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Psilocybin Helps People Quit Cigarettes More Effectively Than Nicotine Patches Do, American Medical Association-Published Study Shows

Just one dose of psilocybin combined with therapy is associated with “significantly increased long-term abstinence” from cigarettes compared to nicotine patches, according to a new study published by the American Medical Association (AMA) that indicates the psychedelic “holds potential in the treatment of tobacco use disorder.”

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Alabama at Birmingham conducted the study, published in JAMA Substance Use and Addiction, finding more evidence about the therapeutic potential of single-dose psilocybin in tandem with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

The randomized clinical trial of cigarette smokers involved administering one high dose (30mg/70kg) of psilocybin or 8-10 weeks of Food and Drug Administration- (FDA) approved nicotine patch treatment, with both groups participating in a 13-week CBT program for smoking cessation.

“A total of 82 psychiatrically healthy adult smokers participated in the study, with 68 (82.9 percent) completing the 6-month follow-up,” the paper says. “At 6-month follow-up, 17 participants receiving psilocybin (40.5 percent) exhibited biochemically verified prolonged abstinence compared with 4 participants using the nicotine patch (10.0 percent), and 22 participants receiving psilocybin (52.4 percent) exhibited biochemically verified 7-day point prevalence abstinence compared with 10 participants using the nicotine patch (25.0 percent).”

Put another way, smokers who received psilocybin had more than six times greater odds of prolonged abstinence and more than three times greater odds of seven-day abstinence compared to the nicotine patch participants.

“In this pilot randomized clinical trial, one dose of psilocybin with manualized CBT significantly increased long-term abstinence compared with nicotine patch treatment with CBT,” the authors said. “Psilocybin abstinence rates were higher than typical treatments, suggesting promise for tobacco smoking cessation.”

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Cannabis compounds could reverse disease affecting one-third of adults

Compounds found in cannabis could provide a new roadmap for treating the world’s most common chronic liver disorder, according to a study released by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The research, published in the British Journal of Pharmacology, found that cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabigerol (CBG) significantly reduced liver fat and improved metabolic health in experimental models.

CBD is the more widely studied non-intoxicating cannabinoid, while CBG is a less common “precursor” cannabinoid from which CBD is formed.

Unlike THC, the primary psychoactive component in cannabis, these compounds do not produce a “high,” making them viable candidates for long-term medical treatment, the study suggests.

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) currently affects approximately one-third of the global adult population, according to health data.

The condition, which is closely linked to obesity and insulin resistance, has few approved pharmaceutical treatments, the researchers said, leaving patients to rely largely on lifestyle changes that can be difficult to maintain. 

“Our findings identify a new mechanism by which CBD and CBG enhance hepatic energy and lysosomal function,” said lead study author Joseph Tam, director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Cannabinoid Research at Hebrew University, in a press release.

The study highlights a process called “metabolic remodeling,” in which the cannabis compounds created a “backup battery” for the liver by increasing levels of phosphocreatine, a high-energy molecule stored in muscle cells.

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Woke California professor calls to abolish terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ to avoid offending the transgender community

A California professor laid out an argument for tossing out sexual identifiers, as terms like gay and lesbian ‘harms trans people,’ they claimed. 

Brandon Andrew Robinson, an associate professor at the University of California, spoke on the matter with the university while promoting their book, ‘Trans Pleasure: On Gender Liberation and Sexual Freedom.’

Robinson, who uses they/them pronouns, argued that ‘identities limit us’ and the ongoing creation of unlimited new identities demonstrates how such labels ‘fail to capture the full complexities of gender, sexualities and desire.’ 

They particularly noted hyper-specific identities, such as gynosexual, sapiosexual, asexual or pansexual. 

‘It’s a several-fold argument,’ Robinson told UC Riverside. ‘First, I want people to question why we privilege gender and genitals above all other attributes – like height or race – when we conceptualize our sexual identity.’

They continued on to argue that the term ‘gay,’ referring to a man being attracted to a man, ‘assumes a man is a stable, inherent category.’

‘When history shows the definition of manhood is constantly changing,’ they said.

‘Gender essentialism [the belief that men and women possess inherent, fixed traits determined by biology that define their identity and gender roles] also harms trans people, who often complicate those binary boundaries.’

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Incinerated Children and Decimated Liberty: How the US War Machine Slaughters Foreigners to Build a Domestic Panopticon

Randolph Bourne famously penned that war is the health of the State, a grim reality that has haunted the American populace for over eight decades. We are taught in state-funded schools that the military goes abroad to fight for our freedoms, yet every single conflict since the end of the Second World War has been explicitly used as a mechanism to systematically dismantle the liberties of the domestic population. Iran is no different, and in fact, may be much worse.

