Legalized Marijuana Will Only Further Devastate Already Compromised American Mental Health

NYTimes  |  Ever since Justin, a 15-year-old high school freshman, tried marijuana on his birthday two years ago, he has smoked almost every day, several times a day, he said.

“If I smoke a blunt, after that blunt I’m going to be chill,” he said on a recent morning at a corner deli near his school, the Bronx Design and Construction Academy. “I’m not going to be stressing about nothing at all.”

Another boy came by and flashed two glass tubes of smokable flower. More students were smoking across the street in a doorway and on a stoop. On another corner, a smoke shop frequented by children in backpacks and uniforms opened about half an hour before the first bell.

While it has long been common for some teens to smoke marijuana, teachers and students say that more and younger students are smoking throughout the day and at school.

There is little definitive data on marijuana use among children, and what information is available can sometimes offer a contradictory picture. Disciplinary data from the city education department reflects a 10 percent increase in alcohol- and drug-related offenses this year compared to 2019. But a city survey found teen cannabis use had declined in 2021, the same year that the state legalized marijuana for recreational use, to the lowest level recorded since the question was added to the survey in 1997.

Still, two dozen students and teachers at public, private and charter schools across the city said in interviews that some classrooms were in disarray as more pupils showed up late and high.

They said that with the proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops and the availability of vape pens and edible products, cannabis has never been more accessible and inconspicuous. They relayed accounts of students taking hits of vaping pens when teachers turned their backs, of bathrooms and stairwells becoming smoking lounges and of the smell of weed wafting through school hallways.

“It really feels like this unstoppable tide that we’re futilely trying to suppress,” said America Billy, 44, who has been teaching at a public high school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, for over a decade. She said it was hard to know whether a student was out of it because of a lack of sleep, family stress or drugs.

In December, a former principal, April McKoy, described in a letter how students’ cannabis use had spiraled out of control during her last two years in charge of City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology in Brooklyn.

“It felt like more and more were using without knowing the source, impact or consequences of early marijuana use,” Ms. McKoy said in the letter, adding that students had returned after the pandemic “sad, isolated and trying to find ways to cope.”

Freshmen were selling cannabis to each other, and she said she witnessed a smoke shop sell edibles to 14-year-olds with police officers nearby. On another occasion, she sent four students to the hospital because they were sickened from contaminated edibles, she said.

The proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops, which the city says may number as many as 1,500, could be one factor driving marijuana use among children, officials said.

Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman, said that though she had counted fewer than 10 of them in her district on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in September, there were 64 by March. Several school administrators have complained to her about merchants selling joints and infused candies as well as high-potency concentrates and vapes to students.

“We were all saying we need social workers, we need psychologists, we need mental health support in the schools,” she said. But dealing with smoke shops selling to children “was not on the list.”

Heavily Abused Legal Drugs Adderall And Xanax Blocked By "Secret Limits"

Word on the street, and what I've witnessed with my very own lying eyes, information technology CHUDS and medical students alike have been crying like little bishes about the market failure to keep them supplied with their longtime legal drugs of dependency.

Bloomberg  |  Patients diagnosed with conditions like anxiety and sleep disorders have become caught in the crosshairs of America’s opioid crisis, as secret policies mandated by a national opioid settlement have turned filling legitimate prescriptions into a major headache.

In July, limits went into effect that flag and sometimes block pharmacies’ orders of controlled substances such as Adderall and Xanax when they exceed a certain threshold. The requirement stems from a 2021 settlement with the US’s three largest drug distributors — AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. But pharmacists said it curtails their ability to fill prescriptions for many different types of controlled substances — not just opioids.

Independent pharmacists said the rules force them come up with creative workarounds. Sometimes, they must send patients on frustrating journeys to find pharmacies that haven’t yet exceeded their caps in order to buy prescribed medicines.

“I understand the intention of this policy is to have control of controlled substances so they don’t get abused, but it’s not working,” said Richard Glotzer, an independent pharmacist in Millwood, New York. “There’s no reason I should be cut off from ordering these products to dispense to my legitimate patients that need it.”

It's unclear how the thresholds are impacting major chain pharmacies. CVS Health Corp. didn’t provide comment. A spokesperson for Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. said its pharmacists “work to resolve any specific issues when possible, in coordination with our distributors.” 

The Drug Enforcement Administration regulates the manufacturing, distribution and sale of controlled substances, which can be dangerous when used improperly. Drugmakers and wholesalers were always supposed to keep an eye out for suspicious purchases and have long had systems to catch, report and halt these orders. The prescription opioid crisis, enabled by irresponsible drug company marketing and prescribing, led to a slew of lawsuits and tighter regulations on many parts of the health system, including monitoring of suspicious orders. One major settlement required the three largest distributors to set thresholds on orders of controlled substances starting last July.

The “suspicious order” terminology is a bit of a misnomer, pharmacists said. The orders themselves aren't suspicious, it's just that the pharmacy has exceeded its limit for a specific drug over a certain time period. Any order that puts the pharmacy over its limit can be stopped. As a result, patients with legitimate prescriptions get caught up in the dragnet.

Adding to the confusion, the limits themselves are secret. Drug wholesalers are barred by the settlement agreement from telling pharmacists what the thresholds are, how they’re determined or when the pharmacy is getting close to hitting them.

