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The Archaeology of Marijuana

In June, monthly sales for recreational and medical marijuana in my hometown of Colorado reached a record high of $199 million .

The industry’s growth took eight years. In 2012, with the passage of the 64th Amendment, Colorado, along with Washington, became one of the first states in the U.S. where consenting adults could legally purchase and consume marijuana for recreational purposes.

Since then, Colorado’s tourism landscape has changed dramatically. Legalization of recreational marijuana has fueled six of the eight consecutive years of record growth in the tourism industry. In June 2019, the Colorado Department of Revenue announced that total marijuana-related revenue had reached $1 billion since sales began in 2014. This funding has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue for the state, which can be used for education, transportation, environmental protection, and other initiatives.

However, despite the clear economic benefits, many in the United States oppose marijuana legalization. Some of my friends dislike the smell of marijuana. Others are concerned about marijuana use among teenagers, the potential effects of secondhand smoke on children, or people driving under the influence.

I haven’t smoked cigarettes in years, and I’ve never tried edible marijuana. However, I’m very pleased that America is starting to move away from its long road of unnecessarily criminalizing mild recreational drugs.

I voted in favor of Amendment 64 because I oppose the double standards regarding alcohol in the United States. Studies show that alcohol is far more dangerous than marijuana. I also voted in favor because I oppose the systemic racism in the justice system that unfairly punishes people of color for drug-related crimes .

My perspective as an archaeologist is relevant to this matter. I pay close attention to what humanity has done in the past, and from the long-term perspective of human history, I know that not everything in the present is “normal.” The modern fear of marijuana is one of the concerns that seems particularly strange, because researchers estimate that humans have been using cannabis for at least 10,000 years.

What do scholars say about the long history of human use of cannabis? How did cannabis transform from a plant highly valued in many parts of the world to a notorious drug? 

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Trump’s World Liberty Financial uses five billion WLFI to borrow $75 million from a platform its adviser co-founded

World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture co-founded by the Trump family, has executed a series of transactions through decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Dolomite that raises questions about insider access, circular token economics, and concentrated risk to other depositors.

Onchain records analyzed by CoinDesk, sourced from Etherscan, Arkham and publicly accessible wallet data, show the sequence began on Feb. 8, when WLFI’s treasury deposited 14 million USD1, its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, into Dolomite as collateral and borrowed 11.4 million USDC against it.

Minutes later, 11.45 million USDC moved to a Coinbase Prime deposit address, per Arkham. Two days later, 12.5 million USD1 was sent from the treasury to a separate Coinbase Prime deposit address. Coinbase Prime is typically used for converting crypto to fiat or for institutional OTC trading.

That 12.5 million USD1 was not borrowed from Dolomite. It moved directly from WLFI’s treasury wallet to the exchange, meaning the venture sent its own stablecoin straight to a fiat off-ramp.

But the WLFI token entered the picture twelve days later. On Feb. 20, the treasury deposited 890 million WLFI into Dolomite and borrowed 20 million USD1 against it.

On March 24, another 1.1 billion WLFI followed. In total, 1.99 billion WLFI tokens now sit as collateral inside Dolomite, and the treasury has received roughly 31.4 million in stablecoins from the protocol across both episodes.

The choice of protocol is not incidental, however.

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Mamdani Just Took His Commie Jihad Against New Yorkers One Step Further

Numerous reports have revealed that New York City’s race-communist mayor Zohran Mamdani will be blocking patriotic Americans from attending the ball dropping to celebrate the United States’ upcoming 250th birthday. The reactions to the news have been rather predictable.

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SCARY: Maryland Elementary School Vandalized with Graffiti Glorifying Sandy Hook Shooter

Parents, students, and the community in Montgomery County, Maryland, have been left rattled after graffiti honoring the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooter, Adam Lanza, was discovered on Bradley Hills Elementary School over the weekend.

The graffiti, which read “RIP Adam Lanza,” was found painted on a fence at the elementary school on Saturday.

In 2012, Lanza shocked and saddened the world when he carried out the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, murdering 20 first-grade children and six adults before taking his own life.

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) immediately notified families in a letter sent to the Bradley Hills Elementary community.

