The Elwa Winter Salon Exhibition presents the work of 4 contemporary artists. Please click through the links to see examples of their work and learn about their backgrounds: Andrew Moon Bain Andrew Graham Devin Powers Emet Sosna The Junta starts the party early. Before the masses show up for the gallery affair, we have the opportunity to discuss …
Author Archives: Almerindo Portfolio
Should liberals and progressives vote for Obama again?
I recently expressed to Jeremy the unlikelihood of my voting for Obama again, and listed a few reasons. He responded that he understood my disappointment in Obama and “share[d] it in some ways,” but that I was “blinded by idealism.” In the interest of bringing discussions like this out of email and into the public, …
Jungle Drugs
“Unlike other man-made psychedelics such as LSD, synthetic DMT takes many users to the same ‘place,’ where they report meeting elfish, clown-like, and insectoid beings who frequently extend the same warm and welcoming message: ‘We’ve been expecting you.’” If science is beginning to look seriously into psychedelics for health benefits, they are only trying to …
Tue. November 8: Psychedelic Drugs in Modern Cancer Research
Can the mystical states of mind occasioned by psychedelic drugs help alleviate anxiety and depression in people with terminal and recurrent cancer? That is the subject of investigation at NYU and Johns Hopkins, where researchers believe their work could also lead to better treatments for drug addiction and alcoholism. Alexander Zaitchik has been writing about …
Peter Singer on Wikileaks
We’ve been quiet at the Junta lately, preoccupied with summer and its attendant joys. The art event we had planned for June didn’t work out; sorry about that. But it’s only been postponed until fall, when city life gets back to normal – so don’t despair. Meanwhile, here’s a thoughtful piece from Peter Singer in …
Spirit Wrap
We began our spirituality discussion with an overview from EJ of his Zen beliefs – oddly, as it turned out, since Zen as he explained it is not spiritual at all. Zen does not teach that people have “spirits”, or “souls”, as such. “There is no ‘you’; there is no ‘me’.” Like other belief structures, …
Beyond This Life
What happens after we die? The ultimate question, unanswerable by anyone – and yet billions of us follow ideologies which lay out, step by step, exactly what happens when we cross that last river. Isn’t the fear of death the first basis of all religion? Sometimes I see a movie scene in a hospital, where …