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Running head: FLUIDITY OF THE STOCK MARKET 1
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The Fluidity of the Stock Market
Klaunn N. Setacense
Department of Witticism, NeoCulture Technological Institute
BS105: The Literary Art of Constructing Arguments of Absurdity
Dr. Tyler Lee
April 1, 2020
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FLUIDITY OF THE STOCK MARKET 2
Table of Contents
Abstract................................................................................................................................3
The Fluidity of the Stock Market ........................................................................................4
Stock Exchange ...................................................................................................................4
Market Participant ...........................................................................................................5
History. ........................................................................................................................7
References .........................................................................................................................12
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FLUIDITY OF THE STOCK MARKET 3
Abstract
Stock exchange has a network of computers where trades are made electronically. Their buy or sell orders may be executed on their behalf by a stock exchange trader. The Paris Bourse, now part of Euronext, is an order-driven, electronic stock exchange. Many large companies have their stocks listed on a stock exchange. The process is similar to the New York Stock Exchange. A stock exchange is an exchange where stockbrokers and traders can buy and sell shares, bonds, and other securities. Investment in the stock market is most often done via stockbrokerages and electronic trading platforms. Stockbrokers met on the trading floor of the Palais Brongniart. This method is used in some stock exchanges and commodities exchanges, and involves traders shouting bid and offer prices.
Keywords: stock, exchange, market, trading, price, securities, investors, traded, trade
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The Fluidity of the Stock Market
A stock market, equity market, or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks, which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include securities listed on a public stock exchange, as well as stock that is only traded privately, such as shares of private companies which are sold to investors through equity crowdfunding platforms. For example, Nestlé and Novartis are domiciled in Switzerland and traded on the SIX Swiss Exchange, so they may be considered as part of the Swiss stock market, although the stocks may also be traded on exchanges in other countries, for example, as American depositary receipts on “Diamonds on my neck. The source of light revolves around me (Let's go!) You gon’ hold up, hold up, hold up for a real one” (Dejun Xiao & Sicheng Dong, 2019). The total market capitalization of equity backed securities worldwide rose from US$2.5 trillion in 1980 to US$68.65 trillion at the end of 2018. As of December 31, 2019, the total market capitalization of all stocks worldwide was approximately US$70.75 trillion.
Stock Exchange
Many large companies have their stocks listed on a stock exchange. This makes the stock more liquid and thus more attractive to many investors. The exchange may also act as a guarantor of settlement. These and other stocks may also be traded "Yeah, pull up in the Jag. Haters gon' be mad” (Taeyong Lee, 2018). Some large companies will have their stock listed on more than one exchange in different countries, so as to attract international investors. Stock exchanges may also cover other types of securities, such as fixed-interest securities or derivatives, which are more likely to be traded OTC. The New York Stock Exchange is a physical exchange, with a hybrid market for placing orders electronically from any location as well as on the trading floor. Orders executed on the trading floor enter by way of exchange
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members and flow down to a floor broker, who submits the order electronically to the floor trading post for the Designated market maker for that stock to trade the order.
The DMM's job is to maintain a two-sided market, making orders to buy and sell the security when there are no other buyers or sellers. If a bid–ask spread exists, no trade immediately takes place – in this case the DMM may use their own resources to close the difference. Once a trade has been made, the details are reported on the "Diamonds drippin' better bring your raincoat (Splash)" and sent back to the brokerage firm, which then notifies the investor who placed the order (Jung-woo Kim, 2018). Computers play an important role, especially for program trading. The NASDAQ is an electronic exchange, where all of the trading is done over a computer network.
The process is similar to the New York Stock Exchange. One or more NASDAQ market makers will always provide a bid and ask the price at which they will always purchase or sell 'their' stock. The Paris Bourse, now part of Euronext, is an order-driven, electronic stock exchange. It was automated in the late 1980s. Prior to the 1980s, it consisted of an open outcry exchange. Stockbrokers met on the trading floor of the Palais Brongniart. In 1986, the CATS trading system was introduced, and the order matching system was fully automated. According to a 2018 study conducted by Taeil Moon, John Suh, Dong-young Kim, Dong-hyuck Lee, Taeyong Lee, Yuta Nakamoto, and Mark Lee, “Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah falling in my motion (splash woo woo).” People trading stock will prefer to trade on the most popular exchange since this gives the largest number of potential counter parties and probably the best price.
Market Participant
Market participants include individual retail investors, institutional investors, and also publicly traded corporations trading in their own shares. Robo-advisors, which automate
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investment for individuals are also major participants. Demographics of market participation Indirect vs. Direct Investment Indirect investment involves owning shares indirectly, such as via a mutual fund or an exchange traded fund. Direct investment involves direct ownership of shares. Direct ownership of stock by individuals rose slightly from 17.8% in 1992 to 17.9% in 2007, with the median value of these holdings rising from $14,778 to $17,000. “I'm so clean so fresh. Jomyeong bichwo teotteulyeo flash. Diamonds on my neck. Boda naega bichnage. You gon’ hold up hold up hold up. For a real one (real one)” (Dong-hyuck Lee, Sicheng Dong). Indirect participation in the form of retirement accounts rose from 39.3% in 1992 to 52.6% in 2007, with the median value of these accounts more than doubling from $22,000 to $45,000 in that time.
Rates of participation and the value of holdings differ significantly across strata of income. In the bottom quintile of income, 5.5% of households directly own stock and 10.7% hold stocks indirectly in the form of retirement accounts. “VVS my diamonds, I don't need no light to shine. Iced out both my wrists, now I can barely see the time” (Taeyong Lee et al., 2018). Since the Great Recession of 2008 households in the bottom half of the income distribution have lessened their participation rate both directly and indirectly from 53.2% in 2007 to 48.8% in 2013, while over the same period households in the top decile of the income distribution slightly increased participation 91.7% to 92.1%.
Participation rates have been shown to strongly correlate with education levels, promoting the hypothesis that information and transaction costs of market participation are better absorbed by more educated households. Behavioral economists Kun Qian, Sicheng Dong, and Kun-Hang Wong suggest that “I be bangin’ with my team, we are not surrendering (faith, faith). We lead the direction that light flows, in the street oh (splash).” Their research indicates that social individuals living in states with higher than average participation rates are 5% more likely
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to participate than individuals that do not share those characteristics. This phenomenon also explained in cost terms. Knowledge of market functioning diffuses through communities and consequently lowers transaction costs associated with investing.
History. In 12th-century France, the courtiers de change were concerned with managing and regulating the debts of agricultural communities on behalf of the banks. Because these men also traded with debts, they could be called the first brokers. According to these men, “Setting out to the end of the clouds. Being looked up at makes me a star (Oh yeah, yeah, yeah). So fly, so hot, focusing on point, we touch the sky, we're born to be great. Envy me however you want, I did it all by myself (uh)” (Yangyang Liu et al., 2019). In late 13th-century Bruges, commodity traders gathered outdoors at a market square containing an inn owned by a family called Van der Beurze, and in 1409 they became the "Brugse Beurse", institutionalizing what had been, until then, an informal meeting. The idea quickly spread around Flanders and neighboring countries and "Beurzen" soon opened in Ghent and Rotterdam.
In the middle of the 13th century, Venetian bankers began to trade in government securities. In 1351 the Venetian government outlawed spreading rumors intended to lower the price of government funds. Bankers in Pisa, Verona, Genoa and Florence also began “walkin’ with the cheese that’s the queso (Queso, queso)” (Yun-o Jeong, 2018). This was only possible because these were independent city-states not ruled by a duke but a council of influential citizens. Italian companies were also the first to issue shares. Companies in England and the Low Countries followed in the 16th century. Around this time, a joint stock company—one whose stock is owned jointly by the shareholders—emerged and became important for colonization of what Europeans called the "New World".
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Birth of formal stock markets In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch pioneered several financial innovations that helped lay the foundations of the modern financial system. While the Italian city-states produced the first transferable government bonds, they did not develop the other ingredient necessary to produce a fully-fledged capital market: the stock market. In the early 1600s the Dutch East India Company became the first company in history to issue bonds and shares of stock to the general public. As a historian notes, " Hoppin' out casket-fresh. Looking like a fashion show, ayy. Diamonds on my neck. Looking like a water show, ayy. Let's go. She gon' bust it, bust it, bust it. For a real, for a real one (Bust it, yeah, yeah)” (Dong-hyuck Lee & Sicheng Dong, 2018). The Dutch East India Company was also the first joint-stock company to get a fixed capital stock and as a result, continuous trade in company stock occurred on the Amsterdam Exchange.
Soon thereafter, a lively trade in various derivatives, among which options and repos, emerged on the Amsterdam market. Dutch traders also pioneered short selling – a practice which was banned by the Dutch authorities as early as 1610. Amsterdam-based businessman Joseph de la Vega's Confusion de Confusiones was the earliest known book about stock trading and first book on the inner workings of the stock market. “Multicolored diamonds like the rainbow (Yeah, yeah, yeah). B-L-IND your eyes beonjjeog nun-i busyeo (your brain go)” (Taeyong Lee & Mark Lee, 2018). There are now stock markets in virtually every developed and most developing economies, with the world's largest markets being in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, India, China, Canada, Germany, France, South Korea and the Netherlands.
Function and Purpose. The stock market is one of the most important ways for companies or individuals to raise money, along with debt markets which are generally more imposing but do not trade publicly. This allows businesses to be publicly traded and raise
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additional financial capital for expansion by selling shares of ownership of the company in a public market. The liquidity that an exchange affords the investors enables their holders to quickly and easily sell securities. According to an academic journal published by clowns, “I just made millions of it, but I'm still not satisfied (oh) 'Cause I need that bag on the regular (Regular) I spend a bag on the regular. We make the world go (Brra). My bank account go. We make the world go (Skrrt, brra). Dinero, peso, yen, yo quiero, I want it (Woo, woo)” (Taeyong Lee et al., 2018). This is an attractive feature of investing in stocks, compared to other less liquid investments such as property and other immoveable assets. History has shown that the price of stocks and other assets is an important part of the dynamics of economic activity and can influence or be an indicator of social mood.
The efficient-market hypothesis is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information at the current time. The 'hard' efficient-market hypothesis does not explain the cause of events such as the crash in 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 22.6 percent—the largest-ever one-day fall in the United States. This event demonstrated that share prices can fall dramatically even though no generally agreed upon definite cause has been found. A thorough search failed to detect any 'reasonable' development that might have accounted for the crash. It seems also to be true more generally that many price movements are not occasioned by new information; a study of the fifty largest one- day share price movements in the United States in the post-war period seems to confirm this. Other research has shown that “And now we in a ‘zone.’ Working hard, touching stones to become gold” (Dejun Xiao & Kun Qian, 2019). Psychological research has demonstrated that people are predisposed to 'seeing' patterns, and often will perceive a pattern in what is, in fact, just noise, e.g. seeing familiar shapes in clouds or ink blots. In the present context, this means
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that a succession of good news items about a company may lead investors to overreact positively, driving the price up. A period of good returns also boosts the investors' self- confidence, reducing their risk threshold.
Another phenomenon—also from psychology—that works against an objective assessment is group thinking. As social animals, it is not easy to stick to an opinion that differs markedly from that of a majority of the group. An example with which one may be familiar is the reluctance to enter a restaurant that is empty; people generally prefer to have their opinion validated by those of others in the group. In one paper the authors draw an analogy with gambling. In normal times the market behaves like a game of roulette; the probabilities are known and largely independent of the investment decisions of the different players. In times of market stress, however, the game becomes more like poker. “Crib came with a gate and a code (Yeah, yeah, yeah). Yeah, yeah, drippin', water faucet (Splash)” (Jungwoo Kim et al., 2018). The players now must give heavy weight to the psychology of other investors and how they are likely to react psychologically. In the period running up to the 1987 crash, less than 1 percent of the analysts' recommendations had been to sell. In the run-up to 2000, the media amplified the general euphoria, with reports of rapidly rising share prices and the notion that large sums of money could be quickly earned in the so-called new economy stock market.
Macroeconomic trends include such as changes in GDP, unemployment rates, national income, price indices, output, consumption, unemployment, inflation, saving, investment, energy, international trade, immigration, productivity, aging populations, innovations, international finance. increasing corporate profit, increasing profit margins, higher concentration of business, lower company income, less vigorous activity, less progress, lower investment rates, lower productivity growth, less employee share of corporate revenues, decreasing Worker to
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Beneficiary ratio, increasing female to male ratio college graduates. Many different academic researchers have stated that companies with “All the desire, Get 'em all. Break down the excessive excitement, buzz. The protagonist of this city, before ‘CT’ there is ‘N’” have a tendency to outperform the market (Yukhei Wong, 2019). Research has shown that mid-sized companies outperform large cap companies, and smaller companies have higher returns historically.
