Notice that these well known beneficial effects on blood sugar, blood pressure, pulse and gut health from cannabis are always left out when discussing whether or not there is genuine harm in adolescent cannabis use. When it comes to adolescent use, the razor sharp focus is strictly on changes that take place in the brain while the beneficial effects on the rest of the body are ignored.

If cannabis use is beneficial for the health of adults, why are we to believe there is some special case with adolescents that causes them to be harmed by this otherwise beneficial therapeutic with generalized benefits to health?

There are many ways to look at trust. At first it seems like trust is an unequivocally good and desirable trait but take the case of trusting a predator. Is it a virtue to trust a predator?

It has happened many times in the past that states have become predatory and fallen into a path of mechanical destruction of the citizens, an orgy of destruction in the name of the state. The Spanish Inquisition is but one example, The Holocaust is another and the War on Drugs is yet another.

When the state becomes an agent of sadism that exists with punishment as its goal and justification for existence, trusting the state is no virtue, it is a vice --a moral failing.

They're both examples of how simply changing an image doesn't create a new right. The two examples are in separate paragraphs. That's not confounding them, that's two separate examples.

This is not a simple case though. If I take a picture of someone's face in public and then apply a filter to it, that doesn't immediately give me copyright ownership over someone else's image who does not consent to it being used. Simply altering it does not make it mine.

If this were the case, I could simply add a second of silence to the end of any audio recording and then sell it as my own work.

Biden's going to get excited reading about this . He's got a long-term obsession with locking people in cages.

Here's a little backgrounder on his obsession with prisons:

Lock the SOB's Up

Lithium prices which were down 20% over the five month peak last time I checked are now closer to 30% off the highs and heading south fast.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

People who paid top dollar for used IC autos in the last few years are going to be regretting it when EV prices collapse and the market is flooded with unwanted ICs.

If you look at that five year lithium carbonate price chart, you notice that the bubble began in 2022. This was when the LiFePO4 patents expired. That meant any manufacturer could make batteries without cobalt and that caused the spike in lithium as that was the next bottleneck. That bubble, though, also led to a massive investment in new lithium production which never was rare to begin with. Now that it's starting to come on-line, we are heading for much lower battery prices. That's good news but it also means there will be follow-on consequences.

If Ford's EV numbers turn out to be accurate or even conservative, what does that mean for oil prices?

This was what I came here to post, the Supreme Court has just handed down a series of absurdly authoritarian rulings on free speech.

No, smoked marijuana actually reduces blood pressure over the longer term according to a study of 150,000 just published this month in Nature, a peer-reviewed journal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22841-6

The important factor is that the paper that is being hyped by CNN is simply a political hit piece that is not peer reviewed. It is nearly certain that CNN is pushing this disinformation precisely because of the big Nature story about the cardiovascular benefits of smoking marijuana long term.

Yeah, in the peer-reviewed world, we're seeing the exact opposite.

Over 150,000 people were studied and they found strong evidence of reduced blood pressure among long-term cannabis smokers. Published in Nature this month.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22841-6

I liked the car parked on the streets of Denver metaphor.

I like the fact that this paper is coming out of Japan which recently began making concessions on medical marijuana. The paper mentions the fact that it has long been a part of funeral practices in both Japan and China to use burnt hemp leaves to purify the attendees. Just as with India, hemp has been integral to cultures across Asia but they all jumped on the Inquisition bandwagon when the US was leading the parade. Now that the US is backing off, they're left to deal with the shame of admitting they were acting like fools.

More like the tariffs on solar are raised once again to bail out the oil sector yet again.

https://carbonherald.com/vedanta-to-use-hydrogen-instead-of-coke-in-green-steel-production/

Yeah, green steel is very much a reality. It's good to have multiple approaches though.

Be careful of those negative correlations. There is a huge anti-cannabis political agenda that is still going strong. As you yourself put it, you have not noticed any negative effects. Why would you assume that there must be some downside?

You don't remember dreaming. There is a difference.

Cannabis use reduces dreaming but it does not usually completely prevent it. It's important to remember that THC is only a partial agonist of the cannabinoid receptors. It doesn't completely block them in the way heroin can block off endorphin receptors or methamphetamine can block off dopamine receptors. So it's unlikely that you can pin any dramatic effects from THC like complete cessation of all dreams when it is only partially affecting its receptors. A partial reduction is far more likely than a total prevention of dreaming because of the partial agonist nature.

