US government aims for better coordination in space weather campaign – SpaceNews

Posted on by

After decades of fighting to be taken seriously, meteorologists say space weather is beginning to get the attention it deserves.

The Trump administration continued the Space Weather Operations, Research and Mitigation (SWORM) working group established by the Obama Administration. SWORM is an interagency panel focused on coordination of federal work aimed at building resilience to the effects of space weather. In addition, space weather legislation is pending in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Everyone agrees this issue is important and it has to be addressed, Bill Murtagh, NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center program coordinator, said at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) conference in Boston earlier this year.

For years, space weather experts in government, industry and academia have been pointing out how vulnerable the electric power grid and Global Positioning System satellites are to solar storms.

The U.S. government has finally figured out that the potential for catastrophic economic impacts from a large space weather event is cause for concern, David Klumpar, director of Montana State Universitys Space Science and Engineering Lab, said by email.

Meanwhile, NASA is preparing to send people beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 50 years, exposing astronauts to higher levels of the suns radiation. Sun activity is likely to rise in the 2020s as the current solar minimum makes way for solar maximum. And the Defense Department is creating a U.S. Space Force.

As solar maximum comes again and the Space Force stands up, we will start having a lot more specific requirements, Maj. Janelle Jenniges, Air Force Space Weather Integration chief, said at the AMS conference.

Even with the renewed attention, experts say, it will take years for the U.S. government to improve the coordination of space weather activities and to fill the gaps in its space weather observing systems.

The National Academies plans to hold a workshop in mid-2020 in the Washington area to examine the U.S. space weather infrastructure and proposals for improving it.

We want to take a holistic approach rather than an ad hoc opportunistic approach, Elsayed Talaat, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Office of Projects, Planning and Analysis, said at AMS.

As those discussions take place, key U.S. and European space weather satellites are approaching the end of their lives. NASAs Advanced Composition Explorer, sent to Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1 in 1997 to monitor solar wind and energetic particles, is expected to run out of propellant around 2024. NASAs remaining Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory satellite, launched in 2006 to orbit the sun and provide imagery of coronal mass ejections and other phenomena, will detect solar activity days before it reaches Earth for about two more years. The solar panels on NASA-European Space Agency Solar and Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO) are set to stop working by 2025. SOHO has monitored coronal mass ejections from Lagrange Point 1 since 1995.

The job of replacing aging space weather satellites and launching new ones is shared by federal agencies. NASA and the National Science Foundation contribute to space weather research and modeling. NOAA issues space weather forecasts. The Defense Department creates additional classified and unclassified space weather analysis and forecasts.

U.S. Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) introduced the Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act in 2019 to clarify the roles and responsibilities of each agency with respect to space weather. The bill also calls on NOAA to develop a replacement for SOHO and directs the Department of Homeland Security to identify critical infrastructure that could be disrupted by space weather. The Senate passed similar legislation in 2017.

In the House, Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) introduced a bill, Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow, to delineate federal agency roles and encourage greater information sharing among federal, academic or commercial space weather forecasters. The House Science, Space and Technology Committee approved the legislation in January.

Space weather can cause significant damage to our infrastructure and our economy, Perlmutter told SpaceNews by email. We need to make sure we are all working together to have the best research which informs the best modeling and forecasting possible.

Although the Senate and House bills are not identical, their intent is very much the same, said a congressional aide who asked not to be identified. Our goal over the coming months is to get together on the same text of the bill. Then, we have a good shot at getting it passed in both the House and the Senate.

Meanwhile, federal agencies are developing and launching new space weather sensors.

The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center awarded contracts to Applied Technology Associates of Albuquerque New Mexico, and Teledyne Brown Engineering of Huntsville, Alabama, to build prototype Energetic Charge Particle sensors. In 2015, then-Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James issued a memo calling for future Air Force satellites to include an energetic charged particle sensor. The sensors are designed to improve Air Force space weather models and pinpoint which anomalies are caused by the actions of an adversary versus space weather.

NOAA is developing Space Weather Follow On (SWFO), a satellite destined for Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1 to house the Naval Research Laboratorys Compact Coronagraph and suite of instruments to measure solar wind. Scheduled for launch in 2024, SWFO is designed to carry on the work of SOHO and NOAAs Deep Space Climate Observatory launched in 2015.

NOAA also plans to send a second Compact Coronagraph into orbit in 2025 on Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-U.

The joint European Space Agency-NASA Solar Orbiter launched Feb. 9 to observe the suns poles, outer atmosphere and solar wind.

In 2024, NASA plans to send Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) to Lagrange Point 1 to study particles and radiation streaming from the sun toward Earth. In addition to providing real-time solar wind data, IMAP is designed to host SWFO.

NASA plans to mount another space weather instrument, the Atmospheric Waves Experiment, on the exterior of the International Space Station in 2022 to observe the light in Earths atmosphere called airglow and determine how this combination of forces drives space weather in the atmosphere, Nicola Fox, NASAs Heliophysics Division director, said at AMS.

In 2022, NASA is set to launch the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere mission to observe and track solar wind leaving the sun as well as coronal mass ejections. The PUNCH mission includes four small satellites.

Three act together to make a widefield imager and the fourth makes a narrow-field imager, Fox said. We are already talking to NOAA about how that can help with real-time aspects of space weather.

Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, a mission designed to ride into orbit as a secondary payload on PUNCH, is focused on gathering information on particles and fields in the region near the North Pole where magnetic field lines curve down toward Earth.

We are making tremendous progress, Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASAs Science Mission Directorate, said at AMS. The most important thing is to take the measurements and start driving them toward predictive power in the space weather domain.

This article originally appeared in the March 16, 2020 issue of SpaceNews magazine.

View original post here:

US government aims for better coordination in space weather campaign - SpaceNews

What is freedom of speech? | Amnesty International UK

Posted on by

Freedom of speech is the right to say whatever you like about whatever you like, whenever you like, right? Wrong.

'Freedom of speech is the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, by any means.'

Freedom ofspeech and the right to freedom of expression applies to ideas of all kinds including those that may be deeply offensive. But it comes with responsibilities and we believe it can be legitimately restricted.

You might not expect us to say this, but in certain circumstances free speech and freedom of expression can be restricted.

Governments have an obligation to prohibit hate speech and incitement. And restrictions can also be justified if they protect specific public interest or the rights and reputations of others.Any restrictions on freedom ofspeech and freedom of expression must be set out in laws that must in turn be clear and concise so everyone can understand them.People imposing the restrictions (whether they are governments, employers or anyone else) must be able to demonstrate the need for them, and they must be proportionate.

All of this has to be backed up by safeguards to stop the abuse of these restrictions and incorporate a proper appeals process.

Restrictions that do not comply with all these conditions violate freedom of expression.

We consider people put in prison solely for exercising their right to free speech to be prisoners of conscience.

Any restriction should be as specific as possible. It would be wrong to ban an entire website because of a problem with one page.

These terms must be precisely defined in law to prevent them being used as excuses for excessive restrictions.

This is a very subjective area, but any restrictions must not be based on a single tradition or religion and must not discriminate against anyone living in a particular country.

Public officials should tolerate more criticism than private individuals. So defamation laws that stop legitimate criticism of a government or public official, violate the right to free speech.

Protecting abstract concepts, religious beliefs or other beliefs or the sensibilities of people that believe them is not grounds for restricting freedom of speech.

Journalists and bloggers face particular risks because of the work they do. Countries therefore have a responsibility to protect their right to freedom of speech. Restrictions on Newspapers, TV stations, etc can affect everyones right to freedom of expression.

Government should never bring criminal proceedings against anyone who reveals information about human rights abuses.

Free speech is one of our most important rights and one of the most misunderstood.

Use your freedom of speech to speak out for those that are denied theirs. But use it responsibly: it is a powerful thing.

Read more:

What is freedom of speech? | Amnesty International UK

The myth of the free speech crisis | World news | The Guardian

Posted on by

When I started writing a column in the Guardian, I would engage with the commenters who made valid points and urge those whose response was getting lost in rage to re-read the piece and return. Comments were open for 72 hours. Coming up for air at the end of a thread felt like mooring a ship after a few days on choppy waters, like an achievement, something that I and the readers had gone through together. We had discussed sensitive, complicated ideas about politics, race, gender and sexuality and, at the end, via a rolling conversation, we had got somewhere.

In the decade since, the tenor of those comments became so personalised and abusive that the ship often drowned before making it to shore the moderators would simply shut the thread down. When it first started happening, I took it as a personal failure perhaps I had not struck the right tone or not sufficiently hedged all my points, provoking readers into thinking I was being dishonest or incendiary. In time, it dawned on me that my writing was the same. It was the commenters who had changed. It was becoming harder to discuss almost anything without a virtual snarl in response. And it was becoming harder to do so if one were not white or male.

As a result, the Guardian overhauled its policy and decided that it would not open comment threads on pieces that were certain to derail. The moderators had a duty of care to the writers, some of whom struggled with the abuse, and a duty of care to new writers who might succumb to a chilling effect if they knew that to embark on a journalism career nowadays comes inevitably with no protection from online thuggery. Alongside these moral concerns there were also practical, commercial ones. There were simply not enough resources to manage all the open threads at the same time with the increased level of attention that was now required.

In the past 10 years, many platforms in the press and social media have had to grapple with the challenges of managing users with increasingly sharp and offensive tones, while maintaining enough space for expression, feedback and interaction. Speech has never been more free or less intermediated. Anyone with internet access can create a profile and write, tweet, blog or comment, with little vetting and no hurdle of technological skill. But the targets of this growth in the means of expression have been primarily women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people.

A 2017 Pew Research Center survey revealed that a wide cross-section of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of black Americans saying they have been attacked online due to race or ethnicity. Ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reported the same. The picture is not much different in the UK. A 2017 Amnesty report analysed tweets sent to 177 female British MPs. The 20 of them who were from a black and ethnic minority background received almost half the total number of abusive tweets.

The vast majority of this abuse goes unpunished. And yet it is somehow conventional wisdom that free speech is under assault, that university campuses have succumbed to an epidemic of no-platforming, that social media mobs are ready to raise their pitchforks at the most innocent slip of the tongue or joke, and that Enlightenment values that protected the right to free expression and individual liberty are under threat. The cause of this, it is claimed, is a liberal totalitarianism that is attributable (somehow) simultaneously to intolerance and thin skin. The impulse is allegedly at once both fascist in its brutal inclinations to silence the individual, and protective of the weak, easily wounded and coddled.

This is the myth of the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political-correctness myth, but is a recent mutation more specifically linked to efforts or impulses to normalise hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it. The purpose of the myth is not to secure freedom of speech that is, the right to express ones opinions without censorship, restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the licence to speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the consequences of that expression.

The myth has two components: the first is that all speech should be free; the second is that freedom of speech means freedom from objection.

The first part of the myth is one of the more challenging to push back against, because instinctively it feels wrong to do so. It seems a worthy cause to demand more political correctness, politeness and good manners in language convention as a bulwark against societys drift into marginalising groups with less capital, or to argue for a fuller definition of female emancipation. These are good things, even if you disagree with how they are to be achieved. But to ask that we have less freedom of speech to be unbothered when people with views you disagree with are silenced or banned smacks of illiberalism. It just doesnt sit well. And its hard to argue for less freedom in a society in which you live, because surely limiting rights of expression will catch up with you at some point. Will it not be you one day, on the wrong side of free speech?

There is a kernel of something that makes all myths stick something that speaks to a sense of justice, liberty, due process and openness and allows those myths to be cynically manipulated to appeal to the good and well-intentioned. But challenging the myth of a free speech crisis does not mean enabling the state to police and censor even further. Instead, it is arguing that there is no crisis. If anything, speech has never been more free and unregulated. The purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is to guilt people into giving up their right of response to attacks, and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands, in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the free-speech-crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments.

