I am a creature of the internet; have been since the late 1990’s, crafted my ridiculous name back in 2001, I believe and never changed it. The upside is that I have used this same name at any and every site on the internet I have ever visited or upon which I have commented.
Over the years, Yahoo News, a large news aggregation site run by Yahoo.com, has been a news site with a large footprint: they are “a big news site” to me. I developed great disdain for CNN in October of 2000, but that’s a story for another time.
And since Obama began his run for the presidency and then spent 8 successful years in the White House, the utter rightwinginess of the site has been writ large in ugly day-glo colors.
There are decent, intelligent and liberal commenters there and a number of them, including me sometimes, but this all pales in comparison to what I consider one of the defining features of Yahoo commenters: deluxe wingnut stupidity: racism, climate change denial, and a very foamy-mouthed support for guns uber alles.
It is The Hall of Wingnut Beliefs.
Sometime ago I developed my own personal sport of seeing some racially charged event — the murder of Michael Brown, for example — I know the moment I see this sort of ugly police brutality tinged with racism that these yahoo commenters will be out on parade with their illiterate racist comments, their pathetic white supremacy, and their guns-uber-alles mentality.
They have been a bastion of Sandy Hook Denial — the crazed delusion some of these nutbags share that the Sandy Hook massacre did not happen. That, folks, is a measuring stick of insanity: so much so that people who truly believe it should not be allowed to own a gun. No, really. But I digress.
In the last couple of months Yahoo appears to have been changing its comment structure and have replaced the old system which supported flame wars to a system which makes flame wars less intense. It’s hard to find comments one has made, so on and so forth. It is something I had hoped they would do, because, frankly, the only answer I had to “why is Yahoo like this?” is that Yahoo wanted to support white supremacists, morons, wingnuts and other menaces to a decent society. And I could not really imagine why.
Along with this change, and I am gonna say maybe the last 3-4 months — I did not keep track of it until I saw the pattern emerge — their front page news had this structure: 3 or 4 big news stories with panel photos, then 2 more main headlines… then an article on cannabis relegalization.
I was shocked to see a pro-cannabis story on this wingnut site. Not just a story here and there. Cannabis stories seem to be given this slot day to day. It’s like the “cannabis news slot” at Yahoo News!
The stories DID bring out lots of marijuana reform supporters but also brought out the crap you would expect from boot-licking authoritarian suck-ups like teabaggers and other rightwing sorts. People who have actually believed the bullshit we have been force fed since before birth.
They were there, telling us how we’ll have a monkey on our backs from smoking the devil weed. How children will be dying of heroin overdoses on the playground and other such regurgitated propaganda from the 1940s, 1950, 1960’s, 1970’s and so forth.
Yesterday, I clicked on Yahoo news just to see what’s there and I was truly shocked.
What if society treated consuming marijuana the same way we treat caffeine? Instead of starting off your Sunday morning with a cup of coffee, you'd pour a steamy weed-infused drink. Maybe when you're taking a walk through the park, that latte in your hand actually has a small dose of cannabis in it.
Front page news at a historically wingnut news site, folks. It’s like something from High Times 10 or 20 years ago, but now on the FRONT PAGE of a large news site, treated with this happy, upbeat language. Oh the times they are a-changin’ — this time for the better.
They go on to talk about how eating herb is, in a way, superior to smoking it , and I will largely back that up, as I have largely stopped smoking cannabis and have developed a reliable brownie recipe.
But, as they say on late-nite infomercials, that is not all!
They go on to talk — in a front page news story — about how to cook with cannabis, how to determine dose and then have a recipe that AIN’T some Cheech and Chong brownie recipe. We are talking gourmet cooking.
Chef Michael Cirino, who has a background in molecular gastronomy and food science, believes weed edibles will eventually transform our leisure time — if we can solve one big problem.
— — — — —
For proper dosing, Cirino recommends 1 gram of cannabis for every 20 to 25 grams of solvent for a cocktail-like strength, and 1 gram for every 30 to 50 grams solvent for a coffee-like strength. People should wait about one and a half to two hours to re-dose.
The article even discusses decarboxylation: the act of heating herb specifically to activate the THC in it.
One has to get the raw THC-A in the herb to change to the desirable Delta-9 THC and, in turn, that when you make proper edibles, it transforms into “11-hydroxy-THC”. This appears to be responsible for how edible herb seems to produce a steady, intense high, versus the age-old smoking it with a high that spikes and then wears off.