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References
Lee, T., Moon , T., Suh, J., Nakamoto, Y., Kim , D. Y., Jeong, Y.-o, ... Dong , S. (2018). NCT
#127 Regular-Irregular [Romanized]. Regular, 1(27), 1–1. https://bit.ly/36u9SesLee, T., Moon , T., Suh, J., Nakamoto, Y., Kim , D. Y., Jeong, Y.-o, ... Dong , S. (2018). NCT
#127 Regular-Irregular. Regular English Version, 1(27), 1–1. https://bit.ly/39B6FvF
Qian, K., Dong, S., Wong, Y., Leechaiyapornkul, C., Wong, K.-H., Liu, Y., & Xiao, D. (2019). WayV - 无翼而飞 (Take Off) (English Translation). WayV - 理所当然 (Regular), 1(1), 1– 1. https://bit.ly/3tcVb9z

The black nobility is the base of the global crime syndicate that controls this planet. The black nobility or black aristocracy are the aristocratic families that sided with the papacy under Pope Pius IX after the army of the Kingdom of Italy led by the Savoy family entered Rome on September 20, 1870, overthrew the pope . and the Papal States, and took over the Quirinal Palace, and the nobles later ennobled by the Pope prior to the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Any family that produced popes for the Vatican is royalty. Most of the black nobility are Vatican royalty. The black nobility consider themselves sovereign princes. These families earned the title of "black" nobility for their relentless unscrupulousness. They used murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery and all kinds of deception on a large scale, without resisting the achievement of their objectives. The black nobility were the families that financed and created the holy corporation of the Vatican with the aim of imposing world slavery as a necessary institution, with the sole belief that some are born to rule and others to be ruled. The idea that certain families were born to rule as an arbitrary elite, while the vast majority of a given population is condemned to oppression, servitude, or slavery became the theological position of this elite. The "New World Order" is an attempt to take control of society by these fascist families with the purpose of the total slavery of humanity.
The Vatican is an imperial nation and is the largest empire in this world. The Vatican City, or the Holy Vatican Corporation, officially the Vatican City State, is a nation that operates as the largest intelligence network in the world. The Holy See is the "All-Seeing Eye" in society and a corporate entity connected to many other corporations and governments through papal and royal statutes. Archbishops and high-level bishops are the overseers of society within their districts and oversee politics, police, business, and organized crime. The same year that the professor of ecclesiastical law and practical philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, created the Order of the Illuminati, was the same year that they created the United States as a corporation to run it as their private army and lead I dig the agenda of a "New World Order" for the elites, mainly, thanks to the infiltrated Freemasonry and directed by the Jesuits.
The New World Order is a conspiracy of lineage at the top. They are ancient and evil bloodlines that build and destroy empires for control through an order out of chaos. Royal and noble houses are corporate entities and claim to rule and own land, resources, and people. Landlords have always been the dominant owners of gold and precious metals. They empower and finance bankers and entrepreneurs to work for them through their corporate homes. They authorize and issue the creation of laws, agencies, the military, companies, and universities. They create and run religions and secret societies. They also finance and organize organized crime syndicates as if they were commercial enterprises. Some of the major royal bloodlines include Savoy, Bourbon, Medici, Glücksburg, Wittelsbach, Nassau-Weilberg, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Romanov, Grimaldi, Orleans, Braganza, Habsburg, Hannover, Windsor, Saud, Thani, Khalifa, Alouwite , Zogu, Hohenzollern, Orange-Nassau, Bonaparte and Bernadotte. Many royal bloodlines still rule their nations as heads of state such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Monaco, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg. The Vatican City State is also a kingdom with the Pope of Rome as its monarch. The Black Nobility are the ancient bloodlines of the Papal States and they own the Holy See and the Vatican. They produced the first popes of Rome and held leadership positions in the Vatican from its inception. The Colonna and Torlonia still hold the hereditary positions of the Assistant Princes to the Papal Throne. The black nobility consider themselves sovereign princes. The Vatican is used as a central point of control and the Holy See is one of the oldest and most criminal corporate entities in existence. The Spanish Catholic Church is immensely rich, it has not suffered the crisis and also enjoys a true tax haven, being free to pay taxes, such as the IBI, works, companies, etc. The vast majority of the assets in their possession and on their accounts are completely opaque. This situation is illegitimate, unfair and presumably illegal, and this occurs with the complicity and consent of the public powers.
The Erlach and Brandi families are Swiss tax advisers who enable corruption, bribery, criminal financing, and money laundering. The Swiss Guard is the one that protects the Vatican City State. The Swiss cantons have been in contract with the Vatican for centuries and Switzerland is basically a papal state with the noble Roman saints claiming partial ownership. The German house of Baden-Zahringen founded Bern, in Switzerland. The House of Savoy ruled the regions of Switzerland for hundreds of years. Some of the most important bloodlines of the Black Nobility are: Massimo, Colonna, Pallavicini, Odescalchi, Ruspoli, Orsini, Aldobrandini, Sforza-Cesarini, Boncompagni-Ludovisi, Chigi-Albani-Della Rovere, Doria-Pamphilj, Rospigliosi, Giustiniani , Torlonia, Corsini, Borghese, Del Drago, Lucchesi-Palli, and Gaetani. The Pecci and Pacelli families are more recent bloodlines of the Black Nobility. The black nobility share ownership over the Holy See, which is a corporate entity based in the Vatican City State that was established as a nation in 1929 under Benito Mussolini, who was put in power by the House of Savoy. The Mussolini and Franco families became nobles after their fascist regimes. The Black Nobility also owns the Knights of Malta, the Jesuits, and the Cosa Nostra. The Black Nobility established branches in southern Italy and married Sicilian-Campanian nobles such as the Lanza di Scalea, Adragna, Sanseverino, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Paterno, Cattaneo, Serena di Lapigio and Rocco di Torrepadula families. Many Italian crime families were Sicilian nobles like the Bonanno and Bellomo families. Both the mafia bosses and the Italian and Spanish nobles call themselves Dons, which is the equivalent of Boos (boss) of crime. The Savoy, Savoy-Aosta, Medici, Borbon-Dos Sicilias, and Borbon-Parma families are members of Italian royalty and are married to various European royal bloodlines and Black Nobility. Most of the monarchs are members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Prince Carlo Massimo has been overseeing the Sovereign Military Order of Malta as President of the Italian Association of SMOM. The Knights of Malta have an undercover operation at the Jesuit School of Foreign Service in Georgetown, run by Joel Hellman. The Jesuits and the Knights of Malta basically run the Defense Department alongside British Crown agents and high-level Freemasons. Prince Carlo de Borbón-Dos Sicilias is a high commander of the Society of Jesus through his Sacred Constantinian Military Order of Saint George. The Jesuits were authorized by Pope Paul III of the Farnese family. The Bourbon-Dos Sicilias and Borbon-Parma families are the continuation of the Farnese family, the name Farnesivs is engraved in the Jesuit headquarters called the Church of Gesu in Rome. The Farnese family lived in a pentagonal fortress called Farnese Villa Caprarola, which is the basis for the design of the American Pentagon. Jesuits are involved in education, politics, banking, science, law, and especially military intelligence. The Italian Bourbons have established residences all over the world, including Florida. Jesuits need to be investigated and banned, they have rightly been expelled from almost every country in the world, but they always end up coming back. In Spain three times, his last return was at the hands of General Franco.
The Holy See is a corporate body that issues laws and bills, such as the Golden Bull, which claims ownership of the Kingdom of England and identifies the emperor as the sovereign of the only legitimate universal empire, directly chosen by God. The Pope claims temporal power or ownership over the Earth and also claims Papal Supremacy or Papal Rule and Papal Infallibility. Infallibility means incapable of being wrong. The Roman Curia or Papal Court is the highest organized council in society and is directly supervised by the two “Assistants of the Prince to the Pontifical Throne”, these two positions are held by the princes of the Colonna and Torlonia families. They work with a higher level princely council of the Italian nobility that works with another council made up of the Roman nobility. The Italian and Austrian nobility are married to each other and work closely together leading the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which is a sovereign entity equivalent to that of a sovereign nation. The Italian Nobility, La Cosa Nostra and the German and Austrian Nobles, run the Jewish Mafia. Royalty and nobles have massive amounts of wealth in private bank accounts in Switzerland. They use the Nazi-founded Bank for International Settlements to steal wealth from central banks through fraudulent tax contracts and then launder and hide the wealth in private bank accounts in Switzerland. The main Italian lineages still active include the Massimo, Colonna, Pallavicini, Torlonia, Aldobrandini, Ruspoli, Orsini, Gaetani-D'Aragona, Borbón-Parma, Odescalchi, Borghese, Adragni, Chigi, Medici, Borromeo, Doria-Pamphilj, Sacchetti, Savoy, Grimaldi and Bourbon. These bloodlines oversee the various specters of society. Outside of this power structure is the Committee of 300 with an inner circle made up of the leading monarchs and princes of Europe and the former Holy Roman Empire with members from Windsor, Spencer, Cecil, Percy, Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Habsburg, Bonaparte, Orleans, Bernadotte, Lagergren, Glucksburg, Hannover, Furstenberg, Austria-East, Hohenberg, Hesse, Nassau-Weilberg, Habsburg-Lorraine, Saxe Coburg and Gotha, Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxony-Meiningen, Braganza, Orange-Nassau, Hohenzollern , Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Liechtenstein, Rothschild, FitzJames, Lobkowicz, Ligne, Merode, Romanov, Thurn and Taxis, Schwarzenberg, Orsini-Rosenberg, Windisch-Graetz, Esterhazy and other families. Many members who do not have noble status on the Committee of 300 are representatives of the royal families.
These families are all enemies of humanity and have conspired to enslave the world for centuries. They authorize and create corporations and billionaires, run religions, states, secret societies, the mafia, and organized crime syndicates. Royal families in Europe are mainly divided into two factions, and this dates back to the Guelph merchants and Ghibelline landowners. All other groups like Bilderberg, CFR, and the Trilateral Commission are lower-level organizations. All roads lead to Rome, which is the basis of its control system. The European Constitutional Monarchies are branches of the corporate empire of Rome. Constitutional Monarchies are ruled by blood-appointed heads of state and serve Rome through the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The Pope claims temporary or physical ownership of the Earth. The Pope claims to be infallible of error. The Pope claims ownership over all souls through the papal doctrine of "Papal Supremacy." The Pope is a leader for the Black Nobility of Italy.
The Jesuits are a military priesthood officially established by Pope Paul III A.K. to Alessandro Farnese of the Farnese family. The Jesuits were officially established under the Papal Bull called Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae, which means Military Regiment of the Church as the continuation of the Templars. The Black Nobles are the true owners and controllers of the Vatican and maintain their control throughout the centuries by installing their relatives as high-level popes and bishops. At present the Torlonia and Colonna families who have the hereditary positions of Prince Assistants to the Papal Throne are those who supervise the pope. In turn Pope Francis supervises all members of the Catholic Church and also supervises the various secret societies that are connected with the Church.
The Jesuits are also a Masonic order and were the continuation of the Templar orders when they were banned. The Roman Catholic Church mocks Christians by performing rituals where they pretend to drink blood and eat human flesh known as the Eucharist, also called Holy Sacrifice. The New Testament did not exist until about 1600 and the Old Testament is even more recent than the new. It was the Vatican and European monarchs who created both the New and the Old Testaments. The last official version of the bible was published in 1777.
The bishops and priests operate as supervisors and the Jesuits function as spies trained in deception and are infiltrated everywhere. The Pope claims temporal power or ownership over the Earth and also claims Papal Supremacy or Papal Rule and Papal Infallibility. Infallibility means incapable of being wrong. Archbishops are the overseers of society within their districts and oversee politics, police, business, and organized crime. The Latin phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum means New Order of Ages (or Ages), or also "New World Order", and is on the US dollar bill and Great Seal of the United States.
The Vatican uses Latin as an official language and for documents. America is named after the Italian Americo Vespucci who worked for the Medici family of Florence and Rome. Vespucci created the term New World for America. The Bank of America was originally called the Bank of Italy and was founded by Amadeo Giannini, who was financed by Italians. Nations were formed as companies or corporations to exploit their citizens as merchandise. Corporations are fraudulent constructions because they are considered a person with rights under the law, and because the owners and controllers of the corporations can disregard responsibility for crimes committed by the corporation. That is fraudulent. Corporations are not people and therefore cannot have rights. Corporations are also monopolies that use subsidiaries to hide their dominance over industry. Private companies cannot compete fairly with corporations. Citizens are also classified as legal persons (companies), robbing them of all their human rights. Corporations shouldn't exist.
