There were Thanksgiving Day festivities today in Wichita featuring parties over turkey and dressing. This is usually nationally mirrored every year above the USA in images in the clouds involving slaughtered turkeys, as we see in this photo, in which the knife blade held over the bird runs along the state lines of Washington and Idaho. The beak of the bird runs out over the Pacific. I had a pre-Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner today myself.
Music: I dreamed I saw St. Birdyteen

Well, in this one a big pair of lips descends from the Kansas border not far from Wichita, holding me in a bottom-finger hand, kissing me on the top of a bust of my smiling head, which appears in eastern Oklahoma and Texas. In this one I appear in profile over Hugo, Oklahoma, and over Paris, Greenville, and Mount Pleasant in Texas. It seems to be a response to my pleasant selection of Free Man in Paris by Joni Mitchell as an insert in my last web-page writing session. Until I saw that the head resembling mine was situated over Paris, Texas, near Greenville, I didn't see how it could possibly have anything to do with me. Also, note the leer in the clouds over western Colorado. It is often useful, when analyzing cloud cover signals, to examine place names on the map beneath the image for further clues. This reminds me of a line from the Bardo Thodol: "the body which thou hast now is called the thought-body of propensities..." This is from my training originating from Dr. Timothy Leary during my psychedelic period 1967-73, when Tim had us reading such stuff:
O nobly-born, when thy body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.
From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come. That is the natural sound of thine own real self. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.
The body which thou hast now is called the thought-body of propensities. Since thou has not a material body of flesh and blood, whatever may come, - sounds, lights, or rays, - are, all three, unable to harm thee: thou art incapable of dying."
Dr. Leary had concluded from his research into the psychedelic experience that it is sometimes well-described by lines from Tibetan Buddhism. Ram Dass (aka Dr. Richard Alpert), a fellow psychologist at Harvard and a psychedelic explorer, wrote a preface to The Dhammapada, the principal document of Buddhism in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). So it was not unusual to experience Buddhist revelations under the influence of LSD. Years later, we may still experience something like them when we seem to see ourselves in a mystic piece of cloudcover illumination visible from a satellite. Imagery seen in clouds often has a visionary, psychedelic quality, because the psychedelic experience often features heightened sensitivity to patterns, which may have a visionary, phantasmagoric quality perhaps familiar from Gestalt psychology or from artists like Salvador Dali. Once the nervous system of a novice has been alerted to their existence, he may continue to percieve them somewhat. That is one way in which the psychedelic experience could tune us in to the existence of higher intelligence in the universe, manifesting itself in a fabric of visions imbedded in a turbulent mirror. The awesome thing, of course, is how huge ensembles of intelligently imaging nebulosities can seem to focus their communications directly on us from time to time. Otherwise, they may herald holiday themes, busts of men associated with holidays, constellations just coming over the horizon, big international news, or turkey sacrifices at Thanksgiving.
Music: Magical Mystery Tour, from Paul McCartney's US Tour: The Space Within Us.
See Timothy Leary and "Gem Green" in Timothy Leary's Neurocomics .

This, gentlemen, is CommuNisM. Clues: Links/Cuba and Nicaragua. See Google News, November 28, 2008: Russian president visits Cold War ally Castro: Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev met with Cuba's Castro brothers Friday during the final leg of a Latin America tour designed to bolster Moscow's profile in a region long dominated by the United States. The two leaders laid a wreath at a monument to Soviet soldiers, which holds the remains of about 50 Soviets who died in Cuba in 1962 and 1963, a time when the island was forging a close alliance with the communist bloc. Wearing a dark suit instead of his traditional olive-green army uniform and clutching Medvedev's arm, Raul Castro shouted to television cameras, "It has been a magnificent visit and now he will see Fidel...." Medvedev talked Thursday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez aboard a Russian warship, and earlier with Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, saying Russia is ready to consider participating in a socialist trade bloc led by Chavez.
This seems to be a good example of the cloud cover mirroring a news story.

Left: Old - 1 mg of astragalosides per 30 drops. Right: New - "500 mg crude herb equivalent". The Old preparation, left, is about 13.2 times as strong as the New preparation, right. Coincidentally, I had checked out Shine a Light by the Rolling Stones at the time the photo was taken. Music: Satisfaction.

