2010:warmest year ever since records began

[MSimon]

Mothers who use pot deliver healthier babies:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/c ... t/93/2/254

Objective. To identify neurobehavioral effects of prenatal marijuana exposure on neonates in rural Jamaica.

Design. Ethnographic field studies and standardized neurobehavior assessments during the neonatal period.

Setting. Rural Jamaica in heavy-marijuana-using population.

Participants. Twenty-four Jamaican neonates exposed to marijuana prenatally and 20 nonexposed neonates.

Measurements and main results. Exposed and nonexposed neonates were compared at 3 days and 1 month old, using the Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale, including supplementary items to capture possible subtle effects. There were no significant differences between exposed and nonexposed neonates on day 3. At 1 month, the exposed neonates showed better physiological stability and required less examiner facilitation to reach organized states. The neonates of heavy-marijuana-using mothers had better scores on autonomic stability, quality of alertness, irritability, and self-regulation and were judged to be more rewarding for caregivers.

Conclusions. The absence of any differences between the exposed on nonexposed groups in the early neonatal period suggest that the better scores of exposed neonates at 1 month are traceable to the cultural positioning and social and economic characteristics of mothers using marijuana that select for the use of marijuana but also promote neonatal development.

Mother's milk is full of marijuana analogs:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... borns.html

Yes. When I first learned of this practice I was shocked. What kind of mother would do such a thing?

Cannabinoids, whether plant-derived, synthetic or endogenous, have been shown to stimulate appetite in the adult organism. We have reported previously that cannabinoid receptors play a critical role during the early suckling period:

Then comes a description of the science followed by what we have all been waiting for. The executive conclusion:

Our data support previous evidence for a critical role of cannabinoid CB1 receptors for the initiation of suckling. Further, the present observations support the existence of an unknown cannabinoid receptor, with partial control over milk ingestion in newboms. Our data also suggest that the CB-/-1 neonates possess a compensatory mechanism which helps them overcome the lack of cannabinoid CB1 receptors.

[KitemanSA]

Because the issue is whether it is our RIGHT to do whatever we want to our body, REGARDLESS of the harm it does to us.

Quite so. Do we own ourselves or are we just cattle on the BIG GOVERNMENT cattle ranch?

No, you are people with the delusion that you are an island and that what you do will not harm others.

Where EVER did any of us suggest that it was ok to harm others? Not once, that I can recall. What seems to be the delusion here is that you think that the POSSIBILITY that somehow someone MIGHT harm someone is equal to harming them and should be treated as a crime. This thought process is the basis of tyranny around the world.

You own yourself, but you also have a responsibility to others not to do things detrimental to society, and that includes behaving recklessly.

IBID. By the way, it is NOT incumbant upon me to do anything that is beneficial to society. It is incumbant upon me to allow folks to interact with me in a voluntary manner. If "society" wants some benefit from me, and I don't volunteer to provide it, too bad, so sad, but not my problem.

I have a LOT of people depending on me, and if I screw myself up, i'm gonna hurt a lot more people than just myself.

Then don't do that. But that is between you and them, not the government.

Society, is in fact an integrated system. What one person does to themselves, can have severe and unforeseen consequences for people other than themselves.

Nice statement. Evidence? Or do you mean that the folks that want to own you (the term cattle ranch comes to mind) will be unhappy?

[KitemanSA]

So, according to you, the problem with Needles Park would be solved by making the entire country a needles park?

Are you really this dim? Did I not state in my prior post that needle park was flawed in that it retained the illegality? Why in the WORLD you you think that I would support a whole country of such flawed condition? Are you really that dim or are you just clutching at straws?

We're back to the theory of communism. The reason it doesn't work is because it's not widespread enough. It WOULD work, if freedom( or in this case, prohibition) didn't exist on the other side of the border. Strange that the Swiss couldn't see this simple answer.

Again, straws. I didn't make any such claim. You castigate me for X*infinity and here you do it yourself. Shame.

What I need to do is stop listening to libertarian propaganda. I find it pretty pathetic that many of these conversations inevitably end up on the topic of drug prohibition. It is the equivalent of arguing about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic in terms of importance, yet among those with this topic as a fetish, it is the most important thing in the world.

