Two months into the imprisonment of Julian Assange by the UK, for the ostensible crime of ducking bail, and it has become clear that neither the UK nor the US has any intention of waiting for the conclusion of some kangaroo court to exact their vengeance. That punishment has already arrived in the form of the “no-touch“, CIA-style psychological torture. A UN inspector who recently observed Assange found an “alarming deterioration in his mental and physical state”, and retired USAF liutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski believes he is being forcibly administered the powerful psychotropic drug 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate.

These methods are far more devastating and insidious than much physical torture due to the fact that the wounds form in the psyche, and are hidden from cameras. No bruises, no broken bones, no signs of the much-maligned “water-boarding”, yet psychological torture inflicts damage just as severe. Similar to the dehumanizing tactics used against Chelsea Manning during her detainment: solitary confinement, forced nudity, prolonged sleep deprivation, a colorful array of psychotropic drugs, etc.. They are meant to break the psyche of their victim. And just as they were used as tools of revenge against Manning, they are just as surely being used against Assange for the same purpose. Who, by the way, isn’t even a U.S. citizen, but an Australian national. That’s right, no one is safe from the U.S. Warfare State. If you’ve sufficiently embarrassed them, or exposed their crimes, it will find a way to get at you.

That the self-proclaimed saviors of the world, the governments of the West, self-described guardians of liberty and vanquishers of tyranny, are openly persecuting an individual for the crime of exposing the predictable outcome of this hypocritical megalomania should inspire widespread outrage and condemnation. For the most part, it hasn’t. Virtually every citadel of power is cheering Assange’s treatment, they want him strung up, because they themselves were also exposed.

The revenge springs from the stinging embarrassment felt by every rung of the Welfare/Warfare State as each new revelation of the Bush/Obama Iraq slaughter emerged: helicopter pilots chuckling while gunning down Reuters reporters and civilians, mercenaries on murder sprees among crowded Iraqi streets, and rampant abuse of the U.S.-supported Iraqi police force. Manning and Assange laid bare the consequences of allowing our government to embark on never-ending war: thugs of the First World unleashing death and destruction on the innocent civilians of the Third.

The wars were sold to us as urgent, limited military actions, with no time to examine the details or ponder the consequences. We were told that Iraq, or Syria, or Libya, was on the verge of massacring thousands of its own citizens, so the bombs had to fly as soon as possible. Shortly thereafter, the wars became open-ended, and resulted in millions of deaths, millions more displaced, obliterating the native social order, and unleashing chaos.

How will Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and the other nations on the receiving end of U.S. bombs ever rebuild? Who would even do the rebuilding?

Thanks to Manning, Assange, Kiriakou, and the like, their whistleblowing took the wind out of the sails of the Warfare State’s military campaigns, and, ever so slightly, discredited the notion that ‘humanitarianism’ played any role in their formation or execution. Except for the great mass of the voting public, who would never really care about war unless it was fought in their own countries, directly affecting their own communities. And so we have journalists pleading with the public to care about their own government’s crimes on the other side of the world.

If journalism is anything at all, it is what Assange took part in: exposing the criminal nature of the powerful. Which is why he is also so hated among the sycophants, stenographers, and propaganda couriers that comprise the corporate media. They are the ones constantly selling us on every new war as another “humanitarian interventions”, wrap it up in counterfeit patriotism, and brand critics as “anti-American”. I’d say there’s nothing more American that opposing and exposing a corporate class hell-bent on a murderous regime-change war that our children will end up paying for, in both lives and billions of increasingly worthless currency.

Assange’s abhorrent treatment is meant to be the equivalent of a public execution. Every journalist on the planet is watching his mistreatment, and they wonder if it could happen to them. Is it worth the risk? This is not what America was supposed to become: a petty, vengeful oligarchy of warmongers. America was supposed to be the one place in the world where the liberty of the individual was enshrined as an absolute, irrevocable right. The very value of that right lay in what Assange took part in. The First Amendment exists, not to talk about the weather, but to openly criticize the powerful. It’s a shield and tool that is indispensable to a free society. The value a society places on that freedom says much about the value they place on their own liberty. And it’s difficult to resist encroaching tyranny, far easier to settle in to an easy serfdom, and let the government run amok.