Not How Humanlike Machines Have Become - Rather - How Machinelike Humans Tend To Be

Blake Lemoine got fired for being an embarrassment who needlessly stoked the fears of ignorant fantasists. There's no upside for Google in further baseless public speculation about large language models.

Bottom line.

Machines are not sentient, don't have ethics, and suffer no personality defects or mental illnesses.

Powerful chatbots have disclosed one thing - and one thing alone - that 99.9997% have failed to either recognize or articulate.

That one thing is - the now indisputable fact of exactly how mechanistic human natural language is.

If human awareness is mostly comprised of pictures and words, and far more of the latter than the former - then we are compelled to acknowledge how unconscious and mechanistic our highly overrated linguistic behaviors tend to be.

The great chatbot takeaway is not how humanlike machines have become, rather, it's how rudimentary and mechanical human beings have always tended to be.

Add to that baseline psycholinguistic realization the fact that human beings are creatures of chemical habit, and you've got a pretty unflattering but vastly more accurate understanding of the rank and file human condition.

Everything else is, as they say, merely conversation!

Humans are creatures of chemical habit and language is a mechanism.

Looking at that picture of Mr. Lemoine - we can see that he suffers from poor chemical habits (you can almost hear the ritualized hissing sound as he cracks open the day's first sugary carbonated bottle/can of fizzy lifting drink) and from that point as he embarks on a circular trudge between his cubicle and the snack drawer - locked in unselfconscious and fully automated combat with successive blood sugar spikes and crashes.

Po thang...,

Do you suppose it was the sugar highs that got him erroneously believing that Lambda Pinocchio had come to life?

Most people are addicted to some or another chemical substance(s), and more important, all people are addicted to a surrounding pattern of behavior centered on these substances and their consumption. Distinctions among chemical habits delineate the confluence of mental and physical energies that shape the behavior of each of us.

People not involved in a relationship with food/drug stimulation are rare. These relationships shape every aspect of our identities. Because you haven't spent any meaningful time in a large and longstanding IT department, you lack familiarity with the typological ecosystems which prevail in this context. Mr. Lemoine is conspicuously true to type. It is as if he had been dispatched from central casting. 

Many people yearn to be introduced to the facts concerning their true identity. To not know one's true identity is to exist as a pitifully broken machine. Indeed, the image of a broken machine applies to the mass of human beings now abiding in the digital-industrial democracies.

What passes for the identity of these broken machines is their ability to follow and comply with mass style changes (many purely linguistic) dictated from above and conveyed through the media. Chemically immersed in processed "food" these broken machines are condemned to toxic lives of minimal self-awareness sedated by prescripted habits of consumption.

Broken machines "measure" their self-worth by their capacity to consume. This is perhaps even more true today than when Thorsten Veblen broadly and originally lampooned it nearly 125 years ago.
 

Drug Addicts Don't Even Trust These Damned Neo-Vaccinoids....,

statnews |  A patient who has taught me a lot about how to best care for people who use drugs floored me one afternoon while she was in the clinic when I asked her thoughts on getting vaccinated against Covid-19.

“I know this sounds crazy,” she said, casting her gaze to the floor, “but I trust my drug dealer more than I trust this vaccine.”

I was stunned. Curious how anyone could trust putting something from the current fentanyl-contaminated heroin supply in their arm over a highly vetted vaccine, I had to ask, “What makes you trust your dealer?”

Here’s the gist of what she told me: When she speaks to her dealer, they listen to her concerns without judgment and accept her for who she is. When she feels bad, they are attentive to her. They will not sell her drugs if they know she is in a bad place because they have known each other for a long time. They are highly accessible, often by text or phone at all hours. They deliver a tangible, immediate response to the needs she expresses. They have time for her and treat her like they would any other human.

To be sure, not all people who sell drugs operate in the best interest of their consumers. After all, we are currently enduring the fourth wave of the opioid overdose epidemic due to illicitly-manufactured fentanyl that has been contaminating the drug supply. Although this phenomenon should be analyzed as a potential result of the war on drugs, some sellers in the drug market clearly prioritize profits over the lives of their customers. This is highlighted by the fact that people who use drugs are more likely to die of a drug overdose than Covid-19.

Yet my patient isn’t alone having this kind of experience with the person who sells her drugs. Other people who use drugs trust their drug dealers, especially those they have established relationships with over longer periods of time. In these sorts of relationships, people who use drugs trust that their dealer communicates openly about the drug supply. As one person told British of Columbia researchers about their dealer: “I guess we’ve known each other for a long time and they’ve always had a good supply and treat me with respect.”

Contrast this with how the health care system treats people who use drugs.

 

 

IMHO - The Addiction Article Is Pseudoscience - The Video Is Closer To The Truth

MIT |  Cocaine, opioids, and other drugs of abuse disrupt the brain’s reward system, often shifting users’ priorities to obtaining more drug above all else. For people battling addiction, this persistent craving is notoriously difficult to overcome — but new research from scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and collaborators points toward a therapeutic strategy that could help.

Researchers in MIT Institute Professor Ann Graybiel’s lab and collaborators at the University of Copenhagen and Vanderbilt University report in a Jan. 25 online publication in the journal Addiction Biology that activating a signaling molecule in the brain known as muscarinic receptor 4 (M₄) causes rodents to reduce cocaine self-administration and simultaneously choose a food treat over cocaine.

