This isn't going to be much of a sales pitch cause I'm not really asking for an investment, just a favor. I am looking for a 5 buyin stake to play a live NL100 game in my hometown. If you're even considering possibly staking me then you most likely know me, and therefore know that I was once decent at poker. Never great, certainly not horrible. I made a small profit at NL100 for a while but not enough to go for the poker life. I've spent the last year in college studying psychology, an interest that was sparked when I began studying body language to try and spot tells at live games.
My biggest poker weaknesses were related to a lack of focus over long sessions, difficulty preventing tilt, anticipating other people's play styles and adjusting accordingly, and (in live games) trouble separating out the important body language from the tsunami of movements people make. Over the past year my schooling has focused on the last two, while my personal practice in yoga and meditation has helped with the first two. Now I'm excited to go sit down at a live game and apply these skills. Unfortunately, being a broke student, I can't afford it. Hence why I'm writing this post.
Basically I'm hoping a friend will help me build a live roll. If I crash and burn you'd be absorbing a hit, so it's definitely a risk. If I do well I'd pay back the $500 and then a % of the profit. So very likely not much to be gained either. But you'd be doing a kind thing for a guy who needs to pull in some money. And, I do think I'm much more likely to come out winning, as I definitely have an edge in this game. So there's that too.
Why do we, as human beings, allow this to happen? We have the technology to tap the resources and provide food for this entire planet - we just don't do it because it's not a profitable venture. What kind of stupid reason is that to give in response to why all those kids had to die?
I could rant about this all day (and have been to friends and family) but I'd rather just let Keith lay it out. For those who don't want to watch him get all blow hardy (while speaking truth) here's my favorite line which really summarizes what has happened:
“We have superceded Congress to facilitate 750 billion dollars in domestic cuts including Medicare in order to end an artificially-induced political hostage crisis over debt, originating from the bills run up by a Republican president who funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to the military-industrial complex by unfunded, unnecessary, and unproductive wars, enabled in doing so by the very same Republican leaders who now cry for balanced budgets - and we have called it compromise. And those who defend it have called it a credit to a pragmatic president who wins some sort of political "points" because, having stood for almost nothing here, he gave away almost nothing for which he stood.”
lol right after I rip on Obama for failing on medical marijuana, he comes back and takes out osama bin laden. nicely done.
Obama Succeeded Where Bush Failed: Osama Bin Laden Rhetoric And Reality
WASHINGTON -- As he announced the death of infamous terrorist Osama bin Laden on Sunday night, President Barack Obama struck an extraordinary contrast with his predecessor, George W. Bush.
That was to some degree unavoidable. Bush’s consistent failure to respond appropriately to bin Laden -- as a potential threat, as a fugitive, or as a public enemy no. 1 -- represents one of the greatest shortcomings of his presidency.
Obama has now succeeded where Bush failed. And it was impossible to hear Obama declare that "justice has been done" without thinking about how long it went undone.
But Obama also went out of his way to draw distinctions between how he approached the problem and how Bush did.
For instance, as the months and years went by after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- and Bush’s initial bluster about capturing the al Qaeda leader “dead or alive” became a source of embarrassment -- Bush began to insist that bin Laden himself wasn’t so very important.
"I truly am not that concerned about him," Bush said at a White House press conference on March 13, 2002. And of course the following March, he shifted America’s focus to Iraq, which proved to be a gigantic diversion.
Obama took a different tack.
"Shortly after taking office," the president explain Sunday night, "I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network."
Obama's comments on Sunday night were clearly directed not just to the American public but to the world, evoking images of the horror of 9/11 in an effort to dampen any possible al Qaeda propaganda value from bin Laden’s death.
By contrast, the tactics and the rhetoric of Bush’s “war on terror” -- most notably his decision to invade Iraq and the torture of Muslims in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere had served as al Qaeda’s most potent recruiting tools.
And to a nation of people who, nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks in America, are overwhelmingly despondent about both of the wars launched by Bush, Obama was at long last able to deliver something that, at least for a moment, seemed like victory: "The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda,” he said.
Ironically, Obama’s announcement came eight years to the day after Bush famously and prematurely declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier.
