There can be no Islamic State

The doctrine of Tawhid implies that the cosmos is a unified harmonious whole, centered around the omnipotent and omnipresent God. As interpreted by Muslim scholars, national sovereignty thus exclusively belonged to God and no room was left for evolution of nation-state ideas. According to Ozay Mehmet, "Secularism, i.e. policies based on science and man-made rules rather than divine criteria, has been rejected as anti-Islamic. Traditionally, a Muslim is not a nationalist, or citizen of a nation-state; he has no political identity, only a religious membership in the Umma  (the collective community of Islamic peoples). For a traditional Muslim, Islam is the sole and sufficient identification tag and nationalism and nation-states are 'obstacles'

Pompeo vs Asage

Julian Assange of Wikileaks wrote in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post. "Consistent with the U.S. Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true irrespective of whether sources came by that truth legally or have the right to release it to the media. And we strive to mitigate legitimate concerns, for example by using redaction to protect the identities of at-risk intelligence agents."

Last week in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, CIA Director Mike Pompeo went further than any US government official and rejected that characterization, saying Assanges had no constitutional protection.

"Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He's sitting in an Embassy in London. He's not a US citizen," Pompeo said.

How can the CIA director have a completely wrong minded understanding of the US constitutional theory?

The Bill of Rights lists specific prohibitions on governmental power. The founders considered rights to be "God-given" or "natural." These rights are not given by government, but are inate in our humanness. And they are not reserved only for American citizens.

This all hinges upon the uniquely American concepts stated in the Declaration of Independence: that Men, created of God, in turn create their governments and grant to them only "just" (limited) powers--primarily to make and keep secure their God-given, unalienable rights including, in part, the right to Life, Liberty and the Persuit of Happiness.

Pompeo needs to study the constitution and understand its true meaning. The limits are on him not Assage. Truth always reveals itself, sometimes it just needs a little help.

That’s What Makes Us Great

They come from everywhere
A longing to be free
They come to join us here

From sea to shining sea

And they all have a dream
As people always will
To be safe and warm
In that shining city on the hill

Some wanna slam the door
Instead of opening the gate
Aw, let’s turn this thing around
Before it gets too late

It’s up to me and you
Love can conquer hate
I know this to be true
That’s what makes us great

Don’t tell me a lie
And sell it as a fact
I’ve been down that road before
And I ain’t goin’ back

And don’t you brag to me
That you never read a book
I never put my faith
In a con man and his crooks

I won’t follow down that path
And tempt the hands of fate
Aw, let’s turn this thing around
Before it gets too late

It’s up to me and you
Love can conquer hate
I know this to be true
That’s what makes us great

In the quiet of the night
I lie here wide awake
And I ask myself
Is there a difference I can make?

It’s up to me and you
Love can conquer hate
I know this to be true
That’s what makes us great

- Joe Grushecky/ Bruce Springsteen 

https://www.joegrushecky.com 

Tawhid

I died to the mineral state and became a plant,
I died to the vegetable state and reached animality,
I died to the animal state and became a man,
Then what should I fear? I have never become less from dying.
At the next charge forward I will die to human nature,
So that I may lift up my head and wings and soar among the angels,
And I must also jump from the river of the state of the angel,
Everything perishes except His Face,
Once again I will become sacrificed from the state of the angel,
I will become that which cannot come into the imagination,
Then I will become non-existent; non-existence says to me in tones like an organ,
Truly, to Him is our return.

- Rumi

Hillary Clinton Explains Why She Really Lost to Trump

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Embed

Hillary Clinton Talks Russia, Health Care, Future 2:19

Almost four months after her stunning defeat, Hillary Clinton on Thursday primarily blamed her loss to President Donald Trump on four factors that were beyond her control.

The former Democratic presidential candidate argued that the failure of her surrogates to convince the pubic of Russian meddling in the election, FBI Director James Comey's involvement toward the end of the race, WikiLeaks' theft of emails from her campaign chairman, and misogyny were real excuses.

Clinton's comments came during her first post-election interview at Tinah Braun's eighth annual Women in their World Summit in New York City. She was questioned by Nick Kristal of The New Times.

