Alexander Shulgin was the brilliant Berkeley chemist who first synthesized MDMA (Ecstasy).
Choice quote: “I have been frequently asked to speak more slowly, and I will do my best to adhere to that request. It’s good for about 40 seconds.”(20:05)
The big lie (German: Große Lügege) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth, used especially as a propaganda technique.[1][2] The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Hitler claimed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and bring about the Holocaust.
Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie propaganda technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.[3] Herf further argues that the Nazis’ big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at international Jewry, which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I.
Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held power behind the
scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It spread claims that
the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and it used these claims to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews as self-defense.[4]
Until the 1900s, when people in Ireland got sick, they would get naked and disappear into steamy saunas. Now, a new project is aiming to uncover timeworn structures’ secrets.
Naked and sweaty, they laid inside grass-covered stone igloo-like structures in the remote fields of Ireland. Some were ill, others may have been having hallucinations, hatching plans to distil illegal alcohol or imagining they were the Vikings who once raided this country. By the time these addled folk emerged from the structures back into the fresh air of 19th-Century Ireland, they had been through a jarring mental and physical journey. One that still holds many mysteries.
“Some people reckoned the cure was worse than the disease,” archaeologist Aidan Harte told me of this sweltering experience, as he stood atop a 150-year-old Irish sweathouse in Killadiskert, an isolated corner of County Leitrim. “Part of the reason there’s crazy theories about hallucinations and making alcohol is because we just don’t fully know the truth about sweathouses and all their uses. They’re a bit of a riddle that we’re now trying to work out.”