Monthly Archives: April 2021

The Commodification of Psychedelics – SF Weekly

Posted: April 17, 2021 at 12:03 pm

Last month, I persuaded another journalist to join me on a midweek mushroom trip. The occasion was a press preview for Immersive Van Gogh, a half-hour long show at SVN that uses musically scored digital projections to animate the Impressionist painters more famous works.

We did it out of winking respect for the twin traditions of gonzo journalism and taking in art while under the influence. And we did it knowing full well that while Hunter S. Thompson and Vincent Van Gogh were geniuses, each has been romanticized and commodified in ways that often obscure their depressing final chapters.

We were high and the experience was intense. The exhibits deliberately glitchy intro was a millimeter shy of overwhelming, but once we settled into the projected circle of light with the best acoustics, we watched the show straight through twice more. Like Hans Zimmers score for Blade Runner 2049, these sorts of spectacles are meant to engulf rather than please, and its easy to nitpick historical inaccuracies and take umbrage on behalf of actual museums. But tripping helps suspend your disbelief and silence that inner critic. And consciously choosing to go along with it all is much more fun. So we went with it, hard.

Ive done two things more in the 12 months of this pandemic than I did cumulatively in my entire life: ride a bike and trip out on mushrooms. Part of me thinks theyre both beneficial, stabilizing my early-middle-aged body and chatter-prone mind, while another part thinks of one as justification for the other. (If Ive biked 1,500 miles and climbed 100,000 feet in 2021 alone, then I can have a damn mushroom on a Tuesday night in March.) In all, Ive tripped maybe 10 or 12 times over the last year. Each instance was enjoyable, often involved plenty of Tame Impala, and left me feeling residually upbeat for days afterward. COVID restrictions aside, though, this is a curious time to dive into mushrooms. As the War on Drugs recedes out to sea, it appears psilocybin may be the next bit of beach exposed to the general public.

Ours is a planet of fungi. What we call mushrooms are only the tip of the iceberg, as it were. The familiar toadstool, also known as the fruiting body, is only the most visible and often the most temporary component, with most of the fungus existing as mycelium strands beneath the surface. The worlds single largest organism is a honey fungus in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon that measures several miles across and may be 2,000 years old.

Even though taxonomy drives our understanding of the natural world, nature always defies easy categorization. Just as viruses which dont eat, excrete, or even grow make us question what it means for something to be fully alive, fungi problematize the idea of what an individual organism actually is. Theyre almost a mindless collective intelligence, ecological go-betweens whose job is essentially humdrum necromancy, facilitating the creation of life from death. Ubiquitous in the soils, they act as pathways to conduct nutrients out of dead matter and back into the ground to replenish other organisms. This is more like the quasi-sentient ecosystem on Pandora in Avatar than simply a terrestrial kingdom on equal footing with animals or plants. Even if the thought of your eventually lifeless body decomposing makes you queasy, its impossible not to marvel at their work. Its fascinating enough that baby spiders know how to spin webs. But fungi seem possessed of an uncanny consciousness.

Occasional news items about how a strain of fungus can digest plastic or neutralize toxic heavy metals a process known as mycoremediation come with flashes of hope for the salvation of our depleted biosphere. Then theres the ongoing effort to grow black Prigord truffles in the root systems of oaks in Napa. For all their trendiness, though, mushrooms-as-metaphor infiltrated our culture long ago. Alice in Wonderland, Super Mario Bros, and a Nutcracker dance in Disneys Fantasia either anthropomorphize them or nod at their abilities. Sylvia Plath saw them as symbols of womens quiet tenacity. Svampen (mushroom) is the famous meeting point in Stockholms most upscale neighborhood. If youve ever browsed the fossils at Paxton Gate on Valencia Street, youve no doubt been transfixed by the cover of All That the Rain Promises and More, which depicts a demented-looking man wearing a tuxedo under a tree and holding both a very large mushroom and a trumpet.

So-called magic mushrooms which is to say, the more than 100 or so species that produce psilocybin are found all over the world, but chiefly in temperate Europe and the Americas. They show up in Pre-Columbian artifacts, and starting in the 1950s they became popular in the United States as a hallmark of the burgeoning counterculture. People repulsed by postwar Americas vacuousness began to ingest them in quasi-religious rites, with effects that range from giggling and pareidolia (seeing faces where none exist) to wearing a really unfortunate shade of purple-gray and falling in love with ones own pompous, Zen-lite drivel.

A couple years ago, cities like Denver and Oakland began to decriminalize plant-derived entheogens like mushrooms, partly because theyre seen as medically beneficial and socially harmless, and partly out of the increased awareness of indigenous cultural practices. (An entheogen is any substance that induces changes in perception or mood that many people perceive as spiritual or sacred.) Four years after California passed Proposition 64, ushering in a consumer wonderland of edibles and CBD tinctures, everybody and their dad started using cannabis. Mushroom chocolates and teas have been around a long time. Might they pop up on dispensary shelves, too?

Oakland is on the cutting edge, having decriminalized psilocybin and other plant-based drugs in June 2019. As of 2021, the decrim movement has typically clustered in left-leaning areas with large universities: Cambridge and Northampton, Mass., Washtenaw County, Mich. (home to Ann Arbor), and Santa Cruz, along with Washington, D.C. Denver voters narrowly passed an initiative that prohibits the city from spending any money to prosecute people for possession, which remains illegal under Colorado law.

Oregon is the only jurisdiction to have fully legalized mushrooms for therapeutic use in supervised settings, after voters approved Measure 109 last November. Here in California, State Sen. Scott Wiener introduced a bill (S.B. 519) that would decriminalize the use and personal possession of mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, DMT, and other drugs. While the bill goes a lot further than Oregons, it managed to pass through the Senate Health Committee by a vote of 6-1 in mid-April. Still, were a long way from branded mushroom-chocolate collabs at Cookies (although Berners ubiquitous legal weed brand does have a new line of non-psychedelic mushroom-and-CBD capsules).

The commodification of psychedelics is one of those things that people dont fully understand, according to Dave Hide, the minister of Zide Door, Oaklands Church of Entheogenic Plants, the first house of worship in America dedicated to magic mushrooms which Hide refers to as sacrament.

Although people want it, and there are people moving forward thinking this is something thats going to be the next cannabis, its far from that. Extremely far, he says. Theres a big difference between decriminalization and being able to walk around with a pound of mushrooms.

Oakland has categorized psilocybin as the lowest priority for local law enforcement, but the sale and consumption of it is still a crime in the state, as well as federally. This is not terribly dissimilar from cannabis quasi-legality, though. When California voters approved Proposition 215 in 1996, they established a medical marijuana program that has flourished for 25 years in spite of cannabis remaining a Schedule I drug, which the federal government defines as substances having no accepted medical application and a high potential for abuse. (The other Schedule I drugs are, somewhat bafflingly, ecstasy, heroin, LSD, methaqualone, and peyote. Cocaine, methamphetamine, and oxycodone are Schedule II.)

In theory, Prop. 64 built on Prop. 215. But Hide doesnt see it that way. He calls that 2016 ballot measure the Fuel the Black Market Act, because the combination of onerous regulations on dispensaries with high taxes has rendered state-sanctioned cannabis so expensive that its effectively only for tourists and sporadic cannabis consumers. Everybody else gets it the same way they always did from a pot dealer.

