the year was 1988, and Maslin was referring to Jesse Jackson.

Politix Update is written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his 12th since 1968.  Click HERE for an index of previous columns.  © 2015 Shaun Mullen.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  

USED WITH PERMISSION.

What A Bummer, Man! The Psychedelic Revolution Wasn't Gonna Be Televised

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER 2009)

Aldous Huxley's creative powers were at their peak in 1960, some three years before his death. The public lectures given by the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception were filled to overflowing and never had a parapsychologist been so acclaimed and had a larger following.

But Huxley was perplexed. As had so many other great minds before and after him, becoming immersed in taking and studying the effects of psychedelic drugs had produced an embarrassing consequence: The more he tripped, the more he traveled to the so-called Other World and the more that he mused over the profundities of these voyages and how they could improve mankind's lot, the less insight he had to offer.

As Huxley confided to a friend: "To have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find that at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.' "

What Huxley was intimating is that while LSD, psilocybin mushrooms or peyote buttons could make individual homo sapiens better people, the psychedelic revolution would not make terra firma a better place.

It wasn't that people didn't try.

Albert "Captain Al" Hubbard, who is said to have given LSD to 6,000 people beginning in the early 1950s until it was outlawed in 1966, believed that if he could provide a psychedelic experience to the executives of Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society.
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had tripped on psychotropic plants in South America and later took psilocybin and LSD, declared that the psychedelic movement was an opportunity "to seize power in the Universe . . . not merely over Russia or America -- seize power over the moon -- take the sun over."

But as big thinking went, it was hard to top Timothy Leary, a psychologist and psychedelic avatar whose increasingly manic quest to get people to "turn on, tune in, drop out" more or less led to the federal prohibition against not just the possession of LSD, but a halt to virtually all research into promising uses of the drug in treating chronic alcoholism, psychoses and other illnesses.

§

If Leary hadn't led the way to LSD being outlawed, someone else's antics certainly would have. After all, how could the government not ban the use of a non-addictive substance that could do such wonderful things, let alone have astonishing curative powers?

Leary's initial foray into psychedelics was innocent enough -- the Harvard Psilocybin Project -- which during its 15-month existence in 1960-61 showed convincingly that the comparatively mild psychedelic was a positive agent for behavioral changes even in prison convicts.

Writes Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream:

"Imagine the Humphrey Bogart of Angels With Dirty Faces suddenly transported into Alice in Wonderland and you will have some idea of what transpired. One of the newcomers [to the psilocybin sessions] became paranoid and decided the whole thing was a fiendish police trick to get him to all the crimes he had never been caught for. . . . But then his paranoia vanished, he forgot about revenge, forgot about his standing in one of Boston's Irish Mafia families; he started thinking about love, about how everyone was really the same, no difference between him and this Harvard boy, really."

The study did have a drawback. The prisoners were indeed changing, but they were changing in ways that made science uncomfortable. As Stevens puts it, "They were getting religion. And if psilocybin could do that to hard-core cons, imagine what it was doing to members of the psilocybin project."

Indeed, the cautious optimism among Leary's professorial peers that the drug could be an extraordinary addition to the psychiatric tool kit turned to anxiety as Leary and many of his graduate students began binging on psilocybin and immersing themselves in mystical texts. What controls their experiments had went out the window and raw data was no longer being collated and written up.

The project's death blow came when the Harvard Crimson ran a story on a drug orgy at Leary's house with students that was picked up by the Boston papers and then the wire services. After confiscation threats from the feds, the Harvard administration put Leary's psilocybin stash under lock and key and promised that when the drug was dolled out in the future there would be close supervision. The scandal had been contained, but it was obvious to all that Leary's contract would not be renewed.Leary rolled with that punch and soon he and colleagues Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were deeply involved with LSD, a substantially more powerful psychedelic that for them was less about love than death and rebirth.

Some LSD therapists were showing remarkable results. Hubbard's work with chronic alcoholics at Hollywood Hospital in British Columbia showed an 80 percent success rate, while a research program at the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto, California showed promising results for psychotic vets. That also is where Ken Kesey, future leader of the Merry Pranksters, tripped while writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

§ 

These results notwithstanding, therapists struggled to figure out why LSD could do what it did.

Stevens presents this analogy in Storming Heaven:

"Imagine the self as an oxbow lake, which is formed when a meander is cut off from the main body of a shallow, slow-moving river. Over time, unless fresh sources of water are found, the oxbow begins to stagnate, becoming first a marsh, then a swamp, as vegetation (thickets of received ideas, neuroses, etc.) starts to compete for oxygen. Psycholytic therapy, you might say, contented itself with removing the vegetation; psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, operated by dynamiting the obstruction and restoring the oxbow to what, in fact, it had always been: a lazy curve in a broad, flowing river." Most of these therapists used small doses of LSD on their patients in charting a path to consciousness before any deep exploration began, but from the outset Leary administered massive doses to both patients and himself.

Perhaps inevitably a man with the brightest of futures in psychiatry began to think of himself as a prophet. By the spring of 1962 he was deeply into Tantric Buddhism and was referring to his acclaimed pre-psychedelic work as "antediluvian stuff."

Stevens:

"To hell with Harvard and psychology, Leary wanted to shout, to hell with boring old bourgeois science. To hell with boring old bourgeois religion. Mind-expanding drugs were going to be the religion of the twenty-first century . . . and he was going to be the chief avatar."

