November 2009 Archives
A very old man lay dying in his bed. In death's doorway, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookie wafting up the stairs.
Was it heaven? Or was it one final act of heroic love from his devoted wife, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man?
Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself toward the table. The aged and withered hand, shaking, made its way to a cookie at the edge of the table, when he was suddenly smacked with a wooden spoon by his wife.
"Stay out of those," she said. "They're for the funeral."
Yes, when you aren't living inside a bubble of lies, and newspeople are allowed to 'do their jobs' (be curious on the air), this is what you get. From the Great White North:
OMNI TV Interview
Program: The Standard
Airdate: April 22, 2008
Vancouver, BC Canada
In this 20 minute Satellite TV interview, Richard Gage, AIA, of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth lays out all the evidence for the controlled demolition of the 3 WTC high-rises on 9/11. The next day Vancouver 9/11 Truth had to turn away 50 people in this standing room only venue of 300 at the famous Vancouver Public Library. Here is the 20 minute power packed video that you can play for your friends, colleagues, and, of course, your local A&E's!
Recently I overheard a Father and daughter in their last moments together at the airport. They had announced the departure.
Standing near the security gate, they hugged and the Father said, 'I love you, and I wish you enough.'
The daughter replied, 'Dad, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Dad.'
They kissed and the daughter left. The Father walked over to the window where I was seated. Standing there I could see he wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude on his privacy, but he welcomed me in by asking, 'Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?'
'Yes, I have,' I replied. 'Forgive me for asking, but why is this a forever good-bye?'.
'I am old, and she lives so far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is - the next trip back will be for my funeral,' he said.
'When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, 'I wish you enough.' May I ask what that means?'
He began to smile. 'That's a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone...' He paused a moment and looked up as if trying to remember it in detail, and he smiled even more. 'When we said, 'I wish you enough,' we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them.' Then turning toward me, he shared the following as if he were reciting it from memory:
I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright no matter how gray the day may appear.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun even more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive and everlasting.
I wish you enough pain so that even the smallest of joys in life may appear bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess..
I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.
He then began to cry and walked away.
They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them; but then an entire life to forget them.
* Only if you wish, send this to the people you will never forget and remember to send it back to the person who sent it to you. If you don't send it to anyone it may mean that you are in such a hurry that you have forgotten your friends.
TAKE TIME TO LIVE....
To all my friends and loved ones, I WISH YOU ENOUGH.
BTW, if you forget the Apple ad when the G4 came out and was actually prohibited from export (due to the fact that it was, technically, the first desktop 'supercomputer' capable of over a gigaflop of processing), here it is:
Kids may seem an unlikely group to include in the medical marijuana debate, but some children with autism are reaping life-changing benefits from the drug. Mieko Hester-Perez, a mother in California, told the Early Show's Hattie Kauffman that marijuana saved her son's life.
Hester-Perez's 10-year-old son, Joey, was uninterested in food and weighed a startling 48 pounds. "Everyone that came to my home was watching me watch Joey die," Hester-Perez told Kauffman. "He was deteriorating hourly."
But that all changed with a batch of marijuana brownies. After four years of only eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Joey's appetite came to life and revived him in other ways as well.
"We're seeing Joey come out," Hester-Perez said. "He's never made noises, we didn't even know he could make noise until the first batch of brownies."
While Kauffman noted that there's no evidence of marijuana helping with autism symptoms, other parents have come out with similar success stories, as seen in Marie Myung-Ok Lee's story on Slate's Double X blog in May.
WATCH the Early Show's interview with Hester-Perez:
(I don't, but I wondered if anyone of my friends does).
- Angel of God, my guardian dear
- to whom God's love commits me here.
- Ever this day/night be at my side
- to light, to guard, to rule and guide.
- Amen.
COVERED in scaffolding, magical movie school Hogwarts slowly takes shape at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park.
The 150ft-high castle is central to the ÂŁ160million attraction due to open in Florida next spring.
Fans can go on three thrilling rides, which are believed to feature likenesses of stars including Daniel Radcliffe as Harry.
Read more:http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2738083/Parks-Harry-Potter-castle-is-built.html#ixzz0XO3Ut2QL
The fact that we don't have any kind of 'Instant Run-Off' replacing our horse-race system of 'First Past the Post' (where in a five way race, anyone over twenty percent might be the 'winner') is just the pinnacle.
That we don't use *any* proportional representation in our legislative bodies is telling as well.
But I think the start would be to allow only people (er, *PEOPLE*) to participate in politics. If you aren't human, why should you be allowed a 'say' in matters. And even if you *are* human, why should you be able to influence races that you can't vote in?
By Dan Cook
PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - The United States' first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration's move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.
The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it -- as long as they are out of public view -- despite a federal ban.
"This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members," said Madeline Martinez, Oregon's executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization.