Further, he says that with respect to mushrooms, were basically in 1994 or 95. What were doing in the Church is different because its for a religious basis. Theres something called the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act, which has successfully been used to defend churches that use plant medicines from the federal government.

That 1993 piece of legislation is far from settled, however. Over the years, the Supreme Court has upheld parts of it and struck down others in cases that dealt with circumstances as wide-ranging as whether a Social Security Number constitutes a Mark of the Beast, whether you can declare yourself religiously exempt from paying taxes, or whether recycling sewage water to generate artificial snow in northern Arizona infringed on Navajo sovereignty.

But it wasnt federal marshals who raided Zide Door last summer, demanding access to its safes; it was the Oakland Police Department. In an episode of the podcast Psychedelic Timeshare, Hide recounted the experience, noting that being first means youre the first to have problems.

Prior to the raid, the Church had grown solely by word-of-mouth, and typically had a cooperative relationship with OPD. The cops even used its surveillance cameras to help solve other crimes. But on Aug. 13, 2020, some 20 officers cleared the streets and entered with their guns drawn, immediately outmatching the churchs single armed guard.

They cleared it like a cartel, Hide said.

No one was arrested, but the officers called in a contingent of firefighters to gain access to safes that each required a significant amount of time to break into. This in turn led to a curious bureaucratic standoff in which Hide persuaded the skeptical officer in charge to let him run to the city attorneys office to get a document attesting that Hide would happily open the safes as long as doing so merely expedited what would otherwise be a 14-hour process without admitting to anything or signing away his rights. Hide also claimed that one firefighter sustained moderate injuries from shrapnel that the safecracking ejected. As Vice reported at the time, officers eventually made off with $200,000 in cash, some cannabis, and some mushrooms, in a quasi-military asset forfeiture operation thats clearly at odds with Oaklands stated policy that mushrooms represent the bottom-ranking priority for the police.

The church simply got too big, Hide believes. (He claims almost 30,000 adherents, from around the Bay Area and out of state.) No sacrament was ever consumed on-site, though. Rather, he would preside over services held Sundays at 4:20 p.m., natch wherein he would sermonize about the origins of religion and his own experiences on extremely high doses, while members of his congregation smoked joints and planned their next shroom-fueled journeys of spiritual self-discovery.

The core of what we believe is that the mushrooms are the origins of all religions. They are what let us first understand that theres something more to this existence, Hide says. This is not commercialization. Psilocybin will not be the next cannabis.

He knows because in 2009, he helped create the first cannabis club in San Jose. He made a commitment to show people that cannabis was neither lethal nor a gateway drug, so he never even experimented with mushrooms until his late 30s.

Zide Door started as a cannabis church to fight the federal government in January 2019, but when Oaklands City Council voted to decriminalize all entheogenic plants five months later, he took it as a sign. Of all the other plant-derived substances that measure covered ayahuasca, ibogaine, peyote only mushrooms seemed safe enough for most people. Approximately one out of every 400 people die on ibogaine, often because of interactions with other substances. Peyote shows potential to eliminate heroin addiction, but trips can last for a week or even two. Ayahuasca needs a trained shaman, and its arguably a closed practice plus tourism to the Amazon is environmentally destructive. And substances synthesized in factories or derived from toads were not covered under Oaklands new law.

So mushrooms it was. Hide began experimenting with higher and higher doses. Famed mushroom enthusiast, philosopher, and psychonaut Terence McKenna had talked about five grams as a heroic dose. Hide got to 10 grams, and eventually 30, which he calls a God dose. (Objectively speaking, this is a humongous quantity, although Hide believes a lethal amount to be somewhere around 2,000 grams.)

His own experiences aside, Hides belief that mushrooms will never be the new cannabis seems pretty indisputable because a person can consume a lot more marijuana.

At my height, I was smoking two ounces per day, which is an insane amount of cannabis, but you can do that and function, Hide says. With the mushrooms, Im one of the people who does some of the most mushrooms and these are for truly religious experiences, to try to understand where religion comes from. Thats between 15 and 30 grams in a single dose.

That level, he says, is where you see visions and encounter entities who possess knowledge they wish to impart. Its also more than many people ingest in a lifetime. But even for Hide, its hard to do that more than once a month, typically in a tea after fasting for 24 to 48 hours.

So when it comes to commodification, its not the dream that people hope it is, Hide says. Its a very important thing for people to connect with God and the divine, but its not a large commercial market. If you do the math on microdosing which does help some people spiritually, but it mostly has a lot of medical potential even then youre talking about 0.2 grams, five times a week. Thats potentially four to five grams, max, in a month.

Thats probably not enough to sustain a boom, notwithstanding billionaire Peter Thiels $125 million investment ATAI Life Sciences, a German startup hoping to treat mental health disorders through psychedelics.

Even if psilocybin were regulated, standardized, and packaged, a dose isnt necessarily the only salient measurement. What you bring to the experience counts, too. Hide shared an anecdote about someone who ate a quarter of a mushroom chocolate that a friend made, and it ended with him swinging a baseball bat at his wife after she did everything she could to get him not to play in traffic. People whove only microdosed in the past may be particularly vulnerable to the allure of, well, macrodosing.

These can be really dangerous if not done in the right context knowing what youre going to experience, Hide says. If youre going to consume an eighth or more, you need to understand whats going to happen to you. Youre going to lie in bed and dive into your head. Theres going to be no chance youre going to have fun. A gram or two can be a recreational experience, but if youve got bad thoughts in your head or something thats really been eating at you, theyre going to bring it up. One of the examples Ive given in my sermons was from one of the first times I did two grams. I was thinking I should brush my teeth first, and during the whole trip I was tripping out over brushing my teeth. In that scenario, nobody got hurt, my teeth didnt fall out, but the whole trip was a repeat of that.

This is a different risk to the mind than the moderately incapacitating paranoia that can happen if you go full Maureen Dowd and ingest too much THC, in other words. I have never had what I understand to be a bad trip although I know theyre real although once or twice this year, a mushroom hit me with such fervor that I was certain I would vomit in public. (I didnt, but 20 minutes of rolling nausea is still uncomfortable.)

Nor have I ever gazed upon the face of God. The impossibly saturated colors, the arresting sight of wind through the trees, the feeling of close connection with a friend, a hunger that isnt as compulsive as the munchies but which spurs me to eat with great zest these are why I enjoy mushrooms. But what characterizes the best trips is a sense of overarching peace, a conviction that everything is going to be OK which is powerful enough to overcome my awareness that Im also really high. So I decided to ask the guy who sells me mushrooms what he thought.

Ive interviewed politicians under cloud of scandal and undocumented refugees, but few subjects are as reticent as a drug dealer. He agreed to speak with me in person with no recording device and as long as I referred to him as Rolando and revealed nothing else about him.

Rolando is bearish about the idea of psilocybin-as-consumer-product in a different way than Hide is. He thinks it will rapidly become the province of pill companies, his derogatory term for Big Pharma. That decriminalization is even a topic strikes him as faintly sinister.

I hate to steal a hipster phrase, but theyre manufacturing consent, he says of the pill companies. People have been eating sacraments and dancing under the moon with the tribe and having these experiences for eons.

