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This is a dumping ground for links and other stuff for the 2018 4/20 article. Might as well get started now. Feel free to post articles or your suggestions in here up until April 20, 2018 (journal comments remain open forever, if you hadn't noticed). The article will cover topics including but not limited to cannabis, the opioid crisis, and the drug policies of any countries you are interested in, not just the U.S. I especially want articles regarding state/local ballot initiatives, implementation of drug policies, and the like, as well as articles about single events that can fit well on a timeline (such as this). If you want to critique the pro-legalization crowd, that's fine too.

Theoretically, the article could grow to an insane size without pissing everyone off too much with liberal use of the spoiler tag:

I've already lost some of the links below due to an invalid resource error. I will probably edit my extension to add the equivalent of the "submission draft" feature for journals.

This journal entry will be edited to include more links and notes as we get closer. Although I'll retain a few surprises for the actual article.

Here are the past 4/20 articles:

2015: 4/20: StonerNews is People
2016: 4/20: Half-Baked Headline
2017: 4/20: The Third Time's Not the Charm

Timeline
(I have to decide whether I want to include many events or just past SoylentNews articles here.)

April 21: Massachusetts Throws Out 21,587 Tainted Drug Convictions
April 23: Remake of Classic "Your Brain on Drugs" Ad Slams Disastrous Drug War

May 11: Vermont Legislature Passes Cannabis Legalisation Bill
May 15: Jeff Sessions Reboots the Drug War
May 16: Cop Brushes Fentanyl Off Uniform, Overdoses

July 31: 34 Criminal Cases Tossed after Body cam Footage Shows Cop Planting Drugs

August 5: Cannabis Company Buys Entire California Town to Create Marijuana Tourist Destination
August 11: President Trump Declares the Opioid Crisis a National Emergency
August 17: Another Canadian Banned From the U.S. for Past Drug Use
August 30: FDA Designates MDMA as a "Breakthrough Therapy" for PTSD; Approves Phase 3 Trials

September 11: Thanks to the DEA and Drug War, Your Prescription Records Have Zero Expectation of Privacy

October 14: Study Suggests Psilocybin "Resets" the Brains of Depressed People
October 26: According to Gallup, American Support for Cannabis Legalization is at an All-Time High
October 27: Opioid Crisis Official; Insys Therapeutics Billionaire Founder Charged; Walgreens Stocks Narcan
October 28: Study Finds That More Frequent Use of Cannabis is Associated With Having More Sex

November 2: FDA Cracking Down on Unsubstantiated Cannabidiol Health Claims
November 4: People Who Take Psychedelics Are Less Likely to Commit Violent Crimes, Study Says
November 15: FDA Blocks More Imports of Kratom, Warns Against Use as a Treatment for Opioid Withdrawal
"Drug Bazooka" Seized Near the U.S.-Mexican Border
November 16: Opioid Commission Drops the Ball, Demonizes Cannabis
November 27: Hallucination Machine: Psychedelic Visuals in VR

December: World Health Organization Clashes With DEA on CBD; CBD May be an Effective Treatment for Psychosis
Ketamine Reduces Suicidal Thoughts in Depressed Patients

Links

* Veterans in New York can now get medical marijuana to treat PTSD
* A 12-Year-Old Girl With Epilepsy Is Suing Jeff Sessions Over Medical Marijuana
* Marijuana could be legal in New Jersey as soon as April
* The War On Drugs Repackaged
* Campaign to legalise magic mushrooms gains momentum in California
* Reports: Manson hospitalized in California
* Ohio's First Crop of Medical Marijuana Dealers See Green, But Face Hurdles
* The Rush is on for Ohio's Marijuana Dispensary Licenses
* Don Martin: Retired cops chasing pot of gold at the end of legalization rainbow
* Veterans are key as surge of states OK medical pot for PTSD (archive)
* The Indigenous Mexican Tribe That Honors Rare Psychedelic Toads
* What It's Like to Smoke the World's Strongest Psychedelic Toad Venom
* Europe's Largest Legal Weed Farm Is Being Built in a Nuclear Bunker
* Why It Feels Like You Can Communicate with Nature on LSD
* Jeff Sessions Isn’t Giving up on Weed. He’s Doubling Down.
* VIDEO: For LSD, What A Long Strange Trip It's Been
* New York Is Closer Than Ever to Legalizing Weed
* Solving the Dutch Pot Paradox: Legal to Buy, but Not to Grow
* Non-psychoactive cannabis ingredient (CBD) could help addicts stay clean
* A Dying Southern Town Needed a Miracle. Marijuana Came Calling.
* Reader: Kratom Saved My Life From a Heroin Addiction