At the same time that new platforms were proliferating on the internet, a rightwing counter-push was also taking place online. It claimed that all speech must be allowed without consequence or moderation, and that liberals were assaulting the premise of free speech. I began to notice it around the late 2000s, alongside the fashionable atheism that sprang up after the publication of Richard Dawkinss The God Delusion. These new atheists were the first users I spotted using argumentative technicalities (eg Islam is not a race) to hide rank prejudice and Islamophobia. If the Guardian published a column of mine but did not open the comment thread, readers would find me on social media and cry censorship, then unleash their invective there instead.

As platforms multiplied, there were more and more ways for me to receive feedback from readers I could be sworn at and told to go back to where I came from via at least three mediums. Or I could just read about how I should go back to where I came from in the pages of print publications, or on any number of websites. The comment thread seemed redundant. The whole internet was now a comment thread. As a result, mainstream media establishments began to struggle with this glut of opinion, failing to curate the public discussion by giving into false equivalence. Now every opinion must have a counter-opinion.

I began to see it in my own media engagements. I would be called upon by more neutral outlets, such as the BBC, to discuss increasingly more absurd arguments with other journalists or political activists with extreme views. Conversations around race, immigration, Islam and climate change became increasingly binary and polarised even when there were no binaries to be contemplated. Climate change deniers were allowed to broadcast falsehoods about a reversal in climate change. Racial minorities were called upon to counter thinly veiled racist or xenophobic views. I found myself, along with other journalists, regularly ambushed. I appeared on BBCs Newsnight to discuss an incident in which a far-right racist had mounted a mosque pavement with his car and killed one of the congregation, and I tried to make the point that there was insufficient focus on a growing far-right terror threat. The presenter then asked me: Have you had abuse? Give us an example. This became a frequent line of inquiry the personalisation and provocation of personal debate when what was needed was analysis.

It became common for me and like-minded colleagues to ask when invited on to TV or radio to discuss topics such as immigration or Islamophobia who was appearing on the other side. One British Asian writer was invited on to the BBC to discuss populist rage. When he learned that he would be debating Melanie Phillips a woman who has described immigrants as convulsing Europe and refusing to assimilate he refused to take part, because he did not believe the topic warranted such a polarised set-up. The editor said: This will be good for your book. Surely you want to sell more copies? The writer replied that if he never sold another book in his life as a result of refusing to debate with Melanie Phillips, he could live with that. This was now the discourse: presenting bigotry and then the defence of bigotry as a debate from which everyone can benefit, like a boxing match where even the loser is paid, along with the promoters, coaches and everyone else behind arranging the fight. The writer Reni Eddo-Lodge has called it performing rage.

Views previously consigned to the political fringes made their way into the mainstream via social and traditional media organisations that previously would never have contemplated their airing. The expansion of media outlets meant that it was not only marginalised voices that secured access to the public, but also those with more extreme views.

This inevitably expanded what was considered acceptable speech. The Overton window the range of ideas deemed to be acceptable by the public shifted as more views made their way from the peripheries to the centre of the conversation. Any objection to the airing of those views would be considered an attempt to curtail freedom of speech. Whenever I attempted to push back in my writing against what amounted to incitement against racial or religious minorities, my opponents fixated on the free speech argument, rather than the harmful ramifications of hate speech.

In early 2018, four extreme-right figures were turned away at the UK border. Their presence was deemed not conducive to the public good. When I wrote in defence of the Home Offices position, my email and social media were flooded with abuse for days. Rightwing media blogs and some mainstream publications published pieces saying my position was an illiberal misunderstanding of free speech. No one discussed the people who were banned, their neo-Nazi views, or the risk of hate speech or even violence had they been let in.

What has increased is not intolerance of speech; there is simply more speech. And because that new influx was from the extremes, there is also more objectionable speech and in turn more objection to it. This is what free-speech-crisis myth believers are picking up a pushback against the increase in intolerance or bigotry. But they are misreading it as a change in free speech attitudes. This increase in objectionable speech came with a sense of entitlement a demand that it be heard and not challenged, and the freedom of speech figleaf became a convenient tool. Not only do free speech warriors demand all opinions be heard on all platforms they choose, from college campuses to Twitter, but they also demand that there be no objection or reaction. It became farcical and extremely psychologically taxing for anyone who could see the dangers of hate speech, and how a sharpening tone on immigration could be used to make the lives of immigrants and minorities harder.

When Boris Johnson compared women who wear the burqa to letterboxes and bank robbers, it led to a spike in racist incidents against women who wear the niqab, according to the organisation Tell Mama, a national project which records and measures anti-Muslim incidents in the UK. Pointing this out and making the link between mockery of minorities and racist provocation against them was, according to Johnsons supporters, assailing his freedom of speech. The British journalist Isabel Oakeshott tweeted that if he were disciplined by his party for perfectly reasonable exercise of free speech, something has gone terribly wrong with the party leadership, and that it was deplorable to see [the Tory leadership] pandering to the whinings of the professionally offended in this craven way.

Free speech had seemingly come to mean that no one had any right to object to what anyone ever said which not only meant that no one should object to Johnsons comments but, in turn, that no one should object to their objection. Free speech logic, rather than the pursuit of a lofty Enlightenment value, had become a race to the bottom, where the alternative to being professionally offended is never to be offended at all. This logic today demands silence from those who are defending themselves from abuse or hate speech. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life.

Our alleged free speech crisis was never really about free speech. The backdrop to the myth is rising anti-immigration sentiment and Islamophobia. Free-speech-crisis advocates always seem to have an agenda. They overwhelmingly wanted to exercise their freedom of speech in order to agitate against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims.

But they dress these base impulses up in the language of concern or anti-establishment conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of political-correctness hysteria, there is a direct correlation between the rise in free speech panic and the rise in far-right or hard-right political energy, as evidenced by anti-immigration rightwing electoral successes in the US, the UK and across continental Europe. As the space for these views expanded, so the concept of free speech became frayed and tattered. It began to become muddled by false equivalence, caught between fact and opinion, between action and reaction. The discourse became mired in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute.

As a value in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit his analysis of perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the US constitution free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited. Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He writes that the US supreme court itself has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a crime, or fighting words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in regard to the ends of the amendment.

Those who believe in the free-speech-crisis myth fail to make the distinction between fighting words and speech that facilitates communication; between free speech and absolute speech. Using this litmus test, the first hint that the free speech crisis is actually an absolute speech crisis is the issues it focuses on. On university campuses, it is overwhelmingly race and gender. On social media, the free speech axe is wielded by trolls, Islamophobes and misogynists, leading to an abuse epidemic that platforms have failed to curb.

This free speech crisis movement has managed to stigmatise reasonable protest, which has existed for years without being branded as silencing. This is, in itself, an assault on free expression.

What is considered speech worthy of protection is broadly subjective and depends on the consensual limits a society has drawn. Western societies like to think of their version of freedom of speech as exceptionally pristine, but it is also tainted (or tempered, depending on where youre coming from) by convention.

There is only one way to register objection of abhorrent views, which is to take them on. This is a common narcissism in the media. Free speech proponents lean into the storm, take on the bad guys and vanquish them with logic. They also seem, for the most part, incapable of following these rules themselves.

Bret Stephens of the New York Times a Pulitzer prize-winning star columnist who was poached from the Wall Street Journal in 2017 often flatters himself in this light, while falling apart at most of the criticism he receives. For a man who calls for free speech and the necessity of discomfort as one of his flagship positions as a columnist, he seems chronically unable to apply that discipline to himself.

In his latest tantrum, just last week, Stephens took umbrage against a stranger, the academic David Karpf, who made a joke calling him a metaphorical bedbug on Twitter, as a riff on a report that the New York Times building was suffering from a bedbug infestation. (The implication was that Stephens is a pain and difficult to get rid of, just to kill the punchline completely.)

Stephens was alerted to the tweet, then wrote to Karpf, his provost, and the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs, where Karpf is a professor. He in effect asked to speak to Karpfs managers so that he could report on a man he doesnt know, who made a mild joke about him that would otherwise have been lost in the ether of the internet because well, because, how dare he? The powerful dont have to suffer the necessity of discomfort; its only those further down the food chain who must bear the moral burden of tolerance of abusive speech. Stephenss opponents who include Arabs, whose minds Stephens called diseased, and Palestinians, who are en masse one single mosquito frozen in amber must bear it all with good grace.

Stephens has a long record of demanding respect when he refuses to treat others with the same. In response to an objection that the New York Times had published an article about a Nazi that seemed too sympathetic, he wrote: A newspaper, after all, isnt supposed to be a form of mental comfort food. We are not an advocacy group, a support network, a cheering section, or a church affirming a particular faith except, that is, a faith in hard and relentless questioning. He called disagreement a dying art. This was particularly rich from someone who at one time left social media because it was too shouty, only to return sporadically to hurl insults at his critics.

In June 2017, Stephens publicly forswore Twitter, saying that the medium debased politics and that he would intercede only to say nice things about the writing I admire, the people I like and the music I love.

He popped up again to call ex-Obama aide Tommy Vietor an asshole (a tweet he later deleted after it was flagged as inappropriate by the New York Times). In response to a tweet by a Times colleague (who had himself deleted a comment after receiving flack for it, and admitted that it had not been well crafted), Stephens said: This. Is. Insane. And must stop. And there is nothing wrong with your original tweet, @EricLiptonNYT. And there is something deeply psychologically wrong with people who think there is. And fascistic. And yes Im still on Twitter.

A dying art indeed. Stephens again deactivated his account after bedbug-gate, retreating to the safe space of the high security towers of the New York Times where, I am told, the bedbug infestation remains unvanquished.

Stephens is a promoter of the free speech crisis myth. It is one that journalists, academics and political writers have found useful in chilling dissent. The free-speech-crisis myth serves many purposes. Often it is erected as a moral shield for risible ideas a shield that some members of the media are bamboozled into raising because of their inability to look past their commitment to free speech in the abstract.

Trolling has become an industry. It is now a sort of lucrative contact sport, where insults and lies are hurled around on television, radio, online and in the printed press. CNNs coverage of the Trump transition, after Donald Trump was elected as US president, was a modern version of a medieval freak show. Step right up and gawk at Richard Spencer, the Trump supporter and head of far-right thinktank the National Policy Institute, as he questions whether Jews are people at all, or instead soulless golem. And at the black Trump surrogate who thinks Hillary Clinton started the war in Syria. And at Corey Lewandowski, a man who appeared on CNN as a political commentator, who appears to make a living from lying in the media, and who alleged that the Trump birther story, in which Trump claimed that Barack Obama was not born on US soil, was in fact started by Hillary Clinton.

In pursuit of ratings from behind a freedom of speech figleaf, and perhaps with the good intention of balance on the part of some many media platforms have detoxified the kind of extreme or untruthful talk that was until recently confined to the darker corners of Reddit or Breitbart. And that radical and untruthful behaviour has a direct impact on how safe the world is for those smeared by these performances. Trump himself is the main act in this lucrative show. Initially seen as an entertaining side act during his election campaign, his offensive, untruthful and pugnacious online presence became instantly more threatening and dangerous once he was elected. Inevitably, his incontinence, bitterness, rage and hatemongering, by sheer dint of constant exposure, became less and less shocking, and in turn less and less beyond the pale.