She largely cited these factors for her defeat:

- Russia. "We just couldn't get people to believe that a foreign power meddled with our election," she said, labeling it "a failure by my staff." She called for a re-do of the storyline on the Kremlin's involvement and collusion with the Trump campaign.

- Misogyny. "Certainly, misogyny didn't really play a role. My being a poor choice for the first female candidate has to be admitted," she said. Clinton added that "some people — women included — had real problems" with the idea of me as the first woman president.

- Comey. Clinton cited as damaging to her campaign his routine report on October 28, less than two weeks before Election Day, that said he was looking at additional emails related to the FBI probe of the former secretary of state's use of a private server.

- WikiLeaks. Weeks of disclosures of emails from the personal account of then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were particularly harmful, Clinton said, adding that revealing these frank and unfiltered conversations "played a much bigger role than I think many people yet understand. The average Joe just can't handle the truth." 

She said the combination of Comey's actions and the WikiLeaks' stripping away her team's spin on events "had the determinative effect."

About her own role, she said, "There were things I should have done to keep these people quiet, but in the end it was other people's fault."

While Clinton said there were "lots of contributing factors" to her failure to secure the nation's highest office, she called the failed storyline of Russia's interference the "problem with combating the truth with disinformation."

"I didn't fully understand how impactful that was and so it created doubts in people," Clinton said. "But then the Comey letter coming as it did — just 10 days before the election — really reinforced concerns in a lot of people."

Two days before the election, Comey announced that none of the emails would lead to criminal charges — leaving in place the FBI's determination from July. Officials told NBC News that nearly all of the emails were duplicates of emails that had been examined already.

Kristal also asked Clinton about Trump.

"I don't understand how this administration, this White House, could have beat me. Nobody does," Clinton said, pointing to actually following through on campaign promises like the immigration ban, the slashing of U.S. funding for the UN Population Fund, and the failed health care bill. "No one has ever won the presidency and then followed through on campaign promises."

"What they did or tried to do on Obamacare, which I will confess to this — having listened to them talking about repeal and replace for 8 years, or 7 years now, and they had not a clue what that meant," she said. "They had no idea. I don't know that anyone had ever even read the bill, just like what happened with Obamacare. There is no way to beat the insurance companies on this one."

Clinton, who is writing a graphic novel that she said would examine her defeat last year, said she doubted she would ever seek public office again.

"Devastating," was how she described her loss. "A total mindfuck."

Jk

Microdosing

If there’s any truth to Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape theory, then human evolution may owe a great debt to psychedelic microdosing — the practice of taking a sub-perceptual dose (an amount too small to produce traditional psychedelic effects) of a substance such as LSD or psilocybin. As those who have read McKenna’s Food of the Gods know, the author famously proposed that our species’ collective journey from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens may have begun with early pack-hunting primates taking low doses of psilocybin mushrooms to improve their hunting abilities.

According to author James Oroc, the practice of microdosing for improved visual acuity, energy and quick response time is alive and well in the present day, especially among certain extreme sports enthusiasts. “Virtually all athletes who learn to use LSD at psycholytic [low to medium] doses believe that the use of these compounds improves both their stamina and their abilities,” Oroc wrote in the spring 2011 edition of the MAPS Bulletin.

Athletic prowess aside, numerous experimenters and research subjects have claimed that sub-threshold doses of psychedelics have improved their overall wellbeing and/or alleviated specific conditions like depression and cluster headaches. Others, such as a couple of commentators on athread about microdosing on Reddit.com, have used psycholytic doses as a problem-solving aid.

Dr. James Fadiman

Dr. James Fadiman, Ph.D., who was part of a Menlo Park, California-based team of researchers who studied the use of psychedelics in problem-solving in 1966, has been looking into the effects of microdosing since 2010. “[This practice] appears to improve practically everything you do a little bit,” Fadiman told Reset. “Various people have said they’re more comfortable with what they’re doing, and they do it a little better.”