"Our plans go beyond serving food and marijuana," said Martinez. "We hope to have classes, seminars, even a Cannabis Community College, based here to help people learn about growing and other uses for cannabis."
The cafe -- in a two-story building which formerly housed a speak-easy and adult erotic club Rumpspankers -- is technically a private club, but is open to any Oregon residents who are NORML members and hold an official medical marijuana card.
Members pay $25 per month to use the 100-person capacity cafe. They don't buy marijuana, but get it free over the counter from "budtenders". Open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., it serves food but has no liquor license.
There are about 21,000 patients registered to use marijuana for medical purposes in Oregon. Doctors have prescribed marijuana for a host of illnesses, including Alzheimer's, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and Tourette's syndrome.
On opening day, reporters invited to the cafe could smell, but were not allowed to see, people smoking marijuana.
"I still run a coffee shop and events venue, just like I did before we converted it to the Cannabis Cafe, but now it will be cannabis-themed," said Eric Solomon, the owner of the cafe, who is looking forward to holding marijuana-themed weddings, film festivals and dances in the second-floor ballroom.
- Tallest living tree: Hyperion (coast redwood), 378.1 feet, Redwood National Park
- Tallest recorded tree: Unnamed eucalyptus, 500-plus feet, recorded in 1872 in Australia
- Most massive living tree: General Sherman (giant sequoia), estimated weight 4 million pounds, Sequoia National Park
- Largest tree canopy: A great banyan in Calcutta's Indian Botanical Garden covers three acres.
- Oldest living tree: Methuselah (Bristlecone pine), estimated 4,650 years old, California's White Mountains
The "Drug War" is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will
You might remember Robert McNamara's stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. "We were wrong," he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. "We were terribly wrong."
Yes, they were, and so are today's leaders (from the White House to nearly all local governments), who are keeping us mired in the longest, most costly, and most futile war in U.S. history: the drug war. As one adamant opponent of this ongoing madness put it, "I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the War on Drugs is a failure. Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing War on Drugs, about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion."
That was no ex-hippie stoner expressing himself through a haze of herbal smoke. It was America's "Uncle Walter," the journalistic icon Walter Cronkite, calling earlier this year for a new truthfulness and sanity in American drug policy.
The drug war is rife with major failures and absurdities, including the rise of a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico, caused by U.S. consumer demand for drugs outlawed by our government; Plan Colombia, a secretive, multibillion-dollar U.S. military operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production in that country, which now produces 15% more coca than it did before the plan was launched; the racist and grossly unjust sentencing disparity, established by lawmakers in the 1980s, between crack-cocaine users (mostly black) and powder snorters (mostly white); and the ridiculous refusal by pious federal authorities to allow our farmers to grow hemp--a useful, profitable, sustainable, and historic crop (see Lowdown, May 1999).
The rest of this article can be read only by paid Hightower Lowdown subscribers. Click here to subscribe! If you're already a subscriber, log in here.The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Sean Hannity Uses Glenn Beck's Protest Footage | ||||
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The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.
In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.
"Despite more than 30 years of clinical research, only a small number of randomized, controlled trials have been conducted on smoked cannabis," said Dr. Edward Langston, an AMA board member, noting that the limited number of studies was "insufficient to satisfy the current standards for a prescription drug product."
The decision by the organization's delegates at a meeting in Houston marks another step in the evolving view of marijuana, which an AMA report notes was once linked by the federal government to homicidal mania. Since California voters approved the use of medical marijuana in 1996, marijuana has moved steadily into the cultural mainstream spurred by the growing awareness that it can have beneficial effects for some chronically ill people.
The playwright Euboulos, in a surviving fragment of a lost play has the god of wine, Dionysos himself, describe proper and improper drinking:
For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.
Posted by blargfrit on January 6, 2009
This satirical infomercial, which had been on YouTube for months, was pulled by Youtube, who deemed it "inappropriate content," only after it skyrocketed into the top three topics on digg.com and began accumulating tens of thousands of views. Upset by the censorship and implications, several youtube users have re-uploaded or 'mirrored' the video in protest. Watch it in full here:
Allergy-causing substances such as pollen surely pose no great threat to our well-being; neither do cat dander and dust mites. Yet contact with such allergens causes millions of us to swell, wheeze, scratch, and sneeze as though under siege. In extreme cases, in reaction to insect stings and certain foods such as peanuts, an overwhelming allergic response, called anaphylactic shock, can even kill the body our immune system is ostensibly protecting.Why does the immune system carry on in this misguided fashion? Allergists don't really know; the field is as replete with controversy as it is with solid science. But one thing is certain: allergy is caused by an immune reaction unlike any other--with the exception of the antiparasite response.
First Posted: 11-23-09 04:48 PM | Updated: 11-23-09 05:09 PM