Thursday, July 31, 2008

still shuttered at the marx

DC's Alcoholic Beverage Control Board still isn't allowing any live entertainment at the Marx Cafe for the next couple of weeks at least. I felt stupid dragging my record bag there, I should have just called before I left. Mike, the bartender, said that there were investigators in last Saturday night checking up on them, looking to see if they were abiding by the rules. Since having djs is such a huge part of their business, the Saturday and Friday hipster parties draw a lot of people; as much as the drinks, atmosphere and sports ever will by themselves, so if they don't get their paperwork in order soon the place might as well shrivel up and die.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Marx Cafe tonight!


Hey guys, I'll be at Marx tonight, will I be able to play any records? We don't know yet. Were they able to work out their problems with the city? Haven't a clue! Seeya there!

10 pm
Marx Cafe
3203 Mount Pleasant St NW

Someone is going to jail!!

About effin' time!!! Now, how's about cleaning up the rest of that den of thieves??
Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska indicted on corruption charges
By David Stout
Published: July 29, 2008

WASHINGTON: Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, was indicted Tuesday on federal corruption charges.

Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven counts of falsely reporting income. The charges are related to renovations on his home and to gifts he has received. They arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator's relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project.

The indictment will surely reverberate through the November elections. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, is up for re-election this year. Mark Begich, a popular Democratic mayor of Anchorage, hopes to supplant him.

The Justice Department scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon to announce the indictment.

Republicans on Capitol Hill were already jittery over a lobbying and influence-peddling scandal related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is now in prison. Stevens's troubles are not linked to that affair. Instead, they stem from his ties to an oil executive whose company won millions of dollars in federal contracts with the help of Stevens, whose home in Alaska was almost doubled in size as a result of the renovation project.

Stevens is a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he is still on the panel. As chairman, he wielded huge influence, and did not hesitate to use it to steer money and projects to his state.

"No other senator fills so central a place in his state's public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska," the Almanac of American Politics says. "Quite possibly, no other senator ever has."

Stevens, one of only a handful of World War II veterans left in the Senate, grew up in Indiana and California and moved to Alaska in 1950, before it was a state, according to the political almanac. He first ran for the Senate in 1962, losing to Ernest Gruening, a Democrat. He was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Senate in 1968 by the governor at the time, Walter Hickel, and has been re-elected six times since then.

Monday, July 28, 2008

military executions

Bush got the secretary of the Army’s recommendation to approve Gray’s death sentence in late 2005. This man has been sitting on military death row since April 1988?? Why is it that only now has the prez decided to act? Clinton, Ron, old man bush; they all didn't think to act here? From the details of the case it should be a simple decision. right?

Here's what the ap says.

AP Top News at 8:30 p.m. EDT

45 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush on Monday approved the execution of an Army private, the first time in over a half-century that a president has affirmed a death sentence for a member of the U.S. military. With his signature from the Oval Office, Bush said yes to the military's request to execute Ronald A. Gray, the White House confirmed. Gray had had been convicted in connection with a spree of four murders and eight rapes in the Fayetteville, N.C., area over eight months in the late 1980s while stationed at Fort Bragg.



And what others have said..


Two killers closer to first military executions since 1961
By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service



February 06, 2006
Monday


WASHINGTON -- President Bush now faces a decision that no commander in chief has confronted in more than 40 years - whether inmates on the U.S. military's death row should live or die.

Bush became the first president since John Kennedy to be faced with that choice when, after years of review, the military recently delivered to the White House recommendations that two convicted multiple murderers be executed for the crimes they committed while in the service.

If Bush signs the warrants, the two convicts - former Army Spec. Ronald Gray, who has been held for 18 years on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Pfc. Dwight Loving, who has been there for 17 years - would still have an avenue of appeal through the federal courts before an execution date would be set.

Even so, the arrival of the warrants at the White House brings into sight what would be the first military execution since 1961.

