Image by Larry, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
Happy Saturday y'all! I have a lot of links for you to enjoy this weekend, so let's get started.
1. Rare and Unseen Color Photographs of America’s Hippie Communes from the 1970s—via The Vintage News. This is a nice collection of unseen photographs of American hippie communes from the 1970s. The people in these communes look so free-spirited and quirky. Although there are a lot of well-known issues with communes, this does make me wish I could live off the grid for the rest of my life.
2. Psychoactive Plants in the Bible—via Philosopher's Page. I found this account of psychoactive plants found in the Bible to be fascinating. It's quite obvious that there were consciousness-altering plants that inspired the stories in the Bible, and this article gives a good overview of what the plants were, how they were used, and the psychoactive effects they generated.
3. 7 Things You Should Know About Matcha—via Health.com. Matcha is a special form of green tea that was used traditionally in Japanese meditation practices. I find it to be quite enjoyable and this article is a good introduction to this type of tea.
4. Is the Internet Killing Middle-Class Jobs?—via The Week. "The robopocalypse for workers may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task. A few of us will own the machines, a few will work a bit — perhaps providing "Made by Man" artisanal goods — while the rest will live off a government-provided income. Silicon-based superintelligence and robots will dramatically alter labor markets — to name but one example, the most common job in most U.S. states probably will no longer be truck driver. But what about right now? If you're unemployed or working part-time instead of full-time, or haven't seen a raise in years, should you blame technology?"
5. Obama Steps Up Commutations, Feeding Drug War Prisoners’ Hopes—via Forbes. This is a step in the right direction, but there are still a lot of people in prison for non-violent "crimes". Hopefully the commutations will continue, with more prisoners of the drug war being released.
6. Vegan Diet Best for Planet—via The Hill. "The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a federally appointed panel of nutritionists created in 1983, decided for the first time this year to factor in environmental sustainability in its recommendations." Naturally, the meat and dairy industries are pissed off about this information being incorporated into dietary recommendations, but that doesn't take away from the truth that a vegan diet is best for environmental sustainability.
7. U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans—via Reuters. This shouldn't be surprising at all, but the Drug Enforcement Administration was collecting data on Americans long before the National Security Agency. Now on top of that, the U.S. government wants information regarding the DEA's domestic spying covered up and kept away from American citizens.
8. American Cops Just Killed More People in March than the UK Did in the Entire 20th Century—via The Free Thought Project. There is something incredibly wrong with the way that policing is done in our country. This is a mind-blowing headline, and the article backs up the claim with statistics.
Enjoy the reads for this weekend and I'll see you next week!