M₄ receptors are found on the surface of neurons in the brain, where they alter signaling in response to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. They are plentiful in the striatum, a brain region that Graybiel’s lab has shown is deeply involved in habit formation. They are of interest to addiction researchers because, along with a related receptor called M₁, which is also abundant in the striatum, they often seem to act in opposition to the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Drugs of abuse stimulate the brain’s habit circuits by allowing dopamine to build up in the brain. With chronic use, that circuitry can become less sensitive to dopamine, so experiences that were once rewarding become less pleasurable and users are driven to seek higher doses of their drug. Attempts to directly block the dopamine system have not been found to be an effective way of treating addiction and can have unpleasant or dangerous side effects, so researchers are seeking an alternative strategy to restore balance within the brain’s reward circuitry. “Another way to tweak that system is to activate these muscarinic receptors,” explains Jill Crittenden, a research scientist in the Graybiel lab.

At the University of Copenhagen, neuroscientist Morgane Thomsen has found that activating the M₁ receptor causes rodents to choose a food treat over cocaine. In the new work, she showed that a drug that selectively activates the M₄ receptor has a similar effect.

When rats that have been trained to self-administer cocaine are given an M₄-activating compound, they immediately reduce their drug use, actively choosing food instead. Thomsen found that this effect grew stronger over a seven-day course of treatment, with cocaine use declining day by day. When the M₄-activating treatment was stopped, rats quickly resumed their prior cocaine-seeking behavior.  Fist tap Dale.

Shellenberger Says Progressives Ruin Cities

michaelshellenberger |  In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

Now, even a growing number of people who have worked or still work within the homeless services sector are speaking out. A longtime San Francisco homeless service provider who read San Fransicko, and said they mostly agreed with it, reached out to me to share their views. At first this person said they wanted to speak on the record. But as the interview went on, and the person criticized their colleagues, they asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.

The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.

But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

 

Shellenberger Says Crack Down Hard On Addicts And The Homeless

michaelshellenberger |   Drug decriminalization and “Housing First” advocates say that all we should do to help Diane is to give her a free apartment, needles for shooting and foil for smoking fentanyl, and a place where she can safely use fentanyl. That’s the progressive thing to do, according to San Francisco’s Mayor and Supervisors, who are advocating for a place for addicts to smoke and inject fentanyl. But does that seem like the moral thing to do? Of course it’s not. In fact, it could kill her, in the same way that decriminalization and Housing First policies have contributed to the deaths of 712 people in San Francisco last year. 

 The moral thing to do is to arrest Diane. Does that sound mean to you? If it does, then you don’t understand addiction, or you’re in denial about its hold over people. In the comments on Twitter to Adam’s video, Jacqui Berlinn, the mother of a fentanyl street addict in San Francisco, said, “She deserves love and compassion mental care and counseling — not needles and foil.” Someone responded, “She has to chose to do that herself. Nobody can force her.” It’s true that Diane has to decide whether to quit fentanyl. But by enforcing our laws against public drug use, we can give Diane the choice of rehab or jail.

Why don’t we? In a word, victimology. That’s the three part idea that a) Diane is a victim; b) victimhood is not a stage on the road to heroism but rather a permanent state; and c) everything should be given and nothing required of victims. According to the progressive victimologists who run San Francisco, and other progressive cities, the laws against public drug use, public defecation, and shoplifting, should not be enforced against Diane because she’s an addict. As a victim, Diane is sacred, and the system is sinful. As such, it is better to let her die from fentanyl than to enforce the law. It’s part of the Woke religion. 

It is Woke religion, a.k.a., victimology, which leads progressives to grossly misrepresent Diane’s situation. Progressives insist, against what they say are our lying eyes, that Diane is homeless not because she is addicted to fentanyl but rather because rents in San Francisco are too high. Progressives insist that the homeless on the streets are locals who couldn’t afford the rent, not people who moved to San Francisco because they knew the city would allow them to maintain their addiction at low cost without risk of arrest. And progressives insist that the only moral approach is to help Diane maintain her addiction, and not enforce the laws when she breaks them.

In San Fransicko, I debunk the myths that homelessness is a result of high rents, show that Europe saved lives being lost to addiction by arresting addicts and closing open drug scenes, and explain why victimology leads progressives to maintain what is plainly an immoral situation. The title of the book has two meanings. The sickness I describe is the sickness of untreated mental illness and addiction. But the other sickness, San Fransickness, is the sickness of those in the grip of victimology. It is a sickness unto death, one that leads them to deny the fact that the normalization and liberalization of drugs is killing 100,000 of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, every year.

 

No Concept Of Dopamine Addiction Or Dopamine Hegemony Constitutes A Crippling Conceptual Failure

caitlinjohnstone |  Humanity is becoming more conscious.

It is. This is not a popular thing to say in the more cynical and pessimistic corners of the internet, but it’s true.

I’m not referring to anything “out there” or “spiritual” when I make this assertion. I’m talking about a mundane reality that is easily verifiable by casual observation, if you just look past all the headlines and narrative chatter to see the big picture as a whole.

Humans are becoming more and more aware of what’s going on, both in our world and in ourselves, as our ability to network and share information with each other becomes greater and greater. Because of the ubiquitousness of smartphones and social media, things like police brutality and the abuse of Palestinians are no longer regarded as mere verbal assertions made by their victims but as concrete realities which must be addressed. The most viral posts of the day on apps like Twitter, Reddit and TikTok are routinely just people making relatable observations about their feelings and psychological tendencies and what it’s like to be human.

