YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Clinton Corruption Update For November 12, 2017.

RECOVERY: Inside the Fight to Study Marijuana for Vets with PTSD.

Cannabis remains classified as a Schedule I substance which means, according to the federal government, it has no accepted medical use. However, the PTSD cannabis trial—the first of its kind to rigorously investigate the safety and efficacy of veterans’ claims about using cannabis for PTSD—is an FDA-approved study using cannabis given to the researchers by the federal government. These types of seemingly contradictory policies have created confusion and, some cannabis advocates argue, bureaucratic excuses which prevent progress in the arena of cannabis research.

After seven years of regulatory hurdles, the researchers finally began sending veterans through their trial in February without recruitment assistance from the VA. But now, they say they’ve exhausted all the veterans organizations near their lab and they won’t be able to find the roughly 50 more volunteers needed for the study without help from the Phoenix VA.

The leadership at the VA in Phoenix—the closest VA to the trial’s lab in Scottsdale, Arizona—still will not permit the researchers to hang flyers in their facility, talk to their clinicians, or do anything else that would inform veterans who go to their site about the study. According to Phoenix VA chief public affairs officer Paul Coupaud, that would change if Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin told them to allow it.

That’s why the American Legion, the country’s largest veterans organization with more than 2 million members, has been calling on Shulkin for more than a year to tell the Phoenix VA to help.

Let the research go forward — you never know what you’ll find.

PREVIOUSLY: FDA designates MDMA [Ecstasy] as “breakthrough therapy” for PTSD.

ADVICE: Don’t buy that crossover! Buy one of these cladded wagons instead!

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Plus, deals on Kitchen Utensils and Gadgets.

IGNORANCE IS BLISS? Trump’s Chief of Staff on Trump’s Tweets: “I do not follow the tweets.”

A GREAT ESCAPE: North Korean soldier shot in defection dash across DMZ.

The soldier bolted from a guard post at the northern side of Panmunjom village in the Joint Security Area to the southern side of the village, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. He was shot in the shoulder and elbow and was taken to a South Korean hospital, the South’s Defense Ministry said. It wasn’t immediately known how serious the soldier’s injuries were or why he decided to defect.

Living in a country where they shoot you for trying to leave seems like reason enough.

A NICE REVIEW FOR MY COLLEAGUE BEN BARTON’S BOOK, Rebooting Justice: More Technology, Fewer Lawyers, and the Future of Law, from Mark Pulliam over at Law and Liberty.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Testing your tap water for contamination is way easier than you think.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH: The Healthiest State In The Country Has Some Of The Steepest Premiums.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: ‘We Need to Normalize the Black Family Again:’ Author Hopes to Reinforce Traditional Families with New Children’s Book.

Bourgeois values work for anyone.

FASTER, PLEASE: Cancer Immunotherapy Uses Melanin Against Melanoma.

SALENA ZITO, VODKAPUNDIT, AND THE HOUSE MAJORITY: For best results, legislate like there’s no tomorrow.

AND IF YOU TELL HIM HE ISN’T, YOU’RE THE CRAZY ONE: ‘Transracial’ Man Born White Feels Like He Is Filipino.

WHY SOME PEOPLE age faster than others.

BOOM: Missouri Attorney General Launches Probe Into Google’s Business Practices.

Missouri’s attorney general has launched a broad investigation into whether Google is violating the state’s consumer-protection and antitrust laws, a new front in the internet giant’s regulatory battles.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley on Monday said he issued an investigative subpoena to probe Google’s collection of user data, its use of other sites’ content, and its alleged manipulation of search results to favor its own services.

Mr. Hawley said his probe was in part prompted by a record $2.7 billion fine European regulators levied against Google in June for allegedly favoring its services in its search results.

“We’re concerned they’re engaged in a similar pattern of behavior in the United States,” he told reporters.

Developing…

STILL A FEW BUGS IN THE SYSTEM: New study shows preferred spots for household insects.