Foreign emergencies are consistently the Trojan horses used by the ruling class to bypass constitutional constraints, normalize mass surveillance, and entirely erode the principles of liberty right here at home.

The blueprint for the modern imperial presidency was drafted during the Korean conflict, a war that permanently altered the relationship between the executive branch and the limits of power. When Harry Truman decided to intervene in Korea, he completely bypassed Congress and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, setting a dangerous precedent that the president could unilaterally commit the nation to bloodshed without a formal declaration of war. By framing it merely as a “police action” for the United Nations, Truman fundamentally shifted the war-making power into the hands of a single, unaccountable individual.

But the usurpation of power didn’t stop at sending men to die in foreign lands; it immediately bled into domestic tyranny. In 1952, Truman issued Executive Order 10340, attempting to literally seize control of the nation’s privately owned steel mills to ensure production for his undeclared war. While the Supreme Court ultimately rebuked this specific overreach in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the die was cast, proving the executive branch viewed private property as entirely subordinate to the machinery of war. Sound familiar? Think, Anthropic.

As the warfare state rolled into the jungles of Vietnam, the financial and social costs required an entirely new level of domestic subjugation. To fund an unwinnable war without sparking an open revolt through direct taxation, Richard Nixon famously closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, entirely severing the dollar’s tie to physical gold. This singular act of financial warfare against the American public ushered in the era of fiat currency, allowing the Federal Reserve to print infinite money to fund infinite wars, guaranteeing the insidious, hidden tax of inflation that continues to crush the middle class today.

Domestically, the state recognized that an awakened public was its greatest threat, prompting the FBI to launch COINTELPRO, a massive, covert operation detailed in the Church Committee Report that treated peaceful dissent, civil rights leaders, and anti-war activists as literal enemies of the state. The political establishment also moved aggressively against free speech, passing the 1965 Draft Card Mutilation Act to ensure that young men who publicly burned their draft cards to protest forced conscription could be violently thrown in cages. The message was clear: criticize the war machine, and you will be targeted, surveilled, and aggressively prosecuted.

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Iran War Supporters Invent a New and Absurd Justification: It Is All About China

Before Operation Epic Fury began, the Trump administration spent very little energy trying to justify the looming war with Iran. The few defenses they did offer were banal platitudes, just echoes of the case for the Iraq War from more than twenty years ago: that Iran was weeks away from obtaining a nuclear device, that their ballistic missile program posed a significant threat to American assets and allies in the region, and that the Iranian people deserved liberation via regime change.

But not long after the bombing began, a new (admittedly more creative) justification emerged online and in the pro-Israel media that war supporters assume will be more persuasive to those doubting the wisdom of yet another Middle East conflict. The war with Iran, we are now told by many, is not really about Iran at all. It is, instead, all about China.

“Some argue Israel dragged the U.S. into war,” a post from The Free Press reads, “But this conflict is bigger than Israel and Iran — it’s about China.” Another article from The Spectator, a British conservative outlet, sang the same tune: “Trump’s ultimate target in this war is China.” Glenn Beck, on March 2, unveiled C.R.I.N.K., or “the new Axis Powers of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” as a way to “understand why Trump attacked Iran.” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told his audience last week that “we are killing two birds with one stone: we stop the number-one sponsor of terror, and we checkmate the Chinese.”

At the very least, if China were really the motive, one would have expected the Trump administration to offer this theory — “this is the chance to counter America’s greatest geopolitical rival” — as a major justification to the American people. One would think they would be particularly motivated to do so, given the consensus of polling data showing that public support for this war is far weaker than for any American war in decades.

But Trump officials never mentioned China as a core motive. In fact, even now, the administration and its backers have hardly mentioned China. This is a theory invented out of whole cloth by Iran-war supporters and/or Trump supporters, grasping for some cogent reason why this new war is in Americans’ interests.

Late last week, Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that this conflict is “a religious war” waged by “radical Islamic terrorists.” On March 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson explained to a group of reporters that the United States “determined, because of the exquisite intelligence that [it] had, that if Israel fired on Iran,” then “[Iran] would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.” Therefore, the House Speaker insisted, because the U.S. would be attacked either way, it had to hit Iran with Israel. President Trump announced on Friday that the U.S. intends to select “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” for the Iranian people, in order to make their country “economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”

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How Grok’s Football Roasts Put X in the Crosshairs of Britain’s Online Censorship Law

Few subjects in Britain carry as much emotional weight as football. Club loyalty runs deep, tragedies remain painfully close to the surface, and rivalries often cross the line between banter and cruelty. That volatile mix resurfaced this week when Grok, the AI chatbot on X, generated what officials described as “vulgar roasts” after users explicitly prompted it to produce offensive material.