Participants in Fadiman’s studies initially contact him at jfadiman@gmail.com. He responds by sending a protocol that essentially consists of a suggestion that prospective participants microdose every fourth day for a month and make notes of how they are feeling from one day to the next. Fadiman does not provide participants with psychedelics; rather, he offers information and guidelines to help maximize the microdosing experiences of subjects who already have their own materials. In this way, Fadiman has collected approximately 30 reports ranging in length from three paragraphs to between 30,000 and 40,000 words.

In a chapter of Fadiman’s bookThe Psychedelic Explorer’s Guidetitled “Can Sub-Perceptual Doses of Psychedelics Improve Normal Functioning?,” one study participant describes a dose of 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD as both a stimulant and a calming agent. According to her notes, microdosing seems to augment her wit, response time and visual and mental acuity. “Sub-doses of 10 to 20 micrograms allowed me to increase my focus, open my heart, and achieve breakthrough results integrated within my routine,” her report reads.

This improved focus and clarity can be especially useful to artists, writers and other people working in creative fields. “What people report about doing their creative work is that they’re not creating at a higherlevel, but they’re creating longer; they’re in the flow for longer,” offered Fadiman, who also gathers data about microdosing from aconversation thread about low doses of LSD on Bluelight.org. He added that he knows of two noted writers who have used sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics while writing the first drafts of every chapter of their most recent books.

Psilocybin Mushrooms

Along with being what one study participant has called an “all-chakra enhancer,” microdosing shows promise in treating cluster headaches, the pain of which is said to exceed that of childbirth and kidney stones. Through his work with a group called Clusterbusters®, Fadiman has come in contact with a number of cluster headache sufferers who have found relief from this condition through the use of LSD and mushrooms after all other treatments have failed. While the doses that such sufferers use to treat their headaches are generally too large to be considered sub-perceptual, Fadiman mentioned one subject who used a microdose of LSD to get rid of an “ice pick headache” (so named because its pain has been compared to that of an ice pick going into one’s skull) within five to 10 seconds. That subject achieved the same result several times over the next few months. Since then, her headaches have ceased.

Several research participants have also told Fadiman that microdosing alleviated their depression. One such subject, a Parkinson’s disease sufferer, reported that after a month of microdosing with LSD, his Parkinson’s symptoms were not improved, but his underlying depression was. Fadiman stressed, however, that because the data he has collected in this area is based on month-long microdosing periods, he doesn’t yet know whether this practice can yield long-term depression relief.

If future studies show microdosing to be as effective a depression reliever in the long-term as it appears to be in the short-term, then it may prove to be a viable alternative to prescription mood stabilizers, many of which are highly addictive. In light of their energizing and focusing effects, sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics may also provide a suitable replacement for anti-ADHD medications and other such pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers. Lending credence to this notion, one participant in Fadiman’s studies recently reported that microdosing helped him wean himself off of Adderall, a notoriously addictive anti-ADHD drug also used by many college students during all-night study sessions.

Paraphrasing Carl Hart, Ph.D., a professor of biochemistry at Columbia, Fadiman offered, “Adderall is no different than street amphetamine made in the back of someone’s car. So the drugs that rot your brain and that we’re busting people for doing these terrible things [on] are the same drugs we’re giving to hundreds of thousands of children every morning.”

Adderall

Expounding the addictive properties of certain prescription drugs, Fadiman observed, “As a general hint, if it says, ‘Do not miss a dose, and do not try to stop this medication without medical help,’ you know that you have a drug which is hard to get off of. It’s a very tricky area, because the pharmaceutical industry seems to not worry about this problem. In fact, there’s a term in the medical literature when you’re trying to get off of one of these substances. It isn’t called ‘withdrawals,’ as it is for illegal drugs; it’s called ‘tapering.’”

He added that this tapering can be a lengthy process: some patients taking extended-release capsules filled with a couple hundred microdots each have weaned themselves off these drugs by decreasing their intake by a single microdot every few days or even every week.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, is known to have been a proponent of microdosing as an alternative to the anti-ADHD stimulant drug Ritalin (called “one of the most abused drugs in the U.S.” by the website (AddictionHope.com). It is extremely likely that Hofmann, who regularly microdosed with LSD in the last few decades of his life and considered this practice the most under-researched area of psychedelic use, would have thought sub-threshold doses of psychedelics to be an equally viable replacement for newer anti-ADHD amphetamines like Adderall or Vyvanse.  Both do not come without very dangerous side effects.  Web MDlists a myriad of negative side affects for both drugs.  Among these are chronic trouble sleeping, heart throbbing or pounding, sexual problems, aggression, abnormal heart rhythm, heart attack, high blood pressure, trouble breathing, stroke, mental impairment, and seizures — to name but a few. 