MCPS Chief of Schools Dr. Peter O. Moran wrote:

“Today, graffiti was discovered on a fence at Bradley Hills Elementary School that included the name of the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. To be clear, the use of the name of an individual responsible for such a heinous act, one that involved the loss of life of young school children, can only be interpreted as an act intended to intimidate and cause fear within the Bradley Hills School community, and the broader neighborhood and community, too.”

Dr. Moran added that the “despicable act” would be met with a “substantial and uniform response” from MCPS and the Montgomery County Police Department.

School staff documented the graffiti, and a building services team removed it before the end of Saturday evening.

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We spend (borrow) $22 billion every week to pay interest on National Debt — just the freaking interest. National Debt grows by $6 billion every day.

The problem with an increasing debt burden is that it costs more to maintain it: This is precisely the issue with which the U.S. Treasury is wrangling at present. As total U.S. national debt ticks over $39 trillion, the interest payments on that value are eye-watering: $529 billion for the first six months of the current fiscal year.

A new budget update from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released yesterday highlights that the government—according to preliminary estimates—paid out the near $530 billion between October 2025, when the fiscal year starts, and March 2026. This equates to more than $88 billion in interest payments a month, or more than $22 billion a week.

That means the service payments on public debt are roughly equal to spending for the same period on both the Department of Defense’s military budget and the Department of Education. These two outlays contribute costs of $461 billion and $70 billion respectively.

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Faith Facade: Democrat Talarico Targets Texas Believers

In the wake of President Trump’s decisive second-term victory, the Democratic Party finds itself in full retreat mode. The old playbook, full of shoving Woke extremism, drag queen story hours, and open borders down America’s throat, backfired spectacularly.

So now they’re trying a new tactic: pretending to be one of us. No more rainbow flags and “defund the police” chants in public.

Instead, they’re courting centrists, independents, and – most brazenly – the very heart of the MAGA base: churchgoing white Christians, Baptists, Evangelicals, and everyday folks who still believe in the God of the Bible.

Nowhere is this deception more obvious than in the 2026 Texas U.S. Senate race. Texas hasn’t sent a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, yet the party is all-in on James Talarico, their freshly minted nominee for the Class II seat currently held by Sen. John Cornyn.

Talarico, a 36-year-old state representative and Presbyterian seminarian, is being sold as a “man of deep faith” – a Lord-begging, Scripture-quoting Texan who supposedly shares the values of Sunday-morning pew-sitters across the Lone Star State. Don’t buy it. This is classic wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing territory, straight out of Matthew 7:15.

Talarico doesn’t hide his church membership. He’s been at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Austin since he was a toddler, and he frames every policy through a distorted Christian lens.

“Love thy neighbor” becomes his justification for open borders and taxpayer-funded abortion. He preaches that Jesus was a “feminist” and twists the Annunciation story to claim Mary’s consent somehow endorses abortion rights.

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New York Times does it again, pushing pro-vaccine narrative over journalism

A recent New York Times article examining Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and developments at the CDC is drawing criticism over what some describe as one-sided vaccine coverage.

The article, published March 23, relied heavily on interviews with former CDC officials and presented commonly cited claims that vaccines are safe and effective, while offering little perspective from those who question that view.

It also highlighted Kennedy’s work and advocacy, including claims that he has spread misinformation about vaccines.

The coverage pointed to a 2025 measles outbreak in a Texas community with low vaccination rates, attributing reported deaths to measles. Other accounts cited by Children’s Health Defense have raised questions about those conclusions.

The article also addressed statements about vaccine ingredients, including the use of fetal cell lines in some vaccines. Kennedy has raised concerns about the presence of human DNA fragments, which some individuals cite as a religious or ethical issue.

On autism, the article echoed the widely held view that rising diagnosis rates are largely due to expanded screening and reporting. Critics argue that explanation does not fully account for the increase.

The article further referenced concerns about what it described as “spurious harms” linked to vaccines. However, federal data show billions of dollars have been awarded through the vaccine injury compensation program.

It also cited public health positions on issues such as fluoridated drinking water and routine vaccination schedules recommended by major medical organizations.

The broader debate over vaccine mandates and informed consent was also raised, including whether individuals should have the right to decline vaccines for religious or personal reasons.

The discussion comes as vaccination rates for some vaccines have declined, religious exemptions have increased, and lawmakers consider changes to vaccine policy, including liability protections and exemption laws.

