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Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UC San Diego, recently helped run a study that provided multiple sclerosis patients with either a marijuana joint or a placebo that looked, smelled, and tasted like marijuana. After smoking whichever substance they were given, patients were tested to see if it reduced their muscle spasticity — an affliction, common to MS patients, that causes painful, uncontrollable spasms of the extremities. Spasticity was unaffected among the placebo patients but dropped 30 percent on average among the patients given real marijuana. The side effects? “Smoking caused fatigue and dizziness in some users,” says Reuters, “and slowed down people’s mental skills soon after they used marijuana.”

The UC San Diego study is just the latest to suggest that marijuana has some medical benefits. Sixteen states, thousands of doctors, and tens of thousands of sick people concur in that judgment. It is dramatized by the personal testimony of sick people who are offered much more powerful drugs, but nevertheless insistthat consuming marijuana was most effective at helping them. (Don’t miss the video at the top of this post, as powerful a testimonial for medical marijuana as you’ll find.)

Marijuana is nevertheless classified under the Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule One drug. Under the law, drugs placed in that category must meet all of the following criteria (emphasis added):

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
• There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision

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Our plane got delayed 20 minutes so we got out the instruments and played a 4 song impromptu set for the packed plane.

Romania here we come!

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Stung by a UN official’s criticism of the country for allowing some of its people to go hungry, Canada has dismissed him as a “patronizing academic” and said there are more pressing food concerns in other countries.

“Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in 10 families with a child under six is unable to meet their daily food needs,” Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Conservative government of Canada has reacted like a scalded cat. Uncharacteristically, at least three ministers have been trotted to the microphones to abhor this “ill-informed, patronising academic”. And don’t mention the facts; that obesity and diabetes rates are rocketing especially in remote communities where fresh food is expensive or unobtainable. Canada’s First Nations citizens are often poor; have high levels of violence, substance abuse and crime; have poor diets and poor health.

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The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon’s Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

General Ray Odierno, the army’s chief of staff, says the plan is part of a new effort to provide US commanders around the globe with troops on a rotational basis to meet the military needs of their regions.

…

Military advisers are also in Uganda to draw lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help train African Union soldiers to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab group.

Lessons like not to fund insurgents on the principle of my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend, perhaps?

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This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today:Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.Until the easy money stopped. When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance. First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences.Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different ?

The Story of Send.

You’d think that Google would make sure this children’s book worked on an Android tablet, instead of looking like a dog’s breakfast.

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Companies should help reduce income inequality and focus more on long-term goals, a new group of supporters of capitalism said on Monday.

[..]

It also includes Carly Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, and Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee.

Irony just died, came back to life, died, came back to life, hemorrhaged, shat twice and died.

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The center of your application is not the database. Nor is it one or more of the frameworks you may be using. The center of your application are the use cases of your application.

Paul Cameron reveals he is a pedophile that likes to rape boys.

That is what I hear him saying. That is the only reason I can think of that would make him assume that all gay people would wish to do that. That, or he was raped when he was young and blames all gay people.

OK, draw yourself up to your full height, purse your lips, wrinkle your nose and in your best Edith Evans imitation say, “A Rand-bag?”

Original link if you want one.

The original:

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Studies show that Massachusetts ranks 12th in the nation in terms of the debt graduating college seniors carry, with an average obligation of $25,541.

In better times, that’s a hefty burden with which to start on a career path. In the middle of the worst economic crisis in more than a generation, it is cruel and unusual punishment.

Unless a graduate has a specialized degree (in, say, engineering, computer science, or nursing) the odds of a finding a job are long. Even those lucky enough to get work are often underemployed — pulling espresso or working part-time.

Brown, together with his Republican colleagues, voted to make a bad situation even worse.

Why?

Because the Democrats’ plan to pay for extending the loan subsidies would have closed a tax loophole often exploited by well-off investors.

In other words, Brown sold out the interests of the poor, the working class, and middle-income families in order to lick the boots of Wall Street, which contributes mightily to his re-election campaign.

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A well-known, openly gay supporter of Mitt Romney in New York has decided to withdraw his support for Romney and back President Barack Obama instead.

The clincher: Romney’s stance on same-sex marriage.

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When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker met with a billionaire campaign donor a month before he launched his attack on the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector workers and public-school teachers, he engaged in a detailed discussion about undermining unions as part of a broader strategy of strengthening the position of his Republican party.

After he initiated those attacks, Governor Walker testified under oath to a Congressional committee. He was asked during the April 2011 hearing to specifically address the question of whether he set out to weaken unions—which traditionally back Democrats and which are expected to play a major role in President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign—for political purposes. Walker replied: “It’s not about that for me.”

During the same hearing, Walker was asked whether he “ever had a conversation with respect to your actions in Wisconsin and using them to punish members of the opposition party and their [union] donor base?”

Walker replied, not once but twice, that the answer was “no.”

