2024-07-16
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Congress Accidentally Legalized Weed Six Years Ago - The Atlantic
The upshot is that although recreational marijuana use is allowed in only 24 states and Washington, D.C., people anywhere in the U.S. can get intoxicated on hemp-derived THC without breaking federal law. These hemp-based highs are every bit as potent as those derived from the marijuana available in legalization states. I know this because I’ve tried recreational pot in California and Colorado, as well as 11 different hemp-derived intoxicants legally available here in North Carolina. I am not exaggerating when I say that they are indistinguishable in effect. In other words, six years ago, Congress inadvertently legalized weed across the entire United States.
Herer died in 2010, but the movement he started achieved its victory with the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized industrial hemp production. Donald Trump’s signature on that bill was like the shot from a starter gun.
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Common logical fallacies surrounding capitalism
The 1970s “Population Bomb” scare is an example of this fallacy in action, a movement erroneously predicting mass starvation. Since then the world population has more than doubled, our standard of living has improved, and relative food prices have decreased. An analysis tracking 50 commodities over a period between 1980 and 2017 found that, on average, their prices fell 36.3%.
Horseshit
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Would AM Mandate Force Carmakers to Scrap Safety Features? - Radio World
"To accommodate analog AM radio as a primary design requirement, certain carmakers may need to scrap advanced safety features, with engineers having to prioritize outdated technology over current or future safety innovations,” they wrote. “If the goal is to save American lives, Congress should encourage automakers to focus on innovative technologies like advanced driver-assistance systems, autonomous vehicles and collision avoidance systems that actually reduce car accidents and fatalities,” they wrote.
They said a mandate “would be a barrier to the success of America’s growing electric vehicle industry” because of the problem of noise on AM from electronic components. “While EV makers could reduce interference by installing additional shielding, there is no way to resolve this issue completely.
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You are responsible for the consequences of your speech
If you use speech that is generally understood to be offensive, people will think you meant to offend them. And they are reasonable in doing so. Don’t act all shocked pikachu face about it, and apologise already.
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Elon Musk is Right: End the Online Censorship Racket – JONATHAN TURLEY
Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. The Global Disinformation Index warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation. Once that index’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Trump heads to convention as authorities investigate motive, security in assassination attempt.
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Trump supporters seize on Biden's 'Bullseye' call as 'coded message to shooter' - Mirror Online
Supporters of Donald Trump have seized on remarks made by Joe Biden earlier this month – describing the US president’s words as a coded message to shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks. n a now-deleted tweet, Collins claimed that the president had “sent the orders” to the 20-year old – who appears to have been a member of the Republican Party. Both President Biden and Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama have expressed shock and outrage at the shooting, which killed one bystander at the rally in Butler, Philadelphia.
But, that hasn’t been enough to prevent an immediate flurry of conspiracy theories emerging on social media – with Trump voters in particular questioning the level of protection by Secret Service agents and state police at the Trump rally. One Trump supporter, named Greg, told the BBC that he had been standing close to a fence just outside the event before the shots rang out. He said: “We noticed a guy crawling up the building, 50 feet away from us. We were pointing at the guy crawling up the roof… he had a rifle, we could clearly see it… we said to the police, ‘Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle.’
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Democrats Order Flags To Be Flown At Half-Staff As Trump Still Alive
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The FBI says it has ‘gained access’ to the Trump rally shooter’s phone - The Verge
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Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden - Washington Examiner
Former President Donald Trump has completely rewritten his convention speech in light of the assassination attempt against him on Saturday and will call on Thursday for a new effort at national unity. In an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner a day after being hit by a sniper’s bullet, Trump said he wanted to take advantage of a historic moment and draw the country together. “The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he said, “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
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Judge dismisses classified documents case against Donald Trump
Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the classified documents case against Donald Trump. In a ruling Monday, Cannon said the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution. “In the end, it seems the Executive’s growing comfort in appointing ‘regulatory’ special counsels in the more recent era has followed an ad hoc pattern with little judicial scrutiny,” Cannon wrote.
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Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, & Winklevoss Twins, Committing $45M/mo to Pro-Trump Pac
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The New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets
A portly guy running for Congress in Georgia made his way to the front of the room to give a speech heavy on MAGA buzzwords and florid expressions of fealty to Donald Trump. “This is sad,” Milius said. No one cheered or even seemed interested. But this was not Trumpworld, even if many of the people in the room saw Trump as a useful tool. And these parties aren’t always so lame. NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s “radical young intellectuals,” as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism’s “terrifying future,” as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic.
