The Binary Circumstance

This story sounds like it’s out of the Dark Ages. Once science gets married to religion or politics, it ceases to exist. This is yet another reason why I don’t want the government messing around in my health care, although it’s obviously already too late to stop that. They’ve been doing it for decades.

This article makes you wonder how many other possible cures they’ve suppressed.

From Alternet.org:

Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.

The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”

60 Minutes did a story tonight on the California water shortage and their decaying levee system. It is well worth watching and you can watch it here.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I think it’s interesting that although a huge increase in the state’s population is mentioned, nobody explicitly says in the story that relentless population growth is the root of the problem. California and the American southwest have been grabbing water from surrounding areas for decades and all that has done is promote more growth. People forget that most of California is a desert. It’s supposed to be dry. That’s what makes a desert a desert.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is called “the green governor,” thinks that spending $40 billion to build more dams, shore up the levees and move more water around is the solution. That sounds like a short-term solution to the current lack of jobs but isn’t it just making the same mistake they’ve made in the past? It can only lead to more growth which will ultimately lead to the need for more water.

On the subject of water wars and shortages, I also recommend Blue Gold: World Water Wars

On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. On May 1, 2003, not even three months later, Bush declared that the job was done and the war had been won in his “mission accomplished” speech. As of today, December 2, 2009, we are still fighting the war in Iraq. As Wikipedia points out:

The vast majority of casualties, among both coalition (approximately 98% as of October 2008) and Iraqi combatants, and among Iraqi civilians, has occurred since the speech.

Last night President Barack Obama announced his plan to send more than 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan. He also said that he would begin withdrawing those troops in July, 2011, after only eighteen months. He has gone one step further than George W. Bush. He’s announced when the mission will be accomplished before it has even started.

That’s no way to fight and win a war. But it is the way to sell another open-ended conflict to the American people.

An episode of South Park from 2001 called “The Entity” will remind you what short-term memories people have when it comes to government bailouts. That’s just in the first three minutes.

The rest is typically brilliant, outrageous, raunchy, laugh-out-loud South Park humor.

South Park Zone has all South Park episodes online in streaming video with HD.

You can also see Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s commentary on “The Entity” on YouTube.