As someone who has lived through a fair amount of history, I can say that unless it's very immediate to you or your family, it's going to eventually fade from your daily existence.
There's nothing sacred about dates or digits. What matters is that we remember the human cost of atrocity and aggression, and put our lives in perspective. Putting memorials on the calendar doesn't make those days sacred, but it does trigger that reflection, when we would ordinarily set aside no time out of our all-important lives to stop and think.
Pearl Harbor's survivors are unique among 20th century Americans in having had to deal with an invading force firsthand.
Imagine yourself trying to write a book about it - how it must have been like the day before, with no warning, and then the morning of. If you've seen any of the movies about it, each one imagines things a bit differently. But in the end, you put together everything you've learned and felt and get your own sense of what it must have been like. The world for these people is forever divided into Before, and After.
And so it is with the occupation of Poland, the attack on the World Trade Center, the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the seizing and rape of Bosnia. The date itself is unimportant; oddly enough for some survivors they were so traumatized that each anniversary thereafter locks them in a private hell of reliving it, but the general effect of irrevocable change is there all year long.
I think most people overestimate the value of their particular culture and technology going into the future.
While it would be great to not lose the wheel, the germ theory, etc., these are things which arose simultaneously in multiple centres in human civilization. They are reproducible, and hopefully will not be completely lost
It should occur to the human participant in such a union that not only is it unsanitary, but that consensual sex depends on mutual communication to avoid harm and establish trust and emotional fulfillment.
Since this level of communication may not be possible, you have no way of knowing whether you are hurting the other party, until they are actively crying out or attempting to physically escape the pain. It goes both ways - if you have sex with a willing rhino, does he know your "safe word" in case he wants to trample you or scarify your thick hide to mark you as his mate?
What pain, you ask? Well, there's likely to be a size or shape mismatch between our parts and their parts. Some animals become physically aggressive with one another during intercourse - and while they are built to take it, you may not be. You get the general gist - hopefully without describing specific examples - but there's a lot of reasons why this just ain't gonna fly, morally, ethically, or even topologically.
It is not just Mexico. Central America is also experiencing the strangling grip of Organized Crime as it sinks its claws deeper and deeper in the region. The governments are virtually helpless to stop drug lords. They buy politicians and law enforcers left and right and kill people who mess with them.
Gang violence scares away foreign investment and tourism, disintegrates families and is generally incredibly disruptive to social production as murder rates in the region are much higher than the global average (between 5 and 10 times higher). It is basically a constant vicious people since as more and more people's lives are ruined by gangs, they become so desperate that joining a gang is their only alternative to survive.
I honestly doubt there is any chance in the near-future for a solution. Short of the U.S. legalizing drugs and producing their own...
This, Guatemala is an absolute legal and human rights wasteland. Even Mexico is attempting to contain traffic on their southern border, similar to US trying to contain Mexican traffic. Many of them are just passing through on their way to US, but it still creates problems for Mexico.
You guys all seem to think drug policy decisions are made intelligently or rationally. In a nation where prisons are run for PROFIT, do you think that's going to happen?
Hehe, nobody is saying "government knows best" is all that sound a reasoning.
Prohibition is pretty good evidence of the contrary. Alcohol is very dangerous, and by the above reckoning should be banned, since it has far more morbidity and mortality numbers than any other drug, period. But it is so deeply intertwined with human civilization, so easily made and distilled, and so addictive that you can't simply outlaw it.
And if prisons are run for profit, it's news to me. Most US prisons are huge money sinks. Law enforcement is the last greatest pure expenditure of a government because it is seen as corrupt to actually profit from criminal activity.
You ever notice with things like this, people only bring up the VERY rare instances of death or ill-effects associated with them and totally ignore the hundreds of thousands of times people ingested the substance and were totally fine?
Sure, it may have led to some nasty fate for those 2 people. What about the thousands upon thousands of kids who smoked it, listened to some tunes, had a great time and went on with their lives?
We only ever notice the bad stuff, because that gives us something to fear. That gives us something to complain about and a place to point the finger and who would want to pass that up?