Just that fact alone is enough to convince me that drugs are bad.

This alone convinces me that you know you lost the argument and want to hide you head in the sand.

But I guess he really means that not-for-profit research groups are "Boeing" and the govm't is pure as the driven snow. Yup, the govm't has succeeded in another snow-job!

I feel the same way about literature from people with an agenda, especially when the conclusions contradict my own first hand knowledge.

First hand knowledge? What FIRST hand knowledge do you have. Details please.

I know people who died from drugs. I know people who might as well be dead, from drugs. I know people who did stuff because of drugs. I know people who escaped from drugs. I used to know walking skeletons.

So what you need to ask yourself is how they came to be infected by said drugs, and you will almost certainly find that some "friend" pushed them into it for nefarious purposes. Those purposes are the direct result of the WAR, not the DRUGs. You had all these unfortunate experiences due to the drug WAR. Yet you support it so vigorously. This is really too bad. You seem such an intellegent person otherwise.

Were I discussing this with someone who expressed what I considered to be a serious attitude regarding this topic, I would provide more information privately, but at this point I don't see any purpose to it, but I will tell you one detail that you may or may not know. The Dealers often "ass pack" to transport their merchandise to the junkie. If they get stopped by the police, they have nothing on them. If a dog attempts to sniff their butt, they act frightened of the dog, or claim it's just smelling their butt.

So the junkie ends up smoking or injecting something that came out of a mans butt hole. Sometimes they get sh*t on it. They smoke it anyway. That's nothing compared to what they will do to get it in the first place.

Gee, some people are stupid. And if there were no drug war, would the dealers "ass-pack" it then? Do alchohol importers "ass-pack" chardonney? To the very end you insist on confusing "drug" effects and drug WAR effects.

Drugs have ill effects on the user. The drug war immorally spreads those ill effects to the rest of society. Oh whell!

[Diogenes]

Yes. But then it's evidence inaccessible for discussion such as this. "nihil affirmat quod non probat", as the saying goes. Just as others oughtn't expect you to discard that evidence, you can't expect others to take your word for it.

Yes, I said something similar.

I need evidence to convince another party that something is so.

If I witnessed something first hand, the only evidence I need is the evidence of my eyes. Now this is not good enough to prove something to others, but it is easily good enough to prove it to myself.

As that is the salient point of this particular side topic, that is all that matters.

[MSimon]

Diogenes wrote:

You own yourself, but you also have a responsibility to others not to do things detrimental to society, and that includes behaving recklessly.

And here I thought only Progressives talked like that.

Please oh great one tell us who this just arbiter of "detrimental to society" is? As far as I can tell there are only us humans here and I don't trust any of them - not the best and certainly not the worst - to determine what is detrimental to society.

What if we let the Muslims decide that? Will you be happy with the results?

Suppose we let the CAGW fanatics decide? Will you be happy?

What about letting folks who don't like firearms decide?

What about militant vegetarians?

What about letting Christian Scientists have sway over medicine?

I mean seriously - who can fookin decide such a question? About the only thing we are sure of is direct action taken against another. That value is universal. All the rest is subjective.

I love the righties who decry the social engineering of the left while having grandiose schemes of their own for making things the way they ought to be.

I know why you don't see the absurdity of your schemes. Simple really. You have found the truth and can't wait to force it on others at the point of a government gun. Not to worry. When fashions change the guns you put in the government's hand will be turned on you. Just deserts eh comrade Zinoviev?

I'm an equal opportunity hater. I hate the social engineering of the left and the right. And since I can't stop the stupidity from either faction I'm going to do my best to get them grinding on each other. To keep them busy while I go about my business.

I can say without fear of contradiction given the totality of my life that neither the left nor the right would approve of how I have lived it. And that is just the way I like it.

======

Riding a motorcycle is 10X as dangerous as riding a car. Premature death is detrimental to society. Outlaw motorcycles? How about tobacco? Why not alcohol given the auto fatalities caused? Innocents get killed. How about tanning beds which if overused cause skin cancer. Heck. How about too much time in the sun? No one NEEDS to skydive. Bungee jumping? Skiing? Lots of injuries from that. Bobsledding? People can get killed. Too much food? People die from it all the time.