In his view, it was the Grateful Dead or, more specifically, the traveling city of misfits and controlled chaos that sprouted up around their shows for decades that operated as the delivery mechanism for psychedelics in America. If Jerry Garcia and company had to compete with pill companies, the fertile matrix of art and culture that gave rise to that endlessly romanticized version of San Francisco would not have happened. There simply would have been no counterculture, broadly defined.

Proposition 215, to Rolando, was written by people who toiled in the dirt to grow weed to make sure they got a return on that labor. Proposition 64 was the opposite, giving rise to an investor class thats superficially savvy about the counterculture but whose intervention will necessarily lead to Roche and GlaxoSmithKline owning everything.

It almost seems like they were being used to put this friendly face on whatever The Man wants to do with this business in a few years, he says. If we see each other as an extension of the largest thing on earth mycelium, where no piece of it is bigger than any other piece of it the message is for people to keep it small. But Ive got bros coming to me saying Weve got investors! We need the poundage! I need somebody to grow this for me!

Central to his viewpoint is the belief that the media only talks about mushrooms now because the media is only allowed to talk about mushrooms now. Consequently, more and more people expressing an interest in hallucinogenic substances are indifferent as to whether they originated in a plant (in the sense of a fungus) or in a plant (in the sense of a factory).

Its the undoing of the magic of Prop 215, that allowed common people to work hard under the hot sun, Rolando says. Prop 215 was magical because whoever wrote it seemed to have an idea of how to keep it out of Corporate Americas hands. Were not legalizing these things. Were colonial-izing these things. Ive been caged twice for pot, and suddenly they want a cut, and its like, What?

Rolando sees mushrooms during COVID as a big chunk of cheese for the rat race. He cites the phenomenon of affluent parents working from home while their kids are learning from home, so mom and dad start microdosing to handle the stress. Its accessing mushrooms power without making any connection to the primal ritual of drum circles around the campfire (or a noodling, 25-minute guitar solo).

They didnt run their brain into the ground in 1990 or 91 on shitty acid in the parking lot, he says. Music and psychedelics will break the human psyche down to a state where theyre ready for more, or where theyre kind of looking for something thats not in a textbook.

Indeed, psychedelics may have already left the dusty Shoreline Amphitheatre parking lot and badged into the adjacent corporate campus. A YouTube clip announcing life-sciences company Cybins partnership with the VC-backed firm Kernel on a non-invasive wearable brain imaging device seems designed to repackage psychedelics without any trace of psychedelia. Its Rolandos living nightmare, basically.

The clip, which features a voiceover that doesnt quite make it across the Uncanny Valley and is chock-full gosh-wow Silicon Valley spirituality (quantifying what was previously impossible), its light on sacrament and heavy on promises of disruption:

Molecules like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, that have shown promise in treating psychiatric disorders, are being revisited and researched, the female narrator explains, pitching her voice in a manner reminiscent of a mid-reverie Dolores Abernathy. Only, this time, instead of leading her fellow Westworld hosts to The Valley Beyond, shes heading up a lobbying firm and filing for intellectual property rights. This resurgence is leading to a paradigm shift in public policy. Cybin is at the forefront of this revolution.

The specifics of the Cybin-Kernel partnership are also a bit vague, but it seems to have something to do with donning the chandelier hat that Doc Brown is wearing when Marty McFly meets him in 1955 and then getting dosed. But hey, if new technologies like these help, say, veterans with PTSD, maybe its worth it.

Dena Justice, an executive life coach and the founder of Ecstatic Collective, comes down somewhere between Rolandos never trust the man cynicism and Cybins bright-eyed (and wide-pupiled) optimism.

They agree that you cant just bypass everything for instant results. You need to put in the work first. Through what Justice calls neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), she focuses on non-ordinary states of consciousness, obtained through movement, breathwork, orgasms, and psychedelics. For her, this is about giving clients the tools to recognize patterns they might be stuck in, and how to break through them and achieve fulfillment.

Some of our strongest language is held in modal operators, words like necessity involves or I have to, she says. But if we can get into possibility language, like I decide to, or I choose to, it changes the way they relate to the world.

Justice is selective about who she takes on and mainly keeps to a supportive role, but otherwise shes reluctant to delve into the specifics of how she guides her clients use of psychedelic medicines. It almost doesnt matter what someones specific difficulty is, she explains, because our problems are always held in language and in the way we communicate. A three-hour intake session may lead to a medicine session whose usefulness is essentially measured in terms of how a person can interrupt their own neural-network highways, whether to achieve financial success or simply figure out what they ought to do in life.

The medicine works, she says. I help people get the fuck out of their [own] way.

To put it succinctly, Justice who named her program Get the F* Out of Your Way is primarily concerned with getting her clients past mental roadblocks. But she is also worried about regulatory roadblocks.

The way Justice sees it, the FDAs bureaucratic process could very well stand in the way of meaningful progress in the field of psychedelic medicine even in a future America where mushrooms have been decriminalized and legalized. Calling herself anti-extreme regulation, Justice is opposed to a standardized process for plant-derived medicines like psilocybin, because unlike pharmaceuticals, theyre not prescriptive in nature.

Oh, youre going to have four sessions with your therapist and then youre going to have a journey and then another four sessions and then another trip? I dont believe thats the way it should be done, she says. Im here to support you as an individual in the time you need. Some people will feel totally safe with you and dont need four sessions to build rapport and trust. Others will need a year.

Well, weve had a year. Now that were hopefully within sight of the end of the pandemic, the present is starting to feel almost like the future again. There were already tardigrades on the moon and lesbians in the U.S. Senate; now were flying helicopters on Mars and theres a trans woman in the Cabinet. And for $50, you can melt your brain a little bit, staring at Van Goghs Sunflowers, Starry Night, and The Potato Eaters while tripping.

Californians have been accustomed to slickly packaged cannabis edibles on dispensary shelves, but something about the idea of mushroom teas next to them feels fundamentally different somehow. Theres something about the idea that feels like a betrayal of countercultural ideals, like when a gay, Black, right-wing, Gen Zer amasses a huge following on TikTok, or someone says Mike Love is their favorite Beach Boy.

It seems inevitable that decriminalization will spread to other states and cities. Granted, the Biden administration fired a bunch of staffers for smoking pot on their own time, so there may not be a linear path to common sense public policy around entheogens. But if the sea change in attitudes about plant-derived substances and the carceral state causes the War on Drugs to wind down further, well capitalism is what it is, and well probably be seeing packets of trippy tea on Eaze sooner or later.

And who knows? Perhaps this was the fungus plan all along.

Peter-Astrid Kane is a former SF Weekly editor. Twitter @peterastridkane

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The Commodification of Psychedelics - SF Weekly

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Silo Wellness Announces Intellectual Property Licensing Agreement of Psilocybin Nasal Spray in Colombia and Brasil – GlobeNewswire

Posted: at 12:03 pm

TORONTO, April 15, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Silo Wellness Inc. (Silo Wellness or the Company) (CSE: SILO) (FRA:3K70), a wellness company in the psychedelics and functional mushroom marketplaces announced today that through its wholly-owned subsidiary, it has signed a binding Letter of Intent (LOI) for a multi-year patent licensing agreement with Jungle Med Inc. (Jungle Med), a human health and wellness company with operations in Latin America, to exclusively manufacture, promote, advertise, distribute and sell the patent-pending, metered-dosing psilocybin nasal spray in the countries of Colombia and Brasil. This marks the Companys first commercial transaction of its new-to-world intellectual property.