A world where all opinions and lies are presented to the public as a sort of take-it-or-leave it buffet is often described as the marketplace of ideas, a rationalisation for freedom of expression based on comparing ideas to products in a free-market economy. The marketplace of ideas model of free speech holds that what is true factually, and what is good morally, will emerge after a competition of ideas in a free, unmoderated and transparent public discourse, a healthy debate in which the truth will prevail. Bad ideas and ideologies will lose out and wither away as they are vanquished by superior ones. The problem with the marketplace of ideas theory (as with all invisible hand-type theories) is that it does not account for a world in which the market is skewed, and where not all ideas receive equal representation because the market has monopolies and cartels.

But real marketplaces actually require a lot of regulation. There are anti-monopoly rules, there are interest rate fixes and, in many markets, artificial currency pegs. In the press, publishing and the business of ideas dispersal in general, there are players that are deeply entrenched and networked, and so the supply of ideas reflects their power.

Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice. The belief that it is some absolute, untainted hallmark of civilisation is linked to self-serving exceptionalism a delusion that there is a basic template around which there is a consensus uninformed by biases. The recent history of fighting for freedom of speech has gone from something noble striving for the right to publish works that offend peoples sexual or religious prudery, and speaking up against the values leveraged by the powerful to maintain control to attacking the weak and persecuted. The effort has evolved from challenging upwards to punching downwards.

It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media that has an interest in creating from the discourse as much heat as possible but not necessarily any light. Central in this process is an establishment of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be pushed. That is the marketplace of ideas now, not a free and organic exchange of intellectual goods.

The truth is that free speech, even to some of its most passionate founding philosophers, always comes with braking mechanisms, and they usually reflect cultural bias. John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use. Today, our braking mechanisms still do not include curbing the promotion of hate towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not a valued or integral part of our popular culture despite what the free-speech-crisis myth-peddlers say.

Free speech as an abstract value is now directly at odds with the sanctity of life. Its not merely a matter of offence. Judith Butler, a cultural theorist and Berkeley professor, speaking at a 2017 forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate, said: If free speech does take precedence over every other constitutional principle and every other community principle, then perhaps we should no longer claim to be weighing or balancing competing principles or values. We should perhaps frankly admit that we have agreed in advance to have our community sundered, racial and sexual minorities demeaned, the dignity of trans people denied, that we are, in effect, willing to be wrecked by this principle of free speech.

We challenge this instrumentalisation by reclaiming the true meaning of the freedom of speech (which is freedom to speak rather than a right to speak without consequence), challenging hate speech more forcefully, being unafraid to contemplate banning or no-platforming those we think are harmful to the public good, and being tolerant of objection to them when they do speak. Like the political-correctness myth, the free-speech-crisis myth is a call for orthodoxy, for passiveness in the face of assault.

A moral right to express unpopular opinions is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence. There are those who abuse free speech, who wish others harm, and who roll back efforts to ensure that all citizens are treated with respect. These are facts and free-speech-crisis mythology is preventing us from confronting them.

This is an edited extract from We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent, published by W&N on 5 September and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

The rest is here:

The myth of the free speech crisis | World news | The Guardian

Free Speech Quotes (167 quotes) – goodreads.com

Posted on by

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendshipthough I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

Go here to read the rest:

Free Speech Quotes (167 quotes) - goodreads.com

Seares: The virus hasn’t killed Mabatid’s right to free speech — or the right’s limits – Yahoo Philippines News

Posted on by

FIRST, on things that Cebu City Councilor Nia Mabatid is right about the coronavirus that now afflicts community, country and the world.

[1] She is right about being free to speak out, not just "as a public official and chairwoman of the committee on health of the City Council," but as an individual citizen of the country and resident of the city. The virus has not killed free speech, not yet anyway.

[2] She has the right to be concerned about the threat of the pandemic and to disagree with the Department of Health's status report that Cebu is Covid-free.

DOH figures may not reflect the true state of health of Cebu as few tests have been made here and many results still have to be sent to Manila for confirmation. Although though not a health expert, Mabatid must have kept herself fully informed about coronavirus and the methods to attack and contain the enemy.

[3] She has the right to be impatient over what she sees as slow response of government and apathy of some Cebu residents, partly caused by the failure to know the real extent of the virus's assault as reflected in the "Covid-free" official figures that are publicized.

Given the experience of other countries that were quick and efficient and those that were not, Mabatid must have been frightened about where we were going.

Unverified, unconfirmed

But Mabatid was obviously wrong in a few other things, which happen to matter more in this time of emergency:

[1] She shouldn't have publicized what she said she heard from a doctor about the death of three patients in a hospital until they were officially confirmed to have died because of coronavirus.

The DOH procedure, which follows World Health Organization standard, was precisely set up to avoid the confusion that could result from contradictory and unverified news.

Mabatid herself qualified her post of bad news with such words as "suspected" and "unconfirmed" but the way it was presented, along with the tantalizing description "first-hand,' was enough to create some uproar.

Coming from a public official who is vice chairperson of the City Council committee on health, the post packed a wallop heavier than one from an ordinary social media user.

[2] She should've used her position in government to relay her "valuable" information to DOH, the city mayor and the City Council where it could've been assessed and perhaps used to influence changes in local strategy in the fight against coronavirus.

Unverified information could harm a public gripped with uncertainty and fear. Mabatid said she did it "for the good of Cebuanos." If it is grade-A I dossier and not fake news, as police suspect her of circulating, it would do some good if it were brought to the attention of the decision-makers, in this case the inter-agency task force and the local leaders.

The Facebook is a public market where regulators cannot stop half-lies and outright falsehoods from being displayed and circulated before they can be taken down. And even the freedom to bring out "what's on one's mind" does not include the right to defame other people, incite sedition or rebellion, or, in Mabatid's case, set off confusion or panic. The laws against those crimes must tell the councilor that freedom of speech cannot always be a defense or an excuse. Although she didn't libel anyone, she gave raw information, which during a crisis times are deemed false unless proven otherwise.

Mabatid's message

In various FB posts, including posters and video clips, Mabatid has kept repeating the message: She fears for her constituents, especially those who are poor and others not privileged. She worries about the health system not adequate to meet a deluge of infected persons; she wants to help them, which she articulates in an multimedia message that top local officials still have to duplicate. And she is helping now by using the City Council to persuade creditors to put off collection bills and by engaging in a campaign to disinfect barangay streets.

Critics may question her motive but they have no proof of ill intent in her self-advertising, which most politicians do all the time anyway. Supporters applaud what she's doing during the period of emergency but they're wary about her prattle about unconfirmed deaths.

Read the original:

Seares: The virus hasn't killed Mabatid's right to free speech -- or the right's limits - Yahoo Philippines News

People Go Before Money. This Is About Saving Lives, Says San Juan Mayor on Pandemic in Puerto Rico – Free Speech TV

Posted on by

Puerto Rico announced a record $787 million financial package to fight the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic Monday, as the islands death toll hits two with 39 cases reported.

The pandemic follows a series of devastating earthquakes in Puerto Rico earlier this year and comes as the island continues to deal with fallout from Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Ricos infrastructure and killed at least 3,000.

One of the things that I think is evident, with the Trump administration and FEMA, we have to continue to remind them time and time again that we are people and that we deserve to be treated with the same sense of justice, urgency and dignity as anybody else, says DN guest, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yuln Cruz.

Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzlez.

Our reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the worlds most pressing issues.

On DN!, youll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events.

Missed an episode? Check out DN on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

#FreeSpeechTV is one of the last standing national, independent news networks committed to advancing progressive social change.

#FSTV is available on Dish, DirectTV, AppleTV, Roku, Sling and online at freespeech.org.

Amy Goodman Carmen Yuln Cruz Coronavirus COVID-19 Democracy Now! Free Speech TV Pandemic Puerto Rico

Read the rest here:

People Go Before Money. This Is About Saving Lives, Says San Juan Mayor on Pandemic in Puerto Rico - Free Speech TV

How Christian Nationalism Is Infecting the United States – Free Speech TV

Posted on by

Katherine Stewart, author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism," joins David Pakman to discuss religious nationalism, the so-called culture war, and much more. Stewart is an American journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Reuters, The Atlantic, Newsweek International, Rolling Stone, The New York Observer, The Nation, The American Prospect, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Santa Barbara Magazine, and others.

The David Pakman Show is a news and political talk program, known for its controversial interviews with political and religious extremists, liberal and conservative politicians, and other guests.

Missed an episode? Check out TDPS on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

#FreeSpeechTV is one of the last standing national, independent news networks committed to advancing progressive social change. .

#FSTV is available on Dish, DirectTV, AppleTV, Roku, Sling and online at freespeech.org

Christian Nationalism Christianity David Pakman Donald Trump Katherine Stewart Rise of Religious Nationalism The David Pakman Show The Power Worshippers

More:

How Christian Nationalism Is Infecting the United States - Free Speech TV

A Hong Kong coronavirus warning and other commentary – New York Post

Posted on by

Foreign desk: A Hong Kong Corona Warning

Only a week ago, Hong Kong seemed like a model for how to contain the novel coronavirus, with just some 150 cases, but now, CNNs James Griffiths notes, its providing a very different object lesson what happens when you let your guard down too soon. Many Hong Kong residents left when the city seemed destined for a major outbreak but returned when all seemed safe and they are bringing the virus back with them. In response, the city has implemented draconian new controls, which shows that quarantines and social distancing must continue well beyond the initial wave of cases, if another round of infections is to be avoided. Thats Asias latest lesson for the West: Even when it seems the coast is clear, keep your guard up.

Campaign watch: Not-So-Presidential Joe

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden had gone unseen for some time in the midst of the coronavirus crisis but after Bidens Monday public address, snarks the editorial board of Issues & Insights, his supporters might want him to go back into hiding. Biden seemed tired, had a leaden delivery, slurred his words and repeatedly stumbled in his remarks, despite reading them from a teleprompter. The contents of his speech werent any better than his delivery, either: After inviting President Donald Trump to refrain from attacking his political opponents, for one thing, Biden proceeded to preview a lengthy political attack on Trump. He ended by attempting lofty rhetoric that fell horribly flat something that characterized the entire speech.

Progressive: Cure Isnt Worse Than Disease

At The Hill, public-policy prof Stuart Shapiro cites several reasons why the economic pain from government restrictions to fight COVID-19 arent worse than the disease. For starters, much of the slowdown was happening without government intervention. The NBA ended its season and airlines canceled flights on their own, because of the economics of their businesses. Meanwhile, government can mitigate the economic damage via bills like the stimulus package. And while COVID-19 might cause only tens of thousands of deaths, there are credible estimates that the US death toll could be in the millions. Few outcomes could be more horrible than doing too little to contain COVID-19, Shapiro argues. While we can use policy to temper the economic costs, we cant use it to bring loved ones back.

From the left: A Mail-In Election Is Unlikely

Despite a pandemic-driven flurry of calls for a massive expansion of voting by mail, including legislation backed by Senate Democrats like Amy Klobuchar, its an unlikely answer now, reports ProPublicas Jessica Huseman. While it may seem an elegant solution as the United States grapples with containing COVID-19, experts say slow-moving state and county governments, inconsistent state rules and limited resources to buy essentials such as envelopes and scanners make it nigh impossible to mail ballots to 200 million registered voters by November. US jurisdictions have taken years to move to vote-by-mail six years in Washington states case. And all sides agree that mail-in ballots are the form of voting most vulnerable to fraud. Indeed, ballot-harvesting scandals, in which political operatives tamper with absentee ballots that voters have entrusted to them, have marred recent elections in North Carolina and Texas.