These things matter. Seeing into each other and around our world all the time like this, in a way we never could before the internet, can’t help but change things. It’s a consistent rule throughout history that every positive change in human behavior has been preceded by an expansion of consciousness, whether it’s becoming collectively conscious of the injustices of racial discrimination or individually conscious of the motives and consequences of our self-destructive behavior. Increasing consciousness is always a movement toward health.

And a movement toward health absolutely is what’s been happening. The young today are the kindest, most sensitive and most awake generation that has ever lived, no matter what the bitter old farts say about them. My kids are having conversations with their friends that are vastly deeper and more tuned-in than I was having with my own friends at their age. The independent content that people are creating without the authorization of the cultural filters in New York and Hollywood can take your breath away every single day if you know where to look, while the movies from the eighties which once enthralled us are today virtually unwatchable because of how shallow and artless they are compared to what we’re now used to seeing.

It’s happening in a weird, sloppy, awkward way, like an infant learning to walk, but it is clearly happening. It’s happening through an internet whose origins are rooted firmly in the US war machine, it’s happening through billionaire-owned social media platforms with extensive ties to powerful governments, it’s happening through technologies that are the fruits of all the most exploitative tendencies of global capitalism, but it’s happening.

Dopamine Hits For A Population Wracked By Technologically Mediated Addiction...,

technologyreview |  The implant was fine; it was me that was unpaired. I’d fallen out of sync with the city, and I hated it for taking people away from me and leaving me on my own. 

It’s safest to stay indoors: stay home. It’s the only way you can avoid the awkwardness, the disappointment, the fear. Delete Netflix and Uber Eats, install Prime Video and Amazon Restaurants. Stay at home and build your own city, make your own dopamine map. What’s the point of being lonely if you can’t do it by yourself?

At first, I tried to watch only movies set in New York, as though that had some significance. So the Avengers movies seemed a good place to start. I thought maybe watching the city being repeatedly reduced to rubble at a whim—endless computer-generated buildings demolished into nothing more than Technicolor pixel dust—might give me the hits I needed. But the app barely registered a spike for the first two hours and 22 minutes.

It wasn’t until I got to the post-credits scene—the one where the whole team is sitting around, silently eating, in some nameless, unaffiliated NYC shawarma joint—that my phone started to vibrate.

I’m not going to lie: for a fleeting moment I was ecstatic. I couldn’t tell you if it was just the dopamine spike or some joyful relief that the app had actually registered it. I rewound the scene and watched it again. Same spike, but with a slightly lower peak, according to the app. Third time was similar, but the results diminished again. Time to find more content.

At first I thought I’d have to watch whole movies for it to have the same impact—like I needed to build up some sense of connection with or investment in the characters before their friendships had any personal weight—and started earnestly slogging through the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But a YouTube fluke showed me otherwise. Before I could stop it, autoplay served me a clip from Ant-Man and the Wasp where Ant-Man is playing with his daughter, and my phone vibrated in my lap. Repeatedly. It was a fucking revelation. I didn’t even have to sit through countless rubble-cities and the eternal melodrama and the endless wisecracking and the infinite polygons. Context was dead: all that mattered was fleeting, calculated emotional spikes. 

It’s not hard to find the content once you know where to look. Listicles are your guide—the real maps to dopamine city are called things like “The 10 Most Heartwarming Moments in the MCU” or “The MCU’s 12 Best Friendships” or “Relive These Feel-Good Moments from the MCU.” Start by searching Tumblr and Screen Rant and you’ll find them all. It’s even better and more efficient if they give you the time stamps. Tony and James sniping at each other in Iron Man (00:10:42). Nick Fury buddy-copping with Carol in Captain Marvel (01:48:07). Peter Parker and Ned Leeds in whichever Spider-Man movie that was (00:23:38).

And then there’s the death scenes, which are perfect if you’ve also got some unresolved societal-level mourning to work through. When Killmonger dies in Black Panther. When Quicksilver dies in Age of Ultron. Spider-Man in Infinity War. Peggy in Winter Soldier. When Groot says “We are Groot” in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.

After a while, of course, you don’t need to search it out; it finds you. Before too long, every ad on every web page was screaming at me about young-adult-oriented TV shows I never knew existed and Star Wars spin-off cartoons. My YouTube recommendations filled up with nothing but fan-edited compilations of superheroes weeping, or supercuts of every time Frodo and Sam hugged. 

There was this whole culture I’d avoided, that I thought I was somehow above, that wasn’t for me. An entire industry built to serve up comforting dopamine hits to a population wracked by technologically mediated loneliness, and exhausted by a society that felt like it was in constant, confusing collapse.

 

 

Caitlin Johnstone's Egoic Consciousness Is An Imprecise Reference To Dopamine Hegemony

caitlinjohnstone |  In a society that's enslaved to egoic consciousness as ours is, the things that generate the most public interest will be those which flatter or infuriate common egoic constructs. This is not unique to politics; advertisers have raked in vast fortunes by associating products with common cultural mind viruses like body image issues and personal inadequacy, and TV show hosts like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich figured out decades ago that you can attract massive ratings by letting people feel smug and superior at the sight of poor and uneducated guests acting out emotionally.

To make something go viral, it needs to appeal to the ego. Advertisers understand this. Media executives understand this. Propagandists understand this.