You need to keep in mind that there is enormous bias against cannabis due to the hysteria of the War on Drugs that continues until this very day. Claims about its dangers and downsides are heavily exaggerated and need to be taken in the context of the political hysteria that surrounds the substance.

No but I do get sick of the obvious bias and hatred directed against the well known medical benefits of a common and easily cultivated plant that have been noted for thousands of years. The cannabis plant has been so profoundly recognized as beneficial throughout history that its benefits have been documented repeatedly across multiple cultures. The reason comments like the above are so annoying is that they feed into the racist and politically motivated campaign to smear cannabis and normalize the bias as if it ought to be some commonly accepted norm to cast disdain and contempt at anything that threatens incumbent financial and political interests. That is truly sickening and not just ugly but sad.

Yeah, I went to southern Yunnan in China in the early 90s. They had wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest clearcutting it "for progress" and "modernization" there was nothing left. The hills were just covered in mud. The rivers were filled with mud, everywhere was nothing but mud and massive erosion.

One little tiny section had been left, perhaps a few thousand acres. You could pay to go in there and spend the night in a tree house to see all the animals that had fled from the deforested area that were fed bales of hay in order to collect a few bucks from the tourists. There was all sorts of wildlife diversity in that little sliver that was left. You could cynically claim that this was good for diversity.

In fact, it was quite sad. The whole thing was depressing.

Well being in Taiwan, this would be concerning but since it's behind a paywall, I can't see it so. . . life goes on.

No, fuck no. That's nonsense. Jobs and Gates and NEC as well as other Japanese interests rushed in to grab a piece of the action when the courts forced it open. It was only because of the Xerox consent decree that any of this stuff ever made it to the public.

The fact you don't know about this is interesting in itself. It used to be widely known but it's interesting how people's opinions have been shaped over time to create this ridiculous narrative. It's actually hard to even find the original documentation anymore because so much effort has gone into hiding it.

But you can still find good info on it but unfortunately much of it is paywalled which is how the ignorance is manufactured:

[The 1975 Xerox Consent Decree: Ancient Artifacts and Current Tensions] (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40843504)

If you search around you can find a copy which goes into what really happened.

And thanks to the formerly progressive Supreme Court of the 1970s that was willing to slap them with the consent decree forcing their patents to be openly licensed. Xerox had no intention of sharing this technology, they were forced to do so by the government in an era when the government actually had the balls to represent the people.

This is not so different from adult second language acquisition. Many people try and fail to learn foreign languages as adults and an important reason many fail to achieve fluency despite spending many hours listening to tapes and studying is that they lack experience in failed interactions that they can learn from.

The babbling part is generally left out of ESL instruction because it's impractical to package up and sell in a profitable manner but it actually works. I found in my studies of Chinese as a second language that the students I attended class with at a very intensive institute would have less ability than people I met outside of class who didn't even intentionally study Chinese but had lovers who were native speakers. The latter would almost instantly develop fluency in cooing type language that gave them a base to explore other type of language interactions in public.

I myself was making very slow progress until one day I learned a phrase that is often mumbled in a jumbled together fashion which means something like "Is that so?" I thought this was a funny phrase to use because nobody could tell if I really knew what I was saying or just mumbling nonsense so I would randomly just repeat it to native speakers and they would assume that I was fluent and then speak back in a stream of words I couldn't understand but became motivated to recall and try to sort out later. From that point on, my progress was steady and I began to develop fluency. But it all went back to basically walking around murmuring at people not knowing what they were saying and trying to guess from the context which is surprisingly easy once you try it.

The hit piece article?

Hah hah! That's amusing. But you must understand that this would not be fair. It's not fair for the government to distort the market you see. That would not be fair. Tariffs --well, that's different.

Tariffs are another story because they punish solar and that benefits oil so that's fair. See? It's all about what's fair.

Gadzooks! The level of disinformation here is absurd. The US used to be the leading polysilicon supplier to China before the Obama tarrifs that killed the US polysilicon industry. Polysilicon is not rare, it is made of quartz which is found everywhere.

The reason China ramped up their production was because of the Obama tariffs which were designed to shut down the business because oil is what the US is all about. Obama worked for the Big Boys just like all US presidents.