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This two-hour edition of Disinformation: The Podcast is the final episode of the series. Join Raymond Wiley, Joe McFall, Austin Gandy, and Joe Nolan for one last journey into the bizarre undercurrents of the human psyche. Raymond talks about the recent release of his first book, The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument. Austin Gandy’s Invisible College returns with a new take on the infamous Knights Templar, and the Oslo shootings they are said to have inspired. Joe Nolan’s Insomnia delves into the undying myths of Carlos Castaneda, and the New Age subculture they have inspired. Finally, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall present a retrospective discussion of their podcast careers, along with impressions of the occult mysteries, conspiracy theories, and obscure realms of belief featured in their seminal broadcasts. After 7 years, 80 podcasts, and more than a million downloads, these two friends say thank you and goodbye to the audience … For now.

Top Five Marijuana Stories:

1. Chronic Art: Making Amazing Mosaics From Roach Papers

2. Graham Hancock on Marijuana & Consciousness

3. Don’t Just Smoke a Joint on 4/20, Take Action Against Marijuana Prohibition

4. Marilyn Monroe: Pot Smoker?

5. Californians [Voted] On Legalizing Pot

Out There Radio: Episode 28 – Murder in Memphis

This episode is the first of two dealing with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In this first part, we deal with the events leading up to the assassination, including FBI surveillance and harrassment of Dr. King. Included in this episode is Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in its entirety, recorded on April 4, 1967 (one year to the day before he was murdered).

Out There Radio: Episode 29 – Murder in Memphis, pt. 2

This episode is the second of two dealing with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This episode features a short discussion about the Military Commissions Act of 2006, followed by the second part of our look at the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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This episode features an interview with Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural, The Sign and the Seal, and the recently released Entangled. We discuss Graham’s influential work in the field of alternative history, 2012, his recent shift from non-fiction to fiction, and his views on the “War on Consciousness.”

Disinformation: The Podcast is a monthly series featuring interviews with authors, artists and filmmakers about topics related to politics, the occult, conspiracy, magick, hidden history, spirituality, fringe science, and much more. Past interviews include Jim Marrs, Douglas Rushkoff, and the legendary Alan Moore.

If you want to learn more about this strange figure, check out our film Aleister Crowley: In Search of The Great Beast 666, available instantly through iTunes and Amazon On-Demand.

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This week we talk to private investigator, and head of Pallorium Inc, Steve Rambam. Steve is famous in the hacker community for his enlightening lectures on the death of privacy.

In this weeks episode we discuss: The death of privacy, smartphones: The little snitch in your pocket, The cavalier use of your data, how to (or not) avoid detection in the age of the Internet,  why Foursquare is a really bad idea (see, we told you) and much more.

Steve’s fantastic talk, ‘Privacy is Dead – Get Over It’,  is available over at Google Videos – Part 1, Part 2.

Steve Rambam Bio:

Steven Rambam is a private investigator operating out of New York and Texas. He has conducted several thousand missing-person searches over almost three decades. Steven is well known in the hacker community for his lecture ‘Privacy is Dead – Get Over It’. Steven Rambam’s upcoming book, Stealing Your Own Identity, chronicles his own playful year-long hunt for friend and co-author Rick Dakan.

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This episode features an interview with Tim Wallace-Murphy, author of Hidden Wisdom: Secrets of the Western Esoteric Tradition. Tim talks about the history of the occult, the historical need for secrecy in this tradition, and what it has left us in modern times.

After the interview, Raymond and Joe celebrate their 5th anniversary as co-hosts by taking up their old mantle of armchair film critics.  Stay tuned for their scathing review of What in the World are they Spraying, a new documentary about the “chemtrail conspiracy.”

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This episode features an interview with Adam Elenbaas, author of Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest. Adam discusses his experiences in the Peruvian jungle with a psychedelic tea called Ayahuasca, and explains how it changed his spiritual outlook.

Stay tuned after the interview for details on Raymond & Joe’s upcoming appearances at Dragon*Con 2010 in Atlanta. The guys will be supporting events and lectures by Disinfo favorite Graham Hancock.

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This week we talk to former member of The Process Church of the Final Judgement, Timothy Wyllie. Timothy has recently authored a fantastic book about his time in The Process, ‘Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgement‘.  In this weeks episode we discuss: The Process Church, Scientology, the controversies of the Process Church, why the church continues to have an influence, Dolphins and ET’s, and much more!

Timothy Wyllie Biography:

Timothy Wyllie is a writer specialising in the study of “non-human intelligences” such as angels. He was born in London in 1940. He moved to America in the mid-sixties and now lives in the desert of New Mexico. He had a near death experience in 1973. Afterwards, he devoted himself to the study of “non-human intelligences” (such as angels, dolphins, and extraterrestrials) using visual art, music and writing as the three main means of communication.