I mean people are allergic to peanut butter, should we ban Reeses Pieces? Certainly people have died from nasty reactions to Tylenol, should we ban that?
Music can alter moods, kids have killed themselves after listening to rock music, should we ban rock music? And no, I'm not just talking about the 2 kids tripping on acid playing Judas Priest backwards.
Sure all these things can alter your moods and bring you to make decisions that perhaps you might not normally make. But in the end, the one making that choice is you. If you blow your brains out or jump off a bridge on a bad acid trip, that's still you doing it, certainly you must have had some deeply ingrained dark and ugly emotions inside and this altered consciousness opened up the doors to what was inside YOUR head. Prescription anti-depressants can have this same effect. But again, big pharma makes money on them so........
Oddly enough, I've never tried "spice" myself, I've just never really had much luck with "legal drugs". I have however had at least half a dozen friends who've tried it. And every single one of them is still alive and well and at very worse mentioned they might have had some mild insomnia as a side effect from it.
Why are people so accepting of people being able to tell them what they can and cannot put in their bodies? I know there's probably not a lot of "heads" in here, so the large majority of you could care less what happened to these sort of things. But how would you feel if they took your Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Doritos away? High Fructose Corn syrup is linked to all sorts of ugly things. Most importantly obesity, which can indeed lead to death and other nasty stuff. Would you be so willing to let the DEA rip that can of soda from your chubby sweating hands?
It's the principle of acceptable risk - what level of risk or harm is society willing to accept in order to have a benefit. You use a ratio of risk/benefit to think about where to draw the line.
The DEA and FDA believe the benefit of THC congeners is marginal, at best, for society.
As for the actual harm, we have 2 reported deaths associated (not exactly causatively connected) with synthetic cannabinoids. Out of an unknown number of instances of use which resulted in no harm, or in subthreshold harm, or transient harm.
That said, the only number that matters is the ratio. If the benefit is considered low, and the harm nonzero AND evidently fatal, then the ratio will tilt towards a decision to ban.
As you can guess, these data are not easy to obtain. What is the REAL risk of using THC congeners? How many different people use these every day, what are their effects, are there any nonfatal adverse reactions, are they being reported to health providers? Who uses these? Are the people who use these already prone to mental or psychological anomalies as a group?
This issue pops up now and then in debate on whether to legalize weed. The medical literature is sparse on actual cases of death or permanent disability/injury related to weed. But just when you've concluded it's probably perfectly safe, along comes a very unusual case of a woman with a pre-existing heart condition who smoked some weed, and promptly died due to the anticholinergic effect some types of cannabis have. Or a kid whose first experience with weed ended tragically in some other way.
Cases where it's clear that marijuana's presence caused or precipitated a permanently harmful effect. That in the absence of marijuana, these folks might still have died, or had a first onset seizure, or first break schizoaffective disorder. But it would have been much less likely, happened much later, been less severe, or the underlying vulnerability might have remained quiescent indefinitely.
You can point at how street weed is prepared and cut with other substances, ranging from No-Doz to Benadryl to oregano. The point still stands - the risk free nature of pure pharmaceutical grade THC to these people is irrelevant if they can't get their hands on it.
Until it's perfectly clear that a recreational drug mechanistically cannot precipitate or exacerbate these other things, its risk to society is unacceptable. As much as I'd like society to have a fuller, richer armamentarium of treatments for what ails us, it's not worth it if there's no science to back it up.
Don't celebrate it, don't care much for any of it. I hate equally all the religious and commercial events surrounding midwinter.
I respect other people's decision to participate in whatever made-up festival their creed or culture dictates. It is a lot more important to some.
If my friends or family need something I will give it to them right then and there, if families are going hungry I donate all year round. The "spirit of Christmas" is the message Christ intended for his followers to demonstrate every day of the year.
Concentrating all your obligations to people around you into one or two weeks at the end of the fiscal year, puts an inordinate stress on folks at a time of year when it is more difficult to fulfill them. Travel becomes a nightmare snarl as millions worldwide try to rejoin their families. Weather is often very bad, people are exhausted and anxious about money and insecure about their social standing at holiday parties and gatherings. It's about high expectations, and failures, and keeping up appearances. It's dumb, and it sucks. Take that goodwill and use it to make time to see your family, share your good fortune, pick a fight with your in-laws etc. during the rest of the year.
