Free Republic

Some day soon, even as sweet, skunky smoke drifts in from the streets outside, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other staunch opponents of marijuana may draw inspiration from a true believer named Morris Sheppard. After the repeal of national Prohibition in 1933 and until his death in 1941, the Texas senator embraced a yearly custom. A progressive Democrat often considered “the father of Prohibition,” Sheppard would rise on the Senate floor to rail against alcohol and call for a repeal of Repeal. “It was a ritual,” Daniel Okrent, author of the 2010 book “Last Call: The Rise and Fall...

A Republican lawmaker wants answers from the Department of Agriculture about taxpayer-funded research experiments at a Maryland facility that have allegedly led to the deaths of hundreds of cats and kittens. Citing documents reviewed by his office, Michigan Republican Mike Bishop described a decades-old research project at the USDA's Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, in which hundreds of kittens are bred, fed meat that is infected with Toxoplasma, and later killed and discarded by "incineration." In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue dated Monday, Bishop wrote that he was "shocked to hear that the USDA, the very...

Many studies have identified variations in the genetic code that seem to be more common in people with psychiatric disorders. This approach goes a step further to show how genes are more or less active in the brains of people with various conditions. The study confirmed that genetic variations contributed to the patterns of activity in the brains, but as the authors wrote, “there is undoubtedly a contribution from environmental effects.” Psychiatric disorders have some overlapping symptoms, making them difficult to diagnose. The molecular signatures in the new study suggested that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism have dysfunctional synapses, the points of...

Q drop #29 Oct 31 2017 23:13:10 Anonymous ID: grTMpzrL 147452214 Some things must remain classified to the very end. NK is not being run by Kim, he’s an actor in the play. Who is the director? The truth would sound so outrageous most Americans would riot, revolt, reject, etc. The pedo networks are being dismantled. The child abductions for satanic rituals (ie Haiti and other 3rd world countries) are paused (not terminated until players in custody). We pray every single day for God’s guidance and direction as we are truly up against pure evil.

The man charged with stabbing two people at the Mall of America was ruled mentally ill with schizophrenia last year and committed to state psychiatric care for much of 2017 before the attack. Mahad Abdirahman, 20, of Minneapolis, faces two counts of first degree assault for stabbing two brothers in a fitting room at the Mall of America Macy's store. Abdirahman, also known in court records as Mahad Abdiraham, seriously wounded the two Minneapolis men, one 19-years-old and the other 25. The pair disarmed and subdued Abdirahman until Bloomington Police could arrest him. But it wasn't Abdirahman's first brush with...

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Monday that the “evil attack” in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend meets the legal definition of an act of domestic terrorism, an early declaration in an investigation after a car plowed into a crowd of protesters. “It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute,” Mr. Sessions said on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to a fatal attack on Saturday when a vehicle drove into a crowd protesting white nationalists, killing one woman and injuring others. A 20-year-old man has been arrested and charged by Virginia authorities with second-degree murder,...

The leech man: Lawyer hopes nightly blood-sucking treatment will help return his sight after his 'schizophrenic son blinded him'A lawyer is hoping that a nightly blood-sucking leech treatment will help return his eyesight after his schizophrenic son allegedly blinded him in a blitz attack. John Dunlap, 80, is placing his trust in an experimental treatment that requires him to attach several leeches around his eyes so that one day he might see again. The lawyer from Memphis started the bizarre therapy after his bipolar and schizophrenic son Andrew, 41, allegedly attacked Dunlap and blinded him in 2015. With the help...

Facing overwhelming evidence against him and a possible death penalty, Esteban Santiago's legal team has only two realistic options, experts say: Try to make a swift plea agreement or pursue an insanity defense. Neither of those choices is a sure thing,.... Santiago, 26, is accused of fatally shooting five people and injuring six others last week at the international airport in Fort Lauderdale. -snip- "But you're not defending against guilt in these types of cases, you're defending against the punishment. ... -snip- Federal prosecutors rarely seek a death sentence and even more rarely persuade jurors that execution is appropriate. The...

Back then it was hard not to laugh, talking about LSD.“It was like having my own TV set, all these little colored lights. ... I had this amazing experience looking down at myself … (and) at some point while I was up there I remembered what I heard about this chap who never made it back.” Among those listening and laughing on the 1965 audio recording was Karl Menninger, one of the giants of psychiatry and co-founder of the Menninger Clinic, as he presided over an academic colloquium on hallucinogenic drugs.The speaker on the tape, a medical student who had...