In that case, former Army Pvt. John Bennett, 28, of Chatham, Va., was hanged at Fort Leavenworth for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria while he was stationed in Germany.

In another possible indication of preparations for an execution, the Army issued regulations Jan. 17 updating its procedures for carrying one out.

Gray, 40, a Miami native and Army cook, was convicted of sexually abusing, beating and fatally knifing a prostitute; raping and shooting to death a female college student; killing a female Army private; and raping several other women in the Fayetteville, N.C., area in 1986 while he was stationed at Fort Bragg.

Loving, 37, a former artillery gunner from Rochester, N.Y., was found guilty of the 1988 fatal shooting of two taxi drivers in Killeen, Texas, as well as the robbery of a convenience store near Fort Hood, where he was stationed. One of the cabbies was an Army private, the other a retired Army sergeant.

In Loving's case, acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee approved his death sentence Nov. 8, 2004, and the death recommendation was delivered to the White House on Jan. 23, said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman.

Brownlee endorsed the death penalty for Gray on Nov. 15, 2004, and it arrived at the White House Sept. 1.

In all, seven ex-service members now sit on the military's death row - three former Army soldiers, three former Marines and one Air Force airman.

Among them is ex-Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who took his place among the condemned last May, after being convicted of killing two fellow soldiers and attempting to murder 16 others in a rifle-and-grenade attack on his own camp in Kuwait at the start of the war in Iraq.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is the military's legal system, only the commander in chief can sign a death order. Presidents also have the option of granting clemency. The military code provides death as a possible punishment for 15 crimes, including murder, rape and espionage in peacetime, and disobedience and desertion during war.

Bennett, the last military convict to die, was the 135th soldier executed by the Army since 1916. In all, about 465 military members have been put to death since the Civil War. Most were deserters or mutineers during wartime, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death-penalty advocacy group.

It was unclear Thursday if the White House would conduct its own review of the two men who could be the next to join that list. A request for comment was not immediately answered.

Both Gray and Loving lost their first round of Supreme Court appeals in 2001. If Bush signs their warrants, they will have the right to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court, as well.



Contact Lisa Hoffman at HoffmanL(at)shns.com

spending is out of control!!

Even John McCain isn't going to be able to fix this before we all go bankrupt.
A Deficit Forecast of $482 Billion, a Record

By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: July 29, 2008

WASHINGTON — The White House predicted on Monday that the Bush administration would bequeath a record deficit of $482 billion to the next president — a sobering turnabout in the nation’s fiscal condition from 2001 when President Bush took office and inherited three consecutive years of budget surpluses.

By most accounts, the worst seems yet to come. The deficit announced by Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, does not reflect the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential $50 billion cost of another economic stimulus package or the prospect of steeper losses in tax revenue or further declines in the housing market.

Mr. Nussle also predicted Monday that the deficit would more than double in the current 2008 fiscal year — to $389 billion, from $162 billion in 2007.

The deficit projected for 2009 would be the largest in absolute terms. The White House and many economists prefer to measure the deficit as a share of the economy. The White House said the 2009 deficit would be 3.3 percent of the economy. That is the largest share since 2004, but well below the percentages recorded in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

The outlook for the budget will crimp the ability of the next president to carry out ambitious spending plans of any kind.

Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal policy group, said that a one-year record deficit would not necessarily be worrisome if not for the overall pessimistic economic atmosphere.

“I think that the fiscal year 2009 deficit could get a lot worse, if you add in war costs, there could well be a real drop-off in revenues from this year’s slowing economy and of course if there are further problems in the housing market, if the federal government does have to inject some money into Freddie and Fannie, that could get worse too,” Mr. Bixby said.

The new estimate of the 2009 deficit was $74 billion higher than Mr. Bush and Mr. Nussle had predicted in the president’s budget six months ago.

Mr. Nussle said the deterioration of the fiscal outlook resulted from “a softening of the economy.” And he attacked Democrats in Congress, saying they had allowed spending to grow out of control.