And if all that weren’t clear enough, Obama made an explicit appeal to set the clock back to those days of national and international unity right after Sept. 11 -- before Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, subverted historical prohibitions against torture and domestic surveillance, and used fear of terror to achieve partisan goals.
"[T]onight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11,” Obama said. "I know that it has, at times, frayed."
As Obama noted, the U.S. was virtually a different country then.
"On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together," the president reminded the nation on Sunday night. "We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.”
The Bush record on bin Laden, of course, starts with him failing to prevent the attacks in the first place. As has been exhaustively documented by now, during the summer of 2001, his White House waved off repeated warnings of an imminent attack from former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke and then-CIA director George Tenet.
Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were said to be more focused on their pet issue, missile defense, and the hunt for a reason to attack Iraq. Bush, according to Bob Woodward, said he wasn't interested in "swatting flies."
The unsuccessful attempts to engage Bush culminated in a briefing he got while vacationing on his Texas ranch. As investigative reporter Ron Suskind reported in his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," an unnamed CIA operative flew to Crawford to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
"All right," Suskind reported Bush saying after hearing out the operative. "You've covered your ass, now."
Former President Bill Clinton in 2006 notably complained that he came close to killing bin Laden in a 1998 missile strike, while Bush and the "right wingers ... had eight months to try [before 9/11]. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted."
Bush’s post-9/11 swagger may go down as one of history’s worst examples of false bravado. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban government quickly fell and al Qaeda retreated into the hills. But in December 2001, when bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora, Bush didn’t pull the trigger.
Then for more than three years, Bush treated bin Laden a lot like the wizards in the Harry Potter books treat He Who Must Not Be Named.
In the summer of 2005, Bush started invoking bin Laden again -- but this time, to win support for his Iraq policy, which was very much on the ropes.
"Hear the words of Osama bin Laden," Bush said, "'This Third World War is raging' in Iraq."
By 2006, on the stump for his fellow Republicans, Bush was citing bin Laden extensively. The president cast bin Laden as the oracular leader of a global movement, and warned of the possibility of an Islamic caliphate "stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia" -- an unsubstantiated fantasy with only one thing going for it: It served the political agendas of both men.
Meanwhile, in an Oval Office session that same month, Bush told to a group of conservative columnists that focusing on bin Laden didn’t fit with his military plans. Putting "100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work," he explained.
Yet, in his attempts to persuade the voting public of the dangers it faced, Bush gave bin Laden exactly the attention he seemed to crave.
After the 2008 presidential election, during which politicians from both parties publicly renounced him, Bush finally admitted some regret in an ABC News interview.
"Do I wish we had brought Osama bin Laden to justice? Sure," Bush said. "But he's not leading a lot of parades these days."
Bush stalwarts are now trying to make the case that their president deserves some, if not most, of the credit for dispatching bin Laden.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Sunday night called bin Laden’s death "a victory for the United States and a tremendous achievement for the military and intelligence professionals who carried out this important mission." As for Obama’s role? "I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice," Cantor said in a statement.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney similarly credited "the military and intelligence professionals who carried out this important mission,” citing their "tireless work since 9/11." It was those years of effort, the majority of which were during the Bush administration, that "made this achievement possible, and enabled us to capture or kill thousands of al Qaeda terrorists and many of their leaders,” Cheney said in a press release.
A small group of young fans gathered outside Bush's house in Dallas Sunday night with a sign that read, "President Obama forgot to say... THANK YOU PRESIDENT BUSH."
Bush himself issued a brief statement congratulating Obama and declaring, "[t]he fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."
*************************
Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for The Huffington Post. You can send him an email, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get email alerts when he writes.
Here's one area where I feel that Obama has failed. I know those of you who don't use cannabis probably scoff and say "big deal, focus on a real issue". But considering the patients who have been harassed and persecuted because of Obama's policies, I think it's a legit issue.
Obama's inability to keep his word on such an easy to fulfill promise makes me doubt his other initiatives. The common excuse for why Obama doesn't follow through on a promise is the roadblocks put up by the Republicans and the gridlocked political system in the USA. But here we have a situation where Obama has the power to direct his people to follow certain guidelines, and punish them if they don't. He did the first part and directed the Justice Department to leave medical marijuana alone, but they have not followed that order and Obama does nothing about it. To me that looks like he's trying to have it both ways - look good to the public by taking the right stand, but still persecute medical marijuana patients and look good to the drug warriors.
