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The American Medical Association (AMA) voted today to reverse its long-held position that marijuana be retained as a Schedule I substance with no medical value. The AMA adopted a report drafted by the AMA Council on Science and Public Health (CSAPH) entitled, “Use of Cannabis for Medicinal Purposes,” which affirmed the therapeutic benefits of marijuana and called for further research. The CSAPH report concluded that, “short term controlled trials indicate that smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis.” Furthermore, the report urges that “the Schedule I status of marijuana be reviewed with the goal of facilitating clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines, and alternate delivery methods.”

via Opposing Views: OPINION:AMA Ends 72-Year Policy, Says Marijuana has Medical Benefits.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

It’s the winter of 1969 in Gordita Beach, a mythical beach town near the Palos Verdes peninsula. The Summer of Love, never really alive in Southern California, is still a “great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side.” Pot smoke and nearby Long Beach petroleum refineries thicken the air. The Manson Family arrests and trial burn broadcast bandwidth. Larry “Doc” Sportello is on the trail of… Something. Something big. Maybe. If only he could quit smoking long enough to remember how to answer the phone.

It’s something completely different and it’s Thomas Pynchon’s best novel ever. Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s second novel to feature cannabis as a more or less primary character (the earlier being Vineland, which locale, being a mythical Humbolt County, more or less, gets a passing mention here). In Inherent Vice a joint (pinners, fatties, “that new Thai stick,” Humbolt sinsemilla, PCP-laced boiler makers) gets lit at least once in every chapter. (If memory serves. Which it may not. Who really knows these things?) Read the rest of this entry »

As KJ-san said when I showed her this video, It’s amazing what humans can do. Too bad we don’t all spend more time being creative rather than tearing the shit out of each other and the Earth.

Air Bear, NYC Urban Art, from William Fuentes on Vimeo.

I just finished this video for work. It features CIRCUL8 Systems’ Gary Wegner talking about the power of poop and nutrient recovery. Instead of treating manure as “waste,” Wegner demonstrates that instead manure is an essential source of nutrients. If we waste manure, he says, we risk running out of the nutrients essential to growing plants, animals and ourselves.

For more information on why Gary’s work is so important, check out this article in Scientific American on a critical and rapidly diminishing resource: “Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply.”

The Merry Misogynist by Colin Cotterill

A lovely young woman is drugged, brutally raped and murdered. That hardly sounds like a scenario for a funny, sweet and devilishly complex mystery story, but that’s because novelist Colin Cotterill is a master of sleight of hand. He’s a master at balancing brutal crime, which he depicts with heart-wrenching empathy, and the comic milieu of Dr. Siri Paiboun.

The Merry Misogynist is Cotterill’s sixth novel featuring Dr. Siri, national coroner, 73, libidinously alive and well, and married to Daeng the noodle shopkeeper. It’s 1978, the Khmer Rouge have taken over Laos, having ousted the 600 year-old monarchy, and the “novice socialist administration is starting to realize its resume didn’t match the job.”

Siri is on the case, along with the local Vientiane detective, but Laos is impossible: what clues the bureaucracy doesn’t ingest the jungle does. The cantonized villages of Laos, further alienated and isolated by a ridiculous but deeply ingrained bias of hill vs. low-land peoples (ridiculous because they’re the same people speaking the same language, but would we be human without racists drawing arbitrary lines between us?), prevents any sort of record sharing — so who knows if similar crimes have been previously committed? Read the rest of this entry »

According to a whistle blower at the International Energy Agency, key figures about the world’s oil supply have been exaggerated in order to avoid triggering panic buying. The Guardian, which broke the story today, says that a senior IEA official

claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was “imperative not to anger the Americans” but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. “We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad,” he added.

Check out this audio clip, an interview with the whistle blowers.

The City and the City by China Miéville

Detective Tyador Borlú of Besźel’s Extreme Crimes Squad is assigned to what at first appears to be a fairly straightforward case: the murder of a young woman whose body was discovered dumped in a park situated on the border between Besźel and Ul Qoma.