In 1980 he started a series of sacred landscape graphics and this led to an examination of the way graphic art can anchor spiritual information into the third-dimensional reality most typically experienced. Much of his visual work has a healing dimension, and he uses a light trance state to create either a mandala or an icon that represents the physical healing intended. His lifelong interest in telepathy inspired him to do a series of graphics designed to explore the potentials of visual telepathy and its relationship to synchronicity and the higher dimensions.

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This episode features an interview with playwright John Burns.  John’s latest work, Aleister Crowley: A Passion for Evil, is being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.

We discuss little known aspects of Crowley’s life, including his childhood and his experiences as a mountaineer.  We also discuss the recent Disinformation documentary Aleister Crowley: In Search of the Great Beast 666, which attempts to dramatize Crowley’s history through filmmaking.

Gollum sculpture at Wax Museum in Mexico City. Photo: Vic201401 (CC)

An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty, saying it has “metastasized” from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is “something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like,” without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, Calif., said at a conference at Stanford University.

Both the Obama administration and the Bush administration had rejected requests from civil libertarians and technologists for the text of ACTA, with the White House last year even indicating that disclosure would do “damage to the national security.” After pressure from the European Parliament, however, negotiators released the draft text two weeks ago.

The international adoption of ACTA could increase the liability for Internet intermediaries — such, perhaps, as search engines — Keller said. “You don’t want to play Russian roulette with very high statutory damages.”

[Read more at CNET News]

NASA has spectacularly and successfully tested the launch abort system – the ejector seat, as it were – for its new Orion crew capsule. There’s just one problem: according to President Obama’s stated plans, Orion will never be launched with crew aboard.

[Read more at the Register]

In this Fox News segment about the recent U.S. District Court decision banning the National Day of Prayer, Dan Barker (author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists) handily parries a Fox News announcer’s clumsy blows.

[See more at BoingBoing]

We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

[Read more at TruthDig]

Liberty Seminary President Ergun Caner claims he traveled the road ‘from jihad to Jesus,’ but Baptist bloggers say his stories of terrorist training are false.

Ergun Caner’s rise to the top of conservative evangelical celebrity — and to the presidency of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell — was fueled by how aggressively he capitalized on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to portray himself as a personal example of the power of Jesus to save even someone raised as a jihadist, which he claimed to be.

There’s only one problem with that part of Caner’s story: it appears not to be true.

In 2001, Caner was pastoring a church in Colorado. After 9/11, he became a hot commodity on the speaking circuit as someone who knew about the evils of Islam firsthand. Before the shock waves from the terror attacks had died down, he was lacing his sermons with his own tale of having been raised in Turkey as the son of a religious leader and trained in a madrassa to wage jihad against Americans.

He said he’d learned about America from TV shows — “Dukes of Hazzard” in some tellings, “Dallas” or “Andy Griffith” in others. He talked about learning English after moving to Brooklyn as a teenager. His personal testimony was used to sell books and videotapes. In one 2001 sermon, “From Jihad to Jesus,” he said he didn’t know much about Christians the first 17 years of his life because “there’s not that many of them in Turkey.” One CD was until recently marketed this way: “Do you believe God can change the heart of a hardened terrorist? Former Muslim Ergun Caner, who came to America to be a terrorist, shares his testimony of how he came to know Jesus Christ.”

[Read more at Alternet]

Photo: Donar Reiskoffer (CC)

Utah is itching for a land fight. A battle with Washington over territorial rights and state sovereignty. It wants to spark a revolt in which Western states attempt to wrest control of federal lands within their borders.

The Beehive State might just get its way, too. In March, Gov. Gary Herbert (R) signed a controversial law authorizing the use of eminent domain to capture some of the millions of acres that the federal government owns here.

The law was tailor-made to provoke a lawsuit, possibly reaching the US Supreme Court, and to inspire other Western states to enact similar legislation.

While it’s unusual for eminent domain to involve the taking of federal lands, this law is a byproduct of many Utahns’ frustrations: The US government owns more than 60 percent of the state, thus dictating whether land has been set aside for preservation or can be accessed for mineral deposits.

[Read more at ABC News]

Voyager 2, which has been traveling through the solar system since the late ’70s, has suffered a data formatting glitch that is preventing NASA from interpreting the content of its scientific data transmissions.

Control and diagnostic transmissions are unaffected, which should enable the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to troubleshoot the problem, provided they’re patient — it currently takes nearly 13 hours for transmissions from Earth to catch up with the probe.