The First Amendment desperately needs a reaffirmation, and there’s no better time for it than during Assange’s persecution. But for that to happen, there must exist a sufficient number of people willing to do the uncomfortable task of engaging in the battle of ideas, never ceding the inviolability of the principle that we have a right to expose the criminality of our own government.

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Here is a mind-boggling article, published nineteen years ago in the Atlantic: The Virus and the Vaccine

A monkey virus known as SV40 contaminated the polio vaccine given to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963. Monkey kidneys had been used to culture the massive quantities of the polio virus for the millions of vaccines needed, but research later found SV40 inside the tumors of those who died of mesothelioma. Fast-forward to thousands of deaths each year and mesothelioma lawsuit commercials. Those commercials point to asbestos as the cause, and the article does say that asbestos is a factor, but that SV40 interacts with asbestos, resulting in a rapid-onset, terminal cancer. The entire article needs to be plucked from the memory hole and read.

A milestone in the burgeoning psychedelic renaissance happened on Tuesday night in Oakland, California: the city council passed a resolution decriminalizing all naturally-occurring psychedelic drugs. This doesn’t merely include the much-celebrated psilocybin found in ‘magic mushrooms’. It also includes peyote (mescaline), ayahuasca (DMT), iboga, among others. They’re what are known as “entheogenic” plants, of which you can find a surprisingly comprehensive list on Wikipedia.

This is astounding, and far bigger news than Denver’s recent decriminalization of magic mushrooms. Oakland’s is an admission of the insanity of enforcing the prohibition of plants, particularly plants that have the power to heal psychological wounds that have thus far proven resistant to treatment. That power is in the evidence: psilocybin has an 80% percent success rate in smoking cessation among life-time smokers. No other substance known to man comes anywhere close. MDMA, while not on the list of approved psychedelics in Oakland yet, successfully treats post-traumatic stress disorder without bringing the baggage that other anti-depressants such as Zoloft are known to have.

While decriminalization is a far cry from out-and-out legalization, it’s a colossal first step. Even ‘colossal’ is an understatement. We are on the verge of a pharmacological awakening. The very word “drugs”, ironically used pejoratively during the Golden Age of insanity-inducing anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, will take on a new meaning.

The near future: ‘You used drugs? From which plant source?’

Big Pharma’s poison pill racket will die a swift death, and it will be exhilarating to watch. No longer will those who walk around with depression, PTSD, or any other Pharma-categorized label become a victim of a prescription medication that will either drive them insane or numb them into perpetual somnambulism. They will liberate themselves “from the Bastille of their psychosis” with an evolutionary gift from the natural world.

This future is inevitable. The only bet now is which community will be next.

To say that the debate over The Wall is heated would be somewhat of an understatement. From all appearances it seems that one side wants no barrier at all between our country and the one to the south, while the other envisions a towering, monumental structure on par with China’s Great Wall, or the Great Pyramids, something for a civilization 5,000 years hence to marvel at while they ponder the causes of the abrupt collapse in 2020 of the society that erected it.

Rather than the false choice we’re presented with, here might be a better solution: build the wall, or at least several different walls, along the most highly trafficked areas of the southern border. BUT, simultaneously dismantle the 100-mile wide “Constitution Free Zone” that extends into our own country, and that 2/3 of U.S. citizens live inside. The harassment of U.S. citizens by law enforcement, the casual violation of basic rights of due process, within this zone has been well-documented. It’s a disgrace, and unworthy of a free society, and any society that calls itself free should not tolerate such behavior from its own government. Every single law-abiding individual this side of the border should be treated as if they’re a resident and citizen. Our government’s failure at the border shouldn’t serve as the justification for the abuse and violation of the rights of U.S. citizens.

If our government can’t control our borders, it should no longer be allowed to employ a legion of badged, unionized thugs to harass U.S. citizens as a solution to its myriad failures. The government of a free society must find a way to function within the confines that the freedom of its citizens permits.