So, did the governor of Wisconsin lie, under oath, to Congress? The videotape of Walker talking with Diane Hendricks, the Beloit, Wisconsin, billionaire who would eventually give his campaign more than $500,000, surfaced late last week. Captured in January 2011 by a documentary filmmaker who was trailing Hendricks, the conversation provides rare insight into the governor’s long-term strategy for dividing Wisconsin. And the focus of the conversation and the strategy is by all evidence a political one.

In the video, Walker is shown meeting with Hendricks before an economic development session at the headquarters of a firm Hendricks owns, ABC Supply Inc., in Beloit. After Walker kisses Henricks, she asks: “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions?”

“Oh, yeah!” says Walker.

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“It is an obvious conflict of interest for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the largest bank in America, to serve on the New York Fed’s board of directors,” Sanders said yesterday in an e- mailed statement. “This is a clear example of the fox guarding the henhouse.”

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A Nigerian man used the identity of the victim in an unsolved murder to hide his status as an illegal immigrant while working undetected for two decades as a security guard and then a security supervisor at one of the United States’ busiest airports, authorities said Monday in announcing his arrest.

The arrest of Bimbo Olumuyiwa Oyewole came on the day a federal report found the Transportation Security Administration’s handling of security breaches at the airport, Newark Liberty International, deficient.

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Ah, the MPAA. Hardly a day goes by when someone there doesn’t say something positively ridiculous. The latest is a reaction to the news that a court in the Netherlands has expanded the censorship of The Pirate Bay to a few more ISPs. The MPAA has decided to explain that this kind of censorship is good for consumers:

The UK ruling and indeed other recent ones in Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Finland as well as this one are positive developments that support not only the creative community but also consumers.

It’s not entirely clear why they say “the UK ruling,” since the post only refers to a ruling from The Netherlands, but it’s a strange world when someone is claiming that censoring a website that consumers find useful is “good for consumers.” So how do they defend such a ridiculous claim? Well, by getting the story backwards yet again:

The number of sites that offer legitimate creative content continues to increase dramatically. But to fully enable this growing sector to thrive and provide consumers with content when they want it, where they want it and how they want it, it is imperative that the content not be siphoned off and distributed illegally by those seeking to profit from the work and creativity of others.

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The German Pirate Party has taken seats in the fourth consecutive regional election, this time in North Rhine-Westphalia, where it received 7.5% of the vote, which will likely translate to 18 seats. These state-level elections are being viewed in part as a referendum on austerity and other Merkel doctrines, and there’s a growing tide of disgust with business-as-usual across Europe. The Pirates are doing a good job of presenting themselves as a real alternative, albeit one with a specialized agenda. The trick will be for the Pirates to articulate the equation that all copyright policy ends up being Internet policy, and all Internet policy ends up being policy for everything, since everything we do involves the Internet. So far, many people are taking that idea to heart.

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For almost half a century, Don Ritchie would approach people contemplating suicide at the edge of The Gap, just 50 metres from his home in Watsons Bay, his palms facing up.

Mr Ritchie told his daughter Sue Ritchie Bereny he would smile and say: “Is there something I could do to help you?”

“And that was all that was often needed to turn people around, and he would say not to underestimate the power of a kind word and a smile,” said Mrs Ritchie Bereny.

Mr Ritchie, sometimes known as the angel or watchman of The Gap, is acknowledged to have stopped about 160 people from jumping to their deaths.

He died at St Vincent’s Hospital yesterday, surrounded by his wife Moya, 85, daughters Jan, Donna and Sue, and four grandchildren, who travelled from across Australia and from Indonesia to Sydney to see him. He was 86.

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Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn.

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A young Haitian man who accused Uruguayan troops serving as UN peacekeepers in Haiti of sexually assaulting him last year has testified in Montevideo before a judge investigating the case.

The scandal erupted in September 2011 after mobile phone video images circulated on the internet appeared to show soldiers serving with the UN mission sexually assaulting the man, then 18, in the southern Haitian town of Port-Salut.

Six Uruguayan marines were indicted last year on charges of disobeying orders and dereliction of duty. The first charge is punishable by four months to four years of prison, and the second by up to three years in prison.

Why is this young man a ‘rape victim’ in the headline? Isn’t he a rape victim or an alleged rape victim?

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A former Rupert Murdoch aide has told an inquiry that she received commiserations from David Cameron, UK prime minister, after she resigned amid the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Rebekah Brooks, in her long-awaited testimony before the Leveson inquiry into press ethics on Friday, said she also received messages from the foreign ministry, interior ministry and the offices of George Osborne, finance minister.

…

Cameron has been a friend of Brooks’ husband for 30 years since they studied together at Eton, the elite British boarding school.

The Camerons and the Brookses are also neighbours in the prime minister’s constituency in rural Oxfordshire, forming part of what is dubbed the Chipping Norton Set, a group of the rich and powerful who live near the village of the same name.

The impression that Cameron and Osborne surrounded themselves with a coterie of privileged individuals for cosy dinners and horse riding in the English countryside, has been pounced on by critics.

This is not much of a surprise (politics as usual), but it’s interesting that at last the UK authorities appear to be doing something about this kind of corruption. Of course an inquiry may be used to cover up the facts.