According to a statement released by the JPL, the problem first became apparent on April 22nd. Data from the scientific transmission, which currently reports on the conditions at the very edge of the solar system, began coming through with improper formatting, making it impossible to interpret the contents. Engineering data is still intelligible, so the JPL staff is expecting that it will be possible to figure out what’s going wrong and introduce a fix. Serious attempts at repair were delayed by a planned roll maneuver, and only started on Friday. With a round-trip time of over a day, however, progress will undoubtedly be slow.

[Read more at Ars Technica]

Source: U.S. Army Europe, via Flickr

This weekend marks the 65th anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. In Russia, and other countries of the former Soviet Union, May 9 marks the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Victory Day (День Победы) is a major public holiday there, vested with almost sacred meaning.

But this year’s military parade in Red Square is particularly unusual: It’s the first time active-duty U.S. troops have been invited to march in the ceremony. Pictured here are soldiers of Co. C, 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, part of the 170th Brigade Combat Team, in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. They took part in the parade as part of a contingent of troops from the nations that defeated Hitler.

[Read more at Wired]

Photo: Valter Campanato/ABr (CC)

Just days after his new Twitter account became a must-read in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez said he was setting up a special office with 200 staff and public funds to handle requests supporters Tweet him.”I’ve created my own Chavezcandanga mission to answer (the messages) and we’re even going to create a fund for the mission to provide many things that are now missing and that are urgent,” Chavez said late Saturday during a televised cabinet meeting.

He said the public fund will be used to make the most needed improvements in the country that his followers bring to his attention, such as in the health care and housing sectors.

Chavez late last month opened his Twitter account and it quickly took top billing in the South American country with an estimated 248,000 followers.

Chavez’s profile name combines his own name with the word “Candanga,” which in Venezuela is used to refer to someone naughty or wild.

[Read more at The Raw Story]

Photo: Ruhrfisch (CC)

There’s an energy revolution brewing right under our feet.

Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there’s 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone—enough to supply the nation’s natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.

We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag—and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade.

I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.

To understand why, you have to consider that even before the shale discoveries, natural gas was destined to play a big role in our future. As environmental concerns have grown, nations have leaned more heavily on the fuel, which gives off just half the carbon dioxide of coal. But the rise of gas power seemed likely to doom the world’s consumers to a repeat of OPEC, with gas producers like Russia, Iran and Venezuela coming together in a cartel and dictating terms to the rest of the world.

[Read more at WSJ]

Richard Dawkins argues that humanity’s historical predisposition towards religion and supernatural beliefs may have held an evolutionary utility. “The rule of thumb: ‘Believe whatever your parents tell you,’ quite clearly could have survival value,” says Dawkins.

Photo: Doc Searls (CC)

In the hours following the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, the predominant feature of the debate has been the swift, campaign-like operation of Washington’s Democratic establishment.

Since President Obama introduced his Solicitor General as the choice to replace retired Justice John Paul Stevens, national airwaves and DC inboxes have been littered with a steady stream of material from Kagan backers.

One party official compared it (favorably) to a presidential campaign war room, with caffeine-aided staffers shooting out “rapid response” messages to Republican attacks and driving narratives either supportive of Kagan or mocking of the GOP.

It has been by design. At the White House, a team of aides overseen by Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and run out of the office of the President’s Counsel had already outlined many of the key arguments they want to dominate the Kagan conversation: her eminent scholarly qualifications, her consensus-driven leadership qualities, and her bipartisan support. The team includes Ron Klain and Cynthia Hogan on the Vice President’s staff, Susan Davies (an Associate Counsel to the President) and press officials Josh Earnest, Jesse Lee and Ben LaBolt – all of whom pitched stories and monitored media throughout the day.

[Read more at The Huffington Post]

Air traffic to and from European destinations was disrupted by a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland for a second consecutive day Sunday.

The cloud is lingering over northwestern Scotland and a finger stretches into the airspace over northwestern Spain and Portugal.

An isolated cloud is affecting southern France and northern Switzerland, while another hangs over southern Switzerland, northern Italy, southern Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria.

Roughly 1,000 fewer flights took place in European airspace on Sunday, a drop of four per cent from the usual number for this time of year.

Hundreds of flights were canceled Saturday as plumes of ash again blew toward western Europe.

Spain closed 19 airports, while dozens of flights were also canceled in Portugal.

Air traffic controllers say transatlantic flights are being diverted north over Greenland to avoid the ash cloud, which stretches from Iceland to the Azores.