Silo Wellness was created to enhance wellness through psychedelics and functional foods. The Companys patent-pending nasal spray makes psilocybin easier to access, administer and ingest. One of the inherent challenges with ingesting psilocybin mushrooms orally is the discomfort it can cause to ones digestive system; however, our nasal spray solves this problem through bypassing the digestive system and entering the bloodstream through the nasal membranes, stated Douglas K. Gordon, Chief Executive Officer of Silo Wellness. The precise metered-dosing format allows for a measured amount of psilocybin to be administered, ensuring a higher degree of safety and consistency. Entering into this exclusive strategic licensing agreement with Jungle Med takes our intellectual property beyond Jamaica and marks our expansion to Latin America.

Jungle Med believes in unlocking the therapeutic power of plants, fungi and psychedelics so partnering with Silo Wellness, a leader in the global psychedelics category, was a natural decision, stated Dr. Beverly Richardson, Chief Executive Officer of Jungle Med. This breakthrough opportunity to become the first company to license the novel psilocybin metered-dosing nasal spray and introduce an effective psilocybin experience in both Colombia and Brasil is an amazing opportunity for consumers of these two Latin American countries to realizing a more natural and fulfilling approach to self-healing and well-being.

Metered-dosing ingestion alternatives with faster uptake speed are important to prevent accidental high-dosage experiences (also known as stacking, when the consumer takes a second dose before the first dose takes effect). Smaller sub-psychedelic, sub-perceptual to perceptual doses of psychedelic mushrooms may give the consumer spiritual, medical and therapeutic benefits without sending the user into a psychedelic trip as with high doses of mushroom biomass.

The exclusive LOI stipulates an upfront licensing fee of USD $250,000, five-year term with automatic renewal provisions, providing sales, distribution and marketing expectations are delivered upon and/or exceeded and royalty provisions. The parties will work expeditiously towards entering a definitive licensing agreement to reflect the terms of the LOI. Todays LOI disclosure with Jungle Med follows the global announcement made mid-March in which Silo Wellness announced it had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to collaborate with the Family of Bob Marley to brand, market and sell a distinct line of functional and psychedelic mushrooms.

About Silo WellnessThe mission of Silo Wellness is to improve health and wellness by developing and introducing psychedelic medicine to reduce trauma and increase performance by destigmatizing the active compounds in psychedelics and innovating ease of administration and ingestion. Silo Wellness intends to introduce new, safe and affordable alternatives to current medicines by facilitating entry into new and emerging markets where psychedelics are legal by conducting ketamine and psilocybin wellness retreats and elsewhere by manufacturing and distributing functional mushrooms.

Since its inception, Silo Wellness activities have focused on: (1) development of psilocybin-free functional mushroom tinctures; (2) the development of the formulation of a psilocybin nasal spray in Jamaica; and (3) offering of Jamaican and Oregon psychedelic wellness retreats as well as the cultivation of psychedelic mushrooms in Jamaica. None of Silo Wellness products claim to cure or mitigate any physical or mental disease, symptoms, disorders or abnormalities.

For further information, please contact: http://www.SiloWellness.com

About Jungle MedJungle Med is a Canadian-based company focused on unlocking the therapeutic power of plants, for the benefit of human health and wellness. Jungle Med consists of two main plant-inspired businesses with operations in Colombia and Brasil including clinical development of medicines and treatments based on alternative compounds derived from powerful sources such as psychedelics and cannabinoids; and ancestral indigenous knowledge from the Amazonian rainforest. The company is developing innovative and cutting edge health and wellness products including cosmetics, skincare and nutraceuticals, inspired by the unique biodiversity of Colombia and Brasil, based upon mushrooms, moringa and cannabis, formulated by a world class team of doctors and Pharmaceutical chemists.

Media Relations:Stuart Kirby, VP of Marketing & Communications press@silowellness.com

Silo Wellness Investor Relations:(604) 343-2724IR@empiregroupir.com

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:This news release contains forward-looking information and forward-looking statements (collectively, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. Other than statements of historical fact, all statements are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates, and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as expects, or does not expect, is expected, anticipates or does not anticipate, plans, budget, scheduled, forecasts, estimates, believes or intends or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results may or could, would, might or will be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. In this news release, forward-looking statements relate, among other things, to: the LOI and the definitive licensing agreement with Jungle Med and the business plans of Silo Wellness. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and the potential impact of COVID-19. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Silo Wellness assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

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Silo Wellness Announces Intellectual Property Licensing Agreement of Psilocybin Nasal Spray in Colombia and Brasil - GlobeNewswire

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Winners of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes announced – Los Angeles Times

Posted: at 12:02 pm

The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced during a virtual ceremony today. Among the winners in 14 categories were short story writer Deesha Philyaw, journalist Isabel Wilkerson, poet Victoria Chang, biographer William Souder and French novelist David Diop. Stephen Graham Jones won the second Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.

For the second consecutive year, the prizes which traditionally kick off The Times weekend-long Festival of Books were awarded without an IRL event due to the pandemic. Times book editor Boris Kachka emceed the virtual awards, and winners gave pre-recorded video speeches.

Philyaw, whose debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was a National Book Award finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner award, took home the Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. She will join authors Ben Okri, Carribean Fragoza and Shruti Swamy on Friday for a Book Fest panel about short stories.

Judges called the book a remarkable debut collection of stories ... fiercely Black and beautiful, which linger in the mind long after we read them... It announces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

In her speech, Philyaw said she wrote the book in hopes that Black women would see and hear themselves in my characters and their stories. I wrote it to be a balm, an affirmation, a celebration and a guidepost for getting free. In what has been a devastation year, were all looking for comfort, solace and healing, all of which we can find in the shelter of each other and in books.

Wilkerson was awarded the current interest prize for Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a powerful study of Americas age-old caste system that became a bestseller after last years Black Lives Matter protests.

This book was a quest for understanding, Wilkerson said in her speech. It required me to travel between three different continents and to study and to learn and to distill and synthesize the history and the culture of three different countries in order to better understand our own. She called her work a book written by an American, for Americans, about America at a time of existential crisis.

In the fiction category, Diop won for At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel, translated by Anna Moschovakis.

Stephen Graham Jones, winner of the 2020 Ray Bradbury Prize for his horror novel The Only Good Indians.

(Gary Isaacs)

Dark, gruesome, vivid, utterly compelling, At Night All Blood Is Black, a war story of racism, colonialism, violence, fear, and madness, is ultimately about the power of storytelling and how stories get told (or very often dont), judges said, adding, we have never read anything like him.

Of Changs Obit, winner in the poetry category, Judge Cyrus Cassells said, innovative poetic obituaries speak to us in a startling way about death and loss with surprising, sometimes surreal juxtapositions of image that never let the riveted reader settle into one groove.

Chang devoted some of her speech to decrying recent waves of violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In a time when so many Asian Americans and those from other marginalized communities still face daily violence, racism and misogyny, I feel particularly moved to be nominated, she said. She wrote the book when she felt most alone, she added, traveling on a raft at sea uncertain if I could find my way back. I wrote this book for myself, the book that I most needed during a time of grieving.