As Stevens notes, Leary's escapades, including the creation of a psychedelic circus known as the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), highlighted what by 1963 was a turf war over who would control traffic to the Other World.Medical doctors believed that mere psychologists like Leary and Al Hubbard, let alone an engineer like Myron Stolaroff, did not have the competencies to examine the extremes of consciousness.The rap on Stolaroff was misplaced. He was an assistant to the president for long-range planning at Ampex Corporation, which was a leading maker of magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders and an incubator for pioneering engineers.

Stolaroff was making big bucks but felt that his life was empty. It was through an acquaintance that he learned of a new drug called LSD and an unusual man from Canada who was administering the substance to Aldous Huxley and others. Stolaroff was skeptical, but then one day in 1956 he looked up from his desk at Ampex to see Hubbard standing in the doorway.

Several weeks later, Stolaroff took 66 micrograms (a moderately heavy dose) of LSD-25 in Hubbard's Vancouver apartment that had been manufactured by Sandoz, the Swiss firm where biochemist Albert Hoffman had stumbled upon the drug's psychoactive properties in 1943.

Stolaroff found his first trip to be a deeply religious event that took him far into his own unconscious mind and he returned to California an LSD zealot. He soon founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study and over the next several years led several hundred people, including Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and 30 or so other young engineers in what came to be known as Silicon Valley, on trips closely supervised by experienced therapists.

The engineer was well aware of the dangers of LSD and was horrified when Leary founded IFIF. "It will wreak havoc on all of us doing LSD work all over the nation," Stolaroff correctly predicted in a letter to Leary. "The medical profession in this country has had these materials available for years. Yet outside of the Canadian groups, and a very few individuals in this country, no one has really learned how to use these materials and get the benefits from them in spite of years of trying. Tim, I am convinced you are heading for very serious trouble if your plan goes ahead as you have described it to me."

"In 1961," Leary's wrote of his master plan in High Priest, one of his two autobiographies, "we estimated that 25,000 Americans had turned on to the strong psychedelics . . . at that rate of cellular growth we expected by 1967 a million Americans would be using LSD. We calculated that the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society would be four million LSD users and this would happen by 1969."

§

After Leary and his IFIF cadre were kicked out of Mexico and two Caribbean nations they landed at Millbrook, a huge estate in Dutchess County in upstate New York.

Millbrook was many things, but to consider it an ashram as many IFIF adherents did is misleading insofar that the leader of a typical ashram doesn't ride around on a horse painted blue on one side and pink on the other and brag about screwing every woman who comes through the door, including his future second wife. Then there were the gold painted ceilings, mandala filled walls and antique furniture with the legs cut off so the residents could live on the floor.

The IFIF spun its wheels, beginning many experiments and programs but finishing none, before succumbing a year later. Out of its ashes rose Leary's next ego trip, an organization called Castalia that was to set up shop on a tropical island a la Huxley's Island, a utopian counterpoint to Brave New World where a drug he called soma was used for enlightenment.

The name Castalia came from Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. The IFIF crowd was convinced that the German author was a psychedelic adept from an earlier age who had succeeded where Huxley had failed in that his books were accounts of the internal drama of the psyche.The Millbrook era ended with a bang in April 1966 with a raid by a law enforcement team led by former FBI agent and future Nixon White House Plumbers unit operative G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate scandal fame, whom in but one of many bizarre plot twists in Leary's life was to become a friend who 15 years later would go on a national speaking tour with him.Undeterred, of course, in September 1966 Leary segued to his next ego trip and created the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as a holy sacrament. The league also was, in part, an attempt to maintain legal status for the use of the drug, which was outlawed the following month.

Leary was arrested nine more times over the next two years, and while his craving for attention would not diminish until he drew his last breath in 1996 at age 75, he spent much of his last three decades dodging the law and doing prison time.It is hard to tell whether Timothy Leary ever understood his role in outlawing a drug that he tirelessly advocated and ingested, but he carried some sense of irony into his dotage, so he probably did, although the Sixties certainly ended with a whimper and not a day glo bang.

Writes Stevens: "And so the psychedelic movement ground to a close. The drugs were still available, more so than ever, but it was a rare person who took them to push the envelope. For the kids, a trip to the Other World was like a trip to Disneyland, lots of scary rides and laughs, but no wisdom.

"Kesey, Owsley, IFIF, the Acid Tests, Castalia, the Trips Festival, the Harvard Psilocybin Project, the Be-In -- it had receded into memory so fast it was almost as if it had happened to an older brother, or an uncle, or maybe they'd read about it in some book or magazine -- it didn't seem real. Had they really thought they could transform Uncle Sam into the Buddha? The fact was, the good times were too painful to talk about because they always led to the bad times, to all the people who had been left behind, either burned out or in prison or on the run or irrevocably lost. . . "

PHOTOGRAPHS (FROM TOP) TIMOTHY LEARY (LEFT) WITH NEIL CASSADY AT MILBROOK (1964); ALDOUS HUXLEY; ALLEN GINSBERG; LEARY (ca. 1962); RICHARD ALPERT; RALPH METZNER; LEARY (ca. 1966); AL HUBBARD; KEN KESEY; MARTIN SOLAROFF' HERMAN HESSE; LEARY ESCORTED BY DRUG AGENTS AFTER 1966 MILLBROOK RAID; LEARY AND FOURTH WIFE ROSEMARY.