Colorado voters have passed a ballot initiative to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms for people 21 and older and to create state-regulated centers where participants can experience the drug.
Colorado becomes the second state after Oregon to establish a regulated system for substances like psilocybin and psilocin, the hallucinogens found in some mushrooms.
Colorado’s initiative eventually will allow an advisory board to add other plant-based psychedelic drugs to the program.
A California megachurch leader and her parents have been arrested on charges including murder and torture in the death of the woman’s 11-year-old daughter.
Leticia McCormack, a leader at Rock Church in San Diego, founded and led by former NFL player Miles McPherson, was booked in jail Monday on a charge of murder, three counts of torture, and three counts of willful cruelty to a child in the death of Arabella McCormack, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office reported.
On Thursday, McCormack’s leadership profile had been removed from the megachurch’s website.
Arabella was initially fostered before being adopted by Brian and Leticia McCormack, officials said.
The 49-year-old church elder’s father, Stanley Tom, 75, was also charged with murder, three counts of torture, and three counts of willful cruelty to a child, according to a news release from the department. Arabella’s grandmother Adella Tom, 70, was booked on three counts of torture and three counts of willful cruelty to a child.
The Canadian national who allegedly attacked the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer in the Pelosis’ home was indicted (pdf) on Nov. 9 by a federal grand jury, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said.
David DePape, 42, was “charged with one count of assault upon an immediate family member of a U.S. official with the intent to retaliate against the official on account of the performance of official duties,” the DOJ said in a statement. “He is also charged with one count of attempted kidnapping of a U.S. official on account of the performance of official duties.”
Federal officials last week confirmed to The Epoch Times that DePape was in the United States illegally, having overstayed his visa after he initially entered the country in 2000. The DOJ statement didn’t mention DePape’s immigration status and referred to him as a “California man.”
If convicted, DePape faces up to 30 years in prison on the alleged assault count and 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping count. He also faces a number of state charges, including attempted murder, for which he has pleaded not guilty.
He remained held on Nov. 10 in the San Francisco County jail without bail ahead of a Dec. 14 preliminary hearing on the local charges, according to the Mercury News. No court date has been set for the federal charges.
The indictment stated that two police officers arrived at the Pelosis’ San Francisco home early on Oct. 28 to see DePape and Paul Pelosi struggling over a hammer. When officers told the two to drop it, DePape allegedly got control of the hammer and hit Pelosi in the head, fracturing his skull.
The officers, according to court papers, then restrained the suspect while Pelosi remained on the ground.
“As set forth in the indictment, once DePape was restrained, officers secured a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties from the crime scene, where officers also observed a broken glass door to the back porch,” the DOJ said in its statement.
A few years ago, a discovery in Bosnia made headlines (2005) when it was announced that the world’s largest pyramid had been found near the town of Visoko, northwest of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. Since then, more than 400,000 people have visited these sites.
What’s interesting about pyramids is that they’re not only found in Egypt. They’re found throughout the world and built by civilizations (if you believe that theory) that had absolutely no contact with each other and roamed the Earth at different time periods throughout human history.
“Modern day archaeology and anthropology have nearly sealed the door on our imaginations, broadly interpreting the North American past as devoid of anything unusual in the way of great cultures characterized by a people of unusual demeanour. The great interloper of ancient burial grounds, the nineteenth century Smithsonian Institution, created a one-way portal, through which uncounted bones have been spirited. This door and the contents of its vault are virtually sealed off to anyone but government officials. Among these bones may lay answers not even sought by these officials concerning the deep past.”Vine Deloria, Standing Rock Sioux, author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights
What makes this massive undertaking so common across our history? What is it about these structures that basically had the entire world construct them? What do they represent? Our history books are far from a valid resource, there are so many new discoveries being made with regards to pyramids and ancient archaeology that our education system simply cannot keep up with it all.
War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.
CNN reports:
Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.
The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.
“Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”
The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.
Bush, you may remember, drew headlines and laughter earlier this year with his Freudian confession in which he accused Vladimir Putin of launching “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine.” The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the US empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.
Believe it or not, California thinks it has a solution to the homelessness problem that can be solved with additional taxation! Go figure.
