USA Hemp Museum presents great pictures of live cannabis plants over Willie and Amy Nelson’s song, “A Peaceful Solution,” performed by Amy Nelson and Rattlesnake Annie. The bill was introduced by Cong. Barney Frank. H.R. 5842 is the 2008 version of the medical marijuana bill. Support the congresspeople who support cannabis.
Related: The Lotus Eco Elise uses a host of sustainable materials to make up the body and trim, including hemp, “eco wool,” sisal and a new high-tech, water-based paint that can be applied by hand. It’s fitted with a set of flexible solar panels on the hard top to help power the electrical systems, reducing the drain on the engine and improving efficiency. There is a new green shift light on the instrument panel that assists drivers in maximizing fuel efficiency.
All of these elements reduce the Eco Elise’s footprint throughout its lifecycle, limit the amount of energy used during production. Lotus looked to reduce the car’s environmental impact by focusing on how it is made as well as how it performs. Link.
Science Daily is a great site for weird stories. Here are some snips from the past few days.
In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in “sacred mushrooms,” produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.
Pete Guither has a great Salon-affiliated blog which aggregates and comments on drug war news. Americans’ weird and deeply twisted propensity to treat each other as guilty until proven innocent has resulted in the highest incarceration rate among “developed” countries. Fact: the U.S. is home to about five percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of the world’s prison population. (Fat America: those figures are about the same for U.S. consumption of oil.)
In regulated markets, disputes are handled by lawyers. In the black market, disputes are handled by guns. I have no love for lawyers, but I’d rather get hit by a stray brief than a stray bullet.
As anyone who has tried to quit smoking knows, dependence is hardest to overcome during difficult or stressful times. That must be why, when the government helps drug abusers quit, they arrest them and take away their job, possessions, and children.
And the line-drive question:
When a government uses military personnel, equipment, and tactics against its own citizens, is it time to call it a Civil War rather than a Drug War?
The percentage of Americans who regularly smoke cannabis has fluctuated, but it hasn’t significantly changed in years. Yet, again, it isn’t a political issue of any importance. At best, it gets tapped in as an invisible plank in Democratic health care policy. Cannabis continues to be the plant that dare not speak its name.
As Robert Anton Wilson (the man, the modality, the moonmeld) indicated in undisclosed locations known only to a select few, and the Dogon of West Africa have known for thousands of years, cheese is of alien origin. The phrase “the moon is made of green cheese” is not just smoke blowing from the door of an opium den. Rather, it is a literal truth, one a world-wide conspiracy has sought to suppress for many moons. Cows are robots from space, implanted with soulful stares that have but one purpose: to disarm and befuddle the planet Earth’s population into thinking that they, and other udder-bearing beasts, are the sole source of milk and milk by-products. Which, in fact, they are. Continue Reading »
I just stumbled across a truly bizarre blog called cfact. There, Dennis T. Avery (author of the wacko Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic) counters a report on the dangers of fast food with the suggestion that we “chew on some real danger foods.” Avery writes, with seeming ignorance of basic nutrition science, “There’s a new children’s book out [Avery does not name the book, always a good tactic when you want to create a diversion], telling kids that vicious food-mongers are trying to make them obese with fast food. That’s such a pathetic scare! Any food can make you fat if you eat too much.” It’s hard to imagine getting fat on lettuce, say, which requires more energy to digest than it contains, but let it go. Here’s the real nutso suggestion by Mr. Avery: eat ergot fungus! Now there’s a real “danger food”! This isn’t even comparing apples to oranges, which are both foods. Ergot, need I remind you, is not a food. Talk about a diversionary tactic: spew out a long, misinformed “history” of St. Anthony’s Fire and avoid talking about killer transfats in Micky D’s poisonous offerings. Continue Reading »
For several years we’ve been hearing reports that moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages is a “heart healthy” activity. And for almost as long I’ve been saying, Follow the money. If you trace the funding for such studies back to their sources you find the wine industries of France and California footing the bill. Now it looks as though I’ve been right all along. “All those health benefits of moderate drinking may be based on nothing but a common methodological error in the studies, a meta-analysis suggested,” reports Medpage Today along with numerous other sources. A “common methodological error”? Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics? When the wine industry is footing the bill for data analysis the error is not merely methodological, which is far too neutral a term. This is the spinning of data to support an industry. Various vested interests–grape growers, wine makers, retail outlets, and especially the federal government of the United States–want you to believe that alcoholic beverages are somehow “healthy.” The tobacco industry would like you to believe the same thing about cigarettes and, historically, that industry has engaged in the same sort of data spin as the wine industry has been pulling for the past decade or so. All of this is designed to divert our dizzy little short-attention-span minds from the obvious: alcohol is a dangerous drug–but it’s legal. Meanwhile, the planet’s only safe intoxicant is demonized throughout the world. It’s time to call the bull-shitters’ bluff: make alcohol illegal and legalize cannabis.