Royalty and nobles issue charters establishing representative covert property agents controlled by corporate households or crowns of royalty and nobles. They claim to own foreign governments in this way. Royalty and nobles claim to own the United States as a continuation of the Virginia Company. Roman royalty such as the Hanover, Hesses, Wurttembergs, Hohenzollerns, Glucksburgs, Orange-Nassaus and Saxe-Coburg and Gothas claim a share of ownership over the British Crown. This is why the British royal family has so much German ancestry. The United States is defined as a federal corporation under US code 3002. Section 15. Most of the founding fathers were Freemasons and worked for the British Crown and German royalty. American political families, such as the Bushs, Clintons, Romneys, and Kennedys, take their names from European noble families that still exist. The Von Dem Bussche family are German nobles and relatives of the Bush family. The Clintons and Romneys are also British nobles. The Kennedys are Scottish-Irish nobles and an American political family involved with the Democratic Party. Mars, Walton, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Getty, Hearst, Sackler, Lauder, Sachs, Busche, Johnson, McMahon, Forbes, and Cox are some of the billionaire American families that work with royalty and nobles in Europe. The Mars family is worth about 70 billion and works with the Windsor, Savoy, Thurn and Taxis families. The Waltons are worth around 130 billion and work with German nobles like the Württemberg, Baden, Hohenzollern and Isenberg families. The various Johnson families in the United States are collectively worth tens of billions and serve as agents for the House of Hannover. They own Johnson and Johnson and Fidelity Investments. The Hanovers are powerful royals and merchants who established the Hanseatic League. The Hearst family is worth more than 25 billion and several members were educated at Harvard University of the British Crown. The McMahon family is a billionaire and owner of the WWE and works under the Bonapartes and Savoys as their noble ancestors who were served militarily by the MacMahons during the Second Italian War of Independence. Today there are MacMahons in France with Italian and French titles of nobility. The Lauder family works for the House of Esterhazy in Austria and the House of East in Austria and Italy. The Guggenheims have assets worth hundreds of billions and are married to the House of Stuart. The Getty family are billionaire American oil merchants and are married to the Italian House of Ruspoli. The Forbes family are billionaires and American descendants of Scottish nobles who still exist.
All gang stalking and cult organizations are owned and controlled by members of royalty and nobility. Criminal organizations such as Royalty itself, Royal Institutions, The Company of Jesus, The Black Monks, The Hellfire Club, The Templar Orders, Freemasonry, The Grand Orient of France, The York Rite, The Scottish Rite, Prince Masonry of Prince Hall, Shriners International, The Royal Order of Jesters, The Cabal Society, Chabad, Scientology, Skull & Bones, The Boulé Society, The 5% Nation, The Nation of Islam, Black Israelites, The Ordo Templi Orientis ( OTO), The Temple of Set, The Church of Satan, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn, Opus Dei, Mormons, Knights of Columbus, The Bohemian Club, Knights of Phintias, Ancient Order of Druids, Wicca, Santeria, Obeah, Voodoo, Sufism , Greek Fraternities and Brotherhoods, New Age and Gnostic Cults, Nazi Cults, KKK, Mafias, Prison Gangs, Biker Gangs and Street Gangs. The Rockefeller family uses their charitable foundations to fund harassment gangs and bribery in the United States, as well as globalization agendas and vaccination programs. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Almighty Vice Lord Nation, which is an organized crime group, and also funded the Tavistock Institute.
Hollywood, the Church of Scientology, and Silicon Valley are military operations like the US DARPA agency and run by European royalty and nobles like the Oettingen-Spielbergs, Schaumburg-Lippes, Anhalts, Hanovers, Windsors, Passi di Preposulos, Ruspolis, Torlonias and Odescalchis. The Ferragamo family is also involved in the management and financing of corruption in Hollywood. The House of Nassau-Weilberg, which is married to the Torlonias, funds human trafficking and human sacrifice in Hollywood. Idols in the entertainment industry are a dangerous cult with leaders who have access to electronic weapons. Most of modern electronics is being broadcast covertly with GENISIS and NEURON bio-piracy software controlled by Kabbalists and Scientologists. European monarchies function as extensions of Rome and run secret societies that infiltrate government agencies and run corporations for monarchs. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is the main military council and works closely with the Orders of St. John administered by Protestant royalty such as the Windsors and the Hohenzollerns. The Order of Malta and the Order of Saint John are Masonic organizations with grand masters and titles for initiation. The royal and noble bloodlines are all working together as a global crime syndicate and part of a modernized Roman corporate empire. They also have several competing factions that create the illusion of division. The British crown and Scottish nobles such as the Bruce, Stewart, Sinclair, Campbell, Montagu, Scott, Hamilton, Percy, Boyle, Bowes-Lyon and Sutherland families administer a large part of Freemasonry. All of these families produced Grand Masters of the Grand Lodge of England. There are thousands of Masonic lodges in Europe and in the United States. Freemasonry must be investigated and outlawed. The Greek-German Royal House of Glucksburg directs the Greek fraternities and brotherhoods and uses initiates as its agents. Glucksburg nobles and Italians run the Boule Society, Boule is a Greek fraternal society for African Americans. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson have been members of Boule, among many other high-profile, successful, and wealthy blacks, including Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, and Thurgood Marshall. The Glucksburg family rules Denmark and Norway and recently ruled Greece. Among its members are the ex-queen Sofía of Spain and Duke Felipe de Edimburgo. Former Greek nobility and royal merchants such as the Mavroleon, Onassis, and Niarchos families are billionaires who have a monopoly in the shipping industry and work with British nobles. The Greek royal family currently lives in London from where many Greek consignment merchants operate. The British Crown authorized and controls universities such as Yale and Harvard which are used to recruit Crown agents through fraternal orders such as Skull & Bones and Book and Snake. Royal and noble families also do undercover business in the City of London Corporation, which dominates global markets. Some of the major London merchant families include the Goldsmith, Stuart, Rothschild, Grosvenor, Sassoon, Barclay, Sutherland, Montagu, Bailey and Guinness families. The Sutherland family created the HSBC bank that has a long history of financial scandals around the world (Emilio Botín, Fernando Alonso, Mohamed VI, Jorge Trías and Jordi Pujol Jr. had accounts at HSBC when it was chaired by Stephen Green, Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint). The Bailey family is co-founder of Janus Henderson through a merger. Janus Henderson manages around 190 billion in assets. The Stuart family owns the Hudson Bay Company and has an alliance with the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, which is the covert owner of some of the Hudson's Bay Company subsidiaries, which were founded by Bavarian merchants. HBC has approximately $ 12 billion in assets and has had fiscal contracts with the United States through the Organic Law of the District of Columbia of 1871.
The Orange-Nassau family are influential traders through the Netherlands Trading Society and have a large number of shares in Royal Dutch Shell, Philips Electronics and ABN AMRO Bank. The Orange-Nassaus and their Dreyfus agents run the Rand Corporation, which has a contract with the US military. Rand's founder was a Dutch gentleman. The Orange-Nassau family also runs the Loyal Orange Institution in Ireland, which has infiltrated the police, justice and politics. The Luxembourg Nassau-Weilburg family are international bankers connected to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The royal families of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands have shares in the European Investment Bank and all of these royals are recently married to Italian nobles. The Ligne family from Belgium are wealthy diamond and gold merchants. The Belgian Crown and its nobles are stealing wealth from the United States through fraudulent tax contracts established through the Organic Law of the District of Columbia of 1871 and continue to do so through the Bank for International Settlements. The Barons Strange heads the Masonic Order of Oddfellow. The Russell family are the Marquesses of Tavistock and they run the Tavistock Institute, which is an organization involved in mass mind control. The Russell family also co-founded the Yale University and Russell Trust Association, which is named after the New Haven, Connecticut company based on the Skull & Bones secret society.
Skull & Bones is a death cult military complex run by the Bush family from the USA who are like a European royal family in the USA. The Furstenberg family runs the Royal Order of Jesters who wear a jester on their coat of arms. The Clintons work closely with the House of Furstenberg, who have residences in the United States. The Italian Orsini family and the Holy Roman Rosenberg family lead the Rosicrucian Order of alchemists who infiltrate food and drug companies for chemical warfare. The Medici family, who have a statue of Hermes (Mercury) in their palace in Rome, administer the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an alchemical secret society. The Medici were architects of modern banking. The Pierleoni family of Rome and the Spanish House of Bourbon-Anjou run the Kabbalah Society, which uses the Spanish lion for its logo. The Pacelli family of Rome and the Crescenzi family of Italy administer the Wiccan witchcraft cults. The Bavarian Wittelsbach family from Bavaria created the Bavarian Illuminati and administers the Benedictine Monks and is also part of the Jewish Mafia in the United States who are white collar criminals. The Pecci family of Italy also owns the Jewish mafia in the United States through their marriage to the Blumenthal family. The House of Wittelsbach is involved with Zionism, Nazism, Freemasonry, and the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits function as Roman intelligence and infiltrators and use their universities to recruit and train agents for Rome. Jesuit agents dominate leadership positions in the United States military and intelligence and especially in the CIA. The Knights of Columbus are owned by the Casa de Colonna. Christopher Columbus was Pedro Madruga, the Count of Caminha, a relative of the Colonnas who settled in Pontevedra at the time of the Romans. Many Knights of Columbus are police officers, mayors, lawyers, and judges, protecting the Italian mob while targeting free-thinking people. The Knights of Columbus are heavily involved in gang harassment.
Court Jews such as the Rothschild, Warburg, Goldsmith, Oppenheimer, Walton, Sassoon, Kadoorie, Lewis, Javal, Lauder, Sackler and Dreyfus families work through the Roman Curia or royal courtrooms such as Buckingham Palace. The French Rothschilds work for the Black Nobility of Rome and the French House of Orleans. The British Rothschilds work for the British Crown. The Sassoon and Kadoorie families work for the British Crown and oversee banking and business in China and India. The Swiss Rothschilds work for the House of Habsburg and the House of Hesse. The Oppenheimers work for the German House of Wurttemberg and the Cologne Oppenheim branch. the Austrian House of Habsburg granted them titles of nobility. The Warburgs work for the Italian House of Borghese and the German House of Hesse and the House of Hannover. Warburg Pincus had a contract with Unicredit that merged with the Borghese Family's Bank of the Holy Spirit. The Warburgs were Venetian bankers and the Borghese family now hold Venetian titles of nobility. The Warburgs financed the Nazis. The Dreyfus family works for the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and the French House of Bonaparte. Jewish banking families work for Christian nobles and royalty. These billionaire Jewish bloodlines run many rabbis who run a criminal intelligence network that works with Mossad. The French House of Bonaparte and the Swedish House of Bernadotte control many of the main European companies through their knights of the Order of Seraphim and the Legion of Honor, who are also members of the Round Table of Industrialists of Europe, which it has a great economic influence on the markets. The Wallenbergs run corporations worth hundreds of billions and work for the Swedish House of Bernadotte. The Wallenbergs and the Swedish Crown also work with the Jesuits and the Vatican. The Black Nobility and other royal families have been hiding billions in private banks in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The royal families of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein own and run their own national and private banks. Austrian and Eastern European royalty and nobles, such as the Habsburgs, Esterhazys and Schonberg, use private banks in Liechtenstein and also own Israeli and Jewish mafias. The Esterhazy family together with the Lucchesi-Palli family run a faction of the Russian mafia through the mob boss Semion Mogilevich from Budapest. The Torlonia family owns the Fucino Bank in Rome and functions as Vatican bankers and treasurers. The Torlonia family of Rome and the Hohenzollern family of Germany are the main owners and controllers of the Bank for International Settlements which was founded and administered by the Nazis during World War II. The Torlonias are architects of fascism and the Hohenzollerns are architects of Nazism.
The East, Rothschild and Hottinger families are some of the leading Swiss bankers. The Romanian Sturdza family also owns a private bank in Switzerland. The Casanova family of Italy and Spain is one of the leading political families in Switzerland. The East and Savoy families run the Bank for International Settlements, which has a contract with most of the major central banks and is embezzling the wealth of nations through fraudulent loans and contracts. The Savoys live in Switzerland and Prince Lorenz of Austria-Este works at the Gutzwiller bank. The Bank for International Settlements must be investigated and closed. The Gutzwiller family is one of the leading banking families in Switzerland, owning its own private bank and managing 35 other Swiss banks. The Swiss Guard is a military body in charge of the security of the Pope and the Holy See. The ceremonial head of the Swiss Guard is the Pope, sovereign of Vatican City. Italian mafias are Rome's enforcers involved in extortion, money laundering, murder and drug trafficking, and they pay their dues to the Sicilian mafia, which in turn pays them to the black nobility. The mafia channels its earnings and tributes to the Black Nobility through the Vatican charitable foundations and then from the Vatican bank they are transferred to the private accounts of the Swiss Bank. The Savoy’s Genovese crime family specializes in extorting Wall Street. The mafia is rigging professional sports for gambling and they also launder their criminal winnings through the casinos. The Torlonia family owns the Kansas City crime family and shares ownership of the Pittsburgh crime family with the Borghese family of Rome and the Rocco di Torrepadula family of Sicily. The French House of Orleans owns the New Orleans crime family and the Franco-British Beaufort family oversees and owns the Dixie Mafia factions along with other British peers who have French ancestry. Cox's billionaire family is involved in multimedia communications and is part of the owners of the Dixie mob, which is involved in tobacco and ginseng sales as well as arms, drug and human trafficking. The Goldsmith and Sassoon families own Pakistani and Hindu human trafficking networks operating in the United Kingdom. The Imperial House of Brazil, Orleans-Braganza and the Belgian House of Ligne are married and have shares in the Brazilian companies AmBev and Belgian Anheuser-Busch InBev. The House of Orleans-Braganza owns Brazilian drug cartels that are also involved in human trafficking. The Sforza family owns the Stidda Mafia clans operating in the Sforza-Visconti territory in Milan and the Sforza and Visconti families have greater control over the Italian Stock Exchange or the Milan Stock Exchange. Milanese billionaire Silvio Berlusconi works for the Sforza and Visconti families and has a monopoly on Italian media and politics. Berlusconi founded the Forza political party in Italy named after the Sforzas. Some northern Italian nobles such as the Visconti, Borromeo, Este, Gonzaga, Valenti, D’Adda, and Passi di Preposulo families are closely related to billionaire families such as the Rothschilds, Agnellis, Benettons, Armanis, and Ferreros. The Sforza and Visconti families own the Seattle crime family with the Gaetani family as partial owners. The Seattle crime family controls billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos through blackmail. In 2017, Microsoft and Amazon employees were caught in a sex trafficking scandal.