Raw cannabis contains a lot of THCA which is not psychoactive (and what’s the fun in that?). When you smoke weed, the THCA molecule loses its carboxylic group (COOH) in the form of water vapor and carbon dioxide and becomes THC. Long story short, THCA becomes THC and your cannabis becomes psychoactive. This process is called decarboxylation or decarbing.
When you smoke or vaporize marijuana, the cannabis is decarbed by the heat. If you ingest cannabis and want the full psychoactive effect, you need to first decarb your cannabis before you cook with it.
You will have to go to the Yahoo News link and catch the recipe. It calls for “beef tallow” — this is NOT pot brownies, people. This is gourmet food. Unsure if I am going to try it and my wife — Super Chef — could probably do it with her eyes closed, but she doesn’t have anything to do with cannabis. Again, I digress.
Do go read the whole article and revel in what I am going to call a milestone in the relegalization and social normalization of the cannabis experience. (Sure, many people live in states that have already fixed this crap, but I still live in a backward state where your life gets ruined. Waiting for cannabis to be legalized in a warm state.)
Cannabis never should have been illegal. Never.
There never was nor is there now any remotely salient, defensible reason to make this plant illegal, let alone allow cops to kill and brutalize generations of AMERICANS about it. It has been far more than simply unethical. It has contributed hugely to the whole issue of police brutality; it has contributed to law enforcement assault on the Constitution — the 1st, 4th, 9th and 10th Amendments in particular.
The 1st: they wanted to silence free speech about cannabis facts and realities and did for a long time. They still don’t want to allow marijuana protests in many states — I live in Atlanta and when I have attended “pot festivals” here they are SURROUNDED by cops and helicopters buzz overhead. It’s surreal and fucking stupid.
The 4th: Drug testing has been a complete assault on the 4th Amendment. When piss testing was foist upon us we were AUTOMATICALLY guilty until “proven innocent” by the content of our PISS. And we can be tested repeatedly to make sure we don’t smoke pot on Saturday night and enjoy ourselves. Cops and the government hate the 4th Amendment, that is why the war on drugs — and its siamese twin, the War on Terror — are so focused on technological runs around the 4th.
The 9th and 10th are about keeping government in its place: the Controlled Substance Act — a glorified memo, essentially — is like a scaffolding that allows the Federal Government to flow outside of the boundaries set forth in the 10th.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.[5]
The Federal government uses the CSA to get around this rather clear limit. They use the CSA and the war on Marijuana to usurp powers “reserved for the People.” This is a huge impetus for the Federal Government to keep this illegal despite the will of the People.
The question at this point is why is marijuana STILL illegal? It matters little “why” it was made illegal in the first place. Racist old assholes did it. Why is it STILL illegal since Americans have a “right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?
The Short Answer is “Republicans”. (Democrats have been no help whatsoever, but they don’t foam at the mouth about it like republicans are required to do).
By now every adult with an IQ north of 90 should know that DICK Nixon created the war on cannabis and the DEA to be the warriors at a time when many Americans were working to get this stupid law changed. For POLITICAL PURPOSES Nixon jacked up this war on weed to hurt “black people and anti-war hippies”:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
So here we are now — 50 freakin years later — still fighting for the relegalization of the Herb, the Federal Government is STILL lying through its goddamned teeth about it every day, spending BILLIONS of our tax dollars to suppress it despite the FACT that the people are sick and tired of it.
We the People have relegalized it in 3 states, many more are on the way.
Did I say “many”?
Try “almost half of the United States.”
Voters in 20 U.S. states could potentially legalize some form of cannabis use in the November 2016 election — part of a historic backlash to the century-old war on marijuana.
According to Ballotpedia, the encyclopedia of American politics, activists have submitted ballot measures for public vote in: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Gallup finds 58 percent of Americans support cannabis legalization for adults. States considered most likely to liberalize cannabis laws at the ballot include Nevada, California, Arizona, while midwestern and southern states are more of a long-shot. Other efforts are purely symbolic. Some states have multiple measures submitted, including anti-pot measures, for a total of 66 pot proposals this election.
And THAT is likely why Yahoo News — a seemingly pro-republican, white-supremacist-supporting news site — would start having pro-marijuana articles gracing its site.
Clearly, big changes are afoot.
Long overdue.
[This piece reflects the perspectives of the author. Doubtlessly there could be other factors involved in how Yahoo News runs its business to which I am uninformed. The purpose of this piece is to highlight the march of the relegalization of cannabis and how it is influencing a variety of issues.]