Notes

Cannabis is the scientific term for the drug colloquially known as "marihuana/marijuana", which is now regarded as an outdated and racist term that was intended to scare the public.

What is the difference between "opioids" and "opiates"? "Opioid" is a broader term:

Want to legalize drugs easily? Make recreational drugs treatments for "boredom" and "spiritual malaise".

Report: Green Beret killed by SEALs after he uncovered alleged theft

Two Navy SEALs being investigated over the death of an Army Green Beret in Mali in June are accused of killing him after he discovered they had been stealing, according to a report in the Daily Beast.

CNN has not independently verified the information in Saturday's article, which the Daily Beast attributes to "five members of the special-operations community who were not cleared to speak publicly."

Naval Criminal Investigative Service spokesman Ed Buice confirmed to CNN last month that the NCIS was investigating whether two members of the Navy's elite SEAL Team Six killed Army Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar.

The New York Times was the first to report that the SEALs were under investigation for Melgar's death at a US government compound near the American embassy in Bamako, the capital.

[...] The Daily Beast article cites two special operations sources as saying the SEALs under investigation over Melgar's death had been taking money from a fund used to pay informants. It says the sources allege that Melgar uncovered the theft and declined an offer to take a cut of the proceeds. On June 4, according to the Daily Beast's sources, an altercation broke out -- the cause of which the article says is unknown -- and Melgar stopped breathing. The SEALs and another Green Beret took Melgar to hospital, the Beast quotes former AFRICOM officials as saying.

Now that's what I call a dishonorable discharge.

Someone gave me 0.990 LTC a week or two ago. At the time that was about $54.00. It has since gone up to about $60.

I bought $60 each of BTC and ETH, paid for with EFTs from my business checking account.

BTC went way down today doubtlessly due to some burglar bragging that he just stole $32,000,000.00 worth of bitcoin by hacking into digital wallets.

CoinBase offers USD wallets if you're down with uploading pix of the front and back of your ID. So I can no longer use CoinBase for money laundering.

The great advantage of the USD wallet is that the transactions take place immediately, rather than having to wait seven days as happened with my EFTs. The price was locked-in when I ordered the purchase but I wasn't permitted to trade the ETH or LTC for over a week.

Now I have BTC 0.0253 that just now is worth $169.15.

My code is going to go beta by the middle of next week. That means I get paid. I'm going to buy one BitCoin - presently that costs $6,682.00 - as well as a mining rig.

The reason I'm doing this is that I have no other hope of funding a decent retirement. Even if I contribute the maximum of $6500 - the "catch-up" rate for people over 50 - until I'm 65, my retirement will have me living like a starving artist through all of my golden years.

So I'm speculating on cryptocurrency. Even if I lose it all, my retirement won't really be any worse than I presently foresee it.

I might form a 501(c)3 tax-deductible non-profit corporation to operate Soggy Jobs. If I do that I could give myself the employment benefit of a 401k, which will enable me to contribute about three times as much as my IRA permits.

I'm soliciting donations but they're not yet tax-deductible.

Google.org exists to give money to charities. I expect I can make a good case for contributing to soggy jobs. There are many philanthropic organizations; if I do form the non-profit I'm going to work with a grant writer to get me some of those Samoleons.