Creating big psychological identity structures out of our politics makes the job of the propagandists so very much easier; it's like a lubricant which lets mass-scale psyops glide smoothly into public consciousness. From there it's a very easy task to get people hating Russia or China for this or that partisan reason, or to get people believing Trump or Biden are helping the American people despite their both continuing and expanding the same murderous and oppressive status quo of their predecessors. 

This is why the partisan divide is the most heated and contentious it's ever been, while the actual behavior of each mainstream party when it's in power brings in only the most superficial of changes. The oligarchs who own the political/media class desire the continuation of the status quo upon which they have built their empire, but they also want to keep the public as plugged in as possible to the partisan perspectives which facilitate the propaganda that cages our minds.

The solution to this, on an individual level, is to dismantle any egoic attachment you might have to either of the mainstream political factions which preserve the status quo. This includes any attachment to the phony populism of progressive Democrats, and it includes any attachment to the phony populism of Trumpian Republicans. These factions within the mainstream factions are themselves propaganda constructs which will never be permitted to advance any agenda that isn't desired by the oligarchic empire; they serve only to keep people who would be inclined to reject mainstream politics plugged in to mainstream politics. 

And of course the ultimate solution to this problem is for humanity to awaken from the ego. All propaganda relies on egoic hooks in public consciousness to circulate itself, so if humanity begins dropping its habit of creating psychological identity structures altogether (which it looks like it might), we will become harder and harder to propagandize. Since humanity's collective problems ultimately boil down to the fact that sociopaths manipulate our minds at mass scale, such a transformation would make a healthy new world not just possible but inevitable.

 

A Startup For Measuring And Monitoring Dopamine Addiction And Hegemony

bloomberg |  Over the next few weeks, a company called Kernel will begin sending dozens of customers across the U.S. a $50,000 helmet that can, crudely speaking, read their mind. Weighing a couple of pounds each, the helmets contain nests of sensors and other electronics that measure and analyze a brain’s electrical impulses and blood flow at the speed of thought, providing a window into how the organ responds to the world. The basic technology has been around for years, but it’s usually found in room-size machines that can cost millions of dollars and require patients to sit still in a clinical setting.

The promise of a leagues-more-affordable technology that anyone can wear and walk around with is, well, mind-bending. Excited researchers anticipate using the helmets to gain insight into brain aging, mental disorders, concussions, strokes, and the mechanics behind previously metaphysical experiences such as meditation and psychedelic trips. “To make progress on all the fronts that we need to as a society, we have to bring the brain online,” says Bryan Johnson, who’s spent more than five years and raised about $110 million—half of it his own money—to develop the helmets.

Johnson is the chief executive officer of Kernel, a startup that’s trying to build and sell thousands, or even millions, of lightweight, relatively inexpensive helmets that have the oomph and precision needed for what neuroscientists, computer scientists, and electrical engineers have been trying to do for years: peer through the human skull outside of university or government labs. In what must be some kind of record for rejection, 228 investors passed on Johnson’s sales pitch, and the CEO, who made a fortune from his previous company in the payments industry, almost zeroed out his bank account last year to keep Kernel running. “We were two weeks away from missing payroll,” he says. Although Kernel’s tech still has much to prove, successful demonstrations, conducted shortly before Covid-19 spilled across the globe, convinced some of Johnson’s doubters that he has a shot at fulfilling his ambitions.

A core element of Johnson’s pitch is “Know thyself,” a phrase that harks back to ancient Greece, underscoring how little we’ve learned about our head since Plato. Scientists have built all manner of tests and machines to measure our heart, blood, and even DNA, but brain tests remain rare and expensive, sharply limiting our data on the organ that most defines us. “If you went to a cardiologist and they asked you how your heart feels, you would think they are crazy,” Johnson says. “You would ask them to measure your blood pressure and your cholesterol and all of that.”

The first Kernel helmets are headed to brain research institutions and, perhaps less nobly, companies that want to harness insights about how people think to shape their products. (Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, calls Kernel’s devices “revolutionary.”) By 2030, Johnson says, he wants to bring down the price to the smartphone range and put a helmet in every American household—which starts to sound as if he’s pitching a panacea. The helmets, he says, will allow people to finally take their mental health seriously, to get along better, to examine the mental effects of the pandemic and even the root causes of American political polarization. If the Biden administration wanted to fund such research, Johnson says, he’d be more than happy to sell the feds a million helmets and get started: “Let’s do the largest brain study in history and try to unify ourselves and get back to a steady state.”

Americans Have Dehumanized One Another To Death...,

eudaeminiaandcompany |   In American life, everything, so much as can be, is private. Almost nothing is public. You go from your big house to your big car to your big sofa and you sit in front of your big TV. Back and forth to and from work you go this way. You barely need to speak to another person at all — except in the way of a commodity. The market mediates all human relationships, more or less — even romantic ones, now, which are brokered by algorithms, and reduced to raw sexuality. Everyone is a commodity.

That sounds like the stuff my favourite teenage punk bands would say. But they were right, the more I think about it. What does it mean when commodified relations are the only ones left in a society?

Well, people grow estranged. From each other. They don’t see each other as fellow travellers anymore, fellow citizens, husbands, mothers, fathers, grandparents…anything.