Libertarian: How Speech Reduces Pandemics

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese authorities muzzled dissenters, making several critics disappear. It shows, Reasons Zach Weissmuller observes, the enormous difference between a country that jails dissenting voices and a country with strong First Amendment protections. US officials, after all, also tried to downplay the crisis yet the free speech on platforms like Twitter and Facebook allowed medical professionals, technologist, epidemiologists and everyday citizens to bypass the mainstream media and the government to implore their fellow citizens to act. Conversation on social media may be chaotic and confusing, but its free, and thats a powerful weapon in this global emergency.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

See the rest here:

A Hong Kong coronavirus warning and other commentary - New York Post

Beware Is The Message Here! – Free Speech TV

Posted on by

In this clip from The Randi Rhodes Show, Randi discusses Trump's calendar of lies, Paula White's campaign to make money for her church amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA's cease and desist letter to Jim Baker and more!

The Randi Rhodes Show delivers smart, forward, free-thinking, entertaining, liberal news and opinion that challenge the status quo and amplifies free speech.

Dedicated to social justice, Randi puts her reputation on the line for the truth. Committed to the journalistic standards that corporate media often ignores, The Randi Rhodes Show takes enormous pride in bringing the power of knowledge to her viewers.

Watch The Randi Rhodes Show every weekday at 3 pm ET on Free Speech TV & catch up with clips from the program down below!

Missed an episode? Check out The Randi Rhodes Show on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

#FSTV is available on Dish, DirectTV, AppleTV, Roku, Sling and online at freespeech.org

See original here:

Beware Is The Message Here! - Free Speech TV

EARN IT: The US Anti-Encryption Bill That Threatens Private Speech… – Bitcoin Magazine

Posted on by

Theres a new bill in the works to fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other risky services on the internet but it could come at a cost to online privacy.

Eliminating Abusive or Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) was proposed by the Senate Judiciary Committee and sponsored by senators from both sides of the aisle such as Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). The bill is also supported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

However, this bill is problematic for both freedom of speech and privacy online according to Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Center for Internet and Society.

This bill is trying to convert your anger at Big Tech into law enforcements long-desired dream of banning strong encryption, argued Pfefferkorn in a blog post. Pfefferkorns detailed explanation says EARN IT appears less like a legitimate way to prevent the spread of child exploitation content and more like a covert attempt to ban end-to-end encryption, without having to ban it outright.

At the end of January 2020, a draft of the proposal was leaked and met with similar apprehension not only by Big tech juggernauts (Facebook, Google, etc.) but also their sometimes opposing counterparts, freedom of speech advocates.

Were concerned the EARN IT Act may be used to roll back encryption, which protects everyones safety from hackers and criminals, and may limit the ability of American companies to provide the private and secure services that people expect, Facebook spokesperson Thomas Richards said in a statement to the Washington Post.

Clearly, the issue could not be more sensitive. Patrick A. Trueman, president and CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, recently voiced this opinion, apparently advocating for EARN IT.

Right now, Big Tech has no incentive to prevent predators from grooming, recruiting, and trafficking children online and as a result countless children have fallen victim to child abusers on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, said Trueman.

While everyone who has publicly condemned EARN IT has also stated a universal commitment to child safety online and in the real world, many say the bills far-reaching approach to content moderation could do more harm than good by essentially eliminating private conversations across the internet, particularly on social media platforms and messaging apps.

To fully comprehend what EARN IT proposes, one needs to understand the importance of two bills passed in the 90s. These laid the groundwork for how privacy and free speech are supposed to operate for U.S. citizens.

First, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), passed in 1996, allows for the continued development of the internet as a free market and universal good for free speech. Section 230 says that online platforms or providers of interactive computer services mostly cannot be held responsible for the things their users say or do on their platforms. It uses the term mostly instead of always because platforms are still liable for exceptions that violate intellectual and federal criminal law. Essentially, this means if someone is defamed for being a fraud, that person can sue their defamer, but they cannot sue the platform for providing the space for free speech.

Second, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, requires telecom providers to make their networks wiretappable for law enforcement. However, it also ensured a carve-out for encrypted messages and information services where websites, email, social media, messaging apps and cloud storage fall out of CALEAs jurisdiction.

The purpose of these carve-outs was to reach a compromise between the competing interests of network security providers, privacy advocates, civil liberties, technological growth and law enforcement. In combination, Section 230 and CALEA prevent regulation from suffocating growth and development of the U.S. information economy.

Since the 90s, more regulation has passed to undo Section 230. Section 230 has been amended since it was passed: SESTA/FOSTA, enacted in 2018, pierces providers immunity from civil and state-law claims about sex trafficking, wrote Pfefferkorn. SESTA/FOSTA is currently being challenged in federal court being unconstitutional and doing more harm than good.

There is also already a regulatory reporting scheme for online providers combatting CSAM. Also, Section 230 does not keep federal prosecutors from holding providers accountable for CSAM on their services.

While the current reporting schemes success is questionable, there is reasonable evidence to believe that EARN IT is an attempt to regulate communication on the internet more broadly.

The so-called EARN IT bill will strip Section 230 protections away from any website that doesnt follow a list of best practices, meaning those sites can be sued into bankruptcy, writes Joe Mullin, a policy analyst with the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

Mullin is referring to how EARN IT would target CSAM. It proposes to do this by creating a federal commission to develop a list of best practices for preventing CSAM that online platform providers would have to follow or else lose their immunity under Section 230 meaning they could be sued into bankruptcy. This commission would largely be made up of law enforcement and allied groups such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

According to Mullin, The best practices list will be created by a government commission, headed by Attorney General Barr, who has made it very clear he would like to ban encryption and guarantee law enforcement legal access to any digital message.

Although the word encryption does not appear anywhere in the EARN IT bill, Mullin is suspicious of how the federal commission might design best practices. For instance, in an earlier draft of the bill, the NCMEC Vice-President stated that online services should be made to screen all messages using screening technology approved by themselves and law enforcement, report what they find in messages to the NCMEC and be held legally responsible for the content of the messages sent by others.

In short, the commission could quietly give backdoor access to all U.S. hosted information services, undoing encrypted messages altogether.

Mullin, Pfefferkorn and other outspoken critics of EARN IT all agree that the bills proposed execution is opening the door for the elimination of encryption: the fact that it is never explicitly addressed is especially concerning..

According to Mullin, its also possible that the current draft of EARN IT will be amended to undo the damage it could do to online privacy. Could be as straightforward as putting a clause in[,] saying the bill doesnt apply to encryption, he writes.

However, until some amendment occurs, critics are wary of a federal commission consisting of fewer than twenty people, according to the latest reports, who would be making large-scale privacy and security decisions for the entire U.S. population.

Such a potentially big power grab would seem a bit ridiculous, but Pfefferkorn also acknowledged that EARN IT rides on a wave of resentment or techlash the U.S. population has begun to harbor against many internet-based companies. This animosity is directed toward both U.S. tech juggernauts, whose business models run off of surveillance capitalism and online free speech platforms which, for the average person, can feel like the concentrated font of human venality every time we open our phones, according to Pfefferkorn.

In general, free speech on social media platforms is already a nuanced and complicated topic. Even under Section 230, social media platforms can still censor content when they deem it inappropriate internally. For example, Twitter has a keyword blacklist and the protocol for how it works can change on a dime.

For Nozomi Hayase, social psychologist and writer, surveillance of encrypted messaging is a movement toward forfeiting democracy. By Hayases reasoning, privacy is a prerequisite for a kind of solitude that allows people to think and act independently and is, therefore, essential to a functioning democratic society.

Democracy requires sovereign individuals who are able to communicate with one another freely. This freedom comes with great responsibility, said Hayase, who recognized EARN IT as the newest installment of a dangerous trend toward online censorship. If we really want to have a truly democratic society, we have to accept the fact that it is the duty of each person to develop his or her own moral capacity to determine what is right and wrong, instead of depending on an external authority to tell us what we should or should not do.

Currently, EARN IT has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Citizens can contact their congressmen directly or take action through the Electronic Frontier Foundations website.

View post:

EARN IT: The US Anti-Encryption Bill That Threatens Private Speech... - Bitcoin Magazine

The 12 Most Popular Psychedelic Drugs | Ocean Breeze Recovery

Posted on by

From attempts to see with the third eye to clandestine government operations, Americans have been fascinated by the confounding effects of psychedelic drugs. Despite thousands of scientific papers that have been written about many of the substances in the list below, we still dont know everything there is to know about hallucinogenic drugs. Part of that is because we still have a lot to learn about the human brain.

Serotonergic (classical psychedelic drugs)

Serotonergic (classical psychedelic drugs) these are usually what the layman (or woman) thinks of when they conjure up an idea of psychedelic drugs. LSD, DMT, and mescaline all fall into this category. Using these drugs will cause drastic changes in your sensory perception including visual and audible hallucinations.

Empathogens

Empathogens these drugs affect the neurons that release serotonin, giving the user the feeling of euphoria, love, and increased attentiveness and awareness. A typical high from one of these psychedelics usually involves relatively mild changes to perception such as audio and visual stimuli.

Dissociatives

Dissociatives the two key things that dissociatives do is create a sense of depersonalization and derealization. Users tend to feel a disconnect from the world, their surroundings, and even their own bodies.

Psychedelics arent often chemically addictive, and some have even been studied as possible aids in addiction treatment. Addiction is often caused by direct alteration of brain chemistry, and psychedelics often have a low impact on brain chemistry, except for indirect influences. However, they do have a high risk of abuse, and some can cause lasting psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder and even psychosis. Some substances can cause psychological addiction when a person becomes emotionally dependent on the drug. And other synthetic psychedelics are believed to be habit forming.

Keep reading to learn about the most popular psychedelic drugs and how they affect your body and brain.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as acid or LSD, is possibly the most well known psychedelic drug. Popularized by the 1960s counterculture, LSD made its way into pop culture with public figures like the Beatles admitting to using it. The chemical was also the subject of a wide range scientific study throughout the 20th century, including the CIAs illegal and controversial Project MKUltra.

LSD alters awareness and perceptions and may also cause hallucinations. It is not chemically addictive but can cause some negative effects like anxiety and paranoia. Some research shows an increased likelihood of developing psychological disorders like schizophrenia in adults with other risk factors.

Psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, a group of fungi that have been used since prehistoric times as an entheogen and hallucinogenic drug. The substance psilocybin is found in a variety of genera, with over 100 species in the genus Psilocybin, though the mushrooms of that genus usually dont produce hallucinations.

Psilocybin causes an increase in empathy, euphoria, and altered thinking. In some species, it can cause open and closed eye visuals.

Though they arent chemically addictive and they dont represent a significant health threat, they are hard to distinguish from deadly mushrooms. Toxic species like Death Caps can look identical to some species of psilocybin and grow in the same places.

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, better known as DMT, was popularized by two researchers in the late 20th century. Scientist Rick Strassman studied it extensively in the 1990s and gave it the nickname the Spirit Molecule. Terence Mckenna, an ethnobotanist, studied and described the effects of the DMT in detail.

DMT has been used for possibly thousands of years by Amazonian tribes that activate DMT innately in rainforest plants by brewing it in tea, called ayahuasca with MAOIs (which is necessary to make it active when ingested).

The substance may be among the most powerful psychedelic drugs on earth, with potential for powerful visual hallucinations. There is little evidence to suggest that it could cause chemical dependence or medical complications. However, there is a chance that psychological issues may develop from bad trips.

Mescaline is a psychedelic alkaloid thats found in a number of southwestern cacti like peyote, the San Pedro cactus, and the Peruvian torch. Peyote is popularly used by Native American shaman in religious ceremonies. The drug is illegal in the US but special exceptions are made for groups that use it for religious purposes.