Representative John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina and chairman of the House Budget Committee, said the deficit figures confirmed “the dismal legacy of the Bush administration.”

“Under its policies,” he said, “the largest surpluses in history have been converted into the largest deficits in history.”

The new White House report includes these highlights:

¶Total federal revenue would decline from 2007 to 2008.

¶In 2008 and in each of the next three years, corporate income tax collections would be lower than the amount collected in 2007.

¶Federal spending will shoot up nearly 8 percent this year and then another 6.5 percent in 2009. In 2009, federal spending would be equivalent to 21.1 percent of the economy, the largest share since 1993.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Teens rip off MP's bicycle.

OMG, I know exactly how he feels. This happened to me once and it sucked.
Caught on camera: The moment a gang of teenagers nicked David Cameron's beloved bike

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 6:08 PM on 24th July 2008

This is the moment Conservative leader David Cameron realised his bicycle had been stolen by a gang of teenagers. He had chained up his bike in Portobello Road, less than a mile from his home, as he went into a supermarket to buy salad for dinner.

However, when he returned five minutes later, the bike was gone.

Mr Cameron had chained it to a 2ft bollard, allowing thieves to lift both the bicycle and the lock clear. The moment that the 41-year-old politician realised his mountain bike had gone missing was captured on camera by a reader of the London Evening Starndard.

Today Mr Cameron said that he had reported the theft to the police but was not 'holding his breath' for its return -nearly 20,000 bikes are stolen in London every year. He added: 'I was cycling home and stopped to pick up some things for supper.

The bike is the one Mr Cameron regularly uses to cycle from his home to the House of Commons. He appealed to the thief to return it, saying: 'If anyone has seen it I would very much like it back. To me it was absolutely priceless.' Mr Cameron searched for about 15 minutes, asking passers-by if they had seen anything.

'I chained the bike through the wheel then put it around one of those bollard things. I have reported it using the police’s new online facility but I’m not expecting to get it back any time soon.'

One shop worker, who asked not to be named, said the Tory leader at first could not believe he had been the victim of petty crime. He said: 'He chained his bike to one of the bollards. There had been a couple of kids hanging around.

'They noticed he had chained it to a short bollard and they just picked it up and ran off. 'He was going up and down Portobello Road. He said, ‘I am sure I chained my bike here and it is not here. I left it for five minutes - how can it be gone?’

To start with he was not sure whether he had just left it somewhere else then after a few minutes he realised it was stolen. 'He was embarrassed and a bit annoyed. He was going round talking to people asking them if they had seen it - most people didn’t recognise him.'

At one point the Tory leader asked two men outside a betting shop in a desperate attempt to recover his bike. The shop worker added: 'He was a bit cheesed off. One man asked if he could have his picture taken with him and he just said, ‘Not now’.'

The theft happened outside the Portobello Road branch of Tesco at about 6.30pm yesterday. A Conservative spokesman said today: 'Obviously David is quite hacked off by the theft of his bike, especially having locked it up.

'Unfortunately these kinds of incidents affect everybody and he is just going to take it on the chin and deal with it.'

Tuesday night

Well, got some bad news, on Tuesday I didn't get to play records at all, apparently Marx Cafe doesn't have a valid 'entertainment license' from the city of Washington, DC. I had no idea this was the case, I have been playing there for almost three years on Tuesday nights, this is the first time we have had any trouble from the law. Alex, one of the co-owners said that when they bought the business from the previous owners they were required to renew the application as the old paperwork didn't transfer with the business. Well, apparently they never got around to it and now we don't know when we'll be able to play there again. I can't imagine this will be good for Marx Cafe at all as a large part of there business seems to revolve around the different DJ nights they rotate in and out of the weekend slots. Hopefully the matter will be resolved soon. I plan on being there next week, but don't know for sure yet.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Marx Cafe tonight!


Hey all, I'll be at Marx Cafe tonight from 10 until whenever. Hope to see you there!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Thursday, July 17, 2008

hidden accounts uncovered

Wow, fuck that dude, not fair! Who does this guy think he is, batman or something!?!?