Original story: Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32 (archive)

Roy Moore can still win

Moore has zero incentive to listen to calls from official Washington for him to leave the race. In fact, the louder those calls get, the more likely it is that Moore digs in even further.

Then there is the fact that the widespread condemnation of Moore among GOP senators is not entirely shared by Alabama Republicans.

Take Alabama state auditor Jim Ziegler, for one. In an interview, Ziegler downplayed the accusations against Moore by citing Scripture:

Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist. Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.

Then there was Alabama Marion County GOP chair David Hall, who told the Toronto Star's Daniel Dale this: "It was 40 years ago. I really don't see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She's not saying that anything happened other than they kissed."

In the Post report, however, the accuser also says Moore sexually assaulted her. She says Moore touched her and forced her to touch him.

Marrying young girls is old hat. We just grope and move on now.

Romney: 'Unfit' Moore 'should step aside'

Why do we care what Romney thinks, again?

Romney mulling Senate bid: report
I Never Liked Mitt Romney, But Now I’m Desperate for His Comeback

Oh, ok.

I went to the new restaurant that wants to become the 'McDonald's of pasta' — and they are onto something big

Ladner says Pasta Flyer's service model embodies the two cornerstones of fast food: speed and low prices. But he refers to the food itself as "slow" and more comparable to what you'd find at a traditional restaurant.

[...] I sampled four pastas: fusilli with basil pesto sauce, fettuccine with creamy Alfredo sauce, whole grain rigatoni with Nonna's meat ragu, and spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce. I was shocked to find that all four were of the same quality I would expect from an upscale Italian restaurant that charges around $25 for a bowl of pasta. The noodles were cooked to al dente perfection, the sauces were warm and rich, and the meat was flavorful and tender. The dishes were simple, but done right.

[...] To make this happen, Ladner says the sauces are held just above a temperature set by the NYC Department of Health. After a customer orders, their noodles are cooked in 15 seconds while their sauce is brought to a boil, and then the two are plated.

[...] Ladner says the wheat is milled directly before the pasta is made, resulting in a noodle that's "fresh and alive," and will still be al dente when you eat it a day later as leftovers. "It's the best pasta I know of in the world, and it's $7.50," he says.

Whereas I have zero faith that the West has any capability, much less will, to solve its problems.

I believe my reply is instructive:

Let's take a tour of the problems that the West not only has the capability or will to solve, but actually has done so:

1. Wars -solved.
2. Pollution - solved.
3. Poverty - partially solved. Note the current economic systems of the West have also partially solved poverty in China as well through global trade.
4. Habitat destruction - partially solved with conservation and setting aside green space and wilderness.
5. Population growth - solved.
6. Mass education -solved.
7. Mass, global communication - solved.
8. Global trade system - solved.
9. Authoritarian clowns telling you what to do - partially solved for now.
10. Feeding the world - solved for now.

While I won't discuss all of these, I want to discuss the first three: wars, pollution, and poverty, the last along with population growth because the two problems are intertwined. These are the most stereotyped and the most often wrong when discussing problems and solutions.

So let's start with the problem of wars. Everyone knows that wars continue to happen. We even have a rather bloody one going on in Syria right now. Here, I claim that wars are "solved", yet we still have them. What gives? The first observation here is that wars are between multiple parties, states or significant sub-state actors (guerillas, paramilitary groups, terrorists, freedom fighters, etc). A single entity can't fix all wars. If party A and party B want to fight, party C is limited in what they can do to keep the two parties from fighting, even if they have legal police power over one or both groups. So a solution to war is merely the cessation of war between parties, not the ability of a third party to prevent war.

The key is to look at the developed world countries and conflicts since the end of the Second World War. If one looks at the list of the top 16 (all those with a Human Development Index of above 0.900), one sees that these countries, while often in conflict, particularly the US and UK, are never in conflict with each other. The only real conflict with any sort of involvement between these countries is the paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland which involved the UK directly and had significant private support from Ireland and the US citizens (though zero official support).

Otherwise, conflicts reduce to fishing boats bumping each other on the high seas and fall far short of any serious definition of war.

