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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Adding to this because I feel a bit annoyed at how John C Lilly gets so badly represented sometimes. He wasn’t a nut job. He was a weird guy with a very unique personality. He had an intense passion for knowledge and scientific inquiry. He also had a massive ego. But he was a reasonably self reflective person. Read his books and watch interviews with him. He wasn’t just a hedonist who got addicted to K. He always had a very non typical experience of reality. He had hallucinations of angels as a child, partly due to a heavily religious upbringing. It’s totally understandable that he was primed for strange trips when he got into psychedelics. But he was able to function as a professional. He had multiple government funded research projects during his career, medical credentials, and owned electrical engineering patents. His characterisation as a kook is very similar to the crap that people say about Tim Leary, who had a successful academic career before being kicked out of Harvard and was actually a very rational person.



  • Another sad aspect to this is that often the parents think they are doing the right thing. They’re wrong of course. Some people have mental issues that lead them to “magical thinking”. I know some people who are anti Vax, and are very health conscious in all other respects. They’re just ignorant. One of the founders of permaculture in Australia wrote about being against the covid vaccine during the lockdowns here. I used to live in one of the villages he designed, and the people and their beliefs were mostly lovely. But they have a distrust of science that makes them vulnerable to dangerous ideas.














  • It’s true. But I think the point is that more opportunities were available to that generation. For example, both my boomer parents grew up in poverty. Dad was an orphan. They moved to the city with no money and made careers for themselves. Housing was cheap. That’s not possible today without family wealth (in Australia at least). I’m a software engineer with an electrical engineering degree and I’ll never own a house or retire. They bought houses on public service wages without degrees.