Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Vermont Bill Would Legalize Psilocybin Despite Federal Prohibition

A bill filed in the Vermont State House would legalize the use of psilocybin – the psychotropic substance in “magic mushrooms,” setting the stage to nullify federal prohibition of the same in practice and effect.
A coalition of 31 Democrats and one Republican led by Rep. Joseph Troiano (D) filed House Bill 371 (H371) on Feb. 24. The legislation would amend existing state law by removing criminal penalties for the “possessing, dispensing, or selling” of psilocybin. The bill would also establish a Psychedelic Therapy Advisory Working Group for continued research into the beneficial effects of psilocybin.

Psilocybin, often referred to as “magic mushrooms,” is a hallucinogenic compound found in certain mushrooms. A number of studies have shown psilocybin to be effective in the treatment of depression, PTSD, chronic pain and addiction. For instance, a Johns Hopkins study found that “psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer.”

Efforts to legalize psilocybin in Vermont follow a successful ballot measure that decriminalized a number of drugs, including heroin and cocaine in Oregon. In 2022, Colorado voters passed a ballot measure decriminalizing several naturally occurring psychedelic substances. At least 14 cities including Detroit, Michigan have decriminalized “magic mushrooms.”

Psychedelic decriminalization and legalization efforts at the state and local levels are moving forward despite the federal government’s prohibition of psilocybin and other psychedelic substances.

Keep reading

FBI probing death on private plane of 9/11 commission lawyer

Former Clinton and Obama administration lawyer Dana Hyde was injured aboard a private plane and died in a Hartford, Connecticut hospital following an emergency landing on Friday, state police told the media on Monday. Hyde’s identity had not previously been made public.

Hyde died of blunt force injuries, according to the state chief medical examiner. Her family has not issued a statement, though her husband, Jonathan Chambers, the couple’s two children, and the aircraft’s two crew members were reportedly not injured during the flight.

The FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating Hyde’s death, according to the Daily Mail. Specialists have reportedly taken possession of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the Bombardier Challenger 300, which belongs to Chambers’ employer, high-speed internet provider Conexon. 

Keep reading

Studies Link Marijuana Legalization to All Sorts of Positive Public Health Outcomes

Legalization linked to fewer suicides, traffic fatalities, and opioid deaths. A new paper on the public health effects of legalizing marijuana finds “little credible evidence to suggest that [medical marijuana] legalization promotes marijuana use among teenagers” and “convincing evidence that young adults consume less alcohol when medical marijuana is legalized.” And that’s just the start of the positive pot news contained in the paper, which was published this month in the Journal of Economic Literature.

The paper reviews previous research on the public health effects of legal weed, including studies published between 2013 and 2020.

These days, 36 states have legalized medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized recreational marijuana, study authors D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees note. This has spawned all sorts of concerns about potential public health issues, from promoting the use of marijuana—or other substances—among teenagers to worry about crime, traffic fatalities, and more. But across a range of measures, the evidence is inconclusive at worst and very often quite positive.

For instance: it becomes clear that medical marijuana laws aren’t driving an epidemic of marijuana use among minors. In fact, some researchers have even “found a negative association between [medical marijuana laws] and youth marijuana use.”

Likewise, a 2019 paper found recreational marijuana legalization associated “with an 8 percent decrease in the odds of any marijuana use among high school students and a 9 percent decrease in the odds of frequent marijuana use among high school students.”

Anderson and Rees suggest one possible explanation for the decreased use findings is that “it is more difficult for teenagers to access marijuana when drug dealers are replaced by licensed dispensaries that require proof of age.”

But some small studies have shown a correlation between recreational marijuana legalization and increased teen use. “Researchers will have to wait until more years of post-legalization data become available before drawing firm conclusions about the relationship between [recreational marijuana laws] and youth marijuana use,” the authors say.

The effect of legalization on adult marijuana use is also inconclusive. Using surveys that asked adults about their use, one study found “no evidence of a relationship between [medical marijuana laws] and marijuana consumption among adults,” while another found them associated with a 4–7 percent increase in past-month adult use and recreational legalization linked to a 30 percent increase in use.

