From CNN: “By 6½ months, after all patients had received psilocybin, about 60% to 80% showed clinically significant reductions in depression, anxiety and existential distress and and improved attitudes toward death.

Presidential candidate Warren has made it clear that she will impose burdensome and restrictive regulation on social media, which includes designating them “platform utilities”, aggressively eliminating “disinformation” to protect “free speech”, as well as fulfilling the incoherent populist rallying cry of “breaking up” the biggest of the corporations. It would be a massive, authoritarian intervention into a very free and open market for networking, finding and sharing news,

But “disinformation” is in the eye of the beholder. How long would it take before legitimate criticism of various powerful officials, agencies, or industries would be deemed disinfo? Free speech enjoys far greater protection on the internet right now, in the absence of any government regulation. Warren’s hyperbolic proposal would siphon all the energy of the free, unhampered interaction occurring every second on social media, leaving a digital product that no one would want to use.  And what of other, smaller social media firms? At what point would they receive the same bureaucratic treatment?

Warren’s plan would kill social media, and in the process severely damage freedom of expression on the web.

Ghoulish revelations in this New York Times article: Still in a crib, yet being given antipsychotics:

“Most experts suspected that the trend of medicating younger and younger children for suspected psychiatric disorders was trickling down to very young children. Last year, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that health care providers had given a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to at least 10,000 children age 2 or 3 and then prescribed medications such as Adderall outside American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines.

“I think you simply cannot make anything close to a diagnosis of these types of disorders in children of that age,” said Dr. Ed Tronick, a professor of developmental and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “There’s this very narrow range of what people think the prototype child should look like. Deviations from that lead them to seek out interventions like these. I think it’s just nuts.””

I don’t quite know what to make of the clip of Bloomberg grabbing a dog’s face and shaking it, rather than having a normal human interaction. Jimmy Dore is puzzled as well:

Profoundly disturbing. What could the psychological state be of a person that behaves in this way?

Tulsi’s $50 million defamation lawsuit against Clinton is moving forward.

He’ll win Iowa in two days regardless.

H/t vaXism:

It’s very frustrating to see prominent activists among several nominally pro-liberty/pro-choice political movements loudly advocate for increased government interference in other areas of life. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed it recently within a particular movement by individuals who I’d had thought would’ve known better. The specific interventions that they support are being sold by legislators as an urgently necessary protection of “the people” against “Big Business”. But every single authoritarian measure is sold as a means to keep us safe, be it war, surveillance, taxes, spending, et cetera. Authoritarianism is never packaged honestly. If it were it would be easy to spot. The danger lies in the ability of the powerful to sell authoritarianism as humanitarianism.

It’s easy to fall for authoritarian measures when they are sold as a means to protect the little guy, as harmless humanitarian interventions. But legislative intrusions into freedom, no matter how heart-felt the initial sentiment, eventually are universally destructive to the liberty and choice of the very people it was designed to protect.

We have a natural, evolved capacity within us to worship something, be it a god, a government, some leader, cargo planes, et cetera. We still see various wild-eyed cults arise from time to time, even in the modern age. I’m sure that in distant prehistory, this capacity saved our species from extinction on numerous occasions. But this instinct that we’ve carried with us is destructive to the liberty that has produced everything around us that we regard as civilization. It’s too easy to give in to this primitive instinct to support authoritarian measures, but we need to understand that it is de-civilizing, a reliance or an advocacy of legislative coercion, no matter how ostensibly benign, is a reversion away from the forces that sustain liberty and allow civilization to continue to evolve into something better.

The particular piece of legislation that triggered this blog post was a legislative measure to enforce “free speech” on social media. It has, ironically, been celebrated by a large number of activists of a cause that I have thrown my support behind. But it would be a massive encroachment on the liberty of business to behave how they saw fit, to do business with whom they chose, et cetera. Enforcing “free speech” on business would increase the amount of legislative coercion in an area that is already overloaded with regulation and prohibition. And every act of government that increases this amount of coercive power over business universally helps the powerful, not the powerless. Fiercely protecting the liberty of all is the only possible safeguard of the liberty of the powerless.

“Vote for someone else!”, says the thin-skinned Biden to voters who pose even the slightest question or criticism to him. I’m sure voters will take his advice:

A great disservice has been done to the young people of the United States. Those who are slowly emerging into adulthood, and are now looking around and taking stock of the nation that has been bequeathed to them by their elders are horrified at what has been allowed to happen. They see problems, but have rarely been offered guidance on the path toward solutions to the fiscal, regulatory, and military rot that has been allowed to fester by those of the older generation. Many young people, natural idealists who don’t know any better, turn to “socialism” as an answer to this country’s ills. These people, of the aging “millennial” generation of which I am a part, and even younger, are immediately scoffed at and written off by the older generations, who have never bothered to offer them an alternative, because they have none to offer.

It’s become a pastime to ridicule young “socialists” by the same people who allowed the political climate to decay to a point that the youth feel that they must take it upon themselves to fix it. Having not received any guidance or vision whatsoever by the chattering, chiding, finger-wagging blob of older generations, they take their idealism and turn their backs. Unsurprisingly.

And so, being idealists, they go to hear those who preach idealism while also presenting a plan of action. They genuinely want to change the world for the better, but as so few prophets of liberty are able to capture their imagination, they gravitate to those who do. Enter the socialists, who masterfully appeal to this wayward idealism of the young and gain their support.

Yes, socialism is a false prosperity doctrine, but these kids came of age during the end of the Bush Presidency, throughout the disillusioning Obama terms, and have been disgusted by the Trump Presidency.

We are failing to appeal to the one group that will see liberty to its fruition: the young idealists. Our philosophy of liberty is for them, and would speak to them if only more people had the courage to speak it. Instead, we allow free trade to be associated with Trumpism, or just another brand of authoritarianism. It is much more than that.

Trump seems to awake the middle-aged adolescent in his supporters. Even his detractors. The young of this country are sickened unto death by this behavior. They know they deserve better, than the human race is meant for more than an endless sequence of bickerings and petty squabbles that consume the time of so many people. The young socialists are so because they have been offered no alternative. But the philosophy of liberty thrives best within just such people, if only they are given the opportunity to hear it and allow it time to “click”.

The young adults of this country have been the driving force behind marijuana legalization, despite having been schoolmarmed about the dangers of marijuana throughout their childhood. They pursued this ideal anyway, and all the while were laughed at by the older generations who now frequent the many cannabis shops that have opened throughout the country. But what they may not understand is that marijuana legalization has been a victory for liberty, a removal of authoritarian prohibition over a harmless plant, prohibition that has caused endless suffering and death. Now all that suffering and death is ending, the cannabis market has erupted, and thousands are employed in actual jobs.

The heart and spirit of liberty is its idealism, even its utopianism. This is the philosophy that these young socialists are truly seeking, they just don’t know it yet. The removal of all barriers to voluntary action, the removal of force and violence from transactions, is the true idealism of liberty. Advocates of liberty must keep this in mind; their idealism is their strength. Ron Paul used idealism to great effect, it was the greatest awakening to the philosophy of liberty that will probably ever occur. But it was the idealism of Paul that fueled his success. There was none of the MAGA baggage to pollute the message, it was just liberty. Paul’s revolution lives on in the cannabis legalization movement, even the vaccine choice movement.

It is the act of fearlessly advocating for liberty in a pure and consistent manner which will win hearts and minds, something that apparently few people are capable of, but will naturally attract those predisposed to seeking it out. But lets not ridicule the young for desperately wanting to fix a country that has been allowed to reach such a state of rampant mismanagement, corruption, authoritarianism, and apathy.