And right away the reader realizes that, no matter how straightforward this murder mystery might be, there’ll be nothing straight about the narrative, for Besźel and Ul Qoma aren’t merely countries that happen to border one another. They are city-states in a state of intimate balkanization.

One side of a street may be in Besźel while the other is in Ul Qoma. Part of the park is in one country, while little islands of playground are in the other. The top storey of an apartment building is in Ul Qoma, the rest in Besźel. Situated in an unnamed Eastern European milieu, the conjoined cities are ill at ease with one another and, historically, occasionally at war. Like territories in the former Yugoslavia, various areas of Besźel/Ul Qoma are either disputed or not claimed by either city. Read the rest of this entry »

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

One-time cyberpunk Kadrey (Metrophage) has traded in his old religion and the metaphysics of the digital realm for a new and ancient one, the demonic folk tale. Sandman Slim is like a noir bunch of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a smart-mouth, street-smart leading man in place of the buxom teen – non-sensical, unbelievable, and one helluva good time.

James Stark, AKA Sandman Slim, the only human to survive Hell – much less live to tell the tale and eek out revenge for his tribulations – has come through the Darkness with special powers. He always was good at magic – not the hokey legerdemain that passes for entertainment among those with too much time on their hands – and that landed him with a bad crowd. Now he’s amped up with secrets from The Man (if man the devil be) himself. Ice-picked Trotsky’s friends were true-blue compared to Stark’s comrades. And power struggles among the demon-allied take on epic proportions. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some snips from an email I got yesterday from the Campaign for America’s Future:

A planned $1.5 billion dollar Texas wind farm — seeking financing with US stimulus money — will create only 30 permanent jobs here, but 2000 jobs in China manufacturing wind turbines.

This is according to a Wall Street Journal article from Oct. 30: “Chinese-Made Turbines to Fill U.S. Wind Farm.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer is pressing Energy Secretary Steven Chu to take action. Yesterday he sent Dr. Chu a letter saying, “I urge you to reject any request for stimulus money unless the high‐value components, including the wind turbines, are manufactured in the United States.”

It is imperative for our economy to support Schumer and call on the Energy Department to direct American stimulus money towards creating American green jobs.

Click here to tell Energy Secretary Chu: Don’t send our tax dollars overseas. Stimulus funds must create American green jobs.

Remember J.G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island? It takes place in London (sort of): the protagonist has spent his life in London, and much of it has been spent in trying to get the hell out of London. But he can’t escape the urban sprawl and he can’t seem to ever get off the motorway that circles the city in concrete. He finds escape, though, when he wrecks: down into a (what we out west would call) a freeway interchange he goes and there he stays, trapped, as high-speed traffic speeds by all around him. It’s a kind of descent into Hell and, being Ballard and all, is very allegorical and Dantesque.

The impersonal hellishness of freeway systems is being mitigated, a bit, in Istanbul. A garden has been planted inside a cloverleaf interchange.

Photos via Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden (inset) and the Istanbul Governor's Office.

The complete story is over on Treehugger, but here’s the jist:

In connection with the Urban Age conference hosted this week in Istanbul, the German bank for the third time issued an open call for entries of projects that “benefit communities and local residents by improving their urban environments.” Out of 87 entries received, a jury shortlisted five — including the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden.

“Located improbably in the ‘urban voids’ created by a vast motorway spaghetti-junction on the Asian side of Istanbul, the Ali Nihat Gökyiğit Foundation has created a series of landscaped spaces that provide sanctuary for plants and people in the middle of a dystopian urban setting,” the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award jury announced.

Established in 1995, the 125-acre botanical garden contains more than 17,000 species of plants and is the city’s largest replanted green area. The facility includes a special children’s garden where schoolkids learn how to grow and care for flowers and vegetables; an area devoted to drought-tolerant plants and those useful in combating soil erosion and desertification; and a section for medicinal plants.