the reason that nobody talks to america anymore is that nobody trusts america anymore.

so, everybody appears to be operating around their airspace without telling them what they're doing. all of these alliances and strategic operations are taking place, and the americans are just out of the loop.

this has just left america grasping for a light switch in the dark.

they need to get out pronto. asap. now.

the state department is clueless; the united states has no idea what's going on, anymore.

sadly, what's unfolding in the united states state department right now is justifying the kinds of arguments that authoritarian states - like russia and turkey - use to discredit democracy.

it's chaos. insanity. disorder.

tillerson was clueless enough, himself, and never should have been put into this position. now, the department is falling apart, you've got the second major turnover in months...and they can't do basic analysis any more...

is trump at least smart enough to realize he should recuse his country from a conflict that it no longer understands?

http://www.newsweek.com/us-actually-agrees-iran-syria-says-turkey-helping-isis-attacking-afrin-852159

i speak for a great deal of canadians outside of quebec when i say that i would have liked to vote for gilles duceppe, if only i could have.

i still think the qs is poised for a major break through, and that the harder couilliard fights on his right, the larger the swing will be. these four-party spectrums get so messy.

the quebec liberals are too right-wing for my tastes. i would like to see qs cut substantively into their voting base, especially with recent immigrants.

but, if couilliard wants to split the caq vote up a bit, he might want to go out of his way to remind everybody that legault has renounced sovereigntism, making him a local representative of the federal conservative party.

this is no doubt the opposite of what he is thinking.

it's the smoke that's the problem.

but, it seems like it's really eating that makes me so tired - this is the catalyst.

so, i'm going to avoid eating until the end of the day.

no, i'm not the hopeless nerd that wants to be cool.

i'm the "cute nerd" that's constantly frustrated by the world's refusal to treat me like the nerd that i am.

what i long for is the isolation and ostracization that i can't get, because i'm cursed with being too good looking.

i really do need to call a dentist.

i wanted to wait until i was sure i'd quit smoking...

odsp covers basic cleaning, which is all i really need.

i'm going to print this off and leave it on a few doors.

i'm not convinced that first-hand vaping is much better than smoking. but i've been around the pens at bars, and they don't produce the same level of second-hand smoke.

http://stonerpros.com/reasons-to-vape/

even norml comes right out and says it, although they're also being confusing, and it's kind of maddening.

there have been studies that have suggested that the active ingredients in marijuana - thc & cbd - may have anti-oxidant properties, but the way this is presented pretty much everywhere is grossly misleading.

some of the studies have even gone so far as to suggest that thc might shrink tumours, it is true, but what these studies did is inject the compound directly into the tumour at concentrations that are beyond anything we could imagine. you'd have to condense thousands and thousands of joints worth of thc into a syringe to get these kinds of properties. the amount of thc you get from smoking bud is absolutely clinically useless.

so, these reports say things like "it's true that marijuana smoke has been found to produce pre-cancerous cells...but it also has thc", with the implication that it balances out. but, that is dishonest. marijuana smoke has carcinogens in very, very high concentrations (equivalent or higher than tobacco smoke) and trace amounts of anti-oxidants. they don't balance out.

in very, very high concentrations, nicotine could potentially reverse ageing. but, nobody talks about that when discussing the effects of smoking.

you can wait fifty years for these studies to come back, but unless you've smoked yourself retarded, you know it's going to give you cancer - and there's no use in pretending you don't.

http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/cannabis-smoke-and-cancer-assessing-the-risk

 “Cannabis use could already be responsible for one in 20 lung cancers diagnosed in New Zealand,”
 
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cancer-cannabis/cannabis-bigger-cancer-risk-than-cigarettes-study-idUSHKG10478820080129

see, and then she burns incense to cover up the smell.

the incense is probably worse than the pot.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/nov/26/passive-smoking-deaths-who-report

deaths by gun violence: 33,636 (2013, wiki)
deaths by second-hand smoke: 53,800 (1997, california epa)

these are american numbers, to demonstrate the point (gun deaths in canada are far less).

i don't know why they attribute this to a conservative blowhard, rather than a humanist scientist; it's a scientific fact, not a religious opinion.

but it's true.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/29/george-will/claims-smoking-kills-more-people-annually-other-da/

"they're not hurting anybody, police resources should be deployed towards people that are harming others."

https://www.theguardian.com/news/reality-check/2013/dec/18/cigarettes-or-war-which-is-the-biggest-killer

so, what's the way out of this?

it's edibles.

if i were a sitting senator, i might contemplate sending the bill back in order to relegislate the issue around making access to edibles easier, and access to bud almost impossible.