@ above: Comparing different religions winter festivals and then going ahead and celebrating a big secular commercial Christmas - seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you want your kids to learn about what everybody else is doing on Christmas, let them spend the holiday season with a family of a different cultural or religious background. At the end of the day, it's not about what colour ribbons go up, or what god you pray to. It's about winter being hard on folks and a need to gather together and be a family again, even if only just for a day. To take care of society's throwaways and indigent, and see to it they have food in their stomach and a roof over their head and someone to talk to during the worst of times. It's about resting your body and reflecting on how the year went, and what lies ahead.
Weed is probably safer because no matter how pure your strain is, there's a limit to how much THC the plant can naturally store in its tissues. So a typical dose, you get X amount of THC. Want more? Have to grow some more.
With designer dope, you get as much as you can cook up in a batch and sell. Changing the chemical structure of plain old THC in any way could have unforeseen additional actions, affect the brain in vastly different ways.
That last part more than anything else is probably why the DEA/FDA jumped on it so hard.
Don't read books. Go outside, meet girls, real ones, and spend time with them. Figure out what you want, what they want out of a relationship. You will lose your taste for the ones who are immature and chaotic.
To be fair, dead duck giblets are nothing compared to the ingredients used in Chinese medicine.
Just remember: alternative medicine is not alternative medicine, it is an alternative TO medicine, and generally a bad one.
Sadly people are of the opinion that homeopathy, naturopathy etc are less harmful than Western medicine. Surely some watchdog agency or the FDA prevents anything really noxious from being sold in their country, right?
Not true.
FDA may only test one batch in 100,000 of a medicinal substance entering its borders. It only responds to remove something from the market if it has caused a statistically significant number of acute and highly traceable adverse events.
Chronic, insidious damage or delayed adverse effects are virtually impossible to trace using postmarketing research. Patients underreport which home remedies, natural medicines, supplements, etc. they take. Doctors' eyes glaze over with incomprehension and apathy when patients DO tell them what supplements and alternative therapies they use.
Many of these have no beneficial effect for their indicated condition. Drug companies, looking to patent a novel and cheap treatment for common diseases, have thoroughly exhausted traditional Chinese medicine and herbal remedies' formularies, testing and retesting, formulating and isolating every compound possible. Most simply have no clinically significant activity, even if they are structurally and biochemically potentially clinically useful.
Or their benefit:harm ratio is unfavorable. They never get their chance to become "real" medicines because the active compounds are just nasty and have unpredictable, harmful effects. People continue to insist that Western medicine ignores traditional remedies - but drug companies have spent decades trying to squeeze profit by purifying and designing better versions of these, and only a couple ever make it through.
If a casual survey of the site's traffic shows that most of the traffic is torrenting of copyrighted material, or leading to torrents of copyrighted material, then the US copyright infringement law can probably shut it down without prior notice.
As for seizing the site entirely, that is another matter. Emergency shutdown of a leaking hose, and confiscating the hose and faucet altogether, are two very different things.
There should be a mechanism for the US government to intervene to immediately stop trafficking copyrighted material illegally. But this should have a time limit and should be accompanied by a mandatory attempt to work it out with the owner(s) and controller(s) of the servers involved. Many sites are exactly the same - they host a variety of perfectly legal content or aid users in linking to perfectly legitimate uses. It's possible for end users to misrepresent the torrents they are feeding or linking to. This should not be cause for seizure of property.
The US government has a responsibility to do whatever it can to sort out the bad guys from the bystanders. The site owners have their own responsibility of making sure they comply with copyright laws to the best of their ability - including self-monitoring to limit access to copyrighted materials.
There's nothing sacred about dates or digits. What matters is that we remember the human cost of atrocity and aggression, and put our lives in perspective. Putting memorials on the calendar doesn't make those days sacred, but it does trigger that reflection, when we would ordinarily set aside no time out of our all-important lives to stop and think.
