Should medical marijuana be kept from minors at all costs?
We should also ask:
Should Sheriff Pat Hedges, the local deputies and the federal thugs who accompanied them on the raid of Charley Lynch’s medical marijuana dispensary be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity?
If the entrenched legislative bodies and criminal justice system will not properly deal with these perps then it is time to create a replacement system.
Via Winston Smith.
The French are taking a step, albeit a small one, that the rest of the world, especially the United States, should follow:
France’s military will slash its ranks by 54,000 personnel and close dozens of air, army and other bases in an overhaul meant to slim forces at home while making it easier and faster to deploy troops abroad, the prime minister announced Thursday.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the 15 percent cut in manpower and base closings will save billions of dollars but still permit an agile military suited to the country’s security needs.
This small beginning in demilitarization will open the doors to our future just a bit wider. A future of free human beings creating and evolving rather than nation states destroying and killing.
It is unfortunate that opposition to these clearly desirable actions comes from those who live off the milk of the state:
Officials in towns slated to lose their bases argue the plan will be disastrous for local economies and say they will fight the closures.
Fillon said he understood people’s fears and promised $503 million in aid to the most affected regions, many in France’s depressed northeast. He also said measures would be taken to encourage investment in the those regions.
Fight the closures they might but their futures will be much stronger if built locally rather than on the backs of taxpayers and at the whim of national or state governments.
These bases should not have existed in the first place and that they have is no rationale for either maintaining them or subsidizing local economies once they are gone.
In an on line exclusive, I and the Bird #80 introduces the participants in the first ever I and the Bird Summer Olympics.
Go check out the competitors!
I think we are all familiar with the mass produced Wikipedia, right?
Today Google opened a bit of a competitor, Knol, to everyone:
Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we’re making Knol available to everyone.
…..
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
It is interesting that also today the Medpedia Foundation made more information on their project available:
The Medpedia Project today announced the formation of the world’s largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine called Medpedia. Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are now volunteering to collaboratively build the most comprehensive medical clearinghouse in the world for information about health, medicine and the body. This free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008, and a preview site becomes available today at www.medpedia.com.
Both look like very interesting and potentially valuable projects.
However, if you look at the many sample Knols on the Knol front page you will see that most of them are oriented toward medicine and written by professionals.
I can’t visualize medical professionals having bundles of time to write and maintain the types of expert articles that both Knol and Medpedia visualize. In fact, this is one reason at least one observer expects Knol to fail.
Is Google trying to preempt Medpedia?
From the information bar right above the Archive button:
You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil.
Yours may say something different…
Being Google I also expected to see links to the best tin-foil hat design pages.