as a society, we really ought to be coercing people to start eating it and stop smoking it - not just for the benefit of users, but also for the health of everybody else.

so, when you recognize that complications from smoke inhalation is the leading cause of death in society, what does it mean to argue that the cops are wasting their time dealing with smoke inhalation issues?

smoke kills more people than guns, gangs, alcohol, sexual violence & virtually everything else you can come up with, combined.

if we were to be rational about the data, we would have to conclude that the primary purpose of the police should be to ensure that people aren't smoking anywhere near where it can be inhaled by anybody. they should be in special facilities, that you need to put hazmat suits on to enter.

i need to repeat this: smoke is the leading cause of death.

smokers kill more people than gangs.

smoke is more dangerous than guns.

we've got this all backwards.

but, how can we be so ignorant? what's underlying this absurdity?

it's probably some good old fashioned toxic masculinity. for, while it may be true that smoke is more dangerous than guns, fighting smokers isn't quite like fighting gangs. it doesn't have that combat component, that feeling of danger.

but, we need to be more rational about this - and that means getting more strict on smokers, not less strict.

there's this idea that marijuana doesn't kill anybody. i've stated it myself. but it's wrong.

if you were to claim that tobacco doesn't create overdoses, you'd be correct. so, would you then claim that tobacco doesn't kill anybody?

overdose deaths from tobacco: 0.

in fact, tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death.

one of the things about prohibition is that it skews the statistics, and i'll admit that it's never going to be easy to separate deaths caused by tobacco from deaths caused by marijuana, because it's such a heavy overlap. when a marijuana smoker gets lung cancer, or heart disease, it's never going to be clear if the primary cause is the marijuana or the tobacco that this person also smokes, along with the unhealthy diet and the sedentary lifestyle. what we can say, right now, is that prohibition removes marijuana from the statistics.

full legalization should hopefully allow us to better understand marijuana smoke as a risk factor for heart disease, for cancer, for emphysema, for diabetes, for stroke - for all the things we've tied so heavily to tobacco.

and, in a decade or two, this idea that marijuana doesn't kill anybody is going to be a surreal joke about how ignorant we were.

09/15 is finally done, and it was something like 3-4 months in size.

october should be much, much less intense.

this may end up being a short day, or i might just be taking a nap. the air in here is far better than before, but i had to hover over a space to block it and it's not clear at this point if it's made me tired, or if i'm just agitated and drained.

i wanted to make some calls but slept all day - again, possibly due to air pollution. hopefully, it's just a nap so i can get on to things tomorrow...

...but, i'm into the last few weeks of the election, now.

regarding the "free syrian army".

you need to be careful with videos coming to you from the region, because it's 98% propaganda, and intended to sway western attitudes. but, these aren't good guys, and they're going to do bad things.

the difference between the saudi-backed groups and the turkish-backed groups, however, is that the saudi-backed groups are being funded by people that want to set up these systems permanently, while the turkish-backed groups are foreign mercenaries being used as muscle - and the eventual intent is to clear them out and restore order.

so, yes: they are more or less the same thing, on the ground. but, the people paying them have almost diametrically different intentions. back when this was a turkish-saudi proxy war to take over the space left vacant by russian influence, there was little reason to think the turks would have supported anything other than a democratic transition, while the saudi aim appears to have been to prevent a democratic transition.

what the kurds were trying to do in the area was not sustainable, and not an intelligent approach, in the long run. they can't fight professional armies, like this. as a taz it served it's purpose; now, it's time to pack their things and start over somewhere else. and that is what this was - a taz. it could have never been permanent.

permanent change must be structural.

so, it's crazy to suggest they won't get slaughtered, if they stay.

the way to get rid of the fsa, from here on in, is through syrian law enforcement. expect the turks to cut the cord fairly soon.

so, the kurds would be wise to retreat to safer areas, to let the turks run through. erdgan is a belligerent fool with a military force that cannot be effectively resisted. but, once the region is returned to assad, they will no doubt be allowed to return.

and, again: it defies reason to suggest that the turks have any interest in annexing this region, or in provoking a wider conflict with the kurds in the region.

the area on the other side of the euphrates is more complex, as it is not clear if or when the united states intends to leave. nobody wants the turks to get into a fight with the americans. but, the russians are going to agitate for the territorial integrity of the syrian state.

nor is the obvious solution of partition acceptable to the turks, because it would be a kurdish state.

it's consequently hard to see a way out of this: unless america acknowledges defeat and withdraws, turkey is on the path to direct conflict with the united states over a plot of land with virtually no strategic value to the empire at all.

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/03/ypg-pushed-out-tal-rifaat.html