BUT OF COURSE: Colin Kaepernick GQ’s ‘Citizen of the Year,’ Pro-Sharia Linda Sarsour Also Makes List.

WINNING: Ukraine Turns to American Coal to Defend Itself Against Russia.

JAZZ SHAW: California Sheriffs Still Fighting New Sanctuary State Law.

Sheriff Mims has already enacted a variety of policies designed to make it easier for ICE to enforce the law. She set up office space for ICE agents inside her jail so they could have direct access to prisoners for questioning and possible detention where appropriate. She also restructured the schedule, pushing release times for prisoners to later in the day so immigration enforcement agents would have more time to arrive and take care of business. Most of these programs won’t be affected by the new law, but she’s in the process of negotiating other deals to get around the intentional impediments put in place by the state government.

The real irony here is that Mims is actually helping to avoid what most of the Democrats in Sacramento claim is part of the problem. Do you recall the massive ICE deployment dubbed Operation Safe City from a couple of months ago? Agents arrested literally hundreds of criminal illegal aliens in sanctuary cities across the country, going to people’s homes, places of employment, courthouses and other public areas. And the only reason they did it was because they had insufficient access to the criminals at the jails where they could be taken into custody in a safe environment.

California is powerless to stop ICE from doing its job. All they can do is make it more inconvenient and time consuming.

California’s sanctuary law is the legislative equivalent of a temper tantrum.

HATE CRIMES IN THE AGE OF TRUMP: I’ve long suspected that the purported massive increase in hate crimes resulting from the Trump campaign was wildly exaggerated. The new FBI hate crimes stats are out, and hate crimes rose only 5% between 2015 and 2016. The increase isn’t good news, but between what certainly looks like an increase in hate crimes hoaxes and the greater attention paid by the media to real hate crimes, which encourages reporting, there may not be any real increase at all. Certainly, the whole “2016 in the United States is like 1933 in Germany” crowd should be embarrassed. Relatedly, the ADL recently reported a 67% surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, which preposterously includes bomb threats made to Jewish institutions that were ultimately traced to a mentally disturbed Jew in Israel.

WHY THE NARRATIVE THAT RIGHT-WING HATE KILLED JFK IS FALSE.

As I wrote a decade ago, bad things happen to your psyche when you’re trapped in Camelot.

WHAT A MESS: U.S. Admits Possible Role in Arming Iranian-Backed Militants in Iraq.

U.S. lawmakers and military insiders are concerned by what they described as the American government’s continued arming and training of Iranian-backed fighters in Iraq, an ongoing policy that multiple sources described to the Washington Free Beacon as one of the U.S.’s chief foreign policy failures in the region.

Top lawmakers and others have begun to present evidence showing that the State Department continues to provide widespread support for Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, a program that first begun under the Obama administration.

This has helped solidify Iran’s presence in key Iraqi territories and appears to directly conflict with the Trump administration’s newly outlined push to combat the Islamic Republic’s regional military efforts, which have included targeting U.S. forces in Syria and other locations.

Multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon both on and off the record accused the State Department of making “common cause” with the IRGC, which they say has benefited from ongoing American efforts to arm and train Iraqi militia groups, many of which have direct ties to Iran.

These sources pointed to the continued presence of senior Obama administration officials in government as one of the primary drivers of this ongoing policy.

Rex Tillerson needs to get serious about State’s serious personnel problem, but after almost a year in office shows zero interest in doing so.

FIRE, PENN JILLETTE, AND OTHERS DEMAND BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY NOT CENSOR PLAY ABOUT CENSORSHIP: At a university named for one of the greatest free speech champions in American history, faculty and administrators decided to cancel a play about the perils of easily offended students…due to outrage from offended students. Penn Jillette, Kitty Bruce (daughter of Lenny), Ron Collins, and Bob Corn-Revere joined FIRE today to ask Brandeis to live up to its promises of free speech, and its supposed veneration of the late, great comedian Lenny Bruce whose iconoclastic comedy inspired the play.