‘“As someone who has worked with psychedelics for decades, watching the White House event was a very trippy experience,” said Dimitri Mugianis, an underground practitioner who was prosecuted by federal authorities for illegally treating a heroin addict with the psychedelic drug ibogaine.

Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.

But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.…’ (via The New York Times)

‘If you’re going to criticise the past actions of previous US administrations, then it’s probably best you double-check who was in charge at the time.

One criticism from Donald Trump’s Department of State, shared on Thursday, has seen it ridiculed online given the problem itself has lasted for “nearly 7 years”, and the Republican was halfway through his first term back in 2019.

The tweet reads: “For nearly 7 years there have been no direct commercial flights between the U.S. and Venezuela.

“Under President Trump we’re changing that today. Flights between Miami and Caracas restored.”

And sure enough, many X/Twitter users were quick to point out that it was Trump who oversaw the initial decision..

“I wonder who was president 7 years ago,” wrote Francisco Rodríguez, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research…’ (via  indy100)

…’[T]he Pope is making headlines after appointing Evelio Menjivar-Ayla – a formerly undocumented immigrant from El Salvador who came to the US in the trunk of a car, according to The Washington Post – as the new bishop for West Virginia.…’ (via indy100)

‘The White House just posted an hour-long video of Trump repeating a single word – yes, really…’ (via indy100)

Warning: Do not watch the referenced video. That will be 60 minutes of your life you will never get back. 

‘Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The “yellow press” encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true.

But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought. The American people weren’t consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing pundits, activists, and civil-society groups to have their say. As Trump told The New York Times in January, his power as commander in chief was constrained by nothing but “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”…’ (Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic)

‘All things come to an end eventually, including the human species. From the perspective of the universe it won’t matter, and so it also shouldn’t matter to us now. The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important, especially since no one will be around to notice.

My basic point is the same as Epicurus’ philosophical medicine against the fear of death: “Death should not concern us because as long as we exist, death is not here, and when death is here, we are not.…” ‘ (Thomas Wells via 3 Quarks Daily)

‘Wildlife filmmaker Devon Massyn captured absolutely magnificent and rare drone footage of the volcano Kavachi erupting explosively underwater. Kavachi, which sits in the Pacific Ocean near the Solomon Islands, had not erupted for nearly a decade before this.…’ (Lori Dorn via Laughing Squid)

‘Prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a worldwide laughingstock this week for an unintentionally embarrassing article in which he argued that conversing with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has made him believe that large language models are not only sentient, but actually conscious….[T]he author of The God Delusion is now suffering from a Claude delusion.…’ (via Flux)

‘A new analysis of the “Boltzmann brain” paradox suggests our memories and sense of reality could, in theory, be random illusions born from cosmic chaos. By uncovering circular reasoning in how physicists think about time and entropy, the study raises fresh doubts about what we can truly know about the past.…’ (via ScienceDaily)