Of course, data about the effect of legalization on adult use is complicated by the fact that legalization might make more people comfortable admitting marijuana use in surveys.

Anderson and Rees also say that it’s “difficult to gauge” the effect of marijuana legalization on opioid deaths and on several other public health measures, including mental health, traffic fatalities, workplace health, and crime. Still, there are a lot of positive indicators in the research.

The authors note that “several studies have produced credible evidence” that medical marijuana legalization may reduce the number of opioid-related deaths. However, one 2019 study “confirmed the negative association between legalization and opioid-related mortality…for the period 1999–2010, but found that this association became positive when data for the years 2011–17 were added to the analysis.” The authors suggest that this could be “due to the changing nature of the opioid epidemic. Perhaps marijuana and prescription pain medications are substitutes, but marijuana and heroin are not.”

Recent research on recreational marijuana legalization and opioid deaths has been promising. Another 2019 study found recreational legalization associated with a 14 percent decline in opioid-related deaths, and a 2020 study “found that the legalization of recreational sales was associated with a 16–21 percent decrease in opioid-related mortality.”

In addition, there is “strong evidence that legalizing marijuana discourages the use of alcohol, especially binge drinking.”

Keep reading

DOJ Accuses Louisville Police Of Civil Rights Violations, Discrimination After Breonna Taylor Investigation

Louisville’s police routinely violate constitutional rights and federal law, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said following a two-year investigation following the death of Breonna Taylor.

The DOJ announced the findings of its investigation on Wednesday in a press conference and 90-page report. Federal investigators said their review found that officers of the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law.”

Some of the report’s findings include use of excessive force, executing search warrants without knocking or announcing, using invalid search warrants, and violating the rights of protesters.

Keep reading

Matt Taibbi rips ‘spineless’ media for ignoring FTC’s demand for Twitter to reveal journalists

The Federal Trade Commission’s demand that Twitter reveal the names of journalists who were granted access to company records is being assailed as “an outrageous attack on the First Amendment.”

Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist, blasted his “former colleagues in mainstream media” for failing to cover what is being billed as “insane overreach” by FTC Chair Lina Khan.

He wrote that the lack of media outrage was “particularly infuriating” given that none of the journalists who published the “Twitter Files” had “asked for nor received access to private user data” whereas “the Files themselves are full of instances of government agencies improperly asking for the same.”

“Which journalists a company or its executives talks to is not remotely the government’s business. This is an insane overreach,” according to Taibbi.

In a Twitter thread, Taibbi referred to mainstream reporters as “spineless, corrupt, amoral f–kwits.”

Author Michael Shellenberger, who was among those given access to Twitter Files, blasted the Biden administration for its “outrageous attack on the First Amendment.”

Keep reading

Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years frozen in permafrost

Warmer temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost — a frozen layer of soil beneath the ground — and potentially stirring viruses that, after lying dormant for tens of thousands of years, could endanger animal and human health.

While a pandemic unleashed by a disease from the distant past sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, scientists warn that the risks, though low, are underappreciated. Chemical and radioactive waste that dates back to the Cold War, which has the potential to harm wildlife and disrupt ecosystems, may also be released during thaws.

“There’s a lot going on with the permafrost that is of concern, and (it) really shows why it’s super important that we keep as much of the permafrost frozen as possible,” said Kimberley Miner, a climate scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

Permafrost covers a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere, having underpinned the Arctic tundra and boreal forests of Alaska, Canada and Russia for millennia. It serves as a kind of time capsule, preserving — in addition to ancient viruses — the mummified remains of a number of extinct animals that scientist have been able to unearth and study in recent years, including two cave lion cubs and a woolly rhino.

The reason permafrost is a good storage medium isn’t just because it’s cold; it’s an oxygen-free environment that light doesn’t penetrate. But current day Arctic temperatures are warming up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, weakening the top layer of permafrost in the region.

