From the New York Times.

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: