Hal Brown’s July blog
My photo blog is here. +++ Links to all the several dozen articles I cross-posted to Daily Kos with comments are here.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

BRAIN ON DRUGS

 07.03.16 4:10 AM ET

Your Grandma Needs To Be Smoking Pot

It's going to be pretty hard to keep weed illegal when your grandparents are smoking it to prevent Alzheimer's.

This week scientists found evidence that the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), may be able to remove the buildup of a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer’s. It’s good news for the fastest growing group of marijuana users—seniors—and gives those above the age of 50 who haven’t come out of the pot closet a good reason to do so.  LINK

Saturday, July 2, 2016

What’s wrong with this picture?

You can be forgiven if you didn’t catch it right off,
I don’t know ifI would have if I hadn’t seen it first on The Huffington Post.

I didn’t read the 800 page Benghazi report but someone did, give me a break, Gowdy wanted people to print it out…
In one sentence:
The internal documents don’t prove evidence of a scandal, but they do show an administration reflexively concerned with the politics of a national security emergency.

Friday, July 1, 2016
Quote of the day: “Donald Trump is like the ball in a pinball game.” Stuart Evans on the Lawrence O’Donnell show on MSNBC.
Evans wrote a book about a president similar to Trump, except he never could have imagined a president as batshit crazy as Trump.

A few years ago I started noodling on a novel that I hoped would expose the fault lines that seemed to be splitting our politics. My thought was to take reality and push it to the edge both for comic affect and to offer up a cautionary tale of where our politics might be headed. I finished the book in the summer of 2015 and I was a little worried that I had gone too far. How believable would it be that a xenophobic Republican who wanted to ban immigration and deport millions might actually be a real contender for president?
Well, now we know. Donald Trump hasn’t called for a new Bill of Rights like Armstrong George, the handsome fire-breather in my novel, The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear, but he’s the first candidate who’s running as if the Bill of Rights doesn’t exist. (If we get through this election without some reporter asking Trump if he can name the amendments in the Bill of Rights, it will be a crying shame.) Even while channeling my darkest impulses—and Lord knows we all have them, which is probably the key to Trump’s success so far—it never occurred to me that a candidate for president of the United States of America could call for a religious test to enter the United States without being considered a frothing lunatic. Continued on Daily Beast

BACK…. earlier articles:
More June articles May, 2016 April, 2016