To better understand the risks posed by frozen viruses, Jean-Michel Claverie, an Emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in Marseille, France, has tested earth samples taken from Siberian permafrost to see whether any viral particles contained therein are still infectious. He’s in search of what he describes as “zombie viruses” — and he has found some.

Keep reading

Slowly But Steadily, the Executive Branch is Bringing Back Widespread Drone Warfare

Not at any other time in the 21st century has the average American kept up less with the Global War on Terror, and now three presidents later, the questions of legality, productivity, and collateral damage remain as unanswered as they’ve ever been.

Over the last 15 months, the number of US drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia has increased greatly compared to the first half of the Biden Administration. On March 1st, AFP reported that local government sources in the Yemeni province of Marib said a US drone strike had killed the al-Qaeda leader Hamad bin Hamoud al-Tamimi, a “judge” of a sort-of “leadership council.”

This came about a month after similar sources reported 3 supposed al-Qaeda fighters killed in a US drone strike in the same province.

Regarding the latter, the 3 men were killed in a car. Evidence at the scene let two experts tracking the US drone warfare program believe it was an R9X Hellfire missile – an expensive and sophisticated bomb typically reserved for “high-value targets.”

“The R9X is for high-value target killing and we don’t have any [sic] ’Who is this guy, why does he merit this now?’” said David Sterman, a senior policy analyst at the Washington-based think tank New America, which for years has tracked US drone strikes in Yemen. “If it is a US strike, it raises substantial questions about what is the state of the US drone war in Yemen.”

Drones haven’t been in the news as much as they were when former-President Donald Trump substantially downgraded the required authority to launch one from the theater commander, who needed the White House’s permission under the Obama Administration, to officers on the ground.

Only recently did Joe Biden’s administration even establish a policy for their use, long after he had used them to supposedly kill al-Qaeda founder Ayman al-Zawahiri last August, and 10 innocent children and men in Kabul the August before that.

Luke Hartig, the former Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and former Dept. Director for Counterterrorism under the Sect. of Defense, is one of the only minds in America still actively criticizing drone policy from inside the establishment.

Keep reading

CNN ex-boss Jeff Zucker told staff not to probe ‘lab leak’ theory because it was ‘Trump talking point’

CNN’s then-president Jeff Zucker told his staffers not to investigate the “lab leak theory” behind the origins of COVID-19 because he thought it was a “Trump talking point,” according to a report.

A “well-placed” CNN insider told Fox News Digital on Monday that Zucker gave the order in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital.

“It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”

Mainstream news organizations including CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC and others have been pilloried in recent days following a recent government report that concluded that an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory is the most likely explanation for the COVID outbreak.

In the initial weeks and months of the pandemic, prominent media personalities, public health officials, and elected officials from the Democratic Party dismissed the “lab leak” theory as “debunked” — with some suggesting it was racist to even discuss the topic.

The Post has sought comment from CNN and Zucker.

Keep reading

FBI worked secretly with hospitals to strip US citizens’ gun rights, documents show

The FBI coordinated secretly with hospitals and medical centers to strip U.S. citizens of their rights to own, buy, or even use firearms , according to a trove of internal documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

Behind closed doors and without congressional approval, the FBI has worked hand in hand with the Secret Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to strip over two dozen people of their gun rights with internal forms, records show. On the heels of this revelation by the Washington Examiner in December 2022, newly obtained documents and emails shed light on how the bureau apparently received a helping hand from medical facilities to waive gun rights from at least five people.

“Any time you have evidence of private entities coordinating with federal agents to strip Americans of their rights, the public should be alarmed and demanding answers and action,” said Aidan Johnston, federal affairs director for Gun Owners of America, a firearms rights group. “This is just the latest terrifying new instance of the illegal NICS self-submission form being used in nefarious ways, and those who used it to violate the public’s trust must be held to account.”

Between 2016 and 2019, the FBI presented forms to U.S. citizens at their homes and in other undisclosed locations that registered them with the bureau’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the Washington Examiner previously reported . Newly obtained records, however, date the FBI’s usage of the form back to 2011.

Keep reading