As you all know I worked my ass off to get him elected. I still think I did the right thing, as he's overall better than McCain would have been. But at this point he's lost my vote and support. Sadly I will probably have no choice but to hold my nose and vote for him in 2012 because the only other choice will be the absolutely insane options that the GOP offers. Such is life in the great old USA.
O tempora, o mores, what a day, what a day, right? This morning's tilt-a-whirl news conference, in which President Barack Obama decided to release his long form birth certificate, to satiate some pure-bred American nutters in thrall to the President's most disingenuous -- or paranoid -- opponents, was an event I never thought would come, because I just figured that the White House had the eminent good sense to know that conspiracists should not be negotiated with - just like terrorists.
But here we are today. The President of the United States has brandished documentation that only proved that there was never a compelling reason to brandish it in the first place, seeing as it only proved what he and every relevant official and the documents that were publicly available had already confirmed: that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a pure citizen of these United States.
Chances are it was a confluence of dumb events that brought the White House to this point. A nearly-enacted law in Arizona that wouldn't have been satisfied with the clear proof already available. A campaign season on the horizon. Ed Henry's idiotic questions, posed a day after his own network decided to actually debunk the nonsense once and for all. Franklin Graham's paranoid assertions going unchallenged on a Sunday Morning political show. I think I understand Obama's mindset when he said this:
"We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We have better stuff to do. I have got better stuff to do. We have got big problems to solve...We are not going to be able to do it if we are distracted, we are not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other ... if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts, we are not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by side shows and carnival barkers.
Of course, lately, the biggest barker in this barmy carny show has been Donald Trump. Admittedly, he's been the gift that keeps on giving -- the guy who's been telling America that he's going to stick it to China, even while his clothing line is manufactured there. He literally doesn't say much of anything. He rarely even tries: his campaign rhetoric is typically confined to empty bromides and tautological assertions of his great value. But if there's an issue Trump had exerted effort to put into the public square, it's this idiotic birtherism. And today, he claims to be "honored" by the fact that the nation was dragged into this trench.
Well, turnabout is fair play. And if members of the press actually want to end the sideshow, they have a choice: they can be the audience member, or they can be the critic. They can treat the carny barker as an object of ridicule, or better yet, start treating him as if he were a serious candidate. Either way works for me. But they have to quit the circus. They have to stop dancing Trump's dance, and stop performing to his beck and call.
Greg Sargent suggests a great place to start:
George Stepanopoulos reminds us that he recently asked Trump in an interview if he'd release his tax returns if Obama released the birth certificate Trump has been demanding. Trump responded:
"Maybe I'm going to do the tax returns when Obama does his birth certificate. I may tie my tax returns. I'd love to give my tax returns. I may tie my tax returns into Obama's birth certificate."
Story continues below
I've asked a Trump spokesperson whether he will now release his tax returns in light of this morning's development
The question of whether Trump will follow through no this suggestion goes directly to the heart of whether Trump's presidential flirtation has been a big fraud all along. Those who say it's a ruse argue that Trump will never run for president, because he'd have to reveal that his net worth is far less than he's claimed. Trump, who bristles at this suggestion, sought to dispel such talk by suggesting to Stephanopoulos that he'd release his tax returns if Obama released his birth certificate -- apparently thinking he was secure in the knowledge that Obama would never do this. Now Trump's bluff has been called.
Show us the money, Donald. Show us your grades. Show us the invoices from your crack team of birthernaut investigators that haven't delivered proof, that Obama was born elsewhere or of their existence. Show me a guy from your old neighborhood who even remembers you were around.
And memo to Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair and Justin Elliott at Salon: put those media criticism doodles you got from Trump up on eBay. Let's see what the real world value of Donald Trump's opinion is.
I'll leave you with the thoughts of The Onion's Baratunde Thurston, who basically just went off today when he heard what was happening. Of Trump's birther binge, Thurston says, "It's embarrassing to the entire nation that we would sit and let this happen. We have all been debased by this incident. By this charlatan, by this con man, by this mere promoter of himself."