There is much to be appreciated about Peter Lee’s Opium Culture, and plenty more to criticize. The book is loosely organized around the theme (never stated) of “use it, but don’t abuse it.” Lee, who “lives in retirement in Thailand” and comes down firmly on the “use it” side, purports to supply users or potential users with accurate information. It should be noted, however, that with opium, as with cannabis or any number of other “illegal” intoxicants, accuracy is a misnomer: what research has left blank folklore fills in. Continue Reading »
Donald Rumsfeld told us that the people of Iraq would greet the conquering “Coalition” forces with “chocolates and flowers.” In retrospect–and even at the time, to many of us–that sounds completely idiotic. But maybe Rumsfeld was counting on something that, like the best laid plans of chickenhawks and neo-con-men, went didn’t happen. In this context, consider this excerpt from Dr. Lester Grinspoon’s 1975 book, The Speed Culture: ” ‘Chemical warfare’ or ‘drug pacification’ by MDA would probably suppress the fighting instincts of soldiers (or civilians) and make them expansively warm, friendly, and concerned for the welfare of their ‘enemies’.” MDA is an early version of MDMA or, as it’s better known, Ecstasy, the “love drug” and a member of America’s beloved amphetamine family. Grinspoon goes on: “no one (except perhaps for a very small and close-mouthed circle of Defense Department researchers and their employees) seems to know what the effects of massive doses of MDA on large groups of soldiers or civilians might be” (59). Rumsfeld is, of course, a longtime member of the U.S. defense-intelligence community. And the military tested MDA on civilians starting in the 1940s (and continuing into the 1970s–that is, if the experiments have ceased) in a series of projects, the most notorious (or at least the most well known) of which was MK Ultra. MK, you know, is spook-speak for “mind kontrol.”
Wild colors. Weird sounds. Sensations of the presence of the divine. An acute feeling of the presence of a demon. The range of altered states of consciousness covers a gamut as wide and varied as the people who have taken LSD, DMT or any of the other psychedelic substances. And all those experiences are here, in Charles Hayes’ eye-opening, wonderful, and lovingly edited anthology.
The basic premise of Tripping is simple. Instead of writing yet another tome about how great acid, ecstasy and all the rest are—a project that is inevitably subjective, no matter how thoughtful the author—go out and ask the folks who have taken the drugs what they experienced. What we get, then, is the varieties of psychedelic experience, a kind of informal ethnography. Continue Reading »
of West Africa have known for thousands of years, cheese is of alien origin. The phrase “the moon is made of green cheese” is not just smoke blowing from the door of an opium den. Rather, it is a literal truth, one a world-wide conspiracy has sought to suppress for many moons. Cows are robots from space, implanted with soulful stares that have but one purpose: to disarm and befuddle the planet Earth’s population into thinking that they, and other udder-bearing beasts, are the sole source of milk and milk by-products. Which, in fact, they are. 
