Get Cynical

Like Green Eggs and Ham, but replace the green eggs with ganja.

It’s Just a Plant is an illustrated children’s book about marijuana. It follows the journey of a young girl as she learns about the plant from a diverse cast of characters including her parents, a local farmer, a doctor, and a police officer.

Marijuana can be difficult to talk about.

Many parents have tried marijuana, some still use it. Neither feel great about disclosing such histories (many duck the question), for fear that telling their kids might encourage them to experiment on their own.

Unfortunately, most “drug facts” that children learn in school are more frightening than educational, blaming pot for everything from teenage pregnancy to terrorism. A child’s first awareness of drugs should come from a better source.

It’s Just a Plant is a book for parents who want to educate their children about the complexities of pot in a thoughtful, fact-oriented manner.

And they didn’t even factor in his $58,000 tax free disability pension.

Soros: Financial crisis as bad as the Great Depression:

Buffett says recession may be worse than feared.

Economy in U.S. Probably Expanded at Slowest Pace in Five Years

Opec says oil could hit $200

(via Why That’s Delightful)

(via Classic TV Showbiz)

From a letter Salinger wrote which is up for grabs on Ebay:

Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro, which wasn’t exactly indelibly fine, but Deneuve herself maybe was, or came close. I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors.

From Haaretz.com:

The Mandate-era Hebrew press watched with wonder mixed with concern at the unprecedented political phenomenon that surfaced in those years in Germany: the rapid gains of the Nazi party until it took over the government.

Ilana Novetsky-Bendet, a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is researching the Hebrew press’ attitude toward events in Germany from the time of the emergence of the Nazis as a significant political force, until World War II. In Bendet’s master’s thesis, which covers the period up until Hitler’s rise to power, she found that the Hebrew press showed an interest in and followed the growing strength of the Nazis as early as the late 1920s. However, the papers in Palestine had trouble discerning Hitler’s political power and the centrality of the racist component of the party’s ideology.

“The more the party’s electoral power increased, the greater the interest in it,” says Bendet, whose mentor for her doctoral thesis is Prof. Moshe Zimmerman. “But hardly any of the papers grasped the severity of Nazi anti-Semitism.”

Only one paper took a completely contrary position to Hitler’s ascendance: Hazit Ha’am, the journal of the right-wing of the Revisionists. “If the segments of our people draw the appropriate conclusions from the Hitlerism, then we will be able to say that something good came out of a bad situation,” the paper stated a few days after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.

The paper even praised certain foundations of the Nazi ideology, primarily its fight against communism: “the anti-Semitic husk should be discarded, but not its anti-Marxist inside,” the paper’s editors wrote of Nazism. The praise of Nazism stopped only after the intervention of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who called for “a total end to this abomination.” Around two years later, in 1935, Hazit Ha’am folded.

(via Digg)

(via Clusterflock)

If it is important for us to know that he was the Son of God,
I say, then, that it devolves upon God to give us the evidence. Let
him write it across the face of the heavens, in every language of
mankind. If it is necessary for us to believe it, let it grow on
every leaf next year. No man should be damned for not believing,
unless the evidence is overwhelming. And he ought not to be made to
depend upon say so, or upon “as was supposed.” He should have it
directly, for himself. A man says that God told him a certain
thing, and he tells me, and I have only his word. He may have been
deceived. If God has a message for me he ought to tell it to me,
and not to somebody that has been dead four or five thousand years,
and in another language.

Besides, God may have changed his mind on many things; he has
on slavery, and polygamy at least, according to the church; and yet
his church now wants to go and destroy polygamy in Utah with the
sword. Why do they not send missionaries there with copies of the
Old Testament? By reading the lives of Abraham and Isaac, and Lot,
and a few other patriarchs who ought to have been in the
penitentiary, maybe they can soften their hearts.

Robert Green Ingersoll – “Orthodoxy”(1884)