[Read more at CBC News]

Moms got tougher drunk-driving laws on the books and were directly responsible for passing and then repealing alcohol Prohibition. Now marijuana activists are trying to enlist the nation’s mothers in legalization efforts with a sales pitch that pot is safer than booze.

The nation’s largest marijuana legalization lobby recently started a women’s group. The Moms4Marijuana website draws thousands. And just in time for Mother’s Day, a pot legalization group in Denver has created a pink-carnation web card asking moms to support legalization.

These marijuana moms argue that pot is no worse than alcohol, that teens shouldn’t face jail time for experimenting with it and that marijuana can even help new mothers treat postpartum depression.  “I know so many mothers who support this but aren’t willing to come out and say it,” said Sabrina Fendrick, head of the Women’s Alliance at the Washington-based National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.

Marijuana activists say they need more moms to publicly back pot use if they are to succeed with public officials.

[Read more at MSNBC]

Photo: Mattl (CC)

For a couple years now, the MPAA has been asking the FCC to break your TV/DVR, and let them effectively put a type of DRM (by enabling “Selectable Output Control” or SOC) on video content, such that you will not be able to access the content via third party devices, such as your DVR or your Slingbox. Effectively, they want to break the ability of your equipment to work. You wouldn’t be able to legally record the movie that was playing on your TV. The MPAA’s argument here makes absolutely no sense at all — and when they’re called on it, the doubletalk comes out.

The MPAA’s argument is that if it could block people from recording movies, they could release the movies on things like PPV before they release them on DVD, adding yet another window to the long list of windows that Hollywood uses. It’s still not clear how more windows helps anyone but Hollywood, but they keep claiming this is some sort of consumer benefit. The thing is, their argument makes absolutely no sense at all when you look at the details. First of all, there was nothing whatsoever stopping them from releasing movies on PPV prior to the DVD release. Nothing. You don’t need DRM to do it. In fact, some major studios already do this without breaking your TV in the process.

Of course, the MPAA’s response is that it would never release movies this way without SOC, because then people would copy them and… um… piracy… oh mygod… Hollywood is dying. Or something like that. But that makes no sense. First, as noted, some studios already release movies this way. They don’t need SOC. Second, the whole claim that this will lead to more unauthorized file sharing is a total red herring — because all of the movies they’re talking about were already in theaters — and once a movie is in the theaters, it’s already available widely on file sharing networks. There is no increase possible, because the content would already be widely available. On top of that, of course, as the GAO just noted, the MPAA’s ridiculous claims of losses from “piracy” are totally bogus.

[Read more at Techdirt]

Photo: European Space Agency

ESA’s Herschel telescope has snapped an embryonic star likely to turn into one of the biggest and brightest in our galaxy within the next few hundred thousand years.

The star-forming cloud RCW 120 already contains eight to ten times the mass of the Sun, and is still surrounded by an additional 2,000 solar masses of gas and dust from which it can feed further.

“This star can only grow bigger,” says Annie Zavagno of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille. But, she says, “According to our current understanding, you should not be able to form stars larger than eight solar masses.”

This is because the fierce light emitted by such large stars should blast away their birth clouds. Now that Herschel has observed one of these ‘impossible’ stars near the beginning of its life, astronomers can investigate why this doesn’t seem to happen.

Another new image shows stellar embryos first appearing inside filaments of glowing dust and gas draped across the galaxy.  These form chains of stellar nurseries, tens of light-years long.

Herschel has also been surveying deep space in the infrared. Each galaxy appears as just a pinprick, but its brightness allows astronomers to determine the rate of star birth within it.

[Read more at TG Daily]

Photo: Martin LaMonica, CNET

Scientists at the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Research Center have successfully printed thin-film solar on paper. By coating white sheets of paper with organic semiconductors, the researchers are, in effect, able to turn an everyday object into a current-producing device.

MIT President Susan Hockfield and Paolo Scaroni, CEO of the Italian oil company Eni, officially dedicated the new research center last week. Vladimir Bulovic, the center’s director, took the opportunity to unveil the paper solar panel.

The process is said to be similar to an inkjet printer. Just as an inkjet deposits ink onto paper fairly quickly and cheaply, the MIT scientists are depositing carbon-based dyes, used as organic semiconductors, to absorb the sunlight and then convert it into solar electricity.

According to Bulovic, any material can be used as long as it is deposited onto the paper at room temperature.

The efficiency is not great at 1.5-2 percent, but the convenience of the cells could completely modify home solar, and possibly commercial in the future, depending up how the efficiency rate improves.

The MIT researchers say the paper solar panels are years away from hitting the market. When they do, the smaller panels will likely be much cheaper and more convenient than the conventional roof-mounted solar energy systems of today.

