SP tomorrow night, and a few stray thoughts
Details: “Prison and Punishment,” with Nate DeWard, Thursday, April 16, 7pm, Port 393, Holland, MI
We are not well, folks. Nate and I will share more on this tomorrow night.
Psychedelics in the news
In March we covered the science and therapeutic potential of psychedelics. This past Sunday, The Daily podcast from the New York Times featured an interview with one of their own reporters. Political reporter Robert Draper details his experience traveling to Mexico to a retreat center where they administer the powerful psychedelic ibogaine. Draper had a brother with serious mental health issues who terrorized him as a child and who later died tragically. Draper was haunted by this for many years and couldn’t find relief. He tells the story of his ibogaine journey for The Daily. Check it out here.
Cuba is next
In my last post, I included a clip from M Gessen, who explained how the next phase in Trump’s authoritarian takeover would be foreign wars, a new American imperialism. Currently, the target is Iran, but I suggested that Cuba was next. Well, we are starting to get reporting that Trump has ordered the military to begin preparations for an operation in Cuba.
Zeteo is an independent journalistic enterprise founded by Mehdi Hasan, whom I trust and admire.
In recent days, according to two sources familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it, officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US government were quietly given a new directive that came straight from the Trump White House. The message: ramp up your preparations for possible military operations against Cuba.
It appears that Trump has not made a final decision yet on military action, and negotiations to end Trump’s “economic bombing” of the island’s civilian population are ongoing. If Trump doesn’t get what he wants, Zeteo is told that one option that has been discussed within the Trump administration is for the US military to conduct another abduction operation against some of the Cuban leadership, similar to its kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela early this year.
Iran and Islam (and USA and Christianity)
I listened to really helpful podcast episode from On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti. It was about the Iranian revolution of 1979, which led to the Islamic theocracy that runs Iran to this day. It was these lines, which are part of a 3-minute section that I’ve included below, that caught my attention.
And then, after 79, it becomes a theocracy where Shia Islam is supposed to be the source of everything you do. And what has happened 47 years later is they’ve turned people off.
Again, I find it so ironic that today, Iran is by most accounts the most secular country in the Islamic world.
The only theocracy now sits on top of the most secular population. And the regime is happy that they can go to places like West Africa, convert a few people who happen to be, I don’t know, Sunni Muslim Nigerians, convert them to Shia Islam, and declare that as a major victory when they’re losing literally millions of people who were supposed to be a Shia Muslim but have abandoned their faith.
First of all, I did not know that millions of Iranians had abandoned their Muslim faith. Second of all, as I listened to the full clip, I realized that this is similar to what is happening to Christianity in the United States. Millions of Christians in the United States are abandoning the faith because of its cultural and political witness (in part). People see how abusive and cruel it is, and they want nothing to do with it. Here is the full clip.
Israel’s commitment to destruction and death
Lastly, Ezra Klein devoted his last episode to Iran, and the experts he had on the show agreed that Israel would be content to destroy Iran, its institutions and infrastructure, so completely that it became a failed state. Here’s the clip.