The prize for mystery/thriller went to S.A. Cosby for Blacktop Wasteland, the noir tale of a Virginia family man pushed to the edge by poverty, racism and his previous life of crime. Judges said it reflects concerns of the 21st century through a gripping plot accented by fully fleshed-out characters with realistic motives.

In history, Martha S. Jones took the prize for Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

I wrote Vanguard because its the book that I needed to read in 2020, Jones said in her speech. Mindful of the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, Jones said she wanted to ensure that Black womens roles in that struggle were not overlooked. What I couldnt have anticipated was the extraordinary range of consequential roles that Black women would play in the 2020 election cycle.

Previously announced winners were also celebrated during the ceremony: the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helped many bookstores during the pandemic, won the Innovators Award; Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko took the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. Andrew OHagan was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose for his coming-of-age novel Mayflies, the bittersweet tale of a friendship cemented in the New Wave 1980s on an epic trip to Manchester, England.

Robert Kirsch Award winner Leslie Marmon Silko.

(Penguin Classics)

When I set out to write Mayflies, I knew from the start that it would be not only an intimate book but my most autobiographical, OHagan said in a speech recorded in London. My dying friend and I came up with a pact that I would write a novel about our childhood and about the last year of his life. It came from the heart; some books just do.

Diana Wagman, a judge in the category, called Mayflies an easy choice among the many submissions for the award.

The memoirist and novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, who accepted the Robert Kirsch Award on behalf of her good friend Silko, recalled their own epic trip to China alongside the late literary giants Allen Ginsberg and Toni Morrison. Your earring beads were the exact colors and shapes on the columns of temples: red, green, blue and white, Kingston recalled, addressing Silko.

Youre not only a writer, Leslie, you are a sybil. An oracle. A prophet. You suffered from visions of the U.S. military and weapons at the Mexican border. Today, we could see that those omens have come true.

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Why Fake News Is an Affront to God – Algemeiner

Posted: at 12:01 pm

A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

Have you ever heard of Veles (pronounced veh-less)? I dont expect you have. Its a small town in a European country called North Macedonia which, until 1991, was a province of Yugoslavia. Truthfully, this sleepy little city that was once part of both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and included the name of Marshall Tito in its official name between 1945 and 1996 should have no bearing on the 21st century.

Indeed, Veles might well have retained its obscurity had it not been revealed in 2016 that a group of intrepid Veles-based teenagers had set up and were coordinating more than 140 websites which actively promoted fake news articles in support of then US presidential candidate Donald Trump.

I started the site for an easy way to make money, a 17-year-old Veles resident who set up a website called DailyNewsPolitics.com told BuzzFeed, as reported in The New York Times.Ironically, you couldnt make this stuff up.

The fake news phenomenon is actually fascinating. While not entirely new, it has blossomed in the age of the Internet and social media, with unverified and patently false stories gaining traction and then going viral with alarming speed, causing untold damage and leaving disaster in their wake.

April 16, 2021 10:45 am

After all, which mainstream outlet would ever have had the audacity to publish false stories like Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President and FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide?

Donald Trump likes to tell us that he was the first tier-one politician to use the phrase fake news but guess what, thats fake news.

In fact, his erstwhile election opponent, Hillary Clinton, used the term before him in December 2016, when she railed against the epidemic of malicious fake news in a speech to supporters, adding that it is now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences. Trump turned the phrase into a media-bashing weapon soon after taking office, the first time when responding to a question posed to him by CNN reporter Jim Acosta in January 2017 by telling him, youre fake news.

But although fake news may not have been known by that name before 2016, and there were certainly no centers of misinformation with an international reach like Veles before then, the concept of fake news is as old as information itself.

The British philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was already writing about it in 1620, noting that it is human nature to seize eagerly on any fact, however slender, that supports his theory; but question, or conveniently ignore, the far stronger facts that overthrow it. Modern psychology refers to this as confirmation bias the desire to see things only from our own perspective, and to dismiss any information that undermines our viewpoint, or even to airbrush it out completely.

Most of what is referred to as fake news is not actually completely fake; it generally contains elements of truth, or is at least derived from an existing truth.

Everything boils down to presentation, context, perspective, and circumstances. Individual facts may be true, or even a combination of facts, but do they represent an objective truth? Media outlets, even those that pride themselves on objectivity, are by-and-large riddled with bias and prejudice, which inevitably affects how they tell a story, or even which stories they choose to tell. Inconvenient facts are omitted, while those that underscore the viewpoint of those writing the story are all included.

In tabloid newspapers, or on presenter-fronted TV programs, facts that are in line with the media-outlets stance are exaggerated or repeated; meanwhile, usually no credence or space is allowed for a broader, more nuanced presentation of the facts. On social media its even worse. Often, a 15-second clip of some eye-jarring infraction becomes the sole source of truth, and anything that may have happened before or after the clip was shot which might mitigate or offer perspective is consigned to irrelevancy.

Rashi on Parshat Tazria quotes the sages of the Talmud, who state that tsaraat the skin, clothing, or wall discoloration that dominate this parsha and the next comes about as a punishment for lashon hara, which is Judaisms term for gossip and slander. All of the punishments in the Torah represent some sort of quid pro quo, with the punishment fitting the sin. So, how is tsaraat an appropriate punishment for lashon hara?

One of the characteristics that define lashon hara is that it isnt an outright lie. In which case, what is so bad? Why would the Torah want to ban the dissemination of truth? The answer is:that is exactly the point. Just because something is true doesnt mean it reflects the whole picture. It can be fake news a distorted picture, calibrated to vilify, or to present a slanted point-of-view. The Torah prohibits lashon hara because it represents a one-sided, negative view of its intended target, even if it is based on fact, turning someone who has erred in one small aspect of their behavior into a full-on monster with no redeeming features.

And this is a lesson that can be learnt from tsaraat. Although it may only be a tiny spot of discoloration, tsaraat contaminates an entire person, or a suit of clothes, or an entire house. The sin of lashon hara is reflected in the punishment, teaching the perpetrator that what they did to their intended target was a heinous wrongdoing.

You may not be from Veles, nor even have heard of it before today but that doesnt mean you are immune from the dangers of becoming a purveyor of fake news. The fundamental lesson of Tazria and Metzora is that molehills can become mountains, and we must be ever diligent not to fall into the trap of fake news both by spreading it or by believing it.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.

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Action to be taken against those spreading fake news on social media in Bhopal – India Today

Posted: at 12:01 pm

Photo for representation

Action will be taken against those spreading fake news on social media in Madhya Pradesh's capital Bhopal.

Bhopal Collector Avinash Lavaniya has issued an order saying that those spreading fake news will be punished under the IT Act.

The administration is fearing that fake news will deteriorate the law and order situation in the city.

In his order, the Collector has written that recently it has come to the notice that some people put misleading news, false and objectionable messages, videos, pictures, and audio clips on social media. Such information creates panic among the public without any reason. These types of messages can sometimes provoke religious sentiments of different communities.

The notice says, "Do not send or share any such thing which is full of degrading discrimination against any community and religion, creates a state of fear or doubt in the public. If found doing so, legal action will be taken under Section 188 under the other provisions of the Information and Technology Act.

Also read: Facebook showed ads for fake Clubhouse for PC app with malware

Also read: Maharashtra HSC, SSC Exams 2021: Gaikwad dismisses fake news, no decision announced yet

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Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire spreads fake news a day after The Logical Indian apologised for the same: Read details – OpIndia

Posted: at 12:01 pm

The Kumbh Mela has become a matter of concern for several people who had defended the Tablighi Jamaat when they had deliberately spread the virus by hiding in mosques, spit in places, pelted stones at police personnel and even defecated in hospitals. Almost determined to undermine Hindus and obfuscate facts, the propaganda has been at its highest. In the midst of this, Siddharth Varadarajan has resorted to spreading fake news again. In fact, the same fake news that the Logical Indians had apologised for just a day ago.

Siddharth Varadarajan took to Twitter to tweet The Wire article, with a comment why godi media warriors were not demanding he be arrested under the IPC and NDMA and Epidemic Diseases Act?, referring to the BJP leader Sunil Bharala.

The headline that was visible in the tweet preview of the article he plugged read, BJP MLA Says He Visited Kumbh Mela and Was COVID-19 Positive. The preview headline clearly insinuates that Bharala was actually COVID-19 positive at the time he visited the Kumbh Mela.

This, however, is not accurate. Logical Indian, that had first reported this, had just a day ago taken to Twitter to a apologise for spreading fake news.

In their statement, The Logical Indian said, The Logical Indian earlier reported that Uttar Pradesh BJP leader Sunil Bharala tested positive for COVID-19 and still attended the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar. However, in an interview with NDTV, the leader said that he attended the event and later added that he is currently COVID positive.

We wish to acknowledge that we inadvertently misrepresented the facts. The Logical Indian apologizes for the incorrect statement that claimed he attended the event while he was infected with the virus, he added.

In the fake news post, TLI attributed a fake quote to Sunil Bharala. The fake quote said, Im COVID positive myself. I still went to Kumbh. Dharma is above Corona guidelines. The news post further claimed that Kumbh Mela has become a Covid hotspot.

Interestingly, even after The Logical Indian apologised for spreading fake news, Siddharth Varadarajan took to Twitter to spread the same fake news and even demand that other media houses join in.

The article that The Wire wrote itself seems to have been updated since it does acknowledge that the Logical Indian apologised for spreading this news, however, Siddharth Varadarajan craftily took to Twitter to spread the fake news further and refused to delete it despite several people pointing out his error to him.

One Twitter user pointed out that if the Uttar Pradesh Government books him for deliberately spreading fake news, Varadarajan would cry FOE (like he had done before).

Another simply plugged the apology statement by The Logical Indian and assumed that Varadarajan had the IQ to understand that he was spreading fake news.

Another demanded that the Uttar Pradesh police arrest him for spreading fake news.

However, despite several such tweets, Varadarajan has refused to delete his post till the time this article was written.

In April 2020, two FIRs had been registered against The Wire Founder-Editor Siddharth Varadarajan for spreading fake news against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Varadarajan, in a bid to whitewash the deeds of Tablighi Jamaat. At that time, he hadwrongly attributed a fake quote to the UP CM.

Mrityunjay Kumar, the media advisor to the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, had informed that despite the warning from the state government, Varadarajan neither deleted the false article and nor apologised for the same. Therefore, an FIR had been registered against him.

In January 2021 as well, a complaint was registered in Uttar Pradesh against The Wire Editor Siddharth Varadarajan forpublishingand circulating false propaganda with intent to cause violence after he had tweeted an article void of any facts pertaining to the death of a rioter during the tractor rally.

The complaint was registered against Varadarajan under Section 153B and 505of the IPC in Rampur police station for trying to instigate the crowd by peddling false information about the death of a rioter named Navreet Singh, who had died during the tractor rally after his tractor turtled.

In fact, after the FIR was filed against Siddharth Varadarajan for spreading fake news in a bid to shield the Tablighi Jamaat, several liberals had come out to cry Freedom of Expression and even threatened the Yogi Adityanath government with USA pressure to ensure that the case against Varadarajan was withdrawn.

It is clear that Siddharth Varadarajan has a habit of spreading fake news against Uttar Pradesh, its Chief Minister and its ministers and when the government takes action, he and his coterie cry freedom of expression to shield themselves. If under the current situation, the Uttar Pradesh government decides to act against him, it is almost a certainty that he and his cohorts will cry about how media freedom is under threat while refusing to delete the blatantly fake news that he has clearly chosen to spread.

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The Fake News Outrage Over Georgia’s Voting Law Is Costing JobsStarting With Mine | Opinion – Newsweek

Posted: at 12:01 pm

If you've been paying attention the last two weeks, you've heard about Georgia's voting law and the growing corporate backlash. Most recently, the actor Will Smith announced on Monday that he was moving his latest project, the Apple thriller Emancipation, out of Georgia, where it was set to film. "We cannot in good conscience provide economic support to a government that enacts regressive voting laws that are designed to restrict voter access," Smith and director Antoine Fuqua said in a press release.

But like the other corporations and politicians expressing outrage over Georgia's law, it's based on a lie.

Politicians and outside groups are using lies and distortions to try to smear Georgia legislators, pressure Georgia businesses and hurt Georgian workers over common-sense laws that protect Georgia's election system. If the spin doesn't stop, Georgia and our democracy will both suffer.

After Georgia's General Assembly passed SB 202 and Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill, a powerful misinformation machine quickly kicked into gear. From cable networks to the U.S. Senate to the White House itself, politicians and pundits slammed Georgia's law as soon as it passed and called for mass boycotts of Georgia businesses. But these attacks don't hold up to the facts.

Senator Chuck Schumer was one of the first out of the gate, stating the General Assembly "recently passed a bill to eliminate early voting on Sunday"a claim which was patently false. The law actually doubles the required days of early voting. President Biden himself weighed in, calling Georgia's new election law "Jim Crow on steroids." His basis for the claim? Biden said that the new Georgia law limits early voting hoursanother obvious falsehood. The new law actually increases both early voting hours and the number of weekend voting days. These false claims were so blatant that even The Washington Post gave Biden four Pinocchios, while Politifact fact-checked Schumer's lie.

But other groups have taken up the claims. MSNBC claimed the law prohibits "food or water in line," yet another false claim repeated across the country. Under the new provision designed to limit electioneering, any voter can bring food or water into line, poll workers can pass out water, and third-party groups can pass out refreshments 150 away from polling places. These distortions are the ammunition for claims of "Jim Crow."

But words have meaning, and these lies have real consequences. I would know: They cost me my job.

Last month, the grifters at The Lincoln Project targeted me in a series of tweets. Among other things, they falsely accused me of co-sponsoring a bill to "suppress black votes" and "institute a new Jim Crow." They made the claims in several since-deleted tweets that also tagged my employer, a major law firm, and several of its well-known clients.

In less than 24 hours, my reputation and employment were destroyed. And all over fake news.

The charge for which I lost my job is, like Schumer and Biden's claims, unfounded. I did not try to take away anyone's vote.

The unreported truth is that I co-sponsored and voted for a bipartisan bill, Georgia Senate Bill 62, which calls for ballots in the state of Georgia to have a watermark, seal and other security elements to include the precinct number. These are simply best practices for voting that any ordinary Georgian should support. The bill even received numerous Democratic votes.

When I called out The Lincoln Project, they deleted their tweets, but no apology was offered, and the damage was done. I was no longer employed.

But my experience is nothing compared to what other Georgians might suffer. The cost of this misinformation campaign is already adding up: After calls from the Left to boycott Georgia employers, the MLB decided to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado, without specifying their objection to our laws. That move alone will cost the state $100 million. That won't hurt politicians or CEOs, but it will hurt Georgia's workers, fans and familiesjust like Apple moving production of its television show.

If the Left succeeds in pushing boycotts based on falsehoods, they will likely put thousands of Georgian workers out of workmany of them minorities.

Even Stacey Abrams agrees: She said that minorities in Georgia are "the most likely to be hurt by potential boycotts of Georgia," and asked non-Georgians not to boycott the state. Unfortunately, Abrams herself has pushed the misleading narrative that has stoked the fire of woke anger against the Peach State. Now she is recognizing that her words matter. I hope it's not too late.

You don't have to agree with Georgia's common-sense election integrity laws to see the threat that these lies pose to democracy. Out-of-state firebrands with no clue about Georgia's voting laws are using lies and deception to stoke division, pressure powerful corporations, hurt Georgia workers and destabilize our great nation.

When lies and economic terrorism are used to silence voters and lawmakers, democracy is in trouble.

John Albers is a Senator in the Georgia General Assembly, representing the 56th district.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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Macron’s anti-Muslim fake news in the FT needs urgent correcting – Middle East Eye

Posted: at 12:01 pm

Any political strategist hoping to get a controversial message across to an educated audience would be hard-pressed to look beyond a letter in theFinancial Timesfrom the president of France. TheFTis widely viewed as a peerless newspaper of record one read by power brokers everywhere whilethechefdetatof the French republic is one of the most powerful chief executives on earth.

Hence, EmmanuelMacronwas taken very seriously indeed when hespreadfake newsabout his countrysfive million Muslimsin theFTlast November. In a fewtoxicparagraphs, he conjured up a picture of lawless council estates whereMuslimparents arepoisoning the minds of little girls whilecoveringtheir bodiesunderburkas.

The problem was that hardly anything thatMacronwrote was true. The president had simply reproduced despicable tropes with no facts to support them

Without a shred of evidence, the president wrote:Visit the districts where small girls aged three or four are wearing a full veil, separated from boys, and, from a very young age, separated from the rest of society, raised in hatred of Frances values.

The presidentalso statedthatthese childrenspend their time in hellhole communities surrounded by hundredsof radicalised individuals, who we fear may, at any moment, take a knife and kill people. Introducingdisturbingbiologicalreferences into his narrative,Macronsaid these areas were breeding grounds for terrorists in France.

If the purpose of thissulphurous prosewas to spread collective guilt, itcertainly had the desired effect. An actual president had confirmed what venal propagandists have been saying for years that France has been overrun by alien hordes, and that murderous, cradle-to-grave radicalism is widespread. Everyone from anonymous social media trolls with swastika avatars to the kind of racist pop-philosophers who currently dominate French political thinking now had the presidents backing.

The letter was a particularly important one, and received much international publicity, becauseMacronwas also using ittoaccuse theFTof fake news. He was angry about anFTcolumn that, he claimed,had misrepresented his position on Islam. The article byanFTcorrespondent waswiped off theFTwebsite, while the presidentswriting billed byMacronhimself as a collection of simple facts was published in full.

The problem was that hardly anything thatMacronwrote was true. The president had simply reproduced despicable tropes with no facts to support them. We now know this for surebecause, four months on, nobody hasbeen ableto provide a scrap ofevidence to prove Macrons wicked deceit neither the French authorities, nor the FT.

Financial Times investigating complaint over Macron's claims aboutFrench Muslims

Followingreaders queries, theFTput barrister Greg Callus, the newspaperscomplaints commissioner, on the case.He was asked to justify a letter that continues to do untold harm to French Muslims, butafter an excruciatingly lengthy process, hasnot been able to do so.

Callus launched an investigation last December, and it was onlyin March that his convoluted adjudication was published. It stated:I must admit that I myself washighly scepticalof one aspect of this claim, namely the use of the term full veil being used in respect of the head-coverings worn by girls of this age.

The defamation lawyer added that these claims trouble me and that I might still not be content to positively assert that these facts are true or have been established definitively.Yet, Callus stopped short of correcting or apologising for these untruths, saying he hadno general jurisdiction to fact-check or adjudicate statements by world leaders or others who appear in the news.

FT editor Roula Khalaf has in fact opposed a Society of Editors statement about the alleged lack of bigotry in the media, noting: There is work to be done across all sectors in the UK to call out and challenge racism. The media has a critical role to play, and editors must ensure that our newsrooms and coverage reflect the societies we live in.

In light of the Callus adjudication, Khalafs words might sound hollow and hypocritical. This is especially the case now that Macrons incendiary allegations have been exposed.

In fact,the burka(or niqab) a full-veil garment thatcovers a womans body, including her face,apart from the eyes isactually banned in France,andanyone would face a possible prison sentence if they forced a child to wear one. There is not a single recorded incident ofa child in a burka, let alone any prosecutions or convictions.

The urban myth that Muslims hide their offspring away,while teaching them to hate, is similarly obscene.This simply plays into macabre legends about communities who prey on the young, including their own.

Instead, calls to relevant bodies from Frances InteriorMinistry, to police and prosecutors havenot yielded supporting facts. Sources there were all baffled by suchsensational andrecklessfantasies onesthat would instantly make front-page news if they were true.In an era when cameras are everywhere, there are no images to back upMacronsfabricationsabout these infant sociopaths either.

More than four months on, shining a light on such chronic perversions of the truth is particularly important, because they continue to play avenomous part in mainstream French politics.

Both Le Pen and Darmanin have disgraceful records for Muslim-baiting, and were more than happy to show off their prejudices to a mass audience

Earlier this year, far-rightNational Rally leader Marine Le Pen sparred with Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin in a live TV debate about which one of them is toughest on Islam. They were ostensibly discussing the place of religion in a secular republic, and how to deal with criminals who aredrawn toterrorism, but as usual, the spreading of collective guilt took precedence.

The terms Islam and Islamist were regularly interchanged, asMuslims per se were portrayed as adangerousunderclass largely made up of savage misfitsprone to suicidal barbarism.

There was no mention of the most high-profile lone-wolf terrorist outrages of last year being carried out by a Russian Chechen, a Tunisian and aPakistani instead, the implication was thatMacrons breeding ground estates on the edges of major cities, such as Paris and Marseille, produce all the knifemen.

Both Le Pen and Darmanin have disgraceful records for Muslim-baiting, and were more than happy to show off their prejudices to a mass audience of voters.Le Pen and her father, the convicted racist, antisemite and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, are past runners-up in elections to become president of France. Both represented the National Front, now known as the National Rally, a party founded by extreme nationalists who supported Nazism and Frances collaborating Vichy regime during the Second World War, and indeed by those furious about an independent Algeria.

The partys current incarnation remains a dynastic vehicle for the Le Pens, with Marine Le Pen currently the favourite to once again go head to head withMacronin the 2022 presidential election, just as she did in 2017.

This is whyMacroncovetsLe Pen votes, and is moving so drastically to the right as he tries totake them. Demonising minority groups by using weasel words is very important to this objective, as is obvious from the passage through parliament ofMacrons draft measures seeking to tackle radicalism.