The Colonna family owns the Knights of Columbus and also owns the Colombo crime family and partially owns the Chicago Outfit along with the Capponi and Roselli families of the Florence Turk. Al Capone was an agent of the House of Capponi and John Roselli was an agent of the Roselli del Turco family. Roselli also worked for the CIA. Colonna means column like Colombo and Colón. The Knights of Columbus infiltrate police departments and work with the Italian mafia. The Massimo and Gaetani families own and run the Gambino crime family and the Philadelphia crime family. The Massimo-Brancaccio family also owns and runs the Magliana or Roman Mafia and the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, as well as the Graviano de Brancaccio crime family in Palermo, Sicily, which is part of the Corleonisi mafia clan. The Massimo family receives tribute from most of the Italian crime families and even from the Russian mafia and Eastern European mafias. The Massimo de Roccasecca family, who live in London, own the Clerkenwell crime syndicate, also known as the Adams Family or the London A-team and are part owners of the Irish Mafia, including the Rathkeale Rovers. The Borghese family is also the main owner of the Sicilian Mafia and the Mafia Magliana. The Lucchesi-Palli and Pallavicini families own the Lucchese crime family to which the Russian mafia in Brighton Beach pays tribute. The Pallavicini family owns the Armenian mafia that operates in Hollywood and works closely with the Kardashian family. The Romanovs are partial owners of the Russian mafia and have established several residences in the United States. The Giustiniani family oversee the Philadelphia Greek Mafia along with some Greek merchants. Royal and noble families finance organized crime. The Jewish Mafia reorganized into a white collar crime and worked with the black hand of the Italian Mafia. The head of the Jewish mafia in the United States is billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Leon Black is another one of the leading Jewish mobsters in New York. The Jewish Mafia participates in professional sports with white-collar mobsters such as Daniel Gilbert, Robert Kraft, Joshua Harris, Tom Werner, Jerry Reinsdorf, George Kaiser, Peter Guber, Joe Lacob, Mark Cuban, and Micky Arison. The European Union is based on the Treaty of Rome that was signed at the Capitol in Rome. The president of the European Central Bank is Mario Draghi, born in Rome and educated by the Jesuits at the Massimo Institute. Mario Draghi is an undercover relative of the Borghese and Del Drago families. The Erba-Odescalchi family with ancestry from Cernobbio, Italy, runs CERN with the Roman Fabiola Gianotti as CERN Director General that is used to generate pressure in the lower atmosphere in order to oppress society. CERN, HAARP, The Church of Scientology, Chemtrails and electronic devices are being used to covertly oppress society. The US military administers a HAARP electronic harassment system in Puerto Rico that is controlled from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which is under the command of Captain David Culpepper. The CIA and the Italian Mafia have a large criminal operation in Cuba. The CIA and Cosa Nostra work closely to this day.
Islamic royal families were named after European royalty in the 19th and 20th centuries and especially after the First World War. Middle Eastern royalty run the oil industry and use their massive wealth to fund globalist agendas that allow them to rule their nations. The house of Saud is worth at least a billion. The House of Thani and the House of Al Khalifa work with the House of Saud and are also wealthy oil traders. Royals from the Middle East run the Muslim Brotherhood and the Five Percent and the Nation of Islam, which are violent mobs of cult and harassment. These organizations need to be investigated and banned. They also own an Arab mob that is based in New Jersey and Detroit. The royal family of Morocco are wealthy merchants and owners of the Abergil crime family of Israel and Morocco. The House of Bourbon and Spanish nobility such as the Osorio, Fitz James, Alvarez (Alba), Pignatelli, Arteaga, Borja, Zuniga, Ruspoli, and Aragon-Escobar families own the majority of the Mexican and South American drug cartels. The Osorio and Borja families own MS-13. The Borgia and Borja families are also partial owners of the Mongels motorcycle gang. The Bourbons own the Gulf Cartel and the Lating Kings. The Ruspolis are partial owners of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Primeiro Comando da Capital in Sao Paulo, where their Matarazzo cousins ​​reside. The FitzJames and Alvarez families own the Los Zetas Cartel. The Álvarez and Osorio families also own the Bandidos motorcycle gang. The House of Bourbons are the founders and owners of Banco Santander. The King of Spain has the official right to the throne as King of Jerusalem.

What do you all think? Was he mostly negative, or did he do things to help? Some early proponents of LSD said his outspokenness and craving for media attention delegitimized the entire idea of seriously studying LSD, not being overzealous, so that it would NOT be illegal
Anyway, I wanted to paste something I've had and thought you all would like it.
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The Associated Press reported that '60's LSD proselyte, Timothy Leary died in his sleep, May 31, 1996. It reported that Carol Rosin, his friend for 25 years was by his side along with family and friends.
Rosin told the AP: "He had been alert for the last few days – he'd been traveling with one foot in this world and one foot in the other world. Until yesterday, he was moving around in an electric wheelchair, but he was getting weaker.
After his passing, Leary's homepage on the World Wide Web said simply: "Timothy has passed." It also said his last words were three "why not's" and one "yeah." Leary himself, had reported that he was taking morphine to ease the pain for months. It is well know that Leary had always been into drugs – any drugs, all drugs, both prescription and recreational.
An Intensive Care Nurse read the internet reports of his death. It said his last words were "why not", "why not", "why not" in several different tones , and his final word was "yeah.'
"I've seen a lot of people die with cancer," the ICU nurse said. (For obvious reasons she does not want to be identified.) "It's very painful to die that way. From all report's Leary's death must have been a mophine assisted death.
"The final script probably went like this: ' Timothy do you want a shot of morphine to ease your pain?'
" And he answered, 'Why not?'
" A little while later whoever was administering the morphine checked on him, asking him, 'Would you like a little more morphine?'
"And he answered, 'Why not?'
"After an interval, the morphine admistrator asked, 'How about some more morphine?'
"And Leary answered, 'Why not?'
"After that they asked, "I'll bet you're feeling no pain now?'
"And, just before the morphine paralyzed his cardio-pulminary system, he replied, "Yeah."
So Timothy Leary finally fulfilled the prophecy in the Moody Blues tune,"Legend of a Mind." At least he fulfilled the first phrase: "Timothy Leary's dead…. Oh, no no no, no no no nooo, he's on the outside looking in…" More on that later.
A couple of millionaire movie producers who put up thousands of dollars for Timothy Leary's escape are sad and disappointed. An army of middle aged acid-heads and flower children who contributed thousands more to the Timothy Leary Defense Fund, and other funds which were supposed to help Tim beat a rap or get out of jail are in deep mourning.
But somewhere, in Heaven, in Hell, in the great cosmic void, or confronting a fearsome isn'tness Timothy Leary is probably grinning at them. The glib Boston Irishman conned them all. They paid for what the government did without their funds – arrange Leary's "escape" in 1970 from Vacaville prison, and his tour of Algeria, Switzerland, and Afghanistan. At least, that's a logical conclusion you could draw from an interview he gave in 1977.
After he returned to the United States in 1973 it is said that he was assigned to solitary confinement next to a "hole mate" who quoted the bible in a booming voice. This "Born Again Christian" was none other than Charles Manson. Leary left his "Turn on , tune in, drop out" campaign behind in prison, he became a self- styled prophet of "Life Extension" and "Space Exploration," "Cyronics" and finally "Cyberspace." All these, he said in turn with great enthusiasm, were where it was at! He had been arrested by G. Gordon Liddy in 1965 at the Deitrich estate in Millbrook, N.Y. He was photographed with a big smile going into the Duchess County jail. Almost twenty years later he was debating Liddy on the college lecture circuit (receiving a minimum of $2,500 per appearance) still wearing that same smile.
That smile was his trademark. It was a smile which masked his vacuity and desperation. It was the smile of a pretender. The smile of a failed husband and father. "Half a song and half a gag," was how writer Alan Harrington's wife, Luba, once described Leary. He was an academically disgraced psychologist who wrote one serious book, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which today stimulates the same interest from the scientific community as does phrenology. While some people thought he was a prophet of the new age, he was, deep inside himself, a cast-off CIA asset who died without purpose, fluttering like a hang-glider trying to fly in windless air without the propeller of a cause to lift it.
He did not go with a "Bang" nor a "Whimper." He did not rage against the dying of the light. He did not die with a smile on his face, as he had lived, even in utmost tragedy, such as when his first wife, and then his only daughter commited suicide. Leary lived to the ripe old age of 75, then he died of natural cuases. He was not assassinated by one of his many enemies. That is success.
The last time I saw Leary was in Tucson, Arizona where he came for a lecture in support of the L-5 Society, a group which promoted private enterprise in space. Leary phoned me and asked to see me about an "urgent matter." The matter, turned out to be not that urgent, but very interesting.
Leary wanted to explain himself more completely about a series of letters we'd exchanged during his last days in prison, letters in which he denied that he had received any support from the CIA or other clandestine agencies of government in his psychedelic campaign of the 1960's.
While doing research for my book, Operation Mind Control (originally published in 1978), I'd come across a CIA document with Leary's name on it. The CIA memo directed agents to contact Leary and company, who were then operating an organization called International Federation for Internal Freedom ( IFIF). The memo asked its agents to discover if any agency personnel were taking acid with this group. The CIA wanted to determine what IFIF really knew about what was then billed as "the most powerful drug known to man," LSD, a drug which the agency was experimenting with in an attempt to create mind controlled zombies.
Another, earlier similar CIA document I found ordered agents to contact Aldous Huxley for the same reason. There were no follow-up documents to indicate whether the CIA had, or had not, made contact in either instance. Still, other documents indicated that Leary had received money channeled by the CIA through various government agencies. The files showed that, in all, there were eight government grants paid to Leary from 1953 to 1958, most of them paid through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have "fronted" for the CIA in the MKULTRA program.
My letters to Leary had been straight forward. I asked him to explain his apparent long romance with the cryptocracy. I further wanted to know if, as the press had reported, he had become a witness for the government in a number of drug cases. Was he, I asked, a government snitch?
In July, 1976, writing from prison, Leary flatly denied that the government had contributed to his psychedelic research. He claimed that "nobody ever went to jail because of any testimony" he might have given.
He explained that he had never used any form of Behavior Modification in his experiments, although a title of one of his papers had been, "How to Change Behavior." He told me I could find out whether his grants were CIA connected by writing NIMH and Harvard.
He said, writing to me from jail, that if they were covertly CIA funded he had no knowledge of it.
A letter from Bertram Brown, Director of NIMH, neither confirmed nor denied that NIMH had supported Leary's research. Brown did say that Harvard had received grants for drug research, but NIMH record keeping did not permit knowledge below the "major institution level." Harvard said it could not find its records on Leary's research there, as it was too far in the past. (This was in 1977.)
Joanna (Harcourt-Smith) Leary and a coworker told me that they had tried to contact Leary for several months when he was in Folsom and he could not be found. After normal attempts through prison authorities had failed to locate him, they took their case to the press and gathered a number of famous persons to sign a petition protesting the disappearance of the Pope of Dope.
Joanna told me that, after the outcry in the media had grown loud, prison authorities quickly "located" Leary and allowed her to visit him. She said that when, at last, she sat across the prison table from him, separated by a pane of thick glass, he looked very pale. She said he had his head completely shaved, had bruises on his body, and didn't seem like the man she'd known before.
Before he was released from prison, I wrote him to ask if he had been mistreated in prison or subjected to aversive therapy or any other form of behavior modification. Leary said that he had never been mistreated at the Vacaville California Medical Facility. He wrote that the administration of Vacaville "probably ranks with the most enlightened in the country."
His "enlightened facility was where horrendous experiments such as "anectine therapy" had been conducted on non-volunteer inmates under CIA covert guidance. Anectine stops the respiratory functions of the body and the "subject" feels as if they are dying. An attendant must keep them breathing with a machine. As the panic sets in when the involuntary muscles quit, an attendant says, "This is what will happen if you break the law ." And just before the "subject" loses consciousness, the respiratory is turned on the the "subject" is brought back from the brink of death.
