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Side Effects of Ketamine Could Explain a Lot About Elon Musk’s Behavior

These side effects sound mighty familiar.

As The Atlantic reports, research into the effects of sustained ketamine use may offer some insights into the increasingly bizarre antics of the South African-born gem mining scion who’s admitted to using the drug to treat depression — and who’s allegedly indulged in it for recreational purposes, too.

Delusions of grandeur are not, obviously, the sole provenance of ketamine users, and there’s little doubt Musk had an outsized opinion of himself long before he discovered “Special K.” But his behavior in recent years has grown more and more erratic, especially in the since his purchase of Twitter, in ways that seem to track with those descriptions of frequent ketamine use side effects.

Ream more on Futurism.com

Trump administration plans to cut 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs, according to internal memo

How can they keep saying that more services will be offered by reducing resources?

The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency Tuesday that it had an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration, as well as to cover veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.

The VA last year experienced its highest-ever service levels, reaching over 9 million enrollees and delivering more than 127.5 million health care appointments, according to the agency’s figures.

Inside Patel’s first week: Internal upheaval at the FBI – some of his own making

This is praetorian hubris at its ugliest and they are proud. Firing ANYONE who was involved in the Jan 6 investigation. Losers.

FBI Director Kash Patel walked into his new office on the seventh floor of the bureau’s headquarters last week and made an immediate order – he wanted new carpeting and window coverings, calling the office “dingy.”

Patel’s plans to remake the FBI go well beyond redecorating. He wants to overhaul the bureau in fundamental ways that could drastically realign its workforce and the scope of its mission. But like nearly every renovation project, it hasn’t all gone as planned.

DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week

More DOGEshit!? We need a website to document DOGE’s mistakes! I wanna see their timesheets!

The cuts, highlighted on an earlier version of the “wall of receipts” posted by Elon Musk’s team, contained mistakes that vastly inflated the amount of money saved.

The “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.

CIA dismisses intelligence officers for working on diversity issues

I am not seeing the value of using assigned TAD to determine who goes. Fuckwits.

The CIA late last week moved to fire more than a dozen officers for working on diversity issues, in what amounts to a deeply unusual round of mass firings at the agency, according to court filings and current and former officials familiar with the effort.

In a court filing, the government suggested that further dismissals may be imminent, and a current official familiar with the matter confirmed that agency officials are in the process of working on recommendations for further cuts. A final number has not yet been decided, that person said.

Some of the fired officers are now challenging their dismissal in court on the grounds that it violated federal workforce laws, and a federal judge in Virginia is expected to hold a hearing to weigh a temporary restraining order against the move on Monday. Kevin Carroll, a lawyer and former CIA officer, said he represents 21 officers who have been fired.