Here a little figure with an eye in Indiana and his bottom in Mississippi about to tangle with some North Carolina bottom looks back at the world of political animals in pursuit. I have interpreted the little figure as GAIA Herbs, which recently diluted its premier astragaloside-specific product at 1 mg of astragalosides per 30 drops to "500 mg of crude herb equivilant", representing dilution to about 1 part in 13. I want my medicine at full potency, and don't desire to take 13.2 times as much to equal the former potency, so I wrote to GAIA Herbs and various editors about it, hoping that the new weak offering will not eclipse the outstanding phytomedicine still available from GAIA Herbs at my health food store Whole Foods, along with the new, diluted medicine. Both formulations are sold for the same price, about $11.59, although the new "500 mg crude herb equivalent" is worth about 1/13 the old formula offering, based on astragaloside content, if my preliminary calculations are correct. I note that my calculations are supported by backlit comparative studies of droppers full both editions of GAIA Herbs astragalus root extract. I am anxious about this lifeline to astragalus extract, which has telomerase-activating effect at sufficiently high dosages that is useful in returning old, senescent cells back to their youthful phenotype. This prevents brain microglial cells, for instance, from turning senescent and developing inflammation leading to Alzheimer's Disease. The anti-senescent effect prolongs apparent youth and makes rejuvenation feasible, although at a glacial maximum rejuventation rate of 9 years per year that can take 9 months to become the least bit visible in a course of continued treatment. Telomere reconstruction rates of 400 to 460 base pairs of telomeric DNA per year have been observed with TA-Sciences TA-65, a smallest-molecule astragaloside obtained chemically from other astragalosides extracted from astragalus, as described by Geron Corporation patents and in TA Sciences news releases. I seem to observe similar results with GAIA Herbs astragalus root extract at 5 mg of astragalosides per day, when taken daily for two weeks out of the month. Rejuvenation of cells to the youthful phenotype happens when the telomerase DNA repair enzyme for telomeres lengthens the telomere so much that it can close its terminal t-loop, removing the source of a double-strand DNA break damage signal leading to cell cycle arrest and to the senescent state of the cell. In dermal fibroblasts, cells with open t-loops are senescent and emit stromelysin and collagenase that attack the extracellular matrix. Furthermore, the factors TIMP1 and TIMP3 that inhibit matrix metalloproteinases from attacking the extracellular matrix are reduced in the senescent state, resulting in wrinkles and other old-age effects. See my file system on the problems of anti-aging medicine starting at Longevity.

Note that the hand is connected to GAIA Herbs in North Carolina, as if to explain to me that it is one thing for the customer to bark, another thing for the company staff to provide. In addition to writing to Mandy O. Smith of GAIA Herbs, I barked around to the news media about my results concerning old and new versions of GAIA Herbs astragalus root extract, a product I view as a lifeline in its old "1 mg astragalosides per 30 drops" incarnation. In fact, I preferred the still older GAIA Herbs Extra Strength astragalus root extract, because I needed to fiddle with the dropper less to get the maximum dose used in Chinese medicine for astragalosides. I have been using 5 mg astragalosides per day for 2 weeks out of 4, steering clear of telomerase inhibitors during the first two weeks, then emphasizing them during the 2nd two weeks. Incidentally, I note that the dog has a little 4-column temple on top of its head, reminiscent of my factor-of-four results leading from General Relativity to a unified quantum field theory of forces. In old age, Einstein "wantum" good medicine. I see that the head out over the Atlantic seems to be exhibiting a two-finger church key at end of his hand in an alternative interpretation of the vision. A curmudgeon could be screwed by an outfit that knows secrets of the magic touch concerning how to crack 'em. However, up until now there has always been some of the "1 mg astragalosides per 30 drops" version of the astagalus root medicine on the shelf, although the firm no longer advertises it on-line, but instead promotes "500 mg crude herb equivalent", which I figure is only about 1/13 th as strong. Therefore I am worried that my lifeline to acceptable medicine from GAIA Herbs may vanish in the near future, and have striven to prevent its disappearance.