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Florida Cops Pull Dozens of Truck Drivers from Roads – Including Illegal Aliens With ‘Literally No Name’

Florida authorities announced that they recently conducted an enforcement crackdown for commercial trucks, resulting in 176 drivers being removed from service — and a few dozen immigration arrests.

Over the course of four days, Florida Highway Patrol and other agencies examined over 3,300 vehicles, according to a report from WKMG.

They observed many safety issues and tried to resolve them.

“The most dangerous things we see are cracked brakes and broken airlines,” Major Tom Pikul of Florida Highway Patrol told the outlet.

“If there is an air release in a brake line, they have no brakes.”

Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass meanwhile said that authorities came across serious identification issues.

“Some of the driver’s licenses that we would find wouldn’t even have a name on the CDL — literally no name,” he revealed.

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After talks fail, IDF planning for return to war, Trump mulls strikes on Iran — reports

All three major Hebrew TV networks reported that the IDF is gearing up for renewed conflict with Iran after the ceasefire talks between the United States and the Islamic Republic collapsed, in what appeared to be a coordinated leak by defense officials on Sunday.

The reported preparations came less than a week after a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan went into effect, and a day after negotiations in Islamabad between the US and Iran failed to produce a deal to permanently end the war in the Middle East.

Earlier on Sunday, the Ynet news site reported that IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir instructed the military to move to a “heightened state of readiness” and to prepare for a resumption of hostilities with Iran.

Then Channel 12 news reported in the evening, without citing any sources, that the IDF was not only gearing up for renewed conflict with Iran, but also preparing for a potential Iranian surprise attack on Israel.

The Kan public broadcaster, meanwhile, cited a “senior defense official” as saying that “Israel is interested in renewing the war against Iran,” after the war ended “too early, without sufficient pressure being applied on Iran regarding the nuclear issue and ballistic missiles.”

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A Critique of the “17 Million Deaths Caused by the Vaccines” Claim

I am a physician-epidemiologist who has consistently questioned the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. In the summer of 2021, I was the lead author on the first major study pointing out the risks of post-Pfizer vaccination myocarditis in adolescents. We found that the potential benefits of full vaccination did not appear to outweigh the risks in healthy adolescent males just looking at post-vaccination myocarditis risks alone. Not long after, I was senior author of another analysis published in BMJ-Journal of Medical Ethics that found the harms of the booster dose in college age students likely outweighed potential benefits by at least 18-fold. What is more, I have written multiple times about the COVID-19 vaccines being implicated in numerous deaths and have a related peer-reviewed paper hopefully coming soon. Finally, I have most recently voiced my concern about the production process of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine and the potential risks of DNA plasmid contamination to the Public Health Integrity Committee.

But if you want to bring attention to safety issues with the mRNA vaccines or other pharmaceutical products, using biased publications or prematurely jumping to conclusions is not the way to do it. We can’t complain about the pharmaceutical industry publishing biased research if we turn around and promote equally, if not more biased research about vaccine side-effects. Not only do we need scientists who are not captured by pharma, we need scientists who are not captured in general – by any ideology. We need scientists who are critical thinkers and can acknowledge limitations in data and identify inappropriate methods and causal inference.

Furthermore, avoiding inappropriately scaring people – be it about Covid or the vaccines – is good public health.

17 million deaths due to the vaccines?

Bret Weinstein (in his fascinating interview) on Tucker Carlson said he “saw a credible estimate of 17 million [deaths] globally from this technology”, meaning the vaccines. Now, this was a bit confusing since they were discussing mRNA vaccines at this moment and it was unclear if he meant all types of Covid vaccines. But I immediately thought: 1) Woah… what percent of vaccinated people would have died and how many people would that mean would have died in little, highly-vaccinated Denmark? (For those who don’t know, I am a Danish citizen). Then I thought: 2) What confounded dataset did he use to get this estimate?

But I also want to point out I found it interesting Bret did not give any sort of range in terms of potential numbers of people killed, how this estimate was arrived at or what kind of residual uncertainty there was about the estimate. 

To answer the second question so you are not scrolling ahead, I quickly learned Bret was referring to this analysis by Rancourt, Baudin, Hickey and Mercier, J.: ‘COVID-19 vaccine-associated mortality in the Southern Hemisphere.’

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