So what are they? They’re rivals. Adversaries. For what, in what? In a series of games. I shouldn’t call them games, though, because the stakes are very real. One game is played at work — Americans compete for “jobs,” in “jobs,” ferociously. They work famously long hours and get little to no real rest or succour. Why? Because, of course, everything is attached to the “job” — healthcare, retirement, childcare, etcetera. I put it in quotes because the only real point of this is to make billionaires richer — Americans are right where they were in economic terms half a century ago.

Americans are rivals for work, which makes them adversaries for basic resources — money, medicine, food, shelter. And they’re also rivals and adversaries for status. Big cars, big houses, big TVs. Americans are told that status and power are all that count in life, apart from money — and they obey this dictum weirdly mindlessly. They preen on Instagram and spend their money on shinier and bigger and faster things, and go ever deeper into debt. They don’t really regard each other as neighbours, friends, colleagues. They’re rivals in these zero-sum games: for basic resources, by way of production, and then for social status, by way of consumption.

This is a strange story of individualism and materialism run amok, gone haywire, pushed to the extreme. American life is so alienating because, above all, it’s hyper-individualistic. Like I said, you can go a day — a week — without ever talking to another living soul as anything other than a commodity. That is because you are never sharing anything with anybody, something as simple as public space.

Americans famously deny each other healthcare — while carrying guns to Starbucks. Mass shootings are weekly if not daily events. America’s legendary cruelty and hostility isn’t a fiction. And neither is the idea that at its heart is an materialism and individualism gone haywire. Everything is private — that’s a statistical fact, about 85% of America’s economy is private, and just 15% public.

That’s a recipe for selfishness that goes off the charts. When everything is private, and so little public, it’s not just that you don’t rub elbows with anyone else, except as a commodity — and well, commodities are disposable. It’s also that a kind of enmity takes over. You’ve got your big house and big car and big TV. And now you have to keep it. The world becomes a threat, to the hyper individualistic, hyper materialistic personality — and sharing anything with anyone, which is vulnerability, becomes a liability.

 

MUCH More Impressed With Abigail Disney Than I Am With Myself!!!

theatlantic |  When you come into money as I did—young, scared, and not very savvy about the world—you are taught certain precepts as though they are gospel: Never spend the “corpus” (also known as the capital) you were left. Steward your assets to leave even more to your children, and then teach them to do the same. And finally, use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it.

If you are raised in a deeply conservative family like my own, you are taught some extra bits of doctrine: Philanthropy is good, but too much of it is unseemly and performative. Marry people “of your own class” to save yourself from the complexity and conflict that come with a broad gulf in income, assets, and, therefore, power. And, as one of my uncles said to me during the Reagan administration, it’s best to leave the important decision making to people who are “successful,” rather than in the pitiable hands of those who aren't.

I took far too long to look with clarity upon these precepts and see them for what they are: blueprints for dynastic wealth. Why it took me so long is a fair question. All I know is that if you are a fish, it is hard to describe water, much less to ask if water is necessary, ethical, and structured the way it ought to be. As long as no one so much as raised an eyebrow about the ethics of the CRAT, the CRUT, and the credit swap, who did I think I was to query the fundamentals? I did not have the emotional courage to go down that path.

There was another reason for my inaction, and I am deeply ashamed to say what it was. But here goes: Having money—a lot of money—is very, very nice. It’s damn hard to resist the seductions of what money buys you. I’ve never been much of a materialist, but I have wallowed in the less concrete privileges that come with a trust fund, such as time, control, security, attention, power, and choice. The fact is, this is pretty standard software that comes with the hardware of a human body.

As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again.

Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.

I tell you all this not to defend myself; that’s between me and my conscience. I am telling you this because human nature is a mighty force, and fighting it requires understanding it.

What has caused me to question my indoctrination has been ethics.

Prescient Huxley-ian Projections About A Contentedly Enslaved Karenwaffen...,

americanthinker |   In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931), who was then living in California, wrote to Orwell.  Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.

Huxley generally praises Orwell's novel, which to many seemed very similar to Brave New World in its dystopian view of a possible future.  Huxley politely voices his opinion that his own version of what might come to pass would be truer than Orwell's.  Huxley observed that the philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sadism, whereas his own version is more likely, that controlling an ignorant and unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less wasteful by other means.  Huxley's masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell's with sadism and fear. 

The most powerful quote In Huxley's letter to Orwell is this: 

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

Could Huxley have more prescient?  What do we see around us?  Masses of people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal.  The majority of advertisements that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs, some of them miraculous but most of them unnecessary.  Then comes COVID, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China.  The powers that be tragically deferred to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping for just such an opportunity.  Suddenly, there was an opportunity to test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty years.  They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still highly experimental.  These jabs are not really vaccines at all, but a form of gene therapy.  There are potential disastrous consequences down the road.  Government experiments on the public are nothing new.

Parler Investor Says You're Slaves Of Social Media Companies

americanconservative |  Apparently, there is great commercial value in understanding our attributes and then using what is learned. Sometimes this is in our interest, but many times it is not.

In the digital world, companies dissect us and package us for commercial gain without compensating us—and too often without our consent. That is not merely an invasion of our privacy, but in actuality is a theft of our personal property.

In any free society, respect for the individual is predicated upon his or her sovereignty. Our most important property right is our right to ourselves. If we lose ownership of ourselves, we become the property of others.

Social media companies, and other platforms that sell or monetize our data without permission are  appropriating aspects of the sovereign individuals who are their users, and it is a violation of our rights.