Mescaline causes color enhancements, euphoria, and an increase in introspection. Users often report having personal epiphanies on while on the drug. When ingested, the peyote cactus is bitter and can commonly cause nausea and vomiting. Mescaline, like other psychedelic drugs, has a potential for psychological addiction. However, it isnt chemically addictive and has a very low physical risk for healthy users.

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as MDMA, ecstasy, or molly is an entactogen which is a class of drugs that produce a feeling of communion or oneness with others. Unlike the rest of the top five psychedelic drugs, MDMA is most often used as a party drug. Other hallucinogens require careful attention to set and setting, the users mindset and the place they are using. In loud, crowded settings, users increase their likelihood of a bad trip.

MDMAs effects; however, have a larger emphasis on increased empathy and emotional connection. It also elevates mood and sometimes facilitates a mental and physical euphoria. In some users, MDMA can create mild hallucinations like color changes or heightened audio effects.

MDMA causes dehydration and raises your body temperature which means users are required to drink water consistently while high. MDMA has been recorded leading to fatal medical complications due to hyperthermia and dehydration, especially when combined with alcohol.

25I-NBOMe, better known as N-Bomb or simply 25I, is a synthetic designer drug that is used for neurochemistry and brain mapping. Its also a potent psychedelic hallucinogen. Like its cousins in the 2C family of synthetic drugs, 25I is used recreationally for its similarity to MDMA. It causes an increase in empathy and affection as well as visual hallucinations. It may also cause extreme anxiety or a feeling of doom.

Unlike the 2C family and MDMA, 25I is fatal at high doses. An effective dose is less than a milligram, while similar synthetic hallucinogens require anywhere between 3 to 10 mg. There have been several recorded instances of overdose caused by mistaken identity.

Salvinorin A, or salvia, is a psychoactive drug that comes from the Salvia divinorum, a plant thats native to the high mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Salvia is unique in its chemical structure when compared to other naturally occurring psychedelics. Unlike other psychedelic drugs, its not an alkaloid, but rather, a terpenoid, which is a broad category of organic chemicals.

Saliva is a dissociative, a class of psychoactive drugs that distortsight and sound which makes users feel detached from the world around them or even from themselves. Hallucinogenic effects can cause trance-like-states, anxiety, and dysphoria.

Salvinorin A is federally legal in the US, but some states like Florida consider it a controlled substance.

Phencyclidine, or PCP, is a synthetic drug that also causes dissociative hallucinations. PCP was originally synthesized as an anesthetic for medical use. Because of its side effects, which can include mania, delirium, and disorientation, use in humans was discontinued in the 1950s.

Unlike other psychedelic drugs, PCP is considered to be moderately addictive, and there is some threat of developing psychological issues.

Ketamine is a precursor to PCP and was synthesized for the same purpose, as an anesthetic for use in surgeries. It can cause sedation and memory loss as a side effect and was later restricted to veterinary use. Its recreational use causes similar effects to PCP and it, too, has a low to moderate addiction potential.

Dextromethorphan, or DXM, is the one drug on this list that has the most accidental usage. DXM is a common active ingredient in a cough suppressing medicines like Vicks, NyQuil, Robitussin, and many others. At high doses, it can cause dissociative hallucinogenic effects like PCP or ketamine. However, it is less likely to cause addiction or dependence.

Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, or GHB, is a psychoactive drug that naturally occurs in the brain as a neurotransmitter. It has been used medically as an anesthetic and for treatment of narcolepsy. When used recreationally, users report effects similar to alcohol or MDMA and, like MDMA, it is often used in clubs and at raves. In rat studies, GHB has shown to be habit forming, and some users report feeling withdrawal symptoms after stopping use.

The 2C family is a group of synthetic psychedelics used as designer drugs and MDMA analogs. They were first synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin in the 1970s. Since then they have been used to circumvent legal bans on MDMA. Many members of the group, like 2C-I and 2C-B cause stimulation, euphoria, increased heart rate, color enhancement, and hallucinations. Different members of the 2C family have different effective doses, and they can be hard to tell apart. This can lead to overdose in cases of mistaken identity.

Marijuana does not make the top 12 despite the fact that it is widely used and some psychologists consider it as a psychedelic drug. However, the number one defining attribute is that a psychedelics primary action is to alter cognition or perception. While marijuana may do this in some situations, it is primarily used for mood-heightening and relaxing effects.

Another psychedelic thats growing in popularity is ibogaine, a substance found in plants that are native to West Africa and used in tribal rituals. It hasnt reached a high level of recreational use compared to some of the drugs on the list. However, it is being studied as an experimental addiction treatment drug in some countries. Though it has shown some potentially dangerous effects on the heart.

If you are struggling addiction or drug abuse of any kind, you are not alone. Psychedelic drugs are often used alongside more dangerous substances with serious side effects and withdrawal symptoms.

Read more:

The 12 Most Popular Psychedelic Drugs | Ocean Breeze Recovery

Green Rush Podcast: Bruce Linton On Psychedelics, Listing On The NEO, And The Difference Between ‘Going Public’ And ‘Being Public’ – Benzinga

Posted on by

Bruce Linton, formerly the CEO of cannabis behemoth Canopy Growth (NYSE: CGC) and now Director of Mind Medicine (OTC: MMEDF) is this weeks guest on The Green Rush! Since his departure from Canopy in 2019, Bruce has since moved onto several new ventures within the cannabis and psychedelics spaces but is still the unquestioned face of the industry. Started with CNBCs Kevin OLeary, Bruces most notable role right now is with Mind Medicine, a neuro-pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops and deploys psychedelic inspired medicines to improve health, promote wellness and alleviate suffering.

Fresh off taking Mind Med public on the NEO Exchange, Bruce sat down with Lewis to chat about what hes been up to since his departure from Canopy. The two touch on all of the headlines dominating the cannabis industry including most notably the public markets and capital crunch as well as what his outlook is for the long and short-term future of the space. In addition, the two tackle the burgeoning psychedelics industry and explore the work that Mind Med is currently undergoing, why now was the time to take the company public and what convinced Bruce that psychedelics were the real deal.

In addition, the pair discuss Bruces other cannabis ventures including his roles at Vireo Health (OTC: VREOF), Better Choice Company (OTC: BTTR) and Gage Cannabis.

As most know, Bruce is a one-of-a-kind leader in this space and his interview with Lewis provides a ton of great insights on how he is approaching the future.

Dont sit back, lean forward and enjoy!

See Also: Green Rush Podcast: Vanguard Scientific's Matthew Anderson On The Cannabis Capital Crunch And Ancillary Services

Bruce Linton, Director of Mind Medicine Inc.

Bruce has a passion for entrepreneurship and making a positive difference in the world. He brings a wealth of experience in building strong technology driven companies, developing world class teams and positioning his companies to deliver exceptional customer value and service.In his newly appointed role as an Active Advisor, Bruce will serve as Executive Chairman with GAGE Cannabis Co., following completion of the acquisition of Innovations GAGE is innovating and curating the highest quality cannabis experiences possible for patients in the state of Michigan and bringing internationally renowned brands to market.

See Also: Green Rush Podcast: ELLO's Hershel Gerson Says The Average Cannabis Company Has 6 Months Of Cash Before They Run Out

He is Special Advisor with Better Choice Company (BTTR) BTTR is an animal health and wellness cannabinoid company that acquired TruPet LLC, an online seller of ultra-premium, all-natural pet food, treats and supplements, with a special focus on freeze dried and dehydrated raw products. And Director with MindMed MindMed is assembling a drug development pipeline of psychedelic inspired medicines planning or undertaking FDA trials.Bruce is also an Activist Investor with SLANG Worldwide Inc. (OTC: SLGWF) is a leading global cannabis consumer packaged goods company with a robust portfolio of renowned brands distributed across 2,600 stores in 12 U.S. states. And with OG DNA Genetics Inc. (DNA) DNA has built and curated a seasoned genetic library and developed proven standard operating procedures for genetic selection, breeding, and cultivation.He is the Founder and Former Chairman and CEO of Canopy Growth Corporation (CGC/WEED), Co-Chairman and past CEO of Martello Technologies, and Co?founder of Ruckify & Better Software.

Links and mentions in the show

Links to the guests company and social media accounts

Show Credits:

This episode was hosted by Lewis Goldberg of KCSA Strategic Communications.

Special thanks to our Executive Producer Nick Opich and Program Director Shea Gunther.

For cannabis and psychedelics content in Spanish, check out El Planteo.

The preceding article is from one of our external contributors. It does not represent the opinion of Benzinga and has not been edited.

2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Link:

Green Rush Podcast: Bruce Linton On Psychedelics, Listing On The NEO, And The Difference Between 'Going Public' And 'Being Public' - Benzinga

Microdosing: taking illegal psychedelic drugs as a form of therapy – does it actually work? – Now To Love

Posted on by

Anxiety is a modern epidemic. Officially it affects around one in four New Zealanders but talk to anyone who works in our schools and universities and they will tell you the problem is far bigger than that.

Young people are suffering and mental health services are struggling to help. Last year, one US study showed the percentage of 18- to 26-year-olds suffering from an anxiety disorder had doubled since 2008. And it seems that women are far more likely to experience psychological distress than men.

What if there was a new therapy for anxiety non-invasive, no side effects, you'd barely even know you were on it except you felt calmer? What if that same treatment could work for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, support the mental health of cancer patients, help in palliative care, control addiction, maybe even boost everyday mood and enhance work performance? Many people believe this potent remedy already exists it is called microdosing and currently, it is against the law.

Microdosing involves taking tiny amounts of illegal psychedelic drugs such as LSD or magic mushrooms, at about a tenth of the usual dose potentially all that is required to make changes in the brain.

It first took off in Silicon Valley where microdosing is one way high performing professionals are trying to give themselves an edge in a competitive business. They believe it boosts creativity and focus, increases productivity, improves sleep and helps them manage stress.

Despite its illegality, the practice is now becoming more widespread.

It may sound like microdosing is the latest and greatest life hack, but so far there isn't much solid scientific evidence to back it up, only a lot of chatter. The man who may be set to change that is Dr Suresh Muthukumaraswamy at Auckland University.

He has spent his career looking at how various therapies affect brain activity and this year will embark on a world-first study to see if microdosing really is as effective as enthusiasts claim.

It has taken a long time to get the ethics approval and funding needed, but partly thanks to a large donation from Silicon Valley, the project is set to go. Dr

Suresh says that while there are many interesting claims about the benefits of microdosing, the few laboratory studies so far haven't found any positive results. This may be due to the placebo effect people believe a drug is going to work and so it seems to but there is another possible explanation.

"Laboratory studies are tremendously boring," Dr Suresh explains. "You come into a sterile environment, take the dose and then you're monitored, probed and prodded for six hours. It's not a good reflection of what is happening when people take a microdose of LSD, then go out and engage with the world, do their job, live their life. If this drug is a platform that enhances experience, then perhaps you need to have an experience."

His University of Auckland trial will involve 40 healthy male volunteers no women this time round because the hormonal activity of the menstrual cycle creates changes in the brain and makes the testing process more complex.

For six weeks, half the men will take a microdose of pharmaceutical grade LSD and half a placebo, then they'll switch. No one will have any idea whether they are on the real drug or the fake, and crucially they will be allowed to take the pills home and experience microdosing "in the wild", rather than solely in the lab.

"People will be filling in nightly questionnaires about things like mood, wellbeing, concentration and any negative effects. And we'll bring them into the lab to do more involved assessments of brain function," says Dr Suresh.

Modern imaging techniques, such as fMRI, mean scientists can actually see what is going on in the brains of people who are taking these drugs. When he was based in the UK, Dr Suresh was involved in one trial where participants took a full dose of LSD and it was found that parts of the brain that don't normally connect with one another, started to communicate.