MIT professor Karen Gleason headed the research and has submitted a paper for scientific review but it has not yet been published. MIT and Eni said this is the first time a solar cell has been printed on paper.

During the press conference, Scaroni said that Eni is funding the center because the company understands that hydrocarbons will eventually run out and believes that solar can be a replacement. At the same time, he said, current technologies are not sufficient.

[Read more at Green Technology Daily]

Photo: Julien Jorge (CC)

All 27 EU finance ministers have been summoned to Brussels on Sunday to sign up to a “European stabilisation mechanism. Britain will be unable to veto this as it will be put through under the “qualified majority voting” system.

The deal, effectively to shore up the euro, was denounced as a “stitch-up” last night after it emerged Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, had devised it behind closed doors and were attempting to push it through at a time when there is no clear government in Britain.

It was declared a “done deal” by the 16 euro zone leaders who met in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The decision was taken as David Cameron was locked in talks with the Liberal Democrats to try to form a government.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, will fly to Brussels for the meeting after promising to keep George Osborne and Vince Cable, his Tory and Lib Dem counterparts, informed. EU finance ministers have been given the deadline of midnight tonight to agree the highly sensitive but rushed proposals to protect the single currency from financial turbulence from the Greek debt crisis.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

Photo: Asy arch (CC)

Some members of Congress made risky bets with their own money that U.S. stocks or bonds would fall during the financial crisis, a Wall Street Journal analysis of congressional disclosures shows.

Senators have criticized Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for profiting from the housing collapse. And Congress is considering legislation to curb Wall Street risk-taking, including the use of financial instruments known as derivatives and of leverage, or methods that amplify returns.

According to The Journal’s analysis of congressional disclosures, investment accounts of 13 members of Congress or their spouses show bearish bets made in 2008 via exchange-traded funds — portfolios that trade like stocks and mirror an index. These funds were leveraged; they used derivatives and other techniques to magnify the daily moves of the index they track.

There’s no evidence the legislators and their spouses used privileged information or failed to follow rules on disclosure. Congressional rules permit lawmakers and their families to invest in—or bet against—publicly held companies they oversee through committee assignments, as well as broader markets or indices. While some made money, others lost.

Some of these legislators have publicly criticized practices such as short-selling, or betting on a security to decline. In February, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) argued on the Senate floor that “we don’t need those speculating in the marketplace to take unfair advantage of the values of equities that are owned by Americans all over this country for the sake of making a buck on a short sale.”

[Read more at WSJ]

Media outlets across the Northwest United States began reporting on April 24 that a strange, previously unknown strain of virulent airborne fungi that has already killed at least six people in Oregon, Washington and Idaho is spreading throughout the region. The fungus, according to expert microbiologists, who have expressed alarm about the emergence of the strain, is a new genotype of Cryptococcus gatti fungi. Cryptococcus gatti is normally found in tropical and subtropical locations in India, South America, Africa and Australia. Microbiologists in the United States are reporting that the strain found here, for reasons not yet fully understood, is far deadlier than any found overseas.

Physicians in the Pacific Northwest are reporting that an undetermined number of people in the region are ill from the effects of the strange strain. Physicians also say that the virulent strain can infect domestic animals as well as humans, and symptoms do not appear until anywhere from two to four months after exposure. Symptoms in humans include a lingering cough, sharp chest pains, fever, night-sweats, weight-loss, headaches and shortness of breath. The strain can be treated successfully, if detected early enough, with oral doses of antifungal medication, but it cannot be prevented, and there is no preventative vaccine. Undiagnosed, the fungus works its way into the spinal fluid and central nervous system and causes fatal meningitis.

The estimated mortality rate is about 25 percent of 21 cases analyzed. Several newspapers and media outlets in the US and overseas quote a researcher at Duke University’s Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Edmond Byrnes, as stating: “This novel fungus is worrisome because it appears to be a threat to otherwise healthy people. Typically, we see this fungal disease associated with transplant recipients and HIV-infected patients, but that is not what we are seeing.”

Microbiologists and epidemiologists studying the strain say the mystery fungus came from an earlier fatal fungus that was first found on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island in the fall of 2001, and perhaps as early as 1999. There the fungus infected and killed dogs, cats, horses, sheep, porpoises and at least 26 people. The disease spreads through spores carried by breezes and wind and when people and animals encounter infected ground where the fungus is present. A number of microbiologists say that the disease has “the potential to essentially travel anywhere the wind or people can carry it.” Reads an alarming study authored in part by Duke University’s Edmond Byrnes: “The continued expansion of C. gatti in the United States is ongoing, and the diversity of hosts increasing.”

[Read more at Truthout]