"No one has ever asked [Trump] to prove anything," Thurston points out. That should change!
That title was for you palak =) Ok, technically I gotta say "probably" because there isn't enough official research to say it does for sure, but the research is strongly suggesting it lately, and well enough for the National Cancer Institute to post this:
Antitumor Effects
One study in mice and rats suggested that cannabinoids may have a protective effect against the development of certain types of tumors. [3] During this 2-year study, groups of mice and rats were given various doses of THC by gavage. A dose-related decrease in the incidence of hepatic adenoma tumors and hepatocellular carcinoma was observed in the mice. Decreased incidences of benign tumors (polyps and adenomas) in other organs (mammary gland, uterus, pituitary, testis, and pancreas) were also noted in the rats. In another study, delta-9-THC, delta-8-THC, and cannabinol were found to inhibit the growth of Lewis lung adenocarcinoma cells in vitro and in vivo .[4] In addition, other tumors have been shown to be sensitive to cannabinoid-induced growth inhibition.[5-8]
Cannabinoids may cause antitumor effects by various mechanisms, including induction of cell death, inhibition of cell growth, and inhibition of tumor angiogenesis and metastasis. [9-11] Cannabinoids appear to kill tumor cells but do not affect their nontransformed counterparts and may even protect them from cell death. These compounds have been shown to induce apoptosis in glioma cells in culture and induce regression of glioma tumors in mice and rats. Cannabinoids protect normal glial cells of astroglial and oligodendroglial lineages from apoptosis mediated by the CB1 receptor. [10,11]
In an in vivo model using severe combined immunodeficient mice, subcutaneous tumors were generated by inoculating the animals with cells from human non-small cell lung carcinoma cell lines.[12] Tumor growth was inhibited by 60% in THC-treated mice compared with vehicle-treated control mice. Tumor specimens revealed that THC had antiangiogenic and antiproliferative effects.
In addition, both plant-derived and endogenous cannabinoids have been studied for anti- inflammatory effects. A mouse study demonstrated that endogenous cannabinoid system signaling is likely to provide intrinsic protection against colonic inflammation. [13] As a result, a hypothesis that phytocannabinoids and endocannabinoids may be useful in the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer has been developed.[14]
Another study has shown delta-9-THC is a potent and selective antiviral agent against Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), also known as human herpesvirus 8.[15] The researchers concluded that additional studies on cannabinoids and herpesviruses are warranted, as they may lead to the development of drugs that inhibit the reactivation of these oncogenic viruses. Subsequently, another group of investigators reported increased efficiency of KSHV infection of human dermal microvascular epithelial cells in the presence of low doses of delta-9-THC.[16]
Palak, it's not just in vitro, it's in vivo too. =)
There are also plenty of anecdotal stories and evidence of cannabis having great healing effects, not just for cancer but for a shitload of other things. Some fun vidoes of news reports:
And in regards to my previous blog post, there's a huge difference between those 2 paragraphs in terms of political consequences. Cannabis is a schedule 1 drug because it has no accepted medical use. The DEA argues that things like appetite stimulation and pain management are just symptom management and not treating a disease, so therefore cannabis has no medical value and should be schedule 1. But if a federal agency, like the NCI, says that cannabis can shrink tumors, then it has a medical benefit that isn't symptom management. This means that they have to move it to schedule 3, which will remove the DEA's ability to run around raiding medical marijuana dispensaries.
That's why the sentence they removed is so important:
In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.
Vs
Though no relevant surveys of practice patterns exist, it appears that physicians caring for cancer patients who prescribe medicinal Cannabis predominantly do so for symptom management.
Knowing the politics you can see why it's so important to them that this sentence changes.
Below is taken from NORML:
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You may recall last Wednesday when we pointed out this incredible paragraph on the website of the National Cancer Institute at cancer.gov, on their general information about medical cannabis, touting its antitumoral effects:
The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.
NCI apparently got a talking to from someone, because now that page has been scrubbed of any reference to the direct antitumoral effects of cannabis:
The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. Though no relevant surveys of practice patterns exist, it appears that physicians caring for cancer patients who prescribe medicinal Cannabis predominantly do so for symptom management.