LSD, commonly known as acid, is a synthetic chemical that binds to the serotonin receptors in the brain. In small amounts, it produces mild changes in perception, mood and thought. When larger doses are taken it can cause visual hallucinations and an altered sense of time.

The heyday of LSD was the 1960s when the US psychologist and writer Timothy Leary urged people to take an acid trip to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", but humans actually have a far longer history of using psychedelics.

In South America, shamans have used a plant-based psychoactive tea called ayahuasca in traditional healing rituals and ceremonies for centuries. And there is archaeological evidence that shows people were taking magic mushrooms thousands of years ago.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelics. Scientists around the world have been looking at how MDMA (ecstasy) might help patients with severe PTSD; at how ayahuasca might be used to treat depression; how LSD may be helpful for addiction and severe phobias; and how psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, might be a breakthrough for hard-to-treat health and mental health issues.

Aucklander Amadeus Diamond runs a Facebook page called Psychedelics New Zealand and has set up the Entheos Foundation with the aim of raising funds for local research and education.

Amadeus works in finance and isn't a microdoser himself, but is excited about the potential of these drugs to help those dealing with everything from addiction to PTSD and depression, and frustrated that their illegality is making it difficult for sufferers to access them.

"I want to help," he says. "I want to put the word out and get these things to the point where people can benefit from them."

Since the publication of US writer Michael Pollan's book, How To Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics in 2018, he says there has been a surge in interest.

"I'm getting six or seven messages a week from people saying, 'I have PTSD' or 'I'm depressed' or 'A family member is suffering from depression, please help.' And it breaks my heart when I have to say I can't. All I'm able to do is point them in the direction of the best research.

"I can't help them source illegal drugs and I can't encourage them to self-medicate because that would be irresponsible."

Illegality notwithstanding, there are other reasons why self-medicating with hallucinogens could be a bad idea. Drugs sold as LSD may actually contain other substances, some of them more dangerous and stronger, so it is easy to take too much.

Pick the wrong mushroom and rather than it being 'magic', it could paralyse and kill you. If you are taking other drugs such as SSRIs or have mental health issues, it might make things worse rather than better.

For Laura*, those risks appear to have been worth it. Since she was a child, she has struggled with anxiety. Her panic attacks were sometimes so severe that she would black out.

"There didn't seem to be a trigger," she recalls. "It would happen randomly while I was at school or walking down the street. Then a couple of years ago my anxiety got so bad I didn't want to leave the house."

Laura, a South Island mother with a corporate job, knew she needed help. She went to her GP who prescribed a class of anti-depressants known as SSRIs that increase levels of the mood-regulating hormone, serotonin, in the brain.

Laura had tried taking them previously while suffering post-natal depression and the drugs hadn't agreed with her. Still, she didn't think there was another option.

"Then, after I started taking them, I couldn't get out of bed for a month," she says.

So her doctor took her off the anti-depressants and Laura made the decision to leave her stressful job and study psychology. That was when she started learning about the healing potential of psychedelic drugs. Laura was most interested in the idea of microdosing.

"I did a lot of reading and got information on how to go about it," she says. "I was lucky there was someone I knew and trusted who had access to LSD and they sold me some."

The first time she tried it, Laura microdosed for a week and there was a real impact on her anxiety. "Suddenly I wanted to go out of the house again. I had conversations where I didn't feel awkward. Probably the biggest thing I noticed was that I wasn't ruminating about the past or feeling anxious about the future."

The beneficial effect lasted for five weeks. Since then, Laura has tried microdosing twice more and says her panic attacks are now a thing of the past. "It's made a huge difference to my life," she says.

LSD is a class A drug and possession can result in six months' imprisonment, a $1000 fine, or both. "Still, I wouldn't hesitate to do it again," Laura admits.

Even if the University of Auckland study does find solid evidence of benefits from healthy men taking microdoses of LSD, the research will need to be repeated with women, and then mental health patients, to see how it is going to affect the wider community.

"With science you've got to do it one step at a time," he says.

Currently, a third of people with serious depression are unable to find a drug that eases their symptoms. Dr Suresh believes that for mental health disorders, a variety of different treatments is required, as patients tend to respond to one and not another.

Some day microdosing may be among the options. In the meantime, it worries Dr Suresh that people out there are taking the risks of self-medicating, when there is no real evidence yet that it works and his own trial might not find any benefits.

"Still, we have to chase the knowledge and find out," he says. "We'll never know unless we do an effective study."

Wellington's Rebekah Senanayake is willing to talk openly about having tried microdosing. She is planning to study for her master's in the traditional cultural uses of psychedelics and has a part-time job looking after the social media for an organisation called the Chacruna Institute which researches and educates around psychedelic plant medicines.

Rebekah was travelling in South America when she had her first experiences with ayahuasca. "It helps you think of things in a completely different way," she says. "Afterwards, I felt a lot clearer in my mind and body, my interactions with other people were better and I could think more deeply."

But ayahuasca is also not without risks. In 2015, New Zealander Matthew Dawson-Carke died while taking it on a retreat in Peru.

Rebekah spent 10 days in the jungle going through a guided ritual with a shaman that involved clean-eating before drinking it several times and says she never had any sort of bad experience.

Since then Rebekah, who is in her mid-twenties, has microdosed with huachuma (or San Pedro), a cactus that originally comes from Peru and has been used for thousands of years in sacred ceremonies.

"I took a tiny, tiny dose every morning for about three months," she says. "That was really interesting because you don't go fully into the experience, you just feel some of the effects. You're still in control, you can do everything you normally do, it's just at a different level. You think about one thing at a time," she says.

Convinced of the potential of these plant medicines to help people when used in the right way, Rebekah hopes her future career path will involve psychedelics. But there is still a long way to go before they are likely to be accepted by mainstream medicine.

See the rest here:

Microdosing: taking illegal psychedelic drugs as a form of therapy - does it actually work? - Now To Love

Making Sense of Meditation: Religion and Spirituality – Psychiatric Times

Posted on by

Most of us in the mental health professions would agree with the following statements:

Religion and spirituality are important, even central concerns for a large portion of the population

Many people insist that their religious and/or spiritual practices help them cope with the inescapable vicissitudes of life

It has long been recognized that some psychiatric conditions can involve religious preoccupations and alleged spiritual experiences

Over the last 50 years meditation practicesgenerally inherited from various religious traditionshave become widely accepted as beneficial for management of stress and have been increasingly adopted by the mental health community as a treatment modality

In view of these observations you would think that psychiatrists would be well-versed in these topics, but the reality is that they are barely touched upon during our training and we are given very little guidance as to how to respond when our patients raise religious or spiritual concerns. Since meditation can be practiced without reference to the religious traditions that transmitted various techniques to us we can feel comfortable recommending it to our patients. But when it comes to relating to the larger questions about life, the nature of suffering, the inevitability of death, etc, we generally have no idea how to proceed.

Recent articles in Psychiatric Times give us several examples of attempts to address these topics. The May 2019 issue presented an interview of Dr Paul Summergard by Dr Lloyd Sederer, Spirituality in the Psychiatric Office, in which Dr Summergard shares his experience and suggests a general attitude to adopt when patients bring up religious concerns. In more recent issues, Dr John Miller shared two editorials exploring the clinical applications of mindfulness practice, Be Here Now, and Mindfulness.

Since our profession has no agreed-upon body of knowledge about the relationship of religion and spirituality to mental illness and mental health, it makes sense that those of us who present ourselves as having something useful to say should establish some sort of credentials. Dr Summergard mentioned that he did a number of years of intensive Zen meditation, and Dr Miller recounts extensive experience with a meditation tradition derived from the Theravadan Buddhist tradition, including a 3-month silent meditation retreat. Both doctors commented on the impact these experiences had on their personal as well as professional lives. So, their credentials for holding forth on these topics consist of substantial experience with meditation practice as taught by two different Buddhist traditions, exposure to the intellectual content of these traditions, and on their perception that these experiences had a significant impact on their personal lives as well as their practice of psychiatry.

In this column I propose to present a framework for understanding the basic psychological mechanisms involved in the practice of mindfulness meditation, which may clarify why it is helpful in many different situations. But if I am going to pontificate on these weighty matters, I too must establish my credentials.

I was raised in a completely secular Jewish family, with virtually no exposure to even a secular Jewish social environment. I entered medical school with the intention of going into psychiatry. In my fourth year I stumbled on the book Psychotherapy East and West by Alan Watts, one of the first well-known Western proponents of Zen Buddhism, which piqued my interest in Buddhism as a psychological system. To make a long story short, I followed a path similar to that of Drs Summergard and MillerI took a year off between my rotating internship and psychiatric residency to engage in intensive meditation and study of Buddhism, then another block of time after my residency, after which I settled down into my career and raising a family.

The particular tradition I connected with was Tibetan Buddhism as taught by Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Lama who founded numerous meditation centers as well as Naropa University in Boulder, CO, which to this day offers a Masters degree in Eastern and Western Psychology. Along the way I did a 1-month meditation retreat, a 10-day solo meditation retreat in an isolated cabin, and a 3-month program with Chogyam Trungpa that involved extensive meditation practice as well as a systematic presentation of the history and formal teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. After my residency I spent 3 months at a meditation center in which I experienced a novel meditation system created by Trungpa in collaboration with Suzuki Roshi, a well-known Zen teacher. The system was based on methods used in Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist monasteries to help stabilize monks who developed serious psychological issues or psychosis in the course of intensive meditation practice.

Trungpa presented the Buddhist tradition to us, a modern American audience, as a psychological system. He made it clear that we did not need to accept anything on faith and stated explicitly that we need not accept any teachings that we could not confirm by our own personal experience. In that environment there were many individuals who enthusiastically accepted the religious aspect of the teachings, which is to say the traditional teachings about the nature of the universe, what happens after death, and so on. As a scientifically trained person from a totally secular background I had some discomfort about these issues. A small incident put my mind at ease: a young man asked Trungpa a question, Everything you have taught us is great, I love all the stuff about meditation . . . but I have to be honest . . . I have a lot of trouble with this whole reincarnation thing. Trungpa replied, For you, sir, reincarnation is waking up in the morning. Dont worry about the rest.

In the spirit of transparency, everything I will say is derived from what I learned through both study and meditation practice in those particular settings. I am not a scholar in these matters, nor can I pretend to be a highly accomplished meditator or teacher. Nevertheless, these experiences were transformative on a personal level, giving me the capacity to cope with extreme stress at various points in my life with a degree of equanimity that would not have been possible previously. They also had a profound effect on my work as a psychiatrist, in particular giving me a wider context in which to understand my patients struggles. I have found that when patients bring up religious or spiritual concerns I am completely at ease conversing with them in a way that is appropriate for that individual, which would have been impossible in my natural state as a person with no exposure whatsoever to religious practices.

When I deal with psychotic people reporting apparent spiritual experiences, I find that I can often understand what it is they are trying to describe and respond in a reassuring way that acknowledges their experience. Dont get me wrongI also give them an antipsychotic. But there is great value in meeting people where they are at, so to speak. I ascribe whatever ability I have developed to deal with these issues effectively to a combination of my personal experiences in the course of meditation practice, but equally to having been given a systematic intellectual framework for understanding the nature of spiritual experiences altogether, and their relationship to our normal mental state as well as to mental illness.

So much for credentials. Now let us turn to the narrow topic of mindfulness meditation. First, what do we mean by the word meditation? Lots of my patients tell me that they meditate, but on further questioning most of them are talking about guided meditation recordingswhich in reality is akin to hypnosisor perhaps they do a few minutes of chanting a mantra in a yoga class. To be sure, these activities can be very beneficial for stress management, sleep, and so on, but they are not meditation. Mindfulness meditation has robust stress-management benefits, but that is somewhat of a side effect. Its primary purpose, interestingly, is to mitigate our habitual mental patterns, which in Western psychology we have conceptualizedat least in previous generationsas neurosis.