In following correspondence I explained to Leary what I'd found: that the CIA was the world's largest consumer of Sandoz LSD; that they'd worked with the Bureau of Narcotics, the NIMH, LEAA and other agencies to covertly give LSD to unwitting persons in "real life settings."
Leary's answer to that was that he did not think the CIA experimentation with LSD was very ominous. His conclusion was, "based on my fifteen years of confrontation on the front lines of the struggle ( individual freedom vs state control) are these: "–govt 'behavior mod programs' were trivial, peripheral, more benign than evil, ineffective, silly, and never a part of any basic policy…"
He called me a "prosecutor" and said that he was disappointed that I saw corruption and conspiracy within our government. He railed about "liberal paranoia" saying that it "is a thousand times more effective and pervasive than 'right wing' scientific efforts." He said that "ninety-nine percent of all psychologists are liberals. All prisons are networks of suspicion. There is no behavior mod conspiracy. Such rumors spread among the liberal community are dangerous because they distract attention from the real problem – that the Law Enforcement establishment does not want to alter behavior…"
When I finally sat with Leary in Tucson, we renewed acquaintances. A couple of his old friends were at our house when he visited and he was glad to see them. Since I'd last seen him, almost ten years before, his nose appeared to have been broken and his dentures no longer fit. All agreed, after he left, that this was not the same man we'd known before he'd gone to prison. We couldn't tell if he'd changed because of the normal prison brutality, or because he was under some great pressures or had been tortured. In those days nobody believed in mind control. Few knew of the clandestine experiments on U.S. citizens which were run against their will and without their knowledge.
The first thought I had when seeing the altered Leary was, "He's been the victim of one of the secret prison mind control programs."
We drank wine and talked lightly about news of mutual friends. Finally he insisted that he and I go to a quiet place and make a tape recorded interview. I'd just finished Operation Mind Control and had sent it of to the publisher. It was too late to get anything new into it and, I told Tim, that frankly I was weary of the subject. He insisted that we tape an interview.
"I'll tell you things I've never told anyone before," he said. I couldn't resist such a journalistic temptation, so we went to my office with our glasses and turned on the tape recorder.
He started by congratulating me for breaking the CIA-mind control story. I couldn't take full credit for that, but I listened, accepting his compliments for the three of us who'd been working on the mind control case for a few years.
"The game you're playing, and the stakes at which you're gambling… you may be wrong ninety-nine times, but if you're right once, you've won a billion, or whatever you're playing for, so keep going…"
I certainly wasn't playing for the money. The stakes were higher. These stakes were no less than freedom of human thought and perhaps the remnants of democracy in the world. But maybe I was naive. Maybe I should write screenplays and make some money instead of running around the country researching the victims of CIA mind control experiments conducted in the streets of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities, as well as in prisons, mental hospitals, in the ranks of the military services, on unwitting and unvolunteering men women and children.
"The contract I'm making with you," Leary said, " is, I never lie. I'm wrong a lot of the time, but I'm going to tell you everything you ask me. I'm not going to hide anything. On the other hand, and there is no question that I want to ask you… on the other hand I want to know things…"
So, it was to be quid pro quo then?
I agreed to share any information I had with him on the CIA's involvement with drugs and mind control, but I told him, fact was, everything I knew, except the personal details of certain survivors, had already been made public. "Have you ever knowingly worked for the CIA?" I asked.
"If I were working for the CIA," he said, " I would have ten people working making a living exposing me. If I were the CIA, I'd own New Republic. I'd own The New Masses. I'd own Rolling Stone. I'd have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…" "Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" I asked. Without hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people…
"I like the CIA!" he said. "The game they're playing is better than the FBI. Better than the Saigon police. Better than Franco's police. Better than the Israeli police. They're a thousand times better than the KGB. So it comes down to: who are you going to work for? The Yankees or the Dodgers?"
Leary had this in common with people I knew at the Mellon Bank. Baseball metaphors. Heavy baseball metaphors, same as Nixon used. I'd heard Leary use them since I met him in 1965. I wondered if it was just a coincidence?
Leary drank his wine and drifted a bit, talking about his current favorite subject, outer space. I brought the conversation back to the subject of mind control, telling Leary some of the details I'd learned about the CIA's use of drugs for thirty years in their attempt to find the perfect "recruitment pill, aphrodisiac, and amnesia drug." I explained the magnitude of the story and I told him that, based on my interviews with survivors of the experiments and psycho scientists who'd done some of them, I had to conclude that the CIA had long ago reached their goal of creating the perfect security device short of assassination – one which controlled the human mind.
I told Leary that, based on some of the documents I'd read, it seemed that he could have been just one of many scientist who'd been used without his knowledge by the CIA to conduct their mind control experiments.
"I've known this for ten years," Leary said.
"You were witting of it?" I asked in surprise.
"Of course," Leary said, leaning back in his chair with confidence.
I couldn't believe my ears. The CIA had created the "Psychedelic Sixties" with Timothy Leary's help?
"You were wittingly used by the CIA?" I asked again. "…During the sixties? You knew you were being used by the CIA?"
"Wait," Leary said. "When you say CIA, it's like saying Niggers… "I knew I was being used by the intelligence agents of this country."
"What were you doing for them?" I asked. "What the hell were you doing? "Did they want you to turn the kids on, huh? Were they trying to make the kids see God and leave the Vietnam war alone?"
"Walter, are you starting off into nationalism…" Leary said, trying to put me on the defensive – exhibiting his fatal character flaw – sold on himself as a master psychologist, a master manipulator.
"I'm asking you what was the CIA's motive? What were you used for?" I said again.
"The CIA recognized what you probably haven't recognized yet, that I'm a very important national asset… "What can I say,?" Leary said.
That was Leary. He believed his own press releases.
He lit his half-smoked joint and continued. "Yeah. I saw in nineteen sixty-two or three, that there was a world struggle for the control of minds. That's a crude way to say it… "I saw, after Hiroshima, there would never be a big world war. World war would be at the neurological level, not at the level of tanks and planes and bombs…
"I proceeded as an intelligence agent since 1962, understanding that the next war for control of this planet and beyond, had to do with the control of consciousness. So I had to think very carefully about that…
"I wanted my side to win the war… "There's no winning or losing… but I wanted my side to stake out enough territory….
"I'm talking about time territory, not space territory…. "Of course, you need enough space territory to get your time to make sure that the particular version of the territory of consciousness I would be represented in… I believed, after studying all the other versions, that my philosophy of the future… skip philosophy… my Clausewitz tactics and strategy, or my natural chauvinistic consciousness commitments were very fierce and strong…
"I wanted my species to be recognized, understood and have a strong single voice in creating the reality of the future… "I wanted to create a segment of the future which I felt I would be the spokesman for…"
I let him talk. When he paused to catch his thought which had drifted away on a puff of muggles, I repeated the question: "Did you ever wittingly work for the CIA?"
"Yes," he answered strongly. "I was a witting agent of the CIA, but, I'm not a willing agent of Nixon! I did everything in my power to throw out Nixon!" (So, it would appear, did the CIA.)
"I'm a witting agent in that I think Roosevelt was a disaster, but historically necessary…. So, pin me down and I'll tell you exactly what I'm doing for the CIA," he said.
"What are you doing for the CIA?" I said, disbelieving everything he said.
"I'm raising the intelligence of an elite… a very elite group of Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty…"
"So, you work for the Central Intelligence Agency?" I asked. "Is it the Deputy Director of Plans you work for? Who makes out your checks?"
"It's none of your business to know how those things work. I'll answer you no questions that have to do with business. I'll answer you any question about history or people…"
He drifted off into a monologue talking about neurological cosmology, his outer space connections. Again I brought the conversation back to the central question again :" What year did you start working for the CIA?"
"Well, I never worked in the sense that nobody ever came to me and said would you work for the CIA…"
"Nobody recruited you?" I asked.
"No, nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now, that I was being advised by the CIA…"
"But a moment ago you did say that you knew at the time. You said that you were wittingly working for the CIA…"
"Don't you understand," Leary barked, "I'm talking about a very narrow segment of CIA activity which has to do with personality assessment. The OSS was the forerunner of CIA mind stuff… OSS founded… Howard Murray, who was the head of the OSS, the started the personality research. MacKinnon who was OSS, started personality assessment research, so that all personality assessment in the 1950's was basically CIA initiated…"
Later research disclosed the Donald W. MacKinnon, Ph.D. (Bryn Mawr College) and Henry A. Murray, M.C., Ph.D., Lt. Col. (Harvard) were among 74 OSS staff members who worked to develop personality assessment techniques which are still used to select employees of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
"Good grief," I said. "I knew they supported Dr. Rhine's ESP experiments at Duke University…"
"I didn't know that," Leary said. "But I think they should have…" and finally the wine began to take effect and the interview degenerated into speculation about CIA's activities in various LSD research projects. Leary was curious about several of them and he asked me to see if I could dig up some information for him. Leary asked me about other LSD researchers of the early days. He wanted to know about Walter Pankhe and he was especially interested in the Chez. psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who, he said, had been brought from behind the "Iron Curtain" to the U.S. to run one of the only official "LSD Research Projects."
At one point in the conversation Leary told me he had talked at length with Al Larkin, a reporter for the Boston Globe which had been investigating his research at Harvard looking for the CIA link.
"Al Larkin told me that the guy that led me to get fired from Harvard was a man named Herbert Chanoch Kelman… Does that name mean anything to you?" Leary asked.
I called Larkin the next day and he admitted that he'd been investigating Leary's involvement with CIA and Harvard since the MKULTRA story had local interest. (Harvard is in Boston.)
"I was in the process of pursuing a number of different avenues," Larkin said, " pursuing the possibility of some of Timothy's money coming through one of the organizations established as a front for CIA money I talked to him about it at that time and he said he had no knowledge of it, although the time span of the two things did coincide.
"I was particularly interested in a project Leary did at the Concord Reformatory, since it was very similar to some of the projects funded by the CIA. It did fit into the proper frame… I was unable to get any records on the Concord Project. I did talk to one of the people who was very closely involved with the MKULTRA research in Massachusetts. I mentioned Leary's name, and the guy almost became livid, as any good CIA patriot should. He said, 'We would never have given anything to him!'"
Larkin said the man's name was Dr. Robert Lashbrook who was number two in the MKULTRA experiments which consumed tens of thousands of unwitting human guinea pigs, causing at least one known death to a non-volunteer victim. Lashbrook was given immunity to testify before Kennedy's congressional committee investigating the CIA's mind control operations.
I relayed to Larkin the details of my interview with Leary. If what Leary had told me was true, it looked like the CIA, then, had made a large contribution to the creation of the Psychedelic Sixties.
"Let me ask you a couple of questions which really shouldn't be repeated," Larkin said. "What is Leary's financial condition right now?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. Why?
"The reason I raised it, he mentioned, two months ago, that he was writing a piece for The New York Times on this topic. He said that he hoped to sell it to The Times on the MKULTRA project.
"I never saw the piece, and I talked to him a few weeks ago and he said, he was talking to someone at Esquire about it. He said, 'I think I'm going to write a piece for them on this, cause I need the money…"
"Then it occurred to me," Larkin said, "that Timothy Leary, who had very little interest in my initial questions about his involvement, suddenly had become interested and may have seen it as a way to establish some credibility for his writing about this. In other words, he realized when The Times didn't want his piece, so he had to enhance his credibility somehow and maybe do it by dropping a hint to you, and then suggesting that you call me. I have a message here that says that I am to call him. He may be wanting to tell me to call you. You see what I'm driving at?'
I told Larkin that I'd played my interview with Leary to several of his friends who all concluded that, because of the contradictions, Leary was not telling the truth. One of the things he said on the tape was "FBI" when he clearly meant to say "CIA."
"He said that you (Larkin) found out that this doctor named Herb Kelman had been responsible for him getting thrown out of Harvard. Leary said that you found out Kelman was a CIA man. Is that true?"
"No. No.,," Larkin said. "He's misinterpreting what I said. Leary told me that Kelman led the fight to get him thrown out of Harvard. I found out that Kelman got a thousand dollars from the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA fund. So, I called Kelman and said to him 'what was your role in the removal of Leary?' He admitted that he played a role in it and he said, 'I didn't like what Leary was doing. I was opposed to human experimentation. I was opposed to giving drugs to undergraduates and I knew that he was doing it.'
"Kelman said, 'I was a young researcher then, and I didn't carry a lot of weight but I was outspoken. And when the furor died down somewhat I continued to argue for it to reemerge.'
So I said to Kelman, "What about this money?'"
Kelman said that he didn't know the Human Ecology Fund was a fund set up by the CIA and he was very up-front about it – he said that he had been editing a book for a small private organization and before it could go to print he had to bring the authors together in Cambridge and the organization which was sponsoring the book didn't have any more money and he needed the thousand dollars and he went to talk to a guy named Edgar Schein…"
Schein was one of the leading investigators during the Korean war into the 'brainwashing' hoax. Schein knowingly worked for the CIA.