UK authorities reacted quickly, discussing the Online Safety Act, Britain’s new censorship law, and raising the possibility of serious financial penalties for X. Under the law, platforms can face fines reaching up to ten percent of global revenue if they fail to address harmful content.

The material dredged up some of the most painful chapters in English football history. It mocked the Hillsborough disaster, where 97 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield after police failures led to fatal overcrowding in a standing pen.

It also referenced the Munich air disaster, which killed 23 people, including eight Manchester United players, when the team’s aircraft crashed during takeoff in icy conditions. Grok further alluded to the recent death of Diogo Jota, who died in a car accident in Spain in June 2025 at the age of 28 while playing for Liverpool F.C.

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Arizona Senate President Confirms “the FBI Has the Records” After FBI Seizes Maricopa County Election Records in Criminal Probe

The FBI has reportedly expanded its investigation into election fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona, obtaining election records through a subpoena in the state’s largest county. 

This comes after DHS Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to Arizona last month, just weeks after the FBI executed a search warrant in Fulton County, investigating fraud in the 2020 election.

Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman at the time had teased a major breakthrough in Arizona’s elections, saying he’d been in contact with the Department of Homeland Security for the “last 72hrs,” adding, “Stay tuned America.”

Now, the FBI has quietly seized Maricopa County election data and voting records via a grand jury subpoena, according to Just the News.

The probe reportedly involves allegations from the 2024 election that Runbeck Election Services, the private company that provides ballot printing and mail-in ballot services in 31 states and 54% of the nation’s voters, allegedly commingled voted ballots with blank ballots in multiple states. US Rep. Abe Hamadeh previously alerted the Department of Justice to these findings and demanded an investigation.

This also comes after the 2020 and 2022 elections, during which hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were counted without chain-of-custody documentation and with mismatched signatures.

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Turkey Blocks 41 Social Media Accounts Over Iran War Posts

Turkey’s government blocked 41 social media accounts on X, Facebook, and Instagram last Friday, deleted content from 75 more, and launched criminal proceedings against account holders, all on the grounds that they spread what officials called “disinformation and provocative content.”

The crackdown followed the start of attacks on Iran. Presidential Communications Director Burhanettin Duran framed the deletions as a national security response, saying the targeted accounts had been “systematically sharing unverified content aimed at creating fear, panic and uncertainty in society.”

Who decided the content was disinformation? The government. Who gets to define “provocative content”? The government. Who determines what threatens “public order, social peace, and our national security”? Also, the government; the same government that ordered the blocks.

The operation involved the Turkish Presidency’s Communications Directorate, the cybercrime department of the Security Directorate General, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, and the chief public prosecutors’ offices. A coordinated state apparatus, mobilized to silence social media accounts during a regional conflict.

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FRENCH CONNECTION: Court Documents Show Epstein Associate Jean-Luc Brunel’s ‘Industrial’ System of Exploitation, With Some Underage Models Trafficked to the US

‘They built/the dark satanic Mills/that manufacture hell on earth’ – Roger Waters/Watching TV

We now have a better idea of how the tentacles of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking ring spread around the world, and from these places, new revelations are arising nonstop.

A disturbing new chapter in the Epstein saga has now emerged from France, where confidential court documents reveal the scale of abuse orchestrated by model scout (and alleged serial rapist) Jean-Luc Brunel.

Brunel was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, and he met the same fate, found ‘suicided’ in his cell in La Santé prison, in Paris.

The newly released documents show Brunel running an ‘industrial system of exploitation’, even transforming luxury castles and apartments into sites of abuse.

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Airport Nightmares Over TSA Lines Have Returned

The Transportation Security Administration is getting affected again by the Democrats, and now those long lines at airports are back. Most of these workers are exempt from the immediate effects of the shutdown in Washington. They have to show up for work, but they aren’t paid. The Democrats believe punishing TSA agents over Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation activities will work. It won’t. As we saw in an NBC News poll, ICE is more popular than the Democratic Party. Also, ICE’s operations remain funded and unaffected—paid through the Big, Beautiful Bill.  

So, what are we even doing here? Democrats could sign off on a DHS funding bill after the January Minneapolis drama. Their base wouldn’t allow it, so most of the government was funded through September, with a short-term CR providing DHS funding until a longer-term funding measure could be hashed out. It failed. Republicans wanted another two-week extension, but Democrats rejected it. The agency was shut down over Presidents’ Day weekend, and now the mayhem has returned. In New Orleans, things looked like an Afghan refugee camp.

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