Broadly speaking there are two types of meditation practiceconcentration techniques and mindfulnessawareness techniques. Concentration techniques involve focusing ones mind on a single objecta candle, a picture, a thought, a sound or mantra, part of the body, pretty much anything. If practiced sufficiently this type of meditation produces trance statesstates of altered consciousness that can be intense and at times ecstatic. The intensity of these experiences is often interpreted as evidence that this is real spirituality and can motivate people to pursue them even more vigorously. There are numerous elaborate traditions utilizing these types of practices. However, there are distinct dangers to taking these techniques to extremes, and they should only be practiced under the close supervision of a knowledgeable guide.

Mindfulness meditation, on the other hand, can be described as a simple technique for observing our own mental processes in granular detail. The usual instruction is to sit upright without a backrestmostly so we will start to fall over if we doze off, which keeps us awake (meditation can be boring). The tradition is to sit cross-legged on a cushion. There is no particular reason to adopt a lotus posture or anything else uncomfortablethis is not about overcoming pain. If you are of a certain age, by all means sit on a chair. Most traditions instruct us to close our eyes, but I was taught to meditate with eyes open. The explanation we were given was that if we close our eyes it is too easy to space out and get lost in our thoughts.

The meditative technique itself is usually to turn our attention on the breath. Easy! The trouble is, after about a microsecond . . . blah, blah, blahwe are talking to ourselves. There are numerous variations and nuances in the instructions given by different traditions and different teachers on how to handle this grasshopper quality of our minds. The technique I learned was that as soon as we realize we are not on our breaths we literally say to ourselves thinking, and gently return attention to our breath. At some point we inevitably get frustrated, thinking, I cant do this, this is ridiculous, Im leaving. At that point . . . back to your breath.

A couple of comments about breath. There is nothing mystical about itits just a convenient way to help us stay in the present moment. Then there is the question of how intensely to focus on the breath. A traditional teaching story tells of a student of the Buddha, a famous musician, who asked the Buddha how intensely to focus his attention. The Buddha asked him how tightly he adjusted the strings on his instrument. The student replied, Not too tight, and not too loose, or the sound will be no good. The Buddha said, Just so. Your focus on your breath should be not too tight, and not too loose. That is, if we make no effort, we dont focus at all on the breath and no progress will be made. But if we get too intense about it, it can turn into a concentration technique focused on the breath, which is definitely not what is intended. If that starts to happen, a competent meditation instructor will tell us to lighten up, maybe look around a little, shift our positionthen come back to the breath.

There is no such thing as not being able to meditate. This statement requires some explanation, which brings us to the discussion of what this meditation technique actually accomplishes.

As we move around in the world and encounter things, or as we sit on the cushion and encounter things in our mind, there are three reflexive impulses that can occur. If the object or thought makes us feel good, confirmed, safe, we want to pull it in, build it up, make it last longer. If it is threatening or uncomfortable, we want to push it away, destroy it. And if it is neither confirming nor threatening, we ignore it. Consequently, we tend to ignore 99% of everything that crosses our awareness. In traditional meditation texts these three impulses are known as the Three PoisonsPassion, Aggression, and Ignorancethe obstacles to successful meditation practice. The meaning of these three words in daily life is obvious: Passion: love, greed, obsession, addiction; Aggression: anger, cruelty, destructiveness; Ignorance: maybe . . . cluelessness? From the point of view of evolutionary psychology, these three impulses are completely natural and highly adaptive: we are attracted to what makes us feel good, we are repelled by what makes us feel bad, and we dont waste energy on the rest.

But in this case, we are not talking about our behavior in the world, rather we are talking about these three impulses as our reflexive reactions to each moment-to-moment thought. What we are being instructed to do when we sit down to meditate is very simple, very difficult, and quite unnaturalwe are being asked to do none of the above. That is, whatever thought comes along, we are instructed to neither cultivate it, nor drive it away . . . nor ignore it. We are asked to simply notice it and come back to the breath.

Initially we are terrible at this. We get lost in a sexual fantasy, or business plans, or political tooth-gnashing. Oh yeah, back to the breath! We obsess about that time we were humiliated, and what we should have said. Back to the breath! But if we persist, little by little, we begin to relax into our own thoughts. They never go awaywe are explicitly not trying to make that happenbut we begin to spend more and more time just watching them come and go, without building them up or pushing them away, and without ignoring them.

This process can be characterized as developing an attitude of equanimity toward our own thoughts. Over time, somewhat magically, we notice that as we move about in the world and stuff comes up, we are less reactive. Something that would have left us upset all day becomes less of a big deal. Some compulsion that we would ordinarily find irresistible becomes less compelling. We begin to feel calmer overall, clearer, and with more freedom to deal with what comes up in whatever way seems bestas opposed to endlessly repeating dysfunctional habitual patterns. These emotional and behavioral changes are gradual and spontaneous.

That is why I say there is no such thing as not being able to meditate. I view it like doing pushups. If we resolve to start exercising with pushups, and we cant do even one, we start with half a pushup. If we work out regularly, eventually we can knock off a whole bunch of pushups. It just takes patience and practice. Thats why we call this activity meditation practice. At this level it is a very simple training program, whose goal could also be described as the art of not taking our own thoughts too seriously.

With this model in mind it becomes clearer why meditation practice can be helpful in so many clinical situations, and why the average person with no identified conditions may find it beneficial. It is also noteworthy that the benefit is not dependent on adopting any particular philosophy or spiritual teaching. The benefits of meditation are a spontaneous result of gradually changing the nature of our relationship to our own thought process.

This model of meditation practice is very simple, yet very fundamental. Along the way I have alluded to a number of far more complex issues. What is the distinction between religion and spirituality? What do we mean by the term spiritual experience? What is the nature of the transformative experiences hallucinogenic drugs can sometimes produce, and what about the religious preoccupations and spiritual experiences of some of our patients? And, what does meditation practice have to do with all of this?

Buddhist psychology provides a comprehensive framework that can illuminate the relationship of these disparate phenomena. Interestingly, it is all about egoa concept that is also at the core of Western psychological thinking. In a future article, I will try to summarize the basic model of the Buddhist psychological tradition in terms that are understandable to students of the Western psychological tradition.

See original here:

Making Sense of Meditation: Religion and Spirituality - Psychiatric Times

Students report on the impact of COVID-19 on religion and spirituality – USC News

Posted on by

On Sunday, March 15, USC Annenberg MS in journalism student Hayley Smith was supposed to be reporting in Armenia but she wasnt. Then, she was supposed to be in Alabama but that didnt happen either. Instead, she went to two sparsely attended Masses in Los Angeles Roman Catholic churches, which were likely some of the last such services that will be held in Los Angeles for quite a while.

The people who came to church were just like people everywhere, Smith said. They were a little bit confused, some were overly confident, and a lot of people were frightened.

As the coronavirus pandemic tightened like a noose around the normal routines of life in the United States and around the world, the USC community has responded with steps to protect the well-being of students, faculty and staff. The experience of the students and faculty in one USC Annenberg graduate-level course, JOUR 585 Specialized Reporting: Religion, provides a window into how those measures have affected students and faculty and how the people of USC Annenberg have adapted to continue engaging with each other, and with the Los Angeles community.

A Miami native, Smith earned her bachelors degree in English from New York University, then worked in communications and marketing for some 10 years before deciding to switch career tracks to journalism.

I was originally drawn to environmental and climate stories, but throughout the course of my time at Annenberg, religion stories and stories about people of faith have continued to come up for me, Smith said.

Enrolling in the reporting on religion course, taught by Diane Winston and Alan Mittelstaedt, was a no-brainer for Smith.

Religion isnt a sexy topic for most journalism students, said Winston, associate professor and Knight Center Chair in Media & Religion. So, to sweeten the pot, the course includes an international trip to cover religion, politics and culture. Since launching it in 2010, with funding from the Luce Foundation, Winston has taken students to Israel/Palestine, India, Ireland, Greece, Indonesia and South Korea.

Winston says she and Mittelstaedt organized this years trip to Armenia with the assistance of the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies, with the intention of having students focus on the cultural and political impact of the Armenian Apostolic Church since the Velvet Revolution. Students also researched stories on prison chaplaincies, religious tourism and religion-inspired fashion. The class spent the first half of the semester reporting on the large Armenian diaspora community in Los Angeles, finding stories on religion and tattoo artists, folk dance and the LGBTQ+ community.

Even as COVID-19 continued its international spread throughout January and February, Winston held out hope that the trip could still happen. Then, on Feb. 28, she got word that USC had canceled all international travel.

Winston and Mittelstaedt, associate professor of professional practice, quickly pivoted to a domestic trip. Winston reached out to media contacts in Alabama and was excited by the reporting prospects. Within 10 days, the students had come up with and begun to report fabulous stories about Alabama, Winston said. The editors at both the Birmingham and Montgomery newspapers were very helpful, offering up both their ideas and newsrooms to us. It looked like it would be a really rich experience.

But when USC canceled all travel at the recommendation of the CDC and moved courses to online instruction, the professors and students pivoted again to look for local stories about communities of faith, spiritual but not religious outliers and the ways in which the virus is affecting ethical decision-making and spiritual sensibilities, Winston said. Smith recalls that Winston and Mittelstaedt compared covering coronavirus to being a war correspondent an idea that inspired her.

I want to talk to people, I want to see how people are feeling, she said. When Armenia got canceled and then when Alabama got canceled, they told us that, as journalists, things are going to happen. You might have to go somewhere at the drop of a hat. You have to be nimble and flexible. Its a teachable moment for us: Sometimes you just have to get out the door and go.

Smith says she had already been planning on covering coronavirus and the Catholic Church in Alabama. The Catholic Bishop of Birmingham had made an announcement a couple of weeks ago about eliminating the communal chalice during Mass, she said. So, when that got canceled, I was like, well, I feel like I can still do that story in Los Angeles.

After attending the 8 a.m. Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels downtown and the 10 a.m. Mass at Our Mother of Good Counsel in Los Feliz both with very few parishioners present Smith wrote her article and turned it in to Winston and Mittelstaedt on Sunday evening. Winston floated several possible media outlets that might publish the piece; Smith thought Religion News Service would be the best fit. It all happened really quickly, Smith said.

Her piece, Prayer in the Time of Coronavirus, appeared the following day on the Religion News Service website. It was genius of her to go to the cathedral, because that is such a central icon for religion in Los Angeles, Winston said. It's also a place where so many people might go for sustenance and comfort at this time.

Winston says that Smith and her classmates have shown incredible resilience as the COVID-19 crisis has radically reshaped their experience with the course.

We have an incredible group of students this year, Winston said. I've never seen an entire class so motivated, so dedicated and so excited about journalism. Rather than give up in frustration, they keep looking for new ways to make this experience worthwhile for them. And I am inspired by their passion.

Coronavirus is going to be the religion story of our lives, Winston added. Deep questions about morality, mortality and metaphysics are going to be a part of every story on this pandemic. Who lives? Who dies? Who gets a ventilator? These are religious questions, ethical questions. We make moral decisions every time we walk out of our house now.

See the original post here:

Students report on the impact of COVID-19 on religion and spirituality - USC News

How Deepak Chopra Is Using This Time For A Spiritual Reset – mindbodygreen.com

Posted on by

In addition to thinking of others, Chopra is using this time to create what he calls "love in action." While we might tell our friends and family members that we love them, Chopra wants to take it a step further.