"He'd told Kelman to go to the Human Ecology Fund and he wrote a letter for him… but no one ever asked Kelman to do anything. According to him, the book had nothing to do with the areas which would interest the CIA, it seems to me to be obviously one of those small cover projects they had to do to maintain their credibility in academia… So Leary's interpretation of the thing is a little bit more… hardcore…"
For some months that's where this story stood – unfinished, in limbo. I didn't even bother to transcribe the interviews. Then the first coincidence – certain proof of the cryptocracy's ongoing Agit Prop operation: A cell mate of Leary's was located. He said that when Leary came back from his escape he was very frightened.
"In Vacaville, he had one of the best positions. He was working in the education wing. He was making it with a pretty little blonde nurse… He was writing and doing meditation, but he was running scared. He was scared behind the Panthers in there… The way the CIA got Tim out of Algeria was they told him that Eldridge Cleaver wanted to kill him, that's why Tim left…"
This cell mate of Leary's wanted to be identified only as Yogi. He said that Leary had some "heavy" friends in prison who protected him.
"But he let everyone down. It's a well known fact that they took him out at night – the Feds did. Before he was testifying, they had Federal guards with him at all times. In the end he was in protective custody… When he was in prison no one knew he was a stool pigeon. He was a hero. He was living on his rep that he was the head Boo-Hoo of the acid freaks. That was enough to protect him by the heavy hippies who looked up to him.
"All of a sudden they took Timmy out at night. "Usually, when you go somewhere, you go by bus, but the Feds took him by car. They stayed with him at all times. That's when we began to suspect that he was working with the Feds…
"He still was Chief Boo-Hoo to most in prison. But then the word came down that he was testifying on Weathermen, and he even gave up his own lawyer and turned over the people who helped him get out of the country. He was giving out who was who in the groups, what they were doing, smuggling and narcotics… He gave up all that… they'd take him down to custody and they'd talk to him. Obviously, they told him, 'If you want to get out of here… if you don't give us what we want to know, we're going to make sure that you die in prison!'
"It was too much for him. I know that they were coming regularly to make him turn over on his own daughter. He could have gone out in style. He could have helped a lot of people… Then everybody found out he was a fucking weak punk.
"I don't know anyone who really respects him. That's why I told you the other night, I told you to tell him about me and see how he reacts. He knows me as Yogi, the guy who brought him the note from Nick (Sands?) in San Francisco. He used to go to the 3HO Yoga classes there…
"That was a beautiful day. Ram Das came and all of us was there. Tim didn't even have enough class to show up. He said that Ram Das was a child molester and he didn't even want to talk to him…"
"Could Leary have been working with the CIA or FBI during the whole 6time he was in prison," I asked Yogi. "Before his escape, and before he came back to prison?"
"He sure could," Yogi said. "He had to be something because to turn over like that, with the rep he had with all the beautiful people… I know he got a lot of people started on the spiritual path. He helped a lot of people get into meditation and yoga… He gained a lot of good karma for that, but he's going to need it.
"I really felt bad that someone who got so many people on the spiritual path was so weak in the end. I can't judge. I still got that joint consciousness. He's a rat and that's that. Let God take care of him. He had to do it the weak way. All my partners and all the people I knew in the joint, everyone felt the same way…"
I transcribed no tapes. Yogi's testimony was just hearsay – the talk of a convict. The second coincidence came: I was introduced to Leary's cell mate in Folsom. Again this man doesn't want to be identified. Both men said that they would, however, come forth to back me up if I ever needed them.
This second former convict has also gone straight and wants to protect his name. He was then the head of his own construction company and was making more money honestly, than he ever made at crime.
This man, we'll call him Ray, spoke of the period when Tim could not be found by his wife, Joanna. He said that one day Leary was returned to their cell with his head shaved and blue lines painted on it.
"Tim got just about the whole works. He was a different type of case than I was. They felt that they could use him a lot more than someone like me. I was an unknown, but if they could turn someone like Leary around and get him to do what he's doing right now, in fact, he'd be very useful to the government… the high priest had to be de-throned.
"Tim is a very fascinating person. There is only a handful of people who did what he did – who took a whole generation and turned them on. That was the challenge to the Feds, if they could find out how his mind worked, and use him…
"Well, one day he comes back to the cell with lines on his head. They were actually very precise measurement lines. His head was shaved and it was marked with all these careful, precise blue lines.
"I asked him what the lines were for. He told me that they were going to give him a lobotomy. They were going to stick ice picks into his brain. He told me that it was really going to be great. They had him completely brainwashed. He said, 'this is going to be the greatest thing. All my life I've been going through this, you get up, you get down, but now, ' he said, 'I'll be just as smart as I am, but I won't have to feel emotions any more. Wow!'"
"You think they broke him?" I asked.
"Totally controlled him. They gave him a lot of those fright drugs. They kept him in solitary. They did everything they could to break his mind, and they succeeded. Look at him now…"
"Suddenly he tells me he worked for the CIA for years," I said.
"Well, that may be one of their defenses. In other words, by admitting what you did, nobody believes it and it makes you look ridiculous. When they're done with you – and I've been through a lot of their drugs and tortures – at a certain state, you're really like a zombie. You're so conditioned chemically that a guy isn't even aware of what's happened. Leary bought the whole thing. They really have gotten good at it. You know, nobody is going to believe us…"
Then they didn't, but will they now?
"Leary never would have gotten out of prison," Ray said. "He'd either bend or they'd break him. No matter how sympathetic you may be, to really understand the situation, you have to go through it yourself. You say, well they couldn't break me. I wouldn't do it. It just couldn't happen.
"But believe me, we are like just so much putty and clay and we can just stand so much, and when they're finished with the mind control, it's almost impossible to tell…"
Still Ray's was just the testimony of another ex-con. While the testimony of his prisonmates was merely hearsay, at least they appeared to believed what they said. Leary, it seemed, believed nothing.
Even after 20 years these questions remain: Did Leary work for the CIA in the 1960's. If he did, why did he admit it? Was he proselytizing LSD during the '60's under CIA direction? Was Leary's escape from Vacaville, allegedly with the help of Cubans and Weather Underground, encouraged by the U.S. government so that Leary could later 'finger' those who helped him? Was his sojourn in Algeria with Cleaver, and in Switzerland, then Afghanistan also CIA directed.
One CIA document was dated 1 November 1963. It was headed:" MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD. SUBJECT: International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), ALPERT, Richard, Ph.D., LEARY, Timothy F., Ph.D., Drugs, Mind Affecting, Agency Policy Regarding."
The last two paragraphs of that memo, now thirty-three years old, remain unanswered: The CIA Security Office (OS) "has not been able to determine whether any staff employees of the Agency have engaged in the unauthorized taking of any of these drugs, but there is information that some nonagency groups, particularly on the West Coast, have taken these drugs in a type of religious experimentation. While as previously mentioned there are no staff employees involved, some individuals known to have taken the drugs have sensitive security clearances and are engaged in classified work.
"Any information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental or personal reasons should be reported immediately to Chief/SRS/OS (Office of Security) with all specific details furnished. In addition, any information of Agency personnel involved with the International Federation for Internal Freedom, or with Drs. ALPERT or LEARY, or with any group engaging in this type of activity should also be reported."
The memo was signed, "Chief/SRS/OS."
No follow-up was furnished in the CIA MKULTRA documents. This document is clearly an in-house query from the security division chief who was worried about what the other divisions of the CIA might be doing. Non-Agency groups meant contract agents or front groups. Staff employees are high-ranking CIA personnel who take their orders, usually, direct from Langley. The CIA operates on a "need to know" basis, with no individual knowing anything more than the minimum he or she needs to know to perform his or her job. Various agencies within the CIA, often the Office of the Deputy Director of Plans, then Richard Helms, were taking matters into their own hands with direction from above. Since the Chief of Security was so concerned, there must have been good reason. And what about Leary's own statement's that he wittingly followed the directions of the CIA in the 1960's? When former CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner was asked whether or not the CIA supported Timothy Leary or gave Leary LSD, he replied only, "The CIA gave it to those who were doing the research."
Was Leary's involvement with promoting private enterprise in outer space, and especially his involvement with the L-5 Society also CIA inspired? A phone call to an old friend who'd once been a director of the L-5 Society revealed that it been about to fold for lack of subscriptions in 1080, when a retired military officer with known intelligence connections sent an unsolicited donation of $10,000 to save it from failure. He said he's wondered himself about the L-5 Society's Director, Carolyn Hanson who'd been with Leary when he visited me. I asked Ms. Hanson to tell me what her political ideas were and she evaded my question. I asked her another question and she was very cryptic. Leary had introduced her as "the smartest woman in the world," and she blushed and demurred, "Well, one of the smartest."
A few years later, in the mid 80's, Leary was writing books dictated by voices he heard, he said, coming from outer space.
Now knowing what we know about mind control, one has to ask if Timothy Leary was himself a victim of the same cryptocracy he once owed his allegiance to, like so many other government employees.
While LSD was banned by the federal government on October 6, 1966, it has made its comeback among the young as the recreational drug of choice. As if to prove its own failure in the "War on Drugs" a 1993 survey made by the federal government showed a substantial upswing in the use of acid by the nation's eighth-graders. The report recorded the highest level of LSD use by high school seniors since 1985 and it said the teen-agers perferred LSD to cocaine.
In 1966, most of the significant legal research projects into psychedelic drugs were officially closed. Only a small band of researchers continued to inch forward in their research, hoping to regain the government's blessing – and grants – to use it on human subjects. In 1991 they won approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the study of LSD's effect on 60 drug addicts.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Richard Yensen, one of the researchers who was about to conduct an officially sanctioned study, said he believes that using humans to assesss LSD is essential because, "it is very hard to ask a rat what is happening in its consciousness."

The continuing practice of routine neonatal nonreligious circumcision represents an enigma, particularly in the United States. About 80 percent of the world's population do not practice circumcision, nor have they ever done so. Among the non-circumcising nations are Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia, the U.S.S.R., China, and Japan. People employing circumcision do so either for "health" reasons or as a religious ritual practiced by Muslims, Jews, most black Africans, non-white Australians, and others.
The origin of the ritual practice is unknown. There is evidence of its performance in Israel in Neolithic times (with flint knives) at least 6000 years ago.³⁸ Jews accept the Old Testament origin as a covenant between God and Abraham,¹⁸ although it is generally agreed that the practice of circumcision in Egypt predated the Abrahamic Covenant by centuries.⁵⁵ Ritual Circumcision is not germane to this discussion except insofar as the surgical ritual impinges upon accepted medical practice.⁶⁵
So called "health" circumcision originated in the nineteenth century, when most diseases were of unknown etiology. Within the miasma of myth and ignorance, a theory emerged that masturbation caused many and varied ills. It seemed logical to some physicians to perform genital surgery on both sexes to stop masturbation; the major technique applied to males was circumcision. This was especially true in the English-speaking countries because it accorded with the mid-Victorian attitude toward sex as sinful and debilitating.⁶⁴
The most prolific enumerator of the health benefits of circumcision was Dr. P. C. Remondino.⁵⁰ In 1891 this physician claimed that the surgery prevented or cured about a hundred ailments, including alcoholism, epilepsy, asthma, enuresis, hernia, gout, rectal prolapse, rheumatism, kidney disease, and so forth. Such ludicrous claims are still disseminated and possibly believed. The book was reprinted in 1974, without change, and the Circulating Branch Catalogue of the New York Public Library (1983) listed the Remondino book, showing a publication date of 1974. One physician, writing in Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality (1974), called the book "pertinent and carefully thought out."⁶³
Remondino was not the only one expounding such views. In 1911, Dr. Joseph Preuss, in a monumental tome, Biblical-Talmudic Medicine, claimed that Jewish ritual circumcision endowed health benefits; his sole source was Remondino⁴⁶ Some espoused more extreme views; in 1910 an article in J.A.M.A. described a new circumcision clamp. The authoinventor claimed that with this device, the operation was so simple that men and women could now circumcise themselves.³⁰
In the 75-year period (1875 to 1950) there was virtually no opposition to routine circumcision in the United States. Instead there were many articles in medical journal and textbooks extolling the practice; the issue was ignored in the popular press. Yet in the more than a century of acceptance of routine circumcision in the English-speaking countries, from 1870 to the present, no other country adopted newborn circumcision.
The first serious questioning of the practice did not occur until late 1949 (in England with the publication of Gairdner's "The Fate of the Foreskin."¹⁷ which began to affect the practice of circumcision by the British. In 1963, an editorial in J.A.M.A. called the attitude of the medical profession paradoxical and confused, and admitted that the facts about circumcision were still unknown.¹⁴ This was followed by several critiques of circumcision such as those by Morgan (1965 and 1967)³⁸ and Preston (1970).⁴⁵ In 1968 Øster confirmed Gairdner's findings,⁴² as did Reichelderfer and Fraga,⁴⁹ who presented a comprehensive study of circumcision. Yet some physicians continued to support circumcision for surprising reasons. For example, Dr. Robert P. Boland, writing in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1969, compared circumcision with tonsillectomy, calling both procedures "ritualistic," and "widely performed on a non-scientific basis." He opposed routine tonsillectomy but concluded vis-a-vis circumcision: "Little serious objection can actually be raised against circumcision since its adverse effects seem miniscule."⁵
Table 1. Estimated Newborn Nonreligious Circumcision Rates in English-Speaking Countries.