Who decides? In a FREE COUNTRY are there limits to "the grater god duvall"?

It is just as I feared. Scratch a conservative and you find a collectivist underneath. Progressive Conservatism indeed. What exactly do we owe to the collective comrade?

[Diogenes]

Ah Diogenes,

Since you admit you can't be swayed by evidence outside your own experience we can say that your opinion is not grounded in general facts but only your own experience. This is a rather limited world view and as such can never be swayed by argument:

I admitted no such thing. I said that the evidence of my own eyes is the best evidence in the court of ME. I did not say it is the only evidence which the court of ME accepts.

I have to admit, the evidence would have to be pretty compelling to convince me that people who have died, or ruined their lives and spread misery on everyone around them (which is the norm in my experience) somehow represent a statistically insignificant minority of the cases of drug users in general. Then you would have to explain how such a cluster of junkies ruining their and other's lives happened to form where I could see it, but is unlikely to occur elsewhere in sufficient degree.

Convince me that I have observed a rare outlier, and that the reality in the rest of the nation is dramatically different, and I will convert to your side.

My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts.

Remind me to avoid you when it comes to engineering projects. Should I forget.

In fact we would call your attitude bigoted or prejudiced in most situations. If you were an engineer (you wouldn't be for long) we would call it stupid.

Seems like we're getting a bit rancorous here.

So let me ask you my social engineering friend - how can you engineer a solution if you refuse to study all the dimensions of the problem? Isn't that exactly what you would accuse our leftist social engineering friends of?

One does not need to be an engineer to realize that someone chopping at the bridge timbers is liable to damage the bridge. The prevention of damage is not engineering, it's maintenance.

Now the real question is re: your experience - is what you saw the result of the drugs or the result of prohibition?

If the one did not exist, the other would be impossible. Arguing that drugs are not the salient point is like arguing that slavery wasn't the salient point.

[Diogenes]

...There are indeed people who want to chop off body parts because of a mental condition. "Apotemnophilia" and "Acrotomophilia". Look em up.

The point is, do you think these people have a right to mutilate themselves, or are they mentally ill and should be protected from doing something to themselves that they will later regret?

Not an "OR" type question. Yes they have the right (morality) to mutilate themselves. The government should not force these poor people into prisons where "criminals" are placed. Seems they are mentally ill. Can you prove that these people are mentally children? If so, then society (the civil court) can recognize another individual as guardian. At that point, the guardian may do what is best (ethics) for the "child". This won't be sticking the child into prison. The distinction is "wrong" vs "bad". Until you can understand that distinction, you will try to apply solutions for "wrong" to problems of good vs bad. You can't do good by doing wrong.

So, if I understand you properly, you are saying (through a lot of beating around the bush and qualifiers regarding procedure) that Yes, the government should prevent ignorant (such as children) and sick (mentally disturbed) from hurting themselves.

Fine, we've got the philosophical point settled. Now we have to argue about what the criteria should be for applying it.

So I can't play this "what-if". If you can convince me that somehow being crazy means that someone is NOT "people" and therefore can be owned by another person who there-after has the right to do with their property as they wish and prevent that not-person from such activity, good luck. I don't think is it gonna happen.

Just tell me your opinion on mental patients, and we can go from there.

Mental patients are people in a mental hospital or ward, or in "out-patient" state of same.

Were they Born in these mental hospitals, or were they at one time NOT in the hospital? I suppose I shouldn't have used the word "patient" to describe a person with a mental illness, but it's used interchangeably in the vernacular, and so I didn't expect it to be arguing that the condition exists beyond diagnosis and treatment.

Was that "Apotemnophilia" or "Acrotomophilia" part of your first hand knowledge? Details please.

Ah, ad hominem. Is your argument now going to degrade to this?

For what it's worth, I knew people who would get healthy teeth pulled just so they could get a prescription for loritabs. Several people, several times. Others would injure themselves by breaking fingers, punctures, etc. to get prescription meds. Most of them were indigents taking advantage of the state's free healthcare.

How about loritabs? I know you are in favor of ILLEGAL narcotics being readily available, but should we apply the same consistent philosophy to LEGAL drugs?

[Diogenes]

You folks ignore that psychoactive substances effect the decision making process,

So does sleep deprivation...

The difference being that sometimes sleep deprivation occurs naturally and unavoidably, and does not hinge on the intentional introduction of a substance designed to interfere with the body's chemistry.

making the individual, not only a danger to himself, but others too.

No, I do not ignore that fact. I just don't absolve them of guilt for anything that happens under the influence, unless the drugs were administered involuntarily.

Now you are approaching the concept of euthenasia. "This person might do something bad to me in the future so I'll kill him now.

Nawww, lets just throw them in prison for the rest of their lives. That'd be ok.

I have no response to this. It is so off base it refutes itself.

[Diogenes]

If drug users are in fact mentally ill they should be treated not persecuted.

The first step is to attempt to prevent them from hurting themselves. You know, keeping knives and scissors (drugs) away from them.

But if they are self medicating they need to be punished to protect the pharmaceutical interests.

I always get a kick out of your "self medicating" argument. I've seen people "self medicate" to the point where their teeth fell out, they were walking skeletons with a distinctly jaundiced look, covered in sores, and sometimes ending up dead in a ditch, bloated and stinking, leaving behind one or more children who then has to rely on others to survive.

Now i've heard your argument that people abuse this stuff because they can't get a sufficient quantity because of interdiction. Funny, that never seemed to be a problem for these people. Usually, they could get all they wanted, they'd go on a three day binge, and then crashing for two days, at which point they would go back on another three day binge (not eating or sleeping) and then crashing again.


I can see how this behavior is a threat to the pharmaceutical industry.

[Diogenes]

What if A is doing this?

What if A is spending so much time getting high that they aren't taking care of their responsibilities, like feeding their children?

Then take that mother to court for child abuse. After all, she is doing wrong to that child, no? To that extent she is being criminal. Makes no difference WHY she was being criminal, that fact that drugs may or may not have been involved is immaterial. Prosecute her crime. And once she has been convicted, have her "parental responsibilities" terminated in favor of you or someone else who volunteers. Problem solved.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But that does not address your contention that Drug use by "A" doesn't affect "B". I pointed out that it very often does, and your response is not to admit that drug use by "A" affects "B", but instead it is to ignore that point and suggest that "A" needs to be punished, which in fact is a sort of tacit admission.

I am going to mark you down as conceding that point, even though you ignore the role that the drug played in this drama.

[Diogenes]

Interesting. My take on this sub-topic had nothing to do with you "lying" about your intentions. My point was that the purity of your intentions did not absolve you of the responsibilty for the forseeable results of your actions.

And that is a completely separate and irrelevant point. Let's just say you are correct about this. You still should not accuse someone of intending to shoot a child when they are shooting at a deer with no knowledge that a child is nearby.

Yet again, a bad analogy. In this case (burning you wife's butt) you had full and perfect knowledge that the child was strapped on the side of the dear and you shot through it anyway. Your poor analogy, not mine.

Now if you are calling your wife a liar, no wait, you think she is calling you a liar because she accused you of intending to burn her butt...

Whatever the case, your action causes the seat to be hot. Be responsible, be a man.

Be a logical thinker. Don't pump useless and irrelevant bullshit into a hypothetical situation created solely for the purpose of getting a point across.

In fact of the matter, I ALWAYS leave my windows down, and My wife has her own car anyway.

Your poor analogy, not mine.

And again, you are ignoring the salient point of all the analogies, whether they be good or bad.

It is WRONG (intellectually dishonest) to accuse someone of having a goal which they DO NOT HAVE.

[Diogenes]

That is right! If a kid has a beer, throw him into jail for 5 year. 10 years for the second. Three strikes and he's out for life. That'll learn'im.

Now you are behaving like a dear friend who really cannot argue in a reasonable manner. He practices a technique that I call "Taking it to the opposite extreme."
If you say something is "X", and he says's it's "Y", and you provide a good argument that it is indeed "X", he'll get pissed off and respond, Yeah, it's X * Infinity! "
Sometimes this behavior is amusing, but sometimes I actually get tired of the histrionics.

I am sorry that you don't recognize yourself in that display of histrionics, since that is EXACTLY what you propose for users of other drugs.

