let's be clear that we understand what the cancer argument for recreational drugs actually is.

nobody is claiming that these mushrooms will cure cancer, although some marketing apparatus will eventually no doubt claim that they will, just as we saw with the marijuana industry, which was also never prescribed as a curative agent.

rather, the argument for allowing these patients legal access to these specific drugs is tied into the fact that they are terminal. as they are terminal, the argument goes, they ought to be allowed to die in the narcotic state of their choosing. after all, the doctors are just going to give them opioids anyways, right?

i can sympathize with this. in the end, i'd rather trip myself to the grave than spend it strung out on government heroin.

but, it's important to understand what the terms of debate are and what they are not. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/4-dying-canadians-wait-to-hear-if-they-ll-be-allowed-to-try-magic-mushrooms-for-their-anguish-1.5653083

i've previously argued against legalizing recreational mushrooms, for the reason that the market is mostly underage. i suppose that argument is malleable to shifts in demand, but the current cultural truth is that people grow out of mushrooms before any relevant legal age of purchase. my mushrooms phase was about 16-18, and that's potentially even a little older than normal; the psilocybin market is really more in the 14-17 range.

it would make the most amount of sense to legalize mdma, which is an adult drug of minimal harm that is generally sold in harmful impurities. most lingering adults in the psilocybin market would even be likely to switch to legal mdma, if it were available.

mushrooms are just kind of intense, as a commodity, which is why people stop doing them. ask around. virtually everybody that goes through their kiddy mushroom phase will tell you that they had to step back because it was messing with their concept of reality. mdma is really actually a better idea.

i don't want to shit on mushrooms too hard (they would defy me and grow, anyways). i had some good times. i can recommend them in the right scenario, after the right research has been done, at the right age. i may do them again one day. but, you learn to respect their powers and avoid them, except in special scenarios.

it just seems obvious to me that what happens with legal mushrooms is very low demand in the legal, adult market and the inevitable illegal dumping of the product to underage sellers, because the vendors can't sell it. nobody should strive for that. just let the market function underground, and maybe stop policing it instead.

again, that could change if a substantive end-of-life market develops. 

some google ad spam got me again on the faul mccartney story, and here's an interesting twist to that whole rumour.

if paul was really replaced by a lookalike, there's some chance that he faked his death, and might actually still be alive. if that were true, he'd have no doubt done it to escape the fame, and just disappear somewhere with some cash and exist. but, he would have no doubt eventually caught up with what happened to the beatles after his disappearance, and with john lennon and everything that john lennon became.

so, what if the real paul, the one that faked his death, and is still out there, is the actual person that orchestrated the assassination of john lennon?

well, it's possible.

he does start to look a little different around that time, though, doesn't he?

deaths in the united states due to coronavirus should increase dramatically this week.

actually, considering that we appear to be heading backwards in time after 2000, after nixon is indeed johnson.

i understand and agree that the nixon-trump comparisons are deeply flawed, but that's only true if you look at time as flowing in the forward direction. if nixon had been born today, and gone backwards in time to 1970, he'd have probably ended up a lot like trump, in the end.

following this model, that would suggest that biden will die in his second term and be replaced by a young vice-president that is perceived as "liberal" but is really a hawk.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/politics/joe-biden-donald-trump-suburban-voters-polling/index.html

well, i think dr jefferson needs to propose a mechanism before such an unravelling of virology can be taken seriously. is he proposing a global reservoir species? is it in the squirrels, and just jumps out due to climate change, or something?

no, really. for a man of his stature, this proposal is remarkably poorly worded, as though he's operating in some pre-socratic alter-reality where he's grappling with what the nature of a virus is. yet, we know very clearly that a virus is a piece of genetic material that requires a host to survive, and dismantles rather quickly in much of any kind of superzero temperatures. we also know how to sequence that genetic material from it's recent ancestors, which helps us understand the recent history of that genetic material, and it does not support dr jefferson's unusual and vague suggestions.

the question of pre-wuhan transmission is an intriguing one, though. while we can be sure that the virus originated recently in bats, evidence may force us to rethink where the jump occurred to humans, and how.