Great Britain	New Zeland	Australia	Canada	America
1	10	30	30	80

In the 1970's, a change seemed in the offing. In 1971 and 1975, the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Circumcision declared: "...there are no valid medical indications for circumcision in the neonatal period."² In 1978, the position of the American Academy of Pediatrics was endorsed by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.⁶⁴ In 1983 both groups jointly reaffirmed their positions.¹ The "firm" firm declarations should have caused a marked drop in the United States circumcision rate. They did not.
To explore the circumcision rate in the United States, it is essential to compare the American experience with the other English-speaking countries. Anticircumcision articles appeared in the medical press in all of these countries. Gairdner¹⁷ and Øster⁴² were published in journals in England; Morgan (1967) was published in Australia.³⁹ In 1971, the Australia Paediatric Association recommended: "Male infants should not as a routine be circumcised."¹³ In 1975, the Canadian Paediatric Society stated, ". . .there is no medical indication for circumcision in the neonatal period."⁵⁷
Although there is no precise data on circumcision from any country,approximated rates for the English-speaking countries reveal that in Great Britain, the practice has virtually been abandoned; New Zealand follows closely behind. (In a 1982 visit, a number of physicians were apologetic for the "inordinately high" rate of 10 percent. Several physicians stated categorically that they refused to perform routine circumcisions.) The rates in Canada and Australia appear to be declining at about 10 percentage points per decade. The United States stands alone as the only country in the world in which the majority of newborn males are circumcised, purportedly for health reasons.
Before addressing the phenomenon of circumcision in the United States let us examine the Canadian and Australian data. In Canada (Table 2), there are considerable rate differences among the provinces but the overall rate is clearly declining, and in Quebec the practice has been virtually been discontinued. In Australia (Table 3), unlike Canada, the rates by states are relatively uniform, but clearly declining. In 1978, the Australia government recommended that payments for circumcision be reduced or eliminated.⁷¹ (In a visit to Australia in 1982, I was told that a national campaign was planned to reduce unnecessary surgery; circumcision was high on the list.)
Table 2. Hospital Inpatient Male Newborn Circumcision in Canada by Province (data from British Columbia and Newfoundland not reported)* 1970 to 1978 by Rank Order of Percentage change

	1970	1979	Change (% rounded)
Total	64,015	44,853	-30
Quebec	12,995	3,077	-76
Nova Scotia	2,477	1,004	-60
New Brunswick	1,543	673	-43
Alberta	10,857	9,608	-12
Manitoba	5,006	4,424	-11
Ontario	24,476	26,283	+4
Saskatchewan	3,276	3,655	+12

Table 3 Estimated Neonatal Circumcision Rate in Australia by State, 1973-74 to 1979-80(%)* Adapted from Wirth, J.L.: Current circumcision practices in Australia. Med. J. Aust., 1:179, 1982.

	1973-74	1979-80	% Decrease
Total	49	39	10
New South Wales	52	42	10
Victoria	39	28	11
Queensland	62	51	11
South Australia	47	41	6
Western Australia	51	38	13
Tasmania	68	43	25

Although nationwide data on circumcision for Canada and Australia are admittedly imperfect, precise data for the United States are virtually non-existent. The H.E.W. Hospital Records Study excludes neonates.⁷⁰ The Cycle III Health Examination Survey, conducted from 1963 to 1965 among youths aged 12 to 17, reflected the practice of circumcision in the early 1950's.⁷⁰ The total circumcision rate was 765 (whites, 80 percent; blacks, 45 percent); regional differences were also noted.
In 1980 Wallerstein provided a crude compendium of circumcision rates reported in the literature.⁶⁴ This was updated in 1981 by King and Roebuck.²⁹ Since these compendia, other reports from individual hospitals have been noted in the literature (Table 4).²⁵ Of the five hospitals reporting, the lowest rate was 80.7 percent; the other rates ranged from 90 to 98 percent. These data are static, that is, reported within a fixed period, making it impossible to discern a trend. Several hospitals reported longitudinal changes. One New York City maternity center stated that "in the past" the rate was 90 percent; in 1980 it was 60 percent.³⁵ Other reports are more precise, indicating changes from 1978 to 1980, and 1975 to 1979 (Table 4, last two hospitals).³ The year-to-year changes were negligible; clearly there was no precipitous decline. This stability of rate was confirmed by the Commission on Professional and Hospital Activities, which publishes annual data based on projections from atypically large hospitals.⁷² They show a 1970 rate of 88 percent and a 1980 rate of 86 percent. The mean rates from 1970 to 1975 and from 1976 to 1980 are identical (86 percent).⁵⁴
Table 4. Circumcision Rates, Selected Hospitals
References: ^{25, 29, 27, 34, 3, 41} respectively

Hospital	Years	Rates(%)
New Britain General Hospital, Connecticut	1976-77	80.7
Southern Illinois Hospital	1979	95
John Hopkins Hospital	1980	97.6
St. Agnes Hospital, Baltimore	1981	96-98
Hershey. Pennsylvania Hospital	1983	90-96
George Washington University Medical Hospital	1979	79
	1979	77
	1980	81
Largest Hospital in Salt Lake County, Utah	1975	92
	1976	93
	1977	92
	1978	92
	1979	93

In 1982 Slatkowski and King approached the question of circumcision rates specifically with respect to the pronouncements of the American Academy of Pediatrics on the practice of circumcision in Illinois.⁵⁴ They obtained data from 18 Chicago-area hospitals; the rates ranged from 27 to 92 percent (mean 78 percent). Five of the hospitals reported rates from 80 to 88 percent; five from 90 to 92 percent; the rates ranged from 74 to 97 percent, with a single exception: one hospital reported a rate of 4.5 percent. Upon further query, that hospital reported a circumcision rate decline beginning after 1974-75.
These United States data reveal no significant national decline in the circumcision rate desperate the pronouncements of the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. However there are instances of sharp declines in several hospitals. Dr. Joan Hodgman, director of the Newborn Division of the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center, reported in 1983 that their circumcision rate is zero. Similarly, J.H.T. Chang, pediatric surgeon at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, the largest in the city, stated in 1983 that circumcision is not performed even if the parents demand it.²⁴
Why have most United States physicians persisted in the practice? One reason is that the medical and popular literature abounds in serious errors of scientific judgment, equivocation, and obfuscation. Space limitations permit a brief examination of four issues: pain, venereal disease, cancer, and hygiene.
PAIN
Pain of circumcision is not a debatable question; it is a fact.²¹ However, a perusal of writings in the popular press (1982 and 1983) reveals confusion. Proctor and Gamble, one of the nations largest advertisers, promotes Pampers to parents by offering the Expectant Parents Information Kit (1982), which contains the following statement: "You may be surprised to learn that circumcision will not be painful to your baby because, at this early stage of development, the penis does not yet have functioning nerve endings."¹⁵
A contrary view was found in American Baby (May 1983), in which parents were told that "Newborns who undergo circumcision experience a great deal of stress and pain . . ." Parents were advised that it was now possible to employ local anesthetics to alleviate such pain.³⁶
Mother's Manual (1982) argues against local anesthesia because ". . . it swells the area to the extent of making an unsatisfactory circumcision too likely."⁷ Genesis, published by the American Society for Psychoprophylaxis in Obstetrics, carried an article in 1982 in which two writers who attended a Jewish ritual circumcision described the surgery as bloodless, painless and stressless. They suggested that non-Jewish parents explore the possibility of employing ritual circumcisors.¹¹
Parents who read such an array of literature are bound to be bewildered.
VENEREAL DISEASE
Prior to the turn of the century, little was known about venereal disease, either causes or cures. Understandably, the false claim could be made with impunity that circumcision prevented sexually transmitted diseases.⁶⁴ These claims persisted beyond the middle of the twentieth century: Urologist A. Ravich titled his 1973 book Preventing V.D. and Cancer by Circumcision.¹⁸
Within the past decade there has been virtually no statement that circumcision prevents syphilis or gonorrhea; the present day "whipping boy" is genital herpes. Even a cursory exploration of a link between circumcision and herpes reveals that such claims are without foundation; the presence or absence of the foreskin neither aids nor deters the transmission of herpes. A definitive statement regarding this claim was made in 1979 by Y.M. Felman, director of the New York City Bureau of Venereal Disease Control: ". . . I don't believe that circumcision is of any value in preventing genital herpes, as this disease is quite common in circumcised males and their female sex partners."¹⁶
Yet in 1981, Warner and Strashin wrote: "Herpes genitalis appears to be the only sexually transmitted disease associated with circumcision status."⁶⁷ Strashin defended his statement the following year.⁶⁸ If circumcision prevents herpes or deters its transmission, how can we explain the phenomenal rise in the incidence of this disease to epidemic proportions, particularly among the most sexually active males, ages 15 to 25, of whom perhaps 75 percent are circumcised? Nevertheless, the 1975 American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force reported: "Adequate studies to determine the relationship between circumcision and the incidence of venereal disease have not been performed." This statement is obvious outdated.
PENILE CANCER
Few diseases strike greater fear than cancer, and no site is more potentially alarming to males than the penis. It is not surprising, therefore that when newborn circumcision is presented as an absolute prophylaxis against penile carcinoma, it is a potent argument for circumcision. Wolbarst wrote in 1932: ". . . cancer of the penis does not occur in Jews circumcised in infancy. There is no case on record."⁷³ Subsequent research indicate that there are such cases on record.⁴
The understatement of the incidence of penile cancer in Jews should be contrasted with the overstatement in regard to the uncircumcised people of India and China. In 1973, deKernion and colleagues wrote: ". . . the disease accounts for 12 percent of all malignancies among the Hindus of India."¹² In 1977 Kaplan claimed, "In China, penile carcinoma accounts for 18 percent of all carcinomata."²⁸ In a visit to the Peoples Republic of China (1976) and India (1982) the incidence of penile cancer was discussed with health officials. They stated that no nationwide health data was available; more specifically, no National Cancer Registries were maintained (much as they would like to do so). They remarked that no reputable scientist in their country would provide such data. Precise data on penile cancer are available from countries in which a National Cancer Registry is maintained. The United States does not maintain such a Registry, and so its data are imprecise. The data from Japan, Norway, and Sweden are compared with the United States' estimates (Table 5). The largest difference in incidence is between the United States and Sweden, three cases per million males; for death rates, the difference between the United States and Japan is one case per million males, small differences indeed. It is worthy of note that in countries in which a National Cancer Registry is maintained and precise incidence or death rates is known, routine circumcisions continues not to be practiced. There is no acceptance of the claimed epidemiologic relationship between circumcision and penile cancer.
Table 5. Penile Cancer: Comparison of Approximate Incidence and Death Rates per 100,000 Males for Selected Countries*
*Data from Cancer Deaths 1980 Ministry of Health and Welfare, Tokyo, Japan for Japan. For other countries; Wallerstein, E.: Circumcision an American Health Fallacy. New York, Springer Publications. 1980.

Country	Year	Incidence	Death Rate
America	1972	0.8/100,000	0.3
Japan	1980	N/A	0.2
Norway	1967	1.1	N/A
Sweden	1968	1 1	N/A

It could be argued that in Japan, Norway, Sweden, high standards of hygiene are maintained. The variable in penile cancer prophylaxis may be hygiene, not retention of foreskin. This is essentially the position taken by the 1975 American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force, which denied a relationship between circumcision and prostatic cancer and stated that "non-circumcision is not of primary etiological significance" in cervical cancer.² In regard to penile cancer, they wrote: "There is evidence that carcinoma of the penis can be prevented by neonatal circumcision. There also is evidence that optimal hygiene confers as much or nearly as much protection" (emphasis added)² In 1981, 6 years later, Grossman and Posner took a more forthright position. Writing in Obstetrics and Gynecology, they stated: "No one today seriously promotes circumcision as a prophylactic against cancer in any form. No significant correlation between cancer and circumcision has ever been proved."²²
The claim that circumcision is related to penile cancer is based upon the "fact" that smegma is a carcinogen. Smegma in infancy consists solely of desquamated epithelial cells, and in adulthood additionally of the secretions of the Tyson's glands. Many attempts have been made to prove a simple cause and effect between smegma and cancer; all failed but one. In 1947 Plaut and Kohn-Speyer "demonstrated" that smegma was a carcinogen. Of the animals examined, 27 percent of those treated with smegma developed cancer whereas 15 percent of the animals treated with cerumen developed cancer.⁴⁴ Is it now possible to claim that cerumen is also a carcinogen with only one half of the carcinogeneity of smegma? This study is deficient in conceptualization, methodology, execution, gathering of data, and analysis.⁴⁴ Understandably, the study has largely been ignored; however, as recently as 1981 it was accepted in one medical journal article without question.²³
Penile cancer scare techniques are still with us. In 1980, Kochen and McCurdy stated that ". . . uncircumcised men are uniquely at risk . . ." They "demonstrated" that the predicted lifetime risk among uncircumcised men was one in 600.31 They did not address why 599 out of 600 at risk" males will not contract penile cancer in their lifetime. More importantly, Kochen and McCurdy based their calculations on the 1968 Stern and Lachenbruch study of one cancer detection center in Los Angeles.⁵⁹ Their 1968 data are obviously skewed in age, ethnicity, religion, social class, and so forth, and are admittedly non-random. Such inadequate local data should not be extrapolated to a national statistic.