"We need to help all of us feel safe, help us all feel secure, help us all that we are engaging in love in action, not just love in theory," he says. "Love in action can create miracles."

Consider this the spiritual version of "show, don't tell." Chopra wants us to take action and care for others; in a time of social distancing, words can only do so muchit's the actions that truly make a difference.

That's not to say you should ignore the rules of a home quarantine. Chopra says there are ways to make sure those in need feel safe: "Use technologymake sure those in distress and those you care about know you can engage with them and help them in some way."

Whether it's providing resources or just offering a safe space to discuss fears, we can all take action to let the people around us know that we love them. After all, we are more connected than we thinkand the spiritual notion that "we are all one" is more important now than ever.

Read more here:

How Deepak Chopra Is Using This Time For A Spiritual Reset - mindbodygreen.com

David Carlson: The spiritual challenge of the coronavirus – Daily Journal

Posted on by

In 2007, while I was conducting interviews for a book project, I visited the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky. My goal was to interview the monks who had known the famous monk Thomas Merton as their novice master or teacher back in the 1960s.

While I was there, something strange happened. I noticed an elderly monk who wasnt on my interview list but who kept peeking around the corner and looking at me. Finally, he knocked on my door in the guesthouse and asked if we could talk.

Although I listened politely, what he told me sounded so wacky that I immediately decided that his comments wouldnt be included in my book. But I did let him continue. According to what hed been told, an Irish woman was receiving direct messages from Jesus. According to the monk, over a period of time, Jesus had told the Irish woman that a great spiritual awakening was coming to the world.

My first thought was that the monk had dementia, and I forgot about our strange conversation until five years had passed. In 2012, I was visiting another monastery, this one on the shore of Lake Superior in Michigans Upper Peninsula. I was actually returning to this monastery to thank the monks for letting me interview them back in 2007 for the book.

The community in the Upper Peninsula was small, consisting of five monks. After dinner together, we retired to the monasterys library, where I read aloud portions of my book based on their interviews. After I finished reading, one of the monks, in a whisper, asked if I had heard the latest from the Vatican.

My first thought was, Why is he whispering? Theres no one within ten miles of us. He continued to whisper, saying that many religious leaders believed that a great spiritual upsurge would soon take place in the world, and religious institutions needed to be ready for this.

I couldnt help but remember the similar conversation from five years before with the elderly monk in Kentucky. Since 2012, I have read that other religious leaders, including Native American spiritual leaders and Buddhist masters, have expressed their conviction that a great influx of light is coming to the world.

Certainly, something major is happening to our world with the coronavirus. Because human beings have free will, whether the crisis will lead to more light and compassion or more darkness and fear is up to us.

As a pandemic, the coronavirus crisis reminds us that we are part of the global human family. What happens in China, Japan, Italy and Spain matters to us, and how we as citizens of the US respond to the crisis will matter to our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world.

I dont pretend to know if the coronavirus is part of the great spiritual awakening that others told me about. Maybe what the monks and others have shared with me over the past decade is what old-timers used to call piffle, utter nonsense.

However, what I believe is that this crisis offers a spiritual challenge, not just a medical and economic one. When this crisis is over, Italy will be remembered as the country where quarantined people sang together from their balconies. Spain will be remembered as the nation where her citizens, at a prearranged time, opened their windows to applaud and cheer the dedication and courage of health-care workers.

What will our country be remembered for? Will America be remembered as the country that stockpiled toilet paper and guns or be remembered as a country that emerged from the crisis with reset values?

The future is not written in stone. What we will be as a nation is up to us. Lets choose wisely, not letting that part of the brain where fears are bred override that part of us the heart that cares for others.

Read more from the original source:

David Carlson: The spiritual challenge of the coronavirus - Daily Journal

Teachers & Healers: Carr mixes medicine and spirituality with his two professions – Huron Daily Tribune

Posted on by

ByMary Drier, For the Tribune

Chuck Carr, at right, has been a respiratory therapist at the Hills and Dales General Hospital in Cass City since 2002. He also managed the respiratory department there for about 16 years before stepping down two years ago to slow down some. (Provided photo)

Chuck Carr, at right, has been a respiratory therapist at the Hills and Dales General Hospital in Cass City since 2002. He also managed the respiratory department there for about 16 years before stepping down

Chuck Carr, at right, has been a respiratory therapist at the Hills and Dales General Hospital in Cass City since 2002. He also managed the respiratory department there for about 16 years before stepping down two years ago to slow down some. (Provided photo)

Chuck Carr, at right, has been a respiratory therapist at the Hills and Dales General Hospital in Cass City since 2002. He also managed the respiratory department there for about 16 years before stepping down

Teachers & Healers:Carr mixes medicine and spirituality with his two professions

CASS CITY Chuck Carrs careers have contributed to peoples well-being both physically and spiritually.

At Hills and Dales General Hospital in Cass City, he is a respiratory therapist, and he is also an itinerant minister in the area.

I started out pastoring a very small church in Missouri," Carr said. "They could not afford to pay me very much, so I worked other jobs. I worked at a store changing truck and car tires. I wasnt married so at that time so my financial needs were not great. Later, I decided I wanted to do something more with my life. A school there had a 12 month respiratory program. I continued to pastor, continued to work at the tire store, and took classes.

At the end of year, he earned a respiratory certification.

Shortly after he graduated, the economy was in a slump so jobs were hard to find in his community of about 3,400 people.

The community had two hospitals, but because of the schools respiratory program there, there was a surplus of us in that field, "he said. So I started to look elsewhere for work.

He started applying for jobs in Michigan in 1983 because his wife is from here.

When asked why I moved to Michigan, I just say, Love brought me here, he said.

He got a job at the Garden City Hospital in Michigan and worked there for 13 years.

While I was there, I continued to do the Lords work itinerant preaching, teaching Bible school, teaching Sunday school, and worked full time, said Carr.

Some of his education for his theological career included attending the Bob Jones University, and earning a second degree from the William Tyndale College in Farmington Hills. He has also attended the Northland Baptist Bible College as well as Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary.

He furthered his education as a respiratory therapist by getting a bachelors degree to upgrade from his certificate.

Carr explained a respiratory therapist program now takes three years to complete and is an associate degree.

He went from the Garden City Hospital to the Port Huron General Hospital for six years, and he also continued his ministry there as well.

From there, he went to Hills and Dales General Hospital in 2002, where he also managed the respiratory department for about 16 years before stepping down two years ago to slow down some.

What I like about being a therapist, it has been a steady career for 37 years, and it has given me an opportunity to be in the community as a Christian, Carr said. Im a respiratory therapist who is also a pastor, and Im a pastor that is also a respiratory therapist."

Those careers have given me an opportunity to enjoy the sciences and the continuing education that goes with being a therapist; and as an itinerate minister, I share the Gospel and administer to spiritual needs," he said. "I enjoy what I do at the hospital an in churches.

Carr preaches at various churches in the area. He helps out at the First Baptist Church in Cass City. He is a deacon on the board there, teaches adult Sunday school, and when the pastor is out of town, he preaches in his place.

He noted both his careers give him a lot of satisfaction.

As a respiratory therapist and part of the hospitals team, it is satisfying when I can help someone physically with their breathing, and satisfying when I can minister the Word that brought comfort and peace.

Carrs position is also called a cardiopulmonary therapist, because it deals with both the lungs and heart.

As a cardiopulmonary therapist, Carr goes to code blue calls at the hospital, which is where someone is in immediate danger of losing their life. He is part of the cardiopulmonary resuscitation team that responds.

That is immensely satisfying," he said. "When you have helped saves someones life."

The downside of his medical profession is when someone who has breathing issues that he worked with for a long time passes, he said.

Visit link:

Teachers & Healers: Carr mixes medicine and spirituality with his two professions - Huron Daily Tribune

spiritual connections – The Batavian

Posted on by

"Spiritual Connections"--The Batavianwill post updates to connect people with their places of worship, religious services, fellowship opportunities, and/or spiritual advisors, etc.

If you have information to announce, please email: [emailprotected] OR [emailprotected]

****************************

First Baptist Church Elbahas moved their services online. Sermons are posted each Saturday for the regular Sunday service time. We encourage you to check out our recent sermons while you are at home during this time. The church is closed during normal services times between 9:30 a.m. - 12 p.m. Sundays. The church office is not open to visitors, however the office phone is answer from 9 a.m - 4 p.m. Monday-Friday. Please call if you need assistance and live in the town limits of Elba. Pastor is Michael Davis. The office phone is 585-757-2722, and the email address is: [emailprotected]

St. Paul Lutheran Church in Batavia is now posting its Sunday and Lenten weekday bulletins with worship service and sermons on theirwebsite. The Church office is not open to visitors but office staff is on hand to take calls during normal office hours 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday for any questions or needs of the congregation. A phone tree has been put in place to check on those that might be home and unable to go out publicly to retrieve necessities. If you do not receive a call, and have a need for assistance, please call the main office at (585) 343-0488. Email address is:[emailprotected]

See the original post here:

spiritual connections - The Batavian

These are the most spiritual travel destinations in the world – Travel Weekly

Posted on by

Over 20,000 people a month (20,870 to be exact) search Google for a spiritual awakening, and with the world currently in lockdown, we wager this number is about to skyrocket.

To achieve spiritual awakening, there are several things people generally try: declutter your home and mind, examine your beliefs, have an existential crisis, take a bubble bath, the list is endless!

But we all know the best thing you can go to expand your mind is to pack up your suitcase and Eat, Pray, Love your way around the world.

This led our friends over at PsychicWorld.com to research the most photogenic and inspiring spiritual destinations in the world.

To achieve this, PsychicWorld.com pulled 50 of the most popular spiritual destinations worldwide and analysed the number of Instagram hashtags for each destination.

Your clients will be chomping at the bit to book their next holiday once the travel ban is lifted, and chances are theyre going to want to do some soul searching given the current circumstances.

Turkeys largest city, Istanbul came out on top as the most photogenic spiritual destination in the world with 92,468,514 tags. This comes as no surprise as a major religious centre for both Greek Orthodox and the Islamic faith, Istanbul is home to some of the worlds most important cultural heritage.

Next up was Ibiza, which to many is not just a party haven, but also a place of healing. This Spanish island came second on the list with 16,262,531 tags.

Finishing off the top three most photogenic spiritual destinations is Japans iconic Kyoto, with 15,417,174 tags.

Its the most technologically advanced location in the world yet Japan has a powerful connection to its ancient heritage and deep spiritual traditions. Nowhere is this most apparent than in Kyoto.

Australia also got a look in, with Byron Bay landing in ninth place.

Heres a break down of the top 20 and how many tags they attract.

Istanbul, Turkey (92,468,514)

Ibiza, Spain (16,262,531)

Kyoto, Japan (15,417,174)

Goa, India (7,811,479)

Tulum, Mexico (5,468,291)

Ubud, Indonesia (4,632,544)

Santa Fe, New Mexico (2,802,200)

Amritsar, India (2,695,261)

Byron Bay, Australia (2,669,304)

Machu Picchu, Peru (1,713,269)

Sedona, Arizona (1,629,553)

Camino de Santiago, Spain (1,563,600)

Angkor Wat, Cambodia (1,499,676)

Mecca, Saudi Arabia (1,442,744)

Borobudur Temple, Indonesia (1,274,255)

Mashhad, Iran (1,222,658)

Saskatchewan Canada 1,214,264

Varanasi India 1,125,775

Rishikesh India 889,589

Montserrat Spain 791,947

Go here to read the rest:

These are the most spiritual travel destinations in the world - Travel Weekly