dr jefferson's suggestion, however, is interesting in the context of melting ice around the world, which is unthawing ancient viruses. we know that this idea of spontaneous virus generation is wrong for this virus, which came from bats. it might not be for the next one, which comes from a melting glacier...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/the-coronavirus-may-not-have-originated-in-china-says-oxford-professor/

this is actually the same legal question i was up against a few years ago; the police think they can hold people on hybrid offences, and they can't. apparently, one of them is being held without any charge at all. you can expect that the justice released these people as soon as she was able to see the case.

see, and i think that the people on the street need a dose of reality as to the length of time required to process these individuals, to actually get the case in front of a justice. what i picked up from my own illegal arrest is that i was scheduled at the end of the day, because the first six hours of the day had already been booked by people coming in from the county jail. the precedent in canada is that habeas corpus is 24 hours, so there is no legal basis of complaint as long as they release you in 24 hours. that has led to a habit of scheduling randoms picked up on the street to the end of the day, after the day's scheduled appearances are done.

if there were more justices, or less inmates, then these things could be processed much faster. i guess that means that the protesters are really complaining about subpar social services, at the end of the day.

the cops need people to file cases in these situations and take them to court to get them to stop doing it. they do it because they get away with it, and it has to stop. that's why i'm suing, and i hope they sue as well.

so, what the cop should have done under canadian law was issue a summons to appear in court on charges of vandalism. while the police technically have the powers of arrest on charges involving hybrid offenses, they are supposed to only utilize it subject to a series of clauses that has been completely ejected from the process and was almost certainly not met, in this case.

that said, i do believe that a proper sentence once the issue works it's way into court would be to order these individuals to clean the statues. the placement of statues is a legitimate topic of democratic debate; their wanton destruction is most unfortunate, and quite barbaric. should it be democratically decided that these statues, which appear to have been of john a. macdonald (a drunk and a corrupt asshole no doubt), should no longer grace the steps of our parks and institutions, the correct step to take next would be to move them to museums, not douse them in paint.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/07/18/blm-toronto-continues-to-press-demands-to-defund-police-service/

first, she talks down lamar alexander, and then she slams betsy devos.

there is probably a dedicated anti-devos vote.

well, she could be an effective "attack dog", clearly.

no, listen.

biden is doing unusually well with white voters and, if that holds, he doesn't need to worry about eking out wisconsin by dominating the black vote in milwaukee. holding the upper midwest via cultural dominance is by far the superior strategy to eking out wins on the margins, like has been the norm in the party since obama. if they can just hold the upper midwest by winning back white voters, that is the dominant strategy. 

hrmmn.

did they search the area where the girls were for carpentier's body?

well, it was apparently a significant distance away. so, how did carpentier get from the car to the area to bury the girls?

there's really four possibilities:

(1) he buried the girls first, and then crashed trying to get away. that would appear to be what the cops assumed, but now they can't find him. this would also potentially be stretching time restraints. i've been following this for a while, and it didn't seem to make sense from the start.
(2) he set up an elaborate decoy, like something out of a mel gibson film (and there's lots of ideas to fake your death in films, something i wish cops would pay closer attention to) to trick the cops into thinking he was in a crash, while disappearing in a different direction. but, that really just makes the time issue that much worse, given that they were seen an hour earlier. he'd have had to kill the girls first, then set up the elaborate ruse, then get out.
(3) it rather seems like the more likely scenario is one where the car was forced off the road by another vehicle, and martin carpentier and his three daughters are ordered to get into it. the girls are then killed and buried, maybe as a result of something financial. this would suggest that carpentier ended up in the custody of some kind of third party at some sort. but, i would request that the area that the girls were found in be sorted through more carefully - the three of them may have been killed at once, and they may have missed his body. otherwise, he could be anywhere, dead or alive.
(4) if some entity wanted him and and/or his daughters killed, they could have created the decoy to make it look like a murder/suicide. they just can't find the body.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/manhunt-for-martin-carpentier-has-been-suspended-sq