Pardon me? What exactly did I propose, and where did I propose it?

I do recall saying that I would violently wipe out the producers and distributors of drugs, and to qualify that I mean cocaine and heroine, but beyond that I don't recall advocating a specific treatment towards drug users beyond what is the current law enforcement methodology. If anything, I would suggest that some things that law enforcement does are not proper and need to be changed.

[Diogenes]

Mothers who use pot deliver healthier babies:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/c ... t/93/2/254

Objective. To identify neurobehavioral effects of prenatal marijuana exposure on neonates in rural Jamaica.

Design. Ethnographic field studies and standardized neurobehavior assessments during the neonatal period.

Setting. Rural Jamaica in heavy-marijuana-using population.

Participants. Twenty-four Jamaican neonates exposed to marijuana prenatally and 20 nonexposed neonates.

Measurements and main results. Exposed and nonexposed neonates were compared at 3 days and 1 month old, using the Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale, including supplementary items to capture possible subtle effects. There were no significant differences between exposed and nonexposed neonates on day 3. At 1 month, the exposed neonates showed better physiological stability and required less examiner facilitation to reach organized states. The neonates of heavy-marijuana-using mothers had better scores on autonomic stability, quality of alertness, irritability, and self-regulation and were judged to be more rewarding for caregivers.

Conclusions. The absence of any differences between the exposed on nonexposed groups in the early neonatal period suggest that the better scores of exposed neonates at 1 month are traceable to the cultural positioning and social and economic characteristics of mothers using marijuana that select for the use of marijuana but also promote neonatal development.

Ha ha ha! No wonder Jamaicans are so relaxed and happy. Yes, we should be emulating the Jamaicans, so we can relax and quit running de raat race mon.

Mother's milk is full of marijuana analogs:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... borns.html

Yes. When I first learned of this practice I was shocked. What kind of mother would do such a thing?

Cannabinoids, whether plant-derived, synthetic or endogenous, have been shown to stimulate appetite in the adult organism. We have reported previously that cannabinoid receptors play a critical role during the early suckling period:

Then comes a description of the science followed by what we have all been waiting for. The executive conclusion:

Our data support previous evidence for a critical role of cannabinoid CB1 receptors for the initiation of suckling. Further, the present observations support the existence of an unknown cannabinoid receptor, with partial control over milk ingestion in newboms. Our data also suggest that the CB-/-1 neonates possess a compensatory mechanism which helps them overcome the lack of cannabinoid CB1 receptors.

So, we let marijuana establish the philosophical precedent and then we expand the franchise to everything else? Seems like a reasonable methodology. Incrementalism has worked before, maybe it will work this time?

So your current proffered argument is that it's not so bad that a mother smoked pot while pregnant. Since most people object to a mother drinking while pregnant, this sounds like a hard sell.

Even if the facts do turn out to be as you have claimed, a lot of people will have an issue with a mother doing something thought to be harmful, without knowing it's effects on her child. Perhaps the mother read the studies you've proffered, and believed them.

More likely, she just wanted to get high, and d@mn the consequences. That feels more likely to me, and I suspect most people.

[Diogenes]

Quite so. Do we own ourselves or are we just cattle on the BIG GOVERNMENT cattle ranch?

No, you are people with the delusion that you are an island and that what you do will not harm others.

Where EVER did any of us suggest that it was ok to harm others? Not once, that I can recall. What seems to be the delusion here is that you think that the POSSIBILITY that somehow someone MIGHT harm someone is equal to harming them and should be treated as a crime. This thought process is the basis of tyranny around the world.

It's an issue of probabilities. Most conduct does not pose a significant harm to others, some behaviors, (through the evolved process of trial and error) have been determined to dramatically raise the odds of harm. Society has decided that drug use is one such behavior.

You own yourself, but you also have a responsibility to others not to do things detrimental to society, and that includes behaving recklessly.

IBID. By the way, it is NOT incumbant upon me to do anything that is beneficial to society. It is incumbant upon me to allow folks to interact with me in a voluntary manner. If "society" wants some benefit from me, and I don't volunteer to provide it, too bad, so sad, but not my problem.