The lower tier (HDI between 0.800 and 0.899) still show remarkably low levels of conflict between members. Russia (as the controlling state of the USSR) has been in military conflict with other members (putting down revolt in Hungary in 1968, for example). Argentina with the UK in the Falkland War. In excess of a billion people, yet with only a handful of minor wars to point to.

Yes, these developed world countries often wage a fair bit of war, but not on those in the same economic class. This indicates a way to solve in the real sense, war. Elevate all countries to developed world status.

It's also worth noting that the number of deaths from wars has gone down over the past few decades globally as well. Everyone is partially benefiting from fewer and less bloody wars, not just the rich countries.

Moving on, let's consider pollution. It's long been a trite cliche to speak of pollution as if it's just as bad as it's ever been (particularly when complaining that no one will do anything about the environmental cause du jour until it's too late). For example, here's a study of ambient levels of smog components in Los Angeles air from 1960 through to near present (2014 I believe). Ozone (O3) and nitrogen oxides ("NOx") dropped by a factor of four over the time period despite an increase in fuel use of a factor of three! That's an order of magnitude drop in pollution per unit of fuel (and keep in mind that vehicles became moderately more fuel efficient over this time period even with SUVs in the mix). More complex organics, volatile hydrocarbons (VOC) and peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN) dropped much faster with at least two orders of magnitude drop in concentrations of each.

There has been many environmental regulations over the decades, and these have had an effect. There's no more rivers catching on fire in Ohio. There's no more killer smogs in London. Yet it is frequent to see people to speak as if these problems were still among us, undiminished. You know, because we never solve problems.

The final one, poverty is the biggest problem of all, for not only does it cause immense suffering on its own, but it is a driver for many other social problems, most particularly overpopulation and a low regard for human life.

While I've hinted before at myopic interpretations of these problem, it's far more pronounced here both with the introduction of deceptive measures of poverty that both don't measure poverty and measure relative quantities that can never really go away. For example, there's a lot of talk of wealth and income inequality rather than more legitimate measures of absolute poverty (which actually measure a problem!). And sometimes those measures are used deceptively (such as a recent story which The convenient aspects of inequality is that it can never go away, and there's no obvious level which is good or bad. Then you get the conflations with real poverty even though it doesn't even remotely measure that (keep also in mind a tendency to declare that poverty is routinely declared to be people with the lowest percentage of wealth).

Let's take a cursory look at how inequality gets abused:

What I think is wrong with society is that, while I'm just barely on the comfortable side of the wealth divide, the gap is growing at a crazy pace. Prices I learned growing up in the 1970s have mostly inflated 10x, as has my income, meanwhile the bottom end of the income scale (virtually anyone below me on the job-value ladder) has only grown maybe 3-4x, it's pretty sad for the majority of the population.

Reality:

What evidence exists for this? I grant that there is wealth inequality and it has appeared to grow somewhat over the past 40 years. But there is no "crazy pace" to it. For example, we have a Pew Study that shows by their measure, the Middle Class shrinking from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015. Roughly, 20% shrinkage in 44 years. That's your "crazy pace". Even worse for your narrative, the upper classes grew more than the lower ones as a fraction of total population. So two thirds of the fraction that were no longer middle class were now upper class.

A particularly dishonest metric claiming an increase in global wealth inequality can be found in this story.

Wealth inequality stands at its highest since the turn of the 20th century - the so-called 'Gilded Age' - as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells yet higher.

The problems with that? 1) not actually measuring wealth inequality. What of the wealth of the 7.4 billion people who aren't billionaires? 2) downplayed that most of the increase in wealth (+17%) can be explained by the pool of billionaires increasing by 10% (145 new billionaires)! 3) Ignores that billionaire wealth is not equal value to those who aren't billionaires and thus, their wealth is exaggerated. Can't eat credit default swaps or even sell them easily for market price. But it made for a great tale of the "second" Gilded Age.

