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You’re More Likely to Get Murdered in Chicago Than Be Hospitalized for COVID-19

“The Delta variant does not appear to be especially deadly,” says Dr. Joel Zinberg in a Tuesday New York Post op-ed.

Zinberg — who practiced medicine for 30 years at Mt. Sinai Hospital — notes that “despite rising numbers of Delta cases in July, hospitalizations have only increased moderately.” Delta victims, he notes, “are no more likely to be hospitalized or die than with other variants.”

Not only that, but as I noted elsewhere here at PJ Media on Wednesday, you’re more likely to get murdered in Chicago (18 murders per 100,000 people) than a senior citizen is to be hospitalized for the Wuhan Flu (2.9 per 100,000), Delta variant or no Delta variant.

While Zinberg adds that most of the increase “is concentrated in areas with low vaccination rates,” the actual COVID death rate is “lower than it was three weeks ago.”

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Texas Democratic lawmaker who fled to DC with other Dems to hamper election security bill likens arrest threat to plight of runaway slaves

Texas state Rep. Senfronia Thompson — among many Democratic lawmakers who fled the state as a way of hampering the passage of a Republican-led election security bill — likened the arrest threat from Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to the plight of runaway slaves.

“We refuse to be a hostage, to remain a hostage within the state of Texas,” Thompson said at a Friday news conference. “And I know that there are search warrants out for us, and I’m ready to be arrested. What do you do to a slave if you don’t do nothing but arrest them when they flee?”

“We fled Texas, and if they want to arrest me, go ‘head,” Thompson added. “I’m ready to be arrested.”

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New Study Puts the Nail in the Coffin of the Myth that ‘Marijuana is a Gateway Drug’

Politicians defending the criminalization of recreational marijuana use have long riled up voters with dire warnings that the substance acts as a “gateway drug.” They insist that even if deaths directly caused by marijuana usage are virtually nonexistent, pot will eventually lead many users to more dangerous drugs.

President Biden himself has long made this claim, stating in 2010 that “I still believe [marijuana] is a gateway drug.” Only in 2019, while campaigning for president, did Biden begin to walk back this position. Yet he still does not fully support federal marijuana legalization. And the “gateway” position is still held by many other politicians clinging to their opposition to a widely popular legalization movement. For example, Republican Congressman Andy Harris recently referred to marijuana as “a known gateway drug to opioid addiction” while arguing against legalization.

However, a new study suggests that the notion that marijuana is a “gateway drug” is little more than political fiction.

Economists examined the impact that recreational marijuana laws passed in 18 states and the District of Columbia have had on metrics key to the “gateway” narrative. The analysis is the first to “comprehensively examine the broader impacts of state recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) on a wide set of outcomes related to hard drug use, including illicit nonmarijuana related consumption, drug-related arrests, arrests for property and violent offenses, mortality due to drug-related overdoses, suicides, and admissions for drug addiction-related treatment.”

Across four different nationwide databases, the researchers “find little consistent evidence” that recreational marijuana laws have gateway effects to hard drugs. The study finds “little compelling evidence to suggest” that marijuana legalization leads to more increases in drug use, arrests for hard drug offenses, drug overdoses, or admissions for drug addiction treatment.

They say there is even “suggestive evidence that legalizing recreational marijuana reduces heroin- and other opioid-related mortality.” Ultimately, the authors conclude that critics’ fear of marijuana’s supposed “gateway” effect appears “unfounded.”

Unfounded, indeed. But don’t expect critics to change their tune.

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The White House escalates its calls for censorship, aims at “conservative news outlets”

The White House is not only stepping up its campaign to bring pressure to bear on online content and providers and sources that the Biden administration considers to be misinformation, but is also broadening the scope of the narrative and potential targets of censorship.

After recently announcing plans to “hold platforms accountable” for spreading misinformation – a point White House comms director Kate Bedingfield is telling the media President Biden spoke about “aggressively” – it’s now the turn of conservative news outlets to get a warning.

“There are conservative news outlets who are creating irresponsible content,” Bedingfield said.

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Woke language: Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ is here

Have you noticed how our language is changing?

At a congressional hearing on “Birthing While Black,” nearly every politician used the words “birthing people” instead of “women” or “mothers.” Asked why, Shalanda Young, President Joe Biden’s budget director, said, “Our language needs to be more inclusive.”

Activists have also changed “equality” to “equity” and “affirmative action” to “diversity.”