But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right.
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Private meeting, billionaires and a G6 jet: The backstory on how Trump picked Vance - POLITICO
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Why J.D. Vance Deserves Our Thanks - POLITICO
Vance isn’t the only Republican calling for the gears of government power to grind Trump’s opponents into dust. Trump himself has famously promised general “retribution” should he become president again. In a September Truth Social post, Trump promised to go after the “dishonest and corrupt” NBC News and MSNBC when he returns to the White House. Last week, Kash Patel, a former Trump aide, took to Steve Bannon’s podcast to threaten the press: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Instead of complaining about Vance, Trump, and Patel’s attempts to criminalize journalism, perhaps we should thank them for giving us advance notice that writing critically about them will get us investigated. Nothing dictatorial about that.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Modern racism rests on scientific theories from the 19th century
- I'd say modern racism rests in laws requiring racial quoatas.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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a Disney employee today will allegedly be waking up to a cold chill and a morning of internal meetings after being outed as “the inside man” in the Disney hack which has seen 1 Tebibyte (around 1.1TB) of data lifted from its servers. The hack supposedly includes information on unreleased games, images, internal messaging, and pretty much everything. This is going to be a rough few weeks for them. None more so than for the alleged inside man who was named in an intimidating warning to others not to cross the group. Readwrite is not publishing the name of the employee as we do not wish to add to the pile on, but our research confirms he has been at the company for almost nine years and lives in Los Angeles.
The message posted online by the hackers reads:
DISNEY INTERNAL SLACK 1.1TiB of data, almost 10,000 channels, every message and file possible, dumped. Unreleased projects, raw images and code, some logins, links to internal api/web pages, and more! Have fun sifting through it, there is a lot there. We tried to hold off until we got deeper in, but our inside man got cold feet and kicked us out! I thought we had something special [Name of employee was here] Consider the dropping of literally every bit of personal info you have, from logins to credit cards to SSN, as a warning for people in the future. MAGNET
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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It’s 1968 All Over Again | The Free Press
radicals are already planning street disruptions in Chicago this year. While the Vietnam War galvanized the left in 1968, this year it’s the war in Gaza. No Americans are fighting, but the U.S. has armed Israel’s defensive war after Hamas invaded the Jewish state on October 7, massacring 1,200 people. The Free Press attended one of the workshops planning these disruptions. The plan is to organize marshals who will stand between demonstrators and the police. These marshals, however, are not there to keep the peace. One of the organizers told activists at the meeting, “We do not dissuade or push back against direct actions or disruptions.” The political implications are clear. A violent convention next month that reminds Americans of the horrors of 1968 will seal the fate of a damaged Democratic presidential campaign. The party is already in the midst of a political civil war over whether President Joe Biden has the stamina or acuity to run for reelection. It’s hard to imagine any candidate, let alone an 81-year-old man who looks every year of his age, surviving this maelstrom.
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‘Morning Joe’ pulled from air Monday because of Trump shooting | CNN Business
The progressive news network confirmed the decision to preempt its influential and top-rated morning show after a CNN inquiry Sunday evening. The network said the show will resume airing Tuesday. A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole. Given the breaking news nature of the story, the person said, it made more sense to continue airing rolling breaking news coverage in the fraught political moment.
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Democrats fret about the political fallout from the Trump rally shooting
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Biden campaign claims Trump picked Vance because he's OK with 'breaking the law'
“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. “Vance has a reputation as one of the most far-right extremists in Washington, endorsing a January 6 rally member for Congress and calling Marjorie Taylor Greene, who trafficks in antisemitism and division, ‘a friend’,” Dillon concluded.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
World
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The UN, an organisation close to breaking point?
Events quickly dashed Guterres’s hopes that the pandemic could be a springboard for greater international solidarity. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine reshaped the UN landscape as the Security Council and General Assembly became locked in debates over the war.
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Copenhagen to reward eco-friendly tourists with free food and tours
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Pre-migration decision-making support for people affected by climate change
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Increasingly Frequent Ocean Heat Waves Trigger Mass Die-Offs of Sealife
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Computer science prof discovers why whales keep washing up on East Coast beaches
He was the tenth whale to strand on beaches in New York and New Jersey in nine weeks. Environmentalists, politicians and ordinary citizens loudly wondered if the construction of offshore wind turbines was killing them. Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who co-created the search engine that powers Ask.com, now says the answer is yes. ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, offshore wind kills whales,’ he says.
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Wyoming bans conservation bidders from oil and gas lease sales