Pearl Harbor's survivors are unique among 20th century Americans in having had to deal with an invading force firsthand.
Imagine yourself trying to write a book about it - how it must have been like the day before, with no warning, and then the morning of. If you've seen any of the movies about it, each one imagines things a bit differently. But in the end, you put together everything you've learned and felt and get your own sense of what it must have been like. The world for these people is forever divided into Before, and After.
And so it is with the occupation of Poland, the attack on the World Trade Center, the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the seizing and rape of Bosnia. The date itself is unimportant; oddly enough for some survivors they were so traumatized that each anniversary thereafter locks them in a private hell of reliving it, but the general effect of irrevocable change is there all year long.
While it would be great to not lose the wheel, the germ theory, etc., these are things which arose simultaneously in multiple centres in human civilization. They are reproducible, and hopefully will not be completely lost
Most of the rest is sadly not that essential.
Since this level of communication may not be possible, you have no way of knowing whether you are hurting the other party, until they are actively crying out or attempting to physically escape the pain. It goes both ways - if you have sex with a willing rhino, does he know your "safe word" in case he wants to trample you or scarify your thick hide to mark you as his mate?
What pain, you ask? Well, there's likely to be a size or shape mismatch between our parts and their parts. Some animals become physically aggressive with one another during intercourse - and while they are built to take it, you may not be. You get the general gist - hopefully without describing specific examples - but there's a lot of reasons why this just ain't gonna fly, morally, ethically, or even topologically.
This, Guatemala is an absolute legal and human rights wasteland. Even Mexico is attempting to contain traffic on their southern border, similar to US trying to contain Mexican traffic. Many of them are just passing through on their way to US, but it still creates problems for Mexico.
Hehe, nobody is saying "government knows best" is all that sound a reasoning.
Prohibition is pretty good evidence of the contrary. Alcohol is very dangerous, and by the above reckoning should be banned, since it has far more morbidity and mortality numbers than any other drug, period. But it is so deeply intertwined with human civilization, so easily made and distilled, and so addictive that you can't simply outlaw it.
And if prisons are run for profit, it's news to me. Most US prisons are huge money sinks. Law enforcement is the last greatest pure expenditure of a government because it is seen as corrupt to actually profit from criminal activity.
It's the principle of acceptable risk - what level of risk or harm is society willing to accept in order to have a benefit. You use a ratio of risk/benefit to think about where to draw the line.
The DEA and FDA believe the benefit of THC congeners is marginal, at best, for society.
As for the actual harm, we have 2 reported deaths associated (not exactly causatively connected) with synthetic cannabinoids. Out of an unknown number of instances of use which resulted in no harm, or in subthreshold harm, or transient harm.
That said, the only number that matters is the ratio. If the benefit is considered low, and the harm nonzero AND evidently fatal, then the ratio will tilt towards a decision to ban.
As you can guess, these data are not easy to obtain. What is the REAL risk of using THC congeners? How many different people use these every day, what are their effects, are there any nonfatal adverse reactions, are they being reported to health providers? Who uses these? Are the people who use these already prone to mental or psychological anomalies as a group?
This issue pops up now and then in debate on whether to legalize weed. The medical literature is sparse on actual cases of death or permanent disability/injury related to weed. But just when you've concluded it's probably perfectly safe, along comes a very unusual case of a woman with a pre-existing heart condition who smoked some weed, and promptly died due to the anticholinergic effect some types of cannabis have. Or a kid whose first experience with weed ended tragically in some other way.
Cases where it's clear that marijuana's presence caused or precipitated a permanently harmful effect. That in the absence of marijuana, these folks might still have died, or had a first onset seizure, or first break schizoaffective disorder. But it would have been much less likely, happened much later, been less severe, or the underlying vulnerability might have remained quiescent indefinitely.
You can point at how street weed is prepared and cut with other substances, ranging from No-Doz to Benadryl to oregano. The point still stands - the risk free nature of pure pharmaceutical grade THC to these people is irrelevant if they can't get their hands on it.