Samsung unleashes 960 Pro and 960 Evo SSDs with ridiculous write speeds by Michael Passingham Samsung has launched the highest-capacity consumer M.2 SSD around, revealing the 2TB 960 PRO at an event in Seoul this morning. Not only that, the firm has also managed to improve top speeds by 40%. The top-of-the-range 960 PRO has claimed peak sequential read speeds of 3,500MB/s (megabytes per second) and write speeds of 2,100MB/s. This is up from 2,500MB/s and 1,500MB/s respectively in the previous generation launched a year ago. The 960 PRO will be available in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Squeezing 2TB...

Brian Godawa has been writing a fascinating fantasy series that takes place in the ancient Near East. It began with Noah Primeval which was rooted in the question, “What was going on in the world that was so horrible that mankind needed destroyed?” The series continued with Enoch Primordial (actually a prequel), which centered around the enigmatic Enoch. A man barely mentioned in the biblical accounts, but because he never died, and the other books attributed to him recount many a strange event, he has long been a person of high speculation. Godawa now steps out from filling in between...

I think when we express a desire to be in, or go back to, simpler days, we're really wanting less thought.

Researchers at the University of Leicester have unravelled a 2,700 year old mystery concerning The Oracle of Delphi -- by consulting an ancient farmer's manual. The researchers from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History sought to explain how people from across Greece came to consult with the Oracle... on a particular day of the year even though there was no common calendar... celestial signs observed by farmers could also have determined the rituals associated with Apollo Delphinios. Postgraduate student Alun Salt said: ..."I was playing around with a planisphere while suffering from insomnia. This is when I noticed that...

A Washington Post article about banning laptops in the classroom claims that professors have found themselves losing to the “cone of distraction” generated by these devices. It’s ironic because the universities themselves exerted strenuous efforts to ensure that every student had a laptop only to find them a nuisance. They mandated them only to ban them. > Julian Jaynes in his “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” claimed that men once heard different parts of their brain as distinct voices. “According to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state would experience the world in a...

Years ago, while with Mangyan tribesmen I concluded that these hill people could read an alphabet unknown to me. The foliage, sounds, the shift in airs, scents -- all of these -- spoke to them as directly as words in a book, though I scarcely imagined how. Later I discovered that psychologist Julian Jaynes had advanced the theory of the bicameral mind, which helped explain what I'd seen. His book, the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind suggests that our ancestors were instructed by voices and visions. They understood through a process of unconscious thinking...

Are our thoughts made of the distributed kind of electromagnetic field that permeates space and carries the broadcast signal to the TV or radio. Professor Johnjoe McFadden from the School of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the University of Surrey in the UK believes our conscious mind could be an electromagnetic field. “The theory solves many previously intractable problems of consciousness and could have profound implications for our concepts of mind, free will, spirituality, the design of artificial intelligence, and even life and death,” he said. Most people consider "mind" to be all the conscious things that we are aware...

Nobody believed him. His family told him to get help. But Timothy Trespas, an out-of-work recording engineer in his early 40s, was sure he was being stalked, and not by just one person, but dozens of them. He would see the operatives, he said, disguised as ordinary people, lurking around his Midtown Manhattan neighborhood. Sometimes they bumped into him and whispered nonsense into his ear, he said. “Now you see how it works,” they would say. At first, Mr. Trespas wondered if it was all in his head. Then he encountered a large community of like-minded people on the internet...

Following 98 patients with schizophrenia and 83 without, the team used MRI technology and a special method called "covariance analysis," to distinguish the increase of brain tissue. This is the first time such a method has been used to prove the brain's ability to reverse the illness' effects, and opens doors to possible cures. "Even the state-of-art frontline treatments aim merely for a reduction rather than a reversal of the cognitive and functional deficits caused by the illness," said research team member Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, Medical Director at the Prevention & Early Intervention Program for Psychoses at London Science Centre....

Ted Cruz said Thursday that those who contributed to the rise of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will have to "bear that responsibility going forward." Cruz appeared Thursday evening on the Houston-based "Michael Berry Show" and was asked whether he thought he was treated fairly in the GOP primary, with the host mentioning Fox News. "Well listen, there's time for recriminations and you know, everyone who was responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, they will bear that responsibility going forward," Cruz responded. "But there were more than a few players that played a disproportionate role in that rise,"...

She sure won’t have to worry about ISIS anymore. The New York woman who stabbed another woman at a Miami art show last year claimed her vicious attack was motivated by paranoia about ISIS — a defense that has earned her deportation to her native China. Siyuan Zhao, 24, took a plea deal Thursday in a Miami court. She pleaded guilty, but instead of serving prison time, she will deport herself back home for treatment, the Miami Herald reported. Zhao’s psychiatrist told the court Zhao suffers from a mental illness and hears voices in her head.