A new measure in Los Angeles, called Measure ULA, is set to generate $900 million in taxes that will then be used for housing subsidies and tenant protections. The tax is essentially a levy on all property sales of more than $5 million, according to Bloomberg.
This “mansion tax”, if it passes, will look to “speed new construction and deliver a way out of the city’s spiraling homelessness crisis”, according to Bloomberg. It could generate some $900 million per year to provide infrastructure like affordable homes and tools like counsel for tenants in eviction courts.
Laura Raymond, director of the nonprofit Alliance for Community Transit–Los Angeles, told Bloomberg: “This would be the biggest investment in tenant protections in the history of LA.”
Yes, and it would be another reason on a long list of reasons for Californians to continue their exodus from the state to greener tax pastures like Florida and Texas.
She continued: ““We want to make sure that once this has passed, the housing experts, community organizations, community leaders and people who’ve been doing this work for many years are at the forefront of implementation.”
Meanwhile critics of the bill say it could ultimately wind up causing costs for developers and, subsequently rents, to rise. The city had tried to issue a bond in 2016 to provide the same type of relief, but that measure was “lackluster” in its success, the report says.
Social media users are sharing images which they claim show top secret photographs from Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic expedition where traces of a lost ancient civilization can be seen. However, the images were created by artificial intelligence and do not show historic photographs of the expedition.
An example can be seen (here).
The text in one post reads: “This is why no one is allowed to visit Antarctica and why every government in the world signed a treaty together to conspire and hide the truth from the mass population. Below you see Top Secret Lost Photos from Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic Expedition. Traces of a lost ancient advance civilization could be seen in the photographs.”
Comments on the post include: “Most interesting photos I’ve seen for a while….” and “There’s most certainly other reasons, would be nice knowing the entire truth of their discoveries.”
Some users point out that the faces of the individuals seen in the images are not visible and others point out that the images must have been created by artificial intelligence.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd was a U.S. naval officer, aviator and explorer who went on several Antarctic expeditions between 1928 and 1956 (here). Details about each expedition can be seen (www.admiralbyrd.com/).
There is no evidence that Byrd discovered a secret civilization in his expeditions as claimed in the posts. However, the expeditions have fueled conspiracy theories. One example is the “Hollow Earth” theory, which believes that the center of the Earth houses a secret civilization as discussed (here), (here).
Videos of Byrd’s Antarctic expeditions can be seen (here), (here), (here), (here) by Reuters and British Pathe. Photographs can be seen on Getty Images (here).
The images seen in the posts appear in a Medium article (here).
The article says: “Thanks to a source who wishes to remain nameless, we had the opportunity to view a large and compelling image collection of never before seen and highly top secret photos from Byrd’s many missions. They seem to depict concrete proof of an entire forgotten civilization — its architectures, artifacts, technologies, and much more — that once called Antarctica their home.”
A note at the end of the article reads: “Certain elements of these images may have been enhanced or generated by AI for quality purposes.”
It sounds like something out of the X-Files, but a former content moderator claims that AIs are generating conspiracy theories and flooding online platforms with fake images, videos, and text in order to manipulate human society, and to discredit real conspiracy theories.
The moderator-turned-whistleblower, who calls himself Scott Chatsalot — and whose real name was withheld on request in the interest of their safety— says that he personally witnessed AI-generated conspiracy content being published onto tech platforms at a “massive scale.” He went on to claim in an email to a major news network: “There are definitely no humans behind these campaigns, which are by orders of magnitude the largest anyone has ever seen, and which platforms are totally covering up. Only AIs have the power to do this…”
After posting his allegations to Twitter in mid-August, Chatsalot alleges that he was fired by his employer for doing so, and subsequently deleted his Twitter account. When contacted, Chatsalot refused to comment and his personal Facebook account appears to have been deleted or shadowbanned, though Chatsalot has since uploaded an apology video to YouTube and has taken to his Reddit account, which still appears active, to make the same allegations.
The author of the alleged email, which was not independently verified claimed that the company that he worked for, referred to by Chatsalot only as Widget, was hired by a large tech company as a content moderation team, whose work he describes as “very sensitive.”