Here's another example from a linked essay rationalizing why the USSR didn't work in typical Marxist fashion:

The United States enacted an income tax in 1913, falling mainly on rentier income, not on the working population. Capital gains (the main source of rising wealth today) were taxed at the same rate as other income. But the vested interests campaigned to reverse this spirit, slashing capital gains taxes and making tax policy much more regressive. The result is that today, most wealth is not gained by capital investment for profits. Instead, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices.

Many middle-class families owe most of their net worth to rising prices for their homes. But by far the lion’s share of the real estate and stock market gains have accrued to just One Percent of the population. And while bank credit has enabled buyers to bid up housing prices, the price has been to siphon off more and more of labor’s income to pay mortgage loans or rents. As a result, finance today is what is has been throughout history: the main force polarizing economies between debtors and creditors.

So first paragraph is a work of art that slams the wealthy for having inordinate gains revenue (which simultaneously downplaying the wealth as mere "debt-leveraged inflation"). So why should we care about gains inequality? Who wants more "debt-leveraged inflation"? Yet it is portrayed as a bad thing even though the argument is sheer nonsense.

And then the author whines about how unfair it is that people actually have to borrow money for a house rather than just have one given to them on a silver platter.

Related to that is the common observation that the wealthiest X people have far more wealth than the poorest Y fraction of the population. As indicated here, there's a couple of enormous flaws with that thinking.

To see the problem, here's another version of the same number: the combined wealth of my two nephews is already more than the bottom 30 percent of the world combined. And they don't have jobs, or inheritances. They just have a piggy bank and no debt.

[...]

The chart [2014 regional wealth distribution, Credit Suisse] shows China has basically no one in the bottom 10 percent of the global wealth distribution. At the same time, if you dig into the country-by-country data (page 107 in the Databook), it shows that America has more than 7 percent of the world's poorest inhabitants — second only to India. That is, to put it lightly, nuts.

Anyway, let me trot out some counterexamples for your consideration. First, let's consider those living in extreme poverty. The fraction of people who live in such extreme poverty (here, using the metric of at most $1.90 per day in "international $", adjusted both for standard of living price changes between countries and inflation) has been declining ever since 1820, the start of the graph in the link (that's almost 200 years of such decline). The absolute number of people in such extreme poverty has been declining, despite population growth heavily biased towards the poorest of the world, since 1970! It currently is around 700 million after peaking at 2.2 billion. Over the same time period, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty dropped from just over 60% in 1970 to under 10% in 2015.

Then there's my favorite example of reduction of global income equality. Over a twenty year period (1988-2008), two thirds of humanity (that's everyone in the world) saw at least a 30% increase in their income with the median increasing by over 60%. While the richest got richer, that still means a decline in overall wealth inequality due to the nearing of developed world and developing world incomes.

I'll note that poverty is a huge correlation with population growth (the other big factor being the fraction of women not in the workforce). In 1970, the global population growth rate was 2.1% per year. It has now dropped to 1.1% per year with the developed world showing negative rates before immigration (among everyone who is not first or second generation immigrants).

To summarize, there has long been a narrative about humanity that emphasizes our inability to solve problems. This narrative is grossly in error with the developed world demonstrating a number of solved or partially solved problems in war, environmental problems, and poverty and overpopulation. These solutions have come to the point that extreme poverty, which until 1980 was the usual condition of most of humanity, now afflicts less than a tenth. We are in the midst of the biggest improvement of the human condition ever.

Yet the games continue. This enormous boon is concealed between a web of selective statistics. Critics peer intently at various dubious versions of wealth inequality (often while simultaneously downplaying the value of the wealth they are comparing) because absolute measures of poverty don't give the right answers any more. Would-be environmentalists complain because poisons are poisons (look at the replies which ignore dosage and proper usage) while completely ignoring whether current regulation solves the problems they claim to care about and whether the role of the poison is necessary.

And for some people, it no longer matters how many people die in wars any more. Wars are equally bad no matter how many die. Very convenient for the peacenik who needs a cause that never goes away.