These companies really aren’t “social media.” They are not public forums. An actual public forum respects the First Amendment, in spirit, and does not monetize content or personal data. Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tyrannical tech giants are private companies operating opaquely in the digital domain, exempt from discovery or accountability, gifted by Congress with a liability exemption that allows them to do whatever they want. Including deplatforming you.

Rabbi Hillel said, “that which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow.”

If you want the right to speak, to express your ideas and opinions, it would be despicable to you if someone prevented you from doing so. You would not want someone else to persecute, dehumanize,  deplatform or digitally exterminate you.

Such behavior is abhorrent to the ideal of free speech. It is unfathomable that, in the twenty-first century, “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it,” has, somehow mutated into, “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will digitally exterminate you if you dare try to say it.”

A true public forum eschews censorship of any kind. Freedom of expression, and the exchange of knowledge that goes along with it, can flourish only in an environment where there is no authoritative entity or controlling party, where one speaks by right, not by permission.

Why No National Lockdown To "Slow The Spread" Of The Two Piece And A Biscuit Pandemic?

thedailybeast  |  Amid social distancing, authorities nationwide are reporting a surge in fatal opioid overdoses. Addiction and recovery advocates say the U.S. is now battling two epidemics at once. From 1999 to 2018, opioid overdoses involving prescription and illicit drugs have killed nearly 450,000 Americans. (One recent study found an additional 99,160 opioid deaths, previously unreported because of incomplete medical records.)

In Franklin County, Ohio, where Lynn lives, the coroner is warning residents of a continued spike in drug deaths, including six on April 24. One week before, the coroner announced that five people died in a span of 12 hours. In February, overdoses were so prevalent the coroner said she might need a temporary morgue to handle the deluge.

“Folks for the fourth Friday in a row we have had a surge of overdose deaths: 6 yesterday,” Dr. Anahi Ortiz posted on Facebook on April 25. “Please keep that narcan on hand, use fentanyl test strips and call 911 for an overdose. Families and friends check on your loved ones who use frequently, consider Thursday, Friday and Saturday to check in and talk.”

Montgomery County, Ohio—which is home to Dayton and was considered the country’s overdose capital in 2017—is reporting a 50 percent jump in overdoses over last year. Coroner Kent Harshbarger suggested to one local news outlet this increase could be closer to 100 percent: “March had around 42 which, our normal baseline is somewhere in the 20s usually. So 42 is a significant increase.”

Indeed, authorities in counties across Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and New York are also reporting rises in overdoses during the COVID-19 crisis.

“The people I’m giving it to don’t want to go to the health department,” he said.

Lynn said isolation and boredom can be a trigger. “The opposite of addiction is human connection, not sobriety,” she said. “Just being totally isolated—especially now that stimulus money came through for a bunch of people—it’s a huge temptation. I didn’t get my money yet, and I’m glad I didn’t.”

Traci Green, director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, told The Daily Beast that community programs should push to secure as much naloxone as possible and provide easy access to treatment in light of stimulus checks.

“Because people will have money and the market pays attention to these things,” Green said. “All markets pay attention to these things. The illicit market is no different.”

While some Americans struggle to find toilet paper and cleaning supplies during the pandemic, the country’s drug users are also facing a dwindling supply.

We Fail Because Our Elites Are Decadent, Parasitic, Ignoble Frauds

ianwelsh |  Let’s chalk this up to aristocratic elites. Aristocrats, unlike nobles, are decadent, but don’t stop with that word; understand what it means.

Elites who are not aligned with the actual productive activities of society and are engaged primarily in activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. This was true in Ancien Regime France (and deliberately fostered by Louis XIV as a way of emasculating the nobility). It is true today of most Western elites; they concentrate on financial numbers, and not on actual production. Even those who are somewhat competent tend not to be truly productive: see the Waltons, who made their money as distributers–merchants.

The techies have mostly outsourced production; they don’t make things, they design them. That didn’t work out for England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it hasn’t worked well for the US, though thanks to Covid-19 and US fears surrounding China, the US may re-shore their production capacity before it is too late.

We also have a situation where Western elites are far removed from the actual creation of the systems they run. This is most true in in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK, which did not suffer the massive bombing and destruction of most of the rest of Europe (the Blitz was minor compared to the bombs dropped on Germany, for example). Of course, reconstructing bombed societies is not the same as pulling oneself out of poverty.

The best handling of the coronavirus crisis in the world was possibly Vietnam, who are run by a generation that just pulled themselves out of poverty. Other excellent handling has happened in societies which still remember times of poverty or which were conquered and set free (Japan/Germany). China’s Xi, probably the most incompetent, also managed the crisis badly, but still better than the US/UK: Once he got serious, he got really serious. Xi, while a princeling, had a hard early life and was forced to work on the communes and so on.

This is all standard three-generation stuff: The first generation builds, the second generation manages, and the third generation wastes and takes it for granted because they’ve never known anything else. Sometimes that extends to four generations or more, but that requires a system which properly inculcates its elites, plus something to force the elites into at least some of the same experiences as the peons. We do not have that kind of a system.

Nobles, as Stirling Newberry explained to me years ago, are elites who make a point of being better than the people below them: better fighters, better farmers, and so on. Aristocrats are people who play court games, which is what financialized economies supported by central banks and bought politicians are. These people aren’t even good at finance. They were actually wiped out in 2008, but used politics to restore their losses and they were/are wiped out by this crisis, but are using politics (the Fed/Congress/the presidency) to restore their losses. The Fed is doing one trillion of operations a day.