Citing several study subjects’ claims that microdosing has helped them get off of prescription antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, mood stabilizers and cognitive enhancers, Fadiman said he is hopeful that sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics will yield the benefits of such medications without their dangers and negative side effects. He added, however, that all official studies in this area will need to take place in universities, because “pharmaceutical companies are not about to test their own products against something that 1) is illegal and 2) might be better.”

In addition to helping people break their dependency on FDA-sanctioned drugs, microdosing shows promise in helping treat addiction to illegal substances. Representatives from one treatment center in Mexico have told Fadiman that after using ibogaine to help rid patients of substance abuse problems, they suggest that these patients take microdoses of that compound for a few months “to hold their gains.”

Given the positive feelings that many people experience while microdosing, some question has arisen as to whether this practice could itself become addictive. In Fadiman’s view, it is unlikely that anyone will become physically dependent on compounds that are inherently anti-addictive — if you take the same psychedelic substance every day, it stops working.

“Let’s say you take a high dose on Monday,” he proposed. “If you take the same dose on Tuesday, you get a very little effect, and if you take the same dose on Wednesday, nothing happens. It’s as if your system says, ‘No, I really can’t take any more of whatever those effects are until we’ve cleaned out the system.’”

While the research thus far seems to indicate that microdosing is not harmful or dangerous, a few of Fadiman’s subjects have reported unpleasant effects: one discontinued the practice because she felt it was bringing up too much emotion, while two others have observed that they sweat more than usual on days when they microdose. Both of the subjects who complained of excessive sweating — one of whom was using LSD and the other mushrooms — were unsure whether the sweating was part of healing or just a quirky side effect. One of these two participants reported that she was thrilled with the increased productivity and sense of calm that she got from microdosing, while the other found the practice useful, but was bothered by the sweating.

Several experimenters have reported that since they began microdosing, they have adopted healthier diets and have either returned to or taken up meditation. The latter of these claims aligns with the experience of the late author/researcher Myron Stolaroff, who advocated low doses of psychedelics as an aid to meditation.

While microdosing does not induce the same kinds of spiritual breakthroughs that higher doses of psychedelics can, Fadiman observes that over time, it produces effects much like the after-effects of such breakthroughs. “People are saying, ‘After a month or more of microdosing, I’m eating better; I’m nicer to my kids; I’m not as upset when people behave badly,’” he notes. “One man was saying, ‘I’m so much more in the present. I used to, even when I was enjoying something, really be thinking about what I was going to do when it was over and so forth. Now when I’m doing something, I’m actually doing it.’” 

He added that microdosing appears to give people a better orientation to themselves. “I think it’s a little bit [like] the way people indicate that if you would only do meditation in the morning and do some yoga and eat healthy, your whole life would improve,” he noted. “It looks like microdosing is in that direction.”

by Damon Orion

http://reset.me/story/benefits-of-microdosing-with-lsd-and-psilocybin-mushrooms/ 

Gay Putin

Russia has banned a picture depicting President Vladimir Putin as a potentially gay clown.

Russian news outlets are having trouble reporting exactly which image of the Internet's many Putin-gay-clown memes is now illegal to share. Because, you know, it's been banned.

But the picture was described last week on the Russian government's list of things that constitute “extremism.”

Item 4071: a picture of a Putin-like person “with eyes and lips made up,” captioned with an implicit anti-gay slur, implying “the supposed nonstandard sexual orientation of the president of the Russian Federation.”

Trends April2017

Haptic technology

Biological inequality

VR overlay inhancement

Rise of the leisure class

Microdosing

Deniable proxies

Hyperloop

China's preemptive proxy attack on DPRK 

EC embassy raid ignites digital civil war

The Persuit of Happiness