My view is that part of the problem is that we have a case of bad ideology which needs to invent exaggerated or even fake problems in order to act out showing concern. Partly, it's that we're going to worry, even if we don't enough to worry about. Whatever the case, I think it would be nice here to wake up and see what's being done right rather than bumble on into some idiotic and dreadful societal theater because of the Chicken Littles of the world.

So, I'm running a Debian knockoff. Did a distro upgrade, primarily because Liquorix kernel is barfing all over Jessie. The distro upgrade went alright, and some irritating quirks in the system were cured. I wasn't expecting that - how long has it been since a system ran noticeably better after an upgrade? Stuff is mostly incremental, and unnoticeable these days.

After booting to the new system, I attempt to install Liquorix again, and it barfs again. I do get a message this time, leaving me hopeful - I need a couple specific packages to satisfy Liquorix kernel. So, apt-get update, then apt-get upgrade. Those packages and a half dozen related are installed. But, apt-get barfs now. /var/apt/ is now locked. So, the only thing to do is dpkg --reconfigure -a

Not possible. My file system is read only now.

I didn't document stuff, so I can't reconstruct all the steps I took, but EVERYTHING failed. I read at least a dozen different pages, trying to figure out how to fix my fs. fsck was being entirely uncooperative, no matter which DVD/USB I booted to. So, screw it - I guess I'll have to install something. Look around the net a bit, think, look at the ISO's I already have downloaded, and decide on Manjaro. Write it to a USB, try again to recover my files system, and fail. I change my mind about installing Manjaro. I decide on Siduction - write that to USB, boot up, and again, decide to try recovering my file system (one more time) before proceeding with installation.

And, the file system is fixed. There were no errors or anything on the part of fsck. It found errors on my root file system, and fixed them. Simple as that.

Obviously, the system was recoverable. It's recovered. It can't get any more obvious than that, can it? So, why did all those rescue disk images, and various distribution ISO's all fail? For a few moments, I wanted to point at systemd as the culprit, but Siduction runs on systemd. So, what is different between Siduction, and everything else I was working with?

I might imagine that Siduction is the distro most similar to the installed system - but that gets me nowhere. None of the administration tools are "different" from one distro to another. I might imagine that one (or more) of my DVD's or USB's was improperly burnt. But, ALL OF THEM???

I might also presume that my SSD is getting ready to barf. Possibly, there is some kind of error going on in the "hard drive" that affected me a dozen times, but didn't trigger on (roughly) the 13th attempt to fix the system?

Or, maybe we're just experiencing an especially heavy cosmic ray storm? Phhhttt - I give up. I've got my system back. Unless it barfs on me again, I'll blame those cosmic rays, or gremlins. If it does barf, I'll stick a new SSD in, install Siduction, and hope it's not some other bit of hardware that caused the problem.

And, maybe I'll just give up on the Liquorix kernal. That's where all of this nonsense started.

Theoretical Physicists Are Getting Closer to Explaining How NASA’s ‘Impossible’ EmDrive Works

Theoretical scientists are trying to understand why and how EmDrive propulsion works. The NASA paper suggests a tentative explanation based on a quantum physics theory, "a nonlocal hidden-variable theory, or pilot-wave theory for short."

A new research paper by a Portuguese scientist, titled "A Possible Explanation for the Em Drive Based on a Pilot Wave Theory" is now trending among EmDrive enthusiasts in the NasaSpaceFlight forum. The paywalled paper proposes a similar model to the NASA one (here's an open access preprint you can read.)

Pilot-wave theories have been proposed since the 1920s by quantum physicists, notably Louis de Broglie and David Bohm, to make sense of the weird behavior of quantum matter. Recently, pilot-wave quantum theories have gained more popularity after it was discovered that pilot-wave quantum-like behavior can be reproduced in classical fluids and explained by classical (non-quantum) fluid dynamics.

Not enough meat on these bones for another story, but you might be interested.

