Global

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Unwilling to allow the public to get zonked or
profit from recreational marijuana, Thailand has instead produced its
first pharmaceutical THC and CBD oils, tablets, oral sprays, chocolate
wafers and traditional potions after recently legalizing medical
cannabis.

This first line of weed-based products puts Thailand on the cutting
edge of Southeast Asia's legal marijuana industry, a lucrative
advantage if allowed to flourish.

If recreational marijuana is legalized and freely grown, it would
create an extremely profitable domestic and international market
possibly bigger than this mostly agricultural country's rice, sugar
cane, or tapioca crops.

South Korea is ahead of Thailand in producing legal medical cannabis
products for domestic use.

India offers relatively small, decades-old legal "bhang" sales for
recreational use solely within that country and made from otherwise
illegal marijuana.

Proud of the tiny amount they created, the government organized a
visit for journalists on August 2 to Rangsit University's new,

“Instead of demanding blue-ribbon safety science and encouraging honest, open and responsible debate on the science, liberal blogs shut down discussion on this key public health and civil rights issue, and silence critics, treating faith in vaccines as a religion; the heresy of questioning dogma meets with anathema and excommunication.”…”Many vaccines contain dangerous amounts of known neurotoxins like mercury and aluminum and carcinogens like formaldehyde, that are associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune problems, food allergies and cancers that might not be diagnosed for many years.”…“No matter how toxic the ingredients, how negligent the manufacturer or how grievous the harm, vaccine-injured children cannot sue a vaccine company!”….” Pervasive financial entanglements with vaccine makers and the other alchemies of agency capture have transformed the FDA and CDC into pharmaceutical industry sock puppets.” -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

Originality is among those attributes I admire and cherish most in the arts, and Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends is very singular on several fronts. First of all, the Cuban-born, Obie Award-winning playwright’s characters are all female, and this is far less common than mixed gender or all male casts, such as in Jason Miller’s That Championship Season, first produced in the 1970s, as was Fefu. This casting and the fact that the bard is a woman indelibly stamps Fefu with a distinctly feminist point of view. As such, Fefu deals with gender issues, sexual politics, as well as with same sex relationships.

There is a serious problem with diversity facing the cybersecurity field. While all minorities struggle to find a foothold in the world of cybersecurity, the dearth of African Americans is one of the most egregious with a mere 3% of the field being comprised of African Americans. This is an unacceptable figure in 2019, when there are more than enough qualified African Americans willing and able to fill the ever-expanding positions that the cybersecurity field generates.

While the lack of representation of African Americans in cybersecurity isn’t something to be explored on moral grounds, it is important that the exact methods of why underrepresentation continues to plague the cybersecurity field be understood. Qualified individuals of any background, creed, gender or race should get a fair shake when it comes to the hiring process, and unfortunately, that just doesn’t seem to be happening in the cybersecurity field.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga goes on even though convicted pedophile Epstein himself has been found hanged in his jail cell in Manhattan. One has to wonder how he managed to kill himself, if that is indeed the case, as he was reportedly on suicide watch at the prison and it is to be presumed that he had been stripped of any clothing or accoutrements that would have been usable to that end. So, he is dead but did he do it himself or was he helped? There are many prominent individuals and powerful government agencies that will be very pleased that he is gone as most of his secrets will have gone to the grave with him.

Rainforests are a crucial feature of Earth’s biosphere. Apart from being critical to Earth’s climate and vital carbon sinks, the major player in Earth’s hydrological (water) cycle, a massive producer of oxygen and home to most of the world’s species, rainforests are the home of a large indigenous human population. They are also the source of many vital resources, including medicines, used by humans around the world.

However, the vast range of ecological services that rainforests have provided ongoingly for the 400 million years of their existence, and which have been critical to the survival of homo sapiens since we first walked the Earth 200,000 years ago, are not measured and valued by accountants and economists: Have you ever seen a balance sheet or set of national accounts that includes an entry for ‘Value of ecological services taken from nature and on which life and our entire production of goods and services depend’?

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini (actually first written by Giovanni Gentile)

Remarks in Poulsbo, Washington, August 4, 2019

This week, 74 years ago, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each hit with a single nuclear bomb that had the power of a third to a half of what NPR calls a low-yield or “usable” weapon. By NPR I mean both the Nuclear Posture Review and National Public Radio, both the U.S. government and what many people dangerously think of as a free press. These so-called usable nukes are for firing from the submarines based nearby here. They are two to three times the size of what destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the U.S. military’s plans involve using multiple nukes at once. But they really are tiny compared to other nuclear weapons that the United States and other nations have ready just in case some unfortunate scenario makes completely annihilating ours and other species the wisest course of action. Some U.S. nukes are 1,000 times what was used to vaporize Japanese populations. Each submarine can launch 5,000 times what was dropped on Hiroshima.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine that a letter from the billionaire real-estate broker George M. Marcus was hand-delivered to the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking to meet with her. What are the chances that Pelosi would find time on her calendar?

Hint: Marcus gave $4.5 million to Pelosi’s House Majority PAC during the 2018 election cycle.

Or, if the letter had come from the hedge-fund billionaire James H. Simons -- who gave $10 million to that PAC during the last election cycle -- would his request for a meeting with Speaker Pelosi be granted?

In contrast, we don’t need to speculate about what would happen if Pelosi received a letter from seven progressive organizations “urgently” requesting a meeting to discuss her recent dismissive comments about four progressive congresswomen -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.

“Many people think that the fight for America is already lost. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe. I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.”

This is how the El Paso killer ended his white supremacy screed, posted just before he “went in” and killed 22 “invaders” who were shopping at a Walmart’s store this past weekend. And, as everyone knows, half a day later another armed maniac wearing body armor and sporting a semiautomatic went on a shooting rampage outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine and wounding 26. And a few days earlier, a gunman killed three people, including two children, at a festival in Gilroy, Calif.