AOC is on a new trip: studying—and potentially legalizing – magic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs for medicinal use.
“From the opioid crisis to psilocybin’s potential w/ PTSD, it’s well past time we take drug use out of criminal consideration + into medical consideration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted Saturday. “That begins with research.”
The progressive darling filed legislation Friday to encourage studies of ‘shrooms, ecstasy and other drugs that some believe could treat a range of ailments, from depression to headaches. Psilocybin is often referred to as magic mushrooms.
The measure, an amendment to a spending bill that would fund the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, would allow federal funds to be spent on such research.
San Francisco instantly became a hellscape of rubble and ruin 112 years ago today, thanks to a magnitude-7.9 earthquake and subsequent fire that killed thousands of people.
Seismologists have said California is due — and perhaps overdue — for the “big one,” another massive earthquake that would cause significant damage, but just when such a quake would strike is unpredictable.
“There is a 99.9% chance that there will be a damaging quake (magnitude greater than or equal to 6.7) somewhere in California in the next 30 years,” said Peggy Hellweg, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t have any idea exactly where and when such a quake can happen.”
John Vidale of the Southern California Earthquake Center, said California’s fears are legitimate.
A “big one” quake of a magnitude-8.0 near the San Andreas Fault would break several hundred miles along the faultline. Even more crippling, would be a smaller magnitude-7.0 placed in the heart of Los Angeles, he said.
“We have no real due date,” Vidale said.
Jen Andrews, a seismologist at the Caltech Seismo Lab, said when the infamous San Andreas fault is broken up into three sections — top, central and lower — it’s clear the section that’s gone the longest amount of time without a big quake is the southern portion.
In fact, the lower section hasn’t seen a large event for about 300 years.
“They don’t happen like clockwork, nor do they happen with the same frequency on different sections of the fault,” Andrews said. “However, the average time between quakes tends to be on the order of 100 to a few hundred years, and in several places it has been about that interval since the last large quake.”
That’s why seismologists talk about the southern part of the state being due, or even overdue, for another big earthquake, she said.
“It’s reasonable for California to be concerned about earthquake hazard and the ‘big one’ as it’s only a question of time. Earthquakes are unpredictable though, so the when and where are very difficult to say and we can only talk in terms of ‘likelihood.”
Andrews concluded: “Anniversaries of big events, as well as smaller felt earthquakes, are great reminders that we should take measures to be prepared for the next one.”
Washington D.C. district judge Judge Trevor McFadden has thrown out a lawsuit by democrats over the reallocation of military funding towards emergency border wall funding. In February the President declared a humanitarian crisis at the southern border.
The judge said the dispute was a political one, and that trying to use the courts to solve the problem was trying to circumvent the political process.
The shares of the big tech giants fell sharply after reports that the US antitrust regulators have divided up oversight of the sector. Firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter saw their values fall, over fears that the government may now challenge their business’ models.
Illinois have voted to pass the Reproductive Health Act and is regarded as the most extreme of it’s kind in the country. The bill will repel a ban of partial-birth abortions, and will compel health care providers to provide abortion cover. The Bill also removes the Abortion Performance Refusal Act, and provides financial penalties against individuals who refuse to recommend, perform or aid in providing an abortion. The wording of the bill explicitly states that the unborn child has no independent rights.
Illinois’s Governor tweeted, “Illinois is making history, because our state will now be the most progressive in the nation for reproductive health care.”
However the bill has met with widespread condemnation amongst pro-life campaigners.
A lawyer for Facebook argued in court Wednesday that the social media site’s users “have no expectation of privacy.”
According to Law360, Facebook attorney Orin Snyder made the comment while defending the company against a class-action lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,” Snyder said.
In an attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out, Snyder further claimed that Facebook was nothing more than a “digital town square” where users voluntarily give up their private information.
“You have to closely guard something to have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Snyder added.
Although Snyder said that the social media site would be focusing more on privacy in the future, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria reportedly pushed back on Facebook’s argument.
“What you are saying now sounds contrary to the message that Facebook itself disseminates about privacy,” Chhabria said, according to Law.com.
The Daily Dot reached out to Facebook for comment but did not receive a reply.
Synder’s statement came just hours before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told company shareholders during their annual meeting Thursday that Facebook would become a “privacy-focused social platform.”
The meeting, held at Hotel Nia in Palo Alto, California, was also met with protest by civil liberties groups calling for the CEO’s firing.
A proposal at the meeting to have Zuckerberg step down as CEO was voted down, however, given that the Facebook co-founder currently controls the majority of voting shares.
The Justice Department have been preparing for weeks to launch an antitrust investigation into Alphabet Inc’s Google. The Investigation will see the tech giant come under a new wave of scrutiny by investigators.
This year Google have already been fined $1.7 billion by the European Union for breaching E.U. antitrust regulations for the third time.
The Governor of Nevada has vetoed a bill with would commit Nevada’s six electoral votes to a group of states agreeing to elect the President by a popular vote.
A popular vote to elect the President would lessen the role smaller states have in electing the President.
In March this year Lenana Wen, Director of Planned Parenthood tweeted: “We face a real situation where Roe could be overturned. And we know what will happen, which is that women will die. Thousands of women died every year pre-Roe.”
The ultra-Liberal, Washington Post, who is no enemy to Planned Parenthood fact checked this statistic. There findings show it to be hugely exaggerated.
When the Post investigated the claim they discovered mortality rates were in serious decline for woman undergoing illegal abortions well before Roe vs. Wade. That annual deaths in their thousands, would only have been seen in the early 20th century before the use of antibiotics, when women died of sepsis after an abortion. Even then these statistics are estimates, as no reliable official records exist. In the years preceding Roe vs. Wade most illegal abortions were conducted by medical professionals acting illegally, but therefore done safely.
For Wen to be using such statistics, which she knows come from the pre-antibiotics era, is something that should be of concern to anyone with an interest in a truthful debate on the subject.