Weekend Economists Celebrates Psychedelia - March 14 - 15

[MattSh]

Psychedelia never really died it seems, it just changed and morphed with the times. While in the past, psychedelia was associated with music and art; these days it's morphed into a psychotic subculture, highly associated with politics and banking and media. How else to explain the mind-altering (and mind-boggling) things that politicians and bankers and media would want us to believe? You either have to be on mind-altering substances to say such nonsense or to believe such nonsense. Or possibly both.

From Wikipedia:

Psychedelia is a name given to the subculture of people who use psychedelic drugs, and a style of psychedelic artwork and psychedelic music derived from the experience of altered consciousness that uses highly distorted and surreal visuals, sound effects and reverberation, and bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke and convey to a viewer or listener the artist's experience while using such drugs. The term "psychedelic" is derived from the Ancient Greek words psychē (ψυχή, "soul&quot and dēloun (δηλοῦν, "to make visible, to reveal&quot , translating to "mind-revealing".

A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters. Psychedelic states are an array of experiences including changes of perception such as hallucinations, synesthesia, altered states of awareness or focused consciousness, variation in thought patterns, trance or hypnotic states, mystical states, and other mind alterations. These processes can lead some people to experience changes in mental operation defining their self-identity (whether in momentary acuity or chronic development) different enough from their previous normal state that it can excite feelings of newly formed understanding such as revelation, enlightenment, confusion, and psychosis.

Psychedelic states may be elicited by various techniques, such as meditation, sensory stimulation or deprivation, and most commonly by the use of psychedelic substances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelia

Now tell me, isn't that a pretty damn good description of what going on in the world these days?



But today, let's celebrate the Psychedelia of the 1960's, when altering one's mind didn't end up altering the planet through psychotic nonsense like "there's no such thing as global warming" or "the global financial system is completely solvent" or "we can totally fight and win 20 wars at the same time, including nuclear ones."

So like they said in the military back then, "smoke 'em if you've got 'em."



Please note! Music and art are mandatory this week! (If you ain't got them, there's this thing called the internet. Check it out)!

The motto of most Americans these days. (Does not apply to those in the State Department or the DoD or the CIA).

I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you

And we all know what happens when you leave these things up to the State Department or the DoD or the CIA! So don't leave it up to them!



Egads! Can you imagine a stamp like this these days? Can you imagine anything costing 10¢ these days? Can you imagine what type of cow Republicans (and many Democrats) would have if the Postal Service advocated preserving the environment?