So, my solution would be this: build physical barriers at various, high-traffic locations to stem the tide of people. But, if some people slip through the barrier and enter the United States, as they invariably will, and no one has witnessed this happen, then it must be assumed that they are U.S. citizens, and treated with the dignity reserved for citizens of a free society. Unchecked law enforcement poses a real, immediate threat to U.S. citizens, and the stories of harassment, rape, and beatings of citizens by Border Patrol are toe-curling. In fact, it’s the Border Patrol committing the atrocities that we’re told illegal immigrants will take part in if we don’t build The Wall. Trading the fear of imagined crimes for real ones, along with a massive loss of liberty, is something that happens far too often.

The video of this encounter with a nut-job cop perfectly illustrates why black people are terrified of police encounters. The cop is a textbook example of what I call a “Barney Fife with a Punisher complex”. He’s clearly loves wielding his authority and scaring civilians half to death. And look at the way he holds his gun, like he’s acting out some childhood macho fantasy. Just like Barney Fife, he’s jumpy and defensive, but unlike Fife, there’s murder in his eyes. The driver’s legally-owned rifle is in the back seat, well out of reach of the driver, yet the cop reacts with paranoid alarm, yelling “Gun!” twice. You expect gunfire to ring out immediately, killing the driver. Miraculously, the cop doesn’t shoot anyone, but it came so close to happening.

This is further proof that cops are using lethal force, not in self-defense against an imminent threat, but as punishment for refusing to comply with a ridiculous order. The “I feared for my life” rationale is just an excuse; bullets fly because “contempt of cop” is seen as a capital offense by too many cops charged with protecting the lives they wind up ending.

Jimmy, in hilarious fashion, exposes the corporate media’s role in spreading news of a report that Syria gassed its own people. A report that turned out to be entirely false. Despite its falsity, Trump launched missile strikes against Syrian airbases based on the report.

The miracle of cascading marijuana legalization across the country has led to an awakening of its seemingly endless physical and mental benefits, but something else has happened that has gone too little noticed: the decades of Drug War propaganda instilled in our minds from an early age has quickly vanished. People much older than I am, who were more than likely subjected to the far more militant prohibitionist propaganda than I ever was, are now experimenting with CBD oil, with some even going whole hog and getting their medical marijuana card. The stigma did not linger, despite the billions wasted on Drug War propaganda. In a way it’s even more tragic to think on the countless lives ruined over the decades by the foolish, reckless war on cannabis, now that we see how quickly attitudes have changed. It’s as if one day, people began waking up to realize that, yes, it is just a plant, why support totalitarian diktats against its consumption? A medical revolution is now underway, as more and more people are finding that a relatively inexpensive plant provides far more effective relief that a jar of pills.

And with the decriminalization of magic mushrooms in Denver heralding the dawn of legal psychedelics, we are about to see something truly astonishing in terms of not just medicine, but humanity’s re-connection with substances that are bound so closely with our mental/spiritual capacity.

Oakland may decriminalize ‘magic mushrooms’. What are they, and will California follow?

I no longer feel any impulse to write about the War on Drugs. It’s coming to an end. Everyone now sees the insanity and tragedy it left behind. We feel ashamed that it was allowed to endure for so long, but we’re finally stepping out of that madness and into the light. If there’s any evidence of our ability to truly evolve into something better, it’s marijuana legalization, along with incipient legalization of psychedelics. When we evolve into something more compassionate, more humane, we’ve moved closer to our potential as a species.

We are entering what could be deemed the Psychedelic Renaissance, or Psychedelic Awakening. If the market is allowed to operate unchained, then we’ll see entire industries restructure, with some collapsing entirely. Their stranglehold on shaping public narrative regarding their products will vanish. Children will cease to be given amphetamines for “hyperactivity”, senior citizens will similarly trade Pharma’s addictive pills for marijuana. Veterans, trauma survivors, and people generally looking to feel better or in search of safe stimulation will eschew Pharma’s poison for the myriad mind-healing psychedelics that will be far more available in the coming years, as more and more people come to learn that they are equally as safe as marijuana.

Back in 2017, but explosive nonetheless: