Quartz: Scientists studying psychoactive drugs accidentally proved the self is an illusion

There are some limitations to psilocybin studies—they tend to be small, and rely on volunteers willing to take drugs and, thus, open to an alternate experience. But the research could have major implications in an age characterized by widespread anxiety. Psilocybin seems to offer some people a route to an alternate view of reality, in which they shed the limitations of their individual consciousness and embrace a sense of interconnectedness and universality. These trips aren’t temporary, but have transformative psychological effects. Even if we don’t all end up on mushrooms, the studies offer insights on how we might minimize suffering and interpersonal strife and gain a sense of peace.

Consider a study of 75 subjects, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology last October. The study concluded that psilocybin leads to mystical experiences that can have long-term psychological benefits in conjunction with meditation training. The greater the drug dosage, the more potent the positive psychological effect was six months later. “Participants showed significant positive changes on longitudinal measures of interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning/purpose, forgiveness, death transcendence, daily spiritual experiences, religious faith and coping,” the study concluded.

Meanwhile, in July, psychologist Richard Williams of John Hopkins University revealed an experiment involving clergy and psilocybin. Williams is enlisting priests, rabbis, and Zen Buddhist monks to take drugs, meditate, and “collect inner experiences.” (No Muslim or Hindu clerics agreed to participate.) The study will last a year, so no results are out yet. But Williams told The Guardian in July 2017 that so far, the clerics report feeling simultaneously more in touch with their own faith and greater appreciation for alternate paths. “In these transcendental states of consciousness, people … get to levels of consciousness that seem universal. So a good rabbi can encounter the Buddha within him,” Williams said. [...]

As Shelby Hartman wrote in Quartz last January, the data (pdf) from three trials of psilocybin in 36 healthy volunteers showed that brief drug-induced mystical experiences changed people over time, leading them to report better moods, heightened altruism and forgiveness, more closeness with others, and a sense of connection six months later. Two-thirds of study subjects rated the experience during a psilocybin session so meaningful that it fell within their top five life events, up there with the birth of a first child, for example. The researchers believe the memory of the drug experience—the trip, if you will—continues to influence people long after the drug itself has technically worn off.

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The Atlantic: The Weirdest—and Possibly Best—Proposal to Resolve the North Korea Crisis

First, consider the shifting balance of power between Pyongyang and Seoul. North Korea has long had a smaller population than South Korea. But until the early 1970s, the two countries had roughly the same per capita GDP. Today, South Korea’s is roughly 23 times higher. Ninety-two percent of South Korea’s roads are paved. In the North, it’s 3 percent. The average South Korean lives more than a decade longer than her North Korean counterpart, and is between one and three inches taller. [...]

But this is only part of the story. North Korea hasn’t only grown weaker vis-á-vis South Korea, it’s grown weaker vis-á-vis the great powers as well. During the Cold War, North and South Korea each had important patrons, which fought alongside them during the Korean War. Then, in 1991, the North’s most powerful ally, the Soviet Union, collapsed. Its successor state, Russia, annulled its mutual-assistance treaty with Pyongyang and opened diplomatic relations with Seoul. By 1992, the Russian and South Korean navies were visiting each other’s ports. [...]

North Korea has since watched America topple yet another dictator who lacked nuclear weapons: Muammar Qaddafi. It’s seen the U.S. practice “decapitation raids” against its own regime. It’s watched Donald Trump declare, in response to a question about assassinating Kim Jong Un, that “I’ve heard of worse things.” And it’s seen the Trump administration both threaten, and mobilize for, war.

It’s also watched China, its last ally, tilt even more heavily toward Seoul. Since he became China’s leader in 2012, Xi Jinping has met his South Korean counterparts seven times. He hasn’t met Kim Jong Un once. Beijing has backed sanctions against the North at the United Nations. Chinese officials have even declared that they no longer feel bound to defend Pyongyang under the Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty that the two countries signed in 1961.  

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The Washington Post: Putin’s Silk Road gamble

Another blow was the loss of Ukraine as a potential participant in Russian-led integration arrangements. Without Ukraine, the second-largest post-Soviet economy and a market of about 44 million people, Moscow’s hopes to create an integrated bloc that would be on par with the European Union and other centers of global economic power were essentially dashed. Lacking a market of sufficient size to create its own viable geo-economic area, Russia was left with the only option of moving into another nation’s economic orbit. [...]

Still, while praising the Belt and Road plan, Moscow is keen to prevent Beijing’s geopolitical domination of continental Eurasia. Instead of wholeheartedly subscribing to China’s scheme, the Kremlin promotes its own vision of “a larger Eurasian partnership” or “Greater Eurasia,” a network of existing and emerging “integration formats.” Beijing’s Belt and Road would be just one element, alongside the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and potentially even the European Union. [...]

Russia aspires to be the main security and diplomatic broker in Eurasia while leaving China with the role of the economic leader. As one observer put it, “China would be the bank, and Russia would be the big gun.” Such an arrangement might harken back to the history of the European Community, when France acted as the political leader while West Germany was the economic engine. Moscow’s preference for a new Eurasian order is reflected in its diplomatic activism, such as its leading role in securing the admission of India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and in advocacy for the future membership of Iran.

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Vox: he Trump-Fox & Friends feedback loop, explained

Fox & Friends has spent years being a fever swamp of conspiracy theories, right-wing propaganda, smear campaigns, and general absurdity. Now, it's President Trump's favorite show, with the power to hijack the news cycle for days at a time.

The Guardian: Self-loathing among gay people is nothing new. We’re overwhelmed by it

Many gay people know the most homophobic school bully often pops up in the local gay bar a few years later, but there are wider examples: Hollywood agents who bar clients from coming out, historical figures such as Senator McCarthy’s anti-gay lawyer Roy Cohn, who maintained till the end that the Aids-related illness that killed him was liver cancer, the countless homophobic politicians caught with male escorts. But self-loathing can turn deadly. Omar Mateen, who committed America’s most deadly homophobic attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, pledged his allegiance to Isis but was also alleged to have made sexual advances towards men. His ex-wife said she believed he was gay. [...]

Gay people are not the only ones to suffer such shame, but experts, both gay and straight, agree that gay kids are overwhelmed with it. Many of us grow up, come out and have wonderful and happy lives. For others, the journey can be rockier. Many bury their feelings, hoping they’ll go away, some psychologically “split”, like the heterosexually married men who believe anonymous internet hook-ups don’t count as gay if they happen in secret. Just this week I met a young man who told me he hated gay pride, hated effeminate men but crucially was trying to work through these feelings by talking about them. The gay community doesn’t talk about this enough, and when we do it’s often with judgment. [...]

Talking about gay shame and self-loathing is not easy. It flies in the face of the message of gay pride that has dominated the gay rights movement of the last 50 years. But we must talk about it. Most people wrestling with shame hurt themselves. Disproportionate numbers of LGBT people suffer with self-destructive behaviour. At the end of 2016 we lost George Michael after years of mental health and addiction struggles. A year later, last November, 21-year-old American rapper Lil Peep died from a fentanyl overdose months after he came out as bisexual. Just last month, the 38-year-old presenter of the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chaser programme, Joel Taylor, died from a GHB overdose on an Atlantis gay cruise. All in a year that saw the usual reports of unsupported LGBT teenagers killing themselves, such as a 15-year-old in Stirling, after years of bullying, and a 16-year-old girl whose life-support machine was turned off after doing the same. And so it goes on and on, without much awareness or enough being done to address the situation.

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Reuters: Italy's League leaves northern bastions, bangs anti-migrant drum

In a radical makeover, the League has dropped the word "Northern" from its name and is presenting itself as a national force, aggressively surfing a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment to vie for supremacy within its own center-right bloc. [...]

Founded in 1991 by Umberto Bossi, the League once campaigned vociferously for northern secession and used to denounce Italy's capital as "thieving Rome". Maps on its website jokingly referred to everything south of Rome as Africa. [...]

He has since rowed back on the euro pledge and has turned his focus onto immigration, tapping public angst over the arrival of more than 600,000 mainly African migrants in four years, mostly by boat from Libya. [...]

"A large part of the old guard which always supported the ideals of the north are now struggling to see themselves reflected in this new party," said Giovanni Fava, who was beaten by Salvini in the party's 2013 leadership battle.

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The Guardian: Italy is being driven into the arms of fascists

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Northern League, has accused the Democratic party of flooding Italy with immigrants to replace Italian workers, thereby transforming the nation into a giant refugee camp. He declares that immigrants bring drugs, theft and violence. Last weekend the impact of this hate speech was made clear, with a drive-by terror attack in Macerata, central Italy. A gunman named as Luca Traini, 28, a candidate for the Northern League in last year’s local elections, went on a two-hour shooting rampage in his car, apparently targeting people of colour. Six were wounded before Traini was arrested, giving a fascist salute as police led him away. At his home, officers found a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a flag with the Celtic cross, a symbol often used by far-right parties.

Yet the most frightening thing about the Macerata episode is how mainstream Traini’s views are. The Northern League has formed a coalition with another far-right anti-immigrant party, Brothers of Italy, as well as with the disgraced former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. This bloc is expected to win the March election. Berlusconi and his allies have for years been encouraging hatred against foreigners, demonising them and creating a situation in which violence against them seems inevitable. [...]

The political agenda of the Berlusconi-backed coalition is virulently anti-immigrant, defending what it calls a “pure race”. One of its candidates, Attilio Fontana, has said that all immigrants threaten the survival of “the white race”. He even bragged in Italy’s main newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, newspaper that his proudly racist views boosted his popularity.

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The Guardian: Trump's America will be saddled with debt – like his bankrupted hotels were

The Tea Party was a collection of strange people, including one candidate who promised she wasn’t a witch. But the strangest thing happened after Obama moved out of the White House, and an orange man moved in. That was when conservatives all across America decided they didn’t actually hate debt and deficits after all. [...]

Grand Wizard Trump first learned his magic debt spells when he built a palace called the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. He called it the eighth wonder of the world, and it certainly was wonderful how the business went bankrupt a year after it opened. Five other Trump palaces went bankrupt the next year, but he waved his wand and everything turned out fine. For him. [...]

Normal people find it hard to borrow money or run businesses after so many bankruptcies. But they don’t know the magic spells that Trump knows, and they don’t have a TV show that makes any buffoon look like a real businessman. They also don’t have Russian wizard friends who buy lots of their property at ridiculously high prices because that’s how they do something they call “laundry”. [...]

And he was right. Nobody but Trump could have imagined that Republicans would vote for a trillion-dollar monster after so many years fighting a religious war against Obama for precisely the same thing. Nobody but Trump could have sold the idea of debt so well to the very people who said they hated it.

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The Guardian: Bermuda becomes first country in world to repeal same-sex marriage

Walton Brown, Bermuda’s minister of home affairs, said the legislation signed by Governor John Rankin would balance opposition to same-sex marriage on the socially conservative island while complying with European court rulings that ensure recognition and protection for same-sex couples in the territory.

Bermuda’s Senate and House of Assembly passed the legislation by wide margins in December and a majority of voters opposed same-sex marriage in a referendum. [...]

But same-sex couples will now have the option only of a registered domestic partnership. Brown said those couples would had “equivalent” rights to married heterosexual couples, including the right to make medical decisions on behalf of one’s partner. [...]

The supreme court ruling on marriage equality in May 2017 was celebrated by Bermuda’s small gay community, but it also outraged many on the socially conservative island, including church leaders, and thousands protested outside parliament.

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