Macronoriginally called it a bill to combat Islamist separatism a concept that fitted in neatly with the kind of Muslim estatesdepicted in hisFTletter but now it is described as legislationbolstering the respect of the principles of the Republic.

Suchrhetorical tweaks have not stopped theMacronadministration from proposing much stricter controls on Muslims, however.Closer monitoringof the perceived enemy within rangesfromtougherrules on the funding of religious organisations, tobanning home-schooling for Muslim children (even in the middle of a global pandemic, when such classes are being encouraged for all others).

The emphasis is on increased security, and the usual crackdowns on those whodisplaytheir religious affiliation via their choice of clothing, for example. Thus,another spectacular inaccuracy inMacronsFTletter was hisclaimthat the French statenever intervenes in religious affairs.

How Macron has become the champion of the far right

Perhaps the most disingenuous, however, wasMacronsallegation that I will not allow anybody toclaimthat France, or its government, is fostering racism against Muslims.

As with somuchof the presidents double-speak, it is not worth the pink paper it is written on, despite its promotion by certain sections of Frances media.

British outlets should know better.TheFTis not a member of IPSO, Britains regulatory Independent Press Standards Organisation, but claims to adhere to the IPSO Code in relation to accuracy and accountability. In such circumstances, theFTshould stop its complicity in spreading hatred against entire Muslim communities in France, andstand up for the truthby apologising and publishingfact-based corrections toMacrons letter.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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Fake news attacks feature in NATO cyber war game – The Star Online

Posted: at 12:01 pm

TALLINN: A fake news site attacking a NATO member recovering from the pandemic is part of the fictional scenario in an alliance cyber war game this week billed as the world's largest.

In the exercise, non-NATO member Crimsonia attacks vital infrastructure such as water supplies and mobile networks on the island state of Berylia, as well as the financial sector.

Crimsonia is also engaging in information warfare, persuading the people of Berylia that their government is responsible for a series of accidents through fake news and social media posts.

The Locked Shields 2021 exercise included 2,000 experts from 30 countries and was organised by the Estonia-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE).

This year the exercise featured several new dilemmas, said Commander Michael Widmann, Head of the CCDCOE Strategy Branch.

The exercise examined how evolving technologies, such as deepfakes, will shape future conflict. The cyber domain and information warfare operate hand in hand in the modern environment, he said, calling for governments to have strong strategic communication policies to mitigate these risks.

In the exercise, he said the teams had to find ways for the government of Berylia to communicate in a manner that does not confuse or, worse yet, panic members of the general public.

Adrian Venables, a British academic who has been involved in the exercise for the past seven years, told AFP that while the information campaign part of the exercise was voluntary it was designed so that teams taking part would score higher.

Venables said the information warfare elements provide additional realism and context although the main focus of the exercise is still technical.

The exercise was taking place alongside a real-world cyber defence conference in Tallinn at which NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana on Thursday warned that the pandemic has made countries more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Russia and China have tried to use the Covid-19 crisis to exploit vulnerabilities, including those in cyberspace, with cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns, designed to sow distrust and division in our democratic societies, he said. AFP

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The anatomy of fake news about Covid-19 The Manila Times – The Manila Times

Posted: at 12:01 pm

The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has been a super-spreader event of misinformation online, leading to an all-time high level of fake news online, according to a report of Tech.co late last year. The unprecedented rise of misinformation and disinformation online about the coronavirus started at the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

For instance, in April last year, the CoronaVirusFact Alliance database recorded nearly 4,000 coronavirus-related hoaxes circulating around the world. In the UK during the first week alone of the countrys lockdown last year, 46 percent of adults on the internet saw false or misleading information about Covid-19, according to a study by telecoms regulator Ofcom. In France just this March 2021, 58 percent of adults surveyed by Statista said that the media they consult the most have reported false information about the Covid 19 outbreak.

Even the US President Donald Trump said in October last year, without evidence, that recent spikes in Covid-19 cases throughout the US are a fake news media conspiracy and that reporting on them amounts to pre-election politics.

Fake news in this time of the coronavirus has become an increasingly pressing issue in news and media, resulting in confusion and harm among people, and a slowdown and even to the outright rejection of vaccination by the public.

According to fact-checker Boom in April 2020, most of the fake news were circulated with videos (35 percent), followed by text messages (29.4 percent) being shared with fake cures, treatments or quotes from celebrities, along with images (29.4 percent) that were either misrepresented or doctored. There was a small number of audio clips (2.2 percent) going viral with false contexts.

But why do people spread fake news about Covid-19, when all of us are affected by this menace? Lets dissect the anatomy of fake news to further understand.

Fake news can be categorized in two quite different ways misinformation and disinformation.

Misinformation involves misleading information, advice or statistics usually spread by well-meaning but ill-informed individuals. This type of information could be spread by governments or organizations releasing skewed data, or a family member wanting to help keep their loved ones safe by sharing information in social media. Examples of this include disputed causes of coronavirus, confusion over lockdown rules, and unproven coronavirus treatments.

Misinformation can be addressed by guiding citizens on how to fact-check and verify the news and its sources. Governments, organizations and family members should continuously educate their constituents and members on how to spot fake news and therefore not share or spread it.

On the other hand, disinformation is malicious and false information, aimed at disrupting public order or manipulating an agenda. Examples of this include news about coronavirus being a hoax or coronavirus as propaganda of government. Misinformation is made more dangerous due to the speed at which fake news spreads during a crisis, on social media or messaging platforms.

Since disinformation is deliberate as it is crafted by viperous groups or individuals aiming to sow belief among people. They dont need to win the factual argument to win the race to belief, according to Mark Gray of the Canada Free Press. He further breaks down the structure of fake news to help us understand the motive behind it.

Fake news has three components the claim, the frame, and the aim, according to Gray.

The claim represents the false factual aspect of fake news, the frame emotionally guides perceptions towards the desired narrative (belief), and the aim is the ability of that information to reach a mind. Furthermore, fake news is repeated by the purveyor in order to persuade, because after all, it works for real and fake news.

One example of fake news that spread like Covid-19 is the one that claimed the ingredients of a vaccines for Covid-19 could rewrite your DNA and embed microchips. This fake news was of the widely viewed videos on Facebook and YouTube in 2020 made by US-based osteopath Carrie Madej. Without giving any evidence, she also claims that these vaccines will link people up to an artificial intelligence interface.

The claim in this fake news is obviously the altering of the DNA and the microchip story, the frame is how Madej, in her video delivers the message powerfully and convincingly, and the aim is to gather a following, which it did in 2020, with thousands of believing followers. This fake news affected the acceptability and rollout of vaccination in certain parts of the world.

But this fake news has been debunked also last year, with pronouncements from medical practitioners and published studies revealing evidence that the claims were not true.

There is more fake news being manufactured and spread out there. Some are spread out of ignorance, while others through malicious intent. We need to stop its fabrication and distribution, and understanding how they are structured is one big step to detect them and consequently stop them.

The author is the founder and chief executive officer of Hungry Workhorse Consulting, a digital and culture transformation consulting firm. He is fellow at the US-based Institute for Digital Transformation. He teaches strategic management in the MBA Program of De La Salle University. The author may be emailed at rey.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com.

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The anatomy of fake news about Covid-19 The Manila Times - The Manila Times

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