It is not your problem because most people don't practice your philosophy. If they did, it would indeed be a problem for you. A serious one.

I have a LOT of people depending on me, and if I screw myself up, i'm gonna hurt a lot more people than just myself.

Then don't do that. But that is between you and them, not the government.

It is between me, them, the government, and everyone else. Who takes up the slack when someone fails? Nowadays, it is the government (and therefore the taxpayers) who pay to support the dependents of drug users when the drug user dies or is incapacitated.


You may want to pretend that no one else is hurt, but you are just fooling yourself.

Society, is in fact an integrated system. What one person does to themselves, can have severe and unforeseen consequences for people other than themselves.

Nice statement. Evidence? Or do you mean that the folks that want to own you (the term cattle ranch comes to mind) will be unhappy?

What evidence would do any good? Ask your daddy to take you to the jail and talk to the convicts. That's the best advice I have for you.


For what it's worth, here's another anecdote. I know a man who is 35, and has nothing. He has had every opportunity in the world, because his family (specifically his mother) worked to give it to him. He's had opportunity to go to college, to get a decent job (He lives in Denver Colorado) and he simply won't do it. He prefers to mooch off of relatives and smoke pot. That's all he does. He lays around and smokes pot and has sex with girls. No car, no money, no property, no family of his own, (might have a kid or two) in trouble with the law. His mother and Uncle have fed him and provided shelter for him his whole life, and he is just a bum.

In any case, last I heard, his Uncle is kicking him out. Now he will either have to flop at his buddies houses, or suck on the taxpayers teat.

[JLawson]

One does not need to be an engineer to realize that someone chopping at the bridge timbers is liable to damage the bridge. The prevention of damage is not engineering, it's maintenance.

Think of a house on stilts. Think of there being a LOT of stilts (say, Florida panhandle, near the beach, designed to weather a severe storm) supporting the house.

Someone comes along, looks at the forest of stilts and goes "There's too many here, and I think a lot of them are unnecessary. I'm going to remove one - there shouldn't be any problem with removing just one." And does so... and nothing happens. So a few more people come along, a fe more stilts are removed, and then a few more - to the point where the people removing stilts finally go "You know, I think that's probably enough." Even with significantly fewer, the house is still sturdy enough for normal conditions.

So far, so good.

What happens when the next hurricane hits? The safety margins have been seriously eroded - but the house may survive... or it may not.

I have seen a lot of sociological 'stilts' pulled out the last 30 years or so. There was the 'war on poverty', which has seemed to entrench a class permanently in that state. The concept of a good education being important has largely been dumped in some cultures for a chase of bling and basketball, and mysogynistic behavior.

Families are considered by some to be superflous, language and attitudes are common now that would have been pretty much unacceptable 30 years back. We see self-destructive social behavior lauded and never seem to wonder - "Okay, just how MUCH of this is tolerable before another pillar gets destroyed?"

We see politicians morph from public servants to an elected, untouchable elite. There are no public 'heroes' any more, no mainstream ideal of an honorable man or woman. As fast as one seems to appear, the media tears them down if they're of the incorrect political persuasion, or hides their follies and foibles if they're properly aligned.

Legalization of drugs may have been possible 40 years back for a time. But now? There's few pillars left, and the house is getting shakey. Is drug prohibition one of them?

What would happen (seriously) if it were removed? What unanticipated consequences could arise? The hopeful think everything will somehow get better. The pessimistic think that deaths will rise, and society will be affected.

I think what we have now doesn't work well. And changing it by removing the current drug prohibition (and possibly introducing severe DUI laws) isn't going to provide a better end state and could possibly make things worse.

I could well be wrong on that - the repeal of Prohibition certainly didn't result in a catastrophe, and over the decades since that event a lot of the cutural permissions towards drinking have been rescinded. But there were a LOT of deaths due to alcohol consumption in those decades, both directly and indirectly.

Are we ready to accept such deaths again, knowing that 50, 60 years down the road it won't be culturally acceptable to drug & drive? Introduce Darwinian selection and culling to the population on a vast scale, weeding out those who can't handle their dope... usually through their death by accident or OD?

That really seems the more likely result to me. Make it available, make it cheap - and the deaths will rise.