The threat of penile cancer hangs over the discussion of circumcision like some mystical demon. It deserves to be exorcised, not circumcised.
PENILE HYGIENE
In several studies, mothers were asked why they agreed to their son's circumcision. The answer given most frequently was "hygiene."⁵³ (In a 1981 United Nations study of female genital surgery in Africa, one reason given for such surgery was "hygiene."¹⁹ ) Why is male genital hygiene viewed with such alarm in the United States that prophylactic surgical intervention is necessary?
For over a century, and to this day, mothers have been warned that proper penile hygiene involves full retraction of the foreskin to clean the glans of smegma, and this procedure should start almost at day one. Such a task is virtually impossible, because in almost all infants the foreskin is attached firmly to the glans. Separation occurs normally within a few months or several years. Separation may be forced but this literally involves tearing the tissues apart, which is usually painful and may result in bleeding. No sane mother enjoys causing distress to her child. No wonder there is fear and reluctance about retraction of the foreskin. This has created a foreskin phobia. Forced retraction of the foreskin may lead to complications, and may well be the reason for so many postinfancy circumcisions (only in the United States).
The problem with this hygienic technique is that it is totally in error. Care of the foreskin is not exceedingly difficult; it is exceedingly simple: leave it alone. The foreskin in infancy should not be retracted. In 1977 Kaplan wrote, " . . . freeing 'adhesions is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment and is unfounded physiologically or medically."²⁸ Development of the foreskin and the inadvisability of forced retraction was noted by Gairdner (1949),¹⁷ Øster (1968),⁴² Reichelderfer and Fraga (1968),⁴⁹ and others.
Many, if not most, American physicians are ignorant of proper care of the foreskin. This was demonstrated by Osborn and colleagues in 1981, who queried Utah pediatricians and found that 67 percent estimated that the foreskin should retract easily by one year.⁴⁰ This is contrary to all findings of studies of the foreskin. Only 3 percent said the newborn foreskin should never be retracted. In interviewing a small sample of mothers of uncircumcised boys, Osborn and colleagues also found that retraction of the foreskin caused such anxiety that 40 percent of these mothers stated that they would have their next male infant circumcised.
The problem is not limited to Utah. In a study of physicians in the Chicago area, Patel and colleagues reported in 1982 that "only 49 percent of the physicians [in the total sample] were aware of the AAP's [American Academy of Pediatrics position."⁴³ Among the pediatricians and obstetricians in the sample, 62 percent were aware of this position. The major reason given for recommending circumcision was "hygiene" (90 percent). In a 1982 study by Stein and colleagues conducted in San Diego, they noted, "Only 36 percent of the responding physicians were aware that the newborn's foreskin is characteristically not found retractable."⁵⁸ When asked "if a nonretractable foreskin is an indication for circumcision," 47 percent of all respondents answered incorrectly. Such incorrect responses were mare likely to be given by those in family practice (50 percent), obstetrics (55 percent), and general practice (67 percent) than by those in pediatrics (13 percent). At the Spring 1983 meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Philadelphia, an exhibit on circumcision was conducted. The most frequently asked question related to proper care of the foreskin.
If physicians are ill-informed about care of the foreskin, how can parents be well informed? There are thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles available to parents relating to child care. Almost none devotes attention to proper care of the foreskin. Discharging a circumcised child without informing the parents of proper wound care constituted negligence. Discharging an uncircumcised child without informing the parents of proper care of the foreskin is equally negligent. Osborn and colleagues reported that the only written information they could find on the subject was this statement in a 1978 book: " . . .retract the foreskin gently and return the foreskin to its normal position to prevent constriction and swelling."⁸ To begin to correct this lack of information, in 1982 Wallerstein wrote a pamphlet entitled "When Your Baby Boy is Not Circumcised."⁶⁶ Boyce also addressed the subject in an article entitled "Care of the Foreskin (1983).⁶ The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a pamphlet entitled "Care of the Uncircumised Penis" (1984).
The issue of hygiene is obfuscated by the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force Report in two ways. As noted earlier, the Report stated that to prevent penile cancer, "optimum hygiene was necessary. The reader, lay public or physician may ask: What constitutes "optimum hygiene? Can parents guarantee such optimum care? If not, isn't it better to play it safe and circumcise? The Report also cautions that retention of the foreskin requires "lifelong" hygiene. This statement is not incorrect; it is incomplete. All body parts require lifelong hygiene, body bathing, hair shampooing, oral hygiene, labial hygiene, and so forth. The discontinuance of any aspect of hygiene may well have deleterious effects. Why single out the foreskin?
The crux of the circumcision/hygiene rationale had its origin in the fear of the "effects" of masturbation; this may persist in attenuated form. Today, however, it is basically a lack of knowledge: the foreskin and glans in infancy are essentially fused, and should not be retracted forcibly, and smegma is not a carcinogen.
Another claimed hygienic benefit is that thousands of United States servicemen, particularly in the South Pacific required circumcision. Would it not be better to circumcise in infancy and thereby avoid the more troublesome operation in adulthood? However, Japanese soldiers were fighting in the identical environment, and the Japanese did not practice newborn circumcision. When Japanese health officials were visited by Wallerstein (1982), they stated that to the best of their knowledge, Japanese military surgeons did not find it necessary to circumcise after World War II. More to the point, in the event of thermonuclear war, the role of the foreskin will pale to insignificance.
Thus, much of the current circumcision misinformation, both lay and professional, is false and misleading. In 1971 and 1975, the American Academy of Pediatrics appeared to take definitive positions; actually they did not. The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on the Fetus and Newborn noted in 1971 that "there are no valid medical indications for circumcision in the neonatal period."² in 1975, the American Academy of Pediatrics Ad Hoc Task Force on Circumcision reported that there was no basis for changing this statement and concluded, "There is no absolute medical indication for routine circumcision of the newborn."²
However, as previously noted, the use of the words "optimum" and "lifelong" with regard to to penile hygiene and the stated uncertainty of a possible link between circumcision and venereal disease represented equivocation. An additional equivocation is found in the 1975 Report: "A diagnosis of phimosis cannot be made with assurance in the newborn period because the cleavage plane between the glans and the deep preputial layer of the penis is not developed at birth. There is a real need for research which will improve diagnostic accuracy in this area."²
In 1983, this statement was challenged by Thompson, who chaired the ad hoc Committee. He wrote: "One major reason used to justify neonatal circumcision - correction or prevention of phimosis has been shown to be untenable by serial studies from birth to adulthood."^{62 Furthermore,} overwhelming epidemiologic evidence from countries that never adopted circumcision or abandoned the practice obviates the need for further study.
Thompson also provided the setting for the equivocation and the absence of a more definitive position: "The ad hoc commmittee was sharply divided in its opinions, and the resulting statement was a compromise that stated that there was no absolute medical indication for routine circumcision of the newborn.' The words absolute and routine were meant to convey a different impression from the conclusion of the AAP Committee on the Fetus and Newborn, but this has no always been the interpretation of readers."⁶²
If the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee was sharply divided and the report subject to misinterpretation, how can physicians and parents take an unequivocal position on circumcision? They cannot. And if the position of the American Academy of Pediatrics is equivocal, the position of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is even more so. When the American Academy of Pediatrics committees reported, the statements were published.⁵⁶ The endorsements of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were not published in their journal.⁶⁴ Moreover, in 1978 Grimes raised an unanswered question: " . . . the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Inc., warns that 'physicians who assume responsibility for the health of male patients for operative or other care will not be regarded as specialists in obstetrics-gynecology . . .'"²⁰ It is well known that obstetricians perform a large percentage of circumcisions.
The acceptance of circumcision was noted by Herrera is 1983, who reported on a nationwide survey of 400 pediatricians and obstetricians; 50 percent believed circumcision indicated in the newborn, 33 percent opposed, and 17 percent were undecided.²⁶ As to advice to parents, there was acquiescence; 15 percent encouraged it, 19 percent discouraged it, and 66 percent remained neutral. "This is one reason why nearly every male neonate is circumcised," Herrera wrote.²⁶
Ambivalence on the part of physicians about circumcision was illustrated in one study by a Canadian hospital in 1983 where there were two patients with a serious complication of circumcision, denuding of the penile shaft that required plastic surgery. A formal proposal to suspend neonatal circumcisions was made but rejected because of anticipated adverse community reaction. However, the circumcision rate in that hospital dropped from about 40 to 20 percent as a result of the mishaps.⁶¹
Judging from the record, American medical professionals are not truly opposed to circumcision; they perform about 1.25 million annually. Some continue to insist that there are health benefits. Some physicians place the responsibility on the parents. In 1983 Maisels and colleagues wrote, "If circumcision practices are ever to be changed, such changes will likely result from organized advocacy of lay groups . . . rather than from the efforts of the medical profession."³⁴ However when physicians demonstrated that routine tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy were unwise, the rate dropped. No amount of parental pressure would cause an ethical physician to perform such an operation if it were unnecessary.
Some charge venality, possibly true for some physicians, but not for all, and impossible to document. Some of the highest circumcision rates are to be found in military hospitals, where the doctors are salaried. Contrast this with the abandonment of routine tonsillectomy; some physicians had reduced revenues, but no one clamored for the reinstatement of the procedure to refill the coffers. Venality may not be dismissed entirely; in private practice, circumcision results in a fee, and there is loss of time convincing parents not to have their sons circumcised.
Then there is the Jewish question. Some non-Jewish physicians may be hesitant to question routine "health" circumcision in the mistaken belief that this stance may offend Jews. However, according to Jewish theologians, the Jewish ritual has nothing to do with health.⁶⁴ Obversely, occasional private comments suggest that Jews are responsible for nonreligious circumcision. This is a canard.
The "enigma" lies in the United States medical profession's apparent inability to come to grips with the simple fact that there are no demonstrable health benefits of circumcision, and there are risks. (Space limitations preclude delineation.) It should also be noted that the foreskin is useful erogenous, and protective tissue. Smegma, both clitoral and penile, is beneficial, not detrimental. Meatitis is not uncommon in circumcised males; rare in the uncircumcised. Moreover, the penis is the only organ subjected to routine prophylactic surgery.
One explanation for holding to outmoded views was provided by a medical professor who told his students, "It takes less than five minutes to print an article in a medical journal and 50 years to erase it." In 1979 Colletti approximated this estimate. He noted that efforts to reverse current circumcision practice "will need at least a generation of widespread education, coaxing, and encouragement to succeed."¹⁰ Warner and Strashin are even more pessimistic, based upon an erroneous premise: "As for the likelihood of a successful hygiene education program we can only point to our own profession's impotence in combating smoking and obesity."⁶⁸ This approach overlooks the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars are expended annually to promote smoking and food intake. No such effort on behalf of circumcision exists.
As scientific evidence mounted to dispute each of Remondino's exaggerated claims, physicians clutched at straws to retain at least one "health" benefit. Now that all such claims have been refuted, circumcision today has become cultural surgery, not very different from ear- and nose-piercing and tattooing. The extreme to which such cultural surgery is carried may be found in the 1983 warning given by the British Social Service Secretary to Harley Street surgeons who charged up to $1500 for a clitoridectomy performed on young girls from Africa, where such surgery is traditional.⁶⁹ More serious examples were found in France in 1982.⁵²
The medical profession was successful in eliminating routine tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy. This is precisely what is needed for routine circumcision. It is necessary to overcome ignorance and the emotional superstructure surrounding the penis, not very different from ancient (and present phallic worship. It is necessary to accept scientific facts; it is necessary to discard myths about circumcision: the foreskin causes premature ejaculation, it keeps the penis from growing, some disaster will befall the uncircumcised child, the uncovered glans is more esthetically pleasing (that is the foreskin is ugly). The special myth that the boy's penis must be identical to his father's ignores the historic truth that no objection was raised, and no problem arose when circumcising millions of boys whose fathers were uncircumcised.
To resolve the problem, the positions of the American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should become definitive statements that circumcision is unnecessary surgery, not to be undertaken except in rare medical circumstances. Endorsements of this position should be obtained from all relevant medical groups. This information should be disseminated to the entire medical profession, to all hospitals, nurses and nursing associations, childbirth educators, and most certainly to parents via the popular press. Meetings professional and lay persons should be called on local, state and national levels to discuss circumcision. With such an approach, routine newborn nonreligious circumcision will soon pass from the scene to join blood-letting and cupping in medical history.
As Prucha observed in 1980, "The history of these few millimeters of skin is utterly fascinating."⁴⁷