Day of Reckoning? Super Rich Tax Cheats Outed by Bank Clerk
Technician in Liechtenstein Turns Over Names of Americans With Secret Bank Accounts
By BRIAN ROSS and RHONDA SCHWARTZ
July 15, 2008

Hundreds of super-rich American tax cheats have, in effect, turned themselves in to the IRS after a bank computer technician in the tiny European country of Liechtenstein came forward with the names of US citizens who had set up secret accounts there, according to Washington lawyers investigating the scheme.

The bank clerk, Heinrich Kieber, has been branded a thief by the government of Liechtenstein for violating the country's bank secrecy laws.

He is now in hiding but scheduled to testify to the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Thursday via a video statement from a secret location, according to Congressional investigators.

Aides for committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) are scheduled to provide reporters with a background briefing later this morning in Washington on the committee's investigation of tax haven banks in Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

Aides say the hearing will also focus on the role of the giant Swiss bank UBS and its alleged efforts to help wealthy Americans hide their money from the IRS through shell companies in Liechtenstein.

Liechtenstein's veil of secrecy was pierced five years ago when the disgruntled technician, Kieber, downloaded the names of foreign citizens connected to the secret accounts.

Kieber reportedly sold three CD's full of names and data to tax authorities to 12 countries including Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States.

Tax authorities in Italy published the full list of names.

In Germany, the disclosures led to the arrests of several prominent CEO's on charges that had evaded millions of dollars in taxes.

A former UBS private banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, has agreed to a plea deal and is reported to be cooperating with US authorities in bring charges against American citizens on tax evasion charges.

The Liechtenstein bank, LGT, is owned by the tiny country's ruling family led by Prince Hans-Adam II.

Kieber's Washington lawyer, Jack Blum, says Kieber should be considered a whistleblower and a hero, not a thief, for revealing how the super rich hid billions of dollars using the Liechtenstein bank.

The names of the US citizens are now in the hands of the IRS and Senate investigators.

Washington lawyers say a number of prominent citizens have been subpoenaed to testify but have already indicated they will refuse to testify, asserting their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

It is not yet clear whether Senator Levin will insist they appear in front of the committee anyway.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Picken's Plan

I'm going to go next year!

Now that's a good vacation.

Tourist gored on third day of Spanish bull run
Wed Jul 9, 2008 8:12am EDT

PAMPLONA, Spain (Reuters) - An American tourist was gored in the abdomen on the third day of the centuries-old annual bull-running festival in the northern Spanish town of Pamplona on Wednesday, organizers said.

The 22-year-old man from California was stable after being admitted to hospital along with a Greek man, aged 20, who suffered facial injuries.

Several of the hundreds who took part were trampled by bulls, but were not reported to require treatment.

Wednesday's injuries added to 13 people treated after the first early morning run on Monday, including a 37-year-old man who suffered a collapsed lung, ruptured spleen and broken ribs.

The San Fermin festival draws tourists from around the world, who don traditional all-white garb with a red sash around the waist and red kerchief around the neck before running through narrow, twisting cobbled streets, pursued by bulls.

The chase lasts about four minutes and is shown live on television. The bulls are usually killed after the runs by bullfighters.

The festival dates back to the 13th century. The bull-running was made famous by Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Sun also Rises", a semi-autobiographical account of an alcohol-fuelled visit to the festival by a group of squabbling British and American friends in the 1920s.

(Reporting by Feliciano Tisera; Writing by Martin Roberts)

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

The earth... it is crying out.

I'm going to start recycling more after reading this, tragic.
Earth's Cries Recorded in Space

Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
SPACE.com Tue Jul 1, 12:33 AM ET

The Earth emits an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, astronomers have discovered.


The sound is awful, a new recording from space reveals.

Scientists have known about the radiation since the 1970s. It is created high above the planet, where charged particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetic field. It is related to the phenomenon that generates the colorful aurora, or Northern Lights.

The radio waves are blocked by the ionosphere, a charged layer atop our atmosphere, so they do not reach Earth. That's good, because the out-of-this-world radio waves are 10,000 times stronger than even the strongest military signal, the researchers said, and they would overwhelm all radio stations on the planet.

Theorists had long figured the radio waves, which were not well studied, oozed into space in an ever-widening cone, like light from a torch.

But new data from the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, a group of four high-flying satellites, reveals the bursts of radio waves head off to the cosmos in beam-like fashion, instead.

This means they're more detectable to anyone who might be listening.

The Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR), as it is called, is beamed out in a narrow plane, as if someone had put a mask over a torch and left a slit for the radiation to escape.

This flat beam could be detected by aliens who've figured this process out, the researchers say. The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search. They could also learn more about Jupiter and Saturn by studying AKR, which should emit from the auroral activity on those worlds, too.

"Whenever you have aurora, you get AKR," said Robert Mutel, a University of Iowa researcher involved in the work.

The AKR bursts -- Mutel and colleagues studied 12,000 of them -- originate in spots the size of a large city a few thousand miles above Earth and above the region where the Northern Lights form.

"We can now determine exactly where the emission is coming from," Mutel said.

Our planet is also known to hum, a mysterious low-frequency sound thought to be caused by the churning ocean or the roiling atmosphere.

Visit SPACE.com and explore our huge collection of Space Pictures, Space Videos, Space Image of the Day, Hot Topics, Top 10s, Multimedia, Trivia, Voting and Amazing Images. Follow the latest developments in the search for life in our universe in our SETI: Search for Life section. Join the community, sign up for our free daily email newsletter, listen to our Podcasts, check out our RSS feeds and other Reader Favorites today!

USA is doomed.

Scathing!

Why floods could bring America to its knees
01.07.2008

A catastrophe for Iowa farmers will not be just a catastrophe for Midwestern Americans. In the Iowa floods, we’ll see more evidence of how the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the problems associated with Peak Oil. In this particular case they lead to an inflection point sometime around the 2008 harvest season, which will also be our time of political harvest.

These are not your daddy’s or granddaddy’s floods. These are 500-year floods, events not seen before non-Indian people started living out on that stretch of the North American prairie. The vast majority of homeowners in Eastern Iowa did not have flood insurance because the likelihood of being affected above the 500-year-line was so miniscule — their insurance agents actually advised them against getting it.

The personal ruin out there will be comprehensive and profound, a wet version of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with families facing total loss and perhaps migrating elsewhere in the nation because they have no home to go back to.

Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a pretty dire situation. So far, the US public has experienced the world grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices.

Cheap corn is behind the magic of the American processed food industry — all those pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).

Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertiliser. Both of these 'inputs' have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-and-gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline. Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertiliser prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more complicated than just buying X amount of 'inputs' (on credit) to be dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant diesel-powered machines.

Like a lot of other activities in American life these days, agribusiness is unreformable along its current lines. It will take a convulsion to change it, and in that convulsion it will be dragged kicking-and-screaming into a new reality. As that occurs, the US public will have to contend with more than just higher taco chip prices. We’re heading into the Vale of Malthus — Thomas Robert Malthus, the British economist-philosopher who introduced the notion that eventually world population would overtake world food production capacity. Malthus has been scorned and ridiculed in recent decades, as fossil fuel-cranked farming allowed the global population to go vertical. Techno-triumphalist observers who should have known better attributed this to the “green revolution” of bio-engineering. Malthus is back now, along with his outriders: famine, pestilence, and war.

We’re headed, it seems, toward a fall 'crunch time', and that crunching sound will not be of cheese doodles and taco chips consumed on the sofas of America. I think we’re heading into a season of hoarding. As the presidential campaign moves into its final round, Americans may be hard up for both food and gasoline. On the oil scene, the next event on the horizon is not just higher prices but shortages. Chances are they will occur first in the Southeast states because oil exports from Mexico and Venezuela feeding the Gulf of Mexico refineries are down more than 30% +over 2007.

Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2,000 for loads that cost them $3,000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralysed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it’s also possible that, at some point, they’ll mount a Night of the Living Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on 'the system' that has brought them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any of its supermarkets.

The yet-more-ominous thing here is that shortages of food and oil are two fiascos that are pretty clearly predictable for the second half of the year. That’s bad enough without figuring in the 'unknowns' that could kick up American hardship a few more notches. The hurricane season just got underway — obscured for the moment by the bigger weather story in Iowa. The fate of the banks is a train wreck still waiting to happen. As it occurs — also heading into the high political and hurricane seasons — we could find ourselves not only a nation wet, hungry, and out-of-gas, but also completely broke. I’m just sorry that Tim Russert will not be here to talk us through it all.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Marx Cafe tonight!



Yes, we are back for another installation of beats and eats! I'll be playing records at Marx Cafe tonight from 10pm until whenever. Belgian Beer specials are in effect, $5 Dekonek and $4 Chimay. Hope to see you out there!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

How do i get that job?!!?

Sounds like a hard working crew there, glad the govt has extra monies to burn on crap like this.

Study finds long benefit in illegal mushroom drug

By MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer


NEW YORK (AP) -- In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named Dede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project.

She felt like she was taking off. She saw colors. Then it felt like her heart was ripping open.

But she called the experience joyful as well as painful, and says that it has helped her to this day.

"I feel more centered in who I am and what I'm doing," said Osborn, now 66, of Providence, R.I. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connected."

Scientists reported Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they'd ever had.

The drug, psilocybin, is found in so-called "magic mushrooms." It's illegal, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.

The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit. It's one of the few such studies of a hallucinogen in the past 40 years, since research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of such drugs in the 1960s.

The project made headlines in 2006 when researchers published their report on how the volunteers felt just two months after taking the drug. The new study followed them up a year after that.

Experts emphasize that people should not try psilocybin on their own because it could be harmful. Even in the controlled setting of the laboratory, nearly a third of participants felt significant fear under the effects of the drug. Without proper supervision, someone could be harmed, researchers said.

Osborn, in a telephone interview, recalled a powerful feeling of being out of control during her lab experience. "It was ... like taking off, I'm being lifted up," she said. Then came "brilliant colors and beautiful patterns, just stunningly gorgeous, more intense than normal reality."

And then, the sensation that her heart was tearing open.

"It would come in waves," she recalled. "I found myself doing Lamaze-type breathing as the pain came on."

Yet "it was a joyful, ecstatic thing at the same time, like the joy of being alive," she said. She compared it to birthing pains. "There was this sense of relief and joy and ecstasy when my heart was opened."

With further research, psilocybin (pronounced SILL-oh-SY-bin) may prove useful in helping to treat alcoholism and drug dependence, and in aiding seriously ill patients as they deal with psychological distress, said study lead author Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins.

Griffiths also said that despite the spiritual characteristics reported for the drug experiences, the study says nothing about whether God exists.

"Is this God in a pill? Absolutely not," he said.

The experiment was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The results were published online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Fourteen months after taking the drug, 64 percent of the volunteers said they still felt at least a moderate increase in well-being or life satisfaction, in terms of things like feeling more creative, self-confident, flexible and optimistic. And 61 percent reported at least a moderate behavior change in what they considered positive ways.

That second question didn't ask for details, but elsewhere the questionnaire answers indicated lasting gains in traits like being more sensitive, tolerant, loving and compassionate.

Researchers didn't try to corroborate what the participants said about their own behavior. But in the earlier analysis at two months after the drug was given, researchers said family and friends backed up what those in the study said about behavior changes. Griffiths said he has no reason to doubt the answers at 14 months.

Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, called the new work an important follow-up to the first study.

He said it is helping to reopen formal study of psychedelic drugs. Grob is on the board of the Heffter Research Institute, which promotes studies of psychedelic substances and helped pay for the new work.

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