The Associated Press no longer uses “mistress.” It tells reporters to use “companion, friend or lover.”

Worse, certain speech is now labeled “violence.”

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Drugs In The White House

May 12-13: sowed hemp at muddy hole by swamp.
August 7: began to separate the male from the female hemp—rather too late.

While it is unlikely that George Washington, who penned these diary notes 200 years ago. smoked any of the scraggly rope-dope he was growing on his Mount Vernon plantation, he certainly dreamed of hemp as a cash crop. After all, it had a solid foreign market and was perfect for cottage industry, basket-making and such. He won over Thomas Jefferson, who began importing hemp seeds to Monticello, but failed to win the support of early American farmers, who favored tobacco cultivation. If, by some historical quirk, they had instead followed Washington’s advice, early U.S. history might have been considerably headier.

As it turned out not until the 19th century did Americans—including presidents—really turn on. The patent-medicine boom in the mid 1800s was largely responsible: Virtually everyone sampled various opium-, cannabis- and cocaine-based remedies and elixirs. If the president had the flu, a stomach ache, piles or a hangover, the prescribed remedy was tincture of opium: laudanum. Also prescribed for all manner of “female complaints,” laudanum found its way into first ladies’ medicine chests too. A century before Betty Ford got strung out on Valium and vodka, Mary Todd Lincoln was portrayed by presidential biographer William H. Herdon as a virtual patent-medicine junkie.

On the whole, however, records of bummers on these 19th-century elixirs are far outweighed by the good trips. Ulysses S. Grant, burned out by years of boozing, was miraculously revitalized near the end of his life by daily doses of Mariani tea, one of chemist Angelo Mariani’s delightful cocaine-based products. It so bolstered the aging ex-president that he was able to put in hours of work a day on his memoirs, valued as one of the finest accounts of the Civil War.

During the 1880s, coca wine, another Mariani tonic, enjoyed unsurpassed popularity on the patent-medicine market. The enterprising Mariani eventually rounded up glowing endorsements from the prince of Wales, the czar and czarina of Russia, the kings of Norway and Sweden, and Pope Leo XIII. In the United States, Pres. William McKinley’s secretary noted that a case of Vin Mariani had received an enthusiastic reception from the president.

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Republican Lawmakers Want Biden to Reclassify Cannabis

Republican lawmakers are asking President Joe Biden to keep his promise and reschedule cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act. 

Yes, you read the lede right. Republicans are asking Biden, a Democrat, to reschedule weed once and for all. 

Representatives Dave Joyce (R-OH) and Don Young (R-AK) both serve as co-chairs of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus. They recently sent a letter to Biden asking for rescheduling and claiming the issue is “a matter of public health.”

Despite all the work that has been happening at the state level to legalize medical and recreational cannabis, it is still classified federally as a Schedule I drug in the U.S., as most cannabis enthusiasts well know. This puts it in the same category with drugs like heroin that are known to be much more harmful. The classification means that cannabis has no medical value and a high potential for abuse in the country’s eyes. 

“As a Schedule I substance, cannabis is not accepted for medical use on the federal level, which has caused significant research restrictions and continues to thwart the treatment of a wide range of patients, including those suffering from cancer as well as veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and people living with Multiple Sclerosis and seizure disorders,” the letter explains regarding the status of cannabis. 

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‘It was only under democracy that black people had leadership roles.’ Cuban exile leader says 1619 Project founder ‘needs to read some Cuban history’ after she the claimed communist country has the ‘least racial inequality’ in the world

The leader of a US Cuban exile group has slammed 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones after she claimed Cuba had the ‘least inequality between black and white people’ thanks to its socialist government.

Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat spoke out against the New York Times journalist Tuesday after a 2019 podcast where she called the communist country one of the most ‘equal’ in the world, resurfaced online.

The Havana-born scholar, who is based in Miami, said Hannah-Jones’s remarks do not ‘reflect the reality of Cuban history’, noting there has actually been a lack of black leadership on the island since the 1959 revolution – which saw dictator Fidel Castro ascend to power.

‘There is a very simple comparison you can make that shows how wrong this statement by Nikole Hannah-Jones is,’ Gutierrez-Boronat told DailyMail.com. 

‘Look at the central committee of the Communist Party for the past 62 years and tell me how many prominent black Cubans have been in that central committee.

‘And then look at the republic that existed between 1902 and 1959. You couldn’t write the history of the republic without mentioning all the prominent black Cubans who were there. 

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