Until it's perfectly clear that a recreational drug mechanistically cannot precipitate or exacerbate these other things, its risk to society is unacceptable. As much as I'd like society to have a fuller, richer armamentarium of treatments for what ails us, it's not worth it if there's no science to back it up.
I respect other people's decision to participate in whatever made-up festival their creed or culture dictates. It is a lot more important to some.
If my friends or family need something I will give it to them right then and there, if families are going hungry I donate all year round. The "spirit of Christmas" is the message Christ intended for his followers to demonstrate every day of the year.
Concentrating all your obligations to people around you into one or two weeks at the end of the fiscal year, puts an inordinate stress on folks at a time of year when it is more difficult to fulfill them. Travel becomes a nightmare snarl as millions worldwide try to rejoin their families. Weather is often very bad, people are exhausted and anxious about money and insecure about their social standing at holiday parties and gatherings. It's about high expectations, and failures, and keeping up appearances. It's dumb, and it sucks. Take that goodwill and use it to make time to see your family, share your good fortune, pick a fight with your in-laws etc. during the rest of the year.
@ above: Comparing different religions winter festivals and then going ahead and celebrating a big secular commercial Christmas - seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you want your kids to learn about what everybody else is doing on Christmas, let them spend the holiday season with a family of a different cultural or religious background. At the end of the day, it's not about what colour ribbons go up, or what god you pray to. It's about winter being hard on folks and a need to gather together and be a family again, even if only just for a day. To take care of society's throwaways and indigent, and see to it they have food in their stomach and a roof over their head and someone to talk to during the worst of times. It's about resting your body and reflecting on how the year went, and what lies ahead.
With designer dope, you get as much as you can cook up in a batch and sell. Changing the chemical structure of plain old THC in any way could have unforeseen additional actions, affect the brain in vastly different ways.
That last part more than anything else is probably why the DEA/FDA jumped on it so hard.
(quote from an Atheist activist billboard)
Sadly people are of the opinion that homeopathy, naturopathy etc are less harmful than Western medicine. Surely some watchdog agency or the FDA prevents anything really noxious from being sold in their country, right?
Not true.
FDA may only test one batch in 100,000 of a medicinal substance entering its borders. It only responds to remove something from the market if it has caused a statistically significant number of acute and highly traceable adverse events.
Chronic, insidious damage or delayed adverse effects are virtually impossible to trace using postmarketing research. Patients underreport which home remedies, natural medicines, supplements, etc. they take. Doctors' eyes glaze over with incomprehension and apathy when patients DO tell them what supplements and alternative therapies they use.
Many of these have no beneficial effect for their indicated condition. Drug companies, looking to patent a novel and cheap treatment for common diseases, have thoroughly exhausted traditional Chinese medicine and herbal remedies' formularies, testing and retesting, formulating and isolating every compound possible. Most simply have no clinically significant activity, even if they are structurally and biochemically potentially clinically useful.
Or their benefit:harm ratio is unfavorable. They never get their chance to become "real" medicines because the active compounds are just nasty and have unpredictable, harmful effects. People continue to insist that Western medicine ignores traditional remedies - but drug companies have spent decades trying to squeeze profit by purifying and designing better versions of these, and only a couple ever make it through.
As for seizing the site entirely, that is another matter. Emergency shutdown of a leaking hose, and confiscating the hose and faucet altogether, are two very different things.
There should be a mechanism for the US government to intervene to immediately stop trafficking copyrighted material illegally. But this should have a time limit and should be accompanied by a mandatory attempt to work it out with the owner(s) and controller(s) of the servers involved. Many sites are exactly the same - they host a variety of perfectly legal content or aid users in linking to perfectly legitimate uses. It's possible for end users to misrepresent the torrents they are feeding or linking to. This should not be cause for seizure of property.
The US government has a responsibility to do whatever it can to sort out the bad guys from the bystanders. The site owners have their own responsibility of making sure they comply with copyright laws to the best of their ability - including self-monitoring to limit access to copyrighted materials.
Let me ask you - have you ever been punched in the face? Like, hard enough to immobilize you? Think about it.