Goin’ To Pot

The other day I’m sitting in the doctor’s waiting room just wasting my time like I was being paid a premium for it, and this pimple-face kid -- well, maybe in his upper teens -- sits down beside me looking excited. Both of his legs are going to some sort of music only he can hear.

He turns to me and asks, “is this doctor dude mellow?”

“Mellow?” I ask. “What do you mean by mellow?”

“Like, can he get me a prescription?” He asks.

“He’s a doctor. That’s what doctors usually do when they find something wrong with you that they can treat.”

“Oh wow, dude, I got something bad!”

At this point, I am not too sure I should be sitting next to this kid. “Bad? How bad?”

“It’s my eyes, dude. They got like guacamole!”

Trying unsuccessfully not to laugh too loud, I said “guacamole? Do you mean Glaucoma?”

“Yeah, that’s it. I need a prescription for like some medical marijuana, dude.”

“Well in the first place, that problem should be seen by an optician. This is a family practice doctor. I doubt he would see you for Glaucoma. In the second place, they will usually give you eye drops for that.”

He sat there for a while with a miffed look on his face and said, “Bummer! Well, I have like Arthuritis too. You take pot for that don’t you?”

“I don’t. But if the doctor truly believes that would help, I suppose he might give you a prescription for that. Some doctors seem eager to issue prescriptions for marijuana to cure anything from hangnails to heart attacks. I don’t know how this doctor feels about it, though.”

“I been smoking the stuff for like a while now and got busted the other day. Dudes on the street said I should like get a medical marijuana card and be legal. They all like have one! Dudes said that gauca… what was it, like Glaucoma stuff was like a sure thing for a card.”

“So you’re what, eighteen, nineteen?”

“Nineteen, dude.”

“And you’re going to tell the doctor you have arthritis?”

“Yeah, dude. I gotta get that card.”

“That would be a real stretch of medical probabilities, but I suppose if this doctor doesn’t prescribe marijuana, another one will. I would wish you good luck, but for your own sake I hope he is more ethical than that.”

“Why dude? It won’t be long and weed will be like legal everywhere. It ain’t hurtin’ no one, and ain’t as bad as alcohol!”

“And how would you know? Have you seen any scientific studies that tell you that?”

“My friends all like do it, and there’s like nothing wrong with them.”

“Well, son, I have seen studies, and they all say that crap is bad for you. One study published in Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers for the first time comprehensively describe existing abnormalities in brain function and structure of long-term marijuana users with multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. Findings show chronic marijuana users have smaller brain volume in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) a part of the brain commonly associated with addiction, but also increased brain connectivity.

“To put it another way, pot shrinks your brain. How many of your friends are rocket scientists?”

“Uhh?”

“Okay, here are some facts from Colorado, where pot has been legal since 2012: The majority of DUI arrests involve marijuana and 25 to 40 percent were for marijuana alone. In 2013, 48.4 percent of adult arrestees tested positive for marijuana, which is a 16 percent increase from 2008. From 2011 through 2013, there was a 57 percent increase of marijuana-related emergency room visits. Hospitalizations related to marijuana increased 82 percent since 2008. I won’t even bother to tell you the bad things that happen to school age kids, but believe me it ain’t pretty. It’s all in a report from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area titled The Legalization of Marijuana in Colorado: The Impact.”

The kid had a blank look on his face. “Dude, those are just like… facts. Pot makes me feel good! I hear these dispensaries have like special blends of pot that will like blow your mind!”

About that time, he was called into the doctor’s office. I guess it is true about pot shrinking your brain, if this kid was any example. The sad part is these kids will be running the country before long.

Class Warfare or Class Welfare

It is no secret that the middle class in America is shrinking. The recent recession – if we can believe it is over – has left far too many people still struggling to make ends meet. In way too many instances, those that lost jobs that gave them not only a living wage but also left them money in their pockets to save or spend on enjoyment found jobs that pay far below the jobs they once held.

I’m no economist, but then, what do they know? Someone, I can’t remember who, once said, “if all economists were laid end to end, they would still point the wrong direction.” I look at this problem from a more practical viewpoint.

The term “class” as commonly used in this country today, refers to a category of the amount of wealth one has. The lower class being the poor, the upper class is the rich, and everything in between is the middle class. Economists like to assign degrees to each class, such as upper-middle and lower-middle, but does it really make much difference to you and me? We know if we are not rich and not poor, we must be somewhere in the middle.

With every price increase on items we need to survive that is not followed by a corresponding income increase, we lose ground and slip closer to the lower class. Because of the recession, a lot of people who were comfortably in the middle class are now knocking on the door of the poverty level.

Mr. Obama’s latest State of the Union speech was intended to give hope to those holding on by their fingernails to the middle-class status. He wants to raise the minimum wage, increase family tax credits, and give away free junior college. To pay for this he wants to increase taxes on the “rich”, end tax cuts on capital gains, and eliminate tax cuts on inheritances. It’s yet another wealth redistribution plan won’t work and has never worked.

Many economists call this class warfare. I call it class welfare. You take from those that have earned theirs and give to those that have not – the socialist utopia. Mr. Obama claims this will end the slide of the middle class. If that is his goal, he is going about it the wrong way.

Henry Ford created the middle class in America. He devised a method for manufacturing a large number of automobiles, reduced the price of his cars so everyone could buy one, added an enormous workforce, paid them high wages, reduced their hours, and grew his company. In the process, he created a ready market for his product by giving his workforce higher wages with extra money to save or spend and time to use the extra wages.

The middle class was formed due to Ford’s manufacturing strategy and ethic, not by some government program or presidential order.

The bottom line is that government can best reduce slippage of the middle class by allowing manufacturing to expand. They need to give manufacturers the ability to invest in larger, more modern plants, and in research and development. It is here that you find the good-paying jobs. The ones that won’t just stop the slide from middle-class, but bring everyone up from the depths of economic anxiety and solidly back into the middle class.

If Obama was truly interested in helping the middle class, he would kill the inheritance tax, eliminate corporate tax, and give tax incentives for manufacturing expansion and research. Instead, he mistakenly believes that class welfare and redistribution of wealth might somehow create a sustainable economic environment and bring more people into the middle class.

Well he is right about one aspect, there will be more middle-class people. But it will be populated by those formerly in the upper class. Obama’s way cannot and will not create a sustainable economic environment that can promote GDP growth or prosperity.

Je suis Charlie

I suspect few in this country have ever read the French satirical weekly “Charlie Hebdo” even if you do speak French. Until recently, I doubt many have ever even heard of “Charlie Hebdo.” Today you would be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of the publication.

Charlie Hebdo is an irreverent left-wing French publication created in 1970 as a successor of Hara-Kiri magazine after it was banned for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle. Charlie stopped publishing in 1982, but resumed in 1992 and currently has a circulation of 45,000. It’s sort of a magazine version of The Daily Show.

Charlie has a long history of rubbing the wrong people the wrong way. The recent attack on Charlie Hebdo by Muslim extremists was not the first such incident. In 2007, the Grand Mosque, the Muslim World League and the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF) sued, claiming the cartoon edition included racist cartoons. In March of 2007, executive editor Philippe Val was acquitted by the court. Following the state attorney's reasoning, the court ruled that two of the three cartoons were not an attack on Islam, but on Muslim terrorists, and that the third cartoon with Muhammad with a bomb in his turban should be seen in the context of the magazine in question, which attacked religious fundamentalism.

A November 2011 issue was renamed "Charia Hebdo" (a reference to Sharia law) and "guest-edited" by Muhammad, depicted Muhammad saying: "100 lashes of the whip if you don't die laughing." Apparently, Muslim radicals don’t have much of a sense of humor when it comes to Muhammad. On 2 November, the newspaper's office was firebombed and its website hacked.

This year on the 7^th of January, two Islamist gunmen forced their way into the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo and opened fire killing twelve and wounding eleven, four of them seriously.

During the attack, the gunmen shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great" in Arabic) and also "the Prophet is avenged.” President Francois Hollande described it as a "terrorist attack of the most extreme barbarity". Police later hunted down and killed the two gunmen, Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, French Muslim brothers of Algerian.

End of story? Not even! It has been evident to authorities for some time that there were sleeper cells of Muslim terrorists in Europe. Directly on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo incident, another Muslim gunman killed a policewoman and took hostages at a Jewish supermarket, killing four people. The gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, was killed by police.

These incidents have been perceived as direct attacks on freedom of the press and attempts to silence criticism of the horrific acts perpetrated by radical Islamic militants. On Sunday, January 11, a march for unity was held in Paris. Around 40 world leaders joined more than one million people in a march to honor the victims of the Paris shootings. Conspicuously absent were high-level leaders of the United States. Apparently, our own President was too busy (did he have a pressing Tee time?), and lesser minions were deemed unnecessary to attend.

While Israel’s Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas saw fit to join in marching arm-in-arm with the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel, England’s David Cameron, and France’s Francois Hollande among others, the most notable figure was the one that was not there. The US President Barack Obama “let the world down” by failing to make the journey to France, according to the front page of the New York Daily News.

It seems Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) does not apply to the one country that prides itself on the constitutional guaranty of freedom of the press. Maybe this is just another example of Mr. Obama’s detestation for the constitution. Or did he simply not want to offend the Muslims in his cabinet by attending an event protesting deadly attacks by Muslims lacking a sense of humor?

By the way, the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo sold over a million issues the week following the attack. Their normal run is 60,000. Issues on eBay have reportedly sold for $1,000 apiece. Not bad for an irreverent left-wing, dirt stirring rag.