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.

Democrats Scuttle Marijuana Decriminalization Vote Over Fears of Not Being Deferential Enough to Cop Lobbyists

A planned House vote on a bill to decriminalize the possession of marijuana was canceled on Thursday under pressure from law enforcement lobbyists and other pro-prohibition special interests.

The expected floor vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would have been the biggest accomplishment yet for cannabis reformers, but the effort has been postponed until after Election Day, Politico reports. Democrats have gotten weak-kneed about a bill that they once saw as a major criminal justice reform.

Indeed, it would have been. The MORE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), would remove cannabis from the schedules of the Controlled Substances Act and make that change retroactive, effectively expunging any federal marijuana offenses and convictions. The bill also orders federal courts to lift all sentences for people currently locked up due to a marijuana conviction.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained when the bill was introduced last year, the MORE Act was in many ways superior to other marijuana legislation, because it “completely deschedules marijuana rather than moving it to a lower schedule or making exceptions to the ban for state-legal conduct, and it seeks to lift the burdens that prohibition has imposed on people caught growing, distributing, or possessing cannabis, a vital project that too often has been treated as an afterthought.”

This year, the bill had collected more than 100 co-sponsorships in the House—it even had support from three Republicans—and appeared on track to pass the lower chamber. Even though the bill was expected to die in the Senate, that House vote would have been historic.

Unfortunately, cop lobbyists seem to have convinced House Democratic leaders that it would also be a liability. A coalition of law enforcement special interests and other proponents of the drug war sent a letter to congressional leaders last week warning about the potential dangers associated with legalizing and “commercializing” marijuana.

That, combined with vague fears about how Republicans might weaponize the legalization vote for negative ads in swing districts, was apparently enough to convince Democrats to scuttle the vote.

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Say What?! CDC director just testified masks might be more effective than vaccine at fighting COVID-19

First, Don’t wear a mask! They won’t help you. In fact, they might even kill you (because you’re too stupid to know how to wear one safely).

Then, Wear your mask! It’s the law! It still won’t help you, but it will save everyone around you!

And now (from the head of the CDC no less, in testimony before Congress Wednesday), Wear your mask! It’s the only thing guaranteed to save you!

“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%. And if I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This face mask will.” — CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield

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Moderna expects to make 20 million doses of coronavirus vaccine by 2020 end

Moderna said on Friday it was on track to produce 20 million doses of its experimental coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, while maintaining its goal of readying 500 million to 1 billion doses in 2021.

Vaccines and treatments are seen as essential in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic that has shown no signs of slowing and killed over 944,000 people worldwide.

A handful of vaccines, including those from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, are also being tested in large studies.

Moderna had enrolled 25,296 participants out of a planned 30,000 in its late-stage study as of Wednesday.

The company is working with Switzerland’s Lonza Group and Spain’s Laboratorios Farmacéuticos Rovi to make the vaccine outside the United States.

Moderna has a vaccine supply deal in place with the U.S. for 100 million doses, and has finished advanced talks with the European Union for the vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anticipates that 35 million to 45 million doses of vaccines from the first two companies to receive authorization will be available in the United States by the end of this year.

Moderna plans to seek emergency authorization for its vaccine’s use in high-risk groups if it proves to be at least 70% effective, its chief executive officer told Reuters earlier this week.

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Democrat Michigan Secretary of State Misprints Trump Ticket on Ballots for Troops

The Michigan secretary of state misprinted the Trump line on ballots intended to be mailed to troops serving overseas, the Detroit News reported.

Jocelyn Benson, who has endorsed President Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, and spoke at the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC), made the apparent error. The ballot listed Jeremy Cohen as Trump’s running mate. Cohen is running for vice president on the libertarian ticket with Jo Jorgensen.

The name of the incumbent vice president, Mike Pence, was omitted altogether. Jorgensen’s line lacked a running mate, thus creating three errors on the ballot.

Over 400 incorrect ballots were downloaded from the secretary’s website by local clerks to be sent to voters. It is not clear how many were actually mailed.

The ballots were “meant to be mailed or emailed to Michigan residents living abroad under the Military and Overseas Empowerment (MOVE) Act,” the paper reported.

“Replacement” ballots will be issued to those who may have been mailed incorrect ones, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“If a voter does happen to return the incorrect ballot instead of the correct ballot, it will still count,” Benson spokeswoman Tracy Wimmer said.

“The clerk will be instructed to duplicate a vote for Trump onto a ballot for Trump/Pence.”

The secretary of state has endorsed Biden for president.

During the DNC, Benson pushed voting by mail.

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A DARPA-Funded Implantable Biochip to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Markets by 2021

The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ BARDA.

The revolutionary breakthrough came to a Canadian scientist named Derek Rossi in 2010 purely by accident. The now-retired Harvard professor claimed in an interview with the National Post that he found a way to “reprogram” the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.

These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As Rossi, himself, puts it: “The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.”

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