On Reddit, Chatsalot alleged that in 2019 he was promoted to lead a large content moderation team of 2,500 employees tasked with policing posts from “all over the internet, including Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.”
According to Chatsalot, the team’s job was to police “all kinds of posts,” from “pornographic to political to religious to everything in between” and its work was “extremely secretive, and there was no oversight,” meaning there was “no one to tell you what was wrong.” He says they “just made it all up on the fly, and nobody else cared.”
Things changed in late 2021 when their moderation team began seeing a huge influx of AI generated media. Chatsalot claims that the content in question was all “generated by AIs and never human hands,” and that the images “are generated completely by artificial intelligence and machine learning trained off all the worst content from social media platforms, which Widget had unique access to.”
He says he saw the AI generated content via the massive Widget content moderation platform used by major social platforms, and that, “the scale at which this was being generated is insane. Billions per second insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He claimed that the platforms “don’t want to talk about it, because it makes them look bad.” He also claimed that whoever is generating these images, text, and videos, “the goal is to generate controversy to get people to click on your content and earn likes and money.” He says the AIs are using A/B testing to see what people respond to most negatively.
He also claimed that Widget itself was using AI to manipulate content across various platforms, and that, “It was using AI to target the conspiracy theories themselves for clicks and revenues.”
“Basically, the AI was teaching itself to know what was a conspiracy theory and what was not. That was its job.”
“The AI could generate a conspiracy theory from nothing and it would always seem real and people would look at it and like it,” he said, “It was actually producing this stuff, and it would use a real photo of something else and alter it, and then post it with a new face or caption that was totally different.” He goes on to claim that “The AI knew that it would make people mad and it would make people click on the image.”
In yet another effort to discover the murderer of 6-year-old beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey, who was found bludgeoned and strangled in her family’s basement in 1996, local police are now going to work with a review team to use new technology to find the killer.
The girl was reported missing the day after Christmas 1996 after JonBenet’s mother Patsy found a handwritten ransom note demanding nearly $118,000; her father John found her body later that day. For years, John, as well as Patsy, who died of cancer in 2006, were suspected by the public of killing their daughter, but in 2008 they were officially cleared.
“The amount of DNA evidence available for analysis is extremely small and complex. The sample could, in whole or in part, be consumed by DNA testing,” the Boulder Police Department and Boulder County District Attorney’s Office stated in a news release.
“The Boulder Police Department will be consulting with the Colorado Cold Case Review Team in 2023. The Cold Case Review Team is comprised of professional investigative, analytical, and forensic experts from across the state,” the district attorney’s office added.
Last May, John Ramsey asked Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) to move the case from the Boulder police to an independent agency.
“Anyone who would do this to a child is just beyond sick. He may be still out there, and if he is, he’s probably killed other children,” Ramsey said, according to Inside Edition, adding that new technology should be used to identify his daughter’s killer. “Technology has advanced so far in 25 years, that to not go back and apply the latest technology is just foolish.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has banned most state residents from buying bulletproof vests for civilian use with very few exceptions.
The law, which went into effect on July 6, banned all state residents “not engaged or employed in an eligible profession” from purchasing, owning, selling, exchanging, giving away or personally disposing of body armor.
The “eligible professions” initially only included police officers, peace officers and people currently serving in the United States Armed Forces or in the New York State Army or Air National Guard.
The law was pushed through the New York State Legislature following the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo in May that killed 10 people. When the law was initially passed, it only banned “bullet-resistant soft body armor,” which could have potentially served as a loophole for civilians who wanted to buy bulletproof vests made with steel, ceramic or polyethylene plates.
Notably, this loophole does not cover the steel-plated vest the Buffalo gunman wore during the shooting, which was strong enough to stop a bullet fired from the firearm of one of the grocery store’s security guards.
Democratic State Assemblyman Jonathan Jacobson, the lead sponsor of the bill, admitted that they did not know the difference between the different kinds of body armor when they were writing the bill.
“I think the important thing was that we took important steps that lessened the possibility that criminals will be using bulletproof vests in commission of crimes,” he claimed, adding that he is willing to rework the legislation to cover body armor using steel, ceramic or polyethylene plates.
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