Previously: Explanation may be on the way for the "Impossible" EmDrive
Finnish Physicist Says EmDrive Device Does Have an Exhaust
EmDrive Peer-Reviewed Paper Coming in December; Theseus Planning a Cannae Thruster Cubesat
It's Official: NASA's Peer-Reviewed EmDrive Paper Has Finally Been Published
Space Race 2.0: China May Already be Testing an EmDrive in Orbit
Physicist Uses "Quantised Inertia" to Explain Both EmDrive and Galaxy Rotation
EmDrive 3.0: Wait, Where's EmDrive 2.0?

An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey's statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former secretary of State of having been "grossly negligent" in handling classified information, newly reported memos to Congress show.

The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.

The change is significant, since federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines.

[...]

The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.

"There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information," reads the statement, one of Comey's earliest drafts from May 2, 2016.

The sources who had seen the early draft, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits on or around June 10 to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was "extremely careless."

So... former FBI Director Comey apparently did at one point use the legally significant phrase "grossly negligent" which then somehow morphed to the legally insignificant phrase, "extremely careless" after draft changes by the Senate Judiciary Committee to Comey's statement. I wonder if Clinton apologists care any more.

Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains

The pesticide, which belongs to a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas made by Nazi Germany, is now found in food, air and drinking water. Human and animal studies show that it damages the brain and reduces I.Q.s while causing tremors among children. It has also been linked [open, DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djh324] [DX] to lung cancer and Parkinson's disease [DOI: 10.1136/oemed-2013-101394] [DX] in adults.

[...] This chemical, chlorpyrifos, is hard to pronounce, so let's just call it Dow Chemical Company's Nerve Gas Pesticide. Even if you haven't heard of it, it may be inside you: One 2012 study found that it was in the umbilical cord blood of 87 percent of newborn babies tested. And now the Trump administration is embracing it, overturning a planned ban that had been in the works for many years.

The Environmental Protection Agency actually banned Dow's Nerve Gas Pesticide for most indoor residential use 17 years ago — so it's no longer found in the Raid you spray at cockroaches (it's very effective, which is why it's so widely used; then again, don't suggest this to Dow, but sarin nerve gas might be even more effective!). The E.P.A. was preparing to ban it for agricultural and outdoor use this spring, but then the Trump administration rejected the ban. That was a triumph for Dow, but the decision stirred outrage among public health experts. They noted that Dow had donated $1 million for President Trump's inauguration.

So Dow's Nerve Gas Pesticide will still be used on golf courses, road medians and crops that end up on our plate. Kids are told to eat fruits and vegetables, but E.P.A. scientists found levels of this pesticide on such foods at up to 140 times the limits deemed safe. "This was a chemical developed to attack the nervous system," notes Virginia Rauh, a Columbia professor who has conducted groundbreaking research on it. "It should not be a surprise that it's not good for people."

[...] Democrats sometimes gloat that Trump hasn't managed to pass significant legislation so far, which is true. But he has been tragically effective at dismantling environmental and health regulations — so that Trump's most enduring legacy may be cancer, infertility and diminished I.Q.s for decades to come.

Chlorpyrifos

Asked in April whether Pruitt had met with Dow Chemical Company executives or lobbyists before his decision, a EPA spokesman replied: "We have had no meetings with Dow on this topic." In June, after several Freedom of Information Act requests, the EPA released a copy of Pruitt's March meeting schedule which showed that a meeting had been scheduled between Pruitt and Dow CEO Andrew Liveris at a hotel in Houston, Texas, on March 9.[91] Both men were featured speakers at an energy conference. An EPA spokesperson reported that the meeting was brief and the pesticide was not discussed.[92]

In August, it was revealed that in fact Pruitt and other EPA officials had met with industry representatives on dozens of occasions in the weeks immediately prior to the March decision, promising them that it was "a new day" and assuring them that their wish to continue using chlorpyrifos had been heard. Ryan Jackson, Pruitt's chief of staff, said in a March 8 email that he had "scared" career staff into going along with the political decision to deny the ban, adding "[T]hey know where this is headed and they are documenting it well."[93]