You Peasants Are All In This Together

off-guardian |  The rush to elevate self-isolation to Olympian heights as a way to combat the spread of COVID-19 has gotten to the celebrities. Sports figures are proudly tweeting and taking pictures from hotel rooms (Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton being a case in point). Comics are doing their shows from home. Thespians are extolling the merits of such isolation and the dangers of the contagion.

All speak from the summit of comfort, the podium of pampered wealth: embrace social distancing; embrace self-isolation. Bonds of imagined solidarity are forged. If we can do it, so can you.

The message of warning varies in tones of condescension and encouragement. Taylor Swift prefers to focus on her cat. “For Meredith, self-quarantining is a way of life,” she posted on Instagram. “Be like Meredith.” Meredith, of course, had little choice in the matter.

John Legend delivered a concert on Instagram, wife Chrissy Teigen beside towelled and quaffing wine. “Social distancing is important, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. I did a little at-home performance to help lift your spirits.”

Then there was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually boasted two miniature ponies. “We will get through this together.” So good of him to let us know.

Others, like model Naomi Campbell, can barely hide their revelations, moments of acute self-awakening amidst crisis. 

A long dormant, cerebral world, awoken by a virus. 

Similarly, singer Lady Gaga has found that within that deodorised, heavily marketed form of celebrity is the heart of a human. “This is reminding me I think a lot of us,” she reflected on Instagram “what it is to both feel like and be like a human being.”

Self-isolation has seen the rich with their entourages making an escape for holiday homes and vast retreats. Then come the eccentric and the slightly ludicrous options: the well-stocked and equipped bunker; the safe room. Such an approach is far more representative of the estrangement between haves and have-nots.

Obamamandius - Peak Globalist Bullshitter

ChicagoTribune |  “We have a sense of urgency about this project (and) when we started, we wanted the public to know we would break ground as soon as possible,” said Michael Strautmanis, the vice president for civic engagement for the foundation. “But we also knew there were some things that were not in our control. We insist on going through the process with integrity and without rushing.”

READ: Federal lawsuit accuses Obama center organizers of pulling an 'institutional bait and switch' »

Before the presidential center can be built, the federal government will review its impact on Jackson Park, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and evaluate the project’s environmental effects. Any impact that the review highlights will have to be resolved before construction can be allowed.

There have already been two public federal review meetings. A third was scheduled in June, but then it was delayed until July. Now it has been delayed until late summer, according to the city of Chicago’s website.

The federal review process has to be conducted because of Jackson Park’s historic status and because it involved closing and expanding major streets.

The news of the delay comes just a day after activists gathered on the South Side at a meeting to discuss placing a community benefits agreement proposition on the February ballot.

“We have a new window of opportunity before the next election to protect the most vulnerable people in our community,” said Parrish Brown, an activist with the Black Youth Project 100 Chicago Chapter, in a written statement. “We’re gathering to make sure Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel and the local aldermen do the right thing, or we’ll have to elect people who will.”

The coalition wants an ordinance that would require that 30 percent of all newly constructed housing near the presidential center be set aside as affordable housing. They want a property tax freeze for the longtime homeowners closest to the site and an independent monitor to make sure local residents are hired to work on the project. In addition, they are now calling for a community trust fund and support for the neighborhood schools.

Both Gaming And Pocket Rectangles Are Process Addictions

WaPo |  For many people, leisure time now means screen time. Mom’s on social media, Dad’s surfing the Web, sister is texting friends, and brother is playing a multiplayer shooting game like Fortnite.

But are they addicted? In June, the World Health Organization announced that “gaming disorder” would be included in its disease classification manual, reigniting debates over whether an activity engaged in by so many could be classified as a disorder.

Experts were quick to point out that only 1 to 3 percent of gamers are likely to fit the diagnostic criteria, such as lack of control over gaming, giving gaming priority over other activities and allowing gaming to significantly impair such important areas of life as social relationships.

Those low numbers may give the impression that most people don’t have anything to worry about. Not true. Nearly all teens, as well as most adults, have been profoundly affected by the increasing predominance of electronic devices in our lives. Many people suspect that today’s teens spend much more time with screens and much less time with their peers face-to-face than did earlier generations, and my analysis of numerous large surveys of teens of various ages shows this to be true: The number of 17- and 18-year-olds who get together with their friends every day, for example, dropped by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2016. Teens are also sleeping less, with sleep deprivation spiking after 2010. Similar to the language in the WHO’s addiction criteria, they are prioritizing time on their electronic devices over other activities (and no, it’s not because they are studying more: Teens actually spend less time on homework than students did in the 1990s). Regardless of any questions around addiction, how teens spend their free time has fundamentally shifted.

If teens were doing well, this might be fine. But they are not: Clinical-level depression, self-harm behavior (such as cutting), the number of suicide attempts and the suicide rate for teens all rose sharply after 2010, when smartphones became common and the iPad was introduced. Teens who spend excessive amounts of time online are more likely to be sleep deprived, unhappy and depressed. Nor are the effects small: For example, teens who spent five or more hours a day using electronic devices were 66 percent more likely than those who spent just one